Night Without End (8 page)

     "Smallwood," the minister announced. He rubbed his thin white hands constantly to drive the cold away. "The Reverend Joseph Smallwood. I'm the Vermont delegate to the international General Assembly of the Unitarian and Free United Churches in London. You may have heard of it - our biggest conference in many years?" 

     "Sorry." I shook my head. "But don't let that disturb you. Our paper boy misses out occasionally. And you, sir?" 

     "Solly Levin. Of New York City," the little man in the check jacket added unnecessarily. He reached up and laid a proprietary arm along the broad shoulders of the young man beside him. "And this is my boy, Johnny." 

     "Your boy? Your son?" I fancied I could see a slight resemblance. 

     "Perish the thought," the young man drawled. "My name is Johnny Zagero. Solly is my manager. Sorry to introduce a discordant note into company such as this" - his eyes swept over us, dwelt significantly longer on the expensive young lady by his side -"but I'm in the way of being a common or garden pugilist. That means 'boxer', Solly." 

     "Would you listen to him?" Solly Levin implored. He stretched his clenched fists heavenwards. "Would you just listen to him? 'pologisin'. Johnny Zagero, future heavyweight champion, apologisin' for being a boxer. The white hope for the world, that's all. Rated number three challenger to the champ. A household name in all-" 

     "Ask Dr Mason if he's ever heard of me," Zagero suggested. 

     "That means nothing," I smiled. "You don't look like a boxer to me, Mr Zagero. Or sound like one. I didn't know it was included in the curriculum at Yale. Or was it Harvard?" 

     "Princeton," he grinned. "And what's so funny about that? Look at Tunney and his Shakespeare. Roland La Starza was a college boy when he fought for the world title. Why not me?" 

     "Exactly." Solly Levin tried to thunder the word, but he hadn't the voice for it. "Why not? And when we've carved up this British champ of yours - a doddery old character rated number two challenger by one of the biggest injustices ever perpetrated in the long and glorious history of boxin" - when we've massacred this ancient has-been, I say-" 

     "All right, Solly," Zagero interrupted. "Desist. There's not a press man within a thousand miles. Save the golden words for later." 

     "Just keepin' in practice, boy. Words are ten a penny. I've got thousands to spare-" 

     Tousands, Solly, t'ousands. You're slippin*. Now shut up." 

     Solly shut up, and I turned to the girl beside Zagero. 

     "Well, miss?" 

     "Mrs. Mrs Dansby-Gregg. You may have heard of me?" 

     "No." I wrinkled my brow. "I'm afraid I haven't." I'd heard of her all right, and I knew now that I'd seen her name and picture a score of times among those of other wealthy unemployed and unemployable built up by the tongue-in-the-cheek gossip columnists of the great national dailies into an ersatz London society whose frenetic, frequently moronic and utterly unimportant activities were a source of endless interest to millions. Mrs Dansby-Gregg, I seemed to recall, had been particularly active in the field of charitable activities, although perhaps not so in die production of the balance sheets. 

     She smiled sweetly at me. 

     "Well, perhaps it's not so surprising after all. You are a bit distant from the centre of things, aren't you?" She looked across to where the youngster with the broken collar-bone was sitting. "And this is Fleming." 

     "Fleming?" This time the wrinkling of my brow was genuine. "You mean Helene?" 

     "Fleming. My personal maid." 

     "Your personal maid," I said slowly. I could feel the incredulous anger stirring inside me. "Your own maid? And you didn't even bother to volunteer to stay while I fixed her shoulder up?" 

     "Miss LeGarde did it first," she said coolly. "Why should I?" 

     "Quite right, Mrs Dansby-Gregg, why should you?" Johnny Zagero said approvingly. He looked at her long and consideringly. "You might have got your hands dirty." 

     For the first time the carefully cultivated facade cracked, the smile stiffened mechanically, and her colour deepened. Mrs Dansby-Gregg made no reply, maybe she had none to make. People like Johnny Zagero never got close enough even to the fringes of her money-sheltered world for her to know how to deal with them. 

     "Well, that leaves just the two of you," I said hastily. The large Dixie colonel with the florid face and white hair was sitting next to the thin wispy-haired little Jew. They made an incongruous pair. 

     "Theodore Mahler," the little Jew said quietly. I waited, but he added nothing. A communicative character. 

     "Brewster," the other announced. He made a significant pause. "Senator Hoffman Brewster. Glad to help in any way I can, Dr Mason." 

     "Thank you, Senator. At least I know who you are." Indeed, thanks to his magnificent flair for self-publicity, half the Western world knew who this outspoken, bitterly - but fairly - anti-communist, near isolationist senator from the south-west was. "On a European tour?" 

     "You might say that." He had the politician's gift for investing even the most insignificant words with a statesmanlike consideration. "As Chairman of one of our Appropriation committees, I -well, let's call it a fact-finding tour." 

     "Wife and secretaries gone ahead by humble passenger steamer, I take it," Zagero said mildly. He shook his head. "That was a fearful stink your Congressional investigation boys raised recently about the expenses of US senators abroad." 

     "That was quite unnecessary, young man," Brewster said coldly. "And insulting." 

     "I believe it was," Zagero apologised. "Not really intended as such. Sorry, Senator." He meant it. 

