He smiled down at her and suddenly, high up there in the merciless light of the brilliant polar Arctic day, skylit, sunlit, dustless, refractive, she saw the lines, the vague shadows, the receding of the flesh pads around the eye sockets, the cheekbones, the nose, so that the bone structure stood revealed, the nose seemed larger than she remembered it, the eyes more sunken, it was as though she had not actually seen him for a long time, though she had looked at him daily. He doesn’t look very well, she thought, worriedly. And then, suddenly stricken with the thought—Why, he’s an old man!

Like a little girl, “I love you, Grampa Thor,” she said.

“Thank you, my dear child,” he said.

Their heads turned toward the window. Two black rocks jutted out of a gray-black sea. From the plane they were black dots only, with a few tiny black specks upon them. At this height it appeared that only a few inches of water separated the two bits of rocky land.

“Why, say!” Alwin Polar exclaimed, “a kid could spit across from one island to the other.”

One of the Dew Line men laughed a trifle uncomfortably. “Heh, I hope our pilot don’t get mixed up which is which.”

Even as they gazed down, fascinated, the passengers seemed imperceptibly to shrink away from the windows as though, by this distribution of weight, they could veer the plane away from the direction of danger. And then, in the distance, meeting the sky line, they saw across the sluggish icy waste of waters a sinister black clifflike mass. It was the coast of Siberia.

“Thor Storm!” Bridie trumpeted from her seat, “you tell Ross Guildenstern to turn this plane around and head back where we belong. Sight-seeing is fine, but I don’t figure on ending up in any slave-labor camp in Russia. Now go on!”

But already the plane was making its graceful birdlike turn as it circled and banked and straightened out. In that moment of turn the two islands had seemed to rise up and stare through the windows at the shrinking passengers.

“It’s all right,” said Miss Larson. “We’re heading for Barrow, we’ll be there in no time. Coffee will be served to any passengers desiring it.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Alwin Polar observed, “I’m not a drinking man as a rule, but the way I feel, coffee wouldn’t settle me, I could do with a little slug.”

“Say, couldn’t we all, brother!” said a Dew Line man.

There was a subtle change now in the plane, a sort of settling to the business at hand. The passengers composed themselves in their places. The icy drafts cut through every unseen chink and crevice. Coats and parkas, mufflers and blankets were pulled closer, tucked more tightly. Soon, on either side, rose the formidable walls of the mountains, and below, the tundra that never had known the foot of man. The flat impassive faces of the Eskimos and the young expectant faces of the Dew Line men, and the absurdly urban vaudeville team, and the old man and the old woman and the young girl, prisoners all in this toylike thing of metal and Plexiglas, glanced out now and then at a formidable, a ruthless, a seemingly illimitable wilderness, and thought their own thoughts.