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leave, he'd be all alone. He shrugged, tossed his dish towel on the floor, then headed for the nearest doorway to find out what was going on.
     
    Black waves threatened to drag Jake Carey under for good. He fought against the dark current tugging at his body, crawled onto the slippery .edge of consciousness, and hung on grimly. He heard a moan and realized it was coming from his own lips. He moaned again, this time on purpose. Good. Dead men don't moan. His next thought was of his wife.
     
    "Myra!' he called out.
     
    He heard a faint stirring in the gray darkness. Hope surged in his breast. He called his wife's name again.
     
    "Over here." Myra's voice was muffled as if coming from a distance.
     
    "Thank God! Are you all. right?"
     
    A pause. "Yes. What happened? I was asleep"
     
    "I don't know. Can you move?"
     
    "No."
     
    "I'll come help you," Carey said. He lay on his left side, arm pinned under his body, a weight pressing on his right side. His legs were locked tight. Icy fear gripped him. Maybe his back was broken. He tried again. Harder. The jagged pain that shot up from his ankle to his thigh brought tears to his eyes; but it meant he wasn't paralyzed. He stopped struggling. He'd have to think this thing through. Carey was an engineer who'd made a fortune building bridges. This was no different from any other problem that could be solved by applications of logic and persistence. And lots of luck.
     
    He pushed with his right, elbow and felt .soft fabric. He was under the mattress. He shoved harder, angling his body for leverage. The mattress gave, then would move no more. Christ, the whole bloody ceiling could be on top of him. Carey took a deep breath, and, using every ounce of strength in his muscular arm,
    he pushed again. The mattress slid off onto the floor.
     
    With both arms free he reached down and felt something solid on top of his ankle. Exploring the surface with his fingers; he figured out it was the chest of drawers that had been between the twin beds. The, mattress must have shielded him from pieces of the wall and ceiling. With two hands free, he lifted the dresser a few inches and slid his legs out one at a time. He rubbed circulation gently back into his ankles. They were bruised and painful but not broken. He slowly got up on his hands and knees.
     
    "Jake." Myra's voice again. Weaker.
     
    "I'm coming, sweetheart Hold on."
     
    Something was wrong. Myra's voice seemed to issue from the other side of the cabin wall. He flicked on a light switch. The cabin, remained in darkness. Disoriented, he crawled through the . wreckage. His groping fingers found a door. He cocked his head, listening, to what sounded like surf against the shore and gulls screaming in the background. He staggered to his feet, cleared rubble from around the door, and opened it on a nightmare.
     
    The corridor was crowded with pushing and shoving passengers who were cast in an amber hue by the emergency lighting. Men, women, and children, some fully dressed, some in their nightclothes under their coats, some barehanded, others lugging bags, pushed, shoved, walked, or crawled as they fought their way toward the upper deck. The hallway was filled with dust and smoke and tilted like the floor of a fun house. A few passengers trying to get to their cabins struggled against the human river like salmon swimming against the current.
     
    Carey glanced back at the door he had just come through 'and realized from the numbers that he'd crawled out of the cabin adjoining his. He must have been thrown from one cabin to the other. That night in the lounge he and Myra had talked to the cabin's occupants, an older ItalianAmerican couple returning from a family reunion. He prayed that they hadn't followed their usual practice of retiring early.
     
    Carey muscled his. way through the throng to his cabin door. It was locked. He went back into the cabin he'd just come out of and pushed through the debris toward the wall. Several times he