Читать книгу Alistair MacLean Arctic Chillers 4-Book Collection: Night Without End, Ice Station Zebra, Bear Island, Athabasca - Alistair MacLean, Alistair MacLean, John Denis - Страница 15

Despite our exhaustion, despite our almost overwhelming need for sleep, I don’t think anyone slept that night, even for a moment, for to have slept would have been to freeze to death.

I had never known such cold. Even with twelve of us jam-packed inside a tiny wooden box built to hold five sleeping people at the most, even with the oil fire roaring up the chimney all night long and warmed by a couple of cups of piping hot coffee apiece, we all of us suffered agonies during these dark hours. The chattering of teeth, the St Vitus’ dance of tremor-ridden limbs knocking against the thin uninsulated wooden walls, the constant rubbing as someone sought to restore life to a frozen face or arm or foot. These were the sounds that never ceased. How the elderly Marie LeGarde or the sick Mahler survived that night was indeed a matter for wonder.

But survive they did, for when I looked at my luminous watch, saw that it was almost four o’clock and decided that enough was enough, both of them were wide awake when I switched on the little overhead light. Weak enough normally, that light was now no more than a feeble yellow glow – an ominous sign, it meant that even the tractor batteries were beginning to freeze up – but enough to see the crowded circle of faces, white and blue and yellowing with frostbite, the smoke-like exhalations that clouded in the air before them with every breath they took, the film of slick ice that already covered the walls and all of the roof except for a few inches round the stove pipe exit. As a spectacle of suffering, of sheer unrelieved misery, I don’t think I have ever seen its equal.

‘Insomnia, eh, Doc?’ It was Corazzini speaking, his teeth chattering between the words. ‘Or just forgotten to plug in your electric blanket?’

‘Just an early riser, Mr Corazzini.’ I glanced round the haggard and pain-filled faces. ‘Anybody here slept at all?’

I was answered by mute headshakes from everybody.

‘Anybody likely to sleep?’

Again the headshakes.

‘That settles it.’ I struggled to my feet. ‘It’s only 4 a.m., but if we’re going to freeze to death we might as well freeze on the move. Not only that, but another few hours in this temperature, and that tractor engine will never start again. What do you think, Jackstraw?’

‘I’ll get the blow-torches,’ he said by way of answer, and pushed his way out through the canvas screen. Almost at once I heard him begin to cough violently in the deadly cold of the air outside, and, in the intervals between the coughing, we could clearly hear the dry rustling crackling of his breath as the moisture condensed, froze and drifted away in the all but imperceptible breeze.

Corazzini and I followed, choking and gasping in turn as that glacial cold seared through throat and lungs, adjusting masks and goggles until not a millimetre of flesh was left exposed. Abreast the driving cabin I drew out my torch and glanced at the alcohol thermometer – ordinary mercury froze solid at −38° – then looked again in disbelief. The red spirit inside the glass had sunk down to within an inch of the bulb and stood on the line of −68° – exactly one hundred degrees of frost. Still well below Wegener’s −85°, further short still of the incredible −125° that the Russians had recorded at the Vostok in Antarctica, but nevertheless the lowest, by almost fifteen degrees, that I had ever experienced. And that it should happen now – now, two hundred miles from the nearest human habitation, with Jackstraw and myself stuck with two murderers, a possibly dying man, seven other passengers rapidly weakening from exposure, exhaustion and lack of food, and a superannuated tractor that was due to pack up at any moment at all.

Over an hour later I had cause to revise the last part of that estimate – it seemed that the tractor had already packed up. I had had my first intimation of trouble to come when I had switched on the ignition and pressed the horn – the faint mournful beep could hardly have been heard twenty yards away. The batteries were so gummed up by the cold that they couldn’t even have turned over a hot engine, far less one in which the crankcase, transmission and differential were all but locked solid in lubricating oil that had lost all power to lubricate anything and had been turned into a super viscous liquid with the consistency and intractability of some heavy animal glue. Even with two of us bringing all our weight to bear on the starting handle it was impossible to turn even one cylinder over the top.

We made to light the paraffin blow-torches but they, too, were frozen solid: paraffin freezes at just over −50°, and even at −40° it still flows like heavy gear-case oil. We had to thaw them out with a petrol blow-torch, then place all five of them on wooden boxes and behind canvas aprons to retain the heat, two to thaw out the crankcase, two for the gear-box and transmission and the last for the differential. After an hour or so, when the engine had begun to turn fairly easily and we had brought out the heavy battery which had been thawing out by the stove, we tried again. But it gave no sign of life at all.

