– we don’t go anywhere near it. And there’s the automatic pilot, and radio beams and – and radio base checks every half-hour. Oh, it’s impossible, it’s impossible! Why do you tell us this?’ She was shaking now, whether from nervous strain or cold I had no idea: the big young man with the Ivy League accent put an arm awkwardly round her shoulder, and I saw her wince. Something indeed seemed to be hurting her – but again it could wait.
‘Joss,’ I called. He looked up from the stove, where he was pouring coffee into mugs. ‘Tell our friends where we are.’
‘Latitude 72.40 north, longitude 40.10 east,’ Joss said unemotionally. His voice cut clearly through the hubbub of incredulous conversation. ‘Three hundred miles from the nearest human habitation. Four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Near enough 800 miles from Reykjavik, 1000 from Cape Farewell, the southernmost point of Greenland, and just a little further distant from the North Pole. And if anyone doesn’t believe us, sir, I suggest they just take a walk – in any direction – and they’ll find out who’s right.’
Joss’s calm, matter-of-fact statement was worth half an hour of argument and explanation. In a moment, conviction was complete – and there were more problems than ever to be answered. I held up my hand in mock protest and protection against the waves of questions that surged against me from every side.
‘All in good time, please – although I don’t really know anything more than yourselves – with the exception, perhaps, of one thing. But first, coffee and brandy all round.’
‘Brandy?’ The expensive young woman had been the first, I’d noticed, to appropriate one of the empty wooden cases that Jackstraw had brought in in lieu of seats, and now she looked up under the curve of exquisitely modelled eyebrows. ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ The tone of her voice left little room for doubt as to her opinion.
‘Of course.’ I forced myself to be civil: bickering could reach intolerable proportions in a rigidly closed, mutually interdependent group such as we were likely to be for some time to come. ‘Why ever not?’
‘Opens the pores, dear man,’ she said sweetly. ‘I thought everyone knew that – how dangerous it is when you’re exposed to cold afterwards. Or had you forgotten? Our cases, our night things in the plane – somebody has to get these.’
‘Don’t talk such utter rubbish.’ My short-lived attempt at civility perished miserably. ‘Nobody’s leaving here tonight. You sleep in your clothes – this isn’t the Dorchester. If the blizzard dies down, we may try to get your things tomorrow morning.’
‘But—’
‘If you’re all that desperate, you’re welcome to get them yourself. Want to try?’ It was boorish of me, but that was the effect she had. I turned away to see the minister or priest hold up his hand against the offered brandy.
‘Go on, take it,’ I said impatiently.
‘I don’t really think I should.’ The voice was high-pitched, but the enunciation clear and precise, and I found it vaguely irritating that it should so perfectly match his appearance, be so exactly what I should have expected. He laughed, a nervous deprecating laugh. ‘My parishioners, you know …’
I was tired, worried and felt like telling him what he could do with his parishioners, but it wasn’t his fault.
‘There’s precedent in plenty in your Bible, Reverend. You know that better than I. It’ll do you good, really.’
‘Oh well, if you think so.’ He took the glass gingerly, as if Beelzebub himself were on the offering end, but I noticed that there was nothing so hesitant about his method and speed of disposal of the contents: his subsequent expression could properly be described as beatific. I caught Marie LeGarde’s eye, and smiled at the twinkle I caught there.
The reverend wasn’t the only one who found the coffee – and brandy – welcome. With the exception of the stewardess, who sipped at her drink in a distraught fashion, the others had also emptied their glasses, and I decided that the broaching of another Martell’s was justified. In the respite from the talk, I bent over the injured man on the floor. His pulse was slower, steadier and his breathing not quite so shallow: I slipped in a few more heat pads and zipped up the sleeping-bag.
‘Is he – is he any better, do you think?’ The stewardess was so close to me that I brushed against her as I straightened. ‘He – he seems a bit better, doesn’t he?’
‘He is a bit, I think. But nothing like over the shock from the wound and the exposure, though.’ I looked at her speculatively and suddenly felt almost sorry for her. Almost, but not quite: I didn’t at all like the direction my thoughts were leading me. ‘You’ve flown together quite a bit, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t offer anything more. ‘His head – do you think—’
‘Later. Let me have a quick look at that back of yours.’
‘Look at what?’
‘Your back,’ I said patiently. ‘Your shoulders. They seem to give you some pain. I’ll rig a screen.’
‘No, no, I’m all right.’ She moved away from me.
‘Don’t be silly, my dear.’ I wondered what trick of voice production made Marie LeGarde’s voice so clear and carrying. ‘He is a doctor, you know.’
‘No!’
I shrugged and reached for my brandy glass. Bearers of bad news were ever unpopular: I supposed her reaction was the modern equivalent of the classical despot’s unsheathing his dagger. Probably only bruises, anyhow, I told myself, and turned to look at the company.
An odd-looking bunch, to say the least, but then any group of people dressed in lounge suits and dresses, trilby hats and nylon stockings would have looked odd against the strange and uncompromising background of that cabin where every suggestion of anything that even remotely suggested gracious living had been crushed and ruthlessly made subservient to the all-exclusive purpose of survival.
Here there were no armchairs – no chairs, even – no carpets, wall-paper, book-shelves, beds, curtains – or even windows for the curtains. It was a bleak utilitarian box of a room, eighteen feet by fourteen. The floor was made of unvarnished yellow pine. The walls were made of spaced sheets of bonded ply, with kapok insulation between: the lower part of the walls was covered with green-painted asbestos, the upper part and entire roof sheeted with glittering aluminium to reflect the maximum possible heat and light. A thin, ever-present film of ice climbed at least halfway up all four walls, reaching almost to the ceiling in the four corners, the parts of the room most remote from the stove and therefore the coldest. On very cold nights, such as this, the ice reached the ceiling and started to creep across it to the layers of opaque ice that permanently framed the undersides of our rimed and opaque skylights.
The two exits from the cabin were let into the fourteen-foot sides: one led to the trap, the other to the snow and ice tunnel where we kept our food, petrol, oil, batteries, radio generators, explosives for seismological and glacial investigations and a hundred and one other items. Half-way along, a secondary tunnel led off at right angles - a tunnel which steadily increased in length as we cut out the blocks of snow which were melted to give us our water supply. At the far end of the main tunnel lay our primitive toilet system.
One eighteen-foot wall and half of the wall that gave access to the trap-door were lined with twin rows of bunks
