Ice Station Zebra

10

The afternoon and evening passed quickly and pleasantly enough. Closing our hatches and dropping down from our hardly won foothold in that lead had had a symbolic significance at least as important as the actual fact of leaving itself. The thick ceiling of ice closing over the hull of the «Dolphin» was a curtain being drawn across the eye of the mind. We had severed all physical connection with Drift Ice Station Zebra, a home of the dead that might continue to circle slowly around the Pole for mindless centuries to come; and with the severance had come an abrupt diminution of the horror and the shock that had hung pall-like over the ship and its crew for the past twenty-four hours. A dark door had swung to behind us, and we had turned our backs on it. Mission accomplished, duty done, we were heading for home again, and the' sudden upsurge of relief and happiness among the crew to be on their way again, their high anticipation of port and leave, was an almost tangible thing. The mood of the ship was close to that of light-hearted gaiety. But there was no gaiety in my mind, and no peace: I was leaving too much behind. Nor could there be any peace in the minds of Swanson and Hansen, of Rawlings and Zabrinski: they knew we were carrying a killer aboard, a killer who had killed many times. Dr. Benson knew also, but for the moment Dr. Benson did not count: he still had not regained consciousness, and I held the very unprofessional hope that he wouldn't for some time to come. In the twilit world of emergence from coma, a man can start babbling and say all too much.

Some of the Zebra survivors had asked if they could look around the ship and Swanson agreed. In light of what I had told him in his cabin that morning, he must have agreed very reluctantly indeed, but no trace of this reluctance showed in his calmly smiling face. To have refused their request would have been rather a churlish gesture, for all the secrets of the «Dolphin» were completely hidden from the eye of the layman. But it wasn't good manners that made Swanson give his consent: refusing a reasonable request could have been responsible for making someone very suspicious indeed.

Hansen took them around the ship and I accompanied them, less for the exercise or interest involved than for the opportunity it gave me to keep a very close eye indeed on their reactions to their tour. We made a complete tour of the ship, missing only the reactor room, which no one could visit anyway, and the inertial-navigation room, which had been barred to me also. As we moved around I watched them all, and especially two of them, as closely as it is possible to watch anyone without making him aware of your observation, and I learned precisely what I had expected to learn — nothing. I'd been crazy even to hope I'd learn anything; our friend with the gun was wearing a mask that had been forged into shape and riveted into position. But I'd had to do it anyway; playing in this league, I couldn't pass up the one chance in a miffion.

Supper over, I helped Jolly as best I could with his evening surgery. Whatever else Jolly was, he was a damned good doctor. Quickly and efficiently he checked and where necessary rebandaged the walking cases, examined and treated Benson and Folsom, then asked me to come right aft with him to the nucleonics laboratory in the stern room, which had been cleared of deck gear to accommodate the four other bed patients, the Harrington twins, Brownell, and Bolton. The sick bay itself had only two cots for invalids, and Benson and Folsom had those.

Bolton, despite Jolly's dire predictions, hadn't suffered a relapse because of his transfer from the hut to the ship — which had been due largely to Jolly's extremely skillful and careful handling of the patient and the stretcher into which he had been strapped. Bolton, in fact, was conscious now and complaining of severe pain in his badly burned right forearm. Jolly removed the burn covering. Bolton's arm was a mess, all right, no skin left worth speaking of, showing an angry violent red between areas of suppuration. Different doctors have different ideas as to the treatment of burns: Jolly favored a salve-coated aluminum foil which he smoothed across the entire burn area, then lightly bandaged in place. He then gave him a pain-killing injection and some sleeping pills and briskly informed the enlisted man who was keeping watch that he was to be informed immediately of any change or deterioration in Bolton's condition. A brief inspection of the three others, a changed bandage here and there, and he was through for the night.

So was I. For two nights now I had had practically no sleep; what little had been left for me the previous night had been ruined by the pain in my left hand. I was exhausted. When I got to my cabin, Hansen was already asleep and the engineer officer gone.

