Ice Station Zebra

5

Lieutenant Hansen was the first man to give up. Or perhaps "give up" is wrong: the meaning of the words was quite unknown and the thought totally alien to Hansen. It would be more accurate to say that he was the first of us to show any glimmerings of common sense. He caught my arm, brought his head close to mine, pulled down his snow mask, and shouted, "No farther, Doc. We must stop."

"The next ridge," I yelled back. I didn't know whether he'd heard me or not, as soon as he'd spoken he'd pulled his mask back up into position again to protect the momentarily exposed skin against the horizontally driving ice storm, but he seemed to understand for he eased his grip on the rope around my waist and let me move ahead again. For the past two and a half hours Hansen, Rawlings and I had each taken our turn at being the lead man on the end of the rope, while the other three held on to it some ten yards behind, the idea being not that the lead man should guide the others but that the others should save the life of the lead man, should the need arise. And the need had already arisen, just once. Hansen, slipping and scrambling on all fours across a fractured, and upward-sloping raft of ice, had reached gropingly forward with his arms into the blindness of the night and the storm and found nothing there. He had fallen eight vertical feet before the rope had brought him up with a vicious jerk that had been almost as painful for Rawlings and myself, who had taken the brunt of the shock, as it had been for Hansen. For nearly two minutes he'd dangled above the wind-torn black water of a freshly opened lead before we'd managed to drag him back to safety. It had been a close thing, far too close a thing, for in far sub-zero temperatures with a gale-force wind blowing, even a few seconds' submersion in water makes the certainty of death absolute, the process of dissolution as swift as it is irreversible. In those conditions the clothes of a man pulled from the water become a frozen and impenetrable suit of armor inside seconds, an armor that can neither be removed nor chipped away. Petrified inside this ice shroud, a man just simply and quickly freezes to death — in the unlikely event, that is, of his heart's having withstood the thermal shock of the body's surface being exposed to an almost instantaneous hundred-degree drop in temperature.

So now I stepped forward very cautiously, very warily indeed, feeling the ice ahead of me with a probe we'd devised after Hansen's near-accident — a chopped-off five-foot length of rope which we'd dipped into the water of the lead and then exposed to the air until it had become as rigid as a bar of steel. At times I walked, at times I stumbled, at times, when a brief lull in the gale-force wind, as sudden as it was unexpected, would catch me off balance, I'd just fall forward and continue on hands and knees, for it was quite as easy that way. It was during one of those periods when I was shuffling blindly forward on all fours that I realized that the wind had, for the time being, lost nearly all of its violence and that I was no longer being bombarded by that horizontally driving hail of flying ice spicules. Moments later my probe made contact with some solid obstacle in my path: the vertical wall of a rafted ice ridge. I crawled thankfully into its shelter, raised my goggles, and pulled out and switched on my flashlight as the others came blindly up to where I lay.

Blindly. With arms outstretched they pawed at the air before them like sightless men, which for the past two and a half hours was exactly what they had been. For all the service our goggles had given us, we might as well have stuck our heads in gunny sacks before leaving the Dolphin. I looked at Hansen, the first of the three to come up. Goggles, snow mask, hood, clothing — the entire front part of his body from top to toe was deeply and solidly encrusted in a thick and glittering layer of compacted ice, except for some narrow cracks caused by joint movements of legs and arms. As he drew close to me, I could hear him splintering and crackling a good five feet away. Long ice feathers streamed back from his head, shoulders, and elbows: as an extra-terrestrial monster from one of the chillier planets, such as Pluto, he'd have been a sensation in any horror movie. I suppose I looked much the same.

We huddled close together in the shelter of the wall. Only four feet above our heads the ice storm swept by in a glittering gray-white river. Rawlings, sitting on my left, pushed up his goggles, looked down at his ice-sheathed furs, and started to beat his chest with his fist to break up the covering. I reached out a hand and caught his arm.

"Leave it alone," I said.

"Leave it alone?" Rawlings' voice was muffled by his snow mask, but not so muffled that I couldn't hear the chattering of his teeth. "This damn suit of armor weighs a ton. I'm out of training for this kind of weight-lifting, Doc."

"Leave it alone. If it weren't for that ice, you'd have frozen to death by this time: it's insulating you from that wind and the ice storm. Let's see the rest of your face. And your hands."

I checked him and the two others for frostbite, while Hansen checked me. We were still lucky. Blue and mottled and shaking with the cold, but no frostbite. The furs of the other three might not have been quite as fancy as mine, but they were very adequate indeed. Nuclear subs always got the best of everything, and Arctic clothing was no exception. But although they weren't freezing to death, I could see from their faces and hear from their breathing that they were pretty far gone in exhaustion. Thrusting into the power of that ice storm was like wading upstream against the current of a river of molasses; that was energy-sapping enough, but the fact that we had to spend most of our time clambering over, slipping on, sliding and falling across fractured ice or making detours around impassable ridges while being weighed down with forty-pound packs on our backs and heaven only knew how many additional pounds of ice coating our furs in front, had turned our trudge across that contorted, treacherous ice into a dark and frozen nightmare.

"The point of no return, I think," Hansen said. His breathing, like Rawlings', was very quick, very shallow, almost gasping. "We can't take much more of this, Doc."

"You ought to listen to Dr. Benson's lectures a bit more," I said reprovingly. "All this ice cream and apple pie and lolling around in your bunks is no training for this sort of thing."

"Yeah?" He peered at me. "How do «you» feel?"

"A mite tired," I admitted. "Nothing much to speak of." Nothing much to speak of! My legs felt as if they were falling off, that was all, but the goad of pride was always a useful one to have at hand. I slipped off my rucksack and brought out the medicinal alcohol. "I suggest fifteen minutes' break. Any more and we'll just start stiffening up completely. Meantime, a little drop of what we fancy will help keep the old blood corpuscles trudging around."

