‘You don’t—’ I broke off my surprised question, asked another instead. ‘Who’s the man in the crew rest room? Navigator?’
‘We don’t carry a navigator either. Harry Williamson is – was – the Flight Engineer.’
No wireless operator, no navigator. There had been changes indeed since I’d flown the Atlantic some years previously in a Stratocruiser. I gave it up, returned to my original question and nodded at the smashed RCA.
‘Well, how did it happen?’
‘I brushed the table as I rose and – well, it just fell.’ Her voice trailed off uncertainly.
‘It just fell,’ I echoed incredulously. ‘One hundred and fifty pounds of transmitter and you flicked it off the table just like that?’
‘I didn’t knock it off. The legs collapsed.’
‘It’s got no legs to collapse,’ I said shortly. ‘Hinges.’
‘Well, hinges, then.’
I looked at Joss, who had been responsible for the erection of the table as well as the radio. ‘Is it possible?’
‘No.’ His voice was flat, definite.
Again the silence in the cabin, the hush, the tension that grew from the merely uncomfortable to the all but unbearable. But I was beginning to see that there was nothing to be gained now by further questioning, much to be lost. The radio was wrecked. Finish.
I turned away without a word, hung up my caribou furs on nails on the walls, took off goggles and gloves and turned to the man with the cut brow.
‘Let’s have a look at your head and your hand – it’s a pretty nasty gash on your forehead. Forget the radio for the moment, Joss – let’s have coffee first, lots of it.’ I turned to Jackstraw, who had just come down the steps from the hatch and was staring at the smashed radio. ‘I know, Jackstraw, I know. I’ll explain later – not that I know anything about it. Bring some empty cases for seats out of the food tunnel, will you. And a bottle of brandy. We all need it.’
I’d just started to wash the cut forehead – a nasty gash, as I had said, but surprisingly little signs of bruising – when the big amiable young man who had helped us lower the second officer from the wrecked plane came to us. I looked across up at him, and saw that I could be wrong about the amiability: his face wasn’t exactly hostile, but his eyes had the cool measuring look of one who knew from experience that he could cope with most of the situations, pleasant and unpleasant, that he was ever likely to come up against.
‘Look,’ he began without preamble, ‘I don’t know who you are or what your name is, but I’m sure we are all most grateful to you for what you have done for us. It’s more than probable that we owe our lives to you. We acknowledge that. Also, we know you’re a field scientist, and we realise that your equipment is of paramount importance to you. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’ I dabbed iodine fairly liberally on the injured man’s head – he was tough, all right, he didn’t even wince – and looked at the speaker. Not at all a man to ignore, I thought. Behind the strong intelligent face lay a hardness, a tenacity of purpose that hadn’t been acquired along with the cultured relaxed voice at the Ivy League college I was pretty certain he had attended. ‘You’d something else to say?’
‘Yes. We think – correction, I think – that you were unnecessarily rough on our air hostess. You can see the state the poor kid’s in. OK, so your radio’s bust, so you’re hoppin’ mad about it – but there’s no need for all this song and dance.’ His voice was calm, conversational all the time. ‘Radios aren’t irreplaceable. This one will be replaced, I promise you. You’ll have a new one inside a week, ten days at the most.’
‘Kind,’ I said dryly. I finished tying the head bandage and straightened up. ‘The offer is appreciated, but there’s one thing you haven’t taken into account. You may be dead inside that ten days. You may all be dead in ten days.’
‘We may all—’ He broke off and stared at me, his expression perceptibly hardening. ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘What I’m talking about is that without this radio you dismiss so lightly your chances – our chances – of survival aren’t all that good. In fact, they’re not good at all. I don’t give a tuppenny damn about the radio, as such.’ I eyed him curiously, and a preposterous thought struck me: at least, it was preposterous for all of a couple of
seconds, before the truth hit me. ‘Have you – have any of you any idea just where you are, right here, at the present moment?’
