thought she heard a voice crying out somewhere in the night in front of her. She moved back to the railing between the boat davits and looked out into the darkness where the faint path of light from the moon began to come abeam as the ship gathered steerageway and started to turn. She thought she heard the strange cry again. Then she gasped as she saw something flat and dark on the surface of the sea less than a hundred yards away. Extending upwards from it was the unmistakable silhouette of a man violently waving his arms. She stood frozen, knowing it was impossible, but with the ship still moving very slowly the figure was caught for several seconds in the path of light and there could be no doubt of what she saw. She wheeled and ran towards the bridge The second mate was just emerging from the wheelhouse.

‘A man!’ she cried out, pointing. ‘There’s a man out there, on a raft or something.’

He stared blankly, startled by the suddenness of it, but then turned and looked in the direction she was pointing. She ran out onto the wing of the bridge, her arm still extended. ‘Right out there! I heard him shout! He was waving!’ But the raft was out of the moon path now and lost in the darkness behind it. The captain emerged from the wheelhouse. She whirled to him.

‘Captain! Stop! Back up!’ She realized she must sound like an idiot; what was the nautical term?

‘What is it, Mrs. Brooke?’ he asked.

‘She says she saw a man on a raft,’ the second mate said.

She saw the exchanged glance. Passengers! The ship was gaining speed, the raft falling farther astern by the minute. She was frantic. Wasn’t there any way she could make them believe it? The captain had reached into a box below the bridge railing and lifted out a pair of binoculars. ‘Back there!’ she cried out again, gesturing. ‘He was in the path of the moonlight! I heard him shout!’

The captain searched the area with the glasses. He lowered them and said, in the tone of one indulging a child, ‘It was probably a piece of dunnage, Mrs. Brooke. Or some weed.’

‘Captain, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not drunk! It was a man! Wouldn’t he show on the radar?’

‘Not on our radar.’ It was the chief mate, who had emerged from the wheelhouse. He spoke to the captain. ‘Maybe she did see something. We’d better take a look.’ Before the captain could reply, he stepped past them and lifted a life ring from its brackets on the rear railing of the bridge. It was attached to a canister. He ripped the canister loose from its supports and threw the whole thing over the side. Karen heard it splash in the water below them, and in a moment a torchlike flame appeared, lighting up the surface of the sea as it began to drop astern. The chief mate turned and called out to the helmsman inside the wheelhouse. ‘Hard left!’

‘Mr. Lind!’ the captain said angrily, drowning out the helmsman’s reply. It was obvious even to Karen that Lind had vastly exceeded his authority, since it wasn’t his watch and the captain was on the bridge besides, but the big man was completely at ease.

He winked at Karen. ‘Cap, it’ll cost us ten minutes to find out. If there’s nobody there, I’ll buy the company a new life ring, and Mrs. Brooke will give a cocktail party.’

The ship was already beginning to swing. The captain started to countermand the order, then shrugged and remained silent. Karen sighed with relief as she retreated from the bridge where she had no business. Lind, she thought, was something of a man.

And with a mocking and reckless sense of humor that could have wrecked it, she added to herself, thinking of the ‘cocktail party’. Captain Steen was a Baptist, a teetotaler, and a dedicated crusader against alcohol. She crossed to the port side of the boat deck where she could continue to watch the flare after they completed the turn, trying to sort out her reactions to the odd fact that she had probably saved a man’s life. What was that old Chinese belief? That if you saved somebody’s life you had meddled in his destiny and you were responsible for him from then on?

* * *

Goddard saw the flame blossom on the surface of the sea, and collapsed, shaking all over and too weak to do anything