by Peter Tonkin
They left Hogg in the watchkeeper’s chair, though he was too comatose really to be on watch. Harry Stone the cheerful radio operator said he was willing to remain on the bridge as well, though there was nothing he could do in his professional capacity until the power came up or the solar flares died down. ‘There’s no heat, no light and no food below,’ he observed. ‘It’s worse than winter back home in Grand Falls, Newfoundland. Why should I want to go down there? No, I’ll stay here and watch Hogg keeping watch.’ Like Timmins, he seemed to use an ironic tone as a matter of course when talking of the second officer. But unlike Timmins he seemed competent and reliable.
They started at the top of the bridgehouse — right at the top, on the open deck at the foot of the main radio mast. Robin would have climbed even higher, but that would have been stupid because the temperature was beginning to tumble further as the cloud cover thinned. The iron rungs up the front of the mast itself were already coated with ice. She kept her mind on the equipment up here and the way it had been maintained, refusing to let her attention wander to the spectacular views northwards over the floe-flecked Davis Strait or southwards over the ice barrier. Everything up here seemed to be neat, clean and properly stowed. She could order none of it to be run or tested until she had power back, so she had to be content with looking.
‘This all seems shipshape,’ she said conversationally, making her tone warm and approving.
‘Yeah, I guess.’
She walked back to the aft section and leaned against the railing, looking down to the lower deck with the funnel rising from the middle of it. That too was neat and tidy, everything well stowed and unobtrusive. ‘Captain Black obviously likes to run a tight ship,’ she observed.
‘Now you look here, lady, that man was good to me. He’s a good captain, he’s just sick, is all, and I won’t hear nothing against him.’ His obvious anger brought out something like a southern drawl in his voice. She found the unexpected accent distracting. Like everything else about the man, it diminished him somehow.
She swung round to face him. His watery blue eyes were gleaming with genuine anger. The frizzy monk’s haircut sticking out from under his warm hood above his ears seemed to be sparking with electric anger. ‘I meant it, Mr Timmins,’ she said. Her tone was quietly placating. Her eyes held his until they dropped. ‘I wasn’t being disrespectful.’
That took the wind out of his sails a bit. ‘Just sick, is all,’ he repeated. ‘He’ll be up and about in no time.’ The way he said it made it sound almost like a threat.
And that gave Robin something else to think about. What would her position aboard be if Captain Black did get over his craving for whatever illegal substance the late Mr Reynolds had supplied him with? If he took over control of his command again, where would that leave her? Out on a limb with Ann, she suspected. Just another woman for the crew to fantasise over. It was not a pleasant thought. But then, this was not a pleasant ship.
She turned back and looked down. The ship rose and settled beneath her. The lines holding her stern against the ice flexed and eased. The movement made either the vessel or its anchorage groan as though there was something out there in deep pain. Something big and dangerous. Abruptly she moved off to the starboard companionway and went down onto the deck beside the funnel. Crossing it at a brisk walk, with Timmins like a sulky spaniel at her heels, she paused to look down at the lifeboat from above. ‘When was the last lifeboat drill?’ she asked.
‘Well, I’d have to check in the log to be sure.’
‘Roughly. Last Tuesday? Monday?’
He shrugged. She frowned.
‘When did you last check all the lifeboat stores and equipment?’
‘Can’t rightly say. The Wide Boy—’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Third Officer Reynolds. He did all this stuff.’
The penny began to drop then. The late third officer had been the only really active deck officer aboard. And of course he would have been extremely happy to look after everyone else’s responsibilities. God alone knew what must be hidden among all this beautifully stowed gear. And now that the weather was moderating and the ship was temporarily safe, the crew had leisure to do a little thinking and she suspected she would not be the only one to wonder.
The next companionway was a ladder reaching down behind the funnel to the small deck where the stores crane was footed. This was quite a solid machine which pointed its short boom out towards the stern, and was used for the purpose its name implied. Like everything else, it was well stowed and had handled the foul weather of the last week surprisingly well.
The final companionway was a much more decorative affair, coming down like a staircase onto the fair-sized poop. There had been much debate with the shipbuilders, she remembered, about whether to place a swimming pool here for the use of the off-watch officers and crew. In Heritage Mariner supertankers there was always a pool in this spot, overlooked by the windows of the gym. But the courses these ships were destined to follow reached exclusively across the northern seas, and the designers questioned the need for such a frippery. Richard and she had insisted, however, and in the end they had come to a grudging agreement. There was a little pool beneath the decking before her, empty and carefully covered until the heat of the summer months. So well designed and fitted was the ship that the deck seemed solid and seamless. What a superb hiding place for Reynolds’ loot that would make, she thought. Perhaps she might even have the leisure to check it out herself in due course.
Without pausing as these thoughts sped through her mind, she strode across the deck to the capstan where Timmins had anchored the shore lines. She glanced at them from a distance as though her interest was on other things. She did not want to alienate him further by seeming to mistrust his work. Nor was there any need to check too closely. One glance from her experienced eye confirmed that he seemed to have done a good enough job. But having come this close to the edge of the deck, it was impossible to ignore the ice any longer.
