Killer

“Good idea,” said Ross. “But you’d better make it quick or we’ll all be asleep.” And it was true. They had all been so dazed with shock and fatigue since they had woken after the explosion, that it was a wonder they had managed to do this much. They were all gazing dully at their cups of soup.

Kate scooped up handfuls of the crystals from the ice, and put them in the pot which had heated the soup. “I hope it’ll not be too salty,” she said.

“No,” said Ross, his eyebrows raised with the effort of thinking, “all the salt leaches out in the first year. It’s fresh.”

As they sat in the fatigue-stunned silence, mindlessly watching the pale flames consume the planks in the fire tray, Ross was desperately trying to get his brain to function. It was absolutely necessary they understand something about the position they now found themselves in, with regard to both the floe and the pack as a whole. It was clearly his responsibility to tell them, for he knew most about the pack and he had looked over the floe with the eye of an expert. He had half-heard Job’s words on what the pack was, and the dangers of the ice, but Job’s love of theatrical expression, the hyperbolic power of his arguments would have outweighed what Simon and the others thought they understood of the facts.

“Look,” he said, his voice rusty with fatigue, and far too loud, “the Arctic is a big place . . .” It sounded flat even to him. Banal. Patronising. Simon Quick smirked. He ploughed on, unwilling to stop. No matter how badly he put them, the facts themselves would – must! – carry some weight. “The area actually inside the Arctic circle is in excess of eight million square miles. That includes a fair amount of land, but the Arctic Ocean itself is so big, it’s broken into seas for easier reference. In winter it’s almost all frozen. In the summer, the edge of the pack retreats until it gets to its smallest area around August, but it never shrinks much under an area of three million square miles.”

He looked around them. Even had they been fully awake, he doubted whether figures of this size would have meant much to them. Perhaps later he would think of some analogy which would make it spring into life. After all, three million square miles of the pack was bigger than the U.S.A. They were all still watching him, their faces blank with fatigue. They didn’t really want to know. A great wave of hopelessness broke over him. To his exhausted mind it really seemed then that this was all his fault. Five years earlier he had fought the Queen of Bitches, Antarctica; fought her and won. Since then he had hidden away, safe from ice and snow. But she had not forgiven him, not forgotten. That this was the North Pole, the Arctic, made no difference: it was the work of that terrible enemy which had cost him everything then, and was demanding more now . . .

He frowned. This was rank stupidity. How long had he been wool-gathering? He glanced round them again. Kate at least still looked vaguely expectant, and so he ploughed on.

“The pack is on average seven feet thick, although, as I’m sure you saw, areas which are actually flat, like this piece, are very rare. The problem is, of course, that the pack is never still. It moves in a clockwise direction around the centre point of the Pole. This movement, caused by the action of winds and tides, varies from two to eight miles a day. The forces needed to move something of three million square miles at that sort of speed are naturally enormous, and so, if there is the slightest hesitation or inconsistency in the movement, the pack ice folds, cracks, piles up on itself to heights of well over one hundred feet. This is clearly what has happened to form the hills back there which in turn have formed this floe.”

Nobody looked at the green iridescent humps and hollows rising between thirty and fifty feet, only yards away. In the silence the water on the fire began to boil, steam billowing impossibly thick in the dry icy air. Ross persisted. It was important they knew more about the floe.

“The floe we’re on is quite a big one, as you can see. In all, I suppose it’s about twenty acres, but of course a lot of that is at the edge and so treacherous as to be unapproachable. What we’ve got then, is this great tongue of ice about five hundred yards long, and at its widest point, two hundred and fifty yards wide. Part of it is the spinal cord of the hills, and the rest, flat plain – as you can see. On the west, the hills slope steeply down into the sea. Some of them overhang on this side, with concave faces so that the summits are highly unstable. You really ought to avoid the hills.”

He paused again. He was at the crux of the matter now: safety. How to behave on the floe: how to stand a good chance of staying alive. He decided the best approach would be to suggest modes of conduct as strongly as he could, without forcing them so much that he set people’s backs up.