"What do we do?" I kept repeating. At one point Honey Hayling woke up long enough to give me a clear answer.

  He said, between operations with the slide rule, "We'll go down and inspect the situation."

  "You mean us?" I demanded.

  "Perhaps," he said. "Shut up. You asked and I'm telling you. If Charlie's predictions are right—I haven't been all through your original data yet, so I can't be sure—there's one thing to be done."

  "That is—" I hinted.

  "We'll have to sink every one of our resources," said Hayling somberly, "in an atomic drive—for the stars."

  I stared at him.

  "If the earth becomes uninhabitable," he continued, "we could try Mars. The air's too thin for breathing there. Or Venus. That's hotter than the earth would be. The air's bad. Very bad. Chiefly carbon dioxide and formaldehyde. Those are our alternatives. Now what have you to say? I mean seriously that either we move to the stars or we die miserably in a planetary-sized Turkish bath."

  I wondered what impact this news would have on the political life of the world. Nobody would believe it. It was too fantastic. I would shortly wake up and find—

  About now, on the contrary, I dozed off.

  By high-powered strategy Hayling got us into Washington. He and Sharp left me in the lurch, so I performed the well-nigh impossible feat of booking rooms for us in a big hotel without reservations, wondered where the hell I would get the cash to pay for mine, and went out on a spree, of sorts. When I got in, I could have kicked myself. Nobody would believe it, huh?

  "We've gotten an interview with the high brass tomorrow," Sharp told me. "Honey Hayling's a living miracle. He's sold a hundred people on the idea already, and it looks like we'll be having a real polar expedition—"

  "South or north?"

  "South, of course. The effects are much more violent down there. Two volcanoes already, on Ross Island. That's the important thing. Now go to bed."

  I didn't sleep very well. I kept dreaming of the future as predicted by Sharp and Charlie, and not so distant a future at that. When I finally woke up for good, Sharp was telling me to hurry up and have breakfast because our conference was at nine.

  I never remembered to inquire what the point was of having me around—it seemed Honey never stopped boiling long enough to think about telling me to go on home. So I came to the interview.

  And to a dozen like it. I met the President and most of the population of Washington and practically all the heads of all the research projects and every meteorologist in the country, and then some. I just sat and goggled as the talk went over my head. And stayed there.

  I met three other mechanical brains and helped to check and re-check every single one of Charlie's findings and I flew to five universities on top secret trips to fetch the real big brains of the country. And Hayling saw to it how secret it was. Nobody let out a thing to the papers. I imagine that if they had done some panic would have resulted.

  Really, I came in rather handy. I flew to Upsala in Sweden and collected a seismologist—an earthquake expert—and fetched him across the Atlantic, talking German to him and French at a guy from the Sorbonne on the other side. I paid a call in Valparaiso and brought back a professor from there and got him so that he arrived in Washington knowing as much as I did about everything without any possibility of a leakage to the public.

  And after only three weeks we had a polar expedition ready and waiting. I didn't want to spend my vacation doing nothing—even in Washington—and I never wanted to stay on an extra year at college anyway, so I signed on. So did Sharp. So did Hayling.

  We'd gotten to know Honey pretty well in those three weeks. He was a man of unbounded vigour and tenacity. He pushed the biggest deals through in zero flat. Things happened when he was around.

  And that was how we up sticks and away down south in a big ice-breaker type ship that had been a whaler until they banned whaling for five years because of the decline in numbers of the whales and had never gone back to the trade. In the news just then was the strange disease killing off orange groves in California, oaks and conifers in Canada and redwoods in the big sequoia plantations of the States, all with equal indifference, and the sudden prevalence of skin cancer among sunbathers.

  Results of the radiation? Nobody could be sure yet.

  We certainly had a slap-up layout. We had a jet plane on the foredeck—they were still the last word in aviation ten years ago—and we had a complete seismographic outfit and a dozen meteorology kits. We had thermocouples and analyzers and an army of specialists to cope with them.

