Алистер Маклин - Night Without End

‘He’s dead, isn’t he, Dr Mason?’ His low voice sounded a little husky. ‘That head injury–’ His voice trailed off.

‘Cerebral hæmorrhage,’ I said quietly, ‘as far as I can tell.’

I lied to him. There was no shadow of doubt in my mind as to the cause of death. Murder. The young boy had been ruthlessly, cold-bloodedly murdered: lying there unconscious, gravely injured and with his hands strapped helplessly to his sides, he had been smothered as easily, as surely, as one might smother a very little child.

We buried him out on the ice-cap, not fifty yards from the place where he had died. Bringing his stiffened body out of the hatch was a grisly job, but we managed it and laid him on the snow while we sawed out a shallow grave for him in the light of one of our torches. It was impossible to dig it out: that frozen ringing surface turned shovel blades as would a bar of iron: even at eighteen inches, the impacted névé of snow and ice defied the serrated spearpoints of our special snow saws. But it was deep enough and within a few hours the eternal ice-drift would have smoothed its blanket across the grave, and we would never be able to find it again. The Reverend Joseph Smallwood murmured some sort of burial service over the grave but his teeth chattered so violently in the cold and his voice was so low and indistinct and hurried that I could hardly catch a word of it. I thought wryly that heavenly forgiveness for this indecent haste was unlikely to be withheld: by all odds it must have been by far the coldest funeral service that Mr Smallwood had ever conducted.

Back in the cabin, breakfast was a sketchy and silent affair. Even in the steadily rising warmth, the melancholy gloom was an almost palpable blanket under the dripping ceiling. Hardly anybody said anything, hardly anybody ate anything. Margaret Ross ate nothing, and when she finally set down her coffee-cup, the contents had scarcely been touched.

You’re overdoing it, my dear, I thought viciously, you’re carrying the grief-stricken act just a little too far: a little longer, and even the others will start wondering – and they have no suspicions at all, you damned inhuman little murderess.

For I had no suspicions either – only certainty. There was no doubt in my mind at all but that she had smothered the young pilot. She was only slightly built – but then it would have required only slight strength. Lashed to the cot as he had been, he wouldn’t even have been able to drum his heels as he had died. I could feel my flesh crawl at the very thought.

She had killed him, just as she had broken the radio and doped the passengers. He had been killed, obviously, to keep him from talking – about what, I couldn’t even begin to guess, any more than I could guess the reason for the destruction of the radio, except that she clearly did not want the news of the crash broadcast to the outer world. But why in the world destroy the radio in the first place, surely she must have known how essential it was for survival? But then, after all, how was she even to have guessed that: she might well have thought that we had big fast tractors that could have whipped them down to the coast in a matter of a couple of days. For that matter, she might have thought she was a great deal nearer the coast than we really were – it was impossible, surely, that she had genuinely imagined that we were in Iceland. Or was it?

My thoughts were spinning now in an unbreakable circle. I knew I was getting nowhere, couldn’t possibly get anywhere without some fresh information. As it was, I was only confusing myself the more with the passing of every moment. I gave it up then, promising myself that from now on I would watch her every possible minute of the day. I looked at her again, covertly, and she was staring vacantly at one of the glowing embers of the stove. Planning her next move, no doubt, planning it as cleverly as the last: asking me last night about the pilot’s chances of survival, doubtless to decide whether he would have to be killed or could safely be left to die, had been clever enough, but insisting on sleeping next to the man she had meant to kill had been nothing short of brilliant. On that account alone no one would ever suspect her, even if the fact that it had been murder became known. And it wouldn’t: I intended keeping that to myself. Or did she suspect I suspected? Heaven only knew. All I knew was that she must be playing for tremendous stakes. Or that she was mad.

It was just after eleven o’clock. Joss and Jackstraw were in a corner by themselves, stripping down the smashed transmitter, while the rest were grouped in a large semi-circle round the stove. They looked wan and sickly and were sitting very still indeed. They looked unwell because the first greyness of the noon twilight was stealing through our rimed skylights and it did unflattering things to any complexion: and they sat so still because I had just explained to them in detail exactly what their situation was, and they didn’t like it one little bit. Neither did I.

‘Let’s get this quite straight, Dr Mason.’ Corazzini leant forward, his lean brown face intent and serious. He was worried all right, but he wasn’t scared. Corazzini didn’t look as if he would scare easily: I had the idea that he would be a pretty good man to have around. ‘The others left here three weeks ago in a big modern Sno-Cat, and aren’t expected back for another three weeks. You’ve overstayed your welcome on the ice-cap, you say, and things have been cut a trifle too fine – you had already started rationing yourselves to make your food spin out until they returned. With thirteen of us here we have food for less than five days. Therefore we may be a fortnight without food before they return.’ He smiled, but there was no humour in it. ‘My arithmetic is correct, Dr Mason?’

‘It is, unfortunately.’

‘How long would the tractor you have take to get to the coast?’

‘There’s no guarantee that it ever would. I told you, it’s falling to pieces. I’ll show you later. Maybe a week – given the right conditions. Any bad weather would stop it in its tracks.’

‘You doctors are all the same,’ Zagero drawled. ‘Always spreadin’ sweet cheerfulness and light. Why don’t we wait for the other machine to get back?’

‘Indeed?’ Senator Brewster said heavily. ‘And how do you propose to live in the meanwhile, Mr Zagero?’

‘People can live for longer than fourteen days without food, Senator,’ Zagero said cheerfully. ‘Think what it would do for that figure of yours. Tush, Senator, you surprise me. Too gloomy by half.’

‘Not in this case,’ I said flatly. ‘The Senator is right. Sure you can live a long time without food in normal conditions. You might even do it here – if you had proper day clothes and night coverings. You haven’t – and how many of you have stopped shivering since you came here? Cold burns up your energy and depletes your reserves at a fantastic pace. Do you want me to list all the Arctic and Antarctic explorers – and Himalayan climbers – who have died within forty-eight hours of their food running out? And don’t kid yourselves about the life-giving warmth of this cabin. The floor temperature is about zero now – and that’s as hot as it’s likely to get.’

‘You said there was a radio on your old tractor,’ Corazzini said abruptly. ‘What range does it have? Couldn’t you possibly reach your friends – or your Uplavnik base – with that?’

I nodded in Joss’s direction. ‘There’s the man to ask.’

‘I heard,’ Joss said without enthusiasm. ‘Do you think I’d be trying to salvage this wreckage, Mr Corazzini, if there was any chance? It’s an eight-watt transmitter with hand-cranked generator and battery receiver, it came out of the ark and was never meant for anything more than walkie-talkie use.’