It would have been less terrifying if Antarctica had rushed head-on through the fog and destroyed herself against the massive ice-cliff which rose before us. As it was, the bump of her bow against the ice held the menace of a long-drawnout death. The sudden drop of the fog-curtain astern heightened the awe-provoking spectacle which lay before our eyes. The fact that I had warned Upton against just this did not mitigate my own fear, the same fear as had once made me thrust the bridge telegraph of H.M.S. Scott to full speed ahead-anything, anything to escape, with all the thrust of her great turbines, from the same platelike crystals of ice, called by whalermen frazil crystals, which now hung halfsubmerged in the sea everywhere, plates of ice which come together with uncanny speed and form the ice belt which is Bouvet's killer. Antarctica seemed to have touched against the central buttress of the encircling semicircle of pack-ice. Nowhere was any white ice to be seen. To port, the cliff blocked out all view, but to starboard the field was low, perhaps only twenty feet above the level of the sea. A vast 114 agglomeration of blue hummocks and pressure ridges stretched away into the distance as far as the eye could see. Within a hundred yards of the ice-edge was a huge, domed mound, smoothed and fashioned by the wind, and a series of lesser mounds stretched away behind. The ice was all shades and variations of blue-azure where the parody of a sun struck down, royal blue where the fluted, striated cliffs to port overhung the leaden-blue sea. At our backs lay the bank of strontium-yellow fog. The knife I held had turned aconite. The air off the blue icefield was as raw and sharp as the blade itself. I wanted to cough as it took me by the throat. The human antagonisms which had been present a moment before were swamped by what the Southern Ocean had conjured up before our startled eyes. The blue light gave Pirow's shocked white face the pallor of a ghost. There seemed almost no need to guard Upton, Walter and Pirow, they were so overcome by what they saw.
" This is it," I said to Upton. " I warned you but you wouldn't listen."
His eyes were very bright, and the way he spoke made me surer of his mental state. I had a gun and a knife in my hand, but he addressed me with the same easy inescapable charm as on our first meeting. " Bruce, boy," he said, " you wouldn't be here if I didn't think you the finest sailor in the Southern Ocean. I should have listened, but it's all yours now. Put those damned toys away. This is what matters for the moment." He jerked his head at the icefield. His smile in the pewter mask was grotesque, reflecting the blue.
Antarctica was bumping gently against the ice-cliff in the still sea. She was in no danger from the movement, beyond the buckling of a few plates in her bows. Her danger lay in the millions of small spicules or thin plates of ice floating in the sea in the first stage of freezing; soon they would lock together and add to the cliffs, hillocks and ridges before us, and in that process crush the big factory ship's steel plates. The offshore mass of bergy bits, growlers, sludge and pancake ice was witness of how quickly the sea was freezing; the curious, upturned edges of the pancake ice were already kissing and coalescing into ever-growing acres of thin ice. For the moment there was a strange stillness, broken only by a faint tinkling as the ice-rind splintered against Antarctica's sides. I remembered that deadly tinkle as I had shaken H.M.S. Scott clear: it had paralleled the distant sound of her engineroom telepraphs. Antarctica's bows could still cut through the ice-plates, but in a couple of hours they would freeze ironhard. I knew that the intensity of the cold which now gripped us was changing even the crystal structure of the metal of the weapons I held; soon they would become brittle as glass
– so would Antarctica's plates, making the task of the ice-vice easier still.
By now, I thought, Upton must have read the annotation on the back of Captain Norris' log. Norris was a sensitive man-his sketches of the lost Thompson Island showed that. What he had written to complement the laconic deck-log version of his discovery revealed his terror at seeing the same icekiller as we were seeing now. Norris had known then it meant death, and who knows to what eventual ghastly end he and his gallant Sprightly went? I could recall by heart what Norris had written, the impress of fear was so vivid upon his words:
I s a w T h o m p s o n I s l a n d o n t h e m i d – a f t e r n o o n o f December 13, 1825. There was fog, floating ice and a Force 8 gale from the north-west. There was the island, long and low in the foreground, and a high peak more distantly. The crew of the Sprightly gazed awe-struck at t h i s u n k n o w n h a v e n o f r e f u g e a m i d s t s e a s w h i c h, b y contrast with their wild tumult, made its ice-bound shores s e e m l i k e p a r a d i s e. T h e g i a n t g l a c i e r w h i c h c a p p e d Thompson Island like a nightmare caul continued into the sea as a solid tongue of steel-blue ice, linking a gigantic, unbroken icefleld on the southern horizon. The grotesque nature of this single massive tongue, like that of a malice-filled and possessive viper from the unknown regions of the Pole, struck a cold grue of terror into my men, used even as they were, to the hardships and evils of the wild Southern Ocean.
