by Ted Mark
There was fear in Olga's voice as she told me this. I didn't like it any better than she did, but I could see that we had no choice. We had to go along with Ungilak's judgment. He was the only one familiar with the techniques of survival in the Arctic, and so his was the only opinion which counted.
I shined the flashlight beam for him just above where the dogs were huddled and watched as he crept stealthily up to them with his spear at the ready. I had offered to help with my gun, but according to Olga he had advised me to conserve my bullets. Still, I had the safety off and my trigger finger was tensed in case he should suddenly need help.
Once he'd reached his objective, Ungilak moved very quickly and surely. He straightened up, poised for a split second with his spear over the neck of one of the sleeping dogs, then brought it down surely. Its deathpoint went in and out smoothly, and then he moved on to the next dog. And the next. And the next…
A yelp of pain aroused the last three left alive. One of them, Ungilak's target, sprang up before he could plunge the spear to its mark. He lunged for Ungilak, and the Eskimo quickly shoved the spear out in front of him to fend the beast off. Now the other two came at him and I sprang to my feet, looking for a chance to shoot.
But there was no chance. The dogs were too fast. Their furious attack was a blur in the beam of the flashlight. I couldn't fire for fear of hitting Ungilak. Fortunately, the Eskimo was even faster than they were.
Fending off one dog with the shaft of the spear, he brought the tip down so that it gashed the side of a second dog. As that one started yelping, Ungilak's foot shot out and connected with the throat of the third dog. It fell back, leaving him free to club the first beast. He hit it hard and accurately, and it collapsed on the snow, its brains oozing out of its skull. Ungilak quickly finished off the second dog by plunging the spear-point into its chest. The movement left him off balance as the last dog attacked again, and they went down together with the snarling beast trying to tear off his fur-covered arm.
I moved in closer, but I wasn't needed. Ungilak's knee slammed into the dog's belly with all his might, and his arm was released. He brought the spearhead up to where he'd kicked, and it went through the animal's stomach and out its back. Ungilak got up and finished it off by stamping on its head with both feet.
The excitement was over for the night. Ungilak arranged the carcasses so they were shielded against the storm and indicated that we should all get some sleep. The next morning he left us, promising to return with help as soon as possible.
In retrospect, the days following Ungilak's departure are a hellish blur. I'm not sure whether it was two days or three when our food ran out and we had to start on the dead flesh of the dogs. I wasn't sure that either Olga or I could bring ourselves to eat it, but hunger finally drove us to it – although even then we ate sparingly.
It was right after that first reluctant meal that the storm changed into a blizzard. The wind became a howling knife cutting through the shelter provided by the sled. The cold was unbelievable now. It penetrated right through the furs we used for covering and it was with us all the time, growing steadily worse. Once every hour I insisted that Olga get up and join me in some exercises to stave off frostbite and keep our circulation going. I didn't tell her, but I had my doubts about how long this might work. Indeed, I had my doubts about whether we could survive at all, and they grew worse as the blizzard grew stronger and the cold increased.
Finally there was nothing to do but bundle together and share the mutual warmth of the furs. The cold still came right through them, though, and the only real source of warmth was our own flesh. Olga protested, the prissy S.M.U.T. fanatic to the bitter end, but I insisted that we take maximum advantage of this source of warmth. I forced her to lie naked with me under the pile of furs, and I kept agreeing to her demands that I wouldn't let anything of a sexual nature occur.
However, due to a defect in my character, or perhaps in my biological make-up – or maybe just because it's instinctive to do just about anything to keep alive – the night came when my body refused to keep the promises I'd made to Olga. By then the cold had grown so intense that it was necessary not only to wrap our bodies around one another, but also to keep up a constant rubbing of flesh against flesh, a life-saving friction, as it were. It was while this was going on that I noticed that a certain intimate portion of my anatomy had grown quite stiff. Half-crazed with cold and hunger as I was, I couldn't tell whether the member was frozen or merely taut with passion. But there seemed to be little feeling in it, and this panicked me. I had a sort of hysterical vision of it suddenly breaking off from its own weight like an icicle.
