The Last One Left Read Free Page A

movements of the HoJun. In the pilot house he checked the chronometer, figured the distance traveled, and, with his dividers, made an exact little prick mark on the penciled course line. He drew an X at that mark, then measured over to the chart border to get the exact position, latitude and longitude in degrees and minutes.
    He rehearsed exactly how he would report it on the emergency channel. But he did not want to report it. He could guess that any skipper familiar with the Stream would have taken the boat in tow without a second thought. This was supposed to be a good day for a crossing.
    “All right, Captain, why didn’t you take a look and see if anybody aboard needed help? That’s your obligation, you know.”
    “Well, I was having a little trouble myself.”
    “Indeed? What sort of trouble?”
    “I—I was losing a little pressure on the starboard engine. Anyway, we went close enough to it to be certain there wasn’t anybody aboard.”
    “Certain there was no one in the bunks below?”
    But it probably wouldn’t be like that at all. It was just a boat that had slipped its moorings somehow. And how much could they ask of you anyway?
    As he turned he saw June come scrabbling dangerously down theladderway, clutching and lurching. She had the binoculars hung around her neck. He winced as he saw them swing and whack solidly against the hand rail. He was about to tell her exactly what they had cost when he saw the frantic expression on her face.
    “A hand! We’ve got to go back, darling! We’ve got to do something.”
    “A what? Make sense!”
    “I saw it with the glasses. It came up and held onto the edge and then it let go. A little hand. A child’s hand. We’ve got to
do
something.”
    Howard Prowt clambered heavily but swiftly up to the fly bridge. She was beside him when he took it out of automatic pilot. Try to get it around quickly, or ease it around? Maybe a little of both. Ease it slowly until it begins to wallow in the trough, then reverse the port engine and kick it around and gun it to get out of the way of the following wave.
    Twice he brought it almost parallel with the swells, but the alarming motion caused him to head back into the wind. He resolved to do it on the third try. He got it into the trough and when she heeled over further than he would have thought possible, and when he heard a thudding and crashing below, he ran it back up into the wind again.
    “At that distance, with both boats jumping all over the goddam ocean, you saw one hand?”
    “I did!”
    “You saw an end of a rag flap over the gunnel for a moment. Something like that.”
    “Can’t we turn around?”
    “It isn’t a case of can’t. Sure. But why crash a lot of gear around below because you’ve got that imagination of yours?”
    Suddenly she turned away from him, lurched, grabbed the rail, hunched over it and was spasmed by nausea, the sea wind whippingat her damp hair. He eased the HoJun back onto course and locked it into pilot, checked his gauges. He looked at her, at the brown hide and slender legs of his life-long wife, at the regular pulsations of nausea which shook her body, and, to his mild astonishment, felt desire for her. It was an obscure and shameful pride that at a time and place so incongruous, this notion, impossible to fulfill, should come to him. Maybe it can happen from being scared, he thought, of thinking of yourself drowning and dying here in this big blue mess, and it’s a way of telling yourself you’re alive.
    When she was through, he went below to put his call in. In the main cabin the television set had fallen out of its brackets and lay face down on the carpeting. The radio set had shifted. He turned it on. It would not light up. He could not send. Then he saw where the cable had been pulled out of the chassis.
    Howard Prowt went up and told her. He looked astern, and he could not spot the drifting boat. The water was changing to a new color, to a blue that was mixed with green and