GROWING OLD

located the oil-lamp and lit it. The light was dim, scarcely reaching the far corners of the cabin, but sufficient to show the mummy-like figures lying huddled on the bunks and sprawled grotesquely across the floor, their frozen breath clouding before their faces and above their heads, then condensing on the cabin walls. The walls themselves were sheeted with ice which had extended far out across the roof, in places reaching the skylights, a condition largely brought about by the cold heavy air that had flooded down the opened hatchway during the night: the outside temperature registered on the drum at 54 below zero. Not everyone was asleep: most of them, I suspected, had slept but little, the numbing cold had seen to that: but they were as warm in their bunks as they would be anywhere else and nobody showed any inclination to move. Things would be better when the cabin heated up a little. I had trouble starting the stoveeven though it was gravity fed from a tank above and to one side of it, the fuel oil had thickened up in the coldbut when it did catch it went with a roar. I turned both burners up to maximum, put on the water bucket that had lain on the floor all night and was now nearly a solid mass of ice, pulled on snow-mask and goggles and clambered up the hatchway to have a look at the weather. The wind had died away almost completelyI'd known that from the slow and dispirited clacking of the anemometer cups -and the ice-drift, which at times could reach up several hundred feet into the sky, was no more than gentle puffs of dust stirring lazily and spectrally, through the feeble beam of my torch, across the glittering surface of the ice-cap. The wind, such as it was, still held out to the east. The cold, too, was still intense, but more bearable than it had been on the previous night. In terms of the effect of cold on human beings in the Arctic, absolute temperature is far from being the deciding factor: wind is just as important -every extra mile per hour is equivalent to a one degree drop in temperatureand humidity far more so. Where the relative humidity is high, even a few degrees below zero can become intolerable. But today the wind was light and the air dry. Perhaps it was a good omen.. . . After that morning, I never believed in omens again. When I got below, Jackstraw was on his feet, presiding over the coffee-pot. He smiled at me, and his face was as fresh and rested as if he'd had nine hours on a feather bed behind him. But then Jack-straw never showed fatigue or distress under any nikon coolpix s210 digital camera black circumstances: his tolerance to sleeplessness and the most exhausting toil was phenomenal. He was the only one on his feet, but far from the only one awake: of those in the bunks, only Senator Brewster was still asleep. The others were facing into the centre of the room, a few propped up on their elbows: all of them were shivering, and shivering violently, their faces blue and white and pinched with the cold. Some were looking at Jackstraw, wrinkling their noses in anticipation of the coffee, the pungent smell of which already filled the cabin; others were staring in fascination at the sight of the ice on the roof melting as the temperature rose, melting, dripping down to the floor in a dozen different places and there beginning to form tiny stalagmites of ice, building up perceptibly before their eyes: the temperature on the cabin floor must have been almost forty degrees lower than that at the roof. "Good morning, Dr Mason." Marie LeGarde tried to smile at me, but it was a pathetic effort, and she looked ten years older than she had on the previous night: she was one of the few with a sleeping-bag, but even so she must have passed a miserable six hours, and there is nothing so exhausting to the human body as uncontrollable night-long shivering, a vicious circle in which the more one shivers the tireder one becomes, and the tireder the less resistance to cold and hence the more shivering. For the first time, I knew that Marie LeGarde was an old woman. "Good morning," I smiled. "How did you enjoy your first night in your new home?" "First night!" Even in the sleeping-bag her movements of clasping her arms together and huddling her head down between her shoulders were unmistakable. "I hope to heaven that it's the last night. You run a very chilly establishment here, Dr Mason." "I'm sorry. Next time we'll keep watches and have the stove on all night." I pointed to the water splashing down to the floor. "The place is heating up already. You'll feel better when you have some hot coffee inside you." "I'll never feel better again," she declared vigorously, but the twinkle was back in her eye. She turned to the young German girl in the next bunk. "And how do you feel this morning, my dear?" "Better, thank you, Miss LeGarde." She seemed absurdly grateful that anyone should even bother to ask. "I don't feel a thing now." "Means nothing," Miss LeGarde assured her cheerfully. "Neither do I. It's just that we're both