None of us, not even Corazzini whose Global tractors were all diesel-powered, was an expert in engine maintenance, and this was when we came very close to despair. But despair was the one emotion we couldn’t afford, and we knew it. We kept the blow-torches burning, returned the battery to the stove, removed and cleaned the plugs, eased the frozen brushes in the generator, stripped and removed the petrol lines, thawed them and sucked out the frozen condensation by mouth, scraped away the ice from the carburettor intake and returned everything in place. We had to remove our gloves for most of this delicate work, the flesh stuck to metal and pulled off like the skin of an orange when we removed our hands, even the backs of our fingers became burnt and blistered from casual knocks on metal, blood oozed out from under our fingernails only to coagulate in the freezing air, and our lips, where they had touched the copper petrol feeds, were swollen and puffed and blistered. It was brutal, killing work, and in addition to the work our arms and legs and faces were almost constantly frozen, despite frequent visits to the stove to thaw ourselves out. It was murderous – but it was worth it. At six-fifteen, two and a quarter hours after we had begun, the big engine coughed and spluttered into life, missed, coughed again, caught and settled down into a steady even roar. I felt my split lips cracking into a painful grin under my mask, thumped Jackstraw and Corazzini for the moment quite forgetting that the latter might be one of the killers – on the back, turned and went in for breakfast.

Or what passed for breakfast. It was little enough, heaven knew – coffee, crackers and the contents of a couple of corned beef tins shared among the twelve of us, the lion’s share going to Theodore Mahler. That left us with only four more tins of beef, four cans of vegetables, about ten pounds of dried fruit, a little frozen fish, a small tin of biscuits, three packets of cereal and – it was the only thing apart from coffee of which we had an adequate supply – over twenty tins of Nestlé’s unsweetened milk. We had, of course, seal meat for the dogs – Jackstraw thawed some out for them over the stove while we had breakfast – and the fried meat of young seal is palatable to a degree. But the dogs had first claim on that. It was more important to preserve their strength than our own: should the engine of the Citroën break down completely, our last hope lay with the dogs.

Breakfast over and the dogs fed, we started off just before moonset, Corazzini driving, with the long trailing plume of our exhaust vapour, milk-white but thick as smoke in that bitter air, stretching out far behind us, bar-straight, almost as far as the eye could see in the waning light of the moon. I had arranged that the drivers should change over every fifteen minutes – as long a period as any person could stand in that unheated and largely unprotected cabin. I had heard of a case in the Antarctic where a driver had sat so long in an exposed tractor that his numbed and frozen fingers had locked so immovably that the steering-wheel had had to be unbolted and brought inside still clutched in the driver’s grasp before the hands could be thawed sufficiently to release the wheel: I didn’t want anything of that kind happening to us.

As soon as we were under way I had a look at Mahler, and his appearance certainly did nothing to inspire any great confidence in his chances. Even although he was fully dressed, lying in an eiderdown sleeping-bag that was zipped all the way to his chin, and covered in blankets, his pinched face was a mottled blue-white and he was shaking continuously with the cold, a handkerchief between his teeth to prevent their chattering. I reached for his wrist. The pulse was very fast, though it seemed strong enough: but I couldn’t be sure, so much skin had been sloughed or burnt off in the past two or three hours that I’d lost all sensitivity in my fingertips. I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.

‘Well, how do you feel, Mr Mahler?’

‘No worse than anyone else, I’m sure, Dr Mason.’

‘That could still be bad enough. Hungry?’

‘Hungry!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thanks to the generosity of these good people here, I couldn’t eat another crumb.’

It was typical of what I had come to expect of this gentle Jew in the past few hours. Despite the relatively generous amount of food he’d had for his breakfast, he’d wolfed it all down like a famished man. He was hungry, all right: his body, lacking the insulin to break down the mounting sugar in his blood, was crying out for nourishment yet unable to find it no matter what his food intake was.

‘Thirsty?’

He nodded. Perhaps he thought he was on safe ground there, but it was another and invariable symptom of the developing acuteness of his trouble. I was pretty certain, too, that he had already begun to weaken, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before he began to lose weight rapidly. Indeed, he already looked thinner, the cheekbones were more prominent, than even thirty-six hours ago. But then that was true of all the others also, especially Marie LeGarde: for all her uncomplaining courage, her determined cheerfulness, she now looked more than old: she looked sick, and very tired. But there was nothing I could do for her.

‘Your feet?’ I asked Mahler. ‘How are they?’

‘I don’t think they’re there any longer,’ he smiled.

‘Let me see them,’ I asked sharply. He protested, but I overruled him. One look at that dead-white ice-cold flesh was enough.

