Killer

He winked. “There’s lines and hooks in that box we opened first. I’m going to try to catch some fresh fish for supper.”

“Good idea!” said Simon Quick. “We’ll not have much else to do now until we get picked up.”

“How long d’you think that’ll take?” asked the doctor.

Quick shrugged. “They got a message off before we came down. Someone should be looking for us.”

“Will we have drifted far?” asked Kate.

“Up to thirty miles a day,” said Ross.

“How long have we been adrift, then?”

They all looked at Job, who looked at the declining sun. “Three days.”

“Three days!” said Preston, surprised. “It hasn’t seemed that long.”

“Well, it’s about sixty hours since we crashed; and we’ve been sleeping for at least half of that.”

“That’s nearly a hundred miles away from where we crashed!” Preston gasped. “And heading for Russian waters . . .”

They were all quiet after that, and sat sipping their coffee thoughtfully.

Preston was the first to move. He left his plate on the ground, and went across to the supply tent. “I’d better get things set up before the bait freezes solid,” he said cheerfully, waving the heavy green line, and the assortment of hooks.

He found he was quite excited at the prospect of doing some fishing, even if it was only dangling ham in the ocean on the end of a hand-line. Neither Ross nor Job told him that the chances of him catching anything were minimal; he knew it anyway, but he didn’t care. The thought of sitting in the camp with nothing to do was irksome, but the idea of sitting doing nothing while holding a line in the water was considered by millions of people to be a most acceptable occupation.

He checked the tackle: a dozen hooks of different sizes, all covered in tiny spines the better to hold in a fish’s mouth; and the line itself made of braided nylon coloured green and with a breaking-strain of at least two hundred and fifty pounds. It was by no means the kit for a sportsman: there was no subtlety in it, no art. The fish, once it became hooked on the deadly spines, really stood no chance whatsoever. And that, of course, was the whole object. This kit was not designed to give people sport, but to keep them alive.

Preston expertly looped a weight on to the end of the green line, attached three hooks of different sizes to the first eighteen inches of the tackle, biggest at the bottom and graduating up, and slipped his firm chunks of ham over their nickel-gleaming spined curves.

“Right.” He picked up a small box and the axe, and went up the floe towards the old campsite. “Wish me luck,” he called over his shoulder.

“Break a hook,” called Ross.

“Be careful,” called Kate.

He waved his left hand carefully, avoiding the hooks which dangled from it.

At the top of the floe, where the camp had stood, there were holes enough for all of them to fish through. He chose one carefully, although he was completely ignorant of the correct things to look for. He pulled a box up, sat down with the line in his hand, and then fed it carefully into the black-green depths at his feet. There was one hundred and fifty yards of it, and he let out half its length, watching it dreamily as it angled down, pulled away by the drag as the currents moved the floe faster than they could move fine line and dead weights. Lacking a rod, he rested his arm on his knee so that it reached over the hole. At first he had worn only his woollen gloves, but his hands soon became cold so that he put his mittens back on. The line was difficult to hold with his hands covered by the heavy sealskin, so he wrapped it round his wrist a couple of times, then he just sat and dreamed, not really expecting to catch anything at all.

There was much to dream about. Through the narrow slits in his mask, his surroundings were still staggeringly beautiful. The flat green ocean stretched all around him, calm and quiet, its steady colour interrupted only by the mottlings of the floes and the cloudshadows, and the burning gilt of sunshine. It reached to the far horizons, to the fine green-smoke line of the pack far to the north, to the great smooth arc to east and south where the horizon was lost in a still gold mist, and the pale gold sky faded into the pale gold sea somewhere near Alaska . . .