"I thought medical opinion was against alcohol in low temperatures," Hansen said doubtfully. "Something about opening the pores."

"Name me any form of human activity," I said, "and I'll find you a group of doctors against it. Spoilsports. Besides, this isn't alcohol, it's very fine Scotch whisky."

"You should have said so in the first place. Pass it over. Not too much for Rawlings and Zabrinski: they're not used to the stuff. Any word, Zabrinski?"

Z?brinski, with the walkie-talkie's aerial up and one earphone tucked in below the hood of his parka, was talking into the microphone through cupped hands. As the radio expert, Zabrinski had been the obvious man to handle the walkie-talkie, and I'd given it to him before leaving the submarine. This was also the reason why Zabrinski wasn't at any time given the position of lead man in our trudge across the ice. A heavy fall or immersion in water would have finished the radio he was carrying slung on his back; and if the radio were finished, so would we be, for without the radio, not only had we no hope of finding Drift Station Zebra; we wouldn't have a chance in a thousand of ever finding our way back to the «Dolphin» again. Zabrinski was built on the size and scale of a medium-sized gorilla and was about as durable; but we couldn't have treated him more tenderly had he been made of Dresden china.

"It's difficult," Zabrinski said. "Radio's okay, but this ice storm causes such damn distortion and squeaking — no, wait a minute, though, wait a minute."

He bent his head over the microphone, shielding it from the sound of the storm, and spoke again through cupped hands. "Zabrinski speaking… Zabrinski. Yeah, we're all kinda tuckered out, but Doc here seems to think we'll make it… Hang on, I'll ask him."

He turned to me. "How far do you think we've come, they want to know."

"Four miles." I shrugged. "Three and a half, four and a half. You guess it."

Zabrinski spoke again, looked interrogatively at Hansen and me, saw our head shakes, and signed off. He said: "Navigating officer says we're four, five degrees north of where we should be and that we'll have to cut south if we don't want to miss Zebra by a few hundred yards."

It could have been worse. Over an hour had passed since we'd received the last bearing position from the «Dolphin», and, between radio calls, our only means of navigating had been by judging the strength and direction of the wind in our faces. When a man's face is completely covered and largely numb, it's not a very sensitive instrument for gauging wind direction — and, for all we knew, the wind might be either backing or veering. It could have been a lot worse, and I said so to Hansen.

"It could be worse," he agreed heavily. "We could be traveling in circles or we could be dead. Barring that, I don't see how it could be worse." He gulped down the whisky, coughed, and handed the flask top back to me. "Things look brighter now. You honestly think we can make it?"

"A little luck, that's all. You think maybe our packs are too heavy? That we should abandon some of it here?" The last thing I wanted to was to abandon any of the supplies we had along with us: eighty pounds of food, a stove, thirty pounds of compressed-fuel tablets, a hundred ounces of alcohol, a tent, and a very comprehensive medical kit. But if it was to be abandoned, I wanted it to be their suggestion, and I was sure they wouldn't make it.

"We're abandoning nothing," Hansen said. Either the rest or the whisky had done him good; his voice was stronger, his teeth hardly chattering at all.

"Let the thought die still-born," Zabrinski said. When I'd first seen him in Scotland, he had reminded me of a polar bear, and now out here on the ice cap, huge and crouched in his ice-whitened furs, he resembled one even more. He had the physique of a bear, too, and seemed completely tireless; he was in far better shape than any of us. "This weight on my bowed shoulders is like a bad leg: an old friend that gives me pain, but I wouldn't be without it."

"You?" I asked Rawlings.

"I'm conserving my energy," Rawlings announced. "I expect to have to carry Zabrinski later on."

We pulled the scarred, abraded and now thoroughly useless snow goggles over our eyes again, hoisted ourselves stiffly to our feet and moved off to the south to find the end of and round the high ridge that had blocked our path. It was by far the longest and most continuous ridge we'd encountered yet, but we didn't mind; we needed to make a good offing to get us back on course, and not only were we doing just that, but we were doing it in comparative shelter and saving our strength by so doing. After perhaps four hundred yards the ice wall ended so abruptly, leading to so sudden and unexpected an exposure to the whistling fury of the ice storm that I was bowled completely off my feet. An express train couldn't have done it any better. I hung on to the rope with one hand, clawed and scrambled my way back to my feet with the help of the others, shouted a warning to the others, and then we were fairly into the wind again, holding it directly in our faces and leaning far forward to keep our balance.

We covered the next mile in less than half an hour. The going was easier now, much easier than it had been, although we still had to make small detours around rafted, compacted and broken ice: on the debit side, all of us, Zabrinski excepted, were near complete exhaustion, stumbling and falling far more often than was warranted by the terrain and the strength of the ice gale. For myself, my leaden, 'dragging legs felt as if they were on fire; each step now sent a shooting pain stabbing from my ankle clear to the top of my thigh. For all that, I think I could have kept going longer than any of them, even Zabrinski, for I had the motivation, the driving force that would have kept me going hours after my legs would have told me that it was impossible to carry on a step further. Major John Halliwell. My elder, my only brother. Alive or dead. Was he alive or was he dead, this one man in the world to whom I owed everything I had or had become? Was he dying, at that very moment when I was thinking of him, was he dying? His wife, Mary, and his three children, who spoiled and mined their bachelor uncle as I spoiled and ruined them: whatever way it was, they would have to know, and only I could tell them. Alive or dead? My legs weren't mine; the stabbing fire that tortured them belonged to some other man, not to me. I had to know, I had to know, and if I had to find out by covering whatever miles lay between me and Drift Ice Station Zebra on my hands and knees, then I would do just that. I would find out. And over and above the tearing anxiety as to what had happened to my brother there was yet another powerful motivation, a motivation that the world would regard as of infinitely greater importance than the life or death of the commandant of the station. As infinitely more important than the living or dying of the score of men who manned that desolate polar outpost. Or so the world would say.

