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for all this was, I would have killed him without compunction. Just then Corazzini came in. After only fifteen minutes at the wheel of the tractor he had just yielded to Jackstraw he was in a pretty bad way. The bluish-white bloodless face was mottled with yellow frostbite blisters, his lips were cracked, the fingernails were beginning to discolour and his hands were in a shocking mess. True, Jackstraw, Zagero and I were little better, but Corazzini was the only one who had driven in that intense cold: he was shaking like a man with malarial fever, and from the way he stumbled up the steps I could see that his legs were gone. I helped him to a vacant seat by the stove. "Feel anything below the knees?" I asked quickly. "Not a damned thing." He tried to smile, but the effort was too painful, the blood started to well again from the open cuts on his lips. "It's pretty vicious out there, Doc. Better rub the old feet with some snow, huh?" He stooped and rumbled uselessly at laces with his numbed and bleeding fingers, but before he could move Margaret Ross was on her knees, easing off his boots with gentle fingers. Looking down at that slight figure lost beneath the bulky layers of clothing, I wondered for the hundredth time how I could ever have been crazy enough to believe about her all the things I had done. "In your own idiom, Mr Corazzini," I said, "snow is strictly for the birds. Just an old wives' tale as far as these temperatures are concerned. You'd be better rubbing your skin off with emery-paper." At 70 below, snow had the hard crystalline structure of sandstone, and, when rubbed, granulated into a gritty white powdery sand. I nodded to one of the snow-buckets on the stove. "When the temperature there reaches 85, stick your feet in it. Wait till the skin turns red. It won't be pleasant, but it'll work. If there are any blisters I'll puncture and sterilise them tomorrow." He stared at me. "Is that sort of thing going to go on all the time, Doc?" "I'm afraid so." And it did go on for all the timeor for the next ten hours, at least, during which time the temperature dropped down to the low seventies, halted and began its slow, ever so slow, upward swing again. Ten hours while the snow-buckets were never off the stove, ten hours while Mrs Dansby-Gregg, her maid, Helene and, later on, Solly Levin held blow-torches against the sides of the buckets to hurry up the melting and heating process, ten ultra compact digital camera comparison hours while we drivers suffered the regularly recurring pounding agony of circulation returning to our frozen limbs, ten hours during which we began to build up an almost pathological dread of the moment when we must again plunge our feet into hot water, ten hours during which Mahler grew steadily weaker and Marie LeGarde, falling silent for the first time, slipped down and lay huddled in a corner, eyelids closed, like one already dead. Ten hours. Ten interminable indescribable hours of suffering borrowed from purgatory. But long before these ten hours were up something happened to change the picture completely. At noon we halted the tractor. While the women were heating up soup and using a blow-torch to thaw out two cans of fruit, Jackstraw and I rigged up the radio transmitter, strung out an antenna and started triggering out our GFK call-sign. Normally, on these hand-cranked eight-watt jobs, a morse key was used for transmission while reception was by a pair of earphones, but thanks to a skilful improvisation by Joss who knew how hopelessly awkward morse was for everyone in the party except himself, the set had been rigged so that the key was used only for the call-up sign. After the link was made, a hand microphone could be used for transmission: and simply by throwing the receiving switch into the antenna lead, the microphone was transformed into a small but sufficiently effective loudspeaker. Calling up Joss was only a gesture. I'd made a promise and was keeping it, that was all. But by this time, I estimated, we were 120 miles distant from him, near enough the limit of our small set: I didn't know what effect the intense cold would have on radio transmission, but I suspected it wouldn't be anything good: there had been no aurora that morning, but the ionosphere disturbance might still be lingering on. and, of course, Joss himself had declared that his RCA was entirely beyond repair. Ten minutes passed, ten minutes during which Jackstraw industriously cranked the handle and I sent out the call-sign, GFK three times repeated, a flick of the receiver switch, ten seconds listening, then the switch pulled back and the call-sign made again. At the end of the ten minutes I sent out the last call, pushed over the receiving switch, listened briefly then stood up, resignedly gesturing to Jackstraw to stop cranking. It was then, almost in the very last instant, that the mike in my hand crackled into life. "GFX calling