Ice Station Zebra (8 page)

      Whoever had installed the 240-ton air-conditioning unit in the _Dolphin_ should have been prosecuted; it just wasn't working any more. The air was very hot and stuffy--what little there was of it, that was. I looked around cautiously and saw that everyone else appeared to be suffering from this same shortage of air, all except Swanson, who seemed to carry his own built-in oxygen cylinder around with him. I hoped Swanson was keeping in mind the fact that the _Dolphin_ cost 120 million dollars to build. Hansen's narrowed eyes held a definite core of worry, and even the usually imperturbable Rawlings was rubbing a bristly blue chin with a hand the size and shape of a shovel. In the deep silence after Swanson had finished speaking the scraping noise sounded unusually loud, then was lost in the noise of water flooding into the tanks.
      We stared at the screen. Water continued to pour into the tanks until we could see a gap appear between the top of the sail and the ice. The pumps started up, slowly, to control the speed of descent. On the screen, the cone of light thrown on to the underside of the ice by the floodlight grew fainter and larger as we dropped, then remained stationary, neither moving nor growing in size. We had stopped.
      "Now," said Swanson. "Before that current gets us again."
      There came the hissing roar of compressed air under high pressure entering the ballast tanks. The _Dolphin_ started to move sluggishly upward while we watched the cone of light on the ice slowly narrow and brighten.
      "More air," Swanson said.
      We were rising faster now, closing the gap to the ice all too quickly for my liking. Fifteen feet, twelve feet, ten feet.
      "More air," Swanson said.
      I braced myself, one hand on the plot, the other on an overhead grab bar. On the screen, the ice was rushing down to meet us. Suddenly the picture quivered and danced, the _Dolphin_ shuddered, jarred, and echoed hollowly along its length, more lights went out, the picture came back on the screen, the sail was still lodged below the ice, then the _Dolphin_ trembled and lurched and the deck pressed against our feet like an ascending elevator. The sail on the TV vanished, nothing but opaque white taking its place. The diving officer, his voice high with strain that had not yet found relief, called out, "Forty feet, forty feet." We had broken through.
      "There you are, now," Swanson said mildly. "All it needed was a little perseverance." I looked at the short, plump figure, the round, good-humored face, and wondered for the hundredth time why the nerveless iron men of this world so very seldom look the part.
      I let my pride have a holiday. I took my handkerchief from my pocket, wiped my face, and said to Swanson, "Does this sort of thing go on all the time?"
      "Fortunately, perhaps, no," he smiled. He turned to the diving officer. "We've got our foothold on this rock. Let's make sure we have a good belay."
      For a few seconds, more compressed air was bled into the tanks, then the diving officer said: "No chance of her dropping down now, Captain."
      "Up periscope."
      Again the long, gleaming silver tube hissed up from its well. Swanson didn't even bother folding down the hinged handles. He peered briefly into the eyepiece, then straightened. "Down periscope."
      "Pretty cold up top?" Hansen- asked.
      Swanson nodded. "Water on the lens must have frozen solid as soon as it hit that air. Can't see a thing." He turned to the diving officer. "Steady at forty?"
      "Guaranteed. And all the buoyancy we'll ever want."
      "Fair enough." Swanson looked at the quartermaster, who was shrugging his way into a heavy sheepskin coat. "How about a little fresh air, Ellis?"
      "Right away, sir." Ellis buttoned his coat and added: "Might take some time."
      "I don't think so," Swanson said. "You may find the bridge and hatchways jammed with broken ice but I doubt it. My guess is that that ice is so thick that it will have fractured into very large sections and fallen outside clear of the bridge."
      I felt my ears pop with the sudden pressure change as the hatch swung up and open and snapped back against its standing latch. Another, more distant sound as the second hatch cover locked open, and then we heard Ellis on the voice tube.
      "All clear up top."
      "Raise the antennae," Swanson said. "John, have them start transmitting and keep transmitting until their fingers fall off. Here we are and here we stay--until we raise Drift Ice Station Zebra."
      "If there's anyone left alive there," I said.
      "There's that, of course," Swanson said. He couldn't look at me. "There's always that."
