A Grue Of Ice (18 page)

It was the sea. It had turned to honey. I knew what it meant.

7.
No Sailor's Sea

I
gasped for breath.
I
was drowning in the bland, jelly-like stuff which
I
had seen below me from
Aurora's
gun platform. Wavering between consciousness and unconsciousness,
I
snatched a lungful of air. The honey jelly had tried to drown my ship once, my soggy mind said, and now it was trying to drown me.
I
gulped down some more air. Its life-giving oxygen cleared my brain momentarily.

I saw that the pale, mercuric oxide yellow light was not honey jelly. Nor was
I
in the sea, as in my semi-conscious state I had imagined. The colour of the light was reflected from the ceiling. And
it
was the ceiling of my cabin aboard 102

Antarctica.
I fought again for air. I remembered hanging from the Hotchkiss harness, and beneath me in the sea there seemed to be a substance floating everywhere, like silky jelly. Below
Aurora's
rail the sea had been covered with it, some of the individual slabs being up to two feet square. At the moment came the recollection of Walter firing the Luger into my face.

The agony of the recollection and of what the honey jelly

meant broke my semi-consciousness. I jerked myself upright in my bunk. The cabin swam round me and as I put my hand to my head I felt the bandages.

" Take it easy, Bruce," said Helen.

I had not seen her in the pale, diffused light. I wondered

how long I had lain unconscious. Hearing her speak, too, brought a new surge of recollection: Walter had fired the Luger and almost at the same moment I had felt the gouge of pain in my head from the bullet. I remembered falling out of the harness into the sea, the honey-jelly sea. And then the roar of the helicopter's rotors overhead, and the unutterable relief of feeling the machine's " horse-collar " rescue gear snatch me from the icy sea. I had been in the water less than a minute. For the second time, Helen had shown her superb skill by saving my life. All the rest was blank.

" Helen!" I got out. " How long have I been here? What time is it?"

" It's hours since I picked you out of the sea," she said. " It's early afternoon."

" Early afternoon!" I echoed. The strange light showed it must be turning dark up top. In the early afternoon! I knew there could be almost no hope of saving
Antarctica
now.

My eyes slewed to the gyro-repeater. I tried to get out of my bunk, but Helen held me back. My head seemed to split with pain. I scarcely recognised my 'own voice. " Helen!

Get on to the voice-pipe! For God's sake tell Bjerko to alter course. We're steering right into it! It's death, I tell you!"

She looked at me with her strange eyes, which were full of shadows in the pale light. " There are a lot of things I want to hear—from you and you alone, Bruce—before I start

worrying about our course."

" I can wait, but the course can't," I said. "I told you about the danger of being nipped in the ice. The honey jelly in the sea was the outrider of the pack-ice, and that yellow

103

light outside means we're running into the second advance

guard—fog."

She shook her head. "If that
is
so, it is too late anyway. You're wounded, and I want to know why. I saw you being

held up at pistol-point, and I want to know why. I saw you

fall from Walter's ack-ack weapon into the sea. Minutes before, I watched that same weapon shoot down a defenceless seaplane. After I had picked you up, I tried to find the seaplane or its crew, but it had already sunk. Why are you wounded?"

I realised that the heavy Luger bullet must have shattered off the casing of the Spandau and that the fragments had knocked me senseless. Walter had missed me—but only just. The bandage had stopped the blood, so the wound could not

be deep. I hauled myself over the side of the bunk and called the bridge on the voice-pipe. Helen made to attempt to stop me this time, but sat immobile, watching me.

" Bjerko!" I said. " Wetherby here. This course is suicide. We might still get clear on another. Steer—" I glanced at the gyrorepeater—" six-oh. Full speed ahead!" There was a pause, and I heard Bjerko say something. When the Norwegian captain replied, there was a note of sarcasm in his voice. " I thank you for your advice, Captain Wetherby, and so does Sir Frederick Upton. Sir Frederick says, you have had a nasty experience, and you need rest.

The ship is in good hands."

" Good hands . . ." I started to exclaim, but the instrument clicked off. " We're steering eight-five degrees," I said to Helen. " Bjerko says .. ." I trailed off at her shrug.

" I asked how you came to be wounded," she said levelly. I stumbled to the bunk and half sat, half lay on it. I told her in detail about Norris' chart, the ransacking of my cabin, the fragments of the plot I had overheard on the Tannoy, and how my fears had been realised when Walter had lashed me

to the Spandau-Hotchkiss and tried to kill me. She listened without saying a word. Her only outward sign of agitation showed when I mentioned her father's mysterious interest in Thompson Island and his instructions to Walter to get rid of me.

" When I landed in the helicopter with you unconscious, my father told me that Walter had been through to him on the W/T. Walter, my father said, told him that you had

gone berserk aboard
Aurora
at the sight of the ack-ack gun. 104

It happens, my father says: a man like yourself has some dormant killer-instinct left over from the war. He sees a weapon like the Spandau-Hotchkiss: all his wartime agonies come alive again. He isn't really responsible,, yet he is a killer all the same. Walter says it happened on the Russian convoys too."

" And how does Walter account for this?" I said, fingering the blood-stained bandage.