‘Miss Ross,’ I said. ‘From now on you are Mr Mahler’s personal Gunga Din. We have a couple of rubber bags in the sled. I want you to keep these alternately filled just as soon as you can get water heated – unfortunately, it takes a long time to melt that damned snow. They’re for Mr Mahler’s feet.’ Again Mahler protested, objecting to what he called ‘This babying’, but I ignored him. I didn’t want to tell him, not yet, that frostbite in the feet of an untreated diabetic could mean only one thing: gangrene and amputation, at the least. Slowly I looked round the occupants of the tractor cabin and I think that had I known for certain who the person responsible for all this was, I would have killed him without compunction.

Just then Corazzini came in. After only fifteen minutes at the wheel of the tractor he had just yielded to Jackstraw he was in a pretty bad way. The bluish-white bloodless face was mottled with yellow frostbite blisters, his lips were cracked, the fingernails were beginning to discolour and his hands were in a shocking mess. True, Jackstraw, Zagero and I were little better, but Corazzini was the only one who had driven in that intense cold: he was shaking like a man with malarial fever, and from the way he stumbled up the steps I could see that his legs were gone. I helped him to a vacant seat by the stove.

‘Feel anything below the knees?’ I asked quickly.

‘Not a damned thing.’ He tried to smile, but the effort was too painful, the blood started to well again from the open cuts on his lips. ‘It’s pretty vicious out there, Doc. Better rub the old feet with some snow, huh?’ He stooped and fumbled uselessly at laces with his numbed and bleeding fingers, but before he could move Margaret Ross was on her knees, easing off his boots with gentle fingers. Looking down at that slight figure lost beneath the bulky layers of clothing, I wondered for the hundredth time how I could ever have been crazy enough to believe about her all the things I had done.

‘In your own idiom, Mr Corazzini,’ I said, ‘snow is strictly for the birds. Just an old wives’ tale as far as these temperatures are concerned. You’d be better rubbing your skin off with emery-paper.’ At 70° below, snow had the hard crystalline structure of sandstone, and, when rubbed, granulated into a gritty white powdery sand. I nodded to one of the snow-buckets on the stove. ‘When the temperature there reaches 85°, stick your feet in it. Wait till the skin turns red. It won’t be pleasant, but it’ll work. If there are any blisters I’ll puncture and sterilise them tomorrow.’

He stared at me. ‘Is that sort of thing going to go on all the time, Doc?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

And it did go on for all the time – or for the next ten hours, at least, during which time the temperature dropped down to the low seventies, halted and began its slow, ever so slow, upward swing again. Ten hours while the snow-buckets were never off the stove, ten hours while Mrs Dansby-Gregg, her maid, Helene and, later on, Solly Levin held blow-torches against the sides of the buckets to hurry up the melting and heating process, ten hours while we drivers suffered the regularly recurring pounding agony of circulation returning to our frozen limbs, ten hours during which we began to build up an almost pathological dread of the moment when we must again plunge our feet into hot water, ten hours during which Mahler grew steadily weaker and Marie LeGarde, falling silent for the first time, slipped down and lay huddled in a corner, eyelids closed, like one already dead. Ten hours. Ten interminable indescribable hours of suffering borrowed from purgatory. But long before these ten hours were up something happened to change the picture completely.

At noon we halted the tractor. While the women were heating up soup and using a blowtorch to thaw out two cans of fruit, Jackstraw and I rigged up the radio transmitter, strung out an antenna and started triggering out our GFK call-sign. Normally, on these hand-cranked eight-watt jobs, a morse key was used for transmission while reception was by a pair of earphones, but thanks to a skilful improvisation by Joss who knew how hopelessly awkward morse was for everyone in the party except himself, the set had been rigged so that the key was used only for the call-up sign. After the link was made, a hand microphone could be used for transmission: and simply by throwing the receiving switch into the antenna lead, the microphone was transformed into a small but sufficiently effective loudspeaker.

Calling up Joss was only a gesture. I’d made a promise and was keeping it, that was all. But by this time, I estimated, we were 120 miles distant from him, near enough the limit of our small set: I didn’t know what effect the intense cold would have on radio transmission, but I suspected it wouldn’t be anything good: there had been no aurora that morning, but the ionosphere disturbance might still be lingering on: and, of course, Joss himself had declared that his RCA was entirely beyond repair.

Ten minutes passed, ten minutes during which Jackstraw industriously cranked the handle and I sent out the call-sign, GFK three times repeated, a flick of the receiver switch, ten seconds listening, then the switch pulled back and the call-sign made again. At the end of the ten minutes I sent out the last call, pushed over the receiving switch, listened briefly then stood up, resignedly gesturing to Jackstraw to stop cranking. It was then, almost in the very last instant, that the mike in my hand crackled into life.