The demented drumming of the spicules on my mask and ice-sheathed furs suddenly eased, the gale wind fell away, and I found myself standing in the shelter of an ice ridge even higher than the last one we'd used for shelter. I waited for the others to come up, asked Zabrinski to make a position check with the «Dolphin», and doled out some more of the medicinal alcohol. More of it than on the last occasion. We were in more need of it. Both Hansen and Rawlings were in a very distressed condition, their breath whistling in and out of their lungs in the rapid, rasping, shallow panting of a long-distance runner in the last tortured moments of his final exhaustion. I became gradually aware that the speed of my own breathing matched theirs almost exactly; it required a concentrated effort of willpower to bold my breath even for the few seconds necessary to gulp down my drink. I wondered vaguely if perhaps Hansen hadn't been right after all; maybe the alcohol wasn't good for us. But it certainly tasted as if it were.

Zabrinski was already talking through cupped hands into the microphone. After a minute or so he pulled the earphone out from under his parka and buttoned up the walkie-talkie set. He said: "We're either good or lucky or both. The «Dolphin» says we're exactly on the course we ought to be on." He drained the glass I handed him and sighed in satisfaction. "Well, that's the good part of the news. Here comes the bad part. The sides of the polynya the «Dolphin» is lying in are beginning to close together. They're closing pretty fast. The captain estimates he'll have to get out of it in two hours. Two at the most." He paused, then finished slowly: "And the ice machine is still on the blink."

"The ice machine," I said stupidly. Well, anyway, I felt stupid, I don't know how I sounded. "Is the ice — "

"It sure is, brother," Zabrinski said. He sounded tired. "But you didn't believe the skipper, did you, Dr. Carpenter? You were too clever for that."

"Well, that's a help," Hansen said heavily. "That makes everything just dandy. The «Dolphin» drops down, the ice closes up, and there we are, the «Dolphin» below, us on top, and the whole of the polar ice cap between us. They'll almost certainly never manage to find us again, even if they do fix the ice machine. Shall we just lie down and die now or shall we first stagger around in circles for a couple of hours and then lie down and die?"

"It's tragic," Rawlings said gloomily. "Not the personal aspect of it, I mean the loss to the U.S. Navy. I think I may fairly say, Lieutenant, that we are — or were — three promising young men. Well, you and me, anyway. I think Zabrinski there had reached the limit of his potentialities. He reached them a long time ago."

Rawlings got all this out between chattering teeth and still painful gasps of air. Rawlings, I reflected, was very much the sort of person I would like to have by my side when things began to get awkward, and it looked as if things were going to become very awkward indeed. He and Zabrinski had, as I'd found out, established themselves as the homespun if slightly heavy-handed humorists on the «Dolphin». For reasons known only to themselves, both men habitually concealed intelligences of a high order and advanced education under a cloak of genial buffoonery.

"Two hours yet," I said. "With this wind at our backs we can be back in the sub in well under an hour. We'd be practically blown back there."

"And the men on Drift Station Zebra?" Zabrinski asked.

"We'd have done our best. Just one of those things."

"We are profoundly shocked, Dr. Carpenter," Rawlings said. The tone. of genial buffoonery was less noticeable than usual.

"Deeply dismayed," Zabrinsld added, "by the very idea." The words were light, but the lack of warmth in the voice had nothing to do with the bitter wind.

"The only dismaying thing around here is the level of intelligence of certain simple-minded sailors," Hansen said with some asperity. He went on, and I wondered at the conviction in his voice: "Sure, Dr. Carpenter thinks we should go back. That doesn't include him. Dr. Carpenter wouldn't turn back now for all the gold in Fort Knox." He pushed himself wearily to his feet. "Can't be much more than half a mile to go now. Let's get it over with."

In the backwash of light from my flashlight I saw Rawlings and Zabrinski glance at each other, saw them shrug their shoulders at the same moment. Then they, too, were on their feet and we were on our way again.

Three minutes later Zabrinski broke his ankle.

It happened in an absurdly simple fashion, but for all its simplicity it was a wonder that nothing of the same sort had happened to any of us in the previous three hours. After starting off again, instead of losing our bearing by working to the south or north until we had rounded the end of the ice ridge blocking our path, we elected to go Over it. The ridge was all of ten feet high but by boosting and pulling each other we reached the top without much difficulty. I felt my way forward cautiously, using the ice probe; the flashlight was useless in that ice storm, and my goggles completely opaque. After twenty feet of crawling across the gently downward-sloping surface, I reached the fax side of the ridge and stretched down with the probe.

"Five feet," I called to the others as they came up. "It's only five feet." I swung over the edge, dropped down, and waited for the others to follow. Hansen came first, then Rawlings, both sliding down easily beside me. What happened to Zabrinski was impossible to see: he either misjudged his distance from the edge or a sudden easing of the wind made him lose his footing. Whatever the cause, I heard him call out, the words whipped away and lost by the wind, as he jumped down beside us. He seemed to land squarely and lightly enough on his feet, then cried out sharply and fell heavily to the ground.

I turned my back to the ice storm, raised the useless snow goggles, and pulled out my flashlight. Zabrinski was half sitting, half lying on the ice, propped up on his right elbow and cursing steadily and fluently and, as far as I could tell, because of the muffling effect of his snow mask, without once repeating himself. His right heel was jammed in a fourinch crack in the ice, one of the thousands of such fractures and fissures that criss-crossed the pressure areas of the pack; his right leg was bent over at an angle to the outside, an angle normally impossible for any leg to assume. I didn't need to have a medical diploma hung around my neck to tell that the ankle was gone: either that or the lowermost part of the tibia, for the ankle was so heavily encased in a stout boot with lace binding that most of the strain must have fallen on the shinbone. I hoped it wasn't a compound fracture, but it was an unreasonable hope: at that acute angle the snapped bone could hardly have failed to pierce the skin. Compound or not, it made no immediate difference; I'd no intention of examining it. A few minutes' exposure of the lower part of his leg in those temperatures was as good a way as any of ensuring that Zabrinski went through the rest of his life with one foot missing.