A cold grue of terror!
Norris had used the Scots word in all its force, and the grue, the thrill of naked fear, which ran through me as I gazed at the blue icefield, was as primordial as the birth of the killer-pack.
" Yes," I said to Upton. " It's saving our skins that matters most." I spoke to Sailhardy. " Put them, Upton, Walter and Bjerko, in irons in Upton's cabin. The same with Pirow, in his radio office. Chain him near his transmitting key. I may need him later."
Sailhardy came over to me to take the Luger. At the same moment our ears were stunned by an immense thunder. It was the icefield. Every rivet in the ship trembled. A cluster of Skua gulls rose in white detonation from the foot of the blue cliff. The reverberation roared through the yellow fog. Helen buried her head against my thick sweater. Across the flat side of the icefield I saw a new mound ejaculate itself, rusty-rose, as some hidden pressure-force threw up ice the size of St.
Paul's Cathedral. Bouvet's conquistador with his sword of ice was coming at us. If the ship were nipped, we could still get stores ashore on the ice-pack, but we would not survive as Shackleton and others had done. Their ice had stayed solid; I knew that Bouvet's pack, when The Albatross' Foot reached it, would dissolve and leave us to drown. We would die either of exposure on the ice or of drowning when the life-giving warmth came. I had to save Antarctica, I told myself before, the challenge itself would have been enough, but now
… I looked down at the fair hair against my shoulder.
I found myself shouting, I was so deaf. " Pirow! Signal the catchers! Tell them to form up in line astern, and come through there." I pointed at the plumes of vapour ghosting above the blue ice forming in the sea, the way Antarctica had come. " Tell them to rush it, and keep the lead open. Each one is to go full astern within three cables' lengths of this ship. I' ll then go full astern and try and break out. Understood?"
" Yes, Herr Kapitan."
Sailhardy ushered the prisoners away, Walter cursing under his breath and holding his injured wrist.
H e l e n d r e w h e r s e l f a w a y f r o m m e. " G o d! I t l o o k s hopeless!"
" There are still open leads of water," I said. " Look at the clouds there above the icefield-see the dark patches? That's water sky, which means that somewhere, even in that lot, there is some sea which is not frozen solid-yet." She shuddered. The frost-smoke or vapour plumes which the whalermen call The Barber could guide us to salvation yet. My first job was to get the head of the factory ship clear of the ice-buttress, and keep the sea reasonably ice-free at the stern. Even if the ice closed, I thought rapidly, we might escape the fate of the factory ship if I brought the catchers in to surround her: with their shallow draught they might pop like peas in a pod out of the clutches of the ice without fatal damage, whereas Antarctica would be trapped because of her greater depth. It was worth risking as a last resort. There were, however, more immediate things to do aboard Antarctica. In the piercing cold, I must get the water drained from the deck mains and have a steam hose run through them, to clear the drain-cocks, or else they would burst soon, leaving us without a water supply. I must also have the rudder strengthened with wire pendants to prevent its being unshipped as we crashed stern-first through the ice. My mind raced on: I hoped that Antarctica had been fitted out by someone icewise and that she had a propeller with removable blades, for we seemed almost certain to damage one of the blades on projecting pieces of ice in getting clear. Breaking propeller blades was, I knew from hard experience, the commonest damage when trying, in a situation like ours, to extricate a ship from being nipped.
" Bruce," said Helen, " what do you intend to do with them, particularly my father? Are you going to hand them over to Thorshammer?"
" That question will have to wait," I replied. " The ice is the danger. Go and get yourself as warmly dressed as you can. Pack something small. Let the valuables go, if you have them. A pair of warm gloves might be more use in the long run."
" You're going to… to… abandon ship, without even a fight?" she asked.
" The fight is on," I said. " Quick now. Come back here." Sailhardy returned to the bridge. He smiled grimly as he looked about him. " She's sick, this ship. Sick with the cold."
