" Am I to see Miss Upton?" I demanded.
He looked inquiringly at the other skippers. " Very well, Captain. We have nothing to lose, and you may have something to gain by it. To-morrow at the approaches to Bollevika – who knows?"
I remembered Bollevika, lit on a dark winter's afternoon by the fragile, strange luminosity of the solar flares which wince and bicker across the Southern Ocean from Cape Horn to the Great Ross Barrier, and my occasional sight of the ice-cliffs and towering peaks while the breakneck lightning of the blue magnetic flare twitched from mountain peak to turbulent sea.
" Bollevika-who knows?" I echoed. " Will you signal Miss Upton to come now from the factory ship?"
He nodded. " March-to the catchers!"
The party trudged wearily across the remaining distance to the ice-edge. Reidar Bull shouted orders to the crews to dismantle the Spandau-Hotchkiss, while he himself went aboard the Crozet to signal Helen. He left Brunvoll to guard us with the Schmeisser. Upton refused to be drawn into any conversation and merely grunted when Brunvoll or Hanssen spoke to him. He and Walter were still shackled. I was grateful for it, since I feared another outburst on the heels of his morose fit. Walter tried to be ingratiating to our captors, and Pirow retained his terrified attitude, as if it were already certain that Aurora would strike one of the mines. Once he edged close to me. " Herr Kapitan," he said in a low voice. " Thompson Island has a safe anchorage, and there are warm springs. You know where the island is. .."
" Shut up!" snapped Brunvoll. " I don't want any whispering, particularly between you two!" I waited. I had scarcely any regard for the activity round me as lights were rigged on Aurora's and Kerguelen's decks, as well as heavy tackles to lift the gun into position from one to the other. We were too far away to hear the crews talking, but once or twice I saw grim glances being cast in the direction of the party. It was clear that they shared the skippers' repugnance at what I was supposed to have done.
My ears were attuned to hear Helen's approach; at length when the familiar roar of the rotors hung over the ships and 147 shore party, it took away, at least for me, some of the forlorn and desolate air of the scene: the men and the ships seemed so puny alongside the great expanse of ice; the very wind seemed to be holding back its violence in preparation for an onslaught against us. I reckoned the temperature must be anything up to thirty degrees below freezing. We stamped and beat our arms to keep warm. Upton's and Walter's shackles, secured outside their thick gloves so that the icy metal would not burn them, clinked dismally.
The helicopter landed next to us. Helen cut the engine.
" You can have half an hour," said Brunvoll. " Then everyone goes aboard. After we've rigged the gun, the men still have to get that machine lashed aboard the Crozet." He waved the Schmeisser. " Don't get any ideas of making a sudden break in the helicopter, although where the hell you'd go to, I wouldn't know."
I swung myself up into the machine and went forward to the cabin. It was warm inside. The light from the loadinglamps threw Helen's face into sharp relief. She was wrapped in the sea-leopard coat. We looked at each other without saying a word. We were insulated from the world outside. I could not even hear the men working on the gun.
Helen broke the long silence. " It couldn't have ended like that, could it, Bruce?"
I shook my head. Her face was taut and the eyes were never lovelier.
" No," I said. " But it could end another way to-morrow." I told her about Meteor's minefield. For a while she did not reply, then she reached out and took my gloved hand in. a grip that revealed her feelings. " If it were not for you, Bruce, I think at this moment I would hate the Southern Ocean and all its works. It never relaxes, never gives, does it? Yet it's a part-perhaps more than half-of you, isn't it? Because of that, I can't hate it."
I leant over and kissed her lips lightly. I saw the pattern of a down-horizon solar flare explosion in her eyes.
" No!" she burst out. " They shan't do it, I tell you!" She reached for the throttle switches. " They shall not, not while I can get you away."
I knocked her hand away and pointed. Brunvoll had the Schmeisser ready pointed.
" Before the rotors got going, Helen, there'd come a burst from that," I said. " Don't think that Reidar Bull, Hanssen and-Brunvoll don't mean it. They do."
" There's a ghastly pattern of things which has caught us up," she exclaimed heatedly. " Here's an ocean as big and as empty of humans as any in the world, and yet it's a human mesh that's taking you away from me."
" The mesh your father wove," I said.
" I know, I know," she went on. " But you and I realise that my father isn't the whole cause."
" Thompson Island," I said.
" Thompson Island!" she said brokenly. " God! How I hate the sound of that name!"
" This moment together is borrowed time," I said gently. " It's running out."
" I'll fly patrol over Aurora to-morrow," she said. "If she's mined, I'll pick you up, like before."
" No, Helen. You know you can't take off from a small catcher's deck pitching in the sort of sea we'll run into at Bouvet."
She buried her face in her hands. " What do you think I' ll feel when I watch Aurora go in towards Bollevika? You… My father, Bruce-we could still get him well again with treatment."
Brunvoll gestured from below. Helen's face was full of anguish: I kissed her and she clung to me for a moment.
Then she took my hand and put it over the compass platform.
" If Suzie Wong has a ghost, let it come and guard Bruce Wetherby's luck," she said. I looked deep into her eyes again and then went aft and jumped down on to the ice. At the head of Aurora's gangplank, as we filed aboard, I turned and looked back. I could just make out the shadow of the sealeopard coat against the perspex window. Upton, Walter, Pirow, Sailhardy and I were locked into one small cabin. Shortly after nightfall the catchers sailed for Bouvet and the Bollevika approaches.
I had thought that once we were alone, there would be a fresh outburst from Upton against me. It did not come. I spent an uneasy night, almost grateful for the guard outside the door, lest Upton's mania should return. He took the sole bunk in the small cabin for himself and covered his head with the blue hood. Sailhardy and I huddled on the floor together for warmth; Pirow and Walter exchanged a few words. I cut Walter short when he tried to speak to me. By drawn Aurora was pitching heavily, and I wondered how the transfer of the crew was to take place. Pirow again spoke anxiously about Meteor's mines before dropping off into an exhausted sleep: it was like going into an ambush, knowing it had been laid, for to me the mine is the assassin, the thug: the torpedo, by contrast, is the hunter and it pits its skill against range and angle, against water salinity, depth, and the chance of a sudden variation of course by its quarry.
Shortly before midday Aurora's engines began to slow. It was impossible to see outside as the porthole was frosted over. There were several sharp alterations of course and then a heavy thump against Aurora's side. I realised what the ice-wise catcher captains were about. They were mooring Aurora alongside a small iceberg with another of the catchers in order to transfer the men.
The cabin door opened. Brunvoll came in, carrying the Sphmeisser. His heavy clothing was streaked with ice. With him was another burly Norwegian.
Brunvoll grinned without humour. " We're about ten miles off Bouvet. You can now have the pleasure, Captain, of seeing whether our friend's story about the mines is correct."
" For the last time, Brunvoll, listen!" protested Pirow. " The place is thick with mines!"
" So you said before," he replied. He handed the other man a key and said something. He went forward and unclicked Walter's and Upton's manacles.