3

I was still looking at, but no longer really reading the article on aconite when it was gradually borne in upon my preoccupation that there was something very far amiss with the Morning Rose. She was still under way, her elderly oil-fired steam engines throbbing along as dependably as ever, but her motion had changed. Her rolling factor had increased till she was swinging wickedly and dismayingly through an angle of close on seventy degrees: the pitching factor had correspondingly decreased and the thudding jarring vibration of the bluff bows smashing into the quartering seas had fallen away to a fraction of what it had previously been.

I marked the article, closed the book then lurched and stumbled-I could not be said to have run for it was physically impossible-along the passageway, up the companionway, through the lounge and out on to the upper deck. It was dark but not so dark as to prevent me from gauging direction by the feel of the gale wind, by the spume blowing off the top of the confused seas. I shrank back and tightened my grip on a convenient handrail as a great wall of water, black and veined and evil, reared up on the port side, just foreword of the beam: it was at least ten feel? higher than my head. I was certain that the wave, with the hundreds of tons of water it contained, was going to crash down square on the foredeck of the trawler, I couldn't see how it could fail to, but fail it did: as the wave bore down on us, the trough to starboard deepened and the Morning Rose, rolling over to almost forty degrees, simply fell into it, pressed down by the great weight of water on its exposed port side. There came the familiar flat explosive thunderclap of sound, the Morning Rose vibrated and groaned as overstressed plates and rivets adjusted to cope with the sudden shearing strain, white, icily cold water foamed over the 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 my choice: if the Morning Rose was running into trouble, and I had a strange fey conviction that it was, Smithy was the man I wanted around.

Smithy's eyes were open and the look in them intelligent. Among other things the aconite article had stated that full intelligence is maintained to the very end. Could this be the end? Paralysis of motion, the article had said, and paralysis of motion we undoubtedly had here. Then paralysis of sensation-maybe that's why they weren't crying out in agony, it could have been that they had been screaming their heads off up on the bridge here with no one around to hear them, but now they weren't feeling anything any more. I saw and vaguely recorded the fact that there were two metal canteens lying close together on the floor, both of them very nearly emptied of food. Both of them, I would have thought, were in extremis, but for one very odd factor: there was no sign of the violent vomiting of which the article had spoken. I wished to God that somewhere, sometime, I had taken the trouble to learn something about poisons , their causes, their effects, their symptoms and aberrant symptoms which we seemed to have here-if any.

Mary Stuart came in. Her clothes were soaking and her hair was in a terrible mess, but she'd been very quick and she'd got what I'd asked her to-including a spoon, which I'd forgotten. I said: "A mug of hot water, six spoons of salt. Quick. Stir it well." Gastric lavage, the book had said, but as far as the availability of tannic acid and animal charcoal was concerned I might as well have been on the moon. The best and indeed the only hope lay in a powerful and quick-acting emetic. Alum and zinc sulphate was what the old boy in my medical school had preferred but I'd never come across anything better than sodium chloride-common salt. I hoped desperately that aconitine absorption into the bloodstream hadn't progressed too far-and that it was aconitine I didn't for a moment doubt.

Coincidence is Coincidence but to introduce some such fancy concoction as curare at this stage would be stretching things a bit. I levered Smithy into a sitting position and was just getting my hands under his armpits when a dark-haired young seaman, clad-in that bitter weather-in only jersey and jeans came hurrying into the wheelhouse. It was Allison, the senior of the two quartermasters. He looked-not stared-at the two men on the deck: he was very much a seaman cast in Smithy's mould.