A Grue Of Ice

by Geoffrey Jenkins

  " 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, rusty-pink 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 ice-breaker, and at this moment I'd give all the Jesu-lover-of my-soul 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 '."

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  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

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  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.

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  9. Metal of the Heavens

  Next morning Antarctica presented a sorry sight. All night the crew, under my orders and Sailhardy's unflagging direction, had brought up on deck every available case of food, every blanket, every item of warm clothing. I had got the emergency power plant working, since the main supply from the engine-room had disappeared in the explosion. Now the deck was stacked with tons of supplies. Over everything, as I looked down from the bridge to the maindeck shortly after dawn, lay a fine patina of ice and frost. Unshaven, sleepless, and hoarse from shouting orders, I had waited for the light in order to find a platform on the ice strong enough to bear the weight of the stores. Throughout the night the ice had tightened its anaconda grip on the dying ship. Rivet by rivet, plate by plate, the life was being strangled out of her. Between decks, her dying noises seemed more than inanimate—a line of rivets would tremble first, then bulge, and then tear with a sub-human sound as the inch-thick plating buckled and burst.

  In search of the ice-platform, Sailhardy and I had swung ourselves down over the ship's side at first light on to the ice. We had found it within a hundred yards of the ship. We had hammered in long ice-poles with scarlet flags to delimit the safe area ; to the left and right of the area, where the ice remained precarious, we had placed a double row of smaller poles carrying orange flags. The platform was slightly longer than wide, and the sun, half obscured by flying cloud, painted it sable, mink and russet ; even Sailhardy's faded, weathered anorak and balaclava were transformed to soft champagne by the diffused light. It was typical of Sailhardy that he had planted a Norse flag at half-mast in the centre of the ice-platform to honour the death of the ship.

  Antarctica lay half over on her starboard side where the water, long since turned to solid ice, had poured through he hole in her side. The port wing of the bridge, connected to the enclosed section by an open lattice covered with a canvas dodger, leaned skywards away from the ice platform.

  The bright orange of the helicopter stood out on the ship's flensing platform. Helen was to fly it off to safety on the ice as soon it was light enough. A broken davit hung like a

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  Narwhal's tusk, impotent. On the port, or sun's side, Antarctica's side was bronze-gold ; to starboard, or the engine-room side, it was blue-black in the ship's own shadow ; neither shadow nor ice could mask the seared plates and mangled corpse.

  Making our way back to the ship, we had marked—again by means of flags—a safe path across the ice from the platform to Antarctica. It was hopeless, Sailhardy and I had agreed during the night, to try and remain aboard. Apart from the noise of plates and steel beams rending, everything had begun to distort at a crazy angle between decks, making doors and bulkheads death-traps, and I feared that before long the ice-vice would exert its pressure fore and aft as well. Already there was an ominous bulge on the maindeck below the bridge.

  Throughout the previous night, Helen had remained on the bridge with me. At intervals she had brought me cups of boiling cocoa. She had talked little, and before the pre-dawn cloud had begun to obscure the sky, the hard stars were blue points in her eyes. Following the explosion, I had brought Upton, Walter and Bjerko on the bridge, but after a time, when I saw there was no immediate danger, I had Sailhardy lock them up again. Upton had been morose, unspeaking, completely withdrawn. Apart from the trouble of guarding the men, I was glad to get rid of his sullen ill-temper. He and Helen had not spoken to each other. The disaster had had exactly the opposite effect on Pirow's temperament. He was tireless and brilliantly efficient, and during the long hours he had sat glued to his radio I had had an insight into his perverted genius. It seemed to make no difference to him that I had chained him up ; action at his beloved instruments stimulated and engrossed him as he relayed to me reports on the catchers, their position on the troublesome radar and Thorshammer's signals.

  The night signals were, however, of little significance after the one Pirow had passed on to me immediately after the explosion. Thorshammer had ordered Reidar Bull, Hanssen and Lars Brunvoll to seize me, Upton, Pirow and Walter. The skippers, said the message, were to rendezvous with the destroyer at Bouvet Island and hand us over.

  There was nothing we could do but await their coming.

  We had no escape. I had told only Helen and Sailhardy what Thorshammer intended to do. What I was at a loss to understand, however, was why Thorshammer had not come 126

  herself. Why order the catcher captains to arrest us? Where was Thorshammer now? What was she about that was more important? From Pirow I could get no reply. He had blamed sunspot interference on the radio, and fragments which he passed on to me were too garbled to be comprehensible.

