Night Without End

‘All right, Solly,’ Zagero interrupted. ‘Desist. There’s not a press man within a thousand miles. Save the golden words for later.’

‘Just keepin’ in practice, boy. Words are ten a penny. I’ve got thousands to spare—’

‘T’ousands, Solly, t’ousands. You’re slippin’. Now shut up.’

Solly shut up, and I turned to the girl beside Zagero.

‘Well, miss?’

‘Mrs. Mrs Dansby-Gregg. You may have heard of me?’

‘No.’ I wrinkled my brow. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t.’ I’d heard of her all right, and I knew now that I’d seen her name and picture a score of times among those of other wealthy unemployed and unemployable built up by the tongue-in-the-cheek gossip columnists of the great national dailies into an ersatz London society whose frenetic, frequently moronic and utterly unimportant activities were a source of endless interest to millions. Mrs Dansby-Gregg, I seemed to recall, had been particularly active in the field of charitable activities, although perhaps not so in the production of the balance sheets.

She smiled sweetly at me.

‘Well, perhaps it’s not so surprising after all. You are a bit distant from the centre of things, aren’t you?’ She looked across to where the youngster with the broken collar-bone was sitting. ‘And this is Fleming.’

‘Fleming?’ This time the wrinkling of my brow was genuine. ‘You mean Helene?’

‘Fleming. My personal maid.’

‘Your personal maid,’ I said slowly. I could feel the incredulous anger stirring inside me. ‘Your own maid? And you didn’t even bother to volunteer to stay while I fixed her shoulder up?’

‘Miss LeGarde did it first,’ she said coolly. ‘Why should I?’

‘Quite right, Mrs Dansby-Gregg, why should you?’ Johnny Zagero said approvingly. He looked at her long and consideringly. ‘You might have got your hands dirty.’

For the first time the carefully cultivated façade cracked, the smile stiffened mechanically, and her colour deepened. Mrs Dansby-Gregg made no reply, maybe she had none to make. People like Johnny Zagero never got close enough even to the fringes of her money-sheltered world for her to know how to deal with them.

‘Well, that leaves just the two of you,’ I said hastily. The large Dixie colonel with the florid face and white hair was sitting next to the thin wispy-haired little Jew. They made an incongruous pair.

‘Theodore Mahler,’ the little Jew said quietly. I waited, but he added nothing. A communicative character.

‘Brewster,’ the other announced. He made a significant pause. ‘Senator Hoffman Brewster. Glad to help in any way I can, Dr Mason.’

‘Thank you, Senator. At least I know who you are.’ Indeed, thanks to his magnificent flair for self-publicity, half the Western world knew who this outspoken, bitterly – but fairly – anti-communist, near isolationist senator from the south-west was. ‘On a European tour?’

‘You might say that.’ He had the politician’s gift for investing even the most insignificant words with a statesmanlike consideration. ‘As Chairman of one of our Appropriation committees, I – well, let’s call it a fact-finding tour.’

‘Wife and secretaries gone ahead by humble passenger steamer, I take it,’ Zagero said mildly. He shook his head. ‘That was a fearful stink your Congressional investigation boys raised recently about the expenses of US senators abroad.’

‘That was quite unnecessary, young man,’ Brewster said coldly. ‘And insulting.’

‘I believe it was,’ Zagero apologised. ‘Not really intended as such. Sorry, Senator.’ He meant it.

What a bunch, I thought despairingly, what a crowd to be stuck with in the middle of the Greenland ice-plateau. A business executive, a musical comedy star, a minister of religion, a boxer with an uninhibited if cultured tongue, his zany manager, a London society playgirl and her young German maid, a Senator, a taciturn Jew and a near-hysterical hostess – or one apparently so. And a gravely injured pilot who might live or die. But willy-nilly I was stuck with them, stuck with the responsibility of doing my damnedest to get these people to safety, and the prospect appalled me. How on earth was I even to start to go about it, go about it with people with no arctic clothing to ward off the razor-edged winds and inhuman cold, people lacking in all knowledge and experience of arctic travel, even lacking, with two or three exceptions, the endurance and sheer muscular strength to cope with the savagery of the Greenland icecap? I couldn’t even begin to guess.

But whatever else they were lacking in at that moment, it wasn’t volubility: the life-giving warmth of the brandy had had the unfortunate side effect of loosening their tongues. Unfortunate, that is, from my point of view: they had a hundred and one questions to ask, and they seemed to think that I should have the answer to all of them.