We lifted his massive bulk, eased the useless foot out of the crack in the ice, and lowered him gently to a sitting position. I unslung the medical kit from my back, knelt beside him and asked: "Does it hurt badly?"

"No, it's numb, I hardly feel a thing." He swore disgustedly. "What a crazy thing to do. A little crack like that. How stupid can a man get?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Rawlings said acidly. He shook his head. "I prophesied this, I prophesied this. I said it would end up with me carrying this gorilla here."

I laid splints to the injured leg and taped them as tightly as possible over the boot and the furs, trying not to think of the depth of trouble we were in now. Two major blows in one: not only had we lost the indispensable services of the strongest man in our party, we now had an extra 220 pounds — at least — of weight, of deadweight, to carry along with us. Not to mention his forty-pound pack. Zabrinski might almost have read my thoughts.

"You'll have to leave me here, Lieutenant," he said to Hansen. His teeth were rattling with shock and cold. "We must be almost there now. You can pick me up on the way back."

"Don't talk rubbish," Hansen said shortly. "You know damn well we'd never find you again."

"Exactly," Rawlings said. His teeth were like Zabrinski's, stuttering away irregularly like an asthmatic machine gun. He knelt on the ice to support the injured man's bulk. "No medals for morons. It says so in the ship's articles."

"But you'll never get to Zebra," Zabrinski protested. "If you have to carry me — "

"You heard what I said," Hansen interrupted. "We're not leaving you."

"The lieutenant is perfectly correct," Rawlings agreed. "You aren't the hero type, Zabrinski. You haven't got the face for it, for one thing. Now shut up while I get some of this stuff off my back."

I finished tightening the splints and pulled mittens and fur gloves back on my silk-clad but already frozen hands. We divided Zabrinski's load among the three of us, pulled goggles and snow masks back into position, hoisted Zabrinski to his one sound leg, turned into the wind, and went on our way again. It would be truer to say that we staggered on our way again.

But now, at last and when we most needed it, luck was with us. The ice cap stretched away beneath our feet as level and smooth as the surface of a frozen river. No ridges, no hummocks, no crevasses, not even the tiny cracks one of which had crippled Zabrinski. Just billiard-flat unbroken ice and not even slippery, for its surface had been scoured and abraded by the flying ice storm.

Each of us took turns at being lead man, the other two supporting a Zabrinski who hopped along in uncomplaining silence on one foot. After maybe three hundred yards of this smooth ice, Hansen, who was in the lead at the moment, stopped so suddenly and unexpectedly that we bumped into him.

"We're there!" he yelled above the wind. "We've made it. We're there! Can't you smell it?"

"Smell what?"

"Burnt fuel oil. Burnt nibber. Don't you get it?"

I pulled down my snow mask, cupped my hands to my face, and sniffed cautiously. One sniff was enough. I hitched up my mask again, pulled Zabrinski's arm more tightly across my shoulder, and followed Hansen.

The smooth ice ended in another few feet. The ice sloped up sharply to a level plateau, and it took the three of us all of what pitifully little strength remained to drag Zabrinski up after us. The acrid smell of burning seemed to grow more powerful with every step we took. I moved forward, away from the others, my back to the storm, goggles down, and sweeping the ice with semicircular movements of my flashlight. The smell was strong enough now to make my nostrils wrinkle under the mask. It seemed to be coming from directly ahead. I turned around into the wind, protectively cupped hand over my eyes, and, as I did, my flashlight struck something hard and solid and metallic. I lifted my flashlight and vaguely, through the driving ice, I could just make out the ghostly hooped-steel skeleton, ice-coated on the windward side, fire-charred on the leeward side, of what had once been a Nissen-shaped hut.

We had found Drift Ice Station Zebra.

I waited for the others to come up, guided them past the gaunt and burnt-out structure, then told them to turn backs to wind and lift their goggles. For maybe ten seconds we surveyed the ruin in the beam of my flashlight. No one said anything. Then we turned around into the wind again.

Drift Station Zebra had consisted of eight separate huts, four in each of two parallel rows, thirty feet separating the two rows, twenty feet between each two huts in the rows — this to minimize the hazard of fire spreading from hut to hut. But the hazard hadn't been minimized enough. No one could be blamed for that. No one, except in the wildest flights of nightmarish imagination, could have envisaged what must indeed have happened: exploding tanks and thousands of gallons of blazing oil being driven through the night by a galeforce wind. And, by a double inescapable irony, fire, without which human life on the polar ice cap cannot survive, is there the most dreaded enemy of all: for although the entire ice cap consists of water, frozen water, there is nothing that can melt that water and so put out the fire. Except fire itself. I wondered vaguely what had happened to the giant chemical fire extinguishers housed in every hut.

Eight huts, four in each row. The first two on either side were completely gutted. No trace remained 9f the walls, which had been of two layers of weather-proofed bonded ply that had enclosed the insulation of shredded glass fiber and kapok; on all of them even the aluminum sheeted roofs had disappeared. In one of the huts we could see charred and blackened generator machinery, ice-coated on the windward side, bent and twisted and melted almost out of recognition: one could only wonder at the furnace ferocity of the heat responsible.

The fifth hut — the third on the right-hand side — was a gutted replica of the other four, the framing even more savagely twisted by the heat. We were just turning away from this, supporting Zabrinski and too sick at heart even to speak to each other, when Rawlings called out something unintelligible. I leaned closer to him and pulled back my parka hood.

