Streaking across the ice, the rocket plane roared into the chill air. I circled above the schooner, climbed higher, and then headed northward across the ice-pack. Within ten minutes, I was flying over the endless expanse of the frozen Arctic Ocean, warm and snug in the oxygen-filled cabin.
A vast white plain, glittering like diamonds in the sunlight, the sea ice had jammed and split, and there were long leads of open water. My mission was to chart the easiest route toward the Pole, so the sleds would lose no time detouring around leads or scrambling over ridges. Once a weather observation camp was established, I would carry in supplies in the plane.
Hundreds of thousands of square miles of the enormous sea of ice had never been seen by man. Earth's last real home of mystery was dazzlingly beautiful — but it was murderous, terrifying, sinister…
Absorbed in keeping the plane on its course and making a map of the ice below, my sense of time was temporarily paralyzed. The rocket motor roared tirelessly, and the ice unrolled endlessly below. When my ship lurched sharply, I abruptly realized that the wind was suddenly rising. I looked around, startled. A huge dark wall was rising across the southern horizon.
"Damn it, I'll never call myself a weather prophet again," I swore. "There just couldn't be any storm. But there it is!"
I banked around sharply and flew southward, fighting to rise above the fury. But the higher I climbed, the higher the black, boiling wall of the storm seemed to rise. I knew I was caught.
"Two minutes to live," I gritted. "It'll be a fast death—"
Driving before it a cloud of stinging snow, the storm smacked my plane like a giant hand. Stunned by the impact, deafened, I swung the nose around and let the wind sweep the plane northward. There was no hope of fighting. I could only run before the gale until its fury subsided. The whole sky was dark and raging around me, filled with screaming wind and snow. Gripping the firing wheel, I battled to keep the reeling plane in the air.
But why did the rune key inside my shirt seem to throb with frantic warning? Why did that alien voice in my mind seem eager and exultant? Why did I feel there was something purposeful about this gale's direction? The storm had come up suddenly out of a clear sky as soon as my plane was well in the air. Now it was hurling me straight in one direction.
The imminent peril of death grew less unnerving than the mounting suspicion that there was something deliberate about the storm. The warning force throbbing from the rune key, and the wildly exultant alien voice in my brain, combined to demoralize me.