Or far Elysian plain, shall we meet those

seven feet. What had happened to the pilot sitting on that side at the moment of the telescopic impact just didn't bear thinking about: but at least we had found our way in. I set the searchlight so that its beam illuminated the wrecked control cabin, gauged the distance to the lower sill of the windscreenit must have been fully nine feetand jumped. My gloved hands hooked on firmly but slipped almost at once on the ice-rimed surface. I grabbed for a purchase grip on one of the windscreen pillars, felt my fingers striking against solid glass on both sidesthe windscreen hadn't been as completely shattered as I had imaginedand was on the point of losing my hold altogether when Jackstraw moved forward swiftly and took my weight. With my knees on his shoulders and a fire axe in my hand it took me no more than two minutes to smash away the glass that clung to the pillars and the upper and lower edges. I hadn't realised that aircraft glasstoughened perspexcould be so tough, nor, when it came to clambering through into the control cabin in my bulky furs, that windscreens could be so narrow. I landed on top of a dead man. Even in the darkness I knew he was dead. I fumbled under my parka, brought out the torch, switched it on for a couple of seconds, then put it out. It was the co-pilot, the man who had taken the full impact of the crash. He was pinned, crushed between his seat and the twisted, fractured wreckage of what had been control columns, levers and dashboard instruments: not since I had once been called out to the scene of a head-on collision between a racing motor-cyclist and a heavy truck had I seen such dreadful injuries on any man. Whatever any of the survivors, the shocked and injured survivors in the plane, must see, it mustn't be this. It was ghastly beyond description. I turned and leaned out the windscreen. Jackstraw was directly below, cupped gloved hands shielding his eyes against the flying ice spicules as he stared upwards. "Bring a blanket," I shouted. "Better, bring a full gunny sack. And the morphia kit. Then come up yourself." He was back in twenty seconds. I caught both sack and morphia box, placed them on the twisted cabin floor behind me, then reached out a hand to help Jackstraw, but it wasn't necessary. Athleticism wasn't the forte of the short arid stocky Greenlanders, but Jackstraw was the fittest and most agile man I had ever met. He sprang, caught the lower sill of the left windscreen in his computer control of digital cameras left hand, the central pillar in the other and swung legs and body through the centre screen as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life. I gave him my torch to hold, rummaged in the gunny sack and dragged out a blanket. I spread it over the dead co-pilot, tucking the corners down among twisted and broken ends of metal, so that it shouldn't blow free in the icy wind that swirled and gusted through the wrecked control cabin. "Waste of a good blanket, I suppose," I muttered. "Butwell, it isn't pretty." "It isn't pretty," Jackstraw agreed. His voice was quite steady, devoid of all inflection. "How about this one?" I looked across at the left-hand side of the cabin. It was almost completely undamaged and the chief pilot, still strapped in his seat and slumped against his sidescreens, seemed quite unmarked. I stripped fur glove, mitten and silk glove off my right hand, reached out and touched the forehead. We had been out of doors now for over fifteen minutes in that ferocious cold, and I would have sworn that my hand was about as cold as the human flesh could get. But I was wrong. I pulled the gloves back on and turned away, without touching him further. I wasn't carrying out any autopsies that night. A few feet farther back we found the radio operator in his compartment. He was half-sitting, half-lying against the for'ard bulkhead of his shack where he must have been catapulted by the crash. His right hand was still clutched firmly round the handgrip of the front panel of his radio setit must have been ripped clear off the transmitter, which didn't look as if it would ever transmit anything again. On the bulkhead, behind his head, blood gleamed dully in the torch-light. I bent over the unconscious man -1 could see that he was still breathingremoved my gloves once more and gently slid my fingers behind his head. Just as gently I withdrew them. How the hell, I thought, part hopelessly, part savagely, am I to carry out a head operation on a person with a telescoped occiput: the state he was in, I wouldn't have given a fig for his chance in the finest operating theatre in London. At the very least he would be blind for life, the sight centre must have been completely destroyed. I reached for his pulse: racing, faint, erratic to a degree. The thought came to me, a thought compounded as much of cowardice as of regret, that in all likelihood the possibility of my having to operate on him was