" He says you were hit by an exploding Spandau shell splinter after you had turned the gun into the deck for some unexplained reason. He considers he was lucky to get away with his life."

" And what do you think?" I asked. I stared at her. There was something different about her. I noticed then that she was no longer wearing her leather flying kit, but a warm dress of mulberry as deep as the colour we had seen together in the sea. Her answer suddenly became of great importance to me. Only hours ago, the importance would have lain in my having an ally. Now .. .

I could have watched the light change through her eyes for hours, had I not known that each darker shadow from outside brought
Antarctica
one step nearer her end. The pale yellow glow which seemed to heighten the fine line of her cheekbones and illuminate the strange eyes was—death.

" Something of the Southern Ocean has passed into my father, into Walter, into you, into Sailhardy," she said quietly, as if exercising all the control she had built up in the past. " Kill or be killed. Now you give me your reason—Thompson

Island."

" That isn't an answer to my question," I said.

" No," she said. " The answer perhaps is that I am sitting here—

have been sitting here for hours—waiting for a man everyone considers a cold-blooded murderer, to come round. My father swore I wouldn't be allowed to. But . . ." she smiled faintly—" here I am. I also know that when I saw you fall off the gun into the sea, something died inside me."

" I might have lived three minutes in the cold," I said.

" I know that," she answered. " I also know that the person who couldn't muster courage to land on an ice-floe died when you sent me up to watch
Thorshammer.
That could not have brought you up alive out of the sea."

" Do you believe I had some sort of blackout and shot down a defenceless seaplane?" I pressed.

105

Again, she replied obliquely. "
I
gave the fleet's position away deliberately to
Thorshammer
when I saw the Blue Whales."

" What!" I exclaimed. " You . . . were in effect turning your father over to the Norwegian authorities? Deliberately?" " Yes," she said.

" So you saw, too, without even knowing that it was Thompson Island that was behind all this! Guarana,

buccaneer's brandy—these are the accoutrements of a ruthless killer." I underestimated the bond between her father and herself. She was on her feet in an instant.

" How dare you! How dare you! I admire my father and I intend to protect him. I gave the fleet's position away to prevent him coming to further harm. If we're inside Norwegian territorial waters—so what? My father can

afford a fine, even a stiff one. He hasn't killed a solitary whale.
Thorshammer can
arrest us. My father may have gone a bit astray in his enthusiasm to find the breeding-ground of the Blue Whale ..."

" So much so that he is prepared to shoot down a seaplane and kill two innocent lads in it?"

" Either Walter or you, or both, shot down the seaplane, not my father," she flashed back. " No wonder Pirow says '

Herr Kapitan '!"

" What do you know about Pirow?" I asked.

She looked surprised. " He's a first-class radio operator. That's all."

I told her about The Man with the Immaculate Hand.

She sat down, her eyes wide. " What are you trying
to
say, Bruce?"

" I've said it," I replied. " Thompson Island. What do you know about Thompson Island? Why does your father want so desperately to find Thompson Island?"

Her face was drawn in the odd light. " I'd never heard of Thompson Island until you mentioned it."

" Your father is quite prepared to kill off Sailhardy and myself now he has the chart," I said. "
I
have tried to tell him the chart is useless by itself. You don't know it, but I am the only living man to have seen Thompson Island. I alone know where Thompson Island
is.
It is not where the chart says."

She got
up impulsively and held her hand across my

106

mouth. " Bruce, for God's sake, don't! Some unknown rock sticking out into an icy ocean suddenly becomes a killer and the thing that dominates all our lives! I'm frightened. Something wicked and enormous is building up.

Even the sky is ghastly. Look, it getting quite dark."

" Your father is building up the evil," I said. "He has got to be stopped."

" Perhaps that is why I gave our position away from the helicopter," she replied thoughtfully. " I didn't know any of this you have told me, but intuitively I felt my father ..." A flicker of fear passed through her eyes.

"Helen," I said gently, " don't you see? All this means one thing and one thing only—your father must be protected, against himself."

She came and stood above me as I half-lay on the bunk.

She reached out and took my hands in hers. They were cold. " You're saying ... you're saying ... my father is mad?" I talked round it. " When a leading interest becomes an obsession, as it has with your father, it is only one stage further to a state of monomania. I don't know enough about what has led up to this expedition. Nor do I know what your father's obsessional interest is. But I do know that it centres on Thompson Island. However, no one goes to the

lengths he has done just in order to rediscover an island which admittedly is one of the sea's great mysteries. I have tried to find out what your father is after. I failed. I am only seeing effect, without the cause. And . .." I grinned wryly" one of the effects was damn nearly my death."

"I feel so alone in this," she said. " I have only you to turn to."

"Try and think back," I said. "How did this expedition come to be fitted out? Did something sudden happen? Did

your father say anything?"

" He was crazy about rare metals," Helen replied. " You see what happened to his face. He threw himself into that research with everything he had."

" That was twenty-odd years ago," I said.

" Wait," she said. "There was something now you come to mention it. Both he and I have made trips to the Antarctic for about five years now. He was never like he is now, though. He enjoyed the voyages and he was always full of interest, always asking everyone we met about unusual places and discoveries."