A Grue Of Ice

by Geoffrey Jenkins

  I looked at my watch. Ten-thirty. Sailhardy had been at the tiller since eight o'clock. I had heard Pirow give a brief signal when the islander had taken over, and as it was mid-morning, Upton and Pirow might not suspect if they heard another after a break of several hours. I would have to muster all my strength and speed to overpower Pirow and

  get off a message before they missed me. I looked down

  at Helen. The ice had rimed her closed eyes, making them strangely ethereal. She broke into an incoherent mutter. I caught nothing except my name. The exquisite little seal pup peeped out from the mouth of her sleeping-bag. Up forward, there was no sign from Upton or Walter.

  I inched out of my sleeping-bag and dragged myself along the gratings to Pirow's cubbyhole. It was so dim that it took me a minute to make out The Man with the Immaculate Hand.

  He was sitting in front of the radio. I heard him move and I 192

  jammed myself hard down on the grating. The snap of a switch followed. He became silhouetted as a weak dial light came alive. I could not see his face, but from the stoop of his shoulders it was clear that he, like the rest of us, was nearing the end of his tether. Let him start sending, I thought let him get the preliminaries done. Then I would jump him when Thorshammer was listening.

  The weak signal started.

  "Thorshammer! Thorshammer!"

  It scarcely needed Pirow's skill to bluff the destroyer now.

  The signal was weak and faltering enough to be genuine.

  Pirow threw over the receiving switch. I was surprised to hear the strength of Thorshammer's reply. She must be very close to come through as clear as that.

  "Thorshammer to Life-raft. Personal Captain Olstad to Lieutenant Mosby. Keep your key down. Let your batteries run out. We are close. We will find you. Keep your key down.".

  Pirow started to exclaim in German. I slithered forward along the gratings. My left arm went hard round his windpipe.

  He gave a strangled gasp. With my free right hand, I locked down the transmitting key. My instinct told me something was wrong. I wrenched round. Walter was coming on hands

  and knees from the bow, a flensing knife in his fist. Behind him, Upton was standing, the Schmeisser pointed.

  I threw myself out of the cubbyhole, but I was still full-length. Walter leapt to his feet at the entrance as I shot out.

  He paused momentarily. Perhaps even he would not kill a man lying at his feet. I jerked sideways and, jack-knifing my body, kicked his legs from under him. He was adroit. He fell heavily, twisting like a cat, and took the fall on his shoulder, but it kept his right hand under him for a moment. I grabbed for his thick beard and swung astride his powerful body. The knife-thrust would come before Sailhardy could help me. My hands clamped on his beard and I jerked his head a couple of inches sideways. The crude skill of the Tristan boatmen had not succeeded in smoothing one of the gnarled knots in the ribs. It would serve as a garotte as efficient as anything in South America. I felt Walter's knife-hand go up for the plunge. I rammed the top of his spine, where it joins the head, hard against the knot. His mouth was wrenched wide open. Fear burst into his eyes.

  " Drop that knife!"

  I heard the weapon clunk against the bottom-boards. We

  G.I.

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  were within three feet of Helen. I saw that her eyes were open and she was staring, startled, at what was going on.

  Now is the time, I told myself savagely with the feel of the thick beard in my hands and kill-lust in my heart, to get the record straight about the shooting down of the seaplane—

  from Walter's own lips.

  " Walter! Say it, and say it quickly. Who shot down the seaplane? Who ordered it?"

  Helen's eyes dilated with horror and fixed on her father. I heard three clicks. -I jerked round without releasing Walter.

  Upton was tugging at the Schmeisser's trigger. It was pointed into my back. My fear and the explanation of the misfire were simultaneous. The firing mechanism was locked by oil which had frozen solid.

  I scarcely recognised my -own voice. " Upton! You can go on clicking that blasted thing as long as you like in this weather, but it won't fire." I shoved Walter's head further back. His spine would snap in a moment. " Tell her! Tell who it was!"

  " I shot it down. Sir Frederick ordered me to."