" Get aft and trim her down well by the stern," I ordered. " Rig some steel wire pendants to the rudderhead from both quarters… My God!" I indicated the echo-sounding equipment. It showed fifteen fathoms-in the middle of the Southern Ocean! It meant that the cold was so intense that even the anti-freeze in the transmitter and receiver tanks had started to freeze. The ice was closing on Antarctica quicker than I thought.
Sailhardy let out a long whistle.
" Get steam through the mains," I snapped down the bridge telephone to the maindeck. Scarcely had I said it, when there was a scream of metal immediately below the bridge. The winch through which the steam had to pass gave a quarter-turn as the head of steam tried to burst through. Then the heavy piping, already frozen inside, ripped along its whole length, as if it had been opened by a huge unseen tin-opener.
Helen came back to the bridge, wearing a heavy coat of 118 sea-leopard skin. She heard the scream of the metal, but without speaking thrust my heavy gloves, reefer jacket, cap, seaboots and duffel coat into my hands. Dragging them on, I raced to the port wing of the bridge and looked at the sea. It was viscous now as it froze.
" Sailhardy!" I said. " Get down on the maindeck first before you rig the tackles. Have them bring ice-axes, crowbars, boat-hooks and poles up from below. You know the drill get every man on the rails with poles and try and keep her sides free of ice. Then get a boat and dynamite and blow the ice at intervals of twenty yards astern-we must keep it open!"
" Aye, aye, Bruce," he said tersely. A moment later he was among the men. If any man could save the ship through my last-ditch drill, he could.
Helen was gazing astern. " The fog is rolling back, Bruce, but I don't see the catchers."
" It's ominous that it should roll back. It means the cold is spreading," I replied. I picked up the phone to Pirow. " Pirow! What the hell is happening to the catchers?"
His voice was cool, professional. " No reply to my signals, Herr Kapitan. They're talking between themselves on the W / T… "
Sailhardy's call from the maindeck interrupted. " What size charges, Bruce?"
" Make them up into pieces of twenty pounds apiece," I told him. " Fuse 'em right up. Short." I returned to Pirow. " Pirow! I'm going full astern in a moment. I may go hellbent into an iceberg. What's the score with the radar?"
" Too much sub-refraction," he replied levelly. " We'll be right on top of anything before I can locate it. The normal detection range means nothing in conditions like this." Helen came with me to the starboard wing of the bridge.
I wanted, if possible, to see what was happening between the main body of the ice and ourselves. As I leant over, I saw. I gripped her arm.
" Look 1" I said. A long underwater spur had grown out from the cliffside towards the ship. It was perhaps ten feet long. Four others, like the teeth of a steam-shovel, reached out at intervals further aft.
" What is it, Bruce?"
"Those spurs," I replied. "I can't wait now. Any one of them will rip off a blade of the screw. In this cold each blade is twice as brittle as normal. One touch, and it will splinter."
I raced back to the engine-room telephone.
" Chief Engineer," said the voice.
Chief," I said, " there's a lot of trouble. There's sludge and brash ice everywhere. In ten minutes your condenser inlets are going to choke. Before that I want everything your engines can give me. Understand? Get a steam hose to the condensers so that there's hot water circulating round them. And for your own sake, see there's no condensation in the main steam pipes, or else you'll be blown to hell. In a moment
I'll be going alternately full ahead and full astern to shake her free. If the inlets block with sludge, I can't wait to stop. Can do?"
" Aye," said the Scots voice. " Can do. Is five minutes enough?"
" Just," I replied. " I'll ring down."
I called Sailhardy on deck. " Belay the dynamite," I said. " Get the tackles rigged, if you can. I want you on the bridge in five minutes."
I turned to Helen, gazing white-faced about her. There was no sign of the catchers. In her sea-leopard coat, she looked like one of those dead things I had seen so often on the icy outcrops of Graham Land.
" Do you want me to fly off the helicopter…" she started to say, when suddenly she coughed. I felt the sharp dagger of wind, too. It came softly, furtively, from the South. I felt its sinister touch by the slight condensation on the inside of my duffel coat. The wind was the last stage of the Bouvet pack: it would advance the ice-edge more rapidly still towards the factory ship; it was also the precursor a the storm which I knew would follow the freeze-up.
