‘Penny for them.’
The rusty, gruff voice was so unfamiliar, so unexpected, that she glanced across at the door, expecting to see one of Titan’s crewmen. Nobody was there and she looked down at the bed again.
Richard’s eyes made her catch her breath, as they always did. She had forgotten how blue they were, how dazzlingly bright, like magnesium flares ignited behind thin panes of sapphire, their colour all the more striking for the contrast with the thick black lashes.
‘Richard! Oh, thank God …’ She ran to his bedside, as impulsive as a teenager, her whole body flooding with relief. ‘How are you?’
He looked at her, his face immobile. Then the faintest of frowns gathered between the perfectly sculpted black wings of brows. Something moved in the depths of those hypnotic eyes. What was it? Confusion? Fear? That deep, rumbling voice came again, though he hardly seemed to move his lips at all. ‘The question, my dear, is not so much how I am,’ he grated, ‘but who I am.’
John Higgins stood, thunderstruck, with the walkie-talkie crushed to his ear. ‘Amnesia?’ He simply couldn’t believe what Asha was telling him.
‘ ‘Fraid so, love. Total. Classic case.’
‘But when will he get his memory back? I mean—’
‘No way to tell, darling, I’m sorry.’
‘But I thought most amnesia was psychological!’
‘This is physiological, John; no doubt of that as far as I can see. Bash on the back of the head. Big bump. Complete memory loss. One, two, three; QED.’
‘Anything else? I mean, how is he otherwise?’
‘No. Nothing else at all. He’s one hundred per cent otherwise. I’ve done a complete series of tests. Everything else is AOK. Couple of Band Aids and some tincture of arnica for the bruises. He’s up and about already, looking for something to do. I’m having the devil of a job keeping him here in the sickbay.’
‘So it shouldn’t be long before—’
‘No idea, darling, I really haven’t. Sorry I can’t be more help, but you’re still in charge of the whole shooting match. I’ll keep you up to date.’
‘Well, I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that, my love. If Richard’s OK, then I’ve another job for you, an urgent one.’
‘What is it?’ Her voice picked up the tension in his own.
‘No idea, but it’s really having quite a negative impact over on Psyche. One of their crew men seems to have picked up some kind of… infection.’
‘Infection?’ She knew how devastating an uncontrolled infection could be in the enclosed environment of a ship at sea.
John glanced around the bridge, looking for somewhere to continue the conversation in private. At last he walked into the captain’s day room behind the chart room and hoped that his navigating officers would assume he was just passing some private endearments to his wife.
‘What sort of infection?’ she was asking. ‘Can you describe the symptoms?’
He did so, his voice unconsciously dropping to little more than a whisper as he did so.
Then, checking that the dayroom door was tightly closed behind him, he unburdened the leaden weight of the news that Professor Jones had passed to him little more than eight hours earlier.
‘Radiation poisoning?’ Her distant voice rose several decibels. Thank God she was in the sickbay, he thought, alone except for the man who could no longer remember that he was Richard Mariner. ‘I’ll get right over and check. But how on earth I can do it without using a Geiger counter or letting this Lamia person or his friends catch on to what I’m doing, I just do not know!’
‘Your first problem is going to be getting over there,’ he said, walking back out into the howling, hissing bedlam of the bridge. As he broke contact, he noted that the light at least was beginning to break through the sandstorm. It was more than an hour late, but at least the day was beginning.
Asha’s journey to Psyche was less of a problem than John had imagined it would be. The situation was resolved by Yves Maille, not through any miracle of meteorology but simply because he could not take satisfactory readings on Titan’s, bridge. So, having been given direct orders from First Officer Sally Bell to provide readings, he went down onto the main deck.
Inside the bulkhead door at the starboard end of the lateral A deck corridor, he adjusted the bulky clothing he had donned to protect himself against the sand. Several men were detailed to help him should he demand it, but the one in attendance was now simply required to close the door behind him and then to await his return. The intrepid Frenchman was going to brave the vicious sandstorm in order to check the readings of the instruments he kept on the ship’s distant forecastle head. These instruments were important not just because they were even more sensitive than Titan’s own, but because they were the only ones at deck level. All the others were located atop the bridgehouse more than twenty metres above.
Yves adjusted his goggles and pulled the filter tighter across his nose and mouth. He nodded once to his assistant and threw open the door. He stepped out with his eyes tight closed in expectation of inundation by whirling sand. He heard the door slam shut behind him. He had taken half a dozen stumbling steps before he realised he was walking in calm, still air. He opened his eyes and blinked. It was clear air too. From the sandswept deck, up through less than ten metres to a claustrophobically close, thick, sand-drizzling sky, there was a band of utterly still air. He ran to the side of the deck and skidded through miniature dunes to catch the safety rail and look down at the strange, sullen sea. It, too, seemed quite calm. Then he turned, thunderstruck, and looked around himself, consciously noting every detail he could discern for the exhaustive report he was going to write to the Geographical Societies in Paris, London and the United States.
The meteorological explanation for what was happening was simple enough, but it had never occurred to any of them, not even to Yves himself, that the forces they were dealing with were so enormous that the microclimates they were capable of creating could be hundreds of square kilometres in area. The harmattan, blowing north from the Sahara, was a cold desert wind, generated by the pressure of the air. It was relatively warm in comparison with the air around the iceberg, however; and that air was further chilled by contact with the ice and with the surface of the water all around Manhattan which had been itself chilled by runoff from the great berg. This had the unforeseen but almost inevitable result of forming a cushion of cold clear air some thirty metres high over which the sand-laden harmattan rode as though over a low hill. To the officers and men on the navigation bridges of the ships, the southerly wind, made impenetrable by the weight of sand it was carrying, seemed to be reaching from the wave tops upward for a thousand metres sheer, but down here on the weather deck, Yves alone could see that things were very different indeed and an utterly unexpected calm held sway.
The effect of being out in that calm was very disturbing. As he looked down the length of the deck, along the wide but terrifyingly shallow band of clear air, he could almost feel the weight of the sand above his head and he found himself crouching as though it was solid rock about to crush him like a mountainous press. But to compare it to rock was misleading, for the stratum a mere seven metres above his head was in frantic, liquid motion. To watch it was to feel reality being torn into inversion until one became almost like a watcher entranced above a silt-laden river in full spate. But in the place of cold spray rising, cold sand drizzled down, lightly, to land like a tawny cloak on everything around until the deck and the billows below it were barely distinguishable.