I didn't need any of Jolly's sleeping pills that night.

I awoke at two o'clock. I was sleep-drugged, still exhausted, and felt as if I had been in bed about five minutes. But I awoke in an instant and in that instant I was fully awake.

Only a dead man wouldn't have stirred. The racket issuing from the squawk box just above Hansen's bunk was appalling, a high-pitched, shrieking, atonic whistle, two-toned and altering pitch every half-second, it drilled stiletto-like against my cringing eardrums. A banshee in its death agonies could never have hoped to compete with that racket.

Hansen already had his feet on the deck and was pulling on clothes and shoes in desperate haste. I had never thought to see that slow-speaking laconic Texan in such a tearing hurry, but I was seeing it now.

"What in hell's name is the matter?" I demanded. I had to shout to make myself heard above the shrieking of the alarm whistle.

"Fire!" His face was shocked and grim. "The ship's on fire. And under this Goddamned ice!"

Still buttoning his shirt, he hurdled my cot, crashed the door back on its hinges, and was gone.

The atonic screeching of the whistle stopped abruptly and the silence fell like a blow. Then I was conscious of something more than silence — I was conscious of a complete lack of vibration throughout the ship. The great engines had stopped. And then I was conscious of something else again: feathery fingers of ice brushing up and down my spine.

Why had the engines stopped? What could make a nuclear engine stop so quickly and what happened once it did? My God, I thought, maybe the fire is coming from the reactor room itself. I'd looked into the heart of the uranium atomic pile through a heavily leaded glass-inspection port and seen the indescribable unearthly radiance of it, a nightmarish coalescence of green and violet and blue, the new "dreadful light" of mankind. What happened when this dreadful light ran wild? I didn't know, but I suspected I didn't want to be around when it happened.

I dressed slowly, not hurrying. My damaged hand didn't help me much but that wasn't why I took my time. Maybe the ship was on fire, maybe the nuclear power plant had gone out of kilter. But if Swanson's superbly trained crew couldn't cope with every emergency that could conceivably arise, then matters weren't going to be improved any by Carpenter running around in circles shouting: "Where's the fire?

Three minutes after Hansen had gone I walked along to the control room and peered in: if I was going to be in the way, then this was as far as I was going to go. Dark, acrid smoke billowed past me and a voice — Swanson's — said sharply: "Inside and close that door."

I pulled the door to and looked around the control room. At least, I tried to. It wasn't easy. My eyes were already steaming as if someone had thrown a bag of pepper into them, and what little sight was left them didn't help me much. The room was filled with black evil-smelling smoke, denser by far and more throat-catching than the worst London fog. Visibility was no more than a few feet, but what little I could see showed me men still at their stations. Some were gasping, some were half choking, some were cursing softly, all had badly watering eyes, but there was no trace of panic.

"You'd have been better off on the other side of that door," Swanson said dryly. "Sorry to have barked at you, Doctor, but we want to limit the spread of the smoke as much as possible."

"Where's the fire?"

"In the engine room." Swanson could have been sitting on his front porch at home discussing the weather. "Where in the engine room we don't know. It's pretty bad. At least, the smoke is. The extent of the fire we don't know, because we can't locate it. Engineer officer says it's impossible to see your hand in front of your face."

"The engines," I said. "They've stopped. Has anything gone wrong — "

He rubbed his eyes with a handkerchief, spoke to a man who was pulling on a heavy rubber suit and a smoke mask, then turned back to me.

"We're not going to be vaporized, if that's what you mean." I could have sworn he was smiling. "The atomic pile can only fail safe no matter what happens. If anything goes wrong, the uranium rods slam down in very quick time indeed — a fraction under a thousandth of a second — stopping the whole reaction. In this case, though, we shut it off ourselves. The men in the maneuvering room could no longer see either the reactor dials or the governor for the control rods. No option but to shut it down. The engine-room crew have been forced to abandon the engine and maneuvering rooms and take shelter in the stern room."

