A Grue Of Ice (21 page)

get every man on the rails with poles and try and keep her sides free of ice. Then get a boat and dynamite and blow the ice at intervals of twenty yards astern—we must keep it open!"

" Aye, aye, Bruce," he said tersely. A moment later he was among the men. If any man could save the ship through

my last-ditch drill, he could.

Helen was gazing astern. " The fog is rolling back, Bruce, but I don't see the catchers."

" It's ominous that it should roll back. It means the cold is spreading," I replied. I picked up the phone to Pirow. " Pirow! What the hell is happening to the catchers?"

His voice was cool, professional. " No reply to my signals, Herr Kapitan. They're talking between themselves on the W / T . . . . "

Sailhardy's call from the maindeck interrupted. " What size charges, Bruce?"

" Make them up into pieces of twenty pounds apiece," I told him. " Fuse 'em right up. Short." I returned to Pirow. " Pirow ! I'm going full astern in a moment. I may go hellbent into an iceberg. What's the score with the radar?"

" Too much sub-refraction," he replied levelly. " We'll be right on top of anything before I can locate it. The normal detection range means nothing in conditions like this." Helen came with me to the starboard wing of the bridge.

I wanted, if possible, to see what was happening between the main body of the ice and ourselves. As I leant over, I

saw. I gripped her arm.

" Look 1" I said. A long underwater spur had grown out from the cliffside towards the ship. It was perhaps ten feet long. Four others, like the teeth of a steam-shovel, reached out at intervals further aft.

" What is it, Bruce?"

"Those spurs," I replied. "I can't wait now. Any one of them will rip off a blade of the screw. In this cold each blade is twice as brittle as normal. One touch, and it will splinter." 119

I raced back to the engine-room telephone.

" Chief Engineer," said the voice.

Chief," I said, " there's a lot of trouble. There's sludge and brash ice everywhere. In ten minutes your condenser inlets are going to choke. Before that I want everything your engines can give me. Understand? Get a steam hose to the condensers so that there's hot water circulating round them. And for your own sake, see there's no condensation in the main

steam pipes, or else you'll be blown to hell. In a moment

I'll be going alternately full ahead and full astern to shake her free. If the inlets block with sludge, I can't wait to stop. Can do?"

" Aye," said the Scots voice. " Can do. Is five minutes enough?"

" Just," I replied. " I'll ring down."

I called Sailhardy on deck. " Belay the dynamite," I said. " Get the tackles rigged, if you can. I want you on the bridge in five minutes."

I turned to Helen, gazing white-faced about her. There was no sign of the catchers. In her sea-leopard coat, she looked like one of those dead things I had seen so often on the icy outcrops of Graham Land.

" Do you want me to fly off the helicopter . . ." she started to say, when suddenly she coughed. I felt the sharp dagger of wind, too. It came softly, furtively, from the South. I felt its sinister touch by the slight condensation on the inside of my duffel coat. The wind was the last stage of the Bouvet pack: it would advance the ice-edge more rapidly still towards the factory ship ; it was also the precursor a the storm which I knew would follow the freeze-up.

" The wind," I said quickly. " I can't give the Chief even his five minutes now." I rang Sailhardy and ordered him back to the bridge. The islander joined Helen and me. The shoulder of his coat was streaked with red rust where he had slung himself over the ship's quarter in a vain effort to rig the rudder-head tackles. A white streak of frozen spray was daubed alongside the red.

" The South wind, Bruce?"

There was almost no need for him to say it. He too had felt its message. I nodded to the port wing of the bridge and together we looked down at the sleazy sea. Catching some of the sun's attenuated light, it had turned to a pale, gelatinous, coagulating mass.

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" Sailhardy!" exclaimed Helen, seeing the look on our faces. " You and Bruce together . . . you two . .."

" 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, rustypink 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 icebreaker, and at this moment I'd give all the Jesu-lover-of mysoul 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

123

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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