With a passionate fury and ire,

time. "They won't. I'm positive of that. No matter how suspicious they may be, how certain they are that we're the big bad wolf, they are going to be shaken to the core when that kid tells them we're carrying papers and letters of authority signed by General Graebel himself. For all they know, curtains for us may be the firing squad for them. Unlikely, but you get the general idea. So they're going to contact H.Q., and the commandant on a small island like this isn't going to take a chance on rubbing out a bunch of characters who may be the special envoys of the Herr General himself. So what? So he codes a message and radios it to Vathy in Samos and bites his nails off to the elbow till a message comes back saying Graebel has never heard of us and why the hell haven't we all been shot dead?" Mallory looked at the luminous dial of his watch. "I'd say we have at least half an hour." "And meantime we all sit around with our little bits of paper and pencil and write out our last wills and testaments." Miller scowled. "No percentage in that, boss. We gotta do somethin'." Mallory grinned. "Don't worry, Corporal, we are going to do something. We're going to hold a nice little bottle party, right here on the poop." The last words of their songa shockingly corrupted Grecian version of "Lilli Marlene," and their third song in the past few minutesdied away in the evening air. Mallory doubted whether more than faint snatches of the singing would be carried to the watch-tower against the wind, but the rhythmical stamping of feet and waving of bottles were in themselves sufficient evidence of drunken musical hilarity to all but the totally blind and deaf. Mallory grinned to himself as he thought of the complete confusion and uncertainty the Germans in the tower must have been feeling then. This was not the behaviour of enemy spies, especially enemy spies who know that suspicions had been aroused and that their time was running out. Mallory tilted the bottle to his mouth, held it there for several seconds, then set it down again, the wine untasted. He looked round slowly at the three men squatting there with him on the poop, Miller, Stevens and Brown. Andrea was not there, but he didn't have to turn his head to look for him. Andrea, he knew, was crouched in the shelter of the wheelhouse, a waterproof bag with grenades and a revolver strapped to his back. "Right!" Mallory said crisply. "Now's your big chance for your Oscar. Let's next shot delay for digital camera make this as convincing as we can." He bent forward, jabbed his finger into Miller's chest and shouted angrily at him. Miller shouted back. For a few moments they sat there, gesticulating angrily and, to all appearances, quarrelling furiously with each other. Then Miller was on his feet, swaying in drunken imbalance as he leaned threateningly over Mallory, clenched fists ready to strike. He stood back as Mallory struggled to his feet, and in a moment they were fighting fiercely, raining apparently heavy blows on each other. Then a haymaker from the American sent Mallory reeling back to crash convincingly against the wheelhouse. "Right, Andrea." He spoke quietly, without looking round. "This is it. Five seconds. Good luck." He scrambled to his feet, picked up a bottle by the neck and rushed at Miller, upraised arm and bludgeon swinging fiercely down. Miller dodged, swung a vicious foot, and Mallory roared in pain as his shins caught on the edge of the bulwarks. Silhouetted against the pale gleam of the creek, he stood poised for a second, arms flailing wildly, then plunged heavily, with a loud splash, into the waters of the creek. For the next half-minuteit would take about that time for Andrea to swim under water round the next upstream corner of the creek everything was a confusion and a bedlam of noise. Mallory trod water as he tried to pull himself aboard: Miller had, seized a boathook and was trying to smash it down on his head: and the others, on their feet now, had flung their arms round Miller, trying to restrain him: finally they managed to knock him off his feet, pin him to the deck and help the dripping Mallory aboard. A minute later, after the immemorial fashion of drunken men, the two combatants had shaken hands with one another and were sitting on the engine-room hatch, arms round each other's shoulders and drinking in perfect amity from the same freshly-opened bottle of wine. "Very nicely done," Mallory said approvingly. "Very nicely indeed. An Oscar, definitely, for Corporal Miller." Dusty Miller said nothing. Taciturn and depressed, he looked moodily at the bottle in his hand. At last he stirred. "I don't like it, boss," he muttered unhappily. "I don't like the set-up one little bit. You shoulda let me go with Andrea., It's three to one up there, and they're waiting and ready." He looked accusingly at Mallory. "Dammit to hell, boss, you're always telling us how desperately important this mission is!"