pressed against her opened mouth while tears welled up in her eyes and overflowed. Why sunset? Why did she have to think of sunset? But she knew, remembering the moments of splendor and that shared enraptured silence when the world was only two people and a boat and a fragment of time poised between night and day. Would he be thinking of them? Would he have to? She was up then, throwing the sailbags behind her to clear the door. She slammed the cases of stores aside as if they were empty, and snatched up a marlinspike she somehow saw in her wildness lying among the coils of rope. Her hand was yanking at the bolt to open the door when some vestige of reason made itself heard at last and she was able to stop herself. She sagged against the bulkhead.
One chance was all she would get. She couldn’t throw it away.
He was a young man, with a young man’s reflexes. No matter how fast or unexpectedly she leaped into the cockpit she couldn’t attack him that way and expect to accomplish anything but her own destruction. And with hers, John’s. God, why did she have to be so helpless? There must be some way to stop him. There had to be.
It was then she remembered the shotgun.
Her mind slid away from it in revulsion. It edged back, reluctantly but compelled. She could see its dismembered pieces—two, she thought there were—wrapped in their separate strips of oiled fleece in one of the drawers under the starboard bunk. John had never assembled it since he’d brought it aboard but he did check it from time to time to be sure it hadn’t been attacked by rust. He was going to hunt something with it in Australia, or maybe it was New Zealand. In the same drawer were two boxes of its ammunition…
It was sickening. It was impossible. Why was she even thinking about the thing? And there was no use trying to threaten him with it. You couldn’t threaten a madman.
She looked down then and saw she still had the marlinspike in her hand. It was over a foot long, of heavy bright steel, gently tapering from one thick end to a point at the other—the classic weapon, she knew from the sea stories she’d read, of the bucko mates of nineteenth-century square-riggers driving their crews around the Horn. She’d never be able to hit him with it from in front, but suppose she could get behind him?
She might. His reactions were unpredictable, of course, but there seemed a chance he wouldn’t attack her out of hand if she came on deck, at least as long as she didn’t appear to be trying to interfere with him. And he’d turned his back on her before. But that was before she’d tried to sabotage the engine, she thought; he’d be suspicious of her now. Well, she could look out the companion hatch and see how he reacted before she went too far.
There was another thing, too, she thought with growing excitement: once behind him, she could take a quick look into the binnacle and see what course he was steering. That would do away with all the trouble and possible inaccuracies of this other way.
The marlinspike would have to be well concealed, but still where it could be withdrawn swiftly and without catching on anything. She experimented. After pulling up the bottom of her blouse, she shoved it into the waistband of the Bermuda shorts and down the outside of her left thigh. But the shorts were a snug fit in this area, and it showed when she walked. She moved it around in front of the hip, where it angled down the hollow of her groin to the inside of the thigh. It had passed inside her nylon briefs, and the steel had a cold and alien feel against her skin. That was better as far as concealment was concerned, but she was aware now of the error of having it inside the shorts at all. When she withdrew it, she had it by the wrong end. The place for it was inside the blouse, which was looser anyway. With the heavy end caught under her arm and only the point inside the waistband, it lifted out easily and quickly and was held just right to swing. Conscious of the extreme shallowness of her breathing, she slid back the bolt and opened the door.
She crossed the after cabin, mounted the