It exerted its own atmosphere and the power of it crept up coldly and swept aboard with an almost physical force like a mist, a miasma or a ghost. It was something far beyond the everyday rough and tumble of the jostling between the fenders and the crystal cliffs. It was something quite apart from the grating rumble with which the ship and her floating dock rose and fell in relationship with each other. There was a mesmerism which could not be denied. Inexorably it called her to the railing and held her there, looking down.
In fact the ice was moving very little, but the ship was still rising and falling on the swell. Robin could see why the nameless sailor had been tempted simply to jump down onto the soft-seeming white slope. When Atropos was in a trough and the barrier was on the back of the wave, there was little more than five feet between the green deck and the ice. A counter-breeze suddenly swept back into her face and she really smelt the ice for the first time. It had not occurred to her that the ice would smell of anything but, just as the oceans have their own odours, so did this frozen segment of Atlantic water. Oddly, for this was sea ice and thick but not old, it had a timeless smell. The sort of smell she imagined would inform the still air of undisturbed tombs. But there was something rich there too, rich but rancid. A touch of whale’s breath, of seal’s bark. So slight as to be little more than her imagination. So powerful as to make her close her eyes and sniff at the freezing air again, for all she knew it was refrigerating her adenoids and probably giving frostbite to her nose tip. But it was gone.
Disappointed, she opened her eyes. And frowned with sudden worry. The ice was at its relative highest, hovering tantalisingly close. The fenders were bunched up high enough to be oozing water over her feet. The ropes from the capstan were at full stretch past her shoulder, angling down to a spike hammered into the snowy crystal to act as a makeshift bollard. And as the full strain came onto it, the spike moved. ‘Number One,’ she said, just as though she was talking to Nico Niccolo. ‘This is funny, look at this.’
He
crossed to stand at her right shoulder and followed her gaze downwards. ‘That was well in,’ he said defensively. ‘Hammered hard home. I checked it myself.’
She nodded. ‘I’m sure you did. But there’s something ... Let’s go down for a closer look.’
No sooner had she spoken than she was off, climbing nimbly over the railing and swarming down the Jacob’s ladder onto the green-white frozen surface. It was so still and solid it almost made her knees buckle. From the heaving deck of her command it had been so easy to imagine that the ship’s movements were reciprocated by the barrier, but this was not the case. She had no real idea how big was the body of solid water she was standing on, but it was moved not one whit by its liquid cousin rolling by beneath it. Surprised, she staggered back and found herself skidding. Again, it had deceived her. The surface behind the vertical faces of the cliffs had seemed flat but it was not: it sloped down with increasing steepness into the first of the corrugated valleys and it was all Robin could do to stop herself sliding away.
As she turned, Atropos heaved up above her and the ten feet between her and the deck became fifteen, and she appreciated anew the size of her command. Forty feet above, on the way up to being fifty, was the overhang of the bridge wing. Sixty feet to the topmost railings. Nearly a hundred to the top of the main radio mast on the bridgehouse. And the great curve of the funnel was only ten feet shorter, just behind. The roaring of the surf between the steel and the ice was incredible. She walked forward to where Timmins was standing, looking down at the spike. Sure enough, the ground in front of it, the snow-caked ice nearest to the ship, was a different colour and as the black column stirred, pulled forward by the pressure of the ship’s movement, so water bubbled up and flowed away to freeze again. ‘It’s the pressure,’ she said. ‘Pressure causes ice to melt. We’ll have to think of some way to anchor it more securely. After a while that stake will just pull itself out of the ground. It’s okay for the moment, though, so we’ve time to take a look at the other one as well. Odds are that Hogg won’t have done as good a job as you did.’
Automatically Timmins turned to go back aboard.
‘Don’t bother,’ she said. ‘We can walk down the ice from here.’ She turned and was off without further thought, her eyes busy on the treacherous but fascinating surface in front of her boots. She had likened the powdery coating over the crystal to snow, but in many ways it was more like sand. When she kicked her toecap into it, it behaved like any beach half remembered from her holidays. Except that there was no real depth to it. Not here at any rate. She looked away to her left, down the deceptive slope into what looked like a shallow valley at the foot of another, higher cliff face.
She suddenly envisaged this section of the barrier like a wide staircase which had been tilted backwards so that the absolute verticals and horizontals of the steps had been softened into a rising series of escarpments and valleys, each a little higher than the last. The angles in the feet of the valleys had been cloaked in this drifting ice sand. Then the whole aspect of the barrier seemed to change and in a matter of a few feet she found herself looking through the ice cliffs up a valley she hadn’t realised was there. She had been so busy thinking about the main structures in the ice running east to west parallel to the coastline that it came as quite a shock to see a feature running north to south, separating the cliffs into blocks as though the whole barrier had been bent upwards to crack open at this point.
