ONCE MORE THE Fortune Bey was far from land. It plunged through the waves, leading the iceberg across the ocean. By now Captain Wrick had learned all the skills of an iceberg-tower: he could tell how the ice would move when the ship sailed into a fresh current or when the wind changed direction and picked up speed, how it would pitch when the waves rose or a storm appeared on the horizon. Sometimes he let out the chains and allowed more slack for the iceberg to float further away, and at other times he ordered his men to wind the chains in until it trailed close behind. He began to feel as if he had been towing icebergs all his life.
But for Bartlett, this part of the journey was not the same as before. Before, it had been an adventure, wondering how they could get a melidrop, then whether they could capture an iceberg, then whether they could tow it. Perhaps he had not really believed that it could be done. But now, they did have an iceberg, and they were towing it, and there was a melidrop inside it. The difficulties had been overcome, the adventurous part was over. Yet there was still a whole ocean to be crossed before the melidrop could be delivered.
One day, when they had already been sailing for two weeks, another ship appeared in the distance. It changed course and came closer. Suddenly a row of coloured flags appeared amongst its sails. Captain Wrick put his telescope to his eye. He muttered an order to Michael, and a moment later a row of flags answered from the mast of the Fortune Bey.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Bartlett.
‘The other captain’s coming aboard.’ Captain Wrick laughed. ‘He would like to drink the Queen’s health. He says that he will bring the whisky if I supply the ice!’
Two of Captain Wrick’s men rowed out to the iceberg and cut a bucket full of ice-cubes, which were put into the excellent whisky that Captain Trobottam, the captain from the other ship, brought with him. Captain Wrick, Michael, Captain Trobottam, Bartlett and Jacques le Grand solemnly raised their glasses to the Queen’s health and settled back in their chairs in Captain Wrick’s cabin to enjoy their whisky. Even Gozo had a glass, although he coughed and spluttered each time he swallowed. Everybody was enjoying the occasion immensely and obviously thought they were extremely clever to have found a way of drinking whisky and ice at sea. Only Bartlett felt ill at ease, and kept glancing at Jacques le Grand who was shovelling another load of ice-cubes into his glass and pouring himself seconds. It wasn’t the whisky that Bartlett was worried about. It was the ice.
The iceberg was melting. Really melting.
Of course everyone knew that the ice was going to melt, and everyone knew that it had started to melt even before they had stopped to pick up the melidrop, but somehow back then the iceberg was still so big that it just wasn’t possible to imagine it melting away to nothing. But now you could see the difference day by day. Each day the jagged edges of the iceberg looked a little smoother, it became a little smaller, and the smaller it became the more quickly it appeared to diminish.
A couple of weeks later Bartlett woke up in a cold sweat. He had just had a terrible dream: the iceberg had broken up into five little pieces and each of the pieces was floating off by itself and melting away five times as fast as the single block would have done. He rushed up on deck. The iceberg was still there in one piece, drifting behind the ship and gleaming in the moonlight. But what would happen if it really did break up? And how quickly would it melt even if it stayed in one piece? They were still not even halfway across the ocean. Even if the winds were favourable, there were still another four weeks of sailing to go. Who could tell if the iceberg would last?
Captain Wrick, of course, thought he could. Smoking his pipe, he made all sorts of calculations and came up with a different answer every day. Half the time he was sure the iceberg would make it—the rest of the time he was sure it wouldn’t. The day he agreed to chop icecubes for Captain Trobottam was one of the days when he thought it would. The next morning he emerged from his cabin and apologised to Bartlett. There were new calculations! He had forgotten to take into account the fact that seabirds sometimes landed on the iceberg, warming it up with the heat of their bodies. The iceberg, Captain Wrick announced, would therefore melt faster than he had calculated. In fact, there was no hope. No hope, he said. He wished now that he had never given the order to cut ice-cubes from it. But an order cannot be taken back once it has been given, just as whisky is gone once it is drunk. There was no point wishing otherwise. In fact, he said, trying to cheer Bartlett up, if the iceberg wasn’t going to make it, it couldn’t hurt to chop off a few ice-cubes while they still had the chance!
Bartlett stopped listening to Captain Wrick’s predictions. He just asked him to drink his whisky without ice.
They had to drill a new hole for the melidrop because the ice melted so much that it was now only a few inches below the surface. Ten days later it was almost at the surface again. This time, when they drilled, a hunk of ice broke off and floated away. When they tried in a different place, the end of the drill broke through the bottom and the hole filled with water. So they cut some ice and put it in a barrel with the frozen melidrop and took it back on board the Fortune Bey.
After that, someone had to row across to the iceberg each day and cut a fresh supply of ice. The ship was making slow progress. Bartlett hardly slept. Ten times a day he went to the back of the ship to look at the iceberg and remind himself how much was left. All night he lay awake in his hammock, wondering how much would remain in the morning. He could hardly bear to think of the magnificent iceberg that they had captured all those long weeks before, when it was big enough to have sunk a ship and large enough for a whole family of seals to roll around on. Now, it could not even hold a melidrop.
It was a question of time. Would the iceberg last long enough? Would the melidrop spoil? It was no longer the expedition to the Margoulis Caverns that made Bartlett want to succeed—he hadn’t thought about that for a long time. Getting the melidrop had been a real adventure in itself. Just as Sutton Pufrock had predicted, it had required all the tools of the explorer: Inventiveness, Desperation and Perseverance. But now it was out of his hands. Now there was nothing to do but wait as the Fortune Bey made its way across the sea. It was all a question of time. And as the iceberg melted, time was running out.