" It's Bruce," I whispered.
There was a faint clink from his manacles.
" How are you, man?" I asked.
His reply was stilted, as if he had difficulty in articulating. " Okay, Bruce, boy. Are you free?"
" Yes," I said, and I outlined my plan. First, I said, we would overpower Pirow in the radio shack and then break suddenly on to the bridge and seize Upton and Bjerko. I hadn't worked out how to get hold of Walter, and with her wicked weapon, Aurora would be a handful.
Helen interrupted. " What about Walter, though? He'll be on the bridge, too."
" How did he get aboard?" I asked.
" While you were unconscious. My father ordered me to fetch him from Aurora."
" That is very good," said Sailhardy. The menace in his voice sent a shiver through me. " He's mine, Bruce, mine!"
" Are you strong enough to tackle him?" I asked anxiously. " I don't want anything more to happen."
" Leave him to me, boy," came the voice in the darkness. " Now get these damned things off my wrists."
I felt for his wrists and started to saw.
" Why are we stopped, Bruce?" he asked.
" Honey-sea," I said.
" My God!" he exclaimed. I heard the sharp intake of his breath. " Has the ice closed on her yet?"
" No," I said, sketching my plan to save the factory ship. " Is there still any water sky?" asked Sailhardy.
" I think so," I said. "I couldn't see too well from my porthole."
" Water sky?" asked Helen. " What is that?"
" Big leaden patches in the fog where the sky should be," I said. " It means that below it there are open leads of water – unfrozen sea. It shows its reflection against the sky."
The saw cut through the centre section of the manacles. " We're wasting time," he said. " We still have a sporting chance of saving our skins."
" Leave Pirow to me," I said.
In the dim corridor outside, Sailhardy looked like an avenging fiend. There was a mask of dried blood over his face, and his teeth glinted raggedly. The steel was still round his wrists and a piece of cut chain hung down from each.
" Come!" I said to Helen. " Keep well behind us, out of harm's way."
" Look after yourself, for God's sake!" she whispered. In single file, myself leading, Sailhardy behind, and Helen in the rear, we went silently up the steel ladder to Pirow's radio office. We dodged through Upton's empty big cabin. Pirow's door was closed. Putting down my sea-boots, I held the long knife in my right hand and opened the door quickly with my left. Pirow wore his headphones, his back to us. I put the point of the knife against his neck.
I said softly in German: " The Man with the Immaculate Hand."
Sailhardy moved like a panther to Pirow's right. Perhaps it was his initial terror at the sight of the bloodied islander that made him say so much. " Herr Kapitan! " he mouthed. " Herr Kapitan! I do not know, I swear it! Heavenly blue, that is all I know. It is Sir Frederick's secret, not mine! I don't know…"
" Heavenly blue-what, Pirow?"
I noted the quick flash of comprehension in his eyes. When he saw the knife-thrust wasn't coming then and there, he started to fumble for words. The immaculate hand edged over to the Morse key. I reversed the knife and struck his knuckles with the handle. He rose to his feet, white with pain.
" Come," I said. " You'll go up first on the bridge. I'll be right behind you, and you'll catch the first bullet if your friend Walter starts shooting."
Helen was white, too, as we threaded our way back through
Upton's cabin. I put Pirow in the lead up the short ladder to the bridge. Sailhardy was almost alongside me. His eagerness made me feel almost sorry for what was coming to Walter.
We emerged silently on to the bridge, my knife-point touching Pirow's back. Walter was standing near the helm indicator trying to see out into the fog. Upton was close to the starboard wing. Both were engrossed.
" Walter!" I called. I held Pirow in front of me with my left hand as a shield.
The thick-set Norwegian swung round. Upton and Bjerko stood rooted to the spot. Sailhardy's left thumb tapped against his palm with that idiosyncrasy of his which preceded physical action. Walter cast one startled glance at my knife. He whipped the Luger out, but was still fumbling with the safetycatch when Sailhardy slid forward and struck him with the sawn-off manacle. He screamed with pain as the shackle bit his wrist. I leaped forward and snatched the automatic from where it had fallen on the gratings. Knife and Luger in hand, I guarded the four men.
