Robert Crews Read Online Free PDF Page B

married a surgeon and became mother of three. As the result of a contretemps at one New Year’s Eve party, Crews was banned from their home for life.
    He was not going to be able to retrieve the bodies from the airplane single-handedly. He could not stay underwater that long. Search efforts must be already in progress: Dick had been shouting into the radio prior to the crash. Those in authority would certainly have been apprised of the plane’s position. And just how far into the wilds had it flown? Insofar as there remained any real wilderness in the age of space satellites which could presumably zero in, from on high, to see minuscule details on earth. He told himself that it would be no time before help arrived, even though the crash had occurred probably in the early afternoon of the day before and nobody had come looking thus far. From the sky the area would be much more vast than when represented on a map, and in this kind of terrain, his lake might well not be unique.
    Spurgeon may have been shouting into the radio because it had ceased to function properly, in which case his position might not have been known. The wait for a rescue might be somewhat longer than one would project on the basis of normal expectations. Crews was striving to be realistic, after many years of refusing to confine himself within standard reality, for that is what he was provided by drink: an alternative to the tedium others called life.
    Having given himself an irrefutable excuse for making no further attempt to bring up the bodies of his late companions, Crews dived again and again to the wreck and tried to do just that. Eventually he was able to remain there long enough to determine that on the impact with the water the instrument panel had been smashed back to crush and imprison the men in the front of the cabin. In back, Comstock was bent over a seat belt with a buckle that when located proved to be locked fast and could not be freed with unassisted fingers, nor was there an available means of cutting the impervious webbing.
    Crews had begun with too few physical resources to exhaust, but if endurance was a matter of sheer will, force was not. He was simply too weak to deal with the problems at hand. He did have the presence of mind, on his final and otherwise ineffectual dive, to scoop up from the compartment behind the rear seats every object with a reachable strap. Some of them floated against the ceiling.
    Impeded by his burdens, not all of which were buoyant, he had only enough remaining strength to swim to the beach and collapse prone on the sand, the sun hot on his bare back. It felt benevolent. Had he still been drunk—a state in which some effects were blindingly swift, but others lingered interminably, and these were no standards but those of caprice—he might have stayed interminably and suffered a severe burn. But now he was unaccountably conscious of threats to his well-being. His skin was in the spring mode, white and vulnerable. He put on his clothes, even unto the seersucker jacket. He had no shoes, having lost them in the frenzy of his escape from the plane.
    He examined the objects he had towed, on their straps, from the airplane. By now the water had ceased to drain through the wickerwork of the big picnic basket. He was interested to see, on unfastening its top, that the interior was stacked with watertight plastic containers and another thermos that, by the heft of it, still held coffee.
    The other three prizes consisted of his duffel bag, a long cylindrical hard-leather case that no doubt contained a segmented fishing rod, and a sizable box covered in olive-green fabric and belted at each end in leather: surely a tackle box. The fishing equipment was of little value to him, but the extra clothing in the duffel might be of use after it was dried. An examination of its contents disclosed that he had forgotten to bring along extra footgear. The absence of toilet articles, however, was not a surprise: he