Night Without End

by Alistair MacLean

  Behind us Senator Brewster blundered along in a blind world all of his own, stumbling often, falling occasionally but always pushing himself up and staggering gamely on. And in those few hours Hoffman Brewster, for me, ceased to be a senator and became again my earliest conception of the old Dixie Colonel, not the proud, rather overbearing aristocrat but the embodiment of a bygone southern chivalry, when courtesy and a splendid gallantry in the greatest perils and hardships were so routine as to excite no comment. Time and time again during that bitter night he insisted, forcibly insisted, on relieving one of the three of us of our burdens and would stagger along under the load until he reached the point of collapse. Despite his age, he was a powerful man: but he had no longer the heart and the lungs and the circulation to match his muscles, and his distress, as the night wore on, became pitiful to see. The bloodshot eyes were almost closed in exhaustion, his face deep-etched in grey suffering and his breath coming in painful whooping gasps that reached me clearly even above the thin high shriek of the wind.

  No doubt but that Smallwood and Corazzini had left us to die, but they had made one mistake: they had forgotten Balto. Balto, as always, had been running loose when they had left us, and they had either failed to see him or forgotten all about him. But Balto hadn’t forgotten us, he must have known something was far wrong, for all the hours we had been prisoners on the tractor sled he had never come within a quarter-mile of us. But as soon as the tractor had dumped and left us, he had come loping in out of the driving snow and settled to the task of leading us down towards the glacier. At least, we hoped he was doing that. Jackstraw declared that he was following the crimp marks of the Citroën’s caterpillars, now deep buried under the flying drift and new-fallen snow. Zagero wasn’t so sure. Once, twice, a dozen times that night, I heard him muttering the same words: ‘I hope to hell that hound knows where it’s goin’.’

  But Balto knew where he was going. Sometime during the night – it might have been any time between midnight and three o’clock in the morning – he stopped suddenly, stretched out his neck and gave his long eerie wolf call. He seemed to listen for an answer, and if he heard anything it was beyond our range: but he seemed satisfied, for he suddenly changed direction and angled off to the left into the blizzard. At Jackstraw’s nod, we followed.

  Three minutes later we came upon the dog-sledge, with two of the dogs curled up beside it, their backs to the wind, their muzzles to their bellies and long brushes of tails over their faces, the drift wailing high around them. They were comfortable enough – so splendid an insulation does a husky’s thick coat provide that snow at forty degrees below zero will lie on its back indefinitely without being melted by body heat but they preferred freedom to comfort, for they were on their feet and vanished into the swirling whiteness beyond before we could lay hands on them. That left only the sledge.

  I suppose that after Smallwood had gone far enough to consider that we would never be able to reach that point, he had cut loose dogs and dog-sledge as a needless encumbrance – but not before he had severed all the traces attaching the dogs to the sledge and, I noticed grimly, removed all the wraps and the magnetic compass that had been there. He thought of everything. For a moment, admiration for the man’s undoubtedly remarkable qualities came in to supplant what had become the motivating reason for my existence, a reason that, as the hours crawled by, were crowding out even the feelings I had for Margaret Ross: my hatred for Smallwood burned like a cold steady flame, an obsession with the idea of sinking my fingers into that scrawny throat and never letting go.

  Within three minutes of finding the sledge we had tied together the severed remnants of the traces, changed them to the front and were on our way again, Marie LeGarde, Mahler and Helene propped up on the thin wooden slats. We had, of course, to pull the sledge ourselves, but that was nothing: for Jackstraw, Zagero and myself, the relief was beyond measure. But it was only momentary.

  We were running on to the smooth, slick ice of the Kangalak glacier, but our progress was no faster than it had been before we found the sledge. The wind was climbing up to its maximum now, the blizzard shrieking along horizontally to the ground and coming in great smoking flurries that cut visibility to zero and made us stop and grab one another lest one of us be knocked flying and for ever lost to sight: several times Theodore Mahler, restless in unconsciousness, rolled off the sledge until I at last made Brewster sit at the back and watch. He protested violently, but he was glad to do as I said.

  I don’t remember much after that, I think I must have been unconscious, eyes shut, but still plodding along in my sleep on leaden, frozen feet. My first conscious memory after installing Brewster on the back of the sledge was of someone shaking me urgently by the shoulder. It was Jackstraw.

