Chapter eleven—Friday 6 p.M.—Saturday 12.15 p.M.

The white hell of that night, the agony of the bitter dreadful hours that followed—and God only knows how many hours these were -is a memory that will never die.

How many hours did we stagger and lurch after that tractor like drunk or dying men—six hours, eight, ten? We didn't know, we shall never know. Time as an independent system of measurement ceased to exist: each second was an interminable unit of suffering, of freezing, of exhausted marching, each minute an son where the fire in our aching leg muscles fought with the ice-cold misery of hands and feet and faces for domination in our minds, each hour an eternity which we knew could never end. Not one of us, I am sure, expected to live through that night.

The thoughts, the emotions of these hours I could never afterwards recall. Chagrin there was, the most bitter I have ever known, an overwhelming mortification and self-condemnation that I had all along been deceived with such childish ease, that I had been powerless to offer any hindrance or resistance to the endless resourcefulness of that brilliant little man. And then I would think of Mrs Dansby-Gregg, and of Margaret bound and hostage and afraid and looking at Smallwood in the dim light of that lurching tractor cabin, looking at Smallwood and the gun in Smallwood's hand, and with that thought anger would flood in to supplant the chagrin, a consuming hatred and a fury that flamed throughout my entire being, but even that anger wasn't all exclusive: it couldn't be, not so long as fear, a fear such as I had never before known, was the dominating factor in my mind. And it was.

It was, too, I should think, in Zagero's mind. He hadn't spoken a word since Mrs Dansby-Gregg had died, had just flung himself uncaringly, ruthlessly, into what had to be done. Head bowed, he plodded on like an automaton. I wondered how many times he must have regretted that impetuous slip of the tongue when he had betrayed to Smallwood the fact that Solly Levin was his father.

And Jackstraw was as silent as we were, non-committal, speaking only when he had to, keeping his thoughts strictly to himself. I wondered if he was blaming me for what had happened but I didn't think so, Jackstraw's mind just didn't work that way. I could guess what he was thinking, I knew the explosive temper that slumbered under that placid exterior. Had we met an unarmed Smallwood and Corazzini then, I do not think we would have stopped short of killing him with our hands.

I suppose, too, that we were all three of us exhausted as we had never been before, frost-bitten, bleeding, thirsty and steadily weakening from lack of food. I say 'suppose', because logic and reason tell me that these things must have been so. But if they were I do not think they touched the minds of any of us that night. We were no longer ourselves, we were outside ourselves. Our bodies were but machines to serve the demands of our minds, and our minds so consumed with anxiety and anger that there was no place left for any further thought.

We were following the tractor. We could, I suppose, have turned back in the hope of stumbling across Hillcrest and his men. I knew Hillcrest well enough to know that he would know that those who had taken over our tractor—he had no means of knowing who they were, for all he knew Zagero might have suddenly overpowered us—would never dare make for Uplavnik but would almost certainly head for the coast. The likelihood was that Hillcrest, too, would head for the Kangalak fjord—together with a small bay beside it, the Kangalak fjord was the only break, the only likely rendezvous in a hundred miles of cliff-bound coast—and he could go there arrow-straight: on board his Sno-Cat he had a test prototype of a new, compact and as yet unmarketed Arma gyroscope specially designed for land use which had proved to have such astonishing accuracy that navigation on the ice-cap, as a problem, had ceased to exist for him.

But, even should he be heading towards the coast, our chances of meeting him in that blizzard did not exist, and if we once passed them by we would have been lost for ever. Better by far to head for the coast, where some patrolling ship or plane might just possibly pick us up—if we ever got there. Besides, I knew that both Jackstraw and Zagero felt exactly as I did—under a pointless but overpowering compulsion to follow Smallwood and Corazzini until'we dropped in our tracks.

And the truth was that we couldn't have gone any other way even had we wished to. When Smallwood had dropped us off we had been fairly into the steadily deepening depression in the ice-cap that wound down to the Kangalak glacier and it was a perfect drainage channel for the katabatic wind that was pouring down off the plateau. Although powerful enough already when we had been abandoned, that wind was now blowing with the force of a full gale, and for the first time on the Greenland ice-plateau—although we were now, admittedly, down to a level of 1500 feet -1 heard a wind where the deep ululating moaning was completely absent. It howled, instead, howled and shrieked like a hurricane in the upper works and rigging of a ship, and it carried with it a numbing bruising flying wall of snow and ice against which progress would have been utterly impossible. So we went the only way we could, with the lash of the storm ever on our bent and aching backs.