  I took the knife and dragged myself upright uncertainly. I lost my footing as the whaleboat rolled, and I crashed heavily on the thwart, the knife spinning across to Upton's feet. He picked it up. Walter pulled himself forward and crouched on his hands and knees near Upton, his face livid, unable to rise.

  Upton's eyes were bright. He seemed in better shape than any of us. " I should say thank you to this frozen gun," he said slowly as I gasped for breath. " I forgot for a moment that you are the only person who knows the secret of Thompson Island. Don't be a bloody fool again and waste your strength. I want it all for Thompson Island."

  " T h o m p s o n I s l a n d ! F o r G o d ' s s a k e , U p t o n ! ' Y o u r daughter's not going to last . . ."

  " But you are," he said. " You are the one person who matters to me. We will find Thompson Island—together."

  My weary brain made a hurried calculation. Assuming that we had travelled directly due south-east from the Norris chart position of Thompson Island, we might well, in the past three days, have covered the one hundred and ten miles which separated the false and the true positions of the island. In my weak state, and for Helen's sake, I was almost tempted to try and find the warmth and the good anchorage Pirow had spoken of—how many days ago now? How I could locate the

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  island without my sextant I did not know, but Sailhardy

  might be able to, with his strange methods of natural navigation. Bouvet, with its well-stocked roverhullet, was a better proposition if we could find it again than an unknown anchorage, but at that moment I would have welcomed any

  shelter away from the storm. But I did not intend Upton to know how near I was to agreeing to find Thompson Island.

  " You were mad to leave Bouvet," I said. " Listen, had Thompson Island been where Norris had charted it, what could come of finding it? There could be all the caesium in the world, but you couldn't take it away in this little boat.

  You might find it, but you would have had to give its position away in order to be rescued."

  Upton's answer underlined the state of his mind. " You're wrong, Bruce. There's a whole fleet of ships waiting at Thompson. We wouldn't need to be rescued." He laughed to himself. " You can take your pick when we get there—you can have a liner, or a freighter, or a tanker, just what you wish."

  There was no point in going on with talk of that kind. I crawled into my sleeping-bag to try and get some rest before taking the afternoon watch from Sailhardy. Upton stood grinning down at me, and then he too stumbled forward out of reach of the ice-sharpened file of wind. I fell into a broken, uneasy state which was half sleep and half semi-consciousness.

  Towards midday I drew Helen's head into the crook of my arm. She did not wake, but mumbled something which I could not follow. I feared for the coming night.

  Sailhardy, too, must have passed out at the tiller, for half the afternoon was gone when I heard him slither down the decking and shake me. His articulation was thick and the long vowels seemed to have difficulty in getting past his cracked lips. He tried to say something, but gave it up and instead gave a curious, stiff and unnatural wave of his arm at the sea and the wind. It was a gesture of surrender. I was aware of a life-sapping lethargy in my limbs and arms. Why not, I argued, leave the whaleboat to it own devices with the rudder lashed rather than forsake the warmth and shelter of my sleeping-bag for the raw hell of the tiller seat? Better to let the boat broach to and sink, for none of us, I felt sure, would see the next day out. I chafed Helen's hands, which was as cold as a corpse's ; the seal pup provided a tiny patch of warmth. I watch Sailhardy, eyes shut, drag himself half into his sleeping-bag and then fall ful
l-length on the gratings.

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  I sat upright. It took me about five minutes to kick myself clear of my own bag. Forward, Upton and Walter lay like dead men. There was silence from Pirow's cubbyhole. The only sign of life was the albatross near the two men in the bows, which was moving his wing as if exercising it.

  I slipped across the ice-covered metal decking to the tiller and undid the lashing, which Sailhardy had secured before, I felt sure, taking his last watch below. I crouched as the thin lances of frozen spray stabbed at my back on the gale.

  For an hour I tried to keep my seared, burning eyes on the waves and steer the boat away from the worst. I remembered the quality of the light starting to change. My soggy mind told me night was at hand, but I had no will or strength left to call Sailhardy or unclamp my gloved hand from the steering-arm. The whaleboat drove on, racing down each long roller, heaving laboriously up the next, while all the time the gale ice-blasted my back, hood and arms with flying granules.

