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persistence and, in despair, had given him the City of Benong— which itself was too old for a young ship’s war.
    They had been somewhere off the bloody beach of Dunkirk; the stukas had missed them when they ran for Alexandria after Greece fell; and the Son of Heaven had lost them in the darkness out of Malaya.
    Captain Dyall Jones eyed the broken sky ahead.
    â€˜Keep her steady on that pattern, Mr Johnson. She’ll do.’
    â€˜Aye, sir,’ said Mr Johnson; and thought privately, with immense pride, what monstrous maritime things a man would take to sea in times of war.
    Captain Dyall Jones left the bridge and the City of Benong sailed out under a sky of streaming cloud and moon.
    Pez lay trying to think of home.
    He thought: ‘I should be calling up pictures of how the fire would be burning in the front room at home on a night like this. And how it would be—coming in out of the rain to the warmth of the fire.’
    But the images were all manufactured in words first and then forced into the brain. There was no real picture—no emotional memory.
    Even in the thought of Helen there was no warmth—though God knows there had been enough fire between them when they lay together; and a deep, friendly warmth of peace and home on those calm evenings when they sat opposite each other, quietly reading or talking.
    And then, of course, there was their problem—three people loving where only two could love. No good thinking about that—there could be no solution yet.
    â€˜When the war is over,’ she had said. ‘When you both come home.’ There was loyalty in her—even if loyalty is not always sense. ‘I can’t write to Bob and tell him it’s ended,’ she said. ‘And when he comes home and I know he’s got to go again—I can’t tell him then.’ She had stared into the fire, her hands clasped against her temples, ruffling the shining brown of her hair. ‘And I don’t know whether it has finished. I know how I feel about you, but I know he needs me. War and loneliness can twist things—you can’t just grab what you think you want without thinking if other people have rights.’
    The whole business seemed far away now. All you could do was say: ‘Sometime—sometime I will again consider hotly the problems of life and love.’
    But a man might never measure out that time, or know if it was coming to him.
    Maybe that was the solution. If Bob was killed…
    You couldn’t wish him dead, but it would solve it. There would be no barriers then—no divided loyalties—no question except that answered by the hasty heart.
    But there was no reality in that either. That was in the future, and a soldier has no future.
    Suddenly he felt the great loneliness of himself upon the earth: the monstrous, lonely howling of the wind was in the rigging; he had lost his past—the future was uncertain; he was alone on a stormy-mooned ocean.
    Pez settled back into the rough warmth of his blanket cocoon. He breathed the cold, clean air.
    So there was no future—what the hell.
    He slept.

2
    Pez awoke in the first grey dawn, stretched his cramped body on the nest of ropes, crawled out of his blankets and went to the rail.
    The City of Benong was anchored in the lee of a small island that lay in the mouth of a broad, shallow bay. There was a great mass of shipping gathered in the calm waters of the bay—a war armada of rusty, sea-grey vessels. Invasion barges surged through the tangle. On the distant smooth black sands, a long line of barges were humped half on the beach, half in the water—their jaws flopping open on the sand like clumsy mechanical saurians.
    At first glance the green bank of palms and jungle growth seemed solid. But as Pez gazed he saw the long palm-leaf buildings take shape under the camouflage of trees, the distant toy movements of men and trucks, the thin, hazel pennants of smoke from the