And the Deep Blue Sea Read Free Page A

let it trickle down his throat. A shark appeared from somewhere and circled the raft three or four times as though intrigued by the strange yellow bubble. Goddard watched its dorsal slicing the surface and, more to break the eerie silence than anything else, said to it, “Shove off, you silly bastard. That’s a low-budget routine.” The shark came closer on its next pass, and he took out his knife and opened it, ready to stab if it decided to roll up and take an experimental bite out of the fabric. The shark lost interest and went away. Around two P.M. a light breeze sprang up, riffling and darkening the surface of the sea and lessening the intensity of its glare. It continued until late afternoon, making the heat at least endurable, and died out only with the vast chromatic explosion of sunset. He watched the colors fade in the sudden velvet night of the tropics and wondered how many more he would see. Two? Four? After a while he slept.
    When he awoke, shivering again, he saw from the positions of the constellations overhead that it was after midnight. The sea was still slick and almost flat now, and beyond his feet propped on the rim of the raft a shimmering path of light stretched away toward a waning moon hung low in the eastern sky. He sat up to stretch his cramped muscles, and when he turned he saw the ship, not more than a mile away.
    His first thought was that he must be dreaming. He rubbed both hands across his face, feeling the beard stab his salt-ravaged face, and looked again. It was real. But there was something wrong. When he realized what it was he had to choke down the cry pushing up into his throat. He could see only a stern light. It was going away from him. It had already passed, only minutes ago, while he slept.
    No! How could it? He looked around at the placid unruffled sea. It would have passed within a few hundred yards, and the bow wave would have tossed the raft end over end like a bit of flotsam. There wasn’t even a trace of wake anywhere. He was almost directly astern of the ship, but it hadn’t gone by him. The only answer was that it was lying dead in the water. It had stopped for something, and had swung around as it lost steerageway. Unless, he thought, his mind was already playing him tricks and there wasn’t any ship there at all.

II
    M ADELEINE DARRINGTON LENNOX WAS LYING naked on her bunk in the sweltering darkness of Cabin C when she heard the engine stop and wondered what was wrong with the stupid ship now. She didn’t care particularly except to the extent the stoppage might affect the rendezvous whose anticipation had made it almost impossible for her to lie still since she had switched out the light a half hour ago and begun her nightly wait for Barset to slip down the passageway and into the cabin. It had been her experience that when anything happened to break the routine of a ship, even on the midnight-to-four watch, there were apt to be people abroad in the passageways either seeking information or trying to right the matter, whatever it was, and Barset was too shrewd to run the risk of being seen by one of the deck officers or perhaps the captain himself. Laying the passengers was no part of the steward’s duties, no matter how great his virtuosity in this field, and as he put it with his gift for unprintable vulgarity, Holy Joe would defecate a ring around himself. So he might not come. And if he didn’t, in the state she was in now she’d need three of the capsules to get to sleep.
    There was no air-conditioning, and the cabin would have been stifling in any event here in the tropics, but it was made worse by the fact she had closed the porthole, as she always did in anticipation of these delights, because it opened onto a deck outside, with no privacy at all if anybody happened to be out there. The door was closed all the way, too, instead of being on the hook, because he could open it and slip in a fraction of a second faster that way rather than having to fumble