Ice Station Zebra (9 page)

      No one hurried over his meal--there was nothing to hurry for--but by and by they rose one by one and drifted off, Dr. Benson to his sick-bay call, the young torpedo officer, Lieutenant Mills, to supervise the efforts of his men who had been working twelve hours a day for the past two days to iron out the faults in the suspect torpedoes, a third to relieve Hansen, who had the watch, and three others to their bunks. That left only Swanson, Raeburn and myself. Swanson, I knew, hadn't been to bed at all the previous night, but for all that he had the rested, clear-eyed look of a man with eight solid hours behind him.
      The steward, Henry, had just brought in a fresh pot of coffee when we heard the sound of running footsteps in the passageway outside and the quartermaster burst into the wardroom. He didn't quite manage to take the door off its hinges, but that was only because the Electric Boat Company put good, solid hinges on the doors of their submarines.
      "We got it made!" he shouted, and then, perhaps recollectmg that enlisted men were expected to conduct themselves with rather more decorum in the wardroom, "We've raised them, Captain, we've raised them!"
      "What!" Swanson could move twice as fast as his comfortable figure suggested, and he was already half out of his chair.
      "We are in radio contact with Drift Ice Station Zebra, sir," Ellis said formally.
      Commander Swanson got to the radio room first, but only because he had a head start on Raeburn and myself. Two operators were on watch, both leaning forward toward their transmitters, one with his head bent low, the other with his cocked to one side, as if those attitudes of concentrated listening helped them to isolate and amplify the slightest sound coming through the earphones clamped to their heads. One of them was scribbling away mechanically on a -message pad. "DSY," he was writing down, "_DSY_" repeated over and over and over again. DSY. The answering call sign of Drift Station Zebra. He stopped writing as he caught sight of Swanson out of the corner of his eye.
      "We've got 'em, Captain, no question. Signal very weak and intermittent, but--"
      "Never mind the signal!" It was Raeburn who made this interruption without any by-your-leave from Swanson. He tried, and failed, to keep the rising note of excitement out. of his voice, and he looked more than ever like a youngster playing hooky from high school. "The bearing? Have you got their bearing? That's all that matters."
      The other operator swiveled in his seat, and I recognized my erstwhile guard, Zabrinski. He fixed Raeburn with a sad and reproachful eye.
      "Course we got their bearing, Lieutenant. First thing we did. Oh forty-five, give or take a whisker. Northeast, that is."

      "Thank you, Zabrinski," Swanson said dryly. "Oh fortyfive is northeast. The navigating officer and I wouldn't have known. Position?"
      Zabrinski shrugged and turned to his watchmate, a man with a red face, leather neck and a shining, polished dome where his hair ought to have been. "What's the word, Curly?"
      "Nothing. Just nothing." Curly looked at Swanson. "Twenty times I've asked for his position. No good. All he does is send out his call sign. I don't think he's hearing us at all, be doesn't even know we're listening, he just keeps sending his call sign over and over again. Maybe he hasn't switched his aerial in to receive."
      "It isn't possible," Swanson said.
      "It is with this guy," Zabrinski said. "At first Curly and I thought it was the signal that was weak, then we thought it was the operator who was weak or sick, but we were wrong: he's just a ham-handed amateur."
      "You can tell?" Swanson asked.
      "You can always tell. You can--" he broke off, stiffened and touched his watchmate's arm.
      Curly nodded. "I got it," he said matter-of-factly. "Position unknown, the man says."
      Nobody said anything, not just then. It didn't seem important that he couldn't give us his position; all that mattered was that we were in direct contact. Raeburn turned and ran forward across the control room. I could hear him speaking rapidly on the bridge telephone. Swanson turned to me.
      "Those balloons you spoke of earlier. The ones on Zebra. Are they free or captive?"
      "Both."
      "How do the captive ones work?"
      "A free-running winch, nylon cord marked off in hundreds and thousands of feet."
      "We'll ask them to send a captive balloon up to five thousand feet," Swanson decided. "With flares. If they're within thirty or forty miles, we ought to see it, and if we get its elevation and make an allowance for the effect of wind on it, we should get a fair estimate of distance. . . . What is it, Brown?" This to the man Zabrinski called "Curly."
      "They're sending again," Curly said. "Very broken, fades a lot. 'God's sake hurry.' Just like that, twice over. 'God's sake hurry.'"
      "Send this," Swanson said. He dictated a brief message about the balloons. "And send it real slow."
      Curly nodded and began to transmit. Raeburn came running back into the radio room.
      "The moon's not down yet," he said quickly to Swanson. "Still a degree or two above the horizon. I'm taking a sextant up top and taking a moon-sight. Ask them to do the same. That'll give us the latitude difference, and if we know they're oh forty-five of us, we can pin them down to a mile."
      "It's worth trying," Swanson said. He dictated another message to Brown. Brown transmitted the second message immediately after the first. We waited for the answer. For all of ten minutes we waited. I looked at the men in the radio room: they all had the same remote, withdrawn look of men who are there only physically, men whose minds are many miles away. They were all at the same place and I was too, wherever Drift Ice Station Zebra was.
