Dead Calm Read Online Free
Author: Charles Williams
me instead of Russ she motioned for me to look the other way and ran forward into their cabin. I found the pills and got a glass of water and called out to her. She said it was all right to come in, she was in the bunk. I gave her one. She swallowed it, but she kept rubbing her hand across her face and shaking her head. ‘Brother, that rum,’ she said. ‘It must have had a delayed-action fuse on it’ Her voice sounded funny, as if she had something stuck in her throat.
“I asked her if she was sure it was the rum, and she said, ‘I don’t know. But you look fuzzy around the edges; I can’t get you into focus.’ She held out her hand and looked at it and said, ‘God, a Picasso hand. It’s got seven fingers on it—”
“What?” Ingram interrupted. He frowned. “Wait a minute-double vision. There’s something I’ve read, or heard—”
“Botulism,” Rae said.
“What’s that?” Warriner asked. “You mean you don’t think it was the salmon?”
“Yes, it probably was the salmon,” Rae explained. “Botulism’s a very dangerous type of food poisoning that attacks the nervous system. I remember reading an article about it somewhere. I don’t remember the other symptoms, but I do recall the double vision and the trouble in speaking or swallowing.”
“Do you know what the treatment is?” Warriner asked. “We had a pretty good medicine chest and I tried everything I could think of, but if it turns out that some simple thing we had aboard could have saved them …”
Rae shook her head. “You can put your mind at rest about that. I don’t think there is any treatment except an antitoxin, which nobody’d have in a first-aid kit. Even if you’d been an M. D. you couldn’t have done anything for them.”
“Oh. I guess that helps. A little, anyway.” Warriner went on. “She looked bad, as I said, but I didn’t realize then how sick she was. I guess she didn’t either. Anyway, about that time we took two or three heavy rolls and I heard the sails begin to slat, so I went back on deck. I thought the wind had died out again and we’d have to sheet everything in—we’d been becalmed off and on for the past two days, just a capful of breeze now and then from all around the compass. But when I got up in the cockpit, that wasn’t it; Russ had left the wheel. He was hanging over the rail, vomiting, and she’d come up into the wind.
“He said he thought he’d got a touch of it too. Even then it’d never occurred to any of us it could be serious; it was just a joke, like the turista. I told him where the pills were, and to go on back and turn in and not to relieve me at eight unless he was sure he was all over it. He went below. The breeze held on, fairly steady out of the west; we were making at least four knots, and not too far off the course we wanted, so I didn’t want to leave the wheel, even when it was eight o’clock and he didn’t come up.
“About eight-thirty I heard somebody moving around in the galley and decided at least one of them was feeling better, but it was Lillian—my wife. She brought me a cup of coffee, and one for herself, and was sitting in the cockpit drinking it when all of a sudden she doubled over with a cramp in her stomach. She ran below to the head. Nobody was able to take the wheel, and Orpheus was always a cranky boat; she wouldn’t steer herself on any point of sailing. So I doused everything and went below to see how they were. Russ and Estelle were still in their bunks, when they weren’t trying to get back and forth to the head. And now Russ was complaining that everything looked fuzzy, and he was having trouble talking. Lillian didn’t have any symptoms like that yet; she was just nauseated and crampy. But I was beginning to be scared, real scared, thinking of all that empty ocean between us and a doctor. It almost had to be some kind of food poisoning, and everybody decided it must have been the salmon because I hadn’t eaten any and I wasn’t
“I asked her if she was sure it was the rum, and she said, ‘I don’t know. But you look fuzzy around the edges; I can’t get you into focus.’ She held out her hand and looked at it and said, ‘God, a Picasso hand. It’s got seven fingers on it—”
“What?” Ingram interrupted. He frowned. “Wait a minute-double vision. There’s something I’ve read, or heard—”
“Botulism,” Rae said.
“What’s that?” Warriner asked. “You mean you don’t think it was the salmon?”
“Yes, it probably was the salmon,” Rae explained. “Botulism’s a very dangerous type of food poisoning that attacks the nervous system. I remember reading an article about it somewhere. I don’t remember the other symptoms, but I do recall the double vision and the trouble in speaking or swallowing.”
“Do you know what the treatment is?” Warriner asked. “We had a pretty good medicine chest and I tried everything I could think of, but if it turns out that some simple thing we had aboard could have saved them …”
Rae shook her head. “You can put your mind at rest about that. I don’t think there is any treatment except an antitoxin, which nobody’d have in a first-aid kit. Even if you’d been an M. D. you couldn’t have done anything for them.”
“Oh. I guess that helps. A little, anyway.” Warriner went on. “She looked bad, as I said, but I didn’t realize then how sick she was. I guess she didn’t either. Anyway, about that time we took two or three heavy rolls and I heard the sails begin to slat, so I went back on deck. I thought the wind had died out again and we’d have to sheet everything in—we’d been becalmed off and on for the past two days, just a capful of breeze now and then from all around the compass. But when I got up in the cockpit, that wasn’t it; Russ had left the wheel. He was hanging over the rail, vomiting, and she’d come up into the wind.
“He said he thought he’d got a touch of it too. Even then it’d never occurred to any of us it could be serious; it was just a joke, like the turista. I told him where the pills were, and to go on back and turn in and not to relieve me at eight unless he was sure he was all over it. He went below. The breeze held on, fairly steady out of the west; we were making at least four knots, and not too far off the course we wanted, so I didn’t want to leave the wheel, even when it was eight o’clock and he didn’t come up.
“About eight-thirty I heard somebody moving around in the galley and decided at least one of them was feeling better, but it was Lillian—my wife. She brought me a cup of coffee, and one for herself, and was sitting in the cockpit drinking it when all of a sudden she doubled over with a cramp in her stomach. She ran below to the head. Nobody was able to take the wheel, and Orpheus was always a cranky boat; she wouldn’t steer herself on any point of sailing. So I doused everything and went below to see how they were. Russ and Estelle were still in their bunks, when they weren’t trying to get back and forth to the head. And now Russ was complaining that everything looked fuzzy, and he was having trouble talking. Lillian didn’t have any symptoms like that yet; she was just nauseated and crampy. But I was beginning to be scared, real scared, thinking of all that empty ocean between us and a doctor. It almost had to be some kind of food poisoning, and everybody decided it must have been the salmon because I hadn’t eaten any and I wasn’t