Ice Station Zebra

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.

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."

"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."

"No one's asking you to consent to anything," I said. "Your consent is not required. All I'm asking you to do is stand to one side. And to arrange for that food-provision package for me. If you won't I'll have to manage without it."

I left and went to my cabin. Hansen's cabin, rather. But even though it wasn't my cabin that didn't stop me from turning the key in the lock as soon as I had passed through the door.

Working on the likely supposition that if Hansen did come down soon he wasn't going to be very pleased to find the door of his own cabin locked against him, I wasted no time. I spun the combination lock on my suitcase and opened the lid. At least three quarters of the available space was taken up by Arctic survival clothing, the very best that money could buy. It hadn't been my money that had bought it.

I stripped off the outer clothes I was wearing, pulled on long underwear, a wool shirt and corduroy trousers, then a triple-knit wool parka lined with pure silk. The parka wasn't quite standard; it had a curiously shaped suede-lined pocket below and slightly to the front of the left armpit, and a differently shaped suede-lined pocket on the right-hand side. I dug swiftly to the bottom of my case and brought up three separate items. The first of these, a nine-millimeter Mannlicher-Schoenauer automatic, fitted into the left-hand pocket as securely and strongly as if the pocket had been specially designed for it, which indeed it had; the other items, spare magazine clips, fitted as neatly into the right-hand pocket.

The rest of the dressing didn't take long. Two pairs of heavy-knit woollen socks, felt undershoes, and then the furs — caribou for the outer parka and trousers, wolverine for the hood, sealskin for the boots, and reindeer for the gloves, which were pulled on over other layers of silk gloves and woollen mittens. Maybe a polar bear would have had a slight edge over me when it came to being equipped to survive an Arctic blizzard, but there wouldn't have been much in it.

I hung snow mask and goggles around my neck, stuck a rubberized water-proof flashlight into the inside pocket of my fur parka, unearthed my walkie-talkie, and closed the case. I set the combination again. There was no need to set the combination any more, not now that I had the Mannlicher-Schoenauer under my arm, but it would give Swanson something to do while I was away. I shoved my medicine case and a steel flask of alcohol in a rucksack and unlocked the door.

Swanson was exactly where I'd left him in the control room. So was Hansen. So were two others who had not been there when I had left: Rawlings and Zabrinski. Hansen, Rawlings, and Zabrinski, the three biggest men in the ship. The last time I'd seen them together was when Swanson had summoned them up from the «Dolphin» in the Holy Loch to see to it that I didn't do anything he didn't want me to do. Maybe Commander Swanson had a one-track mind. Hansen, Rawlings and Zahrinski. They looked bigger than ever.

I said to Swanson, "Do I get those iron rations or not?"

"One last formal statement," Swanson said. His first thoughts, as I came waddling into the control center, must have been that a grizzly bear was loose inside his submarine, but he hadn't batted an eyelid. "For the record. Your intentions are suicidal, your chances nonexistent. I cannot give my consent."

"All right, your statement is on record, witnesses and all. The iron rations."

"I cannot give my consent because of a new and dangerous development. One of our electronics technicians was carrying out a routine calibration test on the ice machine just now and an overload coil didn't function. Electric motor burnt out. No spares: it will have to be rewired. You realize what that means. If we're forced to drop down, I can't find my way to the top again. Then it's curtains for everybody — everybody left above the ice, that is."

I didn't blame him for trying, but I was vaguely disappointed in him: he'd had time to think up a better one than that. I said, "The iron rations, Commander. Do I get them?"

"You intend to go through with this? After what I've said?"

"Oh, for God's sake. I'll do without the food."

"My executive officer, torpedoman Rawlings and radioman Zabrinski," Swanson said formally, "don't like this."

"I can't help what they like or don't like."

"They feel that they can't let you go through with it," he persisted.

They were more than big. They were huge. I could get past them the way a lamb gets past a starving lion. I had a gun, all right, but with that one-piece parka I was wearing I'd practically have to undress myself to get at it, and Hansen, in that Holy Loch canteen, had shown just how quickly he could react when he saw anyone making a suspicious move, And even if I did get my gun out, what then? Men like Hansen, like Rawlings and Zabrinski, didn't scare. I couldn't bluff them with a gun. And I couldn't use the gun. Not against men who were just doing their duty.

"They «won't» let you go through with it," Swanson went on, "unless, that is, you permit them to accompany you, which they have volunteered to do."

"Volunteered." Rawlings sniffed. "You, you and you."

"I don't want them," I said.

"Gracious, ain't he?" Rawlings asked of no one in particular. "You might at least have said thanks, Doc."

"You are putting the lives of your men in danger, Commander Swanson. You know what your orders said."

"Yes. I also know that in Arctic travels, as in mountaineering and exploring, a party always has double the chances of the individual. I also know that if it became known that we had permitted a civilian doctor to set off on his own for Drift Station Zebra while we were all too scared to stir from our nice warm sub, the name of the U. S. Navy would become pretty muddy."

"What do your men think of your making them risk their lives to save the good name of the submarine service?"

"You heard the captain," Rawlings said. "We're volunteers. Look at Zabrinski there: anyone can see that he's a man cast in a heroic mold."

"Have you thought of what happens," I said, "if the ice closes in when we're away and the captain has to take the ship down?"

"Don't even mention it," Zabrinski urged. "I'm not all that heroic."

I gave up. I'd no option but to give up. Besides, like Zabrinski, I wasn't all that heroic and I suddenly realized that I would be very glad indeed to have those three men along with me.