That one glance was enough – or should have been enough. I’d seen these cards scores of times before, but I stared down at this one as if I’d never seen one in my life. This was a completely new factor, it knocked all my preconceived notions on the head, and I needed time, time for reorient a tion, for understanding, for quelling the professional fear that came hard on the heels of that understanding. Then, slowly, I folded the card, pulled down my snow-mask, stepped close to Mahler and pulled his down also. In the harsh glare of the torch, his face was blue and white with the cold, and I could see the jutting of the jaw muscles as he clamped his teeth together to keep them from chattering uncontrollably.
“Breathe out,” I said.
He did as I asked, and there was no mistaking it, none at all: the sweet acetone breath of the advanced and untreated diabetic can’t possibly be confused with anything else. Wordlessly, I handed him back the card and thrust the automatic into my parka pocket.
At last I said quietly: “How long have you had this, Mr Mahler?”
“Thirty years.”
“A pretty advanced condition?” When it came to discussing a man’s illness with him, I had little time for the professional reticence of many of my colleagues: besides, the average elderly diabetic had survived to that age simply because he was intelligent about the dietary and medical treatment of his trouble, and usually knew all about it.
“My doctor would agree with you.” I caught the smile on his face as he pushed his mask up, and there wasn’t much humour in it. “So would I.”
“Twice daily injections?”
“Twice,” he nodded. “Before breakfast and in the evening.”
“But don’t you carry a hypo and-”
“Normally,” he interrupted. “But not this time. The Gander doctor gave me a jab and as I can usually carry on a few hours overdue without Ul effects I thought I’d wait until we got to London.” He tapped his breast pocket. “This card’s good anywhere.”
“Except on the Greenland ice-cap,” I said bitterly. “But then I don’t suppose you anticipated a stop-over here. What diet were you on?”
“High protein, high starch.”
“Hence the sugar?” I looked down at the white crystals still clenched in my left mitten.
“No.” He shrugged. “But I know sugar used to be used for the treatment of coma. I thought maybe if I stuffed enough into myself.. . . Well, anyway, you know now why I turned criminal.”
“Yes, I know now. My apologies for the gun-waving act, Mr Mahler, but you must admit I had every justification. Why in the hell didn’t you tell me before now? I am supposed to be a doctor, you know.”
“I would have had to tell you sooner or later, I suppose. But right now you’d plenty of troubles of your own without worrying about mine also. And I didn’t think there would be much chance of your carrying insulin among your medical stores.”
“We don’t – we don’t have to. Everybody gets a thorough medical before going on an IGY station, and diabetes hardly develops overnight. . . . You take it all very calmly, I must say, Mr Mahler. Come on, let’s get back to the tractor.”
We reached there inside a minute. I pulled back the canvas screen, and a thick white opaque cloud formed almost immediately as the relatively warm air inside met the far sub-zero arctic air outside. I waved my hand to dispel it, and peered inside. They were all still drinking coffee – it was the one thing we had in plenty. It seemed difficult to realise that we’d been gone only a few minutes.
“Hurry up and finish off,” I said abruptly. “We’re on our way within five minutes. Jackstraw, would you start the engine, please, before she chills right down?”
“On our way!” The protest, almost inevitably, came from Mrs Dansby-Gregg. “My dear man, we’ve hardly stopped. And you promised us three hours’ sleep only a few minutes ago.”
“That was a few minutes ago. That was before I found out about Mr Mahler here.” Quickly I told them all I thought they needed to know. “It sounds brutal to say it in Mr Mahler’s presence,” I went on, “but the facts themselves are brutal. Whoever crashed that plane – and, to a lesser extent, stole the sugar – put Mr Mahler’s life in the greatest danger. Only two things, normally, could save Mr Mahler- a properly balanced high-calorie diet as a short term measure, insulin as a long term one. We have neither. All we can give Mr Mahler is the chance to get one or other of these things with all speed humanly possible. Between now and the coast that tractor engine is going to stop only if it packs in completely, if we run into an impassable blizzard – or if the last of the drivers collapses over the wheel. Are there any objections?”
It was a stupid, unnecessary, gratuitously truculent question to ask, but that’s just the way I felt at that moment. I suppose, really, that I was inviting protest so that I could have some victim for working off the accumulated rage inside me, the anger that could find its proper outlet only against those responsible for this fresh infliction of suffering, the anger at the near certainty that no matter what effort we made to save Mahler it would be completely nullified when the time came, as it inevitably must come, that the killers showed their hand. For one wild moment I considered the idea of tying them all up, lashing them inside the tractor body so that they couldn’t move, and had the conditions been right I believe I would have done just that. But the conditions couldn’t have been more hopeless: a bound person wouldn’t have lasted a couple of hours in that bitter cold.
There were no objections. For the most part, I suppose, they were too cold, too tired, too hungry and too thirsty – for with the rapid evaporation of moisture from the warm, relatively humid body thirst was always a problem in dry, intensely cold air – to raise any objections. To people unaccustomed to the Arctic, it must have seemed that they had reached the nadir of their sufferings, that things could get no worse than they were: I hoped as much time as possible would elapse before they found out how wrong they were.
There were no objections, but there were two suggestions. Both came from Nick Corazzini.
“Look, Doc, about this diet Mr Mahler must have. Maybe we can’t balance it, but we can at least make sure that he gets a fair number of calories – not that I know how you count the damn’ things. Why don’t we double his rations – no, even that wouldn’t keep a decent sparrow alive. What say each of the rest of us docks a quarter of his rations and hands them over? That way Mr Mahler would have about four times his normal-”
“No, no!” Mahler protested. “Thank you, Mr Corazzini, but I cannot permit-”
“An excellent idea,” I interrupted. “I was thinking along the same lines myself.”
“Good,” Corazzini grinned. “Carried unanimously. I also suggest we’d get along farther and faster if, say, Mr Zagero and I were to spell you two on the tractor.” He held up a hand as if to forestall protest. “Either of us may be the man you want, in fact, we might be the two men you want – if it is two men. But if I’m one of the killers, and I know nothing about the Arctic, navigation, the maintenance of this damned Citroen and wouldn’t as much as recognise a crevasse if I fell down one, it’s as plain as the nose on your face that I’m not going to make a break for it until I’m within shouting distance of the coast. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” I said. Even as I spoke, there came a coughing clattering roar as Jackstraw coaxed the still-warm Citroen back into life, and I looked up at Corazzini. “All right,” I went on. “Come on down. You can have your first driving lesson now.”
We left at half-past seven that morning, in driving conditions that were just about perfect. Not the slightest breath of air stirred. across the ice-cap and the deep blue-black vault of the sky was unmarred by even the tiniest wisp of cloud. The stars were strangely remote, pale and shimmering and unreal through the gossamer gauze of the glittering ice needles that filled the sky and sifted soundlessly down on the frozen snow, but even so visibility was all that could have been desired: the powerful headlights of the Citroen, striking a million sparkling diamond points of light off the ice spicules, reached a clear three hundred yards ahead into the darkness, leaving the ground to either side of the twin interlocking beams shrouded in impenetrable darkness. The cold was intense, and deepening by the hour: but the Citroen seemed to thrive on it that morning.