And ache our backs did. Only three people—Zagero, Jackstraw and myself—were able to carry anything more than their own weight: and we had among us three people completely unable to walk. Mahler was still unconscious, still in coma, but I didn't think we would have him with us very much longer: Zagero carried him for hour after endless hour through that white nightmare and for his self-sacrifice he paid the cruellest price of all for when, some hours later, I examined the frozen, useless appendages that had once been his hands, I knew that Johnny Zagero would never step into a boxing ring again. Marie LeGarde had lost consciousness too, and as I staggered along with her in my arms I felt it to be no more than a wasted token gesture: without shelter, and shelter soon, she would never see this night out. Helene, too, had collapsed within an hour of the tractor's disappearance, her slender strength had just given out, and Jackstraw had her over his shoulder. How all three of us, exhausted, starved, numbed almost to death as we were, managed to carry them for so long, even though with so many halts, is beyond my understanding: but Zagero had his strength, Jackstraw his superb fitness and I still the sense of responsibility that carried me on long hours after my legs and arms had given out.

Behind us Senator Brewster blundered along in a blind world all of his own, stumbling often, falling occasionally but always pushing himself up and staggering gamely on. And in those few hours Hoffman Brewster, for me, ceased to be a senator and became again my earliest conception of the old Dixie Colonel, not the proud, rather overbearing aristocrat but the embodiment of a bygone southern chivalry, when courtesy and a splendid gallantry in the greatest perils and hardships were so routine as to excite no comment. Time and time again during that .bitter night be insisted, forcibly insisted, on relieving one of the three of us of our burdens and would stagger along under the load until he reached the point of collapse. Despite his age, he was a powerful man: but he had no longer the heart and the lungs and the circulation to match his muscles, and his distress, as the night wore on, became pitiful to see. The bloodshot eyes were almost closed in exhaustion, his face deep-etched in grey suffering and his breath coming in painful whooping gasps that reached me clearly even above the thin high shriek of the wind.

No doubt but that Small wood and Corazzini had left us to die, but they had made one mistake: they had forgotten Balto. Balto; as always, had been running loose when they had left us, and they had either failed to see him or forgotten all about him. But Balto hadn't forgotten us, he must have known something was far wrong, for all the hours we had been prisoners on the tractor sled he had never come within a quarter-mile of us. But as soon as the tractor had dumped and left us, he had come loping in out of the driving snow and settled to the task of leading us down towards the glacier. At least, we hoped he was doing that. Jackstraw declared that he was following the crimp marks of the Citroen's caterpillars, now deep buried under the flying drift and new-fallen snow. Zagero wasn't so sure. Once, twice, a dozen times that night, I heard him muttering the same words: "I hope to hell that hound knows where it's goinV

But Balto knew where he was going. Sometime during the night—it might have been any time between midnight and three o'clock in the morning—he stopped suddenly, stretched out his neck and gave his long eerie wolf call. He seemed to listen for an answer, and if he heard anything it was beyond our range: but he seemed satisfied, for he suddenly changed direction and angled off to the left into the blizzard. At Jackstraw's nod, we followed.

Three minutes later we came upon the dog-sledge, with two of the dogs curled up beside it, their backs to the wind, their muzzles to their bellies and long brushes of tails over their faces, the drift wailing high around them. They were comfortable enough—so splendid an insulation does a husky's thick coat provide that snow at forty degrees below zero will lie on its back indefinitely without being melted by body heat—but they preferred freedom to comfort, for they were on their feet and vanished into the swirling whiteness beyond before we could lay hands on them. That left only the sledge.

I suppose that after Smallwood had gone far enough to consider that we would never be able to reach that point, he had cut loose dogs and dog-sledge as a needless encumbrance—but not before he had severed all the traces attaching the dogs to the sledge and, I noticed grimly, removed all the wraps and the magnetic compass that had been there. He thought of everything. For a moment, admiration for the man's undoubtedly remarkable qualities came in to supplant what had become the motivating reason for my existence, a reason that, as the hours crawled by, were crowding out even the feelings I had for Margaret Ross: my hatred for Small wood burned like a cold steady flame, an obsession with the . idea of sinking my fingers into that scrawny throat and never Jetting go.

Within three minutes of finding the sledge we had tied together the severed remnants of the traces, changed them to the front and were on our way again, Marie LeGarde, Mahler and Helene propped up on the thin wooden slats. We had, of course, to pull the sledge ourselves, but that was nothing: for Jackstraw, Zagero and myself, the relief was beyond measure. But it was only momentary.