‘GFX calling GFK. GFX calling GFK. We are receiving you faint but clear. Repeat, we are receiving you. Over.’

I fumbled and nearly dropped the mike in my excitement.

‘GFK calling GFX, GFK calling GFX.’ I almost shouted the words, saw Jackstraw pointing to the switch which was still in the receiving position, cursed my stupidity, threw it over, called out the signs again and then, quite forgetting the procedure and etiquette of radio communication, rushed on, the words tumbling over one another: ‘Dr Mason here. Dr Mason here. Receiving you loud and clear. Is that you, Joss?’ I threw the switch.

‘Yes, sir. Glad to hear from you.’ Static lent a flat impersonality to the crackling words, robbed them of meaning. ‘How are you? What weather, how far out?’

‘Going strong,’ I replied. ‘Cold intense – minus 70°. Approximately 120 miles out. Joss, this is a miracle! How on earth did you fix it?’

‘I didn’t,’ he said unemotionally. There was a pause and then his voice came again. ‘Captain Hillcrest is waiting to speak to you, sir.’

‘Captain Hillcrest! What on earth is Captain Hillcrest—’ I broke off abruptly, not through astonishment, great though that was, that Hillcrest, whom I had believed to be almost 250 miles to the north of our IGY cabin should have suddenly turned up there, but because the warning glance from Jackstraw had found an echoing answer in the back of my own mind. ‘Hold on,’ I said quickly. ‘Will call you back in two or three minutes.’

We had set up the transmitter just to the rear of the tractor cabin, and I knew that every word said on both sides could be heard by those inside. It was just then that the curtains parted and Corazzini and Zagero peered out, but I ignored them. I never cared less about the hurt I was offering to anybody’s feelings, just picked up the radio and generator while Jackstraw unstrung the antenna, and walked away from the tractor. Two hundred yards away I stopped. Those in the tractor could still see us – the brief light of noonday was flooding over the ice-cap – but they could no longer hear us.

We rigged the radio again, and I tried to tap out the call-sign but it was hopeless, we’d been out too long in that dreadful cold and my hand was beating an uncontrollable tattoo on the key. Fortunately, they knew or guessed at the other end what was happening, for Hillcrest’s voice, calm, confident, infinitely reassuring, came through as soon as I pressed the receiving switch.

‘Surprise, surprise,’ the mike crackled mechanically. ‘Ok, Dr Mason, from what Joss has said – and the recent delay – I guess you’re a good way from the tractor. At seventy below you won’t want to stay there too long. Suggest I do all the talking. I’ll keep it brief. Receiving me?’

‘Loud and clear. What on earth are you – sorry, carry on.’

‘Thanks. We heard Monday afternoon, on both British and American broadcasts, of the overdue airliner. Tuesday morning – yesterday, that is – we heard from the Uplavnik base. They say this hasn’t been announced officially, but the US and British governments are convinced that the plane has not been lost at sea, but that it has landed somewhere in Greenland or Baffin Island. Don’t ask me why they’re convinced – I’ve no idea. Anyway, they’ve mounted the biggest air-sea rescue search since the war. Merchant vessels of several nationalities have been diverted. American, British, French and Canadian fishing trawlers are moving in to the Greenland coast – the west coast mainly. The east’s already blocked with ice. A dozen US air force search bombers are already operating from Thule and Sondre Strömfjord. US coastguard cutters are on the job, a flotilla of Canadian destroyers have been rerouted from mid-Atlantic and are steaming at full speed for the southern entrance of the Davis Strait – although it will take them at least thirty-six more hours to get there – and a British aircraft-carrier, accompanied by a couple of destroyers, has already rounded Cape Farewell: we don’t know yet how far north she can get, the ice is solid on the Baffin side, but it’s open at least to Disko on the Greenland coast, maybe as far as Svartenhuk. All IGY stations in Greenland have been ordered to join in the search. That’s why we came back non-stop to the cabin – to pick up more petrol.’

I could contain myself no longer, threw over the receiving switch.

‘What on earth’s all the mad flap about? You’d think the President of the United States and half the Royal Family were aboard that plane. Why no more information from Uplavnik?’

I waited, and then Hillcrest’s voice crackled again.

‘Radio transmission impossible during preceding twenty-four hours. Will raise them now, tell them we’ve found the missing plane and that you’re on your way to the coast. Any fresh developments with you?’

‘None. Correction. One of the passengers – Mahler – turns out to be an advanced diabetic. He’s in a bad way. Radio Uplavnik to get insulin. Godthaab will have it.’

