Inside the Limit
The crack was so thin that Jane found it with her thumbnail before she found it with her eyes.
Frame 12, low on the right side of the engine room, in the same place she had checked eleven times that year. She wiped the steel with a rag and held the flashlight flat against it, so the light ran along the surface, and there it was: a hairline, about as long as her little finger.
Cracks occur. That was not the question. Every old boat has them, which is exactly why somebody crawls down here every Sunday with a rag and a light. The question was how fast.
She measured it twice. Thirty-four millimeters.
Above her head, through the deck, she could hear the cars coming aboard. Second week of August, the crossing booked solid since June: four hundred passengers, ninety vehicles, a wedding party in the queue with the flowers already in the car.
The captain came down when she stopped answering her radio. He looked at the crack, then at the manual open on the step beside her, where the limit sat in a table like a train timetable. Forty millimeters.
“It's inside the limit,” he said.
“It's inside the limit today.”
“Jane.”
“In May it was twenty-two.” She turned the logbook around so he could read her own handwriting from three months ago. “I didn't even write ‘crack.’ I wrote ‘mark.’”
He was quiet. Somewhere above them a car alarm went off and stopped.
“So what's the actual risk?” he said. “Realistically. Two hours, flat water.”
“Realistically, nothing happens,” Jane said. “Ninety-nine crossings out of a hundred, nothing happens. I just can't tell you which one is the hundredth, so I have to treat this one like it is.”
“The impact on the schedule—”
“I know what the impact is.”
At ten past eight she signaled the bridge, and the boarding stopped with eleven cars still on the ramp. She wrote it up in the flat language the form wanted: crack, frame 12, 34mm, vessel withdrawn pending survey. Then she climbed up into the daylight, where the whole queue was already turning to look at her.
By lunchtime four hundred people would be angry with her. That was the best possible outcome, and she knew it.