Ice Station Zebra (31 page)

      Increasing, too, in what passed now for air, were the Freon fumes from the refrigerating machinery and the hydrogen fumes from the batteries. Worse still, the smoke was now so thick that visibility, even in the for'ard parts of the ship, was down to a few feet, but that smoke had to remain also; there was no power to operate the electrostatic precipitators, and even when those had been briefly tried, they had proved totally inadequate to cope with the concentration of billions of carbon particles held in suspension in the air. Each time the door to the engine room was opened--and that was progressively oftener as the strength of the fire fighters ebbed-- fresh clouds of that evil acrid smoke rolled through the submarine. The fire in the engine room had stopped burning over two hours previously; but now what remained of the redly smoldering insulation around the starboard high-pressure turbine gave off far more smoke and fumes than flames ever could have.
      But the greatest enemy of all lay in the mounting count of carbon monoxide, that deadly, insidious, colorless, tasteless, odorless gas with its murderous affinity for the red blood cells--500 times that of oxygen. On board the Dolphin the normal permissible tolerance of carbon monoxide in the air was thirty parts in a million. Now the reading was somewhere between 400 and 500 parts in a million. When it reached a thousand parts, none of us would have more than minutes to live.
      And then there was the cold. As Commander Swanson had grimly prophesied, the _Dolphin_, with the steam pipes cooled down and all heaters switched off, had chilled down to the sub-freezing temperature of the sea outside, and was ice cold. In terms of absolute cold, it was nothing--a mere two degrees below zero on the centigrade scale. But in terms of cold as it reacted on the human body, it was very cold indeed. Most of the crew were without warm clothing of any kind. In normal operating conditions the temperature inside the _Dolphin_ was maintained at a steady 22°C. regardless of the temperature outside. The men were forbidden to move around, but even if they were allowed to, they now lacked the energy to counteract the effects of the cold, and what little energy was left in their rapidly weakening bodies was so wholly occupied in forcing their laboring chest muscles to gulp in more and ever more of that foul and steadily worsening air that they had none at all left to generate sufficient animal heat to ward off that dank and bitter cold. You could actually hear men shivering, could listen to their violently shaking limbs knocking and rat-tat-tatting helplessly against bulkheads and deck, could hear the chattering of their teeth, the sound of some of them, far gone in weakness, whimpering softly with the cold: but always the dominant sound was that harsh, strangled moaning, a rasping and frightening sound, as men sought to suck air down into starving lungs.
      With the exception of Hansen and myself--both of whom were virtually one-handed--and the sick patients, every man in the _Dolphin_ had taken his turn that night in descending into the machinery space and fighting that red demon that threatened to slay us all. The number in each fire-fighting group had been increased from four to eight and the time spent down there shortened to three or four minutes, so that efforts could be concentrated and more energy expended in a given length of time, but because of the increasingly Stygian darkness in the machinery space, the ever-thickening coils of oily black smoke, and the wickedly cramped and confined space in which the men had to work, progress had been frustratingly, maddeningly slow: and entered into it now, of course, was the factor of that dreadful weakness that now assailed us all, so that men with the strength only of little children were tugging and tearing at the 'smoldering insulation in desperate near-futility and seemingly making no progress at all.
      I'd been down again in the machinery space, just once, at 5:30 a.m. to attend to Jolly, who had himself slipped, fallen, and laid himself out while helping an injured crewman up the ladder, and I knew I would never forget what I had seen there: dark and spectral figures in a dark and spectral and swirling world, lurching and staggering around like zombies in some half-forgotten nightmare, swaying and stumbling and falling to the deck or down into the bilges now deep-covered in great snow drifts of carbon-dioxide foam and huge, smoking, blackened chunks of torn-off sheathing. Men on the rack, men in the last stages of exhaustion; One little spark of fire, one little spark of an element as old as time itself, and all the brilliant technological progress of the twentieth century was set at nothing, the frontiers of man's striving translated in a moment from the nuclear age to the dark unknown of pre-history.