‘Wilco,’ the microphone crackled back. A long pause, during which I could faintly hear the murmur of conversation, then Hillcrest came on again. ‘Suggest you return to meet us. We have plenty of petrol, plenty of food. With eight of us on guard instead of two, nothing could happen. We’re already forty miles out’ – I glanced at Jackstraw, caught the sudden wrinkling of the eyes which I knew to be the tell-tale sign of a quick grin of astonished delight which so accurately reflected my own feelings – ‘so not more than eighty miles behind you. We could meet up in five or six hours.’

I felt elation wash through me like a releasing wave. This was wonderful, this was more than anything I had ever dared hope for. All our troubles were at an end … And then the momentary emotion of relief and triumph ebbed, the cold dismaying processes of reason moved in inexorably to take their place, and it didn’t require the slow, definite shake of Jackstraw’s head to tell me that the end of our troubles was as far away as ever.

‘No go,’ I radioed back. ‘Quite fatal. The minute we turned back the killers would be bound to show their hand. And even if we don’t turn they know now that we’ve been in contact with you and will be more desperate than ever. We must go on. Please follow at your best speed.’ I paused for a moment, then continued. ‘Emphasise to Uplavnik essential for our lives to know why crashed plane so important. Tell them to find out the passenger list, how genuine it is. This is absolutely imperative, Captain Hillcrest. Refuse to accept “No” for an answer. We must know.’

We talked for another minute, but we’d really said all there was to be said. Besides, even during the brief periods that I’d pushed down my snow-mask to speak the cold had struck so cruelly at my cut and bleeding lips that I could now raise scarcely more than a mumble, so after arranging an 8 p.m. rendezvous and making a time-check I signed off.

Back in the tractor cabin curiosity had reached fever pitch, but at least three minutes elapsed – three excruciatingly uncomfortable minutes while Jackstraw and I waited for the blood to come surging back through our frozen veins – before anyone ventured to speak. The inevitable question came from the Senator – a now very much chastened Senator who had lost much of his choler and all of his colour, with the heavy jowls, hanging more loosely than ever, showing unhealthily pale through the grey grizzle of beard. The very fact that he spoke showed, I suppose, that he didn’t regard himself as being heavily under suspicion. He was right enough in that.

‘Made contact with your friends, Dr Mason, eh? The field party, I mean.’ His voice was hesitant, unsure.

‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Joss – Mr London – got the set working after almost thirty hours’ non-stop work. He raised Captain Hillcrest – he’s in charge of the field party – and managed to establish a relay contact between us.’ I’d never heard of the phrase ‘relay contact’ in my life, but it sounded scientific enough. ‘He’s packing up immediately, and coming after us.’

‘Is that good?’ the Senator asked hopefully. ‘I mean, how long—?’

‘Only a gesture, I’m afraid,’ I interrupted. ‘He’s at least 258 miles away. His tractor’s not a great deal faster than ours.’ It was, in fact, almost three times as fast. ‘Five or six days, at the least.’

Brewster nodded heavily and said no more. He looked disappointed, but he looked as if he believed me. I wondered which of them didn’t believe me, which of them knew I was lying because they knew that they had so thoroughly destroyed all the spare condensers and valves that it would have been quite impossible for Joss to repair the RCA.

The long bitter day, a day filled by nothing except that dreadful cold, an endless suffering and the nerve-destroying thunderous roar and vibration of that big engine, crawled by like a dying man. About two-thirty in the afternoon, as the last glow of the noon-light faded and the stars began to stand clear in the cold and brittle sky, the temperature reached its nadir – a frightening 73 degrees below zero. Then it was, that strange things happened: flashlights brought from under a parka died out inside a minute: rubber became hard as wood and cracked and fractured like wood: breath was an opaque white cloud that shrouded the heads of every person who ventured outside the tractor body: the ice-cap froze to such an unprecedented degree of hardness that the tractor treads spun and slipped on flat surfaces, the crimp marks no more than half-seen hairlines on the ground: the dogs, who could with impunity stand up to howling blizzards that would kill any man, whined and wailed in their utter misery in that appalling cold: and, now and again, like some far-off intimation of doom and the end of the world, a dull rumbling sound would come echoing across the ice-cap and the ground shake beneath the treads of the tractor as some great areas of snow and ice contracted still farther under the iron hand of that glacial cold.

It was then, inevitably, that the tractor started to give trouble: it was only a matter for wonder that it hadn’t broken down long before that. What I feared above all was the shearing of some moving metal part, made brittle by that intense cold, that would have been the end of us: a valve-stem, a cam-rod, any one part of the delicate timing mechanism, even so small a thing as a crankshaft pin: it needed just one of these to go, and we would be gone also.