  ‘No more!’ he shouted in my ear. ‘We must stop, Dr Mason, wait till it’s blown itself out. We can’t live through this.’

  I said something that was unintelligible even to myself, but Jackstraw took it for agreement and began pulling the sledge into the sloping side of the glacier valley and to the leeward side of one of the snowdrifts piled up against some of the ridges on the side of the valley. It wasn’t all that much of an improvement, but the wind and the effect of the blizzard were perceptibly less. We unloaded the three sick people on the sledge into what pitiful shelter the ridge offered: I was just about to let my knees buckle and collapse beside them when I realised that someone was missing: it was a fair indication of the toll taken by wind and cold and exhaustion that almost twenty seconds passed before I realised it was Brewster.

  ‘Good God!’ I cried in Jackstraw’s ear. ‘The Senator – we’ve lost him! I’ll go back and look. I won’t be a minute.’

  ‘Stay here.’ The grip on my arm was promise enough that Jackstraw meant to detain me by force, if necessary. ‘You’d never come back. Balto! Balto!’ He shouted a few Eskimo words which meant nothing to me, but the big Siberian seemed to understand, for he was gone in a moment, following the direction of Jackstraw’s pointing hand. He was back again inside two minutes.

  ‘He’s found him?’ I asked Jackstraw.

  Jackstraw nodded silently.

  ‘Let’s bring him in.’

  Balto led us there, but we didn’t bring him in. Instead we left him lying where we found him, face down in the snow, dead. The blizzard was already drawing its concealing shroud over him, in an hour he would be no more than a featureless white mound in a featureless white valley. My hands were too numb to examine him, but I wouldn’t have bothered anyway: the half-century of self-indulgence in food and drink and temper, all of which had been so clearly reflected in the heavy florid face when first I’d seen him, had had their inevitable way. The heart, cerebral thrombosis, it didn’t matter now. But he had been a man.

  How long we lay there, the six of us and Balto huddled close together for warmth, unconscious or dozing while that hurricane of a blizzard reached then passed its howling crescendo, I never knew. Probably only half an hour, perhaps not even that. When I awoke, stiff and numbed, I reached for Jackstraw’s torch. It was exactly four o’clock in the morning.

  I looked at the others. Jackstraw was wide awake – I was pretty sure he’d never shut an eye lest one of us slip away from sleep into that easy frozen sleep from which there would have been no wakening – and Zagero was stirring. That they – and I – would survive, I didn’t doubt. Helene was a question mark. A seventeen-year-old, though short on endurance, was usually high on resilience and recuperative powers, but Helene’s seemed to have deserted her. After the death of her mistress and up to the time she had collapsed she had become strangely withdrawn and unresponsive, and I guessed that the death of Mrs Dansby-Gregg had hit her far more than any of us would have guessed. The previous forty-eight hours apart, it seemed to me that she had had little enough to thank Mrs Dansby-Gregg for in the way of affection and warmth: but, then, she was young, Mrs Dansby-Gregg had been the person she had known best and, as a foreigner, she must have regarded Mrs Dansby-Gregg as he
r sole anchor in an alien sea … I asked Jackstraw if he would massage her hands, then turned to have a look at Mahler and Marie LeGarde.

  ‘They don’t look so hot to me.’ Zagero, too, was studying them. ‘What’s their chances, Doc?’

  ‘I just don’t know,’ I said wearily. ‘I don’t know at all.’

  ‘Don’t take it to heart, Doc. It’s no fault of yours.’ Zagero waved a hand towards the snow-filled emptiness and desolation of the glacier. ‘Your dispensary ain’t all that well stocked.’

  ‘No.’ I smiled faintly, then nodded at Mahler. ‘Bend down and listen to his breathing. The end’s coming pretty close. Ordinarily I’d say a couple of hours. With Mahler I don’t know – he’s got the will to live, sheer guts, his beliefs – the lot … But in twelve hours he’ll be dead.’

  ‘And how long do you give me, Dr Mason?’

  I twisted round and gazed down at Marie LeGarde. Her voice was no more than a weak, husky whisper: she was trying to smile, but the smile was a pitiful grimace and there was no humour in either the eyes or the voice.