  Winter south of the equator. There was none of the traditional foolery crossing the line. We pressed south at a speed that creamed the water for a mile behind. Things didn't allow of seasickness.

  It was a floating laboratory, that vessel. We tested currents for temperature and come up with too much sulphur—that could only be volcanic—and too much carbon. We heard that the last people on Ross Island—there never are many—got drowned when they floated off on an iceberg, which was really serious news to us. It meant that the continental shelf ice, the solid deep stuff that coats the pole, was itself beginning to melt. No news, except that the plague on vegetation got steadily worse. So did cancer. One of our sailors developed it after working stripped in the hot sun. Our tame dermatologist pronounced on him, and henceforth sunbathing was out. Sharp looked at the sky and cursed. He and I didn't get together much, just then. He was nervy and irritable. Justifiably.

  When we got down into the real low latitudes, people started getting hot and bothered. The ocean currents were too warm, for one thing, and there was so much sulphur loose. You could often smell it floating free. And there were far too many icebergs, even for the time of year. We steamed on frantically, passing back no reports. We didn't dare. We might have started a panic which might yet prove to be without cause for all we knew.

  Then we arrived in what should have been sight of Ross Island. It wasn't there.

  Not till after we had checked every compass in the ship did we realise what had happened. Ross Island was there still, but the ice which usually topped it wasn't. And there was too much smoke in the air.

  We fired off the jet and let it scout the area. The pilot's report was startling. A new volcano had erupted on the island, and there was now a chain of hot rock—not covered by ice at all—right along a line from Erebus to Terror, and punctuated almost dead centre by the new crater. Worse—there was now a channel into the pack-ice where hot lava had melted it, and a kind of wedge-shaped split would allow us to steam right in close to the island itself.

  Which we did. It was an awesome experience. We floated up a sort of river between walls of ice, nearly vertical. Ahead there was the source of the sulphurous air.

  We found land, of a sort. Bleak hard black rock, a mere acre of it among miles of ice, but it existed all right, and it was the obvious place for a landing. First we put the seismograph ashore, to test for earthquakes, incipient or otherwise. The needle could detect nothing but the beat of the sea, so we moored securely and sent the jet off on another trip.

  The next two days were among the dullest I remember. I was just plain in the way. The various departments set up analyzers and scanners and seismos and things, and the plane swooped around the place yipping. And I put up some tents and, as I said, got in the way.

  So after two days I borrowed me a sledge and started off over the ice. And that was the way I came to make the most startling discovery of them all, one without which we might never have realised that we could do anything to stop the process of warming the earth.

  I was slithering cheerfully along, running into soft patches when I couldn't help it, and heading over the general course to be followed by our big expedition to the volcanic line the next day. The basic idea was for me to see if there were any impossible spots for the big crawlers we intended using.

  I saw a flying saucer on the horizon.

  Put that way it doesn't amount to much. But I'd never seen one nor believed the people who had, so when I saw this one I stared flabbergasted at the place where it had appeared. And then I noticed something below where the saucer had appeared. Moving. Waving its arms. A man?

  A man, I thought, maybe a survivor of the party who were mostly drowned. So I turned the sledge, gunned the motor hard, and raced towards him.

  But he didn't appear to take my approach in the way I had expected. He began to run away. This upset me. Then other things began to upset me, too. I noticed that the bulky clothing he wore was wrong for a man. The arms were too low. The body was too narrow compared with the height, for a man dressed in furs or woollen clothes. And there was a sort of box on his back. Furthermore, instead of a hood, he wore a dome made of glass or something like it.

  What really made me put on a spurt was the fact that he had three legs.

  Chapter Four

  "Volcanic Blow-Up"

  I CAUGHT UP on him fast. I hadn't bothered to think out what he was. For all I knew, he could be a tin man or an optical illusion. I was only about a hundred yards from him, and I'd had time to examine more closely the details of his dress and get-up, when, not being very good with a sledge, I hit a sharply banked outcrop of ice and turned over.