4
      This, I thought, death's dreadful conception of a dreadful world, must have been what had chilled the hearts and souls of our far-off Nordic ancestors when life's last tide slowly ebbed and they had tortured their failing minds with fearful imaginings of a bleak and bitter hell of eternal cold. But it had been all right for the old boys, all they had to do was imagine it, we had to experience the reality of it, and I bad no doubt at all in my mind as to which was easier. The latter-day Eastern conception of hell was altogether more comfortable, at least a man could keep reasonably warm there.
      One thing sure, nobody could keep reasonably warm where Rawlings and I were, standing a half-hour watch on the bridge of the _Dolphin_ and slowly freezing solid. It had been my own fault entirely that our teeth were chattering like frenzied castanets. Half an hour after the radio room had started transmitting on Drift Ice Station Zebra's wave length and all without the slightest whisper by way of reply or acknowledgment, I had suggested to Commander Swanson that Zebra might possibly be able to hear us without having sufficient power to send a reply but that they might just conceivably let us have an acknowledgment some other way. I'd pointed out that drift stations habitually carried rockets--the only way to guide home any lost members of the party if radio communication broke down--and radio sondes and rockoons. The sondes were -radio-carrying balloons that could rise to a height of twenty miles to gather weather information; the rockoons, radio rockets fired from balloons, could rise even higher. On a moonlit night such as this, those balloons, if released, would be visible at least twenty miles away: if flares were attached to them, at twice that distance. Swanson had seen my point, called for volunteers for the first watch, and in the circumstances I hadn't had much choice. Rawlings bad offered to accompany me.
      It was a landscape--if such a bleak, barren, and, featureless desolation could be called a landscape--from another and ancient world, weird and strange and oddly frightening. There were no clouds in the sky, but there were no stars, either: this I could not understand. Low on the southern horizon a milky, misty moon shed its mysterious light over the dark lifelessness of the polar ice cap. Dark, not white. One would have expected moonlit ice to shine and sparkle and glitter with the light of a million crystal chandeliers: but it was dark. The moon was so low in the sky that the dominating color on the ice cap came from the blackness of the long shadows cast by the fantastically ridged and hummocked ice; and where the moon did strike directly, the ice had been so scoured and abraded by the assaults of a thousand ice storms that it had lost almost all its ability to reflect light of any kind.
      This ridged and hummocked ice cap had a strange quality of elusiveness, of impermanence, of evanescence: one moment there, definitively hard and harsh and repellent in its coldly contrasting blacks and whites; the next, ghost-like, blurring coalescing and finally vanishing like a shimmering mirage fading and dying in some ice-bound desert. But this was no trick of the eye or imagination; it was the result of a ground-level ice storm that rose and swirled and subsided at the dictates of an icy wind that was never less than strong and sometimes gusted up to gale force, a wind that drove before it a swirling rushing fog of billions of needle-pointed ice spicules. For the most part, standing as we were on the bridge twenty feet above the level of the ice--the rest of the _Dolphin_ might never have existed, as far as the eye could tell--we were above this billowing ground swell of ice particles--but occasionally the wind gusted strongly, and the spicules lifted, drummed demoniacally against the already ice-sheathed starboard side of the sail, drove against the few exposed inches of our skin with all the painfully stinging impact of a sand blaster held at arm's length. But, unlike a sand blaster, the pain-filled shock of those spear-tipped spicules was only momentary; each wasp-like sting carried with it its own ice-cold anesthetic, and all surface sensation was quickly lost. Then the wind would drop, the furious rattling on the sail would fade and in the momentary contrast of nearsilence we could hear the stealthy rustling as of a million rats advancing as the ice spicules brushed their blind way across the iron-hard surface of the polar cap. The bridge thermometer stood at --21°F --530 of frost. If I were a promoter interested in developing a summer holiday resort, I thought, I wouldn't pay very much attention to this place.
      Rawlings and I stamped our feet, flailed our arms across our chests, shivered non-stop, took what little shelter we could from the canvas wind-break, rubbed our goggles constantly to keep them clear, and never once, except when the ice spicules drove into our faces, stopped examining every quarter of the horizon. Somewhere out there on those frozen wastes was a lost and dying group of men whose lives might depend upon so little a thing as the momentary misting-up of our goggles. We stared out over those shifting ice sands until our eyes ached. But that was all we had for it: just aching eyes. We saw nothing, nothing at all. The ice cap remained empty of all signs of life. Dead.
