The seaplane started to make a long dive towards-the factory ship. It came into my sights. Although I was expecting it, the heavy 400-round-a-minute burst of the Spandau took my breath away. Cordite fumes blew back. The two weapons were beautifully synchronised, and as Walter swung the Spandau to keep his sights on the seaplane, so mine held steady on it.
I saw my chance.
If I too joined in the firing, using my left hand to pull the Hotchkiss' trigger, I could not help having my right wrist hard up against the spent cartridge ejectment outlet. The Hotchkiss fires fourteen hundred rounds a minute. Thought and action came simultaneously. I pulled the trigger, pushing my right wrist against the outlet. The searing blast of whitehot gas snapped the rope. I yelled with pain as it scorched my wrist. At the same moment I threw full weight against the harness to drag the double weapon down. A double stream of tracer-lighted lead arced through the sky, wide of the seaplane. I cut my fire, jamming my left knee against the centre metal support of the gun to win control from Walter. The tracers flew wide of the plane in a golden orbit. Using all his strength, Walter swung the double weapon back round against my hold, sighting on the aircraft. The heavy bullets from the Spandau tore into its flimsy fuselage. The machine fluttered down towards Aurora, yawed wildly, passed almost between the big gantries of the factory ship, and fell into the sea beyond. The splash looked like the combined spout of a family of Blue Whales.
My hands were already at Walter's throat as he fought to get clear of his harness. I kicked his feet from under him as he fumbled. I was still held in the strait-jacket grip of the Hotchkiss harness. Walter fell, rolled, dragged himself on one elbow, pulling the Luger from his waistband. He raised the automatic to fire.
I swivelled the twin interlocked muzzles to their maximum depression, fixed on Walter. Stark terror leapt into his face. I fired. The spray of bullets ripped into the deck plating, turning everything into a blinding hell of red-hot ricochets and noise.
Walter was too close. Even at maximum depression, the guns, although firing straight at him, could not reach down far enough. The stream of bullets was passing over him, the deck was shredded, but Walter was unharmed. He launched himself forward under the swath of death, grabbed the silent Spandau by the chain which runs from its watercooler backwards, and swung the double weapon backwards so that the barrels pointed wildly skywards. I hung, off my feet, above the gut platform, looking at the Antarctica. The helicopter was rising from the flensing platform. I shouted insanely, impotently, at Helen. Walter raised the Luger and fired. Terror struck through me at what I saw below me.
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 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.