" The wind," I said quickly. " I can't give the Chief even his five minutes now." I rang Sailhardy and ordered him back to the bridge. The islander joined Helen and me. The shoulder of his coat was streaked with red rust where he had slung himself over the ship's quarter in a vain effort to rig the rudder-head tackles. A white streak of frozen spray was daubed alongside the red.
" The South wind, Bruce?"
There was almost no need for him to say it. He too had felt its message. I nodded to the port wing of the bridge and together we looked down at the sleazy sea. Catching some of the sun's attenuated light, it had turned to a pale, gelatinous, coagulating mass.
" Sailhardy!" exclaimed Helen, seeing the look on our faces. " You and Bruce together… you two…"
" Ma'am," he said gently-the long vowels were in his voice-" if this ship is a-dying, you can be sure of one thing: under Captain Bruce Wetherby she'll die the hard way." He pointed across to the dark blue cliff, where the ice rind had become young ice, anything from a couple of inches to half a foot thick.
Helen took the lapels of my duffel coat in her hands. " At first, when I lay in that snow-filled ditch after the Germans had shot me, I prayed. I prayed to God. I prayed with every formal and informal prayer I knew. I ran out of prayers. After my brother had died, I just lay there, without hope, almost without thought. Now…" The strange eyes were luminous, and she shuddered as she looked at the icefield. .. Now I want to live. Then I did not. If my prayers had names at this moment, they would be Bruce Wetherby and Sailhardy the islander."
I could find no words as I watched the light-blue, rustypink and steel-rose-in her eyes. It was Sailhardy who spoke. " Aye, ma'am. Praying words don't help you any here in the Southern Ocean. Prayer-words don't break the ice like an icebreaker, and at this moment I'd give all the Jesu-lover-of mysoul for a north-west wind and two degrees on the mercury."
A cold grue of terror! I relived Norris' fear as I saw the distant water-smoke start to throw up its dazed meridians into the dusty pink-blue light. The transparent membranes surrounding the brain's nerve-centres contract and contort their spider's-web as a blow approaches-that is how I felt as I watched them and waited for the coming blow from the killer-pack.
" Bruce…" Helen started to say, but I strode across to the bridge telegraph. " Sailhardy!" I said. " The wheel!"
" Full ahead!" I rang. " Port twenty," I told the islander as he took over from the Norwegian quartermaster. " If she responds at all."
I picked up the phone to Pirow. " Pirow! What are the catchers doing? Why aren't they coming to help us?"
" They're not answering my signals, Herr Kapitan," he replied.
" Send: ' Stand by to render immediate assistance. Factory ship in grave danger '."
I heard the rapid tap of his key as he called up the catchers. He was back on the phone in a moment. " No reply, Herr Kapitan."
" What the hell are they playing at? They can't leave us like this! Have you got them on the radar?"
Again, I admired the cool professional detachment of The Man with the Immaculate Hand. " Five radar contacts-ship contacts-bearing eight-oh degrees. Receding."
" They're deserting us?" I asked incredulously.
" Yes, Herr Kapitan."
" How far astern?"
" Four-five miles, maybe."
" Are they moving?"
" Yes, Herr Kapitan. Fast. Twelve knots I reckon." That meant they were in clear water, beyond the deadly grip of the ice-crescent.
Pirow went on coolly, " Shall I give a May-Day call, Herr K a p i t a n? I t m e a n s T h o r s h a m m e r w i l l h e a r i t t o o . " May-Day! A ship's last desperate call for help.
" Yes," I said. As I put down the earpiece I heard the start of the distress call, " May-Day! May-Day!" Antarctica started to judder, but she scarcely moved. It was like handling a Ferrari with a slipping clutch. The screws thrashed. Sailhardy spun the spokes. His look of despair told me everything. I must try and shake her free astern.
I called the engine-room. " Chief I Sorry about this. Full astern!"
There was a muffled oath. " Ever hear of torsional stresses in shafting, laddie?" But he'd already shouted my order. " The shaft. .."
I slammed down the earpiece. Unexpectedly, the great ship moved quickly astern. As she did so, a growler seemed to pop up in her wake. Perhaps the thrust of the screws had dislodged it from the main body of the icefield.
