Sam let his head rest on the waterlogged wood of the crate. It didn't help. The slow rocking motion from when he'd first leapt in had become rugged chop and he hadn't managed to keep a hold on whatever his last meal had been. Colourful fish had swarmed around his crate and cleaned the lumps of what looked like diced carrot. Had diced carrot been the last thing he'd eaten? He couldn't remember. He'd have to work to get back memories of his previous leap; there was just this hollow place. Someone would come for him. He knew that. He just couldn't think who. The crate was lower in the water than it had been when he'd first leapt in. Inch by inch it was sinking. He wondered how good he was at swimming.

'Hey! There you are!'

A man. Walking on water towards him. Slowly the man sank into the water, still walking. Not swimming. Not wading. Walking through the water as if it wasn't there.

'Al.' He knew someone would come for him. 'Where am I?'

In his left hand, Al held a small, colourful control pad, in his right, a cigar. He took a brief pull on the cigar and then punched buttons on the control pad. 'According to Ziggy, you're fifteen degrees and twenty seven minutes North and…'

'Al.' Sam let his look of exasperation say what he wanted.

'Oh. Okay, well.' Al stuck the cigar between his teeth and picked at the control pad, frowned, bashed it twice so that it squealed at him and took the cigar back out again. 'You're six hundred and fifty three miles South West of Hawaii.'

Sam shook his head. It was a bad move. The violent purple and orange pattern of Al's shirt was already making him bilious. Now the headspin combined with the ever-shifting horizon and he felt his stomach starting to rebel again. He fought the rising tide inside, aware that he was dehydrated and a little sunstruck and that further loss of fluid was going to be a bad thing.

A long, woozy moment later, he looked up to see Al, disconcertingly dry, gazing at him.

'You okay kid? You don't look so good. I mean, really…'

'Do I usually get seasick?'

Al shrugged. 'You've been on boats before, ocean liners, even. I guess they're a little bigger than -' He shrugged and gestured towards Sam and the crate, his head bobbed up and down in time to the choppy movement over the waves. 'And maybe the sea was calmer then, too.'

Sam closed his eyes, wishing it would make a difference if he could just blot out the way the horizon kept sloshing around. He tried to focus on the sound of seagulls and distant surf. 'Who am I?'

'Ah, not sure.'

'How can you not be sure? Why don't you just ask the guy in the waiting room?' He opened his eyes again, gazing at the impossibly dry Al.

Al took a long, slow draw on his cigar, a delaying tactic that wasn't going to buy him a lot of time. 'Our friend in the waiting room's in a pretty bad way.' His right hand, with the cigar in it, dropped below the level of the waves and then reappeared, cigar still lit.

'What's wrong with him?' Sam braced himself against another assault from his stomach, swallowed hard and willed himself to be okay. 'Aside from terminal seasickness?'

'Basic exposure. He's dehydrated, he's got sunstroke and they think he's been drinking seawater.' Al made a sympathetic face and shook his head. 'If you hadn't leapt in when you did, Ziggy gave him a ninety eight percent chance of being dead within a half hour.'

'And I've been here - how long?'

'Half a day.'

'Half a day? Feels more like two weeks.' Two weeks inside a washing machine. 'So I've already changed history. The guy would've died but I'm still alive.' Not that he was going to last much longer. He'd heard of people throwing themselves overboard into stormy seas in order to escape the feeling of seasickness. Now he knew why. 'I guess all I have to do is just stay alive until I get rescued.'

Al stuck the cigar back into his mouth while his fingers danced a rapid tattoo over the control pad. He shook his head, bashed the pad a couple of times with the heel of his hand and shook his head again. He reached for the cigar and took a final puff. 'Ziggy says there's only a forty three, no, forty two percent chance of you getting rescued. What?' He turned away from Sam, looking across the water at the crazily tilted horizon. 'But he can't…What's Verbeena say?' He turned back to Sam. 'Listen, kid, I'm getting some static off Gooshie here.' He gestured towards whitecaps. 'I just need to go check something out, okay? Now don't go anywhere, I'll be right back.' He punched the keypad and a door-space of brilliant light opened in the middle of the ocean. Al stepped into the light and with a decisive punch of his keypad, vanished.

Sam felt some misgivings as Al left him alone. All he had for company was his misbehaving stomach, his sunburn and the sound of seagulls and surf. He wondered how far gone you had to be before you were tempted to start drinking salt water. Seagulls. If he could catch one, he stood a good chance of surviving. There was moisture in the meat. If he'd had the presence of mind to catch one of those fish when he'd first got sick, he'd be in a much better position now. On the other hand, did he want to eat something that had just eaten the thrown-up contents of his stomach? Who was he trying to kid anyway? He just wasn't some caveman who went around eating raw meat. Just thinking about the smell of raw poultry was making his stomach feel mutinous again. It was some time before it occurred to him that where there were seagulls and surf, there was also land.

The crate was wallowing in the water, too unstable for him to do anything but lie on it, but when it crested the next wave, he raised himself up as far as his arms could go and there, a whole lot closer than he might have dared hope, was an island. He lay back down and stuck his hand in the water and tried to row. So much for Ziggy and his forty-two percent. Sam was just about close enough to walk to the island. This guy was going to be rescued.

The waves were breaking, not on the beach but further out, on a coral reef. The crate rose up on the crest of a wave and smashed down against corals still covered by the water. He felt the wood catch and tug, break apart beneath him. Another couple of waves like that and he'd be on his own, swimming across the reef towards the bay and the pristine beach hugging it. Sam was not dressed for swimming. He was wearing a greasy boiler suit and a waterlogged pair of leather boots. The survivor, the man he'd leapt into, must have just about fallen onto the crate when his ship had gone down, otherwise those boots would have been gone. He clutched at the edge of the crate and unlaced the boots, one at a time, kicked them off, then popped the buttons of the boiler suit. Timing was critical. He'd pushed the suit down to waist level when the crate broke up beneath him, and he spent long seconds underwater, kicking his way out of it before he broke the surface and dragged in a welcome lungful of air.

Either he was in far worse condition than he'd bargained for, or he really sucked at swimming. The waves battered him as he tried to ride them to shore and he gulped for breath, choking, too often, on water instead. There was no one to urge him on but himself and he pulled towards the shore, each glimpse of it a little greyer, foamier, wetter than the last. In a dark washtub of water and froth and shrieking gulls, he thought he felt the solid safety of sand below him, just before everything went dark.