We were running on to the smooth, slick ice of the Kangalak glacier, but our progress was no faster than it had been before we found the sledge. The wind was climbing up to its maximum now, the blizzard shrieking along horizontally to the ground and coming in great smoking flurries that cut visibility to zero and made us stop and grab one another lest one of us be knocked flying and for ever lost to sight: several times Theodore Mahler, restless in unconsciousness, rolled off the sledge until I at last made Brewster sit at the back and watch. He protested violently, but he was glad to do as I said.

I don't remember much after that, I think I must have been unconscious, eyes shut, but still plodding along in my sleep on leaden, frozen feet. My first conscious memory after installing Brewster on the back of the sledge was of someone shaking me urgently by the shoulder. It was Jackstraw.

"No more!" he shouted in my ear. "We must stop, Dr Mason, wait till it's blown itself out. We can't live through this."

I said something that was unintelligible even to myself, but Jackstraw took it for agreement and began pulling the sledge into the sloping side of the glacier valley and to the leeward side of one of the snowdrifts piled up against some of the ridges on the side of the valley. It wasn't all that much of an improvement, but the wind and the effect of the blizzard were perceptibly less. We unloaded the three sick people on the sledge into what pitiful shelter the ridge offered: I was just about to let my knees buckle and collapse beside them when I realised that someone was missing: it was a fair indication of the toll taken by wind and cold and exhaustion that almost twenty seconds passed before I realised it was Brewster.

"Good God!" I cried in Jackstraw's ear. "The Senator—we've lost him! I'll go back and look. I won't be a minute."

"Stay here." The grip on my arm was promise enough that Jackstraw meant to detain me by force, if necessary. "You'd never come back. Balto! Balto!" He shouted a few Eskimo words which meant nothing to me, but the big Siberian seemed to understand, for he was gone in a moment, following the direction of Jackstraw's pointing hand. He was back again inside two minutes.

"He's found him?" I asked Jackstraw.

Jackstraw nodded silently.

"Let's bring him in."

Balto led us there, but we didn't bring him in. Instead we left him lying where we found him, face down in the snow, dead. The blizzard was already drawing its concealing shroud over him, in an hour he would be no more than a featureless white mound in a featureless white valley. My hands were too numb to examine him, but I wouldn't have bothered anyway: the half-century of self-indulgence in food and drink and temper, all of which had been so clearly reflected in the heavy florid face when first I'd seen him, had had their inevitable way. The heart, cerebral thrombosis, it didn't matter now. But he had been a man.

How long we lay there, the six of us and Balto huddled close together for warmth, unconscious or dozing while that hurricane of a blizzard reached then passed its howling crescendo, I never knew. Probably only half an hour, perhaps not even that. When I awoke, stiff and numbed, I reached for Jackstraw's torch. It was exactly four o'clock in the morning.

I looked at the others. Jackstraw was wide awake -1 was pretty sure he'd never shut an eye lest one of us slip away from sleep into that easy frozen sleep from which there would have been no wakening—and Zagero was stirring. That they—and I—would survive, I didn't doubt. Helene was a question mark. A seventeen-year-old, though short on endurance, was usually high on resilience and recuperative powers, but Helene's seemed to have deserted her. After the death of her mistress and up to the time she had collapsed she had become strangely withdrawn and unresponsive, and I guessed that the death of Mrs Dansby-Gregg had hit her far more than any of us would have guessed. The previous forty-eight hours apart, it seemed to me that she had had little enough to thank Mrs Dansby-Gregg for in the way of affection and warmth: but, then, she was young, Mrs Dansby-Gregg had been the person she had known best and, as a foreigner, she must have regarded Mrs Dansby-Gregg as her sole anchor in an alien sea.... I asked Jackstraw if he would massage her hands, then turned to have a look at Mahler and Marie LeGarde.

"They don't look so hot to me." Zagero, too, was studying them. "What's their chances', Doc?"

"I just don't know," I said wearily. "I don't know at all."

"Don't take it to heart, Doc. It's no fault of yours." Zagero waved a hand towards the snow-filled emptiness and desolation of the glacier. "Your dispensary ain't all that well stocked."

"No." I smiled faintly, then nodded at Mahler. "Bend down and listen to his breathing. The end's coming pretty close. Ordinarily I'd say a couple of hours. With Mahler I don't know—he's got the will to live,sheer guts,his beliefs-the lot.. . . But in twelve hours he'll be dead."

"And how long do you give me, Dr Mason?"