‘Sure we have.’ The young man lifted his shoulders fractionally. ‘Just can’t say how far to the nearest drugstore or pub—’
‘I told them,’ the stewardess interrupted. ‘They were asking me, just before you came in. I thought Captain Johnson had overshot the landing field at Reykjavik in a snowstorm. This is Langjökull, isn’t it?’ She saw the expression on my face and went on hastily. ‘Or Hofsjökull? I mean, we were flying more or less north-east from Gander, and these are the only two snow-fields or glaciers or whatever you call them in Iceland in that direction from—’
‘Iceland?’ I suppose there is a bit of the ham actor in all of us, and I really couldn’t pass it up. ‘Did you say Iceland?’
She nodded, dumbly. Everybody was looking at her, and when she didn’t answer they all transferred their gazes to me, as at the touch of a switch.
‘Iceland,’ I repeated. ‘My dear girl, at the present moment you’re at an altitude of 8500 feet, right slam bang in the middle of the Greenland ice-cap.’
The effect was all that anybody could ever have wished for. I doubt whether even Marie LeGarde had ever had a better reaction from an audience. ‘Stunned’ is an inadequate word to describe their mental state immediately after this announcement: paralysis was nearer it, especially where the power of speech was concerned. And when the power of thought and speech did return, it expressed itself, as I might have expected, in the most violent disbelief. Everybody seemed to start talking at once, but it was the stewardess who took my attention, by coming forward and catching me by the lapels. I noticed the glitter of a diamond ring on her hand, and remember having some vague idea that this was against airline regulations.
‘What kind of joke is this? It can’t be, it can’t be! Greenland – it just can’t be.’ She saw by the expression on my face that I wasn’t joking, and her grip tightened even more. I had just time to be conscious of two conflicting thoughts – that, wide with fear and dismay though they might be, she had the most extraordinarily beautiful brown eyes and, secondly, that the BOAC were slipping in their selection of stewardesses whose calmness in emergency was supposed to match the trim-ness of their appearance – then she rushed on wildly.
‘How – how can it be? We were on a Gander-Reykjavik flight. Greenland – we don’t go anywhere near it. And there’s the automatic pilot, and radio beams and – and radio base checks every half-hour. Oh, it’s impossible, it’s impossible! Why do you tell us this?’ She was shaking now, whether from nervous strain or cold I had no idea: the big young man with the Ivy League accent put an arm awkwardly round her shoulder, and I saw her wince. Something indeed seemed to be hurting her – but again it could wait.
‘Joss,’ I called. He looked up from the stove, where he was pouring coffee into mugs. ‘Tell our friends where we are.’
‘Latitude 72.40 north, longitude 40.10 east,’ Joss said unemotionally. His voice cut clearly through the hubbub of incredulous conversation. ‘Three hundred miles from the nearest human habitation. Four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Near enough 800 miles from Reykjavik, 1000 from Cape Farewell, the southernmost point of Greenland, and just a little further distant from the North Pole. And if anyone doesn’t believe us, sir, I suggest they just take a walk – in any direction – and they’ll find out who’s right.’
Joss’s calm, matter-of-fact statement was worth half an hour of argument and explanation. In a moment, conviction was complete – and there were more problems than ever to be answered. I held up my hand in mock protest and protection against the waves of questions that surged against
me from every side.
‘All in good time, please – although I don’t really know anything more than yourselves – with the exception, perhaps, of one thing. But first, coffee and brandy all round.’
‘Brandy?’ The expensive young woman had been the first, I’d noticed, to appropriate one of the empty wooden cases that Jackstraw had brought in in lieu of seats, and now she looked up under the curve of exquisitely modelled eyebrows. ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ The tone of her voice left little room for doubt as to her opinion.
‘Of course.’ I forced myself to be civil: bickering could reach intolerable proportions in a rigidly closed, mutually interdependent group such as we were likely to be for some time to come. ‘Why ever not?’
‘Opens the pores, dear man,’ she said sweetly. ‘I thought everyone knew that – how dangerous it is when you’re exposed to cold afterwards. Or had you forgotten? Our cases, our night things in the plane – somebody has to get these.’
‘Don’t talk such utter rubbish.’ My short-lived attempt at civility perished miserably. ‘Nobody’s leaving here tonight. You sleep in your clothes – this isn’t the Dorchester. If the blizzard dies down, we may try to get your things tomorrow morning.’