We were spared these lethal mishaps, but what we had was almost as bad. Carburettor ice was a constant problem. The steering box froze up and had to be thawed out by blow-torches. Generator brushes stuck and broke, but fortunately we carried spares enough of these. But the biggest trouble was the radiator. Despite the fact that we had it heavily lagged, the cold penetrated the lagging as if it were tissue paper and the subsequent metal contraction produced distortion. Soon it began to leak, and by three o’clock in the afternoon we were losing water at dismaying speed. I doled out some of our precious reserves of heat pads for Mahler’s feet, with the instructions that the water from the snow-buckets on the stove was to be kept solely for the radiator. But even with blow-torches assisting the heat of a stove, the melting of super-chilled snow is a discouragingly slow process: soon we were reduced to pouring half-melted slush down the radiator cap, and finally to cramming snow itself down in order to keep going at all. All this was bad enough: but the frightening thing was that for every pint of radiator liquid lost and every pint of snow-water used to replace it, the anti-freeze became that much more diluted, and though we carried a small reserve drum of ethylene glycol its weight diminished perceptibly with every halt we made.

We had, hours before that, dispensed with a lookout, and the burden of all this work fell on Jackstraw, Zagero, Corazzini and myself. Of the four of us, Jackstraw was the only one who escaped what I knew would be permanent injury or disfigurement in the shape of scars and destroyed tissue. Zagero might never before have borne any of the scars of his trade, but he was going to have what looked peculiarly like one now: we had been too late in getting a cold-water compress to his right ear, and these destroyed tissues would need plastic surgery: two of Corazzini’s toes had also been left too long without treatment, and I knew that he, too, would finish up in a surgical ward: and, because I was the one most in contact with the engine, my fingertips were a painful bleeding mess, the nails already blackening and beginning to rot away.

Nor were things a great deal better with those inside the tractor cabin. The first physiological effects of the cold were beginning to assert themselves, and assert themselves strongly – the almost overpowering desire for sleep, the uncaring indifference to all that went on around them. Later would come the sleeplessness, the anæmia, the digestive troubles, the nervousness that could lead to insanity – if the cold continued long enough these conditions would inevitably succeed the picture of huddled, lifeless misery that presented itself to me whenever I sought the shelter of the cabin and the agony of returning circulation after my spell at the wheel. Many times I saw the picture that afternoon, and always the picture was the same.

The Senator sat slumped in a corner, a dead man but for the fits of violent shuddering that overtook him at regularly recurring intervals. Mahler appeared to sleep. Mrs Dansby-Gregg and Helene lay huddled in one another’s arms – an incredible sight, I thought, but then, next only to death itself, the Arctic was the great leveller, an unparalleled agent in stripping away the pretensions and shoddy veneers of everyday living. I was no great believer in the sudden conversions of human nature, and was pretty certain that, with Mrs Dansby-Gregg, the return to civilisation would coincide with the return to her normal self, and that this moment of common humanity shared by herself and her maid would be no more than a fading and unwelcome memory: but for all my dislike of Mrs Dansby-Gregg, I was beginning to develop more than a sneaking admiration for her. The carefully cherished snobbery, the maddeningly easy and condescending assumption of an inevitable social superiority were irritating enough, heaven knew, but behind that unlovable façade seemed to lie a deep-buried streak of that selflessness which is the hallmark of the genuine aristocrat: although she complained constantly about the tiny irritations, she was silent on matters that caused her genuine suffering: she was developing a certain brusque helpfulness, as if she was half-ashamed of it, and showed a care for her maid which, though probably no more than that feudal kindness that reaches its best in adversity, nevertheless verged almost on tenderness: and I had seen her take a mirror from her handbag, inspect the ravages frostbite had wreaked on her lovely face, then return the mirror to her bag with a gesture of indifference. Mrs Dansby-Gregg, in short, was becoming for me an object lesson against the dangers of an over-ready classification of people into types.

Marie LeGarde, the lovable, indomitable Marie LeGarde, was a sick old woman, weakening by the hour. Her attempts at cheerfulness in her fully wakeful moments – she was asleep most of the time – were strained and almost desperate. The effort was too much. There was nothing I could do for her. Like an old watch, her time was running out, the mainspring of her life running down. A day or two of this would surely kill her.

Solly Levin had taken over the blow-torches which played constantly against the sides of the snow-buckets. Wrapped and huddled in clothes until only one eye was visible, he nevertheless achieved the near impossible of looking a picture of abject misery: but the way my thoughts had been running all day, I had no sympathy to waste on Mr Levin. Margaret Ross dozed by the side of the stove but I turned my eyes away quickly, even to look at that thin white face was a physical hurt.

