I am looking up and along the ship, aft. As my ears drain I hear explosions, shouts—I look for fire, smoke, wondering about the boiler. Makemin is up there, lashed with lengths of chain to the rail of the bridge deck. Below, I can see men roiling on the decks in confusion and some of them are making movements toward the lifeboats on that side.

“Cowards! Cowards! Get away from there!”

Shied to and fro by the motion of the ship, and rammed against the railing again and again, Makemin is screaming at them and blasting holes in the lifeboats with his pistol. My grip fails me—for a moment the water is in retreat and I am bizarrely weightless. I scamper back to the rear of the bridge and am forcing myself down between the radiator and the wall as the next blow pounds the ship ...

*

... One by one, things gradually are falling, fall back into certain places. I am one of these things. The story will have first no person at all, and now a person is coming back.

That I will start with the unhurried, the casual, pausing now and then to reflect or to collect itself, approach, of a visitor: a pain, which is drawing nearer by hasteless degrees.

It is with adjustments in my midsection, so there I am. Coming back into it, out of some other place of stifling closeness and oppressively contained body heat.

A pain has drawn near, not too close to be serious. I can hear water dripping into water. I am slung forward over the radiator and the pain in my midsection is evidently the result of this. Unhinging myself with shoots of new and distracting pain at the base of my spine, I extricate myself. I am in sound condition, I decide, slump to the sloppy floor in an inch of brine, and just breathe. My eyes and throat are swollen, my body is thawing from cold to pain. It is a relief to lie here.

I make myself get up. Tabliq Quibli is in the corner, not conscious. Jil Punkinflake, pale, eyes fluttering, is prostrate across Thrushchurl’s legs, and Thrushchurl is slouched against the wall with his arms still locked in the struts to either side of him, gazing calmly on vacancy. I can dimly make out the motion of his vest. I blunder over to Tabliq Quibli—concussion. Glancing up—

Glancing up I see Meqhasset’s charcoal bluffs within a hundred yards, dwarfing us. I shout.