      When our relief came, Rawlings and I got below with all the speed our frozen and stiffened limbs would allow. I found Commander Swanson sitting on a canvas stool outside the radio room, I stripped off Outer clothes, face coverings, and goggles, took a steaming mug of coffee that had appeared from nowhere, and tried not to hop around too much as the blood came - pounding back into my arms and legs.
      "How did you cut yourself like that?" Swanson asked, concern in his voice. "You've a half-inch streak of blood right across your forehead."
      "Flying ice, it just looks bad." I felt tired and pretty low. "We're wasting our time transmitting. If the men on Zebra were without any shelter, it's no wonder all signals ceased long ago. Without food and shelter, no one could last more than a few hours in that place. Neither Rawlings nor I is a wilting hot-house flower but after half an hour up there we've both just about had it."
      "I don't know," Swanson said thoughtfully. "Look at Amundsen. Look at Scott, at Peary. They _walked_ all the way to the Poles."
      "A different breed of men, Captain. Either that or the sun shone for them. All I know is that half an hour is too long to be up there. Fifteen minutes is enough for anyone."
      "Fifteen minutes it shall be." He looked at me, his face carefully devoid of all expression. "You haven't much hope?"
      "If they're without shelter, I've none."
      "You told me they had an emergency power pack of Nife cells for powering their transmitter," he murmured. "You also said those batteries will retain their charge indefinitely--years, if necessary--irrespective of the weather conditions under which they are stored. They must have been using that battery a few days ago when they sent out their first S.O.S. It wouldn't be finished already."
      His point was so obvious that I didn't answer. The battery Wasn't finished; the men were.
      "I agree with you," he went on quietly. "We're wasting our time. Maybe we should just pack up and go home. If we can't raise them, we'll never find them."
      "Maybe not. But you're forgetting your directive from Washington, Commander." -
      "How do you mean?"
      "Remember? I'm to be extended every facility and all aid short of actually endangering the safety of the submarine and the lives of the crew. At the present moment we're doing neither. If we fail to raise them, I'm prepared for a twentymile sweep on foot arouna this spot in the hope of locating them. If that fails, we could move to another polynya and repeat the search. The search area isn't all that big, there's a fair chance, but a chance, that we might locate the station eventually. I'm prepared to stay up here all winter till we do find them."
      "You don't call that endangering the lives of my men? Making extended searches of the ice cap, on foot, in midwinter?"
      "Nobody said anything about endangering the lives of your men." -
      "You mean--you mean you'd go it alone?" Swanson stared down at the deck and shook his head. "I don't know what to think. I don't know whether to say you're crazy or whether to say I'm beginning to understand why they-- whoever 'they' may be--picked you for the job, Dr. Carpenter." He sighed, then regarded me thoughtfully. "One moment you say there's no hope, the next that you're prepared to spend the winter here, searching. If you don't mind my saying so, Doctor, it just doesn't make sense."
      "Stiff-necked pride," I said. "I don't like throwing my hand in on a job before I've even started it. I don't know what the attitude of the U. S. Navy is on that sort of thing."
      He gave me another speculative glance; I could see that he believed me the way a fly believes the spider on the web who has just offered him safe accommodation for the night. He smiled. He said: "The U. S. Navy doesn't take offense all that easily, Dr. Carpenter. I suggest you catch a couple of hours' sleep while you can. You'll need it if you're going to start walking toward the North Pole."
      "How about yourself? You haven't been to bed at all tonight."
      "I think I'll wait a while." He nodded toward the door of the radio room. "Just in case anything comes through."
      "What are they sending? Just the call sign?"
      "Plus request for position and a rocket, if they have either. I'll let you know immediately anything comes through. Good night, Dr. Carpenter. Or, rather, good morning."
      I rose heavily and made my way to Hansen's cabin.
      The atmosphere around the 8:00 a.m. breakfast table in the wardroom was less than festive. Apart from the officer on deck and the engineer lieutenant on watch, all the _Dolphin's_ officers were there, some just risen from their bunks, some just heading for them, none of them talking in anything more than monosyllables. Even the ebullient Dr. Benson was remote and withdrawn. It seemed pointless to ask whether any contact had been established with Drift Station Zebra; it was painfully obvious that it hadn't. And that after almost five hours of continuous sending. The sense of despondency and defeat, the unspoken knowledge that time had run out for the survivors of Drift Station Zebra hung heavy over the wardroom.