  It was my sailor's instinct alone and nothing to do with my will which perked me to semi-consciousness. Later I was to know that about six hours had passed.

  The whaleboat lay in a calm sea of diaphanous white light. The fury of the Westerlies was dead.

  The silence was more unnerving than the storm.

  My hand, clamped on the tiller, no longer swung, corrected, swung, to keep her stern to the waves. The wind was gone, I told myself, because I had died at my post. It was a dead light, too: not the dayless, nightless coloration of the past week, but a diffused, whitish light, tinged with blue. I glanced at my watch. It was after midnight. I saw where the light was coming from. Then a series of immense flares laced the sky in green, flame, blue and violet—the Southern Lights! One wing rose up like a scarlet and violet scimitar from the direction of the South Pole and brandished its wild glory across the unreal sky. The flares outlined the dome of the heavens, one moment rising in bursting splendour along sky-paths like the spokes of a wheel, the next receding towards the Pole in a petulant bicker of light. Never, however, did they lose their colours, and the broken cloud which passed across the face of the Aurora enhanced rather than diminished the grandeur. I looked round me unbelievingly, for there was no ice on the water and, still in the absence of the Southern Lights, there was a whiteness being reflected from something which I could not see. The albatross stood like a figurehead on

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  the bow decking, flexing and re-flexing his damaged wing and gazing ahead.

  My first thought was for Helen. With the boat lying still, I could get one of the alpine stoves going and give her something hot. I prised my numb hand from the tiller and straightened my cramped limbs. It took me ten minutes of rubbing and banging my arms and legs before I could leave my position.

  " Helen!" I said, shaking her. She lay without moving.

  She was breathing shallowly and the drawn face, with the Antarctic's white beauty mask over it, sent a tremor of fear through me. " Helen!" I tried to kiss her, but all I felt was the crackle of ice and the skin tearing from my lips.

  I found one of the stoves and a can of soup. I lit it and its tiny circle of warmth was more comforting to me than the great blazes which danced across the sky.

  Sailhardy lay still. He was still alive, but only just. There was a stir from forward and Upton sat up in his sleeping-bag. He looked at me, the sky and the sea, in disbelief. He crawled over to me. " Why isn't there ice on the water, Bruce?" His use of my Christian name was an indication of his own distress.

  His sunken eyes became alive. " Thompson Island! You've brought me to Thompson Island!"

  I tried to laugh, but the cold held my jaw. " I have not the remotest idea where we are. I couldn't give a damn for Thompson or any other mystery at the moment. All I want is some hot food."

  I propped Helen's head against me and gave her a spoonful of hot soup. She took it, uncertainly, and her eyes remained closed. The seal pup stared inquisitively. I filled the spoon again and drank from the can myself, and then passed it over to Upton. I felt the warm life of it flood inside me. He passed the can back, three-quarters empty. " Get another couple of cans—in there," I said, indicating the stern cubbyhole. He was back quickly and heated them while I tried to get Helen to take some more.

  " Try and get some down Sailhardy's throat," I told him. "

  He's pretty near finished."

  Helen opened her eyes. The glazed look of delirium was gone. " What is it, Bruce? Did you find Thompson Island?"

  The way she said it made the name sound like a curse.

  " I don't know where we are," I said. " I don't see land.

  All I know is that it's calm and the sea is free of ice. I can't even account for the light."

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  I gave her more hot soup and did the same for Sailhardy.

  It must have been an hour before he was fully conscious, and he seemed very weak and lethargic. Upton roused both Walter and Pirow, who looked like a ghost. We brought out the second alpine stove and cooked our first hot meal in a week. It was nearly dawn by the time we had finished.

  The light began to change almost imperceptibly. The hemisphere-reaching flares of the Southern Lights drew back into their icy matrix. The whole upper lobe of the sky

  became one great sweep of light in a huge arch which stretched, not north and south like the Southern Lights, but east and west. The gigantic tracery was faint and white, although there seemed to be a background of rising colour.

  It was something I had scarcely hoped ever to see—the rare Parry's Arc. It seemed a fitting glory for our deliverance, if indeed deliverance it was.