" Starboard!" I yelled. " Hard astarboard, Sailhardy!" The islander couldn't make it. The sea was seven-tenths ice. It cloyed round the ship, killing her manoeuvrability. A sickening thump shook every rivet. The rudder-head must have taken the force of the blow as Antarctica crashed into the growler. Under full power, she yawed wildly and tore, in a crazy semicircle, stern-first at the cliff. At the same moment I saw a long weal of splinters as the hummocked wall of ice could no longer stand the pressure which had built up in the icefield behind. It broke off. The 122 roar of the avalanche drowned my shouted commands to Sailhardy. The great raft of stuff, half a mile long and a quarter thick, towered, and then, losing its balance untidily, toppled, and tossed the ice-rind high into the air in a thousand fragments. The deadening power of the ice could not stop the huge wave which now rocketed towards the ship. I rang " full ahead " to try and miss the wall of ice coming at the stern.
It may have been an underwater ram from the cliff, or simply another growler, but I felt the propeller go in a scream of tangled metal which rose above the thunder of the ice. As the blades stripped, I felt through the bridge plates the race of the engines and the shattering of the main shaft, already weakened by the cold. The explosion from the engine-room followed almost at the same moment. I rushed to the starboard wing of the bridge with Helen. The plating was ripped, and through the hole, where he had been catapulted, was the mangled corpse of a greaser who a minute before had been a man. Through the ship's side pulsed sprays of boiling oil from the cylinder whose casing had burst.
Helen was not looking at the scene of destruction, but along the maindeck. " God!" she whispered. " Dear God!
Look!"
Reeling along the deck came the oil-blind man. His arms were held wide. The nose, lips and eyes had been filed away by the flaming oil, and the charred tongue bubbled against the roof of his sawn-off mouth. He fumbled blindly at the rail of the bridge companionway and then, as if the slightest touch had sent another thrill of agony through him, he turned and stumbled over the side; the curdling sea held back the splash. He sank only about ten feet under the surface, arms and legs wide.
The wave struck the doomed ship, pouring in through the engine-room gap. Gouts of white-hot oil pulsed once or twice. The fumes condensed whitely. The ship canted over ten degrees as she started to fill.
" Shall I try and get the pumps going, Bruce?" asked Sailhardy dazedly.
I did not recognise my own voice. " No need, she'll freeze solid now. She won't sink. The ice has got her. It will hold her up."
" What about the catchers… " Helen started to say. I shook my head. I picked up the bridge microphone and switched on the loudspeaker system throughout the ship. " Prepare to abandon ship," I said. " All food stores are to be brought on deck immediately. We are in no immediate danger of sinking. Everything movable and of use will be loaded overside and stacked on the ice." I clicked off and rang through to Pirow. As he replied, I could hear the fateful " May-Day, May-Day" call going out.
" No reply from the catchers," he said briefly. " But they're in touch with Thorshammer…"
" I'll send Sailhardy to bring you here," I said. " What are they saying?"
" It is bad for us, Herr Kapitan," he replied. " Very bad for all of us."
Without waiting for him to tell me what was bad I ordered Sailhardy to bring the prisoners on to the bridge.
If they were going to die, I certainly wasn't going to allow them to die down below in irons.
I went over to Helen and put my arm round her shoulders. We felt the ship settle a little farther. The light was going from the sick sun as it dropped out of sight behind the blue cliff, darker now. It was petrifying cold. Tenuous fingers of ice reached out towards the doomed ship. A small growler, looking like a porpoise in incongruous imitation of the tropics, lay immobile under the factory ship's blunt bow. The light brought with it, too, that strange inward coloration of the ship's bulwarks which I have never seen in any other sea: the factory ship's bluff forepeak had become a gangrenous green which had spread to the tarpaulins covering the boats, splintered by the explosion in the engine-room under them.
We stood, not saying anything. There was a sudden, flat scream as the forceps of the ice prised loose the first of the factory ship's plates. A white kelp pigeon wheeled over the far end of the life-line-lead of water towards the fogbank. It seemed to add immeasurably to the distance and desolation of the scene. Another plate gave in agony. As if in echo, the strange, lonely cry of the kelp pigeon struck dully from the sound-absorbing edges of the pancake ice.
Antarctica was on her way to join Captain Norris and the Sprightly. Helen shuddered. The light went. The wind rose.