“Yes. We think – correction, I think – that you were unnecessarily rough on our air hostess. You can see the state the poor kid’s in. OK, so your radio’s bust, so you’re hoppin’ mad about it – but there’s no need for all this song and dance.” His voice was calm, conversational all the time. “Radios aren’t irreplaceable. This one will be replaced, I promise you. You’ll have a new one inside a week, ten days at the most.”
“Kind,” I said dryly. I finished tying the head bandage and straightened up. “The offer is appreciated, but there’s one thing you haven’t taken into account. You may be dead inside that ten days. You may all be dead in ten days.”
“We may all-” He broke off and stared at me, his expression perceptibly hardening. “What are you talking about?”
“What I’m talking about is that without this radio you dismiss so lightly your chances – our chances – of survival aren’t all that good. In fact, they’re not good at all. I don’t give a tuppenny damn about the radio, as such.” I eyed him curiously, and a preposterous thought struck me: at least, it was preposterous for all of a couple of seconds, before the truth hit me. “Have you – have any of you any idea just where you are, right here, at the present moment?”
“Sure we have.” The young man lifted his shoulders fractionally. “Just can’t say how far to the nearest drugstore or pub-”
“I told them,” the stewardess interrupted. “They were asking me, just before you came in. I thought Captain Johnson had overshot the landing field at Reykjavik in a snowstorm. This is Langjokull, isn’t it?” She saw the expression on my face and went on hastily. “Or Hofsjokull? I mean, we were flying more or less north-east from Gander, and these are the only two snowfields or glaciers or whatever you call them in Iceland in that direction from-”
“Iceland?” I suppose there is a bit of the ham actor in all of us, and I really couldn’t pass it up. “Did you say Iceland?”
She nodded, dumbly. Everybody was looking at her, and when she didn’t answer they all transferred their gazes to me, as at the touch of a switch.
“Iceland,” I repeated. “My dear -girl, at the present moment you’re at an altitude of 8500 feet, right slam bang in the middle of the Greenland ice-cap.”
The effect was all that anybody could ever have wished for. I doubt whether even Marie LeGarde had ever had a better reaction from an audience. “Stunned’ is an inadequate word to describe their mental state immediately after this announcement: paralysis was nearer it, especially where the power of speech was concerned. And when the power of thought and speech did return, it expressed itself, as I might have expected, in the most violent disbelief. Everybody seemed to start talking at once, but it was the stewardess who took my attention, by coming forward and catching me by the lapels. I noticed the glitter of a diamond ring on her hand, and remember having some vague idea that this was against airline regulations.
“What kind of joke is this? It can’t be, it can’t be! Greenland – it just can’t be.” She saw by the expression on my face that I wasn’t joking, and her grip tightened even more. I had just time to be conscious of two conflicting thoughts – that, wide with fear and dismay though they might be, she had the most extraordinarily beautiful brown eyes and, secondly, that the BOAC were slipping in their selection of stewardesses whose calmness in emergency was supposed to match the trimness of their appearance – then she rushed on wildly.
“How – how can it be? We were on a Gander-Reykjavik flight. Greenland – 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 MarteU’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.”