"A light!" he shouted. "A light. Look, Doc — across there!"

And a light there was, a long, narrow, strangely white vertical strip of light from the hut opposite the charred wreck by which we stood. Leaning sideways into the storm, we dragged Zabrinski across 'the intervening gap. For the first time my flashlight showed something that was more than a bare framework of steel. This was a hut. A blackened, scorched, and twisted hut with a roughly nailed-on sheet of plywood where its solitary window had been, but nevertheless a hut. The light was coming from a door standing just ajar at the sheltered end. I laid my hand on the door, the one unscorched thing I'd seen so far in Drift Station Zebra. The hinges creaked like a rusty gate in a cemetery at midnight and the door gave beneath my hand. We went inside.

Suspended from a hook in the center of the ceiling, a hissing Coleman lamp threw its garish light, amplified by the glittering aluminum ceiling, over every corner and detail of that eighteen-by-ten hut. A thick but transparent layer of ice sheathed the aluminum roof except for a three-foot circle directly above the lamp, and the ice spread from the ceiling down the plywood walls all the way to the floor. The wooden floor, too, was covered with ice, except where the bodies of the men lay. There may have been ice under them as well. I couldn't tell.

My first thought, conviction rather, and one that struck at me with a heart-sapping sense of defeat, with a chill that even the polar storm outside had been unable to achieve, was that we had arrived too late. I had seen many dead men in my life, I knew what dead men looked like, and now I was looking at just that many more. Shapeless, huddled, lifeless forms lying under a shapeless mass of blankets, mackinaws, duffels and furs; I wouldn't have bet a cent on my chances of finding one heartbeat among the bunch. Lying packed closely together in a rough semicircle at the end of the room, far from the door, they were utterly still, as unmoving as men would be if they had been lying that way for a frozen eternity. Apart from the hissing of the pressure lamp, there was no sound inside the hut other than the metallic drumfire of the ice spicules against the icesheathed eastern wall of the hut.

Zabrinski was eased down into a sitting position against a wall. Rawlings unslung the heavy load he was carrying on his back, unwrapped the stove, pulled off his mittens, and started fumbling around for the fuel tablets. Hansen pulled the door to behind him, slipped the buckles of his rucksack, and wearily let his load of tinned food drop to the floor of the shack.

For some reason, the voice of the storm outside and the hissing of the Coleman inside served only to heighten the deathly stillness in the hut, and the unexpected metallic clatter of the falling cans made me jump. It made one of the dead men jump, too. The man nearest me by the left-hand wall suddenly moved, rolled over and sat up, bloodshot eyes staring out unbelievingly from a frost-bitten, haggard and cruelly burned face, the burns patchily covered by a long, dark stubble of beard. For long seconds he looked at us unblinkingly; then, some obscure feeling of pride making him ignore the offer of my outstretched arm, he pushed himself shakily and with obvious pain to his feet. Then the cracked and peeling lips broke into a grin.

"You've been a bleedin' long time getting here." The voice was hoarse and weak and as cockney as the Bow Bells themselves. "My name's Kinnaird. Radio operator."

"Whisky?" I asked.

He grinned again, tried to lick his cracked lips, and nodded. The stiff shot of whisky went down his throat like a man in a barrel going over Niagara Falls: one moment there, the next gone forever. He bent over, coughing harshly until the tears came to his eyes, but when he straightened, life was coming back into those same lackluster eyes and color touching the pale, emaciated cheeks.

"If you go through life saying 'Hallo' in this fashion, mate," he observed, "then you'll never lack for friends." He bent and shook the shoulder of the man beside whom he had been lying. "C'mon, Jolly, old boy, where's your bleedin' manners. We got company."

It took quite a few shakes to get Jolly old boy awake, but when he did come to he was completely conscious and on his feet with remarkable speed and nimbleness. He was a short, chubby character with china-blue eyes, and although he was in as much need of a shave as Kinnaird, there was still color in his face, and the round, good-humored face was far from emaciated; but frostbite had made a bad mess of both mouth and nose. The china-blue eyes, flecked with red and momentarily wide in surprise, crinkled into a grin of welcome. Jolly old boy, I guessed, would always adjust fast to circumstances.

"Visitors, eh?" His deep voice held a rich Irish brogue. "And damned glad we are to see you, too. Do the honors, Jeff."

"We haven't introduced ourselves," I said. "I'm Dr. Carpenter and this — "

"Regular meeting of the B.M.A., old boy," Jolly said. I was to find out later that he used the phrase "old boy" in every second or third sentence, a mannerism that went strangely with his Irish accent.

"Dr. Jolly?"

"The same. Resident medical officer, old boy."

"I see. This is Lieutenant Hansen, of the U. S. Navy submarine «Dolphin» — "

"Submarine?" Jolly and Kinnaird stared at each other, then at us. "You said 'submarine,' old top?"

"Explanations can wait. Torpedoman Rawlings. Radioman Zabrinski." I glanced down at the huddled men on the floor, some of them already stirring at the sound of voices, one or two propping themselves up on their elbows. "How are they?"

"Two or three pretty bad burn cases," Jolly said. "Two or three pretty far gone with cold and exhaustion, but not so far gone that food and warmth wouldn't have them right as rain in a few days. I made them all huddle together like this for mutual warmth."

I counted them. Including Jolly and Kinnaird, there were twelve all told. I said: "Where are the others?"

"The others?" Kinnaird looked at me in momentary surprise, then his face went bleak and cold. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. "In the next hut, mate."

"Why?"

"Why?" He rubbed a weary forearm across bloodshot eyes. "Because we don't fancy sleeping with a roomful of corpses, that's why."

