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I wanted to tell the Doctor I was still alive, and when we would return to land. But
nobody knew. Although we were supposed to arrive in time for San Diego's tall-ship fest-
ival, Mary had been making indistinct noises about staying out as long as it took to find
areas of higher trash-density. (Art's jokes about Captain Ahab were seeming less joke-like
by the day.) The Pirate King, for his part, was bent on heading back. I couldn't tell if he
was impatient with Mary, or tired of what he thought was a wild goose chase, or if perhaps
he had a deep personal need to attend the tall-ship festival.
In the wheelhouse, the Pirate King keyed the radio and read the Doctor's phone number
to an impossibly distant ham operator—a hobbyist in Florida, I think. Then he handed me
the radio. I waited, while on the other side of the planet, a phone rang.
I never reached her. Several times I left a message, telling her the Kaisei 's latitude and
longitude, and that I was alive and well, and that I loved her. She later told me the messages
were sometimes garbled and unintelligible, my voice warped and splintered by its passage
through the atmosphere. In those moments, she couldn't understand where I was, or any-
thing I said. Only that it was me.
In the pit of night, the radar alarm sounded. A contact directly in front of us. The Pirate
King said it was probably a squall, from how its profile on the radar screen changed and
grew. Squalls patrolled this part of the ocean, hunched pillars of storm that could interrupt
the night with lashing winds and rain.
In the wheelhouse, with our faces lit by the glow of the radar, we watched the contorted
bolus of pixels bear down on us. It passed through the three-mile radius, then the two-mile.
Then, slowly, it convulsed, stretched, and crept to port, passing within a mile.
We went outside and stared off the rail into the darkness, straining to see it. Nothing. No
sky, no horizon. All night, we had seen nothing but a pair of stars, hesitant in the gloom.
The radar said there was something out there, but we couldn't see it.
Then…something changed in our vision. Its outline came into focus. We could see it,
faint and vast in the darkness, a monstrous anvil sliding over the ocean.
The sails hovered in the still air, indifferent. We went to bed.
24 AUGUST—32°59′ N. 145°50′ W
After ten days at sea, we turned back.
The tension among Mary and the Pirate King and the Kaisei 's captain had been growing
for some time. All anyone knew for sure was that Mary wanted to stay out as long as pos-
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