Asha, too, felt that they were moving through a long low cave as she and four crewmen from Titan powered the little inflatable west across Manhattan’s mighty bow and then due north towards Psyche. They were moving northward at twenty knots towards a goal which was moving south to meet them at ten knots. They were travelling through still air, but even allowing for the southerly current, they still had the ship in sight in little more than an hour.
‘There’s Psycho now,’ said one of the seamen quietly. None of them had wanted to come. Asha hardly heard and certainly missed the fact that he had mispronounced the name. The low brown roof of the wildly rushing sky seemed to join the rough wall of the sand-streaming flank of the iceberg and spread out into the dark, flat stillness of the water as though they were coming to the back of the dreary cave now, and the atmosphere of this strange meeting drizzled down on them with all the insidious penetration of the sand itself. Just as the fine grains crept with chilly silence down into every strand of hair and every fold of flesh and clothing, no matter how intimate, so the atmosphere crept into every corner of their minds and crouched there coldly, like shadow. And everywhere, just above them, the wind raved and the whirling sand hissed and the upper galleries of the ice boomed and grumbled and thundered.
If anything, the atmosphere darkened as they climbed up the accommodation ladder onto Psyche’s weather deck, and Asha was whirled back in her mind across the years to her honeymoon and a desperate, doomed freighter called Napoli with a mutinous crew and a deadly cargo destined for the coldest deeps of the Western Ocean. She shivered, for she knew how dangerous things could get on a ship which felt like this one did. The men she had brought with her suddenly grouped themselves round her like a bodyguard. Abruptly she realised that several trained medical assistants had been overlooked in favour of these four whose greatest qualification seemed to be their size. They fell in around her, two in front and two behind, as they hurried up to the A deck bulkhead door and then along the corridor to the lift.
Captain Walcott was tall, distinguished and very worried looking. ‘We’ve got two more,’ he said at once. ‘Not as bad yet, but even so … We’ve isolated them all, of course, from each other and from the rest of us.’ His voice was deep, lilting, and every bit as concerned as the expression on his lined, dark face. He took a deep breath, as though inflating himself, rounding his chest and squaring his shoulders. ‘We don’t know whether or not it’s contagious. We’re counting on you to tell us, Doctor.’ His dark eyes swept round the wide, shadowy bridge, and the atmosphere, like the light, thickened sinisterly for a moment.
John had described Lamia’s symptoms in as much detail as he had at his command and Asha thought she had built up a fairly accurate mental picture of how the man would look. Even so, what she saw as she lifted the bandages off him made her catch her breath with shock. The Greek seaman lay quiet, his eyes open but distant, heavily sedated. ‘I’ll just bring my bag over,’ she said soothingly. ‘I’ve got some ointment which will ease this at once.’
She opened her bag and pretended to be rummaging for medicine but in fact she switched on Kate Ross’s Geiger counter which she had hidden in there. Then, holding her breath, she brought the whole thing over and actually placed it on the bed beside the drugged man.
Nothing. The little machine gave no reaction at all. A weight lifted off her shoulders and she began to breathe again. One less thing for John to worry about, apparently, but a new puzzle for her to solve. It was one which occupied her mind as she treated and re-bandaged Lamia’s wounds, but she found no solution to it. There was nothing in the blisters themselves which offered any explanation, and the patient himself was too far gone to answer any of the questions she was burning to ask him. At last she was finished with him, and it was time to go and see the others, each of whom was in a separate room. ‘Hello!’ she called, and one of her minders from Titan came in at once.
‘Where are the others?’ she asked. ‘I need to see them, and to talk to them in some detail.’
But before she could either see them or speak to them, the sickbay phone buzzed and she lifted it at once. It was Peter Walcott. ‘I don’t know whether this is good news or bad,’ he said crisply, his tone making her suspect that he was in fact quite relieved, ‘but Captain Odate has just reported men on Kraken with similar symptoms. So it’s not just Psyche’s problem. It’s something bigger.’
She found herself nodding, thinking, if it’s not this ship then the next logical culprit must be Manhattan; the two ships that had reported trouble were the closest to it, after all.
But Peter Walcott was still speaking.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘I said that the wind has moderated suddenly. Lifted, actually, gone back up several hundred metres. Captain Higgins has called for Kraken’s helicopter with Tom Snell and his engineers. He said to tell you that he’s taking a team of men up onto the ice. Something about looking for more Russian corpses like that blonde woman.’
Asha went cold with simple terror. She wanted to scream a warning, to order John to avoid the berg until she knew more about what was affecting the sick men’s skin in this horrific way. Even if it was not radioactivity, it was still something that Manhattan was doing. Something horrible; something dangerous. But she would only be screaming at Peter Walcott, and he would never pass the message on to John. Even if he did, John would never listen. She took a deep breath. ‘I see,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ added Peter, as though this was an afterthought, as from his point of view it probably was, ‘he said to tell you he’s taking Kate and Colin Ross and Captain Mariner as well.’
Kraken’s Westland dropped Tom Snell and his men off on the highest northernmost shoulder of the ice and then skipped low over the tawny sea to pick up the contingents from Titan and Niobe. John had called for Richard to be included in Titan’s specially selected team in the hope of jogging his memory. He suspected that Asha would have ordered that the sick man should remain in bed, knowing that this was the surest way to restore his mind. On the other hand, she had said Richard was physically one hundred per cent, and dying to get out and about, so, in her absence, there seemed no harm in bringing him along. If his mental processes were as acute as she had said they were, he would be an asset to them whether he knew who he was or not.
As John climbed into the helicopter’s big square body, his eyes eagerly sought out the tall frame of his friend, half convinced that the sight of the ships would have restored everything. Failing that, perhaps the shock of being back aboard a helicopter so soon after the accident would jog something back into place. Like Asha, he caught his breath at the almost luminous quality of Richard’s gaze. The bright blue eyes seemed to be alight but there was no flicker of recognition, no wide smile of welcome when their eyes met, and John sat, a little deflated, in the seat opposite.
‘I’m not sure that this is such a good idea,’ said Kate Ross severely.