      Brown started writing again, not for long. His voice this time was still matter-of-fact but with overtones of emptiness. He said, "'All balloons burned. No moon.'"
      "'No moon.'" Raeburn couldn't hide the bitterness, the sharpness of his disappointment. "Damn! Must be pretty heavy overcast up there. Or a bad Storm."
      "No," I said. "You don't get local weather variations like that on the ice cap. The conditions will be the same over fifty thousand square miles. The moon is down. For them, the moon is down. Their latest estimated position must have been pure guesswork, and bad guesswork at that. They must be at least a hundred miles farther north and east than we bad thought."
      "Ask them if they have any rockets," Swanson said to Brown.
      "You can try," I said. "It'll be a waste of time. If they're as far off as I think, their rockets would never get above our horizon. Even if they did, we wouldn't see them."
      "It's always a chance, isn't it?" Swanson asked.
      "Beginning to lose contact, sir," Brown reported. "Something there about food but it faded right out."
      "Tell them if they have any rockets to fire them at once," Swanson said. "Quickly, now, before you lose contact."
      Four times in all Brown sent the message before he managed to pick up a reply. Then he said: "Message reads 'Two minutes.' Either this guy is pretty far gone or his transmitter batteries are. That's all. 'Two minutes,' he said."
      Swanson nodded wordlessly and left the room. I followed. We picked up coats and binoculars and clambered up to the bridge. After the warmth and comfort of the control room, the cold seemed glacial, the flying ice spicules more lancetlike than ever. Swanson uncapped the gyro-repeater compass, gave us the line of 045, and told the two men who had been keeping watch what to look for and where.
      A minute passed, two minutes, five. My eyes began to ache from staring into the ice-filled dark; the exposed part of my face had gone completely numb, and I knew that when I removed those binoculars I was going to take a fair amount of skin with them.
      A phone bell rang. Swanson lowered his glasses, leaving two peeled and bloody rings around his eyes--he seemed unaware of it; the pain wouldn't come until later--and picked up the receiver. He listened briefly, hung up.
      "Radio room," he said. "Let's get below. All of us. The rockets were fired three minutes ago."
      We went below. Swanson caught sight of his face reflected in a glass gauge and shook his head. "They must have shelter," he said quietly. "They must. Some hut left. Or they would have been gone long ago." He went into the radio room. "Still in contact?"
      "Yeah." It was Zabrinski. "Off and on. It's a funny thing. When a bum contact like this starts to fade, it usually gets lost and stays lost. But this guy keeps coming back. Funny."
      "Maybe he hasn't even got batteries left," I said. "Maybe all they have is a hand-cranked generator. Maybe these's no one left with the strength to crank it for more than a few moments at a time."
      "Maybe," Zabrinski agreed. "Tell the captain that last message, Curly."
      "'Can't late many tours,'" Brown said. "That's how the message came through. 'Can't late many tours.' I think it should read 'Can't last many hours.' Don't see what else it could have been."
      Swanson looked at me briefly, and glanced away again. I hadn't told anyone else that the commandant of the base was my brother and I knew he hadn't told anyone, either. He said to Brown: "Give them a time check. Ask them to send their call signs five minutes every hour on the hour. Tell them we'll contact them again within six hours at the most, maybe only four. Zabrinski, how accurate was that bearing?"
      "Dead accurate, Captain. I've had plenty of rechecks. Oh forty-five exactly."
      Swanson moved out into the control center. "Drift Station Zebra can't see the moon. If we take Dr. Carpenter's word for it that weather conditions are pretty much the same all over, that's because the moon is below their horizon. With the elevation we have of the moon, and knowing their bearing, what's Zebra's minimum distance from us?"
      "A hundred miles, as Dr. Carpenter said," Raeburn confirmed after a short calculation. "At least that."
      "So. We leave here and take a course oh forty. Not enough to take us very far from their general direction, but it will give us enough off-set to take a good cross-bearing eventually. We will go exactly a hundred miles and try for another polynya. Call the executive officer, secure for diving." He smiled at me. "With two cross-bearings and an accurately measured base line, we can pin them down to a hundred yards."
      "How do you intend to measure a hundred miles under the ice? Accurately, I mean?"
      "Our inertial-navigation computer does it for me. It's very accurate: you wouldn't believe just how accurate. I can dive the _Dolphin_ off the eastern coast of the United States and surface again in the eastern Mediterranean within five hundred yards of where I expect to be. Over a hundred miles I don't expect to be twenty yards out."
      Radio aerials were lowered, hatches screwed down, and within five minutes the _Dolphin_ had dropped down from her hole in the ice and was on her way. The two helmsmen at the diving stand sat idly smoking, doing nothing: the steering controls were in automatic interlock with the inertial-navigation system, which steered the ship with a degree of accuracy and sensitivity impossible to human hands. For the first time I could feel a heavy jarring vibration rumbling throughout the length of the ship. "Can't last many hours," the message had said. The _Dolphin_ was under full power.
