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that, since to him it was an unacceptable insult whether offered with a smile or with a scowl. He had turned pale at first; now the blood rushed to his face, making it glow all over as though it had been scorched with fire.
    Leach glowered at his silent radio officer, growing more and more angered by the man’s silence, which seemed to him very much like dumb insolence. He shifted his feet and the broken glass of the picture-frame grated harshly under the soles of his shoes.
    “Well, out with it, can’t you? You’ve got a tongue, for God’s sake. What do you want?”
    Maggs licked his dry lips and felt venomous. “Nothing,” he muttered. “Nothing.”
    Leach glared at him. “Nothing? Then why come in here? You can’t have come for nothing.”
    “A mistake.”
    “A mistake!” Leach’s voice rose in anger. “You push your way in here without so much as a knock on the door and then you have the infernal impudence to call it a mistake !”
    “I did knock.”
    “You’re a bloody liar.”
    “I knocked twice. Perhaps you were too busy to hear.” Maggs had not bothered to keep the sneer out of his voice. “You seemed to be busy.”
    Leach glanced at the photograph and wrecked frame lying under his feet. He glanced at the broken glass on the desk, at the whisky dripping to the floor. His gaze switched back to Maggs and he detected, or thought he detected, a twist to the little man’s ugly mouth that might have been a grin. Mockery from such a man! Leach’s fury rose to boiling-point. He took a step towards Maggs and swung a clenched fist. Maggs ducked, but not quickly enough. Leach’s fist struck his head, slamming him back against the door.
    “Get to hell out of here,” Leach snarled. “Go back to your bloody hole, you weasel.”
    Maggs was hurt. A blow from Leach’s fist was no light matter. But it was not the physical injury that he felt most; it was the indignity of it. All right then; if that was the way he was to be treated, all right. To the devil with Leach; to the devil with the whole flaming lot of them. Let them take what was coming to them and see how they liked it. Maybe that would teach them not to be so high and mighty. Yes, you bet it would.
    Without another glance at Leach he turned and walked out of the cabin. He went up on deck and crossed to the port rails. From his pocket he took a sheet of flimsy paper, rolled it into a tight ball and flung it into the sea.
    He watched it floating away on the surface of the water, a tiny atom in a waste of ocean. He watched it until he could see it no more. Then he turned away from the rails with a feeling of exultation, a kind of power. He felt as though he held the lives of all the people in the ship in the hollow of his own small hand.
    Only he knew that on the paper that he had just tossed overboard was a signal that had come through on the radio, a warning concerning a storm called Jessie. It was the kind of storm that had different names in different parts of theworld: in the West Indies and the United States it was a hurricane; in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea it was a cyclone; in the China Sea it was a typhoon; while in the waters in which the Chetwynd was then steaming it was known by the aboriginal name of willy-willy. If the ship stayed on her present course and if Jessie also moved as predicted by the weather men it was almost inevitable that sooner or later the two would meet, since their paths were slowly converging like the two sides of a triangle.
    For the Chetwynd such a meeting was likely to prove at best a highly unpleasant experience, at worst disastrous.
    The chip on Maggs’s shoulder was now so heavy that he could even contemplate with equanimity his own involvement in that possible disaster if only it might be the means of taking his revenge on Captain Leach.
    Maggs, without doubt, was more than a little mad.

FOUR
Ah Mai
    S YDNEY E AST was exercising his fingers on a rubber ball, squeezing it, allowing it to expand