Free Bear Island by Alistair MacLean Page A

starboard side and swirled around my ankles and then it was gone, gurgling through the scuppers as the Morning Rose rig" righted herself and rolled far over on its other side. There was no worry about any of this, no threat to safety and life, this was what Arctic trawlers had been built for and the Morning Rose could continue to absorb this punishment indefinitely. But there was cause for worry, if such a word can be used to express a desperately acute anxiety: that massive wave, which had caught the trawler on her port now, had knocked her almost twenty degrees off course. She was still twenty degrees off course, and twenty degrees off course she remained: nobody was making any attempt to bring her round. Another, and a smaller sea, and then she was lying five more degrees over to the cast and here, too, she remained. I ran for the bridge ladder.
        I bumped into and almost knocked down a person at the precise spot where I'd bumped into Mary dear an hour ago. Contact this time was much more solid and the person said "Oof!" or something of that sort. The kind of gasp a winded lady makes is quite different from a man's and instinct and a kind of instantaneous reasoning told me that I had bumped into the same person again: Judith Haynes would be in bed with her spaniels and Nary Darling was either with Allen or in bed dreaming about him: neither, anyway, was the outdoor type.
        I said something that might have been misconstrued as a brusque apology, side-stepped and had my foot on the first rung when she caught my arm with both hands.
        "Something's wrong. I know it is. What?" Her voice was calm, just loud enough to make itself heard over the high-pitched obbligato of the wind in the rigging. Sure she knew something was wrong, the sight of Dr. Marlowe moving at anything above his customary saunter was as good as a police or air-raid siren any day. I was about to say something to this effect when she added: "That's "why I came on deck," which effectively rendered still-born any cutting remarks I'd been about to make, because she'd been aware of trouble before I'd been: but, then, she hadn't had her thoughts taken up with Aconitum napellus.
        "The ship's not under command. There's nobody in charge on the bridge, nobody trying to keep a course.”
        “Can I do anything?" She was wonderful. "Yes. There's a hot water electric geyser on the galley bulkhead by the stove. Bring up a jug of hot water, not too hot to drink, a mug and salt. Lots of salt."
        I sensed as much as saw her nod and then she was gone. Four seconds later I was inside the wheelhouse. I could dimly see one figure crumpled against the chart table, another apparently sitting straight by the wheel, but that was all I could see. The two overhead lights were dull yellow glows. It took me almost fifteen frantic seconds to locate the instrument panel just foreword of the wheel, but only a couple of seconds thereafter to locate the rheostat and twist it to its clockwise maximum. I blinked in the hurtfully sudden wash of white light.
        Smithy was by the chart table, Oakley by the wheel, the former on his side, the latter upright, but that, I could see, didn't mean that Oakley was in any better state of health than the first mate, it was just that neither appeared capable of moving from the positions they had adopted. Both had their heads arched towards their knees, both had their hands clasped tightly to their midriffs. Neither of them was making any sound. Possibly neither was suffering pain and that the contracted positions they had assumed resulted from some wholly involuntary motor mechanism: it was equally possible that their vocal cords were paralysed.
        I looked at Smithy first. One life is as important as the next, or so any one of a group of sufferers will think, but in this case I was concerned with the greatest good of all concerned and the fact that the "all" here just Coincidentally included me had no bearing on