      I didn't leave the control room that morning. I spent most of the time peering over the shoulder of Dr. Benson, who had passed his usual five minutes in the sick bay waiting for the patients who never turned up and then had hurried to his seat by the ice machine. The readings on that machine meant living or dying to the Zebra survivors. We had to find another polynya to surface in to get a cross-bearing on Zebra's position: no polynya, no cross-bearing; no cross-bearing, no hope. I wondered for the hundredth time how many of the survivors of the fire were still alive. From the quiet desperation of the few garbled messages that Brown and Zabrinski had managed to pick up, I couldn't see that there would be many.
      The pattern traced out by the hissing stylus on the chart was hardly an encouraging sight. Most of the time it showed the ice overhead to be of a thickness of ten feet or more. Several times the stylus dipped to show thicknesses of thirty to forty feet, and once it dipped down almost clear of the paper, showing a tremendous inverted ridge of at least 150 feet in depth. I tried to imagine what kind of fantastic pressures created by piled-up log jams of rafted ice on the surface must have been necessary to force ice down to such a depth; but I just didn't have the imagination to cope with that sort of thing.
      Only twice in the first eighty miles did the stylus trace out the thin black line that meant thin ice overhead. The first of those polynyas might have accommodated a small row boat, but it would certainly never have looked at the _Dolphin_; the other had hardly been any bigger.
      Shortly before noon the hull vibration died away as Swanson gave the order for a cut-back to a slow cruising speed. He said to Benson, "How does it look?"
      "Terrible. Heavy ice all the way."
      "Well, we can't expect a polynya to fall into our laps right away," Swanson said reasonably. "We're almost there. We'll make a grid search. Five miles east, five miles west, a quarter mile farther to the north each time."
      The search began. An hour passed, two, then three. Raeburn and his assistant hardly ever raised their heads from the plotting table, where they were meticulously tracing every movement the _Dolphin_ was making in her criss-cross search under the sea. Four o'clock in the afternoon. The normal background buzz of conversation, the occasional small talk from various groups in the control center, died away completely. Benson's occasional "Heavy ice, still heavy ice," growing steadily quieter and more dispirited, served only to emphasize and deepen the heavy, brooding silence that had fallen. Only a case-hardened undertaker could have felt perfectly at home in that atmosphere. At the moment, undertakers were the last people I wanted to think about.
      Five o'clock in the afternoon. People weren't looking at each other any more, much less talking. Heavy ice, still heavy ice. Defeat, despair hung heavy in the air. Heavy ice, still heavy ice. Even Swanson had stopped smiling. I wondered if he had in his mind's eye what I now constantly had in mine: the picture of a haggard, emaciated, bearded man with his face all but destroyed with frostbite, a frozen, starving, dying man draining away the last few ounces of his exhausted strength as he cranked the handle of his generator and tapped out his call sign with lifeless fingers, his head bowed as he strained to listen above the howl of the ice storm for the promise of aid that never came. Or maybe there was no one tapping out a call sign any more. They were no ordinary men who had been sent to man Drift Ice Station Zebra, but there comes a time when even the toughest, the -bravest, the most enduring will abandon all hope and lie down to die. Perhaps he had already lain down to die. Heavy ice, still heavy ice.
      At half-past five Commander Swanson walked across to the ice machine and peered over Benson's shoulder. He said, "What's the average thickness of that stuff above?"
      "Twelve to fifteen feet," Benson said. His voice was low and tired. "Nearer fifteen, I would say."
      Swanson picked up a phone. "Lieutenant Mills? Captain here. What is the state of readiness of those torpedoes you're working on? Four? Ready to go? Good. Stand by to load. I'm giving this search another thirty minutes, then it's up to you. Yes, that is correct. We shall attempt to blow a hole through the ice." He replaced the phone.
      Hansen said thoughtfully, "Fifteen feet of ice is a helluva lot of ice. And that ice will have a tamping effect and will direct ninety per cent of the explosive force down the way, You think we _can_ blow a hole through fifteen feet of ice, Captain?"
      "I've no idea," Swanson admitted. "How can anyone know until we try it?"
      "Nobody ever tried to do this before?" I asked.
      "No. Not in the U.S. Navy, anyway. The Russians may have tried it, I wouldn't know. They don't," he added dryly, "keep us very well informed on those matters."
      "Aren't the underwater shock waves liable to damage the _Dolphin?_" I asked. I didn't care for the idea at all, and that was a fact.
      "If they do, the Electric Boat Company can expect a- pretty strong letter of complaint. We shall explode the warhead electronically about a thousand yards after it leaves the ship: it has to travel eight hundred yards anyway before a safety, device unlocks and permits the warhead to be armed. We shall be bows on to the detonation, and with a hull designed to withstand the pressures this one is, the shock effects should be negligible."
      "Very heavy ice," Benson intoned. "Thirty feet, forty feet, fifty feet. Very, very heavy ice."
      "Just too bad if your torpedo ended up under a pile like the stuff above us just now," I said. "I doubt if it would even chip off the bottom layer."
      "We'll take care that doesn't happen. We'll just find a suitably large layer of ice of normal thickness, kind of back off a thousand yards, and then let go."