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 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.
9. Metal of the Heavens
Next morning Antarctica presented a sorry sight. All night the crew, under my orders and Sailhardy's unflagging direction, had brought up on deck every available case of food, every blanket, every item of warm clothing. I had got the emergency power plant working, since the main supply from the engine-room had disappeared in the explosion. Now the deck was stacked with tons of supplies. Over everything, as I looked down from the bridge to the maindeck shortly after dawn, lay a fine patina of ice and frost. Unshaven, sleepless, and hoarse from shouting orders, I had waited for the light in order to find a platform on the ice strong enough to bear the weight of the stores. Throughout the night the ice had tightened its anaconda grip on the dying ship. Rivet by rivet, plate by plate, the life was being strangled out of her. Between decks, her dying noises seemed more than inanimate-a line of rivets would tremble first, then bulge, and then tear with a sub-human sound as the inch-thick plating buckled and burst.
In search of the ice-platform, Sailhardy and I had swung ourselves down over the ship's side at first light on to the ice. We had found it within a hundred yards of the ship. We had hammered in long ice-poles with scarlet flags to delimit the safe area; to the left and right of the area, where the ice remained precarious, we had placed a double row of smaller poles carrying orange flags. The platform was slightly longer than wide, and the sun, half obscured by flying cloud, painted it sable, mink and russet; even Sailhardy's faded, weathered anorak and balaclava were transformed to soft champagne by the diffused light. It was typical of Sailhardy that he had planted a Norse flag at half-mast in the centre of the ice-platform to honour the death of the ship.
Antarctica lay half over on her starboard side where the water, long since turned to solid ice, had poured through he hole in her side. The port wing of the bridge, connected to the enclosed section by an open lattice covered with a canvas dodger, leaned skywards away from the ice platform. The bright orange of the helicopter stood out on the ship's flensing platform. Helen was to fly it off to safety on the ice as soon it was light enough. A broken davit hung like a Narwhal's tusk, impotent. On the port, or sun's side, Antarctica's side was bronze-gold; to starboard, or the engine-room side, it was blue-black in the ship's own shadow; neither shadow nor ice could mask the seared plates and mangled corpse.
Making our way back to the ship, we had marked-again by means of flags-a safe path across the ice from the platform to Antarctica. It was hopeless, Sailhardy and I had agreed during the night, to try and remain aboard. Apart from the noise of plates and steel beams rending, everything had begun to distort at a crazy angle between decks, making doors and bulkheads death-traps, and I feared that before long the icevice would exert its pressure fore and aft as well. Already there was an ominous bulge on the maindeck below the bridge.