“What are we going to do?” Her voice was strained and shaky, her face a pale blur in the reflected light. “Oh, Johnny, hat are we going to do?”

“I’m going back to bed.” Heaven only knew I felt like it. Then I’ll waste my time trying to figure out how to save Dr. Caroline.”

“Dr. Caroline? I don’t see — why Dr. Caroline?”

“Because he’s number one for the high jump, as things stand. Long before the rest of us. Because he’s the man who’s going to arm the twister,” I said patiently. “Do you think he’ll transfer him to the Ticonderoga and let him acquaint the captain with the fact that the coffin he’s taking back to the states contains not Senator Hoskins but an armed and ticking atom bomb?”

“Where’s it all going to end?” There was panic, open panic, in her voice now, a near hysteria. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. It’s like some dark nightmare.” She had her hands twisted in my lapels, her face buried in my jacket well, anyway, her old man’s jacket and her voice was muffled. “Oh, Johnny, where’s it all going to end?”

“A touching scene, a most touching scene,” a mocking voice said from close behind me. “It all ends here and now. This moment.”

I whirled round, or at least I tried to whirl round, but I couldn’t even do that properly. What with disengaging Susan’s grip, the weakness in my leg, and the lurching of the ship, the sudden turn threw me completely off balance and I stumbled and fell against the ship’s side.

A powerful light switched on, blinding me, and in black silhouette against the light I could see the snub barrel of an automatic.

“On your feet, Carter.” There was no mistaking the voice. Tony Carreras, no longer pleasant and affable, but cold, hard, vicious, the real Tony Carreras at last. “I want to see you fall when this slug hits you. Clever-clever Carter. Or so you thought. On your feet, I said! Or you’d rather take it lying there? Suit yourself.”

The gun lifted a trifle. The direct no-nonsense type, he didn’t believe in fancy farewell speeches. Shoot them and be done with it. I could believe now that he was his father’s son. My bad leg was under me and I couldn’t get up. I stared into the beam of light, into the black muzzle of the gun. I stopped breathing and tensed myself. Tensing yourself against a.38 fired from a distance of five feet is a great help, but I wasn’t feeling very logical at the moment.

“Don’t shoot!” Susan screamed. “Don’t kill him or we’ll all die.”

The torch beam wavered, then steadied again. It steadied on me. And the gun hadn’t shifted any that I could see. Susan took a couple of steps towards him, but he fended her off, stiff-armed. “Out of the way, lady.” I’d never in my life heard such concentrated venom and malignance. I’d misjudged young Carreras all right. And her words hadn’t even begun to register on him, so implacable was his intention. I still wasn’t breathing and my mouth was as dry as a kith.

“The twister!” Her voice was urgent, compelling, desperate. “He’s armed the twister!”

“What? What are you saying?” This time she had got through. “The twister? armed?” The voice malignant as ever, but I thought I detected overtones of fear.

“Yes, Carreras, armed!” I’d never known before how important lubrication of the throat and mouth was to the human voice; a buzzard with tonsillitis had nothing on my croak. “Armed, Carreras, armed!”

The repetition was not for emphasis; I couldn’t think of anything else to say, how to carry this off, how to exploit the few seconds’ grace that Susan had bought for me. I shifted the hand that was propping me up, the one in the black shadow behind me, as if to brace myself against the pitching of the Campari. My fingers closed over the handle of the hammer I’d dropped. I wondered bleakly what I was going to do with it. The torch and the gun were as steady as ever.

“You’re lying, Carter.” The confidence was back in his voice.

“God knows how you found out about it, but you’re lying: you don’t know how to arm it.”

That was it: keep him talking, just keep him talking. “I don’t. But Dr. Slingsby Caroline does.”

That shook him, literally. The torch wavered. But it didn’t waver enough.

“How do you know about Dr. Caroline?” He demanded hoarsely. His voice was almost a shout. “How do you…”

“I was speaking to him to-night,” I said calmly. “Speaking with him! But but there’s a key to arm this. The only key to arm it. And my father has it.”

“Dr. Caroline has a spare. In his tobacco pouch. You never thought to look, did you, Carreras?” I sneered.

“You’re lying,” he repeated mechanically. Then, more strongly: “Lying, I say, Carter! I saw you tonight. I saw you leave the sick bay — my God, do you think I was so stupid as not to get suspicious when I saw the sentry drinking coffee given him by kind-hearted Carter? Locked it up, followed you to the radio office and then down to Caroline’s cabin. But you never went inside, Carter. I lost you then for a few minutes, I admit. But you never went inside.”

“Why didn’t you stop us earlier?”

“Because I wanted to find out what you were up to. I found it.”

“So he’s the person we thought we saw!” I said to Susan. The conviction in my voice astonished even myself. “You poor fool, we noticed something in the shadows and left in a hurry. But we went back, Carreras. Oh yes, we went back. To Dr. Caroline. And we didn’t waste any time talking to him either. We had a far smarter idea than that. Miss Beresford wasn’t quite accurate. I didn’t arm the twister. Dr. Caroline himself did that.” I smiled and shifted my eyes from the beam of the torch to a spot behind and to the right of Carreras. “Tell him, doctor.”

Carreras half turned, cursed viciously, swung back. His mind was fast, his reactions faster; he’d hardly even begun to fall for the old gag. All he’d allowed us was a second of time, and in that brief moment I hadn’t even got past tightening my grip on the hammer. And now he was going to kill me.

But he couldn’t get his gun lined up. Susan had been waiting for the chance; she sensed that I’d been building up towards the chance.

She dropped her lantern and flung herself forward even as Carreras had started to turn and she ad only about three feet to go. Now she was clinging desperately to his gun arm, all her weight on it, forcing it down towards the floor. I twisted myself convulsively forward and that two-pound hammer came arching over my shoulder and flew straight for Carreras’ face with all the power, all the hatred and viciousness that was in me.

He saw it coming. His left hand, still gripping the torch, as raised high to smash down on the unprotected nape of Susan’s neck. He jerked his head sideways, sung out his left arm in instinctive reaction: the hammer caught him just below the left elbow with tremendous force; his torch went flying through the air, and the hold was plunged into absolute darkness. Where the hammer went I don’t know; a heavy rate screeched and rumbled across the floor just at that moment and I never heard it land.

The crate ground to a standstill. In the sudden momentary silence I could hear the sound of struggling, of heavy breathing. I was slow in getting to my feet; my left leg was practically useless, but maybe it only seemed slow to me. Fear, then it is strong enough, has the curious effect of slowing up time. And I was afraid. I was afraid for Susan. Carreras, except as the source of menace to her, didn’t exist for me at the moment. Only Susan: he was a big man, a powerful man; He could break her neck with a single wrench, kill her with a single blow.

I heard her cry out, a cry of shock or fear. A moment’s silence, a heavy soft thump as of falling bodies, a scream of agony, again from Susan, and then that silence again.

They weren’t there. When I reached the spot where they had been struggling, they weren’t there. For a second I stood still in that impenetrable darkness, bewildered, then my hand touched the top of the three-foot baffle and I had it: in their wrestling on that crazily careening deck they’d staggered against the baffle and toppled over on to the floor of the hold. I was over that baffle before I had time to think, before I knew what I was doing; the bo’sun’s knife was in my hand, the needle-pointed marlinespike open, the locking shackle closed.