Jonah Watch by Jack; Cady Page B

of grayness. Watch-standers on the bridge and in the engine room turned the incandescent lights up in those spaces, rolled pencils across the faces of log sheets, listened suspiciously to normal sounds; but through the rest of the ship the red lights threw pale shadows that grew increasingly grotesque.
    "Nobody' s talking," Mother Lamp confided seriously to Howard. "It's like the boys are pretending t'isn't there."
    "Maybe it's behind your shoulder, cook."
    "You've got a smart mouth," Lamp said, "but you're not smart about this. This has the same feel of something that happened once in Hong Kong."
    "There aren't enough Chinese in Hong Kong to match the number of times I've heard about Hong Kong."
    "You haven't heard this." Lamp seemed attentive to an inner voice, a communication rising from some heretofore great void, the cold of which only he had suspected. He shook his red-blond-haired head, looked at Howard like a mother doing her best to dote on an idiot child. Then his face changed. He was nearly timid, certainly sad. "I know you don't like me much. It's okay. Nobody hired you to."
    "I just give you a hard time, cook." Howard was caught with the unease of a man who has stumped his toe on a fact. "Sometimes you make too much of things."
    "Sometimes I do," Lamp said. "So do you."
    "We all do," Howard said magnanimously.
    "No, we don't. Lots don't. But you do, and I do."
    "What happened in Hong Kong?"
    "You're right," Lamp said. "I'm making too much of a thing." He refused to tell the story. The refusal, with even less precedent than men walking on unfrozen water, pressed Howard into silence.
    The week seemed saturated with gray chill and green paint. Cutter Abner sent no messages about the haunt. That was left to the fate-stricken skipper of Ezekiel who was sitting above a load of fish packed in rapidly decaying ice. The skipper talked to fishermen friends on the radio as he watched Abner 's stern disappear at flank speed to assist the burning Clara . "Won't even do for fertilize'," Ezekiel 's skipper said. "Going to try to hang on, chum, but I make it that we'll have to pitch the whole catch overboard. We got this jinx boat swingin' alongside." Long before Abner , trailing its string of refugees, made the Portland Lightship, the nub of the story and its amplifications had entered the bars.
    "They were heads-up and lucky," Abner 's yeoman Wilson told Howard. "The fire in the Clara started in wiring in the engine spaces. They got it out, but they had structural damage aft."
    "It caused some heat aboard our ship," Howard told him. "The new kid got a burn."
    Brace, wearing the aroma of turpentine, and with stiff green hair, came off the four-to-eight and went to the messdeck to eat before making his renewed attack on spilled paint. In the wardroom which lay forward of the messdeck on the starboard side, with the ship's office sitting between, Levere, Dane, and Snow discussed timber for emergency shoring. Dane sat toad-silent, listening, respectful of Snow. To the surprise and provisional despair of some, Dane seemed to like Snow completely. Lamp bustled about the galley to port where he made watchstander chow for Brace and engineman striker McClean. Amon peeled spuds and kept an attentive ear cocked toward the wardroom. Brace arrived with a ladder-thumping stomp, intended, no doubt, to announce that—green paint or not—he remained his own man. He drew coffee, sat in his customary place, and slurped in a seamanlike manner; stolid, nearly, as if the presence of a wrinkle on his forehead gave him the responsibility for new reserve. His hands trembled only slightly.
    "The problem ain't technically storage," said Dane. "But where can we store it so we can get at it fast?"
    "Not below, of course," said Snow. "To be rapidly available it must be abovedeck."
    "Got to keep the working decks clear."
    "Paint it against rot," Levere said. "Cut it to fit as a false deck for the flying bridge. Secure it with light cable and quick-release