A Grue Of Ice

by Geoffrey Jenkins

  " Come!" I said to Helen. " Keep well behind us, out of harm's way."

  " Look after yourself, for God's sake!" she whispered.

  In single file, myself leading, Sailhardy behind, and Helen in the rear, we went silently up the steel ladder to Pirow's radio office. We dodged through Upton's empty big cabin. Pirow's door was closed. Putting down my sea-boots, I held the long knife in my right hand and opened the door quickly with my left. Pirow wore his headphones, his back to us. I put the point of the knife against his neck.

  I said softly in German: " The Man with the Immaculate Hand."

  Sailhardy moved like a panther to Pirow's right. Perhaps it was his initial terror at the sight of the bloodied islander that made him say so much. " Herr Kapitan! " he mouthed. "

  Herr Kapitan! I do not know, I swear it! Heavenly blue, that is all I know. It is Sir Frederick's secret, not mine! I don't know . . ."

  " Heavenly blue—what, Pirow?"

  I noted the quick flash of comprehension in his eyes. When he saw the knife-thrust wasn't coming then and there, he started to fumble for words. The immaculate hand edged over to the Morse key. I reversed the knife and struck his knuckles with the handle. He rose to his feet, white with pain.

  " Come," I said. " You'll go up first on the bridge. I'll be right behind you, and you'll catch the first bullet if your friend Walter starts shooting."

  Helen was white, too, as we threaded our way back through Upton's cabin. I put Pirow in the lead up the short ladder to the bridge. Sailhardy was almost alongside me. His eagerness made me feel almost sorry for what was coming to Walter.

  We emerged silently on to the bridge, my knife-point touching Pirow's back. Walter was standing near the helm indicator trying to see out into the fog. Upton was close to the starboard wing. Both were engrossed.

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  " Walter!" I called. I held Pirow in front of me with my left hand as a shield.

  The thick-set Norwegian swung round. Upton and Bjerko

  stood rooted to the spot. Sailhardy's left thumb tapped against his palm with that idiosyncrasy of his which preceded physical action. Walter cast one startled glance at my knife.

  He whipped the Luger out, but was still fumbling with the safety-catch when Sailhardy slid forward and struck him with the sawn-off manacle. He screamed with pain as the shackle bit his wrist. I leaped forward and snatched the automatic from where it had fallen on the gratings. Knife and Luger in hand, I guarded the four men.

  Before I could say anything, there was a heavy bump for-

  ward by the bows. The indeterminate definition went from the light. We were out of the fog. In place of the veil-like, watery obscurity of a moment before, the light was clear and hard. The razor-edged bank of fog lay immediately astern.

  It was forward that we gazed, transfixed. The sun hung

  like a blood-filled grape. Underneath, the whole world was blue.

  8. "A Cold Grue of Terror"

  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-drawn-out 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 half-submerged 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 engine-room telepraphs. Antarctica's bows could still cut through the 115

  ice-plates, but in a couple of hours they would freeze iron-hard. 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 ice-killer 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 gr
ue 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 116

  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

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  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 ice-wise 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, sea-boots 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, crow-bars, 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 hell-bent 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."

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  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 engin
es 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.

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  " Sailhardy!" exclaimed Helen, seeing the look on our faces. " You and Bruce together . . . you two . .."