“Colin? Colin.” Now Charlie called to him. She stood a little way from him, clad from neck to knee in a grey fur coat. Something inside him tore loose and ran across the snow towards her. Ross stumbled on, watching his own shoulders recede towards her. His phantom reached her. Ross screamed, and fell to his knees. The movement nearly cracked his frozen shoulder. But then his phantom self was back, looking down at him, and screaming, “Get up you son of a bitch. Get up and walk or I’ll leave you here, I swear I will; I’ll leave you here and you’ll lie forever.” “NO,” screamed Ross, looking up along the length of his dream-like self like a whipped dog, without dignity, without pride, without will. “Up, you lazy bleeder, up,” screamed the phantom. Ross’s lips moved silently as the ghost of himself shouted, echoing the words as though learning them by heart. “Your eyeballs’ll be as hard as marbles. Your lungs’ll fill with ice.”
And Ross’s voice broke into a sob as he himself screamed, “Oh get up.” And he got up.
He curled his right arm over his eyes to keep the snow from his goggles, and, dragging the dead-weight of Jeremiah forward, he moved again into the throat of the storm.
His shoulder ached, and his whole left side was a mass of tiny blood vessels packed with freezing blood. He wanted to sleep. God, how he wanted to sleep. It was hopeless anyway.
The figures started coming back again. Job appeared suddenly. “Colin, thank God . . .”
Ross swept back his right arm, and walked on. But Job did not disappear.
Ross’s arm swept down, connected solidly: Job fell down, and Ross fell over him.
Ross had been walking for twenty-eight hours. He had covered less than ten miles. He fell over Job and tumbled into a well of delirium four months deep.
NINE
i
It had done no good, of course, telling them the story. He had not expected it to: Simon hadn’t believed it, Kate hadn’t understood, Warren hadn’t cared and Job already knew. A waste of time, an unnecessary and bitter humiliation with nothing settled, nothing solved, nothing exorcised.
After a while he got up and went out. As soon as he was out of the tent he had narrowed his eyes automatically and cursed under his breath – he had forgotten his face-mask. But then he noticed that he didn’t need it; the power of the sunlight had decreased radically while he had been stumbling through his story. Suddenly the gold all round had turned to blood. The sea, the floes, the ice itself were a deep, shifting shade of red. He glanced up at the sun. It was hanging low in the sky coloured dull orange. And the sky to the south was no longer blue – it was khaki-grey, shading down to nicotine-brown where the horizon should have been. Then he realised what it was: a fogbank.
His mind raced. There was only one cause for a fogbank as high, as solid and as well-defined as this one: a warm current, its surface evaporating into the icy air. A warm current.
Even as he stood there, gazing at the silent white wall, they were swept into it.
Job’s head appeared through the tent-flap. The Eskimo paused, looked around, and crawled out.
“Bad,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know . . .”
The fog swirled, thickened, thinned in its own mysterious dance, blanketed them completely. The others came out and stared, bewildered. In moments the size of their world had shrunk from thousands of square miles of sea and ice to a few square yards. Instinctively they drew together into a huddle as though they now had less space to occupy. In moments they were all beaded with droplets of water.
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Job, his voice strangely hushed.
Simon looked around wildly. “But the fucking ice is going to melt!”
Job shrugged, and repeated, “There’s nothing we can do.”
“If we wait long enough, we can swim,” said Kate, with a wry smile.
“Oh, we’ll have drifted to the Shetland Islands long before that!” sneered Quick.
So, tired out in any case, they went to bed, Kate and her father sharing one tent, Simon moving in with Ross and Job in the other.
As he composed himself for sleep, Job heard the song of a killer calling to the pack, and, distantly, a reply.
There was a scratch at the tent-flap.
“Yes?” called Quick, waking instantly, and Kate stuck her head in.
“Breakfast?” she asked.
“Great,” said Quick. “Bacon, eggs, fried bread, sausages, toast, coffee. Porridge. Please.”
“Coffee I can manage. Anything else you’d better find for yourself. It’s all in the supply tent. Somewhere.”
“I’ll go and look,” he said, cheerfully amenable. “I’ve got a good idea where most things are.”
“Good,” she said, pleased and mildly surprised by the new face of the little man.
Quick himself would have been hard-put to explain his light mood. He began to dress.
“Mind where you’re putting your goddamned elbows,” snarled Ross, still half asleep.
Job, awake now also, shook his head. Quick was still smiling when he stumbled out into the fog.
One of the things which was affecting Colin’s mood was his left arm. It had now been several days since he had removed the false limb for any length of time, and it was chafing painfully against the bruised areas where the arm itself and the straps had cut into him when the polar bear had lifted him off his feet. He waited, therefore, until Job had also left the tent, then he stripped off his vest and unstrapped the length of plastic and steel. He briefly examined the slightly crusted welts across the pale expanse of his chest, shrugged his lop-sided shrug and got dressed without it.
When he came a little self-consciously out of the tent some time later, Job and Kate were sitting beside the fire tray. Of Simon and Doc Warren there was no sign. Kate’s eyes swept briefly over him, pausing on his left arm with its empty sleeve neatly folded and tucked into his pocket; her eyebrows rose a little, and she smiled. It was a warm smile which seduced a fleeting grin out of him. The air was heavy with the smell of cooking and the tang of coffee. Ross’s mood lightened a little.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning,” she said in the same tone.
“Where are Simon and your father?”
“Gone off somewhere.” She gestured into the fog.
He frowned fleetingly and glanced at Job who shrugged and said, “They’ll be careful.”
“They’d better be. God knows what it’s like out there.”
“They’ve taken the axe,” Kate said.
“Oh great,” said Ross. “That’ll help. We’ll just have to hope Nootaikok is in a good mood.”
“Who is Nootaikok?” asked Kate.
“Ask Job later. He’ll tell you about them all.”
“Anyway,” said Kate, concentrating on the business in hand, “do you want some breakfast or not?”
He realised how hungry he was, and sat down beside her. “Love some. What have we got?” With a gleeful flourish she produced a plate covered by another, and handed them to him. They were hot. He balanced them on his knees and slipped the top plate off.