‘But—’
‘If you’re all that desperate, you’re welcome to get them yourself. Want to try?’ It was boorish of me, but that was the effect she had. I turned away to see the minister or priest hold up his hand against the offered brandy.
‘Go on, take it,’ I said impatiently.
‘I don’t really think I should.’ The voice was high-pitched, but the enunciation clear and precise, and I found it vaguely irritating that it should so perfectly match his appearance, be so exactly what I should have expected. He laughed, a nervous deprecating laugh. ‘My parishioners, you know …’
I was tired, worried and felt like telling him what he could do with his parishioners, but it wasn’t his fault.
‘There’s precedent in plenty in your Bible, Reverend. You know that better than I. It’ll do you good, really.’
‘Oh well, if you think so.’ He took the glass gingerly, as if Beelzebub himself were on the offering end, but I noticed that there was nothing so hesitant about his method and speed of disposal of the contents: his subsequent expression could properly be described as beatific. I caught Marie LeGarde’s eye, and smiled at the twinkle I caught there.
The reverend wasn’t the only one who found the coffee – and brandy – welcome. With the exception of the stewardess, who sipped at her drink in a distraught fashion, the others had also emptied their glasses, and I decided that the broaching of another Martell’s was justified. In the respite from the talk, I bent over the injured man on the floor. His pulse was slower, steadier and his breathing not quite so shallow: I slipped in a few more heat pads and zipped up the sleeping-bag.
‘Is he – is he any better, do you think?’ The stewardess was so close to me that I brushed against her as I straightened. ‘He – he seems a bit better, doesn’t he?’
‘He is a bit, I think. But nothing like over the shock from the wound and the exposure, though.’ I looked at her speculatively and suddenly felt almost sorry for her. Almost, but not quite: I didn’t at all like the direction my thoughts were leading me. ‘You’ve flown together quite a bit, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t offer anything more. ‘His head – do you think—’
‘Later. Let me have a quick look at that back of yours.’
‘Look at what?’
‘Your back,’ I said patiently. ‘Your shoulders. They seem to give you some pain. I’ll rig a screen.’
‘No, no, I’m all right.’ She moved away from me.
‘Don’t be silly, my dear.’ I wondered what trick of voice production made Marie LeGarde’s voice so clear and carrying. ‘He is a doctor, you know.’
‘No!’
I shrugged and reached for my brandy glass. Bearers of bad news were ever unpopular: I supposed her reaction was the modern equivalent of the classical despot’s unsheathing his dagger. Probably only bruises, anyhow, I told myself, and turned to look at the company.
An odd-looking bunch, to say the least, but then any group of people dressed in lounge suits and dresses, trilby hats and nylon stockings would have looked odd against the strange and uncompromising background of that cabin where every suggestion of anything that even remotely suggested gracious living had been crushed and ruthlessly made subservient to the all-exclusive purpose of survival.
Here there were no armchairs – no chairs, even – no carpets, wall-paper, book-shelves, beds, curtains – or even windows for the curtains. It was a bleak utilitarian box of a room, eighteen feet by fourteen. The floor was made of unvarnished yellow pine. The walls were made of spaced sheets of bonded ply, with kapok insulation between: the lower part of the walls was covered with green-painted asbestos, the upper part and entire roof sheeted with glittering aluminium to reflect the maximum possible heat and light. A thin, ever-present film of ice climbed at least halfway up all four walls, reaching almost to the ceiling in the four corners, the parts of the room most remote from the stove and therefore the coldest. On very cold nights, such as this, the ice reached the ceiling and started to creep across it to the layers of opaque ice that permanently framed the undersides of our rimed and opaque skylights.
The two exits from the cabin were let into the fourteen-foot sides: one led to the trap, the other to the snow and ice tunnel where we kept our food, petrol, oil, batteries, radio generators, explosives for seismological and glacial investigations and a hundred and one other items. Half-way along, a secondary tunnel led off at right angles - a tunnel which steadily increased in length as we cut out the blocks of snow which were melted to give us our water supply. At the far end of the main tunnel lay our primitive toilet system.
