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Signalman Bixby and consulted her about her two goats. She also had had another look at the island.
    “Best thing would be just to turn them loose over there for the time being,” she said.
    “You mean they can take care of themselves?” I said.
    She looked at me with the unuttered expression of how little I knew about goats.
    “Once they get ashore, Captain, it’s the island that’d better watch out.”
    Somehow this seemed a further reassurance of the island’s fecundity.
    III: Night
    I went out on deck. The sun sat, in immense fieriness, just above the horizon, the sea, glittering in great swatches of phosphorescent white, waiting to receive it. Then the blazing ball dived and was gone, swallowed in one big gulp by the hungry waters. Amazing how fast, once it got near it, the sun in these latitudes hastened into the sea. It was as though in such burning parallels it was anxious to take a dip and cool off, to wash down before showing itself again to us, pristine, fresh, at tomorrow’s dawn. And amazing how, once that happened, darkness, real darkness came on so swiftly with hardly any twilight at all. Though in truth there was no mystery to it. It means you are near the equator where the sun’s rays, falling more perpendicularly, bring on quicker real night. Only the sea, stretching before me to all horizons and beyond, seemed eternal, and somehow never more so than at this time between last light and true darkness when, having received the sun into its depths, it waits in majestic certainty the coming of the stars.
    The ship rested in utter immobility, swinging not at all on her anchor, the air unstirred by the slightest breeze, the sea herself asleep. I stood aft by the lifeline in the great solitude and watched them as they came on in a rush, the constellations, old friends, never-failing guides of seamen, rendering themselves into their ancient choreography until the heavens stood filled with their numbers; studying, by habit, their arrangements I knew as a boy knows his school copybook, checking them out, as if to make certain they were where they were supposed to be. Red Antares, yellow Carina, on station, radiant in their assigned positions; others I knew by name, for over long years they had guided me across many seas. Tonight they seemed to flicker and preen themselves in an exceptionally dazzling manner as though in a personal reassurance, signaling zealously to me as clearly as a signalman’s blinker light, as if saying that in the dark loneliness, in the absolute silence which seemed to bring the load of oppressions pressing down on me as of some unbearable weight, I still had old and steadfast friends.
    My eyes followed them down the sky and touched the top of the forward then the mainmast and moving, sought out our multiple articulation with the outside world: the top-hat antenna UHF, the two whip-antennas, the smaller VHF and the longest range of all, the big-whip HF, lingering there a moment; proceeded to the corresponding antennas for SATNAV, SATCOM, ESM and finally the radar antenna in its slow ghostly orbit; all unceasingly, almost ravenously, seeking some signature from beyond, some mute hail of life appearing as a green blip on a dark screen, a faint sound in a sailor’s ear; for some response, almost any would do. Joining these profound devices in their mission, I scanned the far waters as though expecting something actually visible to the human eye to appear there, an apparition flung forth from the horizon’s distant starlit curve. But nothing save our solitary ship broke the ocean vastness.
    Gazing across it I thought how, far back as I could remember, to boyhood, I had wanted it. The sea, for herself, and to find what lay beyond her horizons, knowing full well that one never found it, that beyond each waited yet another horizon that would keep beckoning me. But that was the greatest summons of all; I would never run out of horizons to go to. Many who hear that call simply wish to leave