Chapter 2

The big gaff-headed schooner was pointed directly at the reef-enclosed island, moving toward it with the solidity of an express train. The sails billowed under powerful gusts of the northwest breeze, and the rusty Allison-Chambers diesel rumbled beneath a teak grating. The skipper and mate stood on the bridge deck and watched the reef approach.

“Anything yet?” the skipper asked. He was a stocky, balding man with a perpetual frown on his face. He had been sailing his schooner among the uncharted shoals and reefs of the Southwest Pacific for twenty-five years. He frowned because his old ship was not insurable. His deck cargo, however, was insured. Some of it had come all the way from Ogdensville, that transshipment center in the desert where spaceships landed.

“Not a thing,” the mate said. He was watching the dazzling white wall of coral, looking for the gleam of blue that would reveal the narrow pass to the inner lagoon. This was his first trip to the Solomon Islands. A former television repairman in Sydney before he got the wanderlust, the mate wondered if the skipper had gone crazy and planned a spectacular suicide against the reef.

“Still nothing!” he shouted. “Shoals ahead!”

“I’ll take it,” the skipper said to the helmsman. He gripped the wheel and watched the unbroken face of the reef.

“Nothing,” the mate said. “Skipper, we’d better come about.”

“Not if we’re going to get through the pass,” the skipper said. He was beginning to get worried. But he had promised to deliver goods to the American treasure-hunters on this island, and the skipper’s word was his bond. He had picked up the cargo in Rabaul and made his usual stops at the settlements on New Georgia and Malaita. When he finished here, he could look forward to a thousand-mile run to New Caledonia.

“There it is!” the mate shouted.

A thin slit of blue had appeared in the coral wall. They were less than thirty yards from it now, and the old schooner was making close to eight knots.

As the ship entered the pass, the skipper threw the wheel hard over. The schooner spun on its keel. Coral flashed by on either side, close enough to touch. There was a metallic shriek as an upper main-mast spreader snagged and came free. Then they were in the pass, bucking a six-knot current.

The mate pushed the diesel to full throttle, then sprang back to help the skipper wrestle with the wheel. Under sail and power the schooner forged through the pass, scraped by an outcropping to port, and came onto the placid surface of the lagoon.

The skipper mopped his forehead with a large blue bandanna. “Very snug work,” he said.

“Snug!“ the mate cried. He turned away, and the skipper smiled a brief smile.

They slid past a small ketch riding at anchor. The native hands took down sail and the schooner nosed up to a rickety pier that jutted out from the beach. Lines were made fast to palm trees. From the fringe of jungle above the beach a white man came down, walking briskly in the noonday heat.

He was very tall and thin, with knobby knees and elbows. The fierce Melanesian sun had burned out but not tanned him, and his nose and cheekbones were peeling. His horn-rimmed glasses had broken at the hinge and been repaired with a piece of tape. He looked eager, boyish, and curiously naive.

One hell-of-a-looking treasure-hunter, the mate thought.

“Glad to see you!” the man called out. “We’d about given you up for lost.”

“Not likely,” the skipper said. “Mr. Sorensen, I’d like you to meet my new mate, Mr. Willis.”

“Glad to meet you, Professor,” the mate said.

“I’m not a professor,” Sorensen said, “but thanks anyhow.”

“Where are the others?” the skipper asked.

“Out in the jungle,” Sorensen said. “All except Drake, and he’ll be down here shortly. You’ll stay a while, won’t you?”

“Only to unload,” the skipper said. “Have to catch the tide out of here. How’s the treasure-hunting?”

“We’ve done a lot of digging,” Sorensen said. “We still have our hopes.”

“But no doubloons yet?” the skipper asked. “No pieces of eight?”

“Not a damned one,” Sorensen said wearily. “Did you bring the newspapers, Skipper?”

“That I did,” Sorensen replied. “They’re in the cabin. Did you hear about that second spaceship going to Mars?”

“Heard about it on the short wave,” Sorensen said. “It didn’t bring back much, did it?”

“Practically nothing. Still, just think of it. Two spaceships to Mars, and I hear they’re getting ready to put one on Venus.”

The three men looked around them and grinned.

“Well,” the skipper said, “I guess maybe the space age hasn’t reached the Southwest Pacific yet. And it certainly hasn’t gotten to this place. Come on, let’s unload the cargo.”

This place was the island of Vuanu, southernmost of the Solomons, almost in the Louisade Archipelago. It was a fair-sized volcanic island, almost twenty miles long and several wide. Once it had supported half a dozen native villages. But the population had begun to decline after the depredations of the blackbirders in the 1850s. Then a measles epidemic wiped out almost all the rest, and the survivors emigrated to New Georgia. A ship-watcher had been stationed here during the Second World War, but no ships had come this way. The Japanese invasion had poured across New Guinea and the upper Solomons, and further north through Micronesia. At the end of the war Vuanu was still deserted. It was not made into a bird sanctuary like Canton Island, or a cable station like Christmas Island, or a refueling point like Cocos-Keeling. No one even wanted to explode alphabet bombs on it. Vuanu was a worthless, humid, jungle-covered piece of land, free to anyone who wanted it.

William Sorensen, general manager of a chain of liquor stores in California, decided he wanted it.

Sorensen’s hobby was treasure-hunting. He had looked for Lafitte’s treasure in Louisiana and Texas, and for the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona. He had found neither. His luck had been better on the wreck-strewn Gulf coast, and on an expedition to Dagger Cay in the Caribbean he had found a double handful of Spanish coins in a rotting canvas bag. The coins were worth about three thousand dollars. The expedition had cost very much more, but Sorensen felt amply repaid.