      Every dark hour brings forth its man, and there was no doubt in the minds of the crew of the _Dolphin_ that that dark night had produced its own hero: Dr. Jolly. He had made a swift recovery from the effects of his first disastrous entry into the engine room that night, appearing back in the control center only seconds after I had finished setting Ringman's broken leg. He had taken the news of Bolton's death pretty badly, but never, either by word or direct look, did he indicate to either Swanson or myself that the fault lay with us for insisting against his better judgment on bringing on board the ship a man whose life had been hanging in the balance even under the best of conditions. I think Swanson was pretty grateful for that and might even have got around to apologizing to Jolly had not a fire fighter come through from the engine room and told us that one of his team had slipped and either twisted or broken an ankle--the second of many minor accidents and injuries that were to happen down in the machinery space that night. Jolly had reached for the nearest closed-circuit breathing apparatus before we could try to stop him and was gone in a minute.
      We eventually lost count of the number of trips he made down there that night. Fifteen at least, perhaps many more, by the time six o'clock had come around, my mind was beginning to get pretty fuzzy around the edges. He certainly had no lack of customers for his medical skill. Paradoxically enough, the two main types of injury that night were diametrically opposite in' nature: burning and freezing, burning from the red-hot sheathing--and, earlier, the steam pipes-- and freezing from a carelessly directed jet of carbon dioxide against exposed areas of face or hands. Jolly never failed to answer a call, not even after the time he'd given his own head a pretty nasty crack. He would complain bitterly to the captain, old boy, for rescuing him from the relative safety and comfort of Drift Ice Station Zebra, crack some dry joke, pull on his mask, and leave. A dozen speeches to Congress or Parliament couldn't have done what Jolly did that night in cementing Anglo-American friendship.
      About 6:45 a.m. chief torpedoman Patterson came into the control center. I suppose he walked through the doorway, but that was only assumption; from where I sat on the deck between Swanson and Hansen, you couldn't see halfway to the door: but when he came up to Swanson he was crawling on his hands and knees,, head swaying from side to side, whooping painfully, his respiration rate at least fifty to the minute. He was wearing no mask of any kind and was shivering constantly.
      "We must do something, Captain," he said hoarsely. He spoke as much when inhaling as when exhaling; when your breathing is sufficiently distressed, one is as easy as the other. "We've got seven men passed out now between the for'ard torpedo room and the crew's mess. They're pretty sick men, Captain."
      "Thank you, chief." Swanson, also without a mask, was in as bad a way as Patterson, his chest heaving, his breath hoarsely rasping, tears and sweat rolling down the grayness of his face. "We'll be as quick as possible."
      "More oxygen," I said. "Bleed more oxygen into the ship."
      "Oxygen? More oxygen?" He shook his head. "The pressure is too high as it is."
      "Pressure won't kill them." I was dimly aware, through my cold and misery and burning chest and eyes, that my voice sounded just as strange as did those of Swanson and Patterson. "Carbon monoxide will kill them. Carbon monoxide is what is killing them now. It's the relative proportion of CO2 to oxygen that matters. It's too high, it's far too high. That's what's going to finish us all off."
      "More oxygen," Swanson ordered. Even the unnecessary acknowledgment of my words would have cost too much. "More oxygen."
      Valves were turned and oxygen hissed into the control room and, I knew, into the crew spaces. I could feel my ears pop as the pressure swiftly built up but that was all I could feel. I certainly couldn't feel any improvement in my breathing, a feeling that was borne out when Patterson, noticeably weaker this time, crawled back and croaked out the bad news that he now had a dozen unconscious men on his hands.
      I went for'ard with Patterson and a closed-circuit oxygen apparatus--one of the few unexhausted sets left--and clamped it for a minute or so onto the face of each unconscious man in turn, but I knew it was but a temporary palliative. The oxygen revived them, but within a few minutes of the mask being removed, most of them slipped back into unconsciousness again. I made my way back to the control room, a dark dungeon of huddled men nearly all lying down, most of them barely conscious. I was barely conscious myself. I wondered vaguely if they felt as I did, if the fire from the lungs had now spread to the remainder of the body, if they could see the first slight changes in color in their hands and faces, the deadly blush of purple, the first unmistakable signs of a man beginning to die from carbon-monoxide poisoning. Jolly, I noticed, still hadn't returned from the engine room; he was keeping himself permanently on hand, it seemed, to help those men who were in ever-increasingly greater danger of hurting themselves and their comrades as their weakness increased, as their level of care and attention and concentration slid down toward zero.
