About 2330, Nicholls was called to treat the Kapok Kid.
Lurching, falling and staggering in the wildly gyrating ship, he finally found the Navigator in his cabin.
He looked very unhappy.
Nicholls eyed him speculatively, saw the deep, ugly gash on his forehead, the swollen ankle peeping out below the Kapok Kid's Martian survival suit.
Bad enough, but hardly a borderline case, although one wouldn't have thought so from the miserable, worried expression.
Nicholls grinned inwardly. "Well, Horatio," he said unkindly, "what's supposed to be the matter with you?
Been drinking again?"
"It's my back, Johnny," he muttered. He turned facedown on the bunk. "Have a look at it, will you?"
Nicholl's expression changed.
He moved forward, then stopped short.
"How the hell can I," he demanded irritably, "when you're wearing that damned ugly suit of yours?"
"That what I mean," said the Kapok Kid anxiously. "I was thrown against the searchlight controls, all knobs and nasty, sharp projections.
Is it torn?
Is it ripped, cut in any way?
Are the seams------"
"Well, for God's sake! Do you mean to tell me------?" Nicholls sank back incredulously on a locker.
The Kapok Kid looked at him hopefully. "Does that mean it's all right?"
"Of course it's all right!
If it's a blasted tailor you want, why the hell------"
"Enough!" The Kapok Kid swung briskly on to the side of his bunk, lifting an admonitory hand. "There is work for you, sawbones." He touched his bleeding forehead. "Stitch this up and waste no time about it.
A man of my calibre is urgently needed on the bridge...
I'm the only man on this ship who has the faintest idea where we are."
Busy with a swab, Nicholls grinned. "And where are we?"
"I don't know," said the Kapok Kid frankly. "That's what's so urgent about it...
But I do know where I was back in Henley.
Did I ever tell you...?"
The Ulysses did not die.
Time and again that night, hove to with the wind fine of her starboard bow, as her bows crashed into and under the far shoulder of a trough, it seemed that she could never shake free from the great press of water.
But time and again she did just that, shuddering, I quivering under the fantastic strain.
A thousand times before dawn officers and men blessed the genius of the Clyde ship-yard that had made her: a thousand times they cursed the blind malevolence of that great storm that put the Ulysses on the rack.
Perhaps "blind" was not the right word.
The storm wielded its wild hate with an almost human cunning.
Shortly after the first onslaught, the wind had veered quickly, incredibly so and in defiance of all the laws, back almost to the north again.
The Ulysses was on a lee shore, forced to keep pounding into gigantic seas.
Gigantic, and cunning also. Roaring by the Ulysses, a huge comber would suddenly whip round and crash on deck, smashing a boat to smithereens.
Inside an hour, the barge, motor boat and two whalers were gone, their shattered timbers swept away in the boiling cauldron.
Carley rafts were broken off by the sudden hammer-blows of the same cunning waves, swept over the side and gone for ever: four of the Balsa floats went the same way.
But the most cunning attack of all was made right aft on the poop-deck.
At the height of the storm a series of heavy explosions, half a dozen in as many seconds, almost lifted the stern out of the water.
Panic spread like wildfire in the after mess-decks: practically every light abaft the after engine-room smashed or failed.
In the darkness of the mess-decks, above the clamour, high-pitched cries of
"Torpedoed!"
"Mined!"
"She's breaking up!" galvanised exhausted, injured men, even those-more than half-in various degrees of prostration from seasickness, into frantic stampeding towards doors and hatches, only to find doors and hatches jammed solidly by the intense cold.
Here and there, the automatic battery lamps had clicked on when the lighting circuits failed: glowing little pin-points, they played on isolated groups of white, contorted faces, sunken-eyed and straining, as they struggled through the yellow pools of light.
Conditions were ripe for disaster when a voice, harsh, mocking, cut cleanly through the bedlam. The voice was Ralston's: he had been released before nine o'clock, on the Captain's orders: the cells were in the very forepeak of the ship, and conditions there were impossible in a head sea: even so, Hastings had freed him only with the worst possible grace.
"It's our own depth charges!
Do you hear me, you bloody fools, it's our own depth charges!"
It was not so much the words as the biting mockery, that stopped short the panic, halted dazed, unthinking men in their tracks.
"They're our depth charges, I tell you!