Iceberg

They went out into the alleyway, stepping through the ashes and debris on the deck, moved to the next compartment, and entered. It had been the radio room.

Most of the ruins were scarcely recognizable. The bunk and furniture were skeletons of charred wood, the remains of the radio equipment one congealed mess of melted metal and hardened drippings of stained solder.

Their senses by now had become accustomed to the overpowering stench and the grotesque carbonized surroundings, but they weren't the least bit prepared for the hideously misshapen form on the deck.

"Oh, good God!" Hu

"I don't envy him his death," Pitt murmured.

The ghastly sight was too much for Hu

"There's no such thing as a pretty corpse," Pitt said. He was begi

Hu

"Maybe, maybe not. The only one who can tell for certain is his dentist." Pitt stared at what had once been a breathing, flesh-and-blood man, and he tried to imagine how the end had come. A furnacelike wall of red and orange flame, a brief unearthly scream, the searing shock of pain that drove the mind into instant insanity, and the limbs flailing in the contorted dance of death.

To die by fire, he reflected, the last seconds of life spent in indescribable agony, was an extinction abhorred by every living man and beast.

Pitt kneeled down and studied the body more closely. His eyes squinted and his mouth tightened. It must have been almost as he had visualized, but not quite. The scorched form was curled in the fetus position, the knees drawn up almost to the chin and the arms pulled tightly against the sides, contracted by the mt-nse heat upon the flesh. But there was something else that caught Pitts attention. He focused the flashlight on the deck beside the body, illuminating dimly the twisted steel legs of the radio operator's chair where they protruded from beneath his disfigured remains.

Hu

"Have a look," Pitt said. "It would seem that poor Gustav was sitting down when he died. His chair literally burned out from under him."

Hu

"Doesn't it strike you strange," Pitt continued, "that a man would calmly burn to death without bothering to stand up or make an effort to escape?"

"Nothing strange about it," Hu

He began to choke with sickness again. "God, we're not doing him any good with our conjectures. Let's get out of here and search the rest of the ship while I'm still able to walk."

Pitt nodded and turned and passed through the doorway. Together they made their way into the bowels of the derelict. The engine room, the galley, the salon, everywhere they went their eyes were laid on the same horrifying spectacle of death as in the radio room. By the time they discovered the thirteenth and fourteenth bodies in the wheelhouse, Hu

"That's about it," he said, snapping the book shut.

"We've found them all except the man we came for."

Pitt lit a cigarette and blew a long cloud of blue smoke and seemed to consider for a moment. "They were all charred so far beyond recognition, he could have been any one of them."

"But he wasn't," Hu

Pitts eyebrows raised. "No, I didn't know."

"No secret really." Hu

"The man we've lied, schemed and risked our lives to find-unfortunately, as it probably turns out, dead-attended one of my classes at the Oceanographic Institute six years ago. A brilliant fellow." He motioned toward the two cremated forms on the deck. "A pity if he ended like this."

"How can you be certain you'll be able to tell him from the others?" Pitt asked.

"By his rings. He had a thing about rings. Wore them on every finger except his thumbs."

"Rings don't make a positive identification."

Hu

"It would," Pitt said thoughtfully. "But we haven't found a corpse that qualifies. We've already searched the entire ship."

"Not quite." Hu

Pitt studied the crude tracing. Then he turned and stepped outside the chartroom. "The opening is here all right. The ladder is burned all to hell, but enough of the rung bracing is left to support our weight."

The isolated compartment-situated in the exact center of the hull without benefit of portholes-was savaged even worse than the others; the steel plating on the walls curved outward, buckled like crinkled sheets of wallpaper. It appeared. empty. No trace of anything that remotely resembled furnishings was left after the conflagration. Pitt was just kneeling down, poking the ashes, searching for a sign of a body, when Hu

"Here!" He fell to his knees. "Over here in the corner." Hu

When Hu

"Not proof positive perhaps. But about as certain as we'll ever get."

Pitt took the fused bits of metal and held them under the beam of his light.

"I remember the rings quite well," Hu

"The settings were beautifully handcrafted and inlaid with eight different semiprecious stones native to Iceland. Each was carved in the likeness of an ancient Nordic god."