  ‘Good lord, you’ve come to!’ I reached out, pulled off her gloves and started to massage the frozen wasted hands. ‘This is wonderful. How do you feel, Miss LeGarde?’

  ‘How do you think I feel?’ she said with a flash of her old spirit. ‘Don’t try to put me off, Peter. How long?’

  ‘About another thousand curtain calls at the old Adelphi.’ The light came from the torch that had been thrust, butt down, into the snow, and I bent forward so that my face was shadowed, my expression unreadable. ‘Seriously, the fact that you’ve recovered consciousness is a good sign.’

  ‘I once played a queen who recovered consciousness only to speak a few dramatic words before she died. Only, I can’t think of any dramatic words.’ I had to strain to catch the feeble whispered words. ‘You’re a shocking liar, Peter. Is there any hope for us at all?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I lied. Anything to get away from that topic. ‘We’ll be on the coast, with a good chance of being picked up by ship or plane, tomorrow afternoon – this afternoon, rather. It can’t be more than twenty miles from here.’

  ‘Twenty miles!’ Zagero interjected. ‘In this little lot?’

  He raised a cupped hand significantly to his ear, a gesture superbly superfluous in the ululating shriek of the blizzard.

  ‘It won’t last, Mr Zagero,’ Jackstraw put in. ‘These williwaws always blow themselves out in a short time. This already has gone on longer than most and it’s easing a lot. Tomorrow will be clear and calm and cold.’

  ‘The cold will be a change,’ Zagero said feelingly. He looked past me. ‘The old lady’s off again, Doc’

  ‘Yes.’ I stopped massaging her hands and slid the gloves on. ‘Let’s have a look at these paws of yours, Mr Zagero, will you?’

  ‘“Johnny” to you, Doc. I’ve been dismissed without a stain on my character, remember?’ He thrust his big hands out for inspection. ‘Pretty, aren’t they?’

  They weren’t pretty, they were the worst case of frostbite I had ever seen, and I had seen all too many, in Korea and later. They were white and yellow and dead. The original skin had vanished under a mass of blisters, and from the few warm spots I could detect on either hand I knew that much of the tissue had been permanently destroyed.

  “Fraid I was a mite careless with my gloves,’ Zagero said apologetically. ‘In fact, I lost the damn’ things about five miles back. Didn’t notice it at the time – hands were too cold, I reckon.’

  ‘Feel anything in them now?’

  ‘Here and there.’ He nodded as I touched some spots where the blood still flowed, and went on conversationally: ‘Am I goin’ to lose my hands, Doc? Amputation, I mean?’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head definitely. I saw no point in mentioning that some of his fingers were beyond hope.

  ‘Will I ever fight again?’ Still the same casual, careless tone.

  ‘It’s difficult to say. You never know—’

  ‘Will I ever fight again?’

  ‘You’ll never fight again.’

  There was a long pause, then he said quietly: ‘You’re sure, Doc? You’re absolutely sure?’

  ‘I’m absolutely sure, Johnny. No boxing commission doctor in the world would ever let you climb into a ring. It would cost him his listing in the Medical Register.’

  ‘Okay, so that’s how it is. Consolidated Plastics of Trenton, New Jersey, have just got themselves a new factory hand: this boxin’ racket was too damn’ strenuous anyway.’ There was no regret in his voice, no resignation even, but that meant nothing: like me, he had more important things to worry about. He looked away into the darkness, then twisted round: ‘What’s the matter with that hound of yours, Jackstraw?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think I’d better find out.’ Twice while we had been talking Balto had left us, vanished into the snow, and returned after a few minutes: he seemed restless, uneasy. ‘I won’t be long.’

  He rose, followed Balto into the darkness, returned in a short time: ‘Come and see this, Dr Mason.’

  ‘This’ was a spot less than a hundred yards away, close into the side of the glacier valley. Jackstraw flashed his torch on to the snow-dusted ice. I stooped, made out a black circular patch on the ground and, a few feet away, a smaller discoloured area where the surface snow had frozen solid.

  ‘Oil from the gearcase or sump, water from the radiator,’ Jackstraw said briefly. He altered the torch-beam. ‘And you can still see the crimp marks of the caterpillars.’