From this awful possibility, my mind jumped to a consideration of Olga. I remembered the first time Crampdick had pointed her out to me back in the brothel in New York. Was it a million years ago? More? No matter. Now I recalled how her pixie face and petite body had made me think she might be a gypsy girl. Little had I guessed that she'd turn out to be just the opposite of the uninhibited gypsy – a girl who'd rather die than part with a virginity she didn't even possess. I remembered how sharp and pointy her breasts had looked under her dress that day, and I marveled that while I'd judged their shape correctly, they felt marvelously soft – even warm – as they pressed against my chest now. I recalled how she'd looked later when I pulled her out of the brothel bed, and my sense of touch now confirmed the promise my sense of sight had made back then. That same sense of touch told me she moved marvelously well, moved with a naturally sexy rhythm that would have been perfect if only -
If only we'd been having sex!
I don't know how long my hallucinating mind dwelt on it, building the obsession. All I know is that finally I reached the point where I just couldn't take all this frenetic motion without following it through to its natural conclusion. Reaching down, I touched myself, and it seemed to me that there was less and less feeling in my rigid manhood., There was only one way to thaw it out, and I decided that it must be done immediately.
Still, even in my hallucinatory state, I remembered not to be a hypocrite about it. I pulled away for a moment and looked straight into Olga's deep blue eyes.
Forthrightly, I told her my intentions. "I'm going to rape you," I said.
"No!" she protested.
"Yes!" I insisted.
"Why?" she interrogated.
"So it won't fall off!" I indicated.
"You mean it's likely to-"
"Yes!"
"But then suppose it happens while you're-"
"That's a chance we'll have to take."
"Surely you're exaggerating," Olga pleaded.
"I am not. Remember the brass monkey."
"What brass monkey?"
"The one that froze its whatzis off."
"I don't care about any brass monkey. I'm not going to let you. Why, if anybody found out, I might be drummed out of S.M.U.T."
"S.M.U.T. will understand." I tried to reassure her. "It's necessary to stay alive."
"I'd rather die!" She crossed her arms dramatically over her breasts.
"I wouldn't. And stop hogging the bearskins." I cuddled closer to her again. "It's no use your protesting," I told her. "I'm going to rape you."
Over us the blizzard raged. The wind screamed its arctic wrath endlessly. The biting cold crawled under the bearskins and beneath our own skins – icy, probing fingers tipped with death. And yet, in my arms, this voluptuous French girl was struggling furiously against accepting the sex which might well be the difference between life and death to us.
She fought me every frozen inch of the way. Her nails raked my cheeks and dug into my neck. Her teeth clamped down on my arm, and I had to slap her to make her let go. Her knee connected with my crotch, and I held her pinned for a moment while I recovered from the pain.
As I was getting over it, I thought to myself that perhaps I really was being too abrupt, not tender enough. I decided to woo her more gently. So I bent and kissed her on the lips. The savage clamp of her teeth almost ri
pped my tongue from its roots. Her hand, flailing out behind me, fastened on the flashlight, and she cracked it against the side of my skull. At the same moment her other hand tangled in the beard I'd grown and tugged mightily.
I retreated for another breather. "It's easy to see you don't know anything about rape," I gasped. "Don't you know the victim is presumed always to have encouraged the attacker?"
"Men!" She spat the word out as if it was the filthiest of curses. "I'll bet some man thought that one up. Men only want one thing from a girl. Even when we're about to freeze to death, the only thing on your mind is sex."
"If you know another way to stay alive, then tell me."
She merely snorted with contempt and fell silent.
The howl of the wind grew louder. The cold it brought with it renewed my determination. I grabbed Olga again.