      Swanson was where I'd left him, propped on the desk against the plotting table. He smiled faintly as I sank down beside him and Hansen.
      "How are they, Doctor?" he whispered. A whisper, but a rock-steady whisper. The man's monolithic calm had never cracked, and I realized dimly that here was a man who could never crack: you do find people like that, once in a million or once in a lifetime. Swanson was such a man.
      "Far gone," I said. As a medical report, it might have lacked a thought in detail, but it contained the gist of what I wanted to say and it saved me energy. "You will have your first deaths for carbon-monoxide poisoning within the hour."
      "So soon?" The surprise was in his red, swollen, streaming eyes as well as in his voice. "Not so soon, Doctor. It's hardly--well, it's hardly started to take effect."
      "So soon," I said. "Carbon-monoxide poisoning is very rapidly progressive. Five dead within the hour. Within two hours, fifty. At least fifty."
      "You take the choice out of my hands," he murmured. "For which I am grateful. John, where is our main propulsion officer? His hour has come."
      "I'll get him." Hansen hauled himself wearily to his feet, an old man making his last struggle to rise from his death bed, and at that moment the engine-room door opened and blackened, exhausted men staggered into the' control room. Waiting men filed out to take their place. Swanson said to one of the men who had just entered, "Is that you, Will?"
      "Yes, sir." Lieutenant Raeburn, the navigating officer, pulled off his mask and began to cough, rackingly, painfully. Swanson waited until he had quieted a little.
      "How are things down there, Will?"
      "We've stopped making smoke, skipper." Raeburn wiped his streaming face, swayed dizzily, and lowered himself groggily to the floor. "I think we've drowned out the sheathing completely."
      "How long to get the rest of it off?"
      "God knows. Normally, ten minutes. The way we are, an hour. Maybe longer."
      "Thank you. Ah!" He smiled faintly as Hansen and Cartwright appeared out of the smoke-filled gloom. "Our main propulsion officer. Mr. Cartwright, I would be glad if you would put the kettle on to boil. What's the record for activating the plant, getting steam up and spinning the turbo generators?"
      "I couldn't say, skipper." Red-eyed, coughing, smokeblackened, and obviously in considerable pain, Cartwright nevertheless straightened his shoulders and smiled slowly. "But you may consider it broken."
      He left. Swanson heaved himself to his feet with obvious weakness--except for two brief inspection trips to the engine room, he had not once worn any breathing apparatus during those interminable and pain-filled hours. He called for power on the broadcast circuit, unhooked a microphone, and spoke in a calm, clear, strong voice: it was an amazing exhibition in self-control, the triumph of a mind over agonized lungs still starving for air.
      "This is your captain speaking," he said. "The fire in the engine room is out. We are already reactivating our power plant. Open all water-tight doors throughout the ship. They are to remain open until further orders. You may regard the worst of our troubles as lying behind us. Thank you for all you have done." He hooked up the microphone and turned to Hansen. "The worst _is_ behind, John--if we have enough power left to reactivate the plant."
      "Surely the worst is still to come," I said. "It'll take you how long--three quarters of an hour, maybe an hour?--to get your turbo generators going and your air-purifying equipment working again. How long do you think it will take your air cleaners to make any noticeable effect on this poisonous air?"
      "Half an hour. At least that. Perhaps more."
      "There you are, then." My mind was so woolly and doped now that I had difficulty in finding words to frame my thoughts, and I wasn't even sure that my thoughts were worth thinking. "An hour and a half at least--and you said the worst was over. The worst hasn't even begun." I shook my head, trying to remember what it was that I had been going to say next, then remembered. "In an hour and a half, one out of every four of your men will be gone."
      Swanson smiled. He actually, incredibly, smiled. He said, "As Sherlock used to say to Moriarty, 'I think not, Doctor.' Nobody's going to die of monoxide poisoning. In fifteen minutes' time we'll have fresh, breathable air throughout the ship."
      Hansen glanced at me just as I glanced at him. The strain had been too much; the old man had gone off his rocker. Swanson caught our interchange of looks and laughed, the laugh changing abruptly to a bout of convulsive coughing as he inhaled too much of that poisoned, smoke-laden atmosphere. He coughed for a long time, then gradually quieted down.