Of course they'd thought him crazy. He had brought the amphibian down in the little harbor off the whaling company's base, gone ashore and greeted his old friends. There was only a handful of men stationed there; the Narwhal was being overhauled in a shipyard at San Francisco, and it wasn't the season for surface whalers. They knew that he, Ken, had been put in a sanitarium; all of them had heard his wild story about sealmen. But he concocted a plausible yarn to account for his arrival, and they had fed him and given him a berth in the bunkhouse for the night.
For the night! Ken Torrance grinned as he recalled the scene. In the middle of the night he had risen, quickly awakened four of the sleeping men, and with his gun forced them to take a torpoon from the outpost's storehouse and put it inside the amphibian's passenger compartment.
It was robbery, and of course they'd thought him insane, but they didn't dare cross him. He had told them cheerfully he was going after the Peary, and that if they wanted the torpoon back they were to direct the searching planes to keep their eyes on the place where the submarine was last heard from....
Ken came back to the present abruptly as the plane lurched. The wind was getting nasty. At least he did not have much farther to go; an hour's flying time would take him to his goal, where he must descend into the water to continue his search. His search! Had it been, he wondered, a useless one from the start? Had the submarine's crew been killed before he'd even read of her disappearance? If the sealmen got them, would they destroy them immediately?
"I doubt it," Ken muttered to himself. "They'd be kept prisoners in one of those mounds, like I was. That is, if they haven't killed any of the creatures. It hangs on that!"
An hour's time, he had reckoned; but it was more than an hour. For soon the world was blotted out by a howling dervish of wind and driven snow that time and time again snatched the amphibian from Ken's control and hurled it high, or threw it down like a toy toward the inferno of sea and ice he knew lay beneath. He fought for altitude, for direction, pitched from side to side, tumbled forward and back, gaining a few hundred feet only to feel them plucked breathtakingly out from under him as the screaming wind played with him.
Now and again he snatched a glance at the torpoon behind. The gleaming, twelve-foot, cigar-shaped craft, with its directional rudders, propeller, vision-plate and nitro-shell gun lay safely secured in the passenger compartment, a familiar and reassuring sight to Ken, who, as first torpooner of the Narwhal, had worked one for years in the chase for killer whales. Soon, it seemed, he would have to depend on it for his life.
For all the Diesel's power, it was not enough to cope with the dead weight of ice which was forming over the plane's wings and fuselage. He could not keep the altimeter up. However he fought, Ken saw that finger drop down, down—up a trifle, quivering as the racked plane quivered—and then down and down some more.
He saw that the plane was doomed. He would have to abandon it—in the torpoon—if he could.