"Because you don't — " I broke off and stared down at the men at my feet. Seven of them were awake now, three of them propped on elbows, four still lying down, all seven registering various degrees of dazed bewilderment. The three who were still asleep — or unconscious — had their faces covered by blankets. I said slowly, "There were nineteen of you."

"Nineteen of us," Kinnaird echoed emptily. "The others — well, they never had a chance."

I said nothing. I looked carefully at the faces of the conscious men, hoping to find among them the one face I wanted to see, hoping that perhaps I had not immediately recognized it because frostbite or hunger or burns had made it temporarily unrecognizable. I looked very carefully indeed, and I knew that I had never seen any of those faces before.

I moved over to the first of the three still sleeping figures and lifted the blanket covering the face. The face of a stranger. I let the blanket drop. Jolly said in puzzlement: "What's wrong? What do you want?"

I didn't answer him. I picked my way around recumbent men, all staring uncomprehendingly at me, and lifted the blanket from the face of the second sleeping man. Again I let the blanket drop and I could feel my mouth go dry, the slow, heavy pounding of my heart. I crossed to the third man, then stood there hesitating, knowing I must find out, dreading what I must find. Then I stooped quickly and lifted the blanket. A man with a heavily bandaged face. A man with a broken nose and a thick blond beard. A man I had never seen in my life before. Gently I spread the blanket back over his face and straightened up. Rawlings, I saw, already had the solid-fuel stove going.

"That should bring the temperature up to close to freezing," I said to Dr. Jolly. "We've plenty of fuel. We've also brought food, alcohol, a complete medical kit. If you and Kinnaird want to start in on those things now, I'll give you a hand in a minute. Lieutenant, that was a polynya, that smooth stretch we crossed just before we got here? A frozen lead?"

"Couldn't be anything else." Hansen was looking at me peculiarly, a wondering expression on his face. "These people are obviously in no fit state to travel a couple of hundred yards, much less four or five miles. Besides, the skipper said be was going to be squeezed down pretty soon. So we call the «Dolphin» and have them surface at the back door?"

"Can he find that polynya — without the ice machine, I mean?"

"Nothing simpler. I'll take Zabrinski's radio, move a measured two hundred yards to the north, send a bearing signal, move two hundreds to the south, and do the same. They'll have our range to a yard. Take a couple of hundred yards off that and the «Dolphin» will find itself smack in the middle of the polynya."

"But still under it. I wonder how thick that ice is. You had an open lead to the west of the camp some time ago, Dr. Jolly. How long ago?"

"A month. Maybe five weeks. I can't be sure."

"How thick?" I asked Hansen.

"Five feet, maybe six. Couldn't possibly break through it. But the captain's always had a hankering to try out his torpedoes." He turned to Zabrinski. "Still able to operate that radio of yours?"

I left them to it. I'd hardly been aware of what I'd been saying, anyway. I felt sick and old and empty and sad and deathly tired. I had my answer now. I'd come 12,000 miles to find it; I'd have gone a million to avoid it. But the inescapable fact was there and now nothing could ever change it. Mary, my sister-in-law, and her three wonderful children — she would never see her husband again; they would never see their father again. My brother was dead, and no one was ever going to see him again. Except me. I was going to see him now.

I went out, closing the door behind me, moved around the corner of the hut, and lowered my head against the storm. Ten seconds later I reached the door of the last hut in the line. I used the flashlight to locate the handle, twisted it, pushed and walked inside.

Once it had been a laboratory; now it was a charnel house, a house of the dead. The laboratory equipment had all been pushed roughly to one side and the cleared floor space covered with the bodies of dead men. I knew they were dead men, but only because Kinnaird had told me so: hideously charred and blackened and grotesquely misshapen as they were,, those carbonized and contorted lumps of matter could have been any form of life or, indeed, no form of life at all. The stench of incinerated flesh and burnt diesel fuel was dreadful. I wondered which of the men in the other hut had had the courage, the iron resolution, to bring those grisly burdens, the shockingly disfigured remains of their former comrades, into this hut. They must have had strong stomachs.

Death must have been swift, swift for all of them. Theirs had not been the death of men trapped by fire; it had been the death of men who had themselves been on fire. Caught, drenched, saturated by a gale-borne sea of burning oil, they must have spent the last few seconds of life as incandescently blazing human torches before dying in insane, screaming agony. They must have died as terribly as men can ever die.

Something about one of the bodies close to me caught my attention. I stooped and focused the flashlight beam on what had once been a right hand, now no more than a blackened claw with the bone showing through. So powerful had been that heat that it had warped, but not melted, the curiously shaped gold ring on the third finger. I recognized that ring; I had been with my sister-in-law when she had bought it.

I was conscious of no grief, no pain, no revulsion. Perhaps, I thought dully, those would come later when the initial shock had worn off. But I didn't think so. This wasn't the man I remembered so well, the brother to whom I owed everything, a debt that could now never be repaid. This charred mass of matter before me was a stranger, so utterly different from the man who lived on in my memory, so changed beyond all possibility of recognition that my numbed mind in my exhausted body just could not begin to bridge the gap.

As I stood there, staring down, something ever so slightly off-beat about the way the body lay caught my professional attention. I stooped low, very low, and remained bent over for what seemed a long time. I straightened, slowly, and as I did I heard the door behind me open. I whirled around and saw that it was Lieutenant Hansen. He pulled down his snow mask, lifted up his goggles, and looked at me and then at the man at my feet. I could see shock draining expression and color from his face. Then he looked up at me.

"So you lost out, Doc?" I could hardly hear the husky whisper above the voice of the storm. "God, I'm sorry."

"What do you mean?"

"Your brother?" He nodded at the man at my feet.

"Commander Swanson told you?"

"Yeah. Just before we left. That's why we came." His gaze moved in horrified fascination over the floor of the hut, and his face was gray, like old parchment. "A minute, Doc, just a minute." He turned and hurried through the doorway.