  Sailhardy, Helen and I stood on the bridge as the first burdened men started to climb down a hastily-rigged gangplank and scrambling-net, following the path of the marker flags to the platform. The wind had not risen nearly as much as I had expected, but it was enough to carry a series of fine snow-flurries and reduce visibility intermittently to a few hundred yards. I did not know where the catchers were. Nor had I any idea of the extent of the icefield. Pirow had been trying for hours to try and pin-point the catchers.

  Impatiently I picked up the phone to Pirow. " Any radar contacts yet? Where the hell are those ships, Pirow? If any man can find them, you can, either by radio or radar."

  His tone had never varied, and it showed no traces of his shift of nearly fifteen hours. " No contacts, Herr Kapitan." A slight note of irony crept into the level voice. "I appreciate your compliment."

  I wondered again how much of Kohler's unequalled success had been due to the misdirected genius at the other end of my line.

  We had respected Kohler, the humane if deadly hunter, but we had feared the implacable Man with the Immaculate Hand.

  " Keep trying," I said. " Report the slightest sign of them to me."

  " Aye, aye, Herr Kapitan."

  Helen said quickly: " Let me go and look for them in the helicopter, Bruce! That would give you something definite to go on, once you knew what they were doing."

  I glanced at the snow-filled sky. " The only distance you are going to fly that machine is from here to the platform.

  By this afternoon it will be a full gale. If Thorshammer wants us, let her or the catcher boys come and get us. You're staying right here!"

  " Let me do something!" she exclaimed. " Shall I fly off now?—to the platform. It is quite light enough."

  " Yes," I agreed reluctantly. " For heaven's sake be careful, though. I've ordered the men to have some full fuel drums there ready to lash the machine to. Otherwise it might blow away later."

  She smiled. " I've been trained for just this, you know."

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  " Not in the Southern Ocean," I replied.

  " Bruce," she went on, " when—and if—the skippers come, what are you going to do about my father? Are you simply going to hand him over . ..?"

  I shrugged. " Our first problem is simply to survive. You forget, I'm in the same boat. Thorshammer wants me as much as your father and Walter. It's only my word against theirs—I'm supposed to have shot down the seaplane."

  " Bruce!" broke in Sailhardy. " Perhaps this sounds a little wild, but it won't be difficult. Let us take the whaleboat, you an
d I. We can carry her across the ice to the sea.

  She's light. There are plenty of supplies. We can make Bouvet, you and I. She'll stand up to any weather."

  I looked deep into Helen's strange eyes. Putting aside the fact that such an escape would brand me guilty anyway, she knew and I knew that to leave the other now was no longer possible.

  I laughed it off. " You're trying to be another Shackleton or Bligh, Sailhardy. We belong in less heroic times."

  " Shackleton survived seven hundred and fifty miles in and ordinary open ship's boat . . ." he began, " and Bouvet is less than one hundred. . . ."

  I cut him short more harshly than I intended. " You are under my orders, Sailhardy. We stay. The same goes for you, Helen. Now fly off that machine. Watch yourself."

  She smiled. " Aye, aye, Herr Kapitan," she mocked.

  I was so intent on making sure Helen took off safely from the canted deck that I did not notice the three figures emerge from a snow-flurry and make their way to the gangplank.

  The roar of the helicopter's rotors was over my head after a perfect take-off before I saw the crew of the Antarctica start to fall back round the gangplank.

  Reidar Bull, Hanssen and Lars Brunvoll strode through the men. There was no mistaking their purposefulness, or the grim, bitter anger in their snow-streaked faces. Nor was there any mistaking the purpose of the Schmeisser machine-pistol Reidar Bull held. A man was coming down the gangplank shouldering a sack, and Reidar Bull thrust him roughly to one side with an oath. Reidar Bull was big, and not unlike Walter, but now it was his hand which I noticed for the first t i m e . F r o m h i s l e f t h a n d , g r i p p i n g t h e b a r r e l o f t h e Schmeisser, three fingers were gone—at some time a faulty harpoon cable must have ripped them off. Hanssen, tall and blond, followed Reidar Bull up the side, and Lars Brunvoll, 128

  black bearded, brought up the rear. The men unloading gaped. For the moment they forgot that every gallon of fuel and every tin of food they humped over the side might save a life later on.

  The three skippers strode quickly up the bridge ladder to where I was. Heidar Bull shoved over the safety catch when he saw me. I had forgotten the Luger and long knife stuck in my duffel-coat belt.