Free Night Without End by Alistair MacLean Page B

Mason." 
         
         "Thank you, Senator. At least I know who you are." Indeed, thanks to his magnificent flair for self-publicity, half the Western world knew who this outspoken, bitterly - but fairly - anti-communist, near isolationist senator from the south-west was. "On a European tour?" 
         
         "You might say that." He had the politician's gift for investing even the most insignificant words with a statesmanlike consideration. "As Chairman of one of our Appropriation committees, I -well, let's call it a fact-finding tour." 
         
         "Wife and secretaries gone ahead by humble passenger steamer, I take it," Zagero said mildly. He shook his head. "That was a fearful stink your Congressional investigation boys raised recently about the expenses of US senators abroad." 
         
         "That was quite unnecessary, young man," Brewster said coldly. "And insulting." 
         
         "I believe it was," Zagero apologised. "Not really intended as such. Sorry, Senator." He meant it. 
         
         What a bunch, I thought despairingly, what a crowd to be stuck with in the middle of the Greenland ice-plateau. A business executive, a musical comedy star, a minister of religion, a boxer with an uninhibited if cultured tongue, his zany manager, a London society playgirl and her young German maid, a Senator, a taciturn Jew and a near-hysterical hostess - or one apparently so. And a gravely injured pilot who might live or die. But willy-nilly I was stuck with them, stuck with the responsibility of doing my damnedest to get these people to safety, and the prospect appalled me. How on earth was I even to start to go about it, go about it with people with no arctic clothing to ward off the razor-edged winds and inhuman cold, people lacking in all knowledge and experience of arctic travel, even lacking, with two or three exceptions, the endurance and sheer muscular strength to cope with the savagery of the Greenland ice-cap? I couldn't even begin to guess. 
         
         But whatever else they were lacking in at that moment, it wasn't volubility: the life-giving warmth of the brandy had had the unfortunate side effect of loosening their tongues. Unfortunate, that is, from my point of view: they had a hundred and one questions to ask, and they seemed to think that I should have the answer to all of them. 
         
         More accurately, they had only half a dozen questions to ask, with a hundred and one variations of these. How was it possible for a pilot to veer so many hundreds of miles off course? Could the compasses have gone wrong? Could the pilot have had a brain-storm? But then surely both co-pilot and second pilot would have known something was wrong? Could the radio have been damaged? It had been a bitterly cold afternoon even when they had left Gander, was it possible that some of the naps and controls had iced up, forcing them off course? But if this were the case, why hadn't someone come to warn them of the possibility of the crash? 
         
         I answered all of their questions as best I could but these answers were all to the same effect, that I didn't really know anything more about it than they did. 
         
         "But you said some time ago that you did, perhaps, know one thing more than we did." It was Corazzini who put the question, and he was looking at me shrewdly. "What was that, Dr Mason?" 
         
         "What? Ah, yes, I remember now." I hadn't forgotten, but the way things were shaping up in my mind I'd had second thoughts about mentioning it, and had time to think up a plausible alternative. "I need hardly tell you that it's nothing that I actually know, Mr Corazzini - how could I, / wasn't in the plane - just a reasonably informed guess in the absence of all other solutions. It's based on the scientific observations made here and in other IGY stations in Greenland, some of them over the past eighteen