Before I could say anything, there was a heavy bump forward by the bows. The indeterminate definition went from the light. We were out of the fog. In place of the veil-like, watery obscurity of a moment before, the light was clear and hard. The razor-edged bank of fog lay immediately astern.
It was forward that we gazed, transfixed. The sun hung like a blood-filled grape. Underneath, the whole world was blue.
8. "A Cold Grue of Terror"
It would have been less terrifying if Antarctica had rushed head-on through the fog and destroyed herself against the massive ice-cliff which rose before us. As it was, the bump of her bow against the ice held the menace of a long-drawnout death. The sudden drop of the fog-curtain astern heightened the awe-provoking spectacle which lay before our eyes. The fact that I had warned Upton against just this did not mitigate my own fear, the same fear as had once made me thrust the bridge telegraph of H.M.S. Scott to full speed ahead-anything, anything to escape, with all the thrust of her great turbines, from the same platelike crystals of ice, called by whalermen frazil crystals, which now hung halfsubmerged in the sea everywhere, plates of ice which come together with uncanny speed and form the ice belt which is Bouvet's killer. Antarctica seemed to have touched against the central buttress of the encircling semicircle of pack-ice. Nowhere was any white ice to be seen. To port, the cliff blocked out all view, but to starboard the field was low, perhaps only twenty feet above the level of the sea. A vast 114 agglomeration of blue hummocks and pressure ridges stretched away into the distance as far as the eye could see. Within a hundred yards of the ice-edge was a huge, domed mound, smoothed and fashioned by the wind, and a series of lesser mounds stretched away behind. The ice was all shades and variations of blue-azure where the parody of a sun struck down, royal blue where the fluted, striated cliffs to port overhung the leaden-blue sea. At our backs lay the bank of strontium-yellow fog. The knife I held had turned aconite. The air off the blue icefield was as raw and sharp as the blade itself. I wanted to cough as it took me by the throat. The human antagonisms which had been present a moment before were swamped by what the Southern Ocean had conjured up before our startled eyes. The blue light gave Pirow's shocked white face the pallor of a ghost. There seemed almost no need to guard Upton, Walter and Pirow, they were so overcome by what they saw.
" This is it," I said to Upton. " I warned you but you wouldn't listen."
His eyes were very bright, and the way he spoke made me surer of his mental state. I had a gun and a knife in my hand, but he addressed me with the same easy inescapable charm as on our first meeting. " Bruce, boy," he said, " you wouldn't be here if I didn't think you the finest sailor in the Southern Ocean. I should have listened, but it's all yours now. Put those damned toys away. This is what matters for the moment." He jerked his head at the icefield. His smile in the pewter mask was grotesque, reflecting the blue.
Antarctica was bumping gently against the ice-cliff in the still sea. She was in no danger from the movement, beyond the buckling of a few plates in her bows. Her danger lay in the millions of small spicules or thin plates of ice floating in the sea in the first stage of freezing; soon they would lock together and add to the cliffs, hillocks and ridges before us, and in that process crush the big factory ship's steel plates. The offshore mass of bergy bits, growlers, sludge and pancake ice was witness of how quickly the sea was freezing; the curious, upturned edges of the pancake ice were already kissing and coalescing into ever-growing acres of thin ice. For the moment there was a strange stillness, broken only by a faint tinkling as the ice-rind splintered against Antarctica's sides. I remembered that deadly tinkle as I had shaken H.M.S. Scott clear: it had paralleled the distant sound of her engineroom telepraphs. Antarctica's bows could still cut through the ice-plates, but in a couple of hours they would freeze ironhard. I knew that the intensity of the cold which now gripped us was changing even the crystal structure of the metal of the weapons I held; soon they would become brittle as glass