Ice Station Zebra (23 page)

      There was an unusual atmosphere aboard ship that afternoon, quiet and dull and almost funereal. It was hardly surprising. As far as the crew of the _Dolphin_ had been concerned, the men manning Drift Ice Station Zebra had been just so many ciphers, not even names, just unknowns. But now the burnt, frost-bitten, emaciated survivors had come aboard ship, sick and suffering men each with a life and individuality of his own, and the sight of those wasted men still mourning the deaths of their eight comrades had suddenly brought home to every man on the submarine the full horror of what had happened on Zebra. And, of course, less than seven hours had elapsed since their own torpedo officer, Lieutenant Mills, had been killed. Now, even though the mission had been successful, there seemed little reason for celebration. Down in the crew's mess the hi-fl and the juke box were stilled. The ship was like a tomb.
      I found Hansen in his cabin. He was sitting on the edge of his Pullman bunk, still wearing his fur trousers, his face bleak and hard and cold. He watched me in silence as I stripped off my parka, undid the empty holster tied around my chest, hung it up, and stuck inside it the automatic I'd pulled from my caribou pants. Then he said suddenly, "I wouldn't take them all off, Doc. Not if you want to come with us, that is." He looked at his own furs, and his mouth was bitter. "Hardly the, uniform for a funeral, is it?"
      "You mean--"
      "Skipper's in his cabin. Boning up on the burial service. Tom Mills and that assistant radio operator--Grant, wasn't it?--who died out there today. A double funeral. Out on the ice. There's some men there already, chipping a place with crow bars and sledges at the base of a hummock."
      "I saw no one."
      "Port side. To the west."
      "I thought Swanson would have taken young Mills back to the States. Or Scotland."
      "Too far. And there's the psychological angle. You could hardly dent the morale of this bunch we have aboard here, much less shoot it to pieces, but carrying a dead man as a shipmate is an unhappy thing. He's had permission from Washington.. ." He broke off uncertainly, looked up at me and then away again. I didn't have any need of telepathy to know what was in his mind.
      "The seven men on Zebra?" I shook my head. "No, no funeral service for them. How could you? I'll pay my respects some other way."
      His eyes flickered up at the Mannlicher-Schoenauer hanging in its holster, then away again. He said in a quiet, savage voice, "Goddamn his black, murderous soul. That devil's aboard, Carpenter. Here. On our ship." He smacked a bunched fist hard against the palm of his other hand. "Have you no idea what's behind this, Doc? No idea who's responsible?"
      "If I had, I wouldn't be standing here. Any idea how Benson is getting along with the sick and injured?"
      "He's all through. I've just left him."
      I nodded, reached up for the automatic, and stuck it in the pocket of my caribou pants. Hansen said quietly: "Even here?"
      "Especially here."
      I left him and went along to the surgery. Benson was sitting at his table, his back to his art gallery of technicolor cartoons, making entries in a book. He looked up as I closed the door behind me.
      "Find anything?" I asked.
      "Nothing I'd consider interesting. Hansen did most of the sorting. You may find something." He pointed to neatly folded piles of clothing on the deck, several small attaché cases, and a few polythene bags, each labeled. "Look for yourself. How about the two men left out on Zebra?"
      "Holding their own. I think they'll be okay, but it's too early to say yet." I squatted on the floor, went carefully through all the pockets in the clothes, and found, as I had expected, nothing. Hansen wasn't the man to miss anything. I felt every square inch of the lining areas and came up with the same results. I went through the small cases and the polythene bags, small items of clothing and personal gear, shaving kits, letters, photographs, two or three cameras. I broke open the cameras and they were all empty. I said to Benson: "Dr. Jolly brought his medical case aboard with him?"
      "Wouldn't even trust one of your own colleagues, would you?"
      "No."
      "Neither would I." He smiled with his mouth only. "Your evil influence. I went through every item in it. Not a thing. I even measured the thickness of the bottom of the case. Nothing there."
      "Good enough for me. How are the patients?"