The marvel of them all was Mr Smallwood, yet another instance, I thought wryly, of how wrong I could get. Instead of being one of the first to go under, he showed every sign of being the last. Three hours ago, when I had been in the cabin, he had brought up his bag from the tractor sled, and as he’d opened it I’d caught a glimpse of a black gown and the red and purple divinity hood. He’d brought out a Bible, donned a pair of rimless steel spectacles and, for several hours now, had been reading as best he could in the dim overhead light. He seemed composed, relaxed yet alert, fit to carry on for a long time to come. As doctor and scientist I didn’t go in much for theological speculation, but I could only suppose that Mr Smallwood was in some way sustained by something that was denied the rest of us. I could only envy him.

During the course of the evening two blows fell. The first of these was not in any way figurative. I still have the scar on my forehead to prove it.

We stopped just before eight o’clock that evening, partly in order to keep our radio schedule with Hillcrest, partly – because I wanted to make a long halt, to give Hillcrest all the more opportunity to overtake us – on the pretext that the Citroën’s engine was overheating badly in the temperature that had been rising steadily since the early afternoon. But despite the fact that it was now almost twenty-five degrees warmer than in mid-afternoon, it was still bitterly cold – our hunger and physical exhaustion saw to it that we still suffered almost as much as ever – dark and very still. Far away to the south-west we could see the jagged saw-tooth line of the Vindeby Nunataks – that hundred-mile long ridge of hills that we would have to cross the next day – the forbidding peaks a gleaming crystalline white in the light of the moon that had not yet topped our eastern horizon.

I was driving when we stopped. I switched off the motor, walked round to the back of the tractor and told those inside that we were making a halt. I asked Margaret Ross to heat some food on the stove – soup, dried fruit, one of our four remaining tins of corned beef – asked Jackstraw to rig up the antenna for the radio, then went back to the tractor, stooped and turned the radiator drainage cap, catching the liquid in a can. The anti-freeze in the water had been thinned down so much in the course of the day that I was pretty certain that, in those temperatures, it wouldn’t take half an hour for the radiator water to freeze up and split open the cylinder jacket.

I suppose it was because of the gurgling of the water into the can that I didn’t hear the sound behind me until the last moment, and even so I had no particular reason just then to be suspicious of anything. I half-straightened and turned round to see who was there, but I was too late. The consciousness of a vague blur in the darkness and the blinding white flash of light and pain as something solid smashed into my forehead, just above the goggles on my right eye, came in one and the same instant. I was out, completely unconscious, long before I crumpled down on to the frozen surface of the ice-cap.

Death could easily have supervened then. It would have been easy, ever so easy, for me to drift from unconsciousness into that numbed sleep from which, almost eighty degrees of frost in the ground, I would never have awakened. But awake I did, slowly, painfully, reluctantly, at the insistence of urgently shaking hands.

‘Dr Mason! Dr Mason!’ Dimly I realised that it was Jackstraw speaking, that he had my head and shoulders supported in the crook of his arm. His voice was low, but with a peculiarly carrying quality. ‘Wake up, Dr Mason. Ah, good, good. Easy does it now, Dr Mason.’

Groggily, Jackstraw’s strong arm helping, I levered myself up into an upright sitting position. A brilliant flame of pain lanced like a scalpel through my head, I felt everything blurring once more, consciously, almost violently, shook off the shadows that were creeping in on me again, then looked dazedly up at Jackstraw. I couldn’t see very well, I thought for one frightening moment that the vision centre had been damaged when the back of my head had struck against the iron-hard ice-cap – the ache there was almost as severe as the one in my forehead – but I soon discovered that it was only the blood seeping from the cut on my forehead that had frozen and gummed together the lids of my right eye.

‘No idea who did it, Dr Mason?’ Jackstraw wasn’t the man to ask stupid questions like ‘What happened?’

‘No idea at all.’ I struggled to my feet. ‘Have you?’

‘Hopeless.’ I could sense rather than see the shrug in the darkness. ‘As soon as you stopped, three or four of them came out. I don’t know where they went – I was out to the south rigging up the antenna.’

‘The radio, Jackstraw!’ I was beginning to think again. ‘Where’s the radio?’

‘No worry, Dr Mason, I have it with me,’ Jackstraw said grimly. ‘It’s here … Any idea why?’

‘None … Yes, I have.’ I thrust my hand into the inside pocket of my parka, then looked at Jackstraw in disbelief. ‘My gun – it’s still there!’

‘Nothing else missing?’