One eighteen-foot wall and half of the wall that gave access to the trap-door were lined with twin rows of bunks – eight in all. The other eighteen-foot wall was given over entirely to our stove, work-bench, radio table and housings for the meteorological instruments. The remaining wall by the tunnel was piled with tins and cases of food, now mostly empties, that had been brought in from the tunnel to begin the lengthy process of defrosting.
Slowly I surveyed all this, then as slowly surveyed the company. The incongruity of the contrast reached the point where one all but disbelieved the evidence of one’s own eyes. But they were there all right, and I was stuck with them. Everyone had stopped talking now and was looking at me, waiting for me to speak: sitting in a tight semi-circle round the stove, they were huddled together and shivering in the freezing cold. The only sounds in the room were the clacking of the anemometer cups, clearly audible down the ventilation pipe, the faint moaning of the wind on the ice-cap and the hissing of our pressure Colman lamp. I sighed to myself, and put down my empty glass.
‘Well, it looks as if you are going to be our guests for some little time, so we’d better introduce ourselves. Us first.’ I nodded to where Joss and Jackstraw were working on the shattered RCA, which they had lifted back on the table. ‘On the left, Joseph London, of the city of London, our radio operator.’
‘Unemployed,’ Joss muttered.
‘On the right, Nils Nielsen. Take a good look at him, ladies and gentlemen. At this very moment the guardian angels of your respective insurance companies are probably putting up a prayer for his continued well-being. If you all live to come home again, the chances are that you will owe it to him.’ I was to remember my own words later. ‘He probably knows more than any man living about survival on the Greenland ice-cap.’
‘I thought you called him “Jackstraw”,’ Marie LeGarde murmured.
‘My Eskimo name.’ Jackstraw had turned and smiled at her, his parka hood off for the first time; I could see her polite astonishment as she looked at the fair hair, the blue eyes, and it was as if Jackstraw read her thoughts. ‘Two of my grandparents were Danish – most of us Greenlanders have as much Danish bl
ood as Eskimo in us nowadays.’ I was surprised to hear him talk like this, and it was a tribute to Marie LeGarde’s personality: his pride in his Eskimo background was equalled only by his touchiness on the subject.
‘Well, well, how interesting.’ The expensive young lady was sitting back on her box, hands clasped round an expensively-nyloned knee, her expression reflecting accurately the well-bred condescension of her tone. ‘My very first Eskimo.’
‘Don’t be afraid, lady.’ Jackstraw’s smile was wider than ever, and I felt more than vaguely uneasy; his almost invariable Eskimo cheerfulness and good nature concealed an explosive temper which he’d probably inherited from some far distant Viking forebear. ‘It doesn’t rub off.’
The silence that followed could hardly be described as companionable, and I rushed in quickly.
‘My own name is Mason, Peter Mason, and I’m in charge of this IGY station. You all know roughly what we’re doing stuck out here on the plateau – meteorology, glaciology, the study of the earth’s magnetism, the borealis, airglow, ionosphere, cosmic rays, magnetic storms and a dozen other things which I suppose are equally uninteresting to you.’ I waved my arm. ‘We don’t, as you can see, normally live here alone. Five others are away to the north on a field expedition. They’re due back in about three weeks, after which we all pack up and abandon this place before the winter sets in and the ice-pack freezes on the coast.’
‘Before the winter sets in?’ The little man in the Glenurquhart jacket stared at me. ‘You mean to tell me it gets colder than this?’
‘It certainly does. An explorer called Alfred Wegener wintered not fifty miles from here in 1930–1, and the temperature dropped by 85 degrees below zero – 117 degrees of frost. And that may have been a warm winter, for all we know.’
I gave some time to allow this cheering item of information to sink in, then continued.
‘Well, that’s us. Miss LeGarde – Marie LeGarde – needs no introduction from anyone.’ A slight murmur of surprise and turning of heads showed that I wasn’t altogether right. ‘But that’s all I know, I’m afraid.’
Night Without End Page 5