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Hudson made a cursory glance over his shoulder. "Hello, Ira." The voice mirrored the eyes. Hagen could almost hear the cracking of ice cubes. "I wondered when you'd show up."
"Come in," said Eriksen in an equally frigid tone. "You're just in time to talk to our man on the moon."
Pitt had cleared Cuban waters and was well into the main shipping lane of the Bahama Channel. But his luck was running out. The only ships that came within sight failed to spot him. A large tanker flying the Panamanian flag steamed by no more than a mile away. He stood as high as he dared without tipping over the tub and waved his shirt, but his little vessel went unnoticed by the crew.
For a watch officer on the bridge to aim his binoculars at the precise spot at the precise instant when the bathtub rose out of a trough and climbed the crest of a swell before dropping from sight again was a bet no self-respecting bookie would make. The awful truth plagued Pitt, he made too small a target.
Pitt's movements were becoming mechanical. His legs had gone numb after rolling around the sea in the cramped bathtub for nearly twenty hours, and the constant friction of his buttocks against the hard surface had raised painful blisters. The tropical sun beat on him, but he wore a good tan and the least of his problems was sunburn.
The sea remained calm, but still it was a continuous effort to keep the bow of the tub straight into the swells and bail out the water at the same time. He had emptied the final drops from the fuel cans into the outboard motor before refilling them with seawater for ballast.
Another fifteen or twenty minutes, that was all he could expect the motor to keep running before it starved for gas. Then it would be all over. Without control, the tub would soon swamp and sink.
His mind began to slip away-- he hadn't slept in thirty-six hours. He fought to stay awake, steering and bailing with leaden arms and water-wrinkled hands. For hour after endless hour his eyes swept the horizon, seeing nothing that was traveling toward his tiny area of the sea. A few sharks had bumped the bottom of the slow-moving tub. One made the mistake of coming too close to the spinning propeller and got his fin chewed up. Pitt eyed them with a detached air. He dumbly planned to beat them out of a meal by opening his mouth and drowning, before realizing it was a stupid thought and brushing it aside.
The wind gently began to rise. A squall passed overhead and deposited an inch of water in the tub. It wasn't the cleanest, but it was better than nothing. He scooped up a few handfuls and gratefully gulped it down, feeling refreshed.
Pitt looked up at the shimmering horizon to the west. Night would fall in another hour. His last spark of hope was dying with the setting sun. Even if he somehow kept afloat, he could never be seen in the darkness.
Hindsight, he mused. If only he'd stolen a flashlight.
Suddenly, the outboard sputtered and then caught again. He slowed the throttle as much as he dared, knowing he was only pushing off the inevitable by a minute or two.
Pitt fought off the cloud of morale collapse and steeled himself to bail until his arms gave out or a wave struck the drifting, helpless little tub on the beam and swamped her. He emptied one of the gas cans of seawater. When the tub sank, he reasoned, he would use the can as a float. So long as he could move a muscle, he wasn't about to give up.
The faithful little outboard coughed once, twice, and then died. After hearing the beat of the exhaust since the night before, Pitt felt smothered by the abrupt silence. He sat there in a doomed little craft on a vast and indifferent sea under a clear and cloudless sky.
He kept her afloat for another hour into the twilight. He was so tired, so physically exhausted that he missed a small movement five hundred yards away.
Commander Kermit Fulton pulled back from the periscope eyepiece, his face wearing a questioning expression. He looked across the control room of the attack submarine Denver at his executive officer.
"Any contact on our sensors?"
The exec spoke into one of the control room phones. "Nothing on radar, skipper. Sonar reports a small contact, but it stopped about a minute ago."
"What do they make of it?"
The answer was slow in coming and the question was repeated.
"Sonar says it sounded like a small outboard motor, no more than twenty horsepower."
"There's something mighty peculiar out there," said Fulton. "I want to check it out. Slow speed to one-third and come left five degrees."
He pressed his forehead against the periscope eyepiece again and increased the magnification. Slowly, wonderingly, he pulled back. "Give the order to surface."
"You see something?" asked the executive officer.
He nodded silently.
Everyone in the control room stared at Fulton expectantly. The exec took the initiative. "Mind letting us in on it, skipper?"
"Twenty-three years at sea," said Fulton, "and I thought I'd seen almost everything. But damned if there isn't a man up there, almost a hundred miles from the nearest land, floating in a bathtub."
Since the blimp's disappearance, Admiral Sandecker had rarely left his office. He buried himself in work that soon lost all meaning. His parents, though quite elderly, were still alive, and so were his brother and sister. Sandecker had never really tasted personal tragedy before.
