North Cape

He had never seen such godforsaken country. The sleet and snow swept across the almost barren muskeg with an ululating keening. The gray sky pressed down thickly and the galling snow lent additional oppression to the landscape. The entire scene reminded him of Dante's description of the tenth circle of hell, so unreal and remote from earth it seemed. The predominate color was gray: gray sky, gray snow, gray rocks, gray trees, and he was the doomed soul, doomed to wander forever in this gray hell searching for the stream of Lethe. Teleman shivered at his morbid thoughts. He could feel what little heat remained in his body quickly dissipating. He knew that he had to get up and keep moving or else he would very quickly freeze to death. But soft tendrils of sleep were curling around his eyes, forcing them closed. With a quivering effort, he forced them open again and struggled to his feet. He faced the snow and rising wind and went on. Now; as the sleet stopped and-the snow fell thicker, blotting away every trace of detail in the barren landscape, he was moving on a treadmill in the middle of white nothingness. For hours it seemed to Teleman, he struggled onward as the wind rose higher, until he was again facing a thirty-knot wind. With vicious suddenness, the wind would quarter, driving him far off course. He no longer knew whether he was moving north. He had dropped the compass sometime back and now had nothing against which to check his direction. Far down in the depths of his conscious mind, he knew that, as long as he kept walking in the direction with which the terrain rose, eventually he would come to the coastal cliffs. Whether or not he would last that long never occurred to him now. Only his survival training was driving him forward, forcing him to plod forward rather than drop in his tracks to freeze to death.

The trees were totally gone, as was the brush. Dimly he knew that he was struggling to climb a steep hill. By now Teleman was nearly asleep, only his subconscious operating his body. He neither knew nor cared where he was or what he was doing except on the dimmest conscious level. But still he went on, climbing the bill that stretched away before him, apparently forever.

Suddenly the wind died for a moment and the snow swirled away as if a curtain had been drawn. Teleman was standing on the lower lip of a hill, which in actuality was the back side of the cliffs leading to the coastal waters. Then the wind came again and the snow fell harder around him. Teleman went to his knees and began to crawl forward, blindly until he had worked his way to the top and the forward edge, which was sheltered from the wind and where the snow fell more thinly than it had before. There was no place for the wind to whirl snow from the drifts to add to the blizzard. He could see, far below, the pounding sea — the waves tall and cold green, smashing into the jagged baseline of the cliffs less than thirty feet away. The waves swept in from the sea in tremendous combers that, as they approached the cliffs, curled up, drawing a paler line at the fold and collapsing against the restraining wall of rock with a shattering roar. Teleman saw that there was no beach. If there had ever been, it had surely been washed away under the onslaught of the waves. The snow was now so heavy that he could see no more than a few hundred — feet out to sea.

After-a few minutes more, the wind slicing it from the sea with the keenness of a razor forced him back from — the cliff edge. Teleman carefully backed away and then moved along paralleling the crest until he found a depression surrounded by two large boulders, which offered some protection against the wind.

Teleman huddled into the lee of the rocks and shrugged off the pack. He sat on his heels, leaning back against the rock, and let the weariness that was exhaustion flow through him. If he could only stay awake long enough to contact the ship, he thought. If the Russians did not pick up the transmission, if the ship was there, if they could get a boat in, if they could beat the Soviets to him… if… then he would have made it. In spite of his tiredness, he grinned weakly before pulling the pack over and digging through it for the radio. Those were some pretty large ifs.

The lightweight unit was almost too much for the meager remains of his strength. Teleman pulled the radio to him and leaned it against a rock. His numbed hands refused to curl around the tip to the antenna for an endless time before he managed to pull it out.