slacks.

From here, where the Leander had started her first turn, the wake ran straight back, traces of it still visible for several hundred yards. With no conscious thought as to why he was doing it, he slipped inside the ring, pushed straight down on it with both hands to give himself all the buoyancy possible, and raised his head as high as he could to look back along the line of the wake. He was lifted by a gentle swell, and then another, and it was while the third was passing under him that he was sure he saw her, a golden dot in the immensity of blue behind him. He dropped away down the slope and began to rise again, and this time there was no doubt. He marked her position against the edge of a cloud formation beyond, and began to swim back to her, towing the life ring.

It was slow work, but he had covered what he thought must be half the distance and had paused momentarily to hold onto the ring and rest when the question finally occurred to him. In the name of God, why? Wasn’t it more merciful to let her drown? Unconsciousness came in probably less than a minute, and then it was over. Wasn’t that better than four or five days, and ultimate madness and death by thirst?

He looked around then, and the Leander was gone, swallowed up in the squall, and he was only a speck in all this vast and aching void. He began kicking ahead, hurrying now, driven by fear that he might be too late. Each time he rose to the crest of a swell he looked anxiously ahead in the direction she had to be. Then he saw her. She rose to the top of a swell less than fifty yards away, only the back of her head visible above the surface.

She disappeared, and looked as though she had gone under. No, she’d probably just dropped away behind the swell. He threshed ahead. He saw her again, closer now, but she was in trouble. She went under, and he could see her struggling weakly. A hand came out. Then her face emerged for a few seconds. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth opened as she tried to gulp for air, water ran into it, and she sank from sight. She didn’t come up again. He was still twenty yards away.

Gasping for breath himself and driven by the awful compulsion to hurry, he tried to keep his eyes fixed on the spot as he flailed ahead, but it was next to impossible in the tilting planes of the swell. He was above it, then cut off from it, and then below it. The sun was in his face, glaring off the surface and making it impossible to see beneath. The only thing to do was go beyond, and turn, with the sun over his shoulder so he could see down. He should be over it now. He lunged on for a few more strokes, and swung around, searching frantically. It might already be too late.

Luck was with him; he saw her almost at once. A swell passed under him, and with the sun’s rays striking almost perpendicularly into the plane of its retreating slope, it was like looking into a shop window. A flash of gold caught the corner of his eye off to the right, and he turned, and she was only three or four feet below the surface less than ten feet away. He swam over and dived, twined his fingers in the aureole of blonde hair streaming outward from her head, and kicked to the surface.

Her eyes were closed, and there was no responsive movement from her body, no attempt to clutch at him at all as he held her against him with her face above the surface. How did he get the water out of her when they were both immersed in it to their chins, with no way to raise her above it? Maybe if he lay flat with the life ring under his back he would have enough buoyancy. When he was positioned, he hauled her body over his and pushed up hard into her midriff, but before her face could clear the water they both went under.

That was hopeless, and he had wasted precious seconds. He threw one leg over the rim of the life ring and stood vertically in the water astride it. It supported them with no need