Ice Station Zebra (10 page)

      "Thin ice!" Benson's voice wasn't a shout, it was a bellow. "Thin ice. No, by God, clear water! Clear water! Lovely, clear, clear water!"
      My immediate reaction was that either the ice machine or Benson's brain had blown a fuse. But the officer at the diving panel had no such doubts, for I had to grab and hang on hard as the _Dolphin_ heeled over violently to port and came curving around, engines slowing, in a tight circle to bring her back to the spot where Benson had called out. Swanson watched the plot, spoke quietly, and the big bronze propellers reversed and bit into the water to bring the _Dolphin_ to a stop.
      "How's it looking now, Doc?" Swanson called out.
      "Clear, clear water," Benson said reverently. "I got a good picture of it. It's pretty narrow, but wide enough to hold us. It's long, with a sharp left-hand dogleg, for it followed us around through the first forty-five degrees of our curve."
      "One fifty feet," Swanson said.
      The pumps hummed. The _Dolphin_ drifted gently upward like an airship rising from the ground. Briefly, water flooded back into the tanks. The _Dolphin_ hung motionless.
      "Up periscope," Swanson said.
      The periscope hissed up slowly into the raised position. Swanson glanced briefly through the eyepiece, then beckoned to me. "Take a look," he beamed. "As lovely a sight as you'll ever see."
      I took a look. If you'd made a picture of what could be seen above and framed it, you couldn't have sold the result even if you added Picasso's name to it; but I could see what he meant. Solid black masses on either side with a scarcely lighter strip of dark jungle green running between them on a line with the fore-and-aft direction of the ship. An open lead in the polar pack.
      Three minutes later we were lying on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, just under 250 miles from the Pole.
      The rafted, twisted ice pack reared up into contorted ridges almost fifty feet in height, towering twenty feet above the top of the sail, so close you could almost reach out and touch the nearest ridge. Three or four of those broken and fantastically hummocked ice hills stretching off to the west, and then the light of the floodlight failed and we could see no more. Beyond that there was only blackness.
      To the east, we could see nothing at all. To have stared Out to the east with opened eyes would have been to be blinded for life in a very few seconds: even goggles became clouded and scarred after the briefest exposure. Close in to the _Dolphin's_ side you could, with bent head and hooded eyes, catch, for a fleeting part of a second, a glimpse of black water, already freezing over; but it was more imagined than seen.
      The wind, shrieking and wailing across the bridge and through raised antennae, showed at consistently over sixty mph on the bridge anemometer. The ice storm was no longer the gusting, swirling fog of that morning but a driving wall of stiletto-tipped spears, near-lethal in its ferocity, highspeed ice-spicule lances that would have skewered their way through the thickest cardboard or shattered in a second a glass held in your hand. Over and above the ululating threnody of the wind we could hear an almost constant grinding, crashing, and deep-throated booming as millions of tons of racked and tortured ice, under the influence of the gale and some mighty pressure center heaven knew how many hundreds of miles away, reared and twisted and tore and cracked, one moment forming another rafted ridge as a layer of ice, perhaps ten feet thick, screeched and roared and clambered on to the shoulders of another and then another, the next rending apart in indescribably violent cacophony to open up a new lead, black, wind-torn water that started to skim over with ice almost as soon as it was formed.
      "Are we both mad? Let's get below." Swanson cupped his hands to my ear and had to shout, but, even so, I could hardly hear him above that hellish bedlam of sound.
      We clambered down into the comparatively sudden stillness of the control room. Swanson untied his parka hood and pulled off the scarf and goggles that had completely masked his face. He looked at me and shook his head wonderingly.
      "And some people talk about the white silence of the Arctic, My God, a boilermaker's shop is like a library reading room compared to that." He shook his head again. "We stuck our noses out a few times above the ice pack last year, but we never saw anything like this. Or heard it. Winter, too. Cold, sure, damned cold, and windy, but never so bad that we couldn't take a brief stroll on the ice, and I used to wonder about those stories of explorers being stuck in their tents for days on end, unable to move. But I know now why Captain Scott died."
      "It is pretty nasty," I admitted. "How safe are we here, Commander?"