When be came back he looked better, but not much. He said, "Commander Swanson said that that was why he had to let you go."

"Who else knows?"

"Skipper and myself. No one else."

"Keep it that way, will you? As a favor to me."

"If you say so, Doc." There was curiosity in his face now, and puzzlement, but horror was still the dominant expression. "My God, have you ever seen anything like it?"

"Let's get back to the others," I said. "We're doing nobody any good by staying here."

He nodded without speaking. Together we made our way back to the other hut. Apart from Dr. Jolly and Kinnaird, three other men were on their feet now: Captain Folsom, an extraordinarily tall, thin man, with savagely burnt face and hands, who was second in command of the base; Hewson, a dark-eyed taciturn character, a tractor driver and engineer who had been responsible for the diesel generators; and a cheerful Yorkshireman, Naseby, the camp cook. Jolly, who had opened my medical kit and was applying fresh bandages to the arms of one of the men still lying down, introduced them, then turned back to his job. He didn't seem to need my help — not for the moment, anyway. I heard Hansen say to Zabrinski: "In contact with the «Dolphin?»"

"Well, no." Zabrinski stopped sending his call sign and shifted slightly to ease his broken ankle. "I don't quite know how to put this, Lieutenant, but the fact is that this little ole set here seems to have blown a fuse."

"Well, now," Hansen said heavily. "That «is» clever of you, Zabrinski. You mean you can't raise them?"

"I can hear them, but they can't hear me." He shrugged apologetically. "Me and my clumsy feet, I guess. It wasn't only my ankle that went when I took that tumble out there."

"Well, can't you repair the damn thing?"

"I don't think so, Lieutenant."

"Damn it, you're supposed to be a radioman."

"That's so," Zabrinski acknowledged reasonably. "But I'm not a magician… And with a couple of numbed and frozen hands, no tools, an old-type set without a printed circuit, and the code signs in Japanese — well, even Marconi would have called it a day."

"«Can» it be repaired?" Hansen insisted.

"It's a transistor set. No valves to smash. I suppose It could be repaired. But it might take hours, Lieutenant. I'd even have to find a set of tools first."

"Well, find them. Anything you like. Only get that thing working."

Zabrinski said nothing. He held out the headphones to Hansen. Hansen looked at Zabrinski, then at the phones, took them without a word and listened briefly. Then he shrugged, handed back the phones, and said, "Well, I guess there «is» no hurry to repair that radio."

"Yeah," Zabrinski said. "Awkward, you might say, Lieutenant."

"What's awkward?" I asked.

"Looks as if «we're» going to be next on the list for a rescue party," Hansen said heavily. "They're sending a more or less continuous message: 'Ice closing rapidly, return at once.'"

"I was against this madness from the very beginning," Rawlings intoned from the floor. He stared down at the already melting lumps of frozen tinned soup and stirred it moodily with a fork. "A gallant attempt, man, but foredoomed to failure."

"Keep your filthy fingers out of that soup and kindly shut up," Hansen said coldly. He turned suddenly to Kinnaird. "How about «your» radio set? Of course — that's it. We have men here to crank your generator and — "

"I'm sorry." Kinnaird smiled the way a ghost might smile. "It's not a hand-powered generator — that was destroyed — it's a battery set. The batteries are dead. Completely dead."

"A battery set, you said?" Zabrinski looked at him in mild surprise. "Then what caused all the power fluctuations when you were transmitting?"

"We kept changing over the nickle cadmium cells to try to make the most of what little power was left in them: we'd only fifteen left altogether: most of them were lost in the fire. That caused the power fluctuations. But even Nife cells don't last forever. They're dead, mate. The combined power left in those cells wouldn't light a pencil torch."

Zabrinski didn't say anything. No one said anything. The ice spicules drummed incessantly against the east wall, the Coleman hissed, the solid fuel stove purred softly, but the sole effect of those thiee sounds was to make the silence inside seem that little bit more absolute. No one looked at his neighbors; everyone stared down at the floor with the fixed and steadfast gaze of an entomologist hunting for traces of woodworm. Any newspaper printing a picture taken at that instant wouldn't have found it any too easy to convince its readers that the men on Drift Ice Station Zebra had been rescued just ten minutes previously, and rescued from certain death at that. The readers would have pointed out that one might have expected a little more jubilation in the atmosphere, a touch, perhaps, of light-hearted relief, and they wouldn't have been far wrong at that, there wasn't very much gaiety around.

After the silence had gone on just that little too long I said to Hansen: "Well, that's it, then. We don't have to hire any electronic computer to work this one out. Someone's got to get back to the «Dolphin» and get back there now. I'm nominating myself."

"No!" Hansen said violently, then more quietly, "Sorry, friend, but the skipper's orders didn't include giving permission to anyone to commit suicide. You're staying here."

"So I stay here," I nodded. This wasn't the time to tell him I didn't need his permission for anything; much less was it the time to start flourishing the Mannlicher-Schoenauer. "So we all stay here. And then we all die here. Quietly, without any fighting, without any fuss, we just lie down and die here. I suppose you reckon that comes under the heading of inspiring leadership. Amundsen would have loved that." It wasn't fair, but then I wasn't feeling fair-minded at the moment.

"Nobody's going anyplace," Hansen said. "I'm not my brother's keeper, Doc, but, even so, I'll be damned if I let you kill yourself. You're not fit, none of us is fit to make the return trip to the «Dolphin» — not after what we've just been through. That's the first thing. The next is that without a transmitter from which the «Dolphin» can pick up our directional bearings, we could never hope to find the «Dolphin» again. The third is that the closing ice will probably have forced the «Dolphin» to drop down before anyone could get halfway there. And the last is that if we failed to find the «Dolphin», either because we missed her or because she was gone, we could never make our way back to Zebra again: we wouldn't have the strength and we would have nothing to guide us back, anyway."

