Bear Island

"What?" Lo

"Not even, say, if they were to have a double gin?"

"What piffling nonsense is this? We are speaking of the influence of alcohol, not about aperitifs for swaddling babes."

"You would see no harm in either of them asking for, say, just one drink?"

"Of course not." Lo

"Yes, I do rather. I just wondered why once, after a long day on the set, when Mary Stuart had asked you for just that one drink you flew completely off the handle."

In curiously slow-motion fashion Lo

"Ever since you came in-now I can see it." He spoke in a kind of sad whisper. Ever since you came in you've been leading up to this one question."

He shook his head and his eyes were not seeing me. I thought you were my friend," he said quietly and walked uncertainly from the saloon.

8

The northwest corner of the Sor-Hamna Bight, where the Morning Rose had finally come to rest, was just under three miles due northeast, as the crow flies, from the most southerly tip of Bear Island. The Sor-Hamna itself, U-shaped and open to the south, was just over a thousand yards in width on its cast-west axis and close on a mile in length from north to south. The eastern arm of the harbour was discontinuous, begi

The Sor-Hamna was not only the best, it was virtually the only reasonable anchorage in Bear Island. When the wind blew from the west it offered perfect protection for vessels sheltering there, and for a northerly wind it was only slightly less good. From an easterly wind, dependent upon its strength and precise direction it afforded a reasonable amount of cover-the gap between Kapp Heer and Makehl was the deciding factor here and, when the wind stood in this quarter and if the worst came to the worst, a vessel could always up anchor and shelter under the lee of Makehl Island: but when the wind blew from the south a vessel was wide open to everything the Barents Sea cared to throw at it.

And this was why the degree of unloading activity aboard the Morning Rose was increasing from the merely hectic to the nearly panic-stricken. Even as we had approached the Sor-Hamna the wind, which had been slowly veering the past thirty-six hours, now began rapidly to increase its speed of movement round the compass at disconcerting speed so that by the time we had made fast it was blowing directly from the east. It was now a few degrees south of east, and strengthening, and the Morning Rose was begi

At anchor, the Morning Rose could comfortably have ridden out the threatened blow but the trouble was that the Morning Rose was not at anchor. She was tied up alongside a crumbling limestone jetty-neither iron nor wooden structures would have lasted for any time in those stormy and bitter waters-that had first been constructed by Lerner and the Deutsche Seefischerei-Verein about the turn of the century and then improved upon-if that were the term-by the International eophysical Year expedition that had summered there. The jetty, which would have been condemned out of hand and forbidden for public use almost anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere, had originally been T-shaped, but the left arm of the T was now all but gone while the central section leading to the shore was badly eaten away on its southward side. It was against this dangerously dilapidated structure that the Morning Rose was begi

When we'd first come alongside shortly before noon, the unloading had gone ahead very briskly and smoothly indeed-except for the unloading of Miss Haynes's snarling pooches. Even before we'd tied up the after derrick had the sixteen-foot work-boat in the water and three minutes later an only slightly smaller fourteen-footer with an outboard had followed it: those boats were to remain with us. Within ten minutes the specially strengthened foreword derrick had lifted the weirdly shaped-laterally truncated so as to have a flat bottom-mock-up of the central section of a submarine over the side and lowered it gently into the water where it floated with what appeared to be perfect stability, no doubt because of its four tons of iron ballast. It was when the mock-up co

It just wouldn't bolt on. Goin and Heissman and Stryker, the only three who had observed the original tests, said that in practice it had operated perfectly: clearly, it wasn't operating perfectly now. The co

The solution was simple-just to hammer the offending curve back into shape-and in a dockyard with skilled plate layers available this would probably have been no more than a matter of minutes. But we'd neither technical facilities nor skilled labour available and the minutes had now stretched into hours. A score of times now the foreword derrick had offered up the offending co