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you everything.” She paused a moment. “You know, they gave me a sedative. It made me very drowsy.”
    “They were worried about your reaction,” Cobb said, taking her hand. “You were very brave, you did just the right thing. But it is not your line of work. I would have been very upset, if it had been me.”
    Kimiko smiled at him indulgently. “Certainly you would.” The sentence was so empty of inflection that it clanged with irony. She knew better. But she went through in detail what happened from the moment she looked up and saw the ship to the time she called her husband at his office. “The children are staying with cousins in Kekaha, so I had a little free time.”
    “You are an amazing observer,” Chazz said. “The shoe. I wouldn’t have noticed that.”
    “I don’t know why it came off, though. I would like to know that. It was strange, perhaps the strangest thing about it. That shoe scared me, more than anything else. They were all dead. That’s all right, I understand that. Something killed them. I thought, poison gas of some kind, caught up with all of them in turn as it rolled over the ship. But the shoe bothered me.”
    “You said the log showed they had been to Polynesia,” Chazz said, “Who found the log?”
    Scott Handel cleared his throat. “All the paramedics wore masks and gloves. They loaned me some, so I took a look around. The lieutenant thought the police ought to be represented, even though this did not look like a police matter.”
    “You brought the log back to headquarters?” Chazz asked.
    “Well…”
    “What the Sergeant is trying to say is that he felt it incumbent upon him to call in the Coast Guard. Now under ordinary circumstances the Coast Guard would be just the right agency to oversee this matter. But unfortunately the sergeant did not wait quite long enough in his enthusiasm. He called before Commander Shafton, a man you will no doubt soon meet, went on leave. It was fortunate indeed that the sergeant had the foresight to get the log for us before calling.”
    Chazz laughed. “So it is still unclear whether this is even a police matter or not. I understand.”
    “There is something of a gray jurisdictional area here, yes,” Cobb agreed. “But under the circumstances it seemed best to take no chances.”
    A doctor entered briskly. “Well, well, Mrs. Takamura,” he said. “And how are we feeling?”
    “I don’t know how you’re feeling, Dr. Standish, but I am feeling as fine as I could feel after reading Hegel.”
    Dr. Standish rubbed his palms together with a whispering sound. “Splendid. I think I can spare you any further Hegel. The tests were all negative. You appear to be quite healthy.”
    “Good.” Kimiko opened a huge cloth bag and stuffed the Hegel inside.
    “We’ll just step outside while you change,” Chazz said, gesturing to Sergeant Handel. Cobb followed them out after a moment.
    They stood at the end of the hall, looking through dusty windows at the ocean to the east. Small puffs of clouds drifted over the water, casting dark oblong shadows on the surface. Inside the shadows, whitecaps winked on and off, warning of dangers invisible to the human eye.
    The sea was vast and mysterious, of course. But now it seemed to hold something new, something subtle and secret and evil.
    “It’s strange. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen in real life, does it?” Handel asked. There was something wistful, even plaintive, about his tone.
    “On the contrary,” Chazz said. “Inexplicable things happen all the time. They could all have eaten something bad: it could be salmonella. It’s the sort of thing that happens at church picnics all the time.”
    “But it isn’t salmonella poisoning,” a voice said behind them. They turned as a group.
    “So, Dr. Shih,” Cobb said.
    The small woman dipped her head with a quirky smile. Her white coat displayed a few strategic dabs of what could only have been blood, a badge of her office as medical