We wrestled. I wedged my knee against her tight-clenched thighs and bore down hard, slowly prying them apart. No gentleman resting on his elbows was I. My weight was necessary to keep her pinned, and my chest crushed those soft, heaving, pointed breasts beneath me. She fought hard, but the fight itself was a kind of perverse love-making. The way she thrashed around and pounded her fists against, my body was exciting. Even the tears of frustration which sprang to her eyes with the realization that she wasn't strong enough to hold me off were an added goad to my passion.
She kept struggling even after the rape was technically a fait accompli. But now her angry writhings took on a certain sexual rhythm despite herself. She kept beating at my spine with the heels of her feet, but the way things were, the tattoo only merged into the act of making love. It was the same with her bouncing efforts to pull free of my stabbing blade of passion. Each movement found it slammed back to the hilt.
Finally she cried out and lost control altogether. Her body took over, and she wasn't fighting me then. Her eyes closed, and she gave herself up to one tremor of release after another. She was thrusting against me now, digging her nails into my buttocks to hold me fast, no longer trying to push me away. Realizing this, I gave myself up to the sensation, and together we soared to the heights of passion.
When it was over, we clung together wearily for a moment. Then she pushed away, groping to regain her composure, seeking the proper tone of voice for a woman forcibly defiled, a woman raped against her will. But she was caught between wanting to come on this way and the vestiges of pleasure she was still feeling. The result was a tone that was shaky and words that equivocated.
"Well, at least," Olga said, "it didn't break off while you were -" She left it hanging.
So did I. I was satisfied – for the time being. We were alive, and the warm afterglow of love-making would keep up alive for a while.
But with the passing of another day, the feeling of satisfaction also passed. The cold gripped us again. And once again I raped Olga.
She didn't fight me quite as hard this time. And the next time she struggled even less strenuously. Soon she was putting up merely token resistance. She would have liked me to believe that this was because her strength was being sapped by our ordeal, but I suspected otherwise.
One night she woke me from a sound sleep and my suspicions were confirmed. "Aren't you going to rape me?" she asked.
"I'm tired," I told her. "Later."
"No. Now! I'm freezing!"
So I obliged. And when she started struggling as usual, I simply stopped and rolled away from her.
"What's the matter?" she panted.
"I'm too tired to fight with you."
"Oh." Olga thought a moment. "All right, then I won't fight," she decided.
The next morning the storm abated. The wind died down, and the snow flurried to a stop. For the first time in I don't know how long, we saw the sun again.
It gave our morale a boost. We were still dependent on Ungilak's return to save us, but our chances of freezing to death were lessened by the passing of the blizzard. We smiled encouragement at each other and speculated that Ungilak might reach us today, or surely tomorrow.
But it wasn't Ungilak who found us. It was mid-afternoon and we were dozing in the shadows of the shelter provided by the overturned sled when Olga's scream awoke me. She screamed only once, and I sat bolt upright with my pistol in my hand.
It was too late. There was a hatchet sticking out of Olga's naked breast. She was dead.
I snapped a shot at the figure standing over her. But I fired too fast, and I missed. I caught a glimpse of a face that was decidedly Chinese, and then he was gone.
I bolted after him, but he was too fast for me. His footsteps led to a narrow crevice running between two mountains of ice. It would have been foolhardy to try to follow him there. I'd have been a setup for an ambush.
He'd be back. I was sure of that. I guessed that it was really me he was after. He'd probably killed.Olga only because she'd seen him and screamed. Even now the Chinese might be cursing to himself over the chance that he might have killed Dr. Nyet herself.
So I settled back of the sled to wait for his return. I propped myself up on the package containing the jeweled phallus and concentrated on staying awake. I was alone now. Just me and the golden genitalia of a Nepalese god.
Death lurked in the ice mountains. Death would surely return. The only question was whether I might not freeze to death before the Chinese came back to kill me. If I did, that priceless phallus might make a worthy tombstone for the man from O.R.G.Y!
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Merry Christmas!"
