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seeing.” She paused, her eyes fixed moodily on the compass card. Then she went on, “What’s a sea burial like?”
    “I’ve never seen one, thank God, but from what I’ve read, you sew the body in canvas and weight it with something. Why?”
    “I’m not sure, but …” She gestured helplessly.
    “I think I know what you mean,” Ingram said. “But I’m not sure I agree with you.” Wrapped in white Orion, with the water this clear and the boat lying dead in the water above them, the bodies would still be visible a long way down if you wanted to torture yourself by leaning over the side and watching them disappear into the dark down there. “But that’s only morbid. This was worse. Horror—I don’t know what you’d call it.”
    She nodded thoughtfully. “I know. But being utterly alone afterward …” Her voice trailed off. The breeze had dropped to a whisper. Saracen ghosted through the bald spot for a few yards, the sails beginning to slat; then it picked up again, only to die out once more in less than fifteen minutes. Saracen rolled heavily, booms aswing. Ingram sheeted them in. He stood up, still disturbed, and annoyed at himself because he didn’t know why, and trained the binoculars on the other yacht. Then, with a gesture of impatience, he made up his mind.
    “I’m going aboard her.”
    Rae looked up. “Why?”
    “I don’t know. There’s something about the whole damned thing I can’t quite swallow; no matter how I turn it, it won’t go down. Look, Rae, anybody who managed to get this far from land in a boat without killing himself must be a sailor, and that’s not the way a sailor abandons one. Just because somebody else comes along going in the same direction—like a hitch-hiker. You’d bring something off, or you’d go back for what you could salvage.”
    “You don’t believe she’s sinking?”
    “All I know is she’s still afloat.” He continued to study the other yacht. As far as he could tell, there was no change in her trim or amount of freeboard. Well, it didn’t mean anything, actually; it could be hours, or even days, before she went under. He was probably being silly.
    “Did he say whether she was insured or not?” she asked.
    “He says she’s not.”
    “Then it’d be pretty expensive, wouldn’t it, just going off and leaving her in the middle of the ocean?”
    He frowned. “Yes, but that’s still not what I mean. If she’s leaking at all, he’d never make port in her alone; she’s too big for singlehanded sailing, to say nothing of being at the pump all the time. He almost has to abandon her, but not the way he did. I keep getting the feeling he doesn’t want anybody to go aboard.”
    “But why?”
    “I don’t know. Admittedly, it doesn’t make any sense. But look—you’ll notice he didn’t turn in until we were under way. And had cast his dinghy adrift.”
    “That was probably just coincidence.”
    “Sure. It could be.”
    “You’re going to put our dinghy over?” Rae asked.
    “No.” He turned, searching for the other one. He could still see it when it crested a swell, several hundred yards astern. “Well pick his up again. No strain, if we get another breeze.”
    Saracen had begun to swing around on the swell, to a southerly and then a southeasterly heading. Ingram stood up again with the glasses and could see the water beginning to darken once more to the southward. He looked at his watch. It had been nearly thirty minutes since Warriner had gone below. He slipped down the ladder, crossed to the passage going into the forward compartment, and looked in. Warriner lay on his back, his eyes closed, breathing heavily.
    He came back to the cockpit just as the breeze began to stir again. It was out of the south, to starboard on the heading they were on now, and the other yacht lay perhaps a mile and a half away on the port bow, with the dinghy somewhere in between. Saracen began to move ahead. He motioned for Rae to steady up where she was, and