"The odds offered aren't all that attractive," I admitted. "What odds are you offering on the ice machine being repaired?"

Hansen shook his head, said nothing. Rawlings started stirring his soup again, carefully not looking up, he didn't want to meet the anxious eyes, the desperate eyes, in that circle of haggard and frost-bitten faces any more than I did. But he looked up as Captain Folsom pushed himself away from the support of a wall and took a couple of unsteady steps toward us. It didn't require any stethoscope to see that Folsom was in a pretty bad way.

"I am afraid that we don't understand," he said. His voice was slurred and indistinct, the puffed and twisted lips had been immobilized by the savage charring of his face: I wondered bleakly how many months of pain would elapse, how many visits to the surgeon's table, before Folsom could show that face to the world again. In the very remote event, that was, of our ever getting him to a hospital. "Would you please explain? What is the difficulty?"

"Simply this," I said. "The «Dolphin» has an ice fathometer, a device for measuring the thickness of the overhead ice. Normally, even if Commander Swanson — the captain of the «Dolphin» — didn't hear from us, we could expect him on our doorstep in a matter of hours. He has the position of this drift station pinned down pretty closely. All he would have to do is drop down, come under us here, start a grid search with his ice fathometer, and it would be only minutes before he located the relatively thin ice out in that lead there. But things aren't normal. The ice machine has broken down, and if it stays that way he'll never find that lead. That's why I want to go back there. Now. Before Swanson's forced to dive by the closing ice."

"Don't see it, old boy," Jolly said. "How's that going to help? Can «you» fix this ice whatyoumaycallit?"

"I don't have to. Commander Swanson knows his distance from this camp, give or take a hundred yards. All I have to do is tell him to cover the distance less quarter of a mile and fire a torpedo. That ought — "

"Torpedo?" Jolly asked. "Torpedo? To break through the ice from beneath?"

"That's it. It's never been tried before. I suppose there's no reason why it shouldn't work if the ice is thin enough, and it won't be all that thick in the lead out there. I don't really know."

"They'll be sending planes, you know, Doc," Zabrinski said quietly. "We started transmitting the news as soon as we broke through, and everybody will know by now that Zebra has been found — at least, they'll know exactly where it is. They'll have the big bombers up here in a few hours."

"Doing what?" I asked. "Sculling around uselessly in the darkness up above? Even if they do have the exact position, they still won't be able to see what's left of this station because of the darkness and the ice storm. Perhaps they can with radar, it's unlikely, but even if they do, what then? Drop supplies? Maybe. But they won't dare drop supplies directly on us for fear of killing us. They'd have to drop them some distance off — and even a quarter mile would be too far away for any chance we'd ever have of finding stuff in those conditions. As for landing — even if weather conditions were perfect, no plane big enough to have the range to fly here could ever hope to land on the ice cap. You know that."

"What's your middle name, Doc?" Rawlings asked dolefully. "Jeremiah?"

"The greatest good of the greatest number," I said. "The old yardstick, but there's never been a better one. If we just hole up here without making any attempt to help ourselves and the ice machine remains useless, then we're all dead. All sixteen of us. If I make it there safely, then we're all alive. Even if I don't, the ice machine may be fixed and there would only be one lost then." I started pulling on my mittens. "One is less than sixteen."

"We might as well make it two," Hansen sighed and began to pull on his own gloves. I was hardly surprised, when he'd last spoken he'd talked at first of "you" having no chance and finished by saying that "we" had none, and it hadn't required any psychiatrist to follow his quick shift in mental orientation: whatever men like Hansen were handpicked for, it wasn't for any predilection for shifting the load to others' shoulders when the going became sticky.

I didn't waste any time arguing with him.

Rawlings got to his feet.

"One skilled volunteer for the soup-stirring," he requested. "Those two wouldn't get as far as that door without my holding their hands. I'll probably get a medal for this. What's the highest decoration awarded in peacetime, Lieutenant?"

"There are no medals given for soup-stirring, Rawlings," Hansen said, "which is what you are going to keep on doing. You're staying right here."

"Uh-uh." Rawlings shook his head. "Prepare yourself to deal with your first mutiny, Lieutenant. I'm coming with you. I can't lose. If we get to the «Dolphin», you'll be too damned glad and happy to have made it to dream of reporting me, apart from being a fair-minded man who will have to admit that our safe arrival back at the ship will be entirely due to torpedoman Rawlings." He grinned. "And if we don't make it — well, you can't very well report it, can you, Lieutenant?"

Hansen walked across to him. He said quietly: "You know that there's more than an even chance that we won't reach the «Dolphin». That would leave twelve pretty sick men here, not to mention Zabrinski with a broken ankle, and with no one to look after them. They've got to have one able man to look after them. You couldn't be that selfish, now, could you, Rawlings? Look after them, will you? As a favor to me?"

Rawlings looked at him for long seconds, then squatted down and started stirring the soup again. "As a favor to me, you mean," he said bitterly. "Okay, I'll stay. As a favor to me. Also to prevent Zabrinski from tripping over his legs again and breaking another ankle." He stirred the soup viciously. "Well, what are you waiting for? The skipper may be making up his mind to dive any minute."

He had a point. We brushed off protests and attempts to stop us made by Captain Folsom and Dr. Jolly and were ready to leave in thirty seconds. Hansen was through the door first. I turned and looked at the sick and emaciated and injured survivors of Drift Station Zebra. Folsom, Jolly, Kinnaird, Hewson, Naseby and seven others. Twelve men altogether. They couldn't all be in cahoots together, so it had to be a single man, maybe two, acting in concert. I wondered who those men might be, those men I would have to kill, that person or persons who had murdered my brother and six other men on Drift Ice Station Zebra.

I pulled the door to behind me and followed Hansen out into the dreadful night.