More accurately, they had only half a dozen questions to ask, with a hundred and one variations of these. How was it possible for a pilot to veer so many hundreds of miles off course? Could the compasses have gone wrong? Could the pilot have had a brain-storm? But then surely both co-pilot and second pilot would have known something was wrong? Could the radio have been damaged? It had been a bitterly cold afternoon even when they had left Gander, was it possible that some of the flaps and controls had iced up, forcing them off course? But if this were the case, why hadn’t someone come to warn them of the possibility of the crash?

I answered all of their questions as best I could but these answers were all to the same effect, that I didn’t really know anything more about it than they did.

‘But you said some time ago that you did, perhaps, know one thing more than we did.’ It was Corazzini who put the question, and he was looking at me shrewdly. ‘What was that, Dr Mason?’

‘What? Ah, yes, I remember now.’ I hadn’t forgotten, but the way things were shaping up in my mind I’d had second thoughts about mentioning it, and had time to think up a plausible alternative. ‘I need hardly tell you that it’s nothing that I actually know, Mr Corazzini – how could I, I wasn’t in the plane – just a reasonably informed guess in the absence of all other solutions. It’s based on the scientific observations made here and in other IGY stations in Greenland, some of them over the past eighteen months.

‘For over a year now, we have been experiencing a period of intense sun-spot activity – that’s one of the main interests of the IGY year – the most intense of this century. As you may know, sun-spots, or, rather, the emission of solar particles from these sun-spots, are directly responsible for the formation of the aurora borealis and magnetic storms, both of these being related to disturbances in the ionosphere. These disturbances can and, actually, almost invariably do interfere with radio transmission and reception, and when severe enough can completely disrupt all normal radio communications: and they can also produce temporary alterations of the earth’s magnetism which knock magnetic compasses completely out of kilter.’ All of which was true enough as far as it went. ‘It would, of course, require extreme conditions to produce these effects: but we have been experiencing these lately, and I’m pretty sure that that’s what happened with your plane. Where astral navigation – by the stars, that is – is impossible, as it was on a night like this, you are dependent on radio and compasses as your two main navigational aids: if these are knocked out, what have you left?’

A fresh hubbub of talk arose at this, and though it was quite obvious that most of them had only a vague idea what I was talking about, I could see that this idea was finding a fair degree of ready acceptance, satisfying them and fitting the facts as they knew them. I saw Joss gazing at me with an expressionless face, looked him in the eye for a couple of seconds, then turned away. As a radio operator, Joss knew even better than I that, though there was still some sun-spot activity, it had reached its maximum in the previous year: and as an ex-aircraft radio operator, he knew that airliners flew on gyrocompasses, which neither sun-spots nor magnetic storms could ever affect in the slightest.

‘We’ll have something to eat now.’ I cut through the buzz of conversation. ‘Any volunteers to give Jackstraw a hand?’

‘Certainly.’ Marie LeGarde, as I might have guessed, was first on her feet. ‘I’m by way of being what you might call a mean cook. Lead me to it, Mr Nielsen.’

‘Thanks, Joss, you might give me a hand to rig a screen.’ I nodded at the injured pilot. ‘We’ll see what we can do for this boy here.’ The stewardess, unbidden, moved forward to help me also. I was on the point of objecting - I knew that this wasn’t going to be nice – but I didn’t want trouble with her, not yet. I shrugged my shoulders and let her stay.

*

Half an hour later, I had done all I could. It indeed hadn’t been nice, but both the patient and the stewardess had stood it far better than I had expected. I was fixing and binding on a stiff leather helmet to protect the back of his head and Joss was strapping him down, inside the sleeping-bag, to the stretcher, so that he couldn’t toss around and hurt himself, when the stewardess touched my arm.

‘What – what do you think now, Dr Mason?’

‘It’s hard to be sure. I’m not a specialist in brain or head injuries, and even a specialist would hesitate to say. The damage may have penetrated deeper than we think. There may be haemor-rhaging – it’s often delayed in these cases.’

‘But if there’s no haemorrhaging?’ she persisted. ‘If the damage is no worse than what you think, what you see?’

‘Fifty-fifty. I wouldn’t have said so a couple of hours ago, but he seems to have quite astonishing powers of resistance and recuperation. Better than an even chance, I would say – if he had the warmth, the food, the skilled nursing he would have in a first class hospital. As it is – well, let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Thank you.’

I looked at her, looked at the washed-out face, the faint blue circles forming under her eyes, and almost felt touched with pity. Almost. She was exhausted, and shivering with cold.

