A Hero for Leanda

chemicals that made it drinkable. At first she had been a bit doubtful about using sea water for drinking, but after the first day she had to admit that it tasted as good as anything from a tap and that the advantages of having an unlimited supply without the need for storage were overwhelming. In between, when she wasn’t cooking or filtering or swabbing, there was steering to be done, and clothes to wash, and the ravages of sun and salt to be made good. One way and another, she never seemed to have a moment to spare. Conway found her extremely efficient, philosophical over minor hardships, and tactfully self-effacing when he was busy.
    Getting enough sleep was her main problem. She had not yet learned to drop off at will, as Conway always did, and she found the watchkeeping disturbing. She could have slept perfectly at the tiller, where the compass card had a mesmeric effect on her, particularly at night, but the thought of Conway rushing out to see why the sails were flapping was too awful to contemplate. The saloon was hot in the daytime, in spite of its ventilators, and scarcely bearable when some of them had to be shut to keep out flying spray. Shafts of sunlight were a nuisance, and at night the noise of the water on the other side of the planking tended to keep her awake. So, occasionally, did the thought that there was only an inch of wood between her and the ocean, and that where they were it was about three miles deep! But gradually she got used to the conditions, as by now she was completely used to the motion of the ship, and in the end she slept adequately.
    Conway was busy most of the time. There were the regular daily jobs—taking the log reading, checking the chronometer with the radio time signal, taking sights from the sun at noon or, if necessary, from the stars at dusk or dawn, marking up the chart, writing up the log. There were the occasional jobs—filling the lamps and stove, giving a touch of grease to the blocks, cleaning the chromium fittings, running the engine for a while to keep it in shape, checking the stores. For short periods, when it wasn’t his watch, he would lie and read, or listen briefly to the radio news before switching off to save the battery. But mostly, when he wasn’t sleeping or working, he was on deck with Leanda.
    Occasionally, some unusual incident would break tire routine. Leanda, in her off time, liked to go forward to the bows and lean out over the pulpit to watch the ship’s stem cleaving the sea—“an attractive but overdressed figurehead,” Conway called her. From there she sighted one day a spouting whale, which came unpleasantly close to Thalia before it finally disappeared. Once, too, an unusually large shark came right alongside, turning on its back so that its vicious teeth were clearly visible and then scraping its belly against the keel of the ship. It stayed around so long that Conway went to get the shotgun from the forecabin to drive it away, but he’d scarcely reappeared when it sheered off and they didn’t see it again. There were other, and pleasanter, creatures to watch—schools of playful porpoises gamboling along in the wake of the ship, and blue-and-black-striped pilot fish that kept to the shady side when there was one, and blue and silver bonitos. Once or twice Conway did a little fishing with a hand line, but the fish began to lose their dazzling tropical colors as soon as they were brought on deck and Leanda said she preferred to watch them in the water.
    Most of the time, nothing happened at all. They seemed to be sailing through an endless desert of sea, featureless, unchanging, and awe-inspiring in its absolute emptiness. As one similar day followed another, with nothing around them but the same heaving blue waste, it was only the marks on the track chart that convinced Leanda they were getting anywhere at all. One morning, as Conway came up from the saloon with “coffee for all hands,” she suddenly said, “You know, Mike, there might be no one else on this planet except us two!”
    “It’s not a bad thought,” he said, with a grin.
    She ignored that. “It’s so hard to keep anything in perspective. The world seems so remote. I have to keep on reminding myself that we still belong, that we’re actually on a terribly important mission, that there’s a man called Kastella on an island somewhere out there, and that we’re on our way to rescue him. It doesn’t seem real.”
    “That’s how you get at sea,” Conway