The sound of the surf thundered hollowly beneath her and she suddenly realised that this was what had happened. The seemingly solid ground on which she was standing was probably a thin crust over a crevasse reaching straight down into the freezing sea. She glanced over her shoulder but Timmins was a good way behind still, watching his feet as though he expected them to vanish at any moment. Fascinated, and with no sense of danger whatsoever, she paused there for a second, waiting. Sure enough, another sea thundered in. This time the sound was louder. And she felt the ice stir. A sort of ripple fled past her insteps, strong enough to make the soles of her feet tingle even through the boots and all the socks she was wearing. And about ten feet down the slope, exactly in line with where she was standing, a geyser of spray and ice crystals shot up into the air as though a whale was breathing there. She skipped off this section at once and turned to warn Timmins of her fears.
The thoughtless action was enough to cause her boots to lose their purchase and she fell forwards onto her face. The ice was as hard as concrete. No sooner had she hit the treacherous surface than she was slithering down the slope into the first of the valleys. As much with frustration as because she believed it would help, she beat at the ground with her gloved hands and her fists jarred painfully along corrugations which were the miniature counterparts of the series of hills behind her. Thinking quickly, she pushed her chest and stomach into the air and ground her hands, knees and toe tips into the surface. At once she slowed and after a moment or two she was able to start crawling back up the slope.
At the crest of the shallow slope, Timmins stood watching her with a strange, unsettled, uncertain look on his face. He wasn’t too scared to help her. It was something other than that. Still, she thought grimly, she didn’t need his help now and she’d be damned if she would ask for it. Then she realised where he was standing. She looked up again and he saw the desperation on her face and utterly misunderstood it. A slow smile spread across his thin lips and the sight of it sickened her just enough to choke off the warning in her throat. He straddled his legs, put his hands on his hips and got ready to enjoy watching her suffer.
Then the black side of the ship which framed him stirred and began to rise. The trembling thunder started again beneath her. ‘Timmins!’ she yelled and the force of her warning sent her sliding again. Her warning was wasted because the wild sound of the surf drowned it out. Atropos continued to rise and rise. Somehow Robin managed to tear herself to her feet, just in time to see the stake Hogg put into the ice at her bows tear loose. The length of the ship rocked back and then slammed forwards into the ice cliffs, adding the massive inertia of twenty thousand tons to the force of the surf in the chamber just beneath the surface of the ice. The flat ram of the side shut tight against the mouth of the cavern, forcing untold amounts of water and air into it like gas into a balloon.
From the point where Robin had seen the geyser of ice crystals and spray, right back along a line to the side of the ship, the ice crust blew open. It came close enough to knock her off her feet again but she knew how to stop sliding now and she remained on her knees, looking up. The force of it went straight up into the air between Timmins’s arrogantly spread legs and took him with it. He was blasted into the air, the one dark object in the heart of a dazzling cloud of purest white. He didn’t go up very far but from Robin’s point of view he seemed to hang in the air, arms and legs spread as he performed a lazy back-flip worthy of a circus acrobat. And perhaps he did actually hang there, supported by the fountain of air like a ping-pong ball sitting on a water jet.
But the situation couldn’t last. The overwhelming power of the explosion began to falter. The spray-soaked body fell. But where there had been a solid crust beneath him brief moments ago there was now a broad crater at the heart of a long crevasse shafting down to a subterranean cavern made of emerald crystal. He hit the edge of the crater with his chest and, once again, his body seemed to hesitate in the grip of powers beyond control. He lay there, legs down the glacial slope and arms thrown out towards Robin as though beseeching her help. It was clear that he was in fact unconscious, and at first there did not seem to be any great rush for her to go to his aid. She was anyway more than a little shocked by the impact of what had happened, and her reactions were slowed to a dreamlike pace by the sudden rush of adrenaline into her exhausted system.
In the heart of a hollow silence, she picked herself up, stumbled, and danced until her footing was firm. All the time she was watching Timmins lying face down on the ice and it was only when her feet were steady that her brain had leisur
e to consider the fact that naked skin on bare ice at temperatures like these would be frostbitten within seconds. But that thought was overwhelmed almost at once by the realisation that the apparently still body was not in fact stationary at all. It was slipping backwards with increasing rapidity into the throat of the crevasse.
Reality arrived with the sound of a slamming door. Speed came back to normal. There was sound and sensation. And bitter self-recrimination. Timmins was likely to die here and the fault was hers. All because she wanted to walk on ice instead of steel. Stupid, stupid, stupid! She hurled herself forward with almost masochistic force in a long dive for his hand. She landed on her stomach with bone-shaking force and skidded forwards spectacularly but she was still too late to save him. She froze, spread like a starfish at the top of the green-glass slope, and watched him slither downwards. At the bottom of the crater was a hole wide enough to admit his body and to show her a cavern maybe twelve feet deep, in the jumbled gravel ice of whose floor the waves foamed restlessly but shallowly. She realised at once that only the tops of the biggest seas could get in there. The cave was long but not deep. Its floor stood above the waterline. It stretched fifty feet at least into the barrier, but it wasn’t deep enough to flood properly. And as she realised this, among the restless, rolling boulders which tumbled like giant lustres from some gargantuan chandelier in the shallow foam she saw the dark jumble of Timmins’s body and realised there was still a chance to save him, if someone was willing to go down there after him.