blinking against the tears of penetrating cold. She felt thin watery
mucus run down her nostrils and it required an effort to lift her -arm
and wipe it away on her sleeve. The beef tea was only a little above
blood warmth, but she could not waste ume and fuel on heating it
further.
The metal pannikin passed slowly from mittened hand to numbed and clumsy
hand. They slurped the warm liquid and passed it on reluctantly, though
there were some who had neither the strength nor the interest to take
it.
come on, Mrs. Goldberg, Samantha whispered painfully. The cold seemed to
have closed her throat, and the foul air under the canopy made her head
ache with grinding, throbbing pain. You must drink! Samantha touched
the woman's face, and cut herself off. The flesh had a puttylike
texture and was cooling swiftly. It took long minutes for the shock to
pass, then carefully Samantha pulled the hood of the old woman's parka
down over her face. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. They were all,
too far sunk into lethargy.
Here/whispered Samantha to the man beside her - and she pressed the
pannikin into his hands, folding his stiff fingers around the metal to
make certain he had hold of it.
drink it before it cools., The air around her seemed to tremble suddenly
with a great burst of sound, like the bellow of a dying bull, or the
rumble of cannon balls across the roof of the sky. For long moments,
Samantha thought her mind was playing tricks with her, and only when it
came again did she raise her head.
Oh God/she whispered. They've come. It's going to be all right.
They've come to save us., She crawled to the locker, slowly and stiffly
as an old woman.
They've come. It's all right, gang, it's going to be all right/ she
mumbled, and she lit the globe on her Mejacket. In its pale glow, she
found the packet of phosphorus flares.
Come on now, gang. Let's hear it for Number 16. She tried to rouse
them as she struggled with the fastenings of the canopy. One more
cheer/ she whispered, but they were still and unresponsive, and as she
fumbled her way out into the freezing fog, the tears that ran down her
cheeks were not from the cold.
She looked up uncomprehendingly, it seemed that from the sky around her
tumbled gigantic cascades of ice, sheer sheets of translucent menacing
green ice. It took her moments to realize that the life raft had
drifted in close beneath the precipitous lee of a tabular berg. She
felt tiny and inconsequential beneath that ponderous mountain of brittle
glassy ice.
For what seemed an eternity, she stood, with her face lifted, staring
upwards -.then again the air resonated with the deep gut-shaking bellow
of the siren. It filled the swirling fog-banks with solid sound that
struck the cliff of ice above her and shattered into booming echoes,
that bounded from wall to wall and rang through the icy caverns and
crevices that split the surface of the great berg.
Samantha held aloft one of the phosphorus flares, and it required all
the strength of her frozen arm to rip the igniter tab. The flare
