oaded now, and droned on toward the ice and the cold bleak skies of
the far north. On, ever on, until Point Barrow, Alaska's northernmost
spur, was left behind to the east, and the world was one of drifting
ice on gray water. Muscles cramped, mind dulled by the everlasting
roar, head aching and weary, Ken held the amphibian to her steady
course, until a sudden wind shook her momentarily from it.

A rising wind. The skies were ugly. And then he remembered that the
men at Point Christensen had warned him of a storm that was brewing.
They'd told him that he was heading into disaster; and their
surprised, rather fearful faces appeared before him again, as he had
seen them just before taking off, after he had told them where he was
going.

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 ke