      "That's anybody's guess." Swanson shrugged. "The wind's got us jammed hard against the west wall of this polynya, and there's maybe fifty yards of open water to starboard. For the moment we're safe. But you can hear and see that that pack is on the move, and not slowly, either. The lead we're in was torn open less than an hour ago. How long? Depends on the configuration of the ice, but those polynyas can close up damned quickly at times, and while the hull of the Dolphin can take a good deal of pressure, it can't take a million tons of ice leaning against it. Maybe we can stay here for hours, maybe only for minutes. Whichever it is, as soon as that east wall comes within ten feet of the starboard side, we're dropping down out of it. You know what happens when a ship gets caught in the ice."
      "I know. It gets squeezed flat, is carried around the top of the world for a few years, and then one day it's released, and drops to the bottom, two miles straight down. The U. S. government wouldn't like it, Commander."
      "The prospects of further promotion for Commander Swanson would be poor," Swanson admitted. "I think--"
      "Hey!" The shout came from the radio room. "Hey, come 'ere."
      "I think Zabrinski wants me," Swanson murmured. He moved off with his usual deceptive speed, and I followed him into the radio room. Zabrinski was sitting half turned in his chair, an ear-to-ear beam on his face, the earphones extended in his left hand. Swanson took them, listened briefly, then nodded.
      "DSY," he said softly. "DSY, Dr. Carpenter. We have them. Got the bearing? Good." He turned to the quartermaster. "Ellis, ask the navigating officer to come here as soon as possible."
      "We'll pick 'em all up yet, Captain," Zabrinski said jovially. The smile on the big man's face, I could see now, didn't extend as far as his eyes. "They must be a pretty tough bunch of boys out there."
      "Very tough, Zabrinski," Swanson said absently. His eyes were remote, and I knew he was listening to the metallic cannonading of the ice spicules, a billion tiny pneumatic chisels drumming away continuously against the outer hull of the submarine, a sound loud enough to make low speech impossible. "Very tough. Are you in two-way contact?"
      Zabrinski shook his head and turned away. He'd stopped smiling. Raeburn came in, and was handed a sheet of paper, and left for his plotting table. We went with him. After a minute or two he looked up and said, "If anyone likes a Sunday afternoon's walk, this is it."
      "So close?" Swanson asked.
      "So very close. Five miles due east, give or take half a mile. Pretty fair bloodhounds, aren't we?"
      "We're just lucky," Swanson said shortly. He walked back to the radio room. "Talking to them yet?"
      "We've lost them altogether."
      "Completely?"
      "We only had 'em a minute, Captain. Then they faded. Got weaker and weaker. I think Doc Carpenter here is right: they're using a hand-cranked generator." He paused, then said idly, "i've a six-year-old daughter who could crank one of those machines for five minutes without turning a hair."
      Swanson looked at me, then turned away without a word. I followed him to the unoccupied diving stand. From the bridge-access hatch we could hear the howl of the storm, the grinding ice with its boom and scream that spanned the entire register of hearing. Swanson said, "Zabrinski put it very well.. . . I wonder how long this damned storm is going to last?"
      "Too long. I have a medical kit in my cabin, a fifty-ounce flask of medicinal alcohol, and cold-weather clothes. Could you supply me with a thirty-pound package of emergency rations, high-protein, high-calory concentrates? Benson will know what I mean."
      "Do you mean what I think you mean?" Swanson said slowly. "Or am I just going nuts?"
      "What's this about going nuts?" Hansen had just come through the doorway leading to the for'ard passageway, and the grin on his face was clear enough indication that though he'd caught Swanson's last words, he'd caught neither the intonation nor the expression on the captain's face. "Very serious state of affairs, going nuts. I'll have to assume command and put you in irons, Captain. Something about it in regulations, I daresay."
      "Dr. Carpenter is proposing to sling a bag of provisions on his back and proceed to Drift Station Zebra on foot."
      "You've picked them up again?" For the moment, Hansen had forgotten me. "You really got them? And a crossbearing?"
      "Just this minute. We've hit it almost on the nose. Five miles, Raeburn says."
      "My God! Five miles. Only five miles!" Then the elation vanished from voice and face as if an internal switch had been touched. "In weather like this, it might as well be five hundred. Even old Amundsen couldn't have moved ten yards through this stuff."
      "Dr. Carpenter evidently thinks he can improve on AmundSen's standards," Swanson said dryly. "He's talking about walking there."