It woke me from the sleep I'd tried so hard to avoid. I blinked, sure that I must still be dreaming. My eyes refocused on Ungilak standing over me, a big grin on his face.
"Merry Christmas!" He repeated it.
Nothing seemed to add up in my fogged brain. Was it really Ungilak? Or was it some vision conjured up from my delirium? If it was him, then how come he was suddenly speaking English? And what was this about Christmas?
"Merry Christmas!" He said it a third time, obviously waiting for some response.
"Merry Christmas." I responded.
My mind went off on a minor obsession, trying to add up the days. Somehow this Christmas bit seemed the easiest thing to cope with at the moment. Allowing for half a dozen or so days that I'd lost in the Arctic cold, I realized that it might indeed be Christmas.
Ungilak was rattling off some of his Eskimo dialect now. I understood that "Merry Christmas" was the extent of the English he'd picked up. When he saw that he wasn't getting through to me, he switched over to sign language. It clicked after a moment, and I understood he was asking where Olga was.
I took him outside and showed him where I'd stashed her corpse. He looked at it and his face grew dark with anger. He thought I'd killed her!
I backed away from him, shaking my head. I pointed to the hatchet still buried in her breast and made gestures to tell him that it wasn't mine. Finally I pointed out the tracks the Chinese had made when he ran away. Ungilak examined them and then nodded to show that he believed me.
I followed him back to the rescue party he'd brought with him. There were five Eskimos besides Ungilak, and two dogsleds. He spoke to them in their native tongue, evidently explaining about Olga's murder, and pointed out the tracks to them. They nodded, and four of the five set out to follow the tracks.
We waited. I guess it was about three hours later that they finally returned. They had the Chinese with them. He was half-dead from frostbite and in no condition to put up a fight, but they tied him down to one of the sleds anyway.
I settled in alongside him as we got under way. The other sled was laden with supplies, and Ungilak didn't seem to want to take the time to shift them. I didn't mind. The Chinese was in no condition to give me any trouble.
We were three days on the trail before he regained some of his strength. I tried talking to him then as we skimmed over the endless snow. To my surprise, he spoke flawless English.
"Why are you here?" I asked him.
"The same reason you are. To find Dr. N
yet."
"How did you know where to look?"
"We had the Russian agent followed."
"Why did you kill him?"
"We felt he was getting close. Indeed, we thought he might have found Dr. Nyet. We thought it was the young lady with you. We didn't want the Russians to have her. Nor you, for that matter. We wanted to take her ourselves. And so we eliminated the Russian to expedite matters."
"And you also may have eliminated Dr. Nyet," I pointed out.
"Possibly. It couldn't be helped. My reflexes simply worked too fast. She screamed and I killed her before she might have had a chance to kill me."
"Just like that." The hatred for him that came through in my voice then was genuine.
"What is done is done." He shrugged it off. "Right now our aims are the same, and we must think about how best to cooperate with each other."
"Oh? So now you want to cooperate."
"Yes. Are you agreeable?"
"Drop dead!" I told him, ending the conversation.
A few hours later we came in sight of the S.M.U.T. settlement at last. There were perhaps thirty or forty igloos spaced out in a wide circle. Ungilak called a halt and strode over to me. He took my hand between both of his and then leaned over to rub his nose against mine affectionately.
"Poli," he said, pointing back the way we'd come. "Poli." He repeated it and I understood that he was saying goodbye, that he was going to leave now because he wanted to get back to his wife. He made signs to tell me that the other Eskimos would see me to the conclusion of the journey, and then he turned the other sled around and started back to Poli.
Before he was out of sight, we were on our way to the settlement. As we drew closer, I was surprised at the number of Eskimos hard at work there. The tribal life of Eskimos is very loose, and it's rare for more than two or three families to congregate together. Yet I guessed there were more than a hundred in sight as we approached. Not one of them, I knew, was a native of Franz Josef Land. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to relocate them here. And someone was seeing to it that they were kept busy building still more igloos.