      "Nine of them," Benson said. "The psychological effect of knowing that they're safe has done them more good than any medication ever could." He consulted cards on- his desk. "Captain Folsom is the worst. No danger, of course, but his facial burns are pretty savage. We've arranged to have a plastic surgeon standing by in Glasgow when we return. The Harrington twins, both met officers, aren't so badly burned but they're very weak from cold and hunger. Food, warmth, and rest will have them on their feet in a couple of days again. Hassard, another met officer, and Jeremy, a lab technician, moderate burns, moderate frostbite, in the best shape of all otherwise. It's queer how different people react so differently to hunger and cold. The other four--Kinnaird, the senior radio operator, Dr. Jolly, Naseby, the cook, and Hewson, the tractor driver and man who was in charge of the generator--are much of a muchness: they're suffering most severely of all from frostbite, especially Kinnaird, all with moderate burns, weak, of course, but recovering fast. Only Folsom and the Harrington twins have consented to become bed patients. The rest we've provided with clothes of one sort or another. They're all lying down, of course, but they won't be lying down long. All of them are young, tough, and basically healthy. They don't pick children or old men to man places like Drift Station Zebra."
      There was a knock on the door and Swanson's head appeared. He said "Hello, back again" to me, then turned to Benson. "A small problem of medical discipline here, Doctor." He stood aside to let us see Naseby, the Zebra cook, standing close behind him, dressed in a U. S. Navy's petty officer's uniform. "It seems that your patients have heard about the funeral service. They want to go along--those who are able, that is--to pay their last respects to their colleagues. I understand and sympathize, of course, but their state of health--"
      "I would advise against it, sir," Benson said. "Strongly."
      "You can advise what you like, mate." The voice came from behind Naseby. It was Kinnaird, the cockney radio operator. who was also dressed in blue. "No offense. Don't want to be rude or ungrateful. But I'm going. Jimmy Grant was my mate."
      "I know how you feel," Benson said. "I also know how _I_ feel about it--your condition, I mean. You're in no state to do anything except lie down. You're making things very difficult for me."
      "I'm the captain of this ship," Swanson put in mildly. "I can forbid it, you know. I can say no and make it stick."
      "And you are making things difficult for us, sir," Kinnaird said. "I don't reckon it would advance the cause of AngloAmerican unity very much if we started hauling off at our rescuers an hour or two after they'd saved us from certain death." He smiled faintly. "Besides, look at what it might do to our wounds and burns."
      Swanson cocked an eyebrow at me. "Well, they're your countrymen."
      "Dr. Benson is perfectly correct," I said. "But it's not worth a civil war. If they could survive five or six days on that damned ice cap, I don't suppose a few minutes more is going to finish them off."
      "Well, if it does," Swanson said heavily, "we'll blame you."
      If I ever had any doubt about it, I didn't have then, not after ten minutes out in the open. The Arctic ice cap was no place for a funeral; but I couldn't have imagined a more promising set-up for a funeral director who wanted to drum up some trade. After the warmth of the _Dolphin_, the cold seemed intense and within five minutes we were all shivering violently. The darkness was as nearly absolute as it ever becomes on the ice cap, the wind was lifting again, and thin flurries of snow came gusting through the night. The solitary floodlight served only to emphasize the ghostly unreality of it all: the huddled circle of mourners with bent heads, the two shapeless, canvas-wrapped forms lying huddled at the base of an ice hummock, Commander Swanson bent over his book, the wind and the snow snatching the half-heard mumble from his lips as he hurried through the burial service. I caught barely one word in ten of the committal and then it was all over: no meaningless rifle salutes, no empty blowing of bugles, just the service and the silence and the dark shapes of stumbling men hurriedly placing fragments of broken ice over the canvas-sheeted forms. And within twentyfour hours the eternally drifting spicules and blowing snow would have sealed them forever in their icy tomb, and there they might remain forever, drifting in endless circles about the North Pole; or someday, perhaps a thousand years from then, an ice lead might open up and drop them down to the uncaring floor of the Arctic, their bodies as perfectly preserved as if they had died only that day. It was a macabre thought.
      Heads bent against the snow and ice, we hurried back to the shelter of the _Dolphin_. From the ice cap to the top of the sail it was a climb of over twenty feet up the almost vertically inclined huge slabs of ice that the submarine had pushed upward and sideways as she had forced her way through. Hand lines had been rigged from the top of the sail, but even then it was a fairly tricky climb. It was a set-up where, with the icy slope, the frozen slippery ropes, the darkness and the blinding effect of the snow and ice, an accident could all too easily happen. And happen it did.
