“Get up!” I yelled to her, “Put some clothes on or you’ll get us a ticket!”
She gave me an “Aw, shucks!” look, stood up, and her head exploded.
We were in Panama for three weeks while the police tried to get things sorted out. It seems that Dawn was hit by a .30 caliber hunting bullet. The bullet was descending at a fifty degree angle when it struck her, and from the direction it had to have come from, there was no land higher than the boat from which it could have been fired. No ship or aircraft had been in the right position at the time. The only conclusion that anybody could come to was that somewhere off in the jungle, somebody had just fired a shot into the air. A weird accident, and a totally senseless death.
We humans like to think that we are somehow important in the great scheme of things, that in some way, our lives and our deaths have meaning. A certain rational part of us tells us that this isn’t true, that the universe is a vast place, and quite indifferent to us, but we don’t like to listen to that annoying little voice very often. And then something like the way Dawn died throws it in our faces.
I was back in the bottom of my black mental hole again, and now each of the other six people was also living in his or her own private place of darkness.
When the police finally gave us permission to leave, everyone but Adam and me decided to accompany Dawn’s body home, and each of them said that they wouldn’t be coming back. Adam tried hard to persuade them to stay, but Dawn’s death just took the wind out of the expedition.
I think that the only reason I stayed on was because I was too numb to do anything else, or maybe because, without Helen and my factory, Bay City wasn’t home any more.
I’m sure that it was his sense of duty that kept Adam on board, though I don’t know if it was his duty to me or to the boat. After we saw the others off at the airport, Adam looked at me and said, “`And the weal of the crew was reduced down to two.'”
“That’s from some sort of a song, isn’t it?”
“Yah. Some sort.”
“Adam, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to sail. Come on.”
EIGHT
We topped off our two thousand-gallon fuel tanks, picked up a few bags of fresh food, and left. We didn’t need anything else. There was enough canned and dried food to last us for three years, even if we didn’t do any fishing. That didn’t count the “emergency” supplies, a ton of dried beans, Bay City being the Bean Capitol of the world. The solar still built into the deck produced ten gallons of pure water a day, and the osmotic water maker could pump out another hundred, at the price of running the generator set. We were as free as any human beings possibly could be, and yet I was living in my own private hell.
I had hardly known Dawn, yet somehow her death and the manner of it weighed on me more than my divorce and bankruptcy had done. It wasn’t that I was berating myself with “if onlys,” although it was true that if I’d just let her lie there, and not acted like a penny-pinching prude, she would still be alive. It was that an uncaring universe had blotted her out with no more concern than a truck driver has for a bug hitting the windshield.
The new cabins had been completed while we were in Panama, and Adam and I moved into them as soon as we were at sea. They were much larger than the other two, and being near the center of the ship, they bounced around less in the waves.
The rule on board had always been that at least one person had to be awake and in charge at all times. The boat could sail itself once it was away from port, but someone was still needed to keep an eye on things. There were Coast Guard regulations about having somebody there to answer the radio, and assist if someone else got into trouble. Then too, neither of us, being engineers, fully trusted anything automatic. We flipped a coin, and I got the noon-to-midnight shift. It wasn’t as though we each had to work twelve hours straight, we just had to be awake in case anything came up. The schedule had the effect that each of us was alone most of the time, and having little to do but look out at the sea has a hypnotic effect that sneaks up on you.
The next stop on the itinerary was the Galapagos Islands. We got there, saw a turtle, and bought a basket of fresh fruit. We had a drink in the bar of another visiting boat, and left before sundown.
We headed out, sailing west.
A few weeks later, we hit another storm. The bouncing around wasn’t as bad as it had been on our previous romps with nature. For one thing, we had a few square feet of the jib showing, and this put our tail to the wind. We were running with it, and in The Brick Royal, it made for a smoother ride. Sleeping near the boat’s center of gravity helped out a lot, too. Adam had rigged up some hammocks that let you stay put while the boat rocked around you. They were slung fore and aft, which canceled the rolling of the boat, and ropes at the ends of the hammock went through pulleys at each bulkhead, near the ceiling, and connected together above you. This let the boat pitch while you stayed almost stationary. Adam said he was going to patent it, next time he got a chance.
In any event, Adam was in the cockpit and I was sound asleep when trouble happened. My first indication that something was wrong came when I was slammed awake. The hammock let the boat bounce around quite a bit without you noticing it, but when she rolled completely over on her side, I smashed into the ceiling.
The mast was built into the wall separating the two big staterooms. The noise was deafening, and I felt another strange bump. The emergency lights came on in time for me to see the mast pull loose from its socket, and then wrench sideways, shattering the new wooden wall into sharp splinters.
I was tangled up in the hammock, trying to get free when the boat suddenly righted itself, which naturally swung me into the swordlike remains of the wall. I managed to twist around so that I was looking where I’d been, and only a dozen or so sharp wooden shards got through the thick canvas and bedding and into my back. Painful.
The carbon-fiber mast, despite the stainless-steel shrouds and stays that held it in position, had somehow been pulled three feet above the lower deck. It slammed back down like a crossbow bolt, going through the deck, through four feet of assorted stores, and then right through the ferrocrete bottom of the boat.
A spray of wet lima beans blasted into me as I renewed my struggle to get out of the hammock. The boat went over again on its side, reacquainting me forcibly with the ceiling. The mast then pulled itself out of the hole it had made, and the next time the boat righted itself, the mast stayed horizontal. It cracked the upper deck, then pulled itself entirely free of the boat, snagging in the process the rope that connected the ends of my hammock. The hammock was thus pulled straight like the string of a discharging crossbow, and I was bounced off the ceiling yet a third time, this time catching it on the face and stomach.
The lights went out, either electrically or because of the way I lost consciousness. I awoke to find the cabin half full of water and Adam leaning over me.
“You okay?” he shouted.
“I respectfully request sick leave,” I said.
“Request denied. We got work to do. Can you move at all?”
“I guess I have to, don’t I. What the hell happened to us?” It was hard to talk in the wet, noise, and confusion of the dim emergency light, the slapping water, and the floating junk.
“We must have hit something. I don’t know what. The boat broke. I don’t know why. Get up.”
“Help me up. Maybe we can get a mattress over that hole in the bottom. Unless you know of something worse that’s happened to us.”
Adam said, “You’re bleeding from twenty places, but that shouldn’t bother a determined engineer. The spars and rigging are dragging beside us, so we’re in the trough of the waves. The engine won’t start, so we can’t use the big pumps, and the electrical pumps will run down the batteries in a few hours. But what the heck. You’re the boss, so we’ll fix the hole in the bottom first.”