When it was over, we clung together wearily for a moment. Then she pushed away, groping to regain her composure, seeking the proper tone of voice for a woman forcibly defiled, a woman raped against her will. But she was caught between wanting to come on this way and the vestiges of pleasure she was still feeling. The result was a tone that was shaky and words that equivocated.
"Well, at least," Olga said, "it didn't break off while you were -" She left it hanging.
So did I. I was satisfied – for the time being. We were alive, and the warm afterglow of love-making would keep up alive for a while.
But with the passing of another day, the feeling of satisfaction also passed. The cold gripped us again. And once again I raped Olga.
She didn't fight me quite as hard this time. And the next time she struggled even less strenuously. Soon she was putting up merely token resistance. She would have liked me to believe that this was because her strength was being sapped by our ordeal, but I suspected otherwise.
One night she woke me from a sound sleep and my suspicions were confirmed. "Aren't you going to rape me?" she asked.
"I'm tired," I told her. "Later."
"No. Now! I'm freezing!"
So I obliged. And when she started struggling as usual, I simply stopped and rolled away from her.
"What's the matter?" she panted.
"I'm too tired to fight with you."
"Oh." Olga thought a moment. "All right, then I won't fight," she decided.
The next morning the storm abated. The wind died down, and the snow flurried to a stop. For the first time in I don't know how long, we saw the sun again.
It gave our morale a boost. We were still dependent on Ungilak's return to save us, but our chances of freezing to death were lessened by the passing of the blizzard. We smiled encouragement at each other and speculated that Ungilak might reach us today, or surely tomorrow.
But it wasn't Ungilak who found us. It was mid-afternoon and we were dozing in the shadows of the shelter provided by the overturned sled when Olga's scream awoke me. She screamed only once, and I sat bolt upright with my pistol in my hand.
It was too late. There was a hatchet sticking out of Olga's naked breast. She was dead.
I snapped a shot at the figure standing over her. But I fired too fast, and I missed. I caught a glimpse of a face that was decidedly Chinese, and then he was gone.
I bolted after him, but he was too fast for me. His footsteps led to a narrow crevice running between two mountains of ice. It would have been foolhardy to try to follow him there. I'd have been a setup for an ambush.
He'd be back. I was sure of that. I guessed that it was really me he was after. He'd probably killed.Olga only because she'd seen him and screamed. Even now the Chinese might be cursing to himself over the chance that he might have killed Dr. Nyet herself.
So I settled back of the sled to wait for his return. I propped myself up on the package containing the jeweled phallus and concentrated on staying awake. I was alone now. Just me and the golden genitalia of a Nepalese god.
Death lurked in the ice mountains. Death would surely return. The only question was whether I might not freeze to death before the Chinese came back to kill me. If I did, that priceless phallus might make a worthy tombstone for the man from O.R.G.Y!
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Merry Christmas!"
It woke me from the sleep I'd tried so hard to avoid. I blinked, sure that I must still be dreaming. My eyes refocused on Ungilak standing over me, a big grin on his face.
"Merry Christmas!" He repeated it.
Nothing seemed to add up in my fogged brain. Was it really Ungilak? Or was it some vision conjured up from my delirium? If it was him, then how come he was suddenly speaking English? And what was this about Christmas?
"Merry Christmas!" He said it a third time, obviously waiting for some response.
"Merry Christmas." I responded.
My mind went off on a minor obsession, trying to add up the days. Somehow this Christmas bit seemed the easiest thing to cope with at the moment. Allowing for half a dozen or so days that I'd lost in the Arctic cold, I realized that it might indeed be Christmas.
Ungilak was rattling off some of his Eskimo dialect now. I understood that "Merry Christmas" was the extent of the English he'd picked up. When he saw that he wasn't getting through to me, he switched over to sign language. It clicked after a moment, and I understood he was asking where Olga was.
I took him outside and showed him where I'd stashed her corpse. He looked at it and his face grew dark with anger. He thought I'd killed her!
I backed away from him, shaking my head. I pointed to the hatchet still buried in her breast and made gestures to tell him that it wasn't mine. Finally I pointed out the tracks the Chinese had made when he ran away. Ungilak examined them and then nodded to show that he believed me.
I followed him back to the rescue party he'd brought with him. There were five Eskimos besides Ungilak, and two dogsleds. He spoke to them in their native tongue, evidently explaining about Olga's murder, and pointed out the tracks to them. They nodded, and four of the five set out to follow the tracks.
We waited. I guess it was about three hours later that they finally returned. They had the Chinese with them. He was half-dead from frostbite and in no condition to put up a fight, but they tied him down to one of the sleds anyway.
I settled in alongside him as we got under way. The other sled was laden with supplies, and Ungilak didn't seem to want to take the time to shift them. I didn't mind. The Chinese was in no condition to give me any trouble.
We were three days on the trail before he regained some of his strength. I tried talking to him then as we skimmed over the endless snow. To my surprise, he spoke flawless English.
"Why are you here?" I asked him.
"The same reason you are. To find Dr. Nyet."
"How did you know where to look?"
"We had the Russian agent followed."
"Why did you kill him?"
"We felt he was getting close. Indeed, we thought he might have found Dr. Nyet. We thought it was the young lady with you. We didn't want the Russians to have her. Nor you, for that matter. We wanted to take her ourselves. And so we eliminated the Russian to expedite matters."
"And you also may have eliminated Dr. Nyet," I pointed out.
"Possibly. It couldn't be helped. My reflexes simply worked too fast. She screamed and I killed her before she might have had a chance to kill me."
"Just like that." The hatred for him that came through in my voice then was genuine.
"What is done is done." He shrugged it off. "Right now our aims are the same, and we must think about how best to cooperate with each other."
"Oh? So now you want to cooperate."
"Yes. Are you agreeable?"
"Drop dead!" I told him, ending the conversation.
A few hours later we came in sight of the S.M.U.T. settlement at last. There were perhaps thirty or forty igloos spaced out in a wide circle. Ungilak called a halt and strode over to me. He took my hand between both of his and then leaned over to rub his nose against mine affectionately.
"Poli," he said, pointing back the way we'd come. "Poli." He repeated it and I understood that he was saying goodbye, that he was going to leave now because he wanted to get back to his wife. He made signs to tell me that the other Eskimos would see me to the conclusion of the journey, and then he turned the other sled around and started back to Poli.
Before he was out of sight, we were on our way to the settlement. As we drew closer, I was surprised at the number of Eskimos hard at work there. The tribal life of Eskimos is very loose, and it's rare for more than two or three families to congregate together. Yet I guessed there were more than a hundred in sight as we approached. Not one of them, I knew, was a native of Franz Josef Land. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to relocate them here. And someone was seeing to it that they were kept busy building still more igloos.