      Hansen looked at me for a long and considering moment, then turned back to Swanson. "I think maybe it's Doc Carpenter we should be locking up in irons."
      "I think maybe it is," Swanson said.
      "Look," I said. "There are men out there on Drift Station Zebra. Maybe not many, not now, but there are some. One, anyway. Men a long way past being sick. Dying men. To a dying man, it takes only the very smallest thing to spell out the difference between life and death. I'm a doctor, I know. The smallest thing. An ounce of alcohol, a few ounces of food, a hot drink, some medicine. Then they'll live. Without those little things, they will surely die. They're entitled to what smallest aid they can get, and I'm entitled to take whatever risks I care to to see they get it. I'm not asking anyone else to go, all I'm asking is that you implement the terms of your orders from Washington to give me all possible assistance without endangering the _Dolphin_ or its crew. Threatening to stop me is not my idea of giving assistance. And I am not asking you to endanger your submarine or the lives of your men."
      Swanson gazed at the floor. I wondered what he was thinking: the best way to stop me, his orders from Washington, or the fact that he was the only man who knew that the commandant on Zebra was my brother. He said nothing.
      "You must stop him, Captain," Hansen said urgently. "Any other man you saw putting a pistol to his head or a razor to his throat, you'd stop that man. This isn't any different. He's out of his mind: he wants to commit suicide." He tapped the bulkhead beside him. "Good God, Doc, why do you think we have the sonar operators in here on duty even when we're stopped. So that they can tell us when the ice wall on the far side of the polynya starts to close in on us, that's why. And that's because it's impossible for any man to last thirty seconds on the bridge or see an inch against the ice storm up there. Just take a quick twenty-second trip up there, up on the bridge, and you'll change your mind fast enough, I guarantee."
      "We've just come down from the bridge," Swanson said niatter-of-factly.
      "And he still wants to go? It's like I say, he's crazy."
      "We could drop down now," Swanson said. "We have the position. Perhaps we can find a polynya within a mile or half a mile of Zebra. That would be a different proposition altogether."
      "Perhaps you could find a needle in a haystack," I said. "It took you six hours to find this one, and even at that we were lucky. And don't talk about torpedoes: the ice in this area is rafted anything up to a hundred feet in depth. Pretty much all over. You'd be as well trying to blast your way through with a twenty-two. Might be twelve hours, might be days before we could break through again. I can get there in two, three hours."
      "_If_ you don't freeze to death in the first hundred yards," Hansen said. "_If_ you don't fall down a ridge and break your leg. _If_ you don't get blinded in a few minutes. _If_ you don't fall into a newly opened polynya that you can't see, where you'll either drown or, if you manage to get out, freeze solid in thirty seconds. And even if you do survive all those things, I'd be grateful if you'd explain to me exactly how you propose to find your way blind to a place five miles away. You can't carry a damn great gyro weighing about half a ton on your back, and a magnetic compass is useless in those latitudes. The magnetic north pole is a good deal _south_ of where we are now and a long way to the west. Even if you _did_ get some sort of bearing from it, in the darkness and the ice storm you could still miss the camp--or what's left of it--by only a hundred yards and never know it. And even if by one chance in a million you do manage to find your way there, how on earth do you ever expect to find your way back again? Leave a paper trail? A five-mile ball of twine? 'Crazy' is hardly the word for it."
      "I may break a leg, drown or freeze," I conceded. "I'll take my chance on that. Finding my way there and back is no great trick. You have a radio bearing on Zebra and know exactly where it lies. You can take a radio bearing on any transmitter. All I have to do is tote a receivertransmitter radio along with me, keep in touch with you, and you can keep me on the same bearing as Zebra. It's easy."
      "It would be," Hansen said, "except for one little thing. We don't have any such radio."
      "I have a twenty-mile walkie-talkie in my case," I said.
      "Coincidence, coincidence," Hansen murmured. "Just happened to bring it along, no doubt. I'll bet you have all sorts of funny things in that case of yours, haven't you, Doc?"
      "What Dr. Carpenter has in his case is really no business of ours," Swanson said in mild reproof. He hadn't thought so earlier. "What does concern us is his intention to do away with himself. You really can't expect us to consent to this ridiculous proposal, Dr. Carpenter."