  I told Helen what it was, and she sat up. The faint white of Parry's Arc began to be laced with brilliant reds, scarlets, greens, violets and blues ; then the arc itself became double in a breathtaking display of ethereal pyrotechnics, and spread itself across the whole sky, the arc elongating itself into an ellipse which seemed to stretch from the Weddell Sea to

  Australia.

  " My God!" called Upton front the bows.

  The light from Parry's Arc was bright enough to reveal

  the awesome spectacle as far as the eye could see: ,the

  whole horizon to windward was a gigantic mass of ice-bergs, between a thousand and fifteen hundred feet high. Behind them, still higher—higher than the cliffs of the great Ross Barrier itself—reached a wall of ice. We lay in a bay, probably fifty miles across, of ice. Perhaps five miles astern, on our starboard quarter, the north-western cliff of floating ice continent—it was scarcely less than that—thrust a squared buttress into the Southern Ocean. Under the uncertain light, it was impossible to tell where it began and ended, and out to port there seemed to be a patch of heavy fog.

  I realised then that we were in the presence of the phenomenon which had first enabled Norris to see Thompson Island, and seventy years later, Captain Fuller and, the third recorded time, myself. In cycles of seventy years a great continent of ice builds up along the shores of the Antarctic mainland, detaches itself, and drifts northwards—toward Thompson

  and Bouvet Islands. Any big icefield will clear visibility, but it took all of a continent of ice to clear the fog-shrouded 198

  shores of Thompson Island, which lay in the heart of the Southern Ocean's weather machine. To back up what I now knew was one of the secrets of Thompson Island, I remembered that when the Japanese had conducted aerial surveys of the Antarctic coastline directly to the south of Bouvet, they were surprised to find that they bore little resemblance to Lars Christensen's air photographs of three decades previously. And I was struck by the coincidence that in the same year that Captain Fuller saw Thompson Island, three famous clippers, including the Cutty Sark, had reported passing clean through a continent of ice—she had used those words in her log to describe it—and all three had barely escaped destruction.

  I rose to my knees and looked round the horizon. But the great flare of Parry's Arc which had lit the distant ice barrier faded, and it was imp
ossible to see much. We were all too weak and too overcome by the sight to do anything but stare.

  Sailhardy croaked: " Look at the albatross, boy!"

  The bird was balancing himself above the cutwater with his wings wide. The last starlets, reds, golds, blues and violets of Parry's Arc made a tracery across their whiteness. For a moment he hung on, uncertain, flapping his wings. Then he launched himself, dipped for a moment towards the water, picked up, wheeled round the whaleboat twice, and struck off towards a point beyond the port bow.

  There was a commotion at my feet and I looked at Helen's sleeping-bag. The seal pup was fighting to kick himself free.

  The little animal shot out of the mouth of the bag. He leapt on to the thwart next to me and stood with his head cocked, every muscle tense.

  Someone was knocking on the bottom of the boat.

  13. Thompson Island

  For a moment I thought Sailhardy or Helen was striking

  the bottom-boards in some final convulsion of weakness.

  Knock! knock! knock ! —someone might have been rapping a knuckle on the underside of the boat.

  Saidhardy's eyes opened and he put his ear to the gratings. I knelt down and did the same.

  The islander exclaimed faintly. " It's the Tristan Knocker!"

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  " The Tristan Knocker?"

  I could see his excitement, but he was so weak that he

  had to speak deliberately to get the words out. " It's got a scientific name in South Georgia, but on Tristan we call it the Knocker. It's a big fish, like a cod. That's the noise they make when they're courting! Look at the seal!"

  The little animal had slithered across the thwart and was gazing excitedly at the sea. At any moment he would go over the side.

  Upton stood over us, gaunt, wild-eyed. " What is it? What is it, you two?"

  S a i l h a r d y s a t u p . " I t ' s l a n d ! T h e T r i s t a n K n o c k e r spawns in shallow water. There's land—close!"

  The seal pup dived over the side. It was just light enough to see in the dawn. The albatross made a point of white against the dark patch out to port which I thought to be fog.