'We'll find nothing,' Pitt said firmly. 'What the fire left, our unknown friends have undoubtedly picked clean.' As if to emphasize his words, he played the beam on the deck, revealing several overlapping footprints in the soot traveling to and from the open hatchway. 'Let's see what they've been up to.'
They went out into the alleyway, stepping through the ashes and debris on the deck, moved to the next compartment, and entered. It had been the radio room.
Most of the ruins were scarcely recognizable. The bunk and furniture were skeletons of charred wood, the remains of the radio equipment one congealed mess of melted metal and hardened drippings of stained solder.
Their senses by now had become accustomed to the overpowering stench and the grotesque carbonized surroundings, but they weren't the least bit prepared for the hideously misshapen form on the deck.
'Oh, good God!' Hunnewell gasped. He dropped his flashlight and it rolled across the deck and came to rest against the shockingly disfigured remains of a head, illuminating the skull and teeth where they burst from the incinerated flesh.
'I don't envy him his death,' Pitt murmured.
The ghastly sight was too much for Hunnewell. He staggered off into one corner and retched for several minutes. When he finally returned to Pitts side. he looked as if he'd recently returned from the grave 'I'm sorry,' he said sheepishly. 'I've never seen a cremated corpse before. I didn't have the vaguest idea what one looked like- never gave it much thought really. It's not a pretty sight, is it?'
'There's no such thing as a pretty corpse,' Pitt said. He was beginning to feel a touch of sickness himself. 'If that lump of ashes on the deck is any indication of things to come, we should find at least fourteen more just like it.'
Hunnewell grimaced as he stooped and picked up his flashlight. Then he slipped a notebook from a pocket, held the light under his arm and flipped through several pages. 'Yes, you're right. The ship sailed with six crewmen and nine passengers: fifteen in all.' He fumbled a little before finding another page. 'This poor devil must be the radio operator-Svendborg-Gustav Svendborg.'
'Maybe, maybe not. The only one who can tell for certain is his dentist.' Pitt stared at what had once been a breathing, flesh-and-blood man, and he tried to imagine how the end had come. A furnacelike wall of red and orange flame, a brief unearthly scream, the searing shock of pain that drove the mind into instant insanity, and the limbs flailing in the contorted dance of death.
To die by fire, he reflected, the last seconds of life spent in indescribable agony, was an extinction abhorred by every living man and beast.
Pitt kneeled down and studied the body more closely. His eyes squinted and his mouth tightened. It must have been almost as he had visualized, but not quite. The scorched form was curled in the fetus position, the knees drawn up almost to the chin and the arms pulled tightly against the sides, contracted by the mt-nse heat upon the flesh. But there was something else that caught Pitts attention. He focused the flashlight on the deck beside the body, illuminating dimly the twisted steel legs of the radio operator's chair where they protruded from beneath his disfigured remains.
Hunnewell, his face void of all color, asked: 'What do you find so interesting in that grisly thing?'
'Have a look,' Pitt said. 'It would seem that poor Gustav was sitting down when he died. His chair literally burned out from under him.'
Hunnewell said nothing, only eyed Pitt questioningly.
'Doesn't it strike you strange,' Pitt continued, 'that a man would calmly burn to death without bothering to stand up or make an effort to escape?'
'Nothing strange about it,' Hunnewell said stonily. 'The fire probably engulfed him while he was hunched over the transmitter sending out a Mayday.'
He began to choke with sickness again. 'God, we're not doing him any good with our conjectures. Let's get out of here and search the rest of the ship while I'm still able to walk.'
Pitt nodded and turned and passed through the doorway. Together they made their way into the bowels of the derelict. The engine room, the galley, the salon, everywhere they went their eyes were laid on the same horrifying spectacle of death as in the radio room. By the time they discovered the thirteenth and fourteenth bodies in the wheelhouse, Hunnewell's stomach was slowly becoming immune. He consulted his notebook several more times, marking certain pages with a pencil until only one name between the padded covers remaimed that didn't have a neat line drawn through it.
'That's about it,' he said, snapping the book shut.
'We've found them all except the man we came for.'
Pitt lit a cigarette and blew a long cloud of blue smoke and seemed to consider for a moment. 'They were all charred so far beyond recognition, he could have been any one of them.'
'But he wasn't,' Hunnewell said positively. 'The body won't be too difficult to identify, at least not for me.' He paused. 'I knew our quarry rather well, you know.'
Pitts eyebrows raised. 'No, I didn't know.'
'No secret really.' Hunnewell puffed on the lenses of his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief.
'The man we've lied, schemed and risked our lives to find-unfortunately, as it probably turns out, dead- attended one of my classes at the Oceanographic Institute six years ago. A brilliant fellow.' He motioned toward the two cremated forms on the deck. 'A pity if he ended like this.'
'How can you be certain you'll be able to tell him from the others?' Pitt asked.
'By his rings. He had a thing about rings. Wore them on every finger except his thumbs.'
'Rings don't make a positive identification.'
Hunnewell smiled a little. 'There is also a toe missing from the left foot. Will that do?'
'It would,' Pitt said thoughtfully. 'But we haven't found a corpse that qualifies. We've already searched the entire ship.'
'Not quite.' Hunnewell pulled a slip of paper from the notebook and unfolded it under the beam of his flashlight. 'This is a rough diagram of the vessel. I traced a copy from the original in the maritime archives.' He pointed at the creased paper. 'See here, just beyond the chartroom. A narrow ladder drops to a compartment directly beneath a false funnel. It's the only entrance.'
Pitt studied the crude tracing. Then he turned and stepped outside the chartroom. 'The opening is here all right. The ladder is burned all to hell, but enough of the rung bracing is left to support our weight.'
The isolated compartment-situated in the exact center of the hull without benefit of portholes-was savaged even worse than the others; the steel plating on the walls curved outward, buckled like crinkled sheets of wallpaper. It appeared. empty. No trace of anything that remotely resembled furnishings was left after the conflagration. Pitt was just kneeling down, poking the ashes, searching for a sign of a body, when Hunnewell shouted.
'Here!' He fell to his knees. 'Over here in the corner.' Hunnewell focused the light on the sprawled outline of what had once been a man, now a barely discernible pile of charred bones. Only bits of the jawbone and pelvis were recognizable. Then he bent very low and carefully brushed away an area of the remains.
When Hunnewell stood up, he held several small pieces of distorted metal in his hand.
'Not proof positive perhaps. But about as certain as we'll ever get.'
Pitt took the fused bits of metal and held them under the beam of his light.
'I remember the rings quite well,' Hunnewell said.
'The settings were beautifully handcrafted and inlaid with eight different semiprecious stones native to Iceland. Each was carved in the likeness of an ancient Nordic god.'
'Sounds impressive but garish,' Pitt said.
'To you, a stranger maybe,' Hunnewell returned quietly. 'Yet if you had known him-' His voice trailed off.
Pitt eyed Hunnewell speculatively. 'Do you always form sentimental attachments to your students?'
'Genius, adventurer, scientist, legend, the tenth richest man in the world before he was twenty-five. A kind and gentle person totally untouched by his fame and wealth. Yes, I think you could safely say a friendship with Kristjan Fyrie could result in a sentimental attachment.'
How strange, Pitt thought. It was the first time the scientist had mentioned Fyrie's name since they had left Washington. And it had been uttered in a hushed, almost reverent tone. The same inflection, Pitt recalled, that Admiral Sandecker had also used when he spoke of the Icelander.
Pitt was conscious of no awe as he stood over the pitiful remains of the man who had been one of the most
