had retreated to the door. His eyes were nervous, his
face pale.

"It's orders, Mr. Torrance. You've been under observation treatment,
and the doctors left strict orders that you must stay."

The young man throbbed with dangerous anger. His hands clenched and
unclenched. He burst out, in a last attempt at reason:

"But don't you see, I've _got_ to get to the _Peary_! It's the last
hope for those men! The position she was last heard from is right
where I--"

"You can't leave, Mr. Torrance! I'm sorry, but I'll have to call a
guard!"

For a minute their eyes held. With an effort, the young man said more
calmly:

"I see. I see. I'm a prisoner. All right, leave me."

The attendant was more than willing. The young man heard the door's
lock click. And then he lowered his head and pressed his hands hard
into his face.

But a second later he was looking up again, at the single wide window
which gave out on the lonely landscape over which sometimes came
drifting the distant cry of a train's whistle.

* * * * *

Two months before, Kenneth Torrance had returned to the whaling
submarine _Narwhal_, of which he was first torpooner, with a confused
story of men who were half-seals that lived in mounds under the Arctic
ice,[1] who had captured him and--he found--had also captured the
second torpooner, Chanley Beddoes. In breaking free from their
mound-prison, Beddoes had killed one of the sealmen and had been
himself slain minutes later by a killer whale, one of the fierce
scavengers of the sea which the sealmen trapped for food even as the
_Narwhal_ sought them for oil. Ken Torrance alone came back.

[Footnote 1: See the February, 1932, issue of Astounding Stories.]

Over their doubts, he had stuck to his story. Later, he had repeated
it to officials of the Alaska Whaling Company, who worked the
submarine and several surface ships. They in return had sent him to a
private sanitarium in the State of Washington for a rest which they
hoped would "iron out the kink" in his brain.

Here Ken had been for six weeks, while the exploring submarine _Peary_
nosed her way northward toward the Pole. Here he had been, all
unknowing, while the world hummed with reports of the _Peary's_
disappearance in that far-off ever-shrouded sea of mystery.

She might, Ken knew, have struck a shaft of underwater ice, sending
her to the bottom; some of her machinery might have cracked up,
paralyzing her; the ice-f