  I got out to survey the mess, and the other guy had vanished. So I fetched out a pick and a torch so that I could chop away the banked ice and put the sledge on an even keel, and made as much haste back to the ship as the clumsy vehicle could take.

  I skidded to a frantic stop and demanded everybody's attention while I shouted the news of what I had seen. Most of the party waved it aside and told me to let them carry on with their work, but Sharp, for the first time since we arrived in sight of the icepack, seemed genuinely interested in what I told him, and made certain queer remarks which gave me the impression that he had hoped for this. I was alert and sensitive in consequence of the strange sight I had seen, and I realised how much more intrigued and excited he was than he cared to reveal.

  But I swallowed my worries and climbed back into the sledge. Then I went out again to continue my job. I covered about sixty miles altogether, taking two and a half hours over it, but I saw neither man nor flying saucer again—if it had been a flying saucer.

  What I did see was the heavy black ridge of rock between the three volcanoes, and the drifting swirls of smoke that swept from the trio of majestic cones. The central, unnamed one was almost dormant, in spite of its recent creation. I parked the sledge on a convenient ridge of ice and ate some lunch while I stared at it.

  There was a thick veil of white vapour on its head, but I got the screwy idea it looked not like smoke but like steam. I told myself it couldn't be.

  There was, furthermore, a good deal of glow and sparks proceeding from both the older volcanoes, and the resultant stream of hot air made the cones look fuzzy. I sat there, enjoying the spectacle. I wished I had a camera, and made up my mind that at the next opportunity I would pinch one of the official, coloured cine films and a camera to match.

  Then I got up in horror as a large lump of pumice kicked up the snow in front of me and sank in, sizzling. I say large, and I mean big. When I dug it out, from the yard-deep burrow it had made for itself, it was still warm and about ten inches across. It weighed five or six pounds.

  Right then was when I beat it. I'm no expert on volcanoes, though I learnt some up later, but mother-wit told me that any eruption which blew six pounds of pumice a thousand yards was liable to make one's pants hot if one sat on it. Not being of an empirical turn of mind, I decided not to test the hypothesis before acting on it, so I warmed the engine in a hurry, slewed the sledge right round—it only weighed a couple of hundred pounds, all told—and then another hunk of rock churned up the landscape, spattering snow all over me. I glanced over my shoulder, and sure enough there was a good deal of smoke arising, punctuated at frequent intervals by sizable slices of primeval rock. I seemed to have chosen the precise point at which everything was coming down hardest. For the life of me I couldn't see the stuff travelling a half-mile in any other direction, in spite of the size of the holes it was leaving. It seemed to want to hit me. So I scrammed, and fast.

  Looking back as I hurried away, I saw much more smoke, and from the general feel of the air I could tell there was going to be the hell of a big quake in less than no time. So I up sticks and out of the vicinity, and, my God, did I move! I covered the intervening distance in twenty minutes—that is, I would have done. I hit the soft patches where I'd bogged down on the outward trip so fast I never noticed them, and all the time I kept thinking of the vast, steamy, column of smoke behind the shoulder of the ice ridge.

  Then it came. It came up behind me, and I saw the surface of the snow shimmer, as if the air was suddenly hot, but it wasn't the air—it was actually happening. It passed me, and the sledge bounced two feet off the ground, and the propeller chugged in anguish in back of me. I shut off the engine, and waited till I'd calmed down a bit. Then I crawled, much shaken, in the general direction of the ship, avoiding the splits and crevasses that faced me on every side. I didn't like it one little bit.

  Yes, I'd endured a really terrific earthquake, and I'd survived. But I thought of the steep ice walls of the channel we'd come up. What about them? If they'd fallen in, then we were stuck. For as long as was needed for the Government to get curious about us—in the circumstances, about three months. If the ship had survived, everything was dandy. If not—we were foredoomed to eat penguin and seal for the rest of our stay here.