  ‘And very recent?’ I suggested. The drifting snow, the scouring effect of the flying ice-particles had scarcely begun to obliterate the traces left by the treads.

  ‘I think so. And they were stopped here a long time, Dr Mason – look at the size of that oil patch.’

  ‘Mechanical trouble?’ I hazarded. I didn’t really believe it myself.

  ‘Riding out the storm – Corazzini must have been blind,’ Jackstraw said definitely. ‘If the engine had stopped on that pair, they’d never have got it started again.’

  I knew he was right. Neither Smallwood nor Corazzini had shown any mechanical ability at all, and I was convinced that it had been no act.

  ‘Perhaps they were still here when we arrived back there? My God, if we’d only carried on another hundred yards!’

  ‘Spilt milk, as you say, Dr Mason. Yes, I’m sure they were here then.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have heard their engine?’

  ‘Not in this wind.’

  ‘Jackstraw!’ A sudden thought, a flash of hope. ‘Jackstraw, did you sleep back there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How long were we stopped?’

  ‘Half an hour, maybe less.’

  ‘And you think they were still here – Good God, man, they can’t be more than a mile away. The wind’s dropping right away, it’s getting colder and we’ll only freeze to death if we stay here, maybe there’ll be crevasses on the glacier to hold them up—’

  I was already on my way, running, slipping, stumbling, Jackstraw by my side, Balto leading the way. Zagero was standing up, waiting – and the young German girl by his side.

  ‘Helene!’ I caught her hands. ‘You all right? How are you feeling?’

  ‘Better, much better.’ She didn’t sound all that much better. ‘I’m sorry I was so silly, Dr Mason. I don’t know—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I cut in, rather brusquely. ‘You can walk? Fine, fine.’ I could feel new hope surging through me as I rapped out a brief explanation to Zagero, within a minute we had Mahler and Marie LeGarde bundled aboard the sledge and were on our way.

  But the hope was short-lived. We made the best speed we could, at times breaking into a kind of staggering run, but the sledge slowed us up terribly on that uneven surface of the glacier. Once it overturned, throwing both Mahler and Marie LeGarde heavily on to the snow, and after that we were forced to slow down. Another such violent capsizing, or even too severe a jolting, and that sledge would become
a bier. From time to time Jackstraw flashed his failing torch on the crimp marks we were following, and even to my inexperienced eye it was obvious that the tracks in the snow were becoming progressively fainter every time we looked at them until the time came at last when I knew we must call a halt to this pursuit, admit defeat: we had fallen so far behind now, three or four miles I was certain, that the hope and chance of overtaking them no longer existed: we were only chasing a hopeless dream, and killing ourselves doing it.

  Jackstraw and Zagero agreed. We put Helene aboard the sledge to steady the two sick people, took a trace apiece over our shoulders and plodded on slowly down the glacier, backs bent, heads bowed, each one of us lost in his own hopeless thoughts.

  As Jackstraw had prophesied, the storm had blown itself out. Completely. The wind had gone so that not a breath stirred across the glacier. The snow had vanished, with the dark and heavy clouds that had carried it: the white stars stood high in a dark and frozen sky. It was cold, with a temperature well below zero, but cold was an old friend now. By eight o’clock that morning, some three hours and six miles after we had left our resting place, the conditions for travel were perfect.

  The weather conditions, that was – underfoot, they varied from the indifferent to the abominable. We were now fairly into the Kangalak glacier and the going was often difficult indeed. A glacier is seldom a smooth river of ice that flows evenly down-hill, but much more frequently an irregularly surfaced fissured and crevassed mass descending as often as not in a series of rounded steps and ledges like a sea of petrified lava. The Kangalak was no exception. Here and there we found some straight stretches, but, for the most part, progress was possible only at the sides where the rate of flow was less and the ice smoother. It was the left-hand side that we were following, but even so it was heavy work, for our path was frequently blocked by the debris of ground moraines that had been forced out on the sides, and when these were absent we were as often as not floundering through the thick drifts that the great wind of the night just gone had piled up high against the sides. The one consolation I found was that if it were difficult for us, it was proving doubly so for the tractor whose irregularly weaving twisting crimp marks we were so doggedly following.