‘No. Spare ammo clip there – wait a moment,’ I said slowly. I hunted around in my parka pocket, but with no success. ‘A paper – I took a newspaper cutting from Colonel Harrison’s pocket – it’s gone.’

‘A cutting? What was in it, Dr Mason?’

‘You’re talking to one of the world’s prize idiots, Jackstraw.’ I shook my head in self-reproach, winced as the pain struck again. ‘I’ve never even read the damn’ thing.’

‘If you had,’ Jackstraw murmured philosophically, ‘you’d probably know why it was taken from you.’

‘But – but what was the point in it?’ I asked blankly. ‘For all they know I might have read it a dozen times.’

‘I think they know you haven’t even read it once,’ Jackstraw said slowly. ‘If you had, they’d have known it by the fact that you would have said or done something they would have expected you to say or do. But because you haven’t – well, they know they’re still safe. They must have been desperate to take a chance like this. It is a great pity. I do not think, Dr Mason, that you will ever see that paper again.’

Five minutes later I had washed and bandaged the cut on my forehead – I’d savagely told an inquiring Zagero that I’d walked into a lamp-post and refused to answer all other questions – and set off with Jackstraw in the strengthening light of the newly-risen moon. We were late for our rendezvous, but when I switched the receiver into the antenna I heard Joss’s call-up sign come through straightaway.

I acknowledged, then asked without preamble: ‘What news from Uplavnik?’

‘Two things, Dr Mason.’ Hillcrest had taken the microphone over from Joss, and, even through the distortion of the speaker, his voice sounded strange, with the flat controlled unemotionalism of one speaking through a suppressed anger. ‘Uplavnik has been in touch with HMS Triton – the carrier coming up the Davis Strait. Triton is in constant communication with the British Admiralty and the Government. Or so I gather.

‘The answers to your questions are these. Firstly, the passenger list from BOAC in America is not yet through, but it is known from newspaper reports that the following three people were aboard: Marie LeGarde, the musical comedy star, Senator Hoffman Brewster of the United States and a Mrs Phyllis Dansby-Gregg, who appears to be a very prominent London socialite.’

I wasn’t greatly excited over this item of news. Marie LeGarde had never been a suspect. Mrs Dansby-Gregg – and, by implication, Helene Fleming – had never had more than a faint question mark against their names, and I had already come to the conclusion that it was long odds against the man who was, or purported to be, Senator Brewster being one of the killers.

‘The second thing is this. The Admiralty cannot or will not say why the plane has been forced down, but I gather there must have been a most vital reason. Uplavnik suggests, on what basis I cannot say, perhaps it is officially inspired, that some person aboard the plane must have been in possession of something of the utmost importance, so important that complete secrecy was vital. Don’t ask me what it was. A microfilm, a formula, something, perhaps, only committed to memory – it sounds fanciful, but that’s all we can guess at. It does seem likely that Colonel Harrison was in possession of it.’

I looked at Jackstraw, and he at me. The man who had so recently knocked me out had been desperate all right. I knew then what I had subconsciously known all along, that I was dealing blindfolded against a man – or men – far cleverer than myself. They knew that Joss couldn’t possibly have hoped to repair the RCA. They knew, therefore, that I must have been talking direct to Hillcrest. They knew, because I had told them, that the eight-watt radio we had with us had a range of not more than 150 miles under normal conditions, so that the chances were high that Hillcrest was actually speaking from the IGY cabin – or a point even nearer. I had also told them that Hillcrest and his four companions wouldn’t be returning from their field trip for another two or three weeks, so that this premature return could only be accounted for by some unforeseen and extraordinary event. It wasn’t hard to guess what that event must have been. That I should ask Hillcrest to find out the reason for the crash followed inevitably, but what was not inevitable, what pointed most clearly of all to the shrewdness of the killers, was their guess that whoever knew the reason for the crash would be most reluctant to go into specific detail: and they had robbed me of the only clue that might have helped me discover what that detail was and so also, I felt sure, the identity of the killers. But the time was far past now for crying over spilt milk.

I pressed the switch to ‘Transmit’.

‘Thank you. But please radio Uplavnik again, emphasise desperate urgency of finding out crash reasons … How far behind do you estimate you are now? We have made only twenty miles since noon. Cold extreme, bad radiator trouble. Over.’

‘We have made only eight miles since noon. It seems—’

I threw the switch over.

‘Eight miles?’ I demanded harshly. ‘Did I hear you say eight miles?’

‘You heard.’ Hillcrest’s voice was savage. ‘Remember the missing sugar? Well, it’s turned up. Your fine friends dumped the whole bloody lot into the petrol. We’re completely immobilised.’