     What a bunch, I thought despairingly, what a crowd to be stuck with in the middle of the Greenland ice-plateau. A business executive, a musical comedy star, a minister of religion, a boxer with an uninhibited if cultured tongue, his zany manager, a London society playgirl and her young German maid, a Senator, a taciturn Jew and a near-hysterical hostess - or one apparently so. And a gravely injured pilot who might live or die. But willy-nilly I was stuck with them, stuck with the responsibility of doing my damnedest to get these people to safety, and the prospect appalled me. How on earth was I even to start to go about it, go about it with people with no arctic clothing to ward off the razor-edged winds and inhuman cold, people lacking in all knowledge and experience of arctic travel, even lacking, with two or three exceptions, the endurance and sheer muscular strength to cope with the savagery of the Greenland ice-cap? I couldn't even begin to guess. 

     But whatever else they were lacking in at that moment, it wasn't volubility: the life-giving warmth of the brandy had had the unfortunate side effect of loosening their tongues. Unfortunate, that is, from my point of view: they had a hundred and one questions to ask, and they seemed to think that I should have the answer to all of them. 

     More accurately, they had only half a dozen questions to ask, with a hundred and one variations of these. How was it possible for a pilot to veer so many hundreds of miles off course? Could the compasses have gone wrong? Could the pilot have had a brain-storm? But then surely both co-pilot and second pilot would have known something was wrong? Could the radio have been damaged? It had been a bitterly cold afternoon even when they had left Gander, was it possible that some of the naps and controls had iced up, forcing them off course? But if this were the case, why hadn't someone come to warn them of the possibility of the crash? 

     I answered all of their questions as best I could but these answers were all to the same effect, that I didn't really know anything more about it than they did. 

     "But you said some time ago that you did, perhaps, know one thing more than we did." It was Corazzini who put the question, and he was looking at me shrewdly. "What was that, Dr Mason?" 

     "What? Ah, yes, I remember now." I hadn't forgotten, but the way things were shaping up in my mind I'd had second thoughts about mentioning it, and had time to think up a plausible alternative. "I need hardly tell you that it's nothing that I actually know, Mr Corazzini - how could I, / wasn't in the plane - just a reasonably informed guess in the absence of all other solutions. It's based on the scientific observations made here and in other IGY stations in Greenland, some of them over the past eighteen months. 

     "For over a year now, we have been experiencing a period of intense sun-spot activity - that's one of the main interests of the IGY year - the most intense of this century. As you may know, sun-spots, or, rather, the emission of solar particles from these sun-spots, are directly responsible for the formation of the aurora borealis and magnetic storms, both of these being related to disturbances in the ionosphere. These disturbances can and, actually, almost invariably do interfere with radio transmission and reception, and when severe enough can completely disrupt all normal radio communications: and they can also produce temporary alterations of the earth's magnetism which knock magnetic compasses completely out of kilter." All of which was true enough as far as it went. "It would, of course, require extreme conditions to produce these effects: but we have been experiencing these lately, and I'm pretty sure that that's what happened with your plane. Where astral navigation - by the stars, that is - is impossible, as it was on a night like this, you are dependent on radio and compasses as your two main navigational aids: if these are knocked out, what have you left?" 

     A fresh hubbub of talk arose at this, and though it was quite obvious that most of them had only a vague idea what I was talking about, I could see that this idea was finding a fair degree of ready acceptance, satisfying them and fitting the facts as they knew them. I saw Joss gazing at me with an expressionless face, looked him in the eye for a couple of seconds, then turned away. As a radio operator, Joss knew even better than I that, though there was still some sun-spot activity, it had reached its maximum in the previous year: and as an ex-aircraft radio operator, he knew that airliners flew on gyrocompasses, which neither sun-spots nor magnetic storms could ever affect in the slightest. 

     "We'll have something to eat now." I cut through the buzz of conversation. "Any volunteers to give Jackstraw a hand?" 

     "Certainly." Marie LeGarde, as I might have guessed, was first on her feet. "I'm by way of being what you might call a mean cook. Lead me to it, Mr Nielsen." 

     "Thanks, Joss, you might give me a hand to rig a screen." I nodded at the injured pilot. "We'll see what we can do for this boy here." The stewardess, unbidden, moved forward to help me also. I was on the point of objecting -1 knew that this wasn't going to be nice - but I didn't want trouble with her, not yet. I shrugged my shoulders and let her stay. 

     Half an hour later, I had done all I could. It indeed hadn't been nice, but both the patient and the stewardess had stood it far better than I had expected. I was fixing and binding on a stiff leather helmet to protect the back of his head and Joss was strapping him down, inside the sleeping-bag, to the stretcher, so that he couldn't toss around and hurt himself, when the stewardess touched my arm. 

     "What - what do you think now, Dr Mason?" 

     "It's hard to be sure. I'm not a specialist in brain or head injuries, and even a specialist would hesitate to say. The damage may have penetrated deeper than we think. There may be haemorrhaging - it's often delayed in these cases." 

     "But if there's no haemorrhaging?" she persisted. "If the damage is no worse than what you think, what you see?" 

     "Fifty-fifty. I wouldn't have said so a couple of hours ago, but he seems to have quite astonishing powers of resistance and recuperation. Better than an even chance, I would say - if he had the warmth, the food, the skilled nursing he would have in a first class hospital. As it is - well, let's leave it at that, shall we?"