The distance should not have made any difference; fifty miles, seventy, or a thousand—it was all the same to Drew if he could not see land. But he was something of a paradox, a boy who loved and even worshiped cold dry facts, mathematical facts particularly; yet he was cursed with the imagination of an excitable poet. To his mind, those extra twenty miles became something more than a statistic; they were the measure of how far he had been cut off from all that was familiar, exiled to a void without reference points, a kind of Sahara constantly in motion. As he looked at the restless immensity, its blue shading toward black in the looming twilight, his pallor grew more sallow and he found that he was having difficulty breathing. These same symptoms had appeared on the trip back from Canada, and he applied the remedy that had worked then; focusing on a point at his feet, he avoided looking out, in much for the same reason that someone phobic about heights avoids looking down from a ladder or the edge of a cliff. Will told him that holding his eyes on the deck instead of on the horizon would only make him queasier. Nathaniel set Will straight: Drew’s malady wasn’t that kind of seasickness, it was this kind, he said, pointing at his temple. It made Drew sick to be out of sight of land.

“We haven’t seen land for the past few hours,” Will remarked, perplexed. He had never heard of such a thing. “Why now, all of a sudden?”

It came on in spells, Nathaniel explained. The best cure for it was a good blow. That was what happened last year, crossing the mouth of the Bay of Fundy; Double Eagle was struck by a pretty good blow, and Drew got physically sick and forgot all about being sick the other way. Will wasn’t pleased to hear this. Drew was his watch mate. Would he be expected to man the wheel by himself throughout every four-hour trick?

“Don’t worry,” Drew said. He resented hearing himself spoken about as if he weren’t there. “It just makes me kind of nervous, and anyway, it goes away after a while.” Raising his head, he forced himself to look toward the eastern horizon. “There. See. Doesn’t bother me. I’m okay now.”