  Every prospect was vile.

  I came to what should have been in sight of the camp. It wasn't.

  I gunned the engine and pulled on another half-mile at speed. The camp wasn't where it should have been. There was a sort of dip in the snow, and the ice had collapsed, filling in the narrow channel as I had feared might happen, and the top of one of the ship's masts protruded from a hole in the snow.

  Then the second shock came, and by the time it subsided, even that masthead had gone.

  I was alone.

  It took me a long time to realise that. I didn't bother to go closer to the pile of snow that had engulfed the camp and the ship. I knew it was useless. But I had no radio and no food—I'd eaten my lunch. Anyway, it wouldn't have lasted me more than a day if I'd still had it. To top things off, the gas was very low in my tanks. I had a gallon left, and no more.

  I got out and sat on the starboard runner and cursed for a while. It relieved my feelings. But I couldn't adequately express what I thought about the predicament I was in.

  Or was I?

  There was no sign of disturbance, over to the left, where the plane took off and landed. There were no traces of a smash, and there were even some of the tracks left made by the aircraft's skis. Unless it had been swallowed whole, it should still be up. I dug out my glasses and searched the sky.

  There it was, a dot on the waste of air, weaving back and forth and leaving the ghost of a vapour trail. So I wished uselessly for a radio, waved frantically for a time, and sat down philosophically to wait for it to return of its own accord.

  I wondered who would be in the plane when it came home to roost. I hoped, illogically, that Sharp would, because if I was going to starve to death I wanted to do it in the company of a friend. The plane's radio had only been intended to reach the ship—its range was at most a hundred miles. It wouldn't bring in New York or even one of the South American stations, much less get a message back to them, unless we could soup it up, and I didn't know anything about radio.

  I shivered a little in the rising wind, and realised I couldn't see half as far one way as I could the other. There was a hell of a blizzard due. I cast anxious glances at the plane. It was getting a little larger, and I wondered which of the two would get here first.

  It was a dead heat, actually. I waved the jet down just as the first snow hit my face. As the plane skidded to a stop, I ran up close to it and flung open the door. Sharp was in the pilot's seat. His white and startled face met mine, asked wordless questions. Honey Hayling was the other occupant of the plane. He carried binoculars and a camera.

  "There's been a hell of an earthquake," I said grimly. "The ship's gone down and the camp is buried. As far as I know, we're the only survivors. And there's a blizzard coming up."

  As I said the words, the snow engulfed the plane, and I scrambled inside, slamming the door. "We can't—stay—here!" I yelled above the roar of the storm. "We'll be snowed under!"

  Sharp yelled back, "We've only fuel for a half hour's flying! Where the hell can we go?"

  Then I had the brainwave whose indirect result was the salvation of the world. "Get over to the volcanoes!" I yelled. "Put down in lee of them!"

  "Isn't any lee in a storm like this," Sharp shouted. But he was back in the pilot's seat, and the roar of the jet was added to the general hubbub. I sat violently down in the passenger's seat beside Honey, who was looking as if a dozen simultaneous volcanoes had erupted in his face, and watched fascinated as Sharp jockeyed the plane into the air. I was just too scared to be airsick.

  Sharp did a magnificent job of piloting, and he fought us up, up, up, until the indicator said two thousand feet and we were streaming across the intervening distance as if all the devils in or out of hell were after us.

  We didn't really land—we came down, on a patch of smooth snow, as I afterwards learnt, nearly a hundred yards from the central volcano of the three. I was out cold, having hit my head across a stanchion when we ran into the rock which broke our port ski. But I heard what happened. More or less, this is it.

  Sharp put her down in a masterly fashion, but the broken ski tilted her over, as well as knocking me out, and the door could not be opened. There was a bank of drifted snow in the way. So they made me comfortable and prepared to spend the duration of the storm there —the sun had set long ago, which didn't improve matters—and wondered how long this would go on.

 

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