      I was about six feet up, giving a hand to Jeremy, the lab technician from Zebra, whose burnt hands made it almost impossible for him to climb alone, when I heard a muffled cry above me. I glanced up and had a darkly blurred impression of someone teetering on top of the sail, fighting for his balance, then jerked Jeremy violently toward me to save him from being swept away as that same someone lost his footing, toppled over backward, and hurtled down past us to the ice below. I winced at the sound of the impact-- two sounds, rather: a heavy, muffled thud followed immediately by a sharper, crisper crack. First the body, then the head. I half imagined that I heard another sound afterward, but I couldn't be sure. I handed Jeremy over to the care of someone else and slithered down an ice-coated rope, not looking forward very much to what I must see. The fall had been the equivalent of a twenty-foot drop on to a concrete floor.
      Hansen had got there before me and was shining his light, not on one prostrate figure, as I had expected, but on two. Benson and Jolly, both of them out cold.
      I said to Hansen, "Did you see what happened?"
      "No. Happened too quickly. All I know is that it was Benson that did the falling and Jolly that did the cushioning. Jolly was beside me only a few seconds before the fall."
      "If that's the case, then Jolly probably saved your doctor's life. We'll need to strap them in stretchers and haul them up and inside. We can't leave them out - here."
      "Stretchers? Well, yes, if you say so. But they might some around any minute."
      "One of them might. But one of them is not going to come around for a long time. You heard that crack when a head hit the ice, it was like someone being clouted over the head with a fence post. And 1 don't know which it is yet."
      Hansen left. I stooped over Benson and eased back the hood of the duffel coat he was wearing. A fence post was just about right. The side of his head, an inch above the right ear, was a blood-smeared mess, a three-inch-long gash in the purpling flesh with the blood already coagulating in the bitter cold. Two inches further forward and he'd have been a dead man; the thin bone behind the temple would have shattered under such an impact. For Benson's sake, I hoped the rest of his skull was pretty thick. No question but that this had been the sharp crack I'd heard.
      Benson's breathing was very shallow, the movement of his chest barely discernible. Jolly's, on the other hand, was fairly deep and regular. I pulled back his anorak hood, probed carefully over his head, and encountered a slight puffiness far back, near the top on the left-hand side. The inference seemed obvious. I hadn't been imagining things when I thought I had heard a second sound after the sharp crack caused by Benson's head striking against the ice. Jolly must have been in the way of the falling Benson, not directly enough beneath him to break his fall in any way, but directly enough to be knocked backward on to the ice and bang the back of his head as he fell.
      It took ten minutes to have them strapped in stretchers, taken inside, and placed in a couple of temporary cots in the sick bay. With Swanson waiting anxiously, I attended to Benson first, though there was little enough I could do. I had just started on Jolly when his eyes flickered and he slowly came back to consciousness, groaning a bit and trying to hold the back of his head. He made an effort to sit up in his cot, but I restrained him.
      "Oh, Lord, my head." Several times he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, opened them wide, focused with difficulty on the bulkhead riotous with the color of Benson's cartoon characters, then looked away as if he didn't believe it. "Oh, my word, that must have been a dilly. Who did it, old boy?"
      "Did what?" Swanson asked.
      "Walloped me on the old bean. Who? Eh?"
      "You mean to say you don't remember?"
      "Remember?" Jolly said irritably. "How the devil should I--" fle broke off as his eye caught sight of Benson in the adjacent cot, a huddled figure under the blankets, with only the back of his head and a big gauze pack covering his wound showing. "Of course, of course. Yes, that's it. He fell on top of me, didn't he?" -
      "He certainly did," I said. "Did you try to catch him?"
      "Catch him? No, I didn't try to catch him. I didn't try to get out of the way, either. It was all over in half a second. I just don't remember a thing about it." He groaned a bit more, then looked across at Benson. "Came a pretty nasty cropper, eh? Must have done." -
      "Looks like it. He's very severely concussed. There's Xray equipment here and I'll have a look at his head shortly. Damned hard luck on you too, Jolly."
      "I'll get over it," he grunted. He pushed my hand away and sat up. "Can I help you?"