‘Bed,’ I said. ‘You’re dying for sleep and warmth, Miss – I’m so sorry, I forgot to ask your name.’

‘Ross. Margaret Ross.’

‘Scots?’

‘Irish. Southern Irish.’

‘I won’t hold it against you,’ I smiled. There was no answering smile from her. ‘Tell me, Miss Ross, why was the plane so empty?’

‘We had an “X” flight – an extra or duplicate charter for an overflow of passengers – out from London yesterday. Day before yesterday it is now, I suppose. We just stayed the night in Idlewild and had to return after we’d slept. The office phoned up people who had booked out on the evening plane, giving the chance of an earlier flight: ten of them accepted.’

‘I see. By the way, isn’t it a bit unusual to have only one stewardess aboard? On a trans-Atlantic flight, I mean?’

‘I know. There’s usually two or three – a steward and two stewardesses – or two stewards and a stewardess. But not for ten people.’

Of course. Hardly worth stewarding, you might say. Still,’ I went on smoothly, ‘it at least gives you time for the odd forty winks on these long night-flights.’

‘That wasn’t fair!’ I hadn’t been as clever as I thought, and her white cheeks were stained with red. ‘That’s never happened to me before. Never!’

‘Sorry, Miss Ross – it wasn’t really meant as a dig. It doesn’t matter anyhow.’

‘It does so matter!’ Her extraordinary brown eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘If I hadn’t been asleep I would have known what was going to happen. I could have warned the passengers. I could have moved Colonel Harrison to a front seat facing the rear—’

‘Colonel Harrison?’ I interrupted sharply.

‘Yes. The man in the back seat – the dead man.’

‘But he hadn’t a uniform on when—’

‘I don’t care. That was his name on the passenger list … If I’d known, he wouldn’t be dead now – and Miss Fleming wouldn’t have had her collar-bone broken.’

So that’s what has been worrying her, I thought. That accounts for her strange distraught behaviour. And then a moment later I realised that it didn’t account for it all – she had been behaving like that before ever she had known what had happened to any of the passengers. My slowly forming suspicions came back with renewed force: the lady would bear watching.

‘You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with, Miss Ross. The captain must have been flying blind in the storm – and we’re more than 8000 feet up here. Probably he’d no knowledge of what was going to happen until the actual moment of crashing.’ In my mind’s eye I saw again the doomed airliner, landing lights on, circling our cabin for at least ten minutes, but if Miss Ross had any such thing in her mind’s eye, it was impossible for me to detect it. She had no idea at all – or she was an extraordinarily good actress.

‘Probably,’ she murmured dully, ‘I don’t know.’

We had a hot and satisfying meal of soup, corned meat, potatoes and vegetables – everything out of cans, but passable enough for all that. It was the last satisfying meal that our guests – or ourselves, for that matter – were likely to have for some considerable time to come, but I felt the moment unpropitious for breaking that sort of news. Time enough for that tomorrow – or later in the day, rather, for it was now already after three o’clock in the morning.

I suggested that the four women sleep in the top bunks – not from any delicacy of sentiment but because it was at least twenty-five degrees warmer there than it was at ground level, and the proportional difference would increase as the night wore on after the stove had been put out. There were some half-hearted protests when they learnt that I intended to shut down the fire, but I didn’t even bother arguing with them. Like all people who have lived for any length of time in the Arctic, I had an almost pathological dread of fire.

Margaret Ross, the stewardess, refused the offer of a bunk, and said she would sleep by the injured pilot, lest he should wake and want anything during the night. I had intended doing that myself, but I saw her mind was set on it, and though I felt unaccountably uneasy about the idea, I raised no objection.

That left five empty bunks among six men -Jackstraw, Joss and I could sleep reasonably enough in our furs. Inevitably, there was some magnanimous argument over the allocation of these bunks, but Corazzini settled the argument by producing a coin and beginning to toss for it. He himself lost in the end, but accepted defeat and the prospect of a cold uncomfortable night on the floor with amiable grace.

When they were all settled down, I picked up a torch and our weather log book, glanced at Joss and made for the trap. Zagero turned in his bunk to look at me.

‘What gives, Dr Mason? Especially at this hour of night, what gives?’

‘Weather reports, Mr Zagero. That’s why we’re here, remember? And I’m already three hours late with these.’

‘Even tonight?’

‘Even tonight. Continuity is the most important thing in weather observation.’

‘Sooner you than me.’ He shivered. ‘If it’s only half as cold outside as it is in here.’

