Hastily he wrapped scarves over 'his entire face, clambered up to the bridge by touch and instinct.
The Kapok Kid followed with the glass.
As they climbed, they heard the loudspeakers crackling some unintelligible message.
Turner and Carrington were alone on the twflit bridge, swathed like mummies.
Not even their eyes were visible, they wore goggles.
"'Morning, Nicholls," boomed the Commander. "It is Nicholls, isn't it?" He pulled off his goggles, his back turned to the bitter wind, threw them away in disgust. "Can't see damn' all through these bloody things... Ah, Number One, he's got the glass."
Nicholls crouched in the for'ard lee of the compass platform.
In a corner, the duckboards were littered with goggles, eye-shields and gas-masks.
He jerked his head towards them.
"What's this, a clearance sale?"
"We're turning round, Doc." It was Carrington who answered, his voice calm and precise as ever, without a trace of exhaustion.
"But we've got to see where we're going, and as the Commander says, all these damn' things there are useless, mist up immediately they're put on, it's too cold.
If you'll just hold it, so, and if you would wipe it, Andy?"
Nicholls looked at the great seas. He shuddered.
"Excuse my ignorance, but why turn round at all?"
"Because it will be impossible very shortly," Carrington answered briefly.
Then he chuckled. "This is going to make me the most unpopular man in the ship.
We've just broadcast a warning.
Ready, sir?"
"Stand by, engine-room: stand by, wheelhouse.
Ready, Number One."
For thirty seconds, forty-five, a whole minute, Carrington stared steadily, unblinkingly through the glass.
Nicholls's hands froze.
The Kapok Kid rubbed industriously.
Then:
"Half-ahead, port!"
"Half-ahead, port!" Turner echoed.
"Starboard 20!"
"Starboard 20!"
Nicholls risked a glance over his shoulder.
In the split second before bis eyes blinded, filled with tears, he saw a huge wave bearing down on them, the bows already swinging diagonally away from it.
Good Godl Why hadn't Carrington waited until that was past?
The great wave flung the bows up, pushed the Ulysses far over to starboard, then passed under.
The Ulysses staggered over the top, corkscrewed wickedly down the other side, her masts, great gleaming tree trunks thick and heavy with ice, swinging in a great arc as she rolled over, burying her port rails in the rising shoulder of the next sea.
"Fullahead port!"
"Full ahead port!"
"Starboard 30!"
"Starboard 30!"
The next sea, passing beneath, merely straightened the Ulysses up.
And then, at last, Nicholls understood.
Incredibly, because it had been impossible to see so far ahead, Carrington had known that two opposing wave systems were due to interlock in an area of comparative calm: how he had sensed it, no one knew, would ever know, not even Carrington himself: but he was a great seaman, and he had known.
For fifteen, twenty seconds, the sea was a seething white mass of violently disturbed, conflicting waves-of the type usually found, on a small scale, in tidal races and overfalls-and the Ulysses curved gratefully through.
And then another great sea, towering almost to bridge height, caught her on the far turn of the quarter circle.
It struck the entire length of the Ulysses, for the first time that night, with tremendous weight.
It threw her far over on her side, the lee rails vanishing.
Nicholls was flung off his feet, crashed heavily into the side of the bridge, the glass shattering.
He could have sworn he heard Carrington laughing.
He clawed his way back to the middle of the compass platform.
And still the great wave had not passed.
It towered high above the trough into which the Ulysses, now heeeled far over to 40ith their hands on the deck, numbed minds barely grasping the inevitable.