I twisted round and gazed down at Marie LeGarde. Her voice was no more than a weak, husky whisper: she was trying to smile, but the smile was a pitiful grimace and there was no humour in either the eyes or the voice.

"Good lord, you've come to!" I reached out, pulled off her gloves and started to massage the frozen wasted hands. "This is wonderful. How do you feel, Miss LeGarde?"

"How do you think I feel?" she said with a flash of her old spirit. "Don't try to put me off, Peter. How long?"

"About another thousand curtain calls at the old Adelphi." The light came from the torch that had been thrust, butt down, into the snow, and I bent forward so that my face was shadowed, my expression unreadable. "Seriously, the fact that you've recovered consciousness is a good sign."

"I once played a queen who recovered consciousness only to speak a few dramatic words before she died. Only, I can't think of any dramatic words." I had to strain to catch the feeble whispered words. "You're a shocking liar, Peter. Is there any hope for us at all?"

"Certainly," I lied. Anything to get away from that topic. "We'll be on the coast, with a good chance of being picked up by ship or plane, tomorrow afternoon—this afternoon, rather. It can't be more than twenty miles from here."

"Twenty miles!" Zagero interjected. "In this little lot?"

He raised a cupped hand significantly to his ear, a gesture superbly superfluous in the ululating shriek of the blizzard.

"It won't last, Mr Zagero," Jackstraw put in. "These williwaws always blow themselves out in a short time. This already has gone on longer than most and it's easing a lot. Tomorrow will be clear and calm and cold."

"The cold will be a change," Zagero said'feelingly. He looked past me. "The old lady's off again, Doc!"

"Yes." I stopped massaging her hands and slid the gloves on. "Let's have a look at these paws of yours, Mr Zagero, will you?"

" 'Johnny' to you, Doc. I've been dismissed without a stain on my character, remember?" He thrust his big hands out for inspection. "Pretty, aren't they?"

They weren't pretty, they were the worst case of frostbite I had ever seen, and I had seen all too many, in Korea and later. They were white and yellow and dead. The original skin had vanished under a mass of blisters, and from the few warm spots I could detect on either hand I knew that much of the tissue had been permanently destroyed.

"Fraid I was a mite careless with my gloves," Zagero said apologetically. "In fact, I lost the damn' things about five miles back. Didn't notice it at the time—hands were too cold, I reckon."

"Feel anything in them now?"

"Here and there." He nodded as I touched some spots where the blood still flowed, and went on conversationally: "Am I goin' to lose my hands, Doc? Amputation, I mean?"

"No." I shook my head definitely. I saw no point in mentioning that some of his fingers were beyond hope.

"Will I ever fight again?" Still the same casual, careless tone.

"It's difficult to say. You never know—"

"Will I ever fight again?"

"You'll never fight again."

There was a long pause, then he said quietly: "You're sure, Doc? You're absolutely sure?"

"I'm absolutely sure, Johnny. No boxing commission doctor in the world would ever let you climb into a ring. It would cost him his listing in the Medical Register."

"Okay, so that's how it is. Consolidated Plastics of Trenton, New Jersey, have just got themselves a new factory hand: this boxin' racket was too damn' strenuous anyway." There was no regret in his voice, no resignation even, but that meant nothing: like me, he had more important things to worry about. He looked away into the darkness, then twisted round: "What's the matter with that hound of yours, Jackstraw?"

"I don't know. I think I'd better find out." Twice while we had been talking Balto had left us, vanished into the snow, and returned after a few minutes: he seemed restless, uneasy. "I won't be long."

He rose, followed Balto into the darkness, returned in a short time: "Come and see this, Dr Mason."

"This' was a spot less than a hundred yards away, close into the side of the glacier valley. Jackstraw flashed his torch on to the snow-dusted ice. I stooped, made out a black circular patch on the ground and, a few feet away, a smaller discoloured area where the surface snow had frozen solid.

"Oil from the gearcase or sump, water from the radiator," Jackstraw said briefly. He altered the torch-beam. "And you can still see the crimp marks of the caterpillars."

"And very recent?" I suggested. The drifting snow, the scouring effect of the flying ice-particles had scarcely begun to obliterate the traces left by the treads.

"I think so. And they were stopped here a long time, Dr Mason—look at the size of that oil patch."

"Mechanical trouble?" I hazarded. I didn't really believe it myself.

"Riding out the storm—Corazzini must have been blind," Jackstraw said definitely. "If the engine had stopped on that pair, they'd never have got it started again."