He turned his back, and Joss rose to his feet. He’d correctly interpreted my look, and I knew he was consumed with curiosity.

‘I’ll come with you, sir. Better have a last look at the dogs.’

We didn’t bother looking at either the dogs or the weather instruments. We went straight towards the tractor and huddled under the tarpaulin for what miserable shelter it could afford. True, the wind had eased, but it was colder than ever: the long winter night was beginning to close down on the ice-cap.

‘It stinks,’ Joss said flatly. ‘The whole set-up stinks.’

‘To high heaven,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s finding out where the smell comes from that the trouble lies.’

‘This fairy tale of yours about magnetic storms and compasses and radios,’ he went on. ‘What was the idea?’

‘I’d previously said I knew something they didn’t. I did. But when it came to the bit I knew I’d be better to keep it to myself. You know how this damnable cold slows up your mind – I should have realised it sooner.’

‘Realised what?’

‘That I should keep it to myself.’

‘Keep what, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Sorry, Joss. Not trying to build up suspense. The reason none of them knew anything about the crash until after it had happened is that they were all doped. As far as I could see, all of them, or nearly all, were under the influence of some sleeping drug or narcotic’

In the darkness I could almost feel him staring at me. After a long time he said softly, ‘You wouldn’t say this unless you were sure of it.’

‘I am sure of it. Their reactions, their dazed fumbling back to reality – and, above all, the pupils of their eyes. Unmistakable. Some kind of sleeping tablet mixtures, of the fast-acting kind. What is known to the trade, I believe, as Mickey Finns.’

‘But—’ Joss broke off. He was still trying to orientate his mind to this new line of thought. ‘But – they would be bound to know of it, to be aware that they had been doped, when they came to.’

‘In normal circumstances, yes. But they came to in what was, to say the least, most abnormal circumstances. I’m not saying that they didn’t experience any symptoms of weakness, dizziness and lassitude – they must have done – and what more natural than that they should ascribe any such unusual physical or mental symptoms to the effects of the crash. And what more natural, too, than that they should conceal these symptoms as best they could – and refrain from mentioning them? They would be ashamed to admit or discuss weaknesses – it’s a very human trait to show to your neighbours the very best face you can put on in times of emergency or danger.’

Joss didn’t reply at once. The implications of all this, as I’d found out for myself, took no little time for digestion, so I let him take his time and waited, listening to the lost and mournful wailing of the wind, the rustling hiss of millions of ice spicules scudding across the frozen snow of the ice-cap, and my own thoughts were in keeping with the bleak misery of the night.

‘It’s not possible,’ Joss muttered at length. I could hear his teeth chattering with the cold. ‘You can’t have some maniac rushing around an aircraft cabin with a hypo needle or dropping fizz-balls into their gin and tonics. You think they were all doped?’

‘Just about.’

‘But how could anyone—’

‘A moment, Joss,’ I interrupted. ‘What happened to the RCA?’

‘What?’ The sudden switch caught him momentarily off-balance. ‘What happened – you mean, how did it go for a burton? I’ve no idea at all, sir. All I know is that these hinges couldn’t have been knocked into the wall accidentally -not with radio and equipment weighing about 180 pounds sitting on top of them. Someone shoved them in. Deliberately.’

‘And the only person anywhere near it at the time was the stewardess, Margaret Ross. Everyone agreed on that.’

‘Yes, but why in the name of heaven should anyone want to do a crazy thing like that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said wearily. ‘There’s a hundred things I don’t know. But I do know she did it … And who’s in the best position to spike the drinks of aircraft passengers?’

‘Good God!’ I could hear the sharp hissing intake of breath. ‘Of course. Drinks – or maybe the sweets they hand out at take-off.’

‘No.’ I shook my head definitely in the darkness. ‘Barley sugar is too weak a covering-up agent to disguise the taste of a drug. Coffee, more likely’

‘It must have been her,’ Joss said slowly. ‘It must have been. But – but she acted as dazed and abnormal as any of the others. More so, if anything.’

‘Maybe she’d reason to,’ I said grimly. ‘Come on, let’s get back or we’ll freeze to death. Tell Jackstraw when you get him by himself.’

Inside the cabin, I propped the hatch open a couple of inches – with fourteen people inside, extra ventilation was essential. Then I glanced at the thermograph: it showed 48° below zero – eighty degrees of frost.

I lay down on the floor, pulled my parka hood tight to keep my ears from freezing, and was asleep in a minute.

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