Well, that was something at least. We weren't going to be blown to pieces, ignobly vaporized on the altar of nuclear advancement: good old-fashioned suffocation, that was to be our lot. "So what do we do?" I asked…

"What we should do is surface immediately. With fourteen feet of ice overhead, that's not easy. Excuse me, will you?"

He spoke to the now completely masked and suited man, who was carrying a small dialed box in his hands. They walked together past the navigator's chart desk and ice machine to the heavy door opening on the passage that led to the engine room over the top of the reactor compartment. They unlatched the door, pushed it open. A dense, blinding cloud of dark smoke rolled into the room as the masked man stepped quickly into the passageway and swung the door to behind him. Swanson clamped the door shut, walked, temporarily blinded, back to the control position, and fumbled down a roof microphone.

"Captain speaking." His voice echoed emptily through the control center. "The fire is located in the engine room. We do not know yet whether it is electrical, chemical, or fuel oil: the source of the fire has not been pinpointed.' Acting on the principle of being prepared for the worst, we are now testing for a radiation leak." So that was what the masked man had been carrying, a Geiger counter. "If that proves negative, we shall try for a steam leak, and if' that is negative, we shall carry out an intensive search to locate the fire. It will not be easy, as I'm told visibility is almost zero. We have already shut down all electrical circuits in the engine room, lighting included, to prevent an explosion in the event of atomized fuel being present in the atmosphere. We have closed the oxygen-intake valves and isolated the engine room from the air-cleaning system in the hope that the fire will consume all available oxygen and burn itself out.

"All smoking is prohibited until further notice. Heaters, fans, and all electrical circuits other than communication lines to be switched off — and that includes the juke box and the ice-cream machine. All lights to be switched off except those absolutely essential. All movement is to be restricted to a minimum. I shall keep you informed of any progress we may make."

I became aware of someone standing by my side. It was Dr. Jolly, his normally jovial face puckered and woe-begone, the tears flowing down his face. Plaintively he said to me, "This «is» a bit thick, old boy, what? I'm not sure that I'm so happy now about being rescued. And all those prohibitions — no smoking, no power to be used, no moving around — do those mean what I take them to mean?"

"I'm afraid they do indeed." It was Swanson who answered Jolly's question for him. "This, I'm afraid, is every nuclearsubmarine captain's nightmare come true — fire under the ice. At one blow we're not only reduced to the level of a conventional submarine — we're two stages worse. In the first place, a conventional submarine wouldn't be under the ice anyway. In the second place, it has huge banks of storage batteries, and even if it were beneath the ice, it would have sufficient reserve power to steam far enough south to get clear of the ice. Our reserve storage battery is so small that it wouldn't take us a fraction of the way."

"Yes, yes," Jolly nodded. "But this no smoking, no moving — "

"That same very small battery, I'm afraid, is the only source left to us for power for the air-purifying machines, for lighting, ventilation, heating — I'm afraid the Dolphin is going to get very cold in a short time-so we have to curtail its expenditures of energy on those things. So no smoking, minimum movement — the less carbon dioxide breathed into 'the atmosphere, the better. But the real reason for conserving electric energy is that we need it to power the heaters, pumps and motors that have to be used to start up the reactor again. If that battery exhausts itself before we get the reactor going — well, I don't have to draw a diagram."

"You're not very encouraging, are you, Commander?" Jolly complained.

"No, not very. I don't see any reason to be," Swanson said dryly.

"I'll bet you'd trade in your pension for a nice open lead above us just now," I said.

"I'd trade in the pension of every flag officer in the U. S. Navy," he said matter-of-factly. "If we could find a polynya I'd surface, open the engine-room hatch to let most of the contaminated air escape, start up our diesel — it takes its air direct from the engine room — and have the rest of the smoke sucked out in nothing flat. As it is, that diesel is about as much use to me as a grand piano."

"And the compasses?" I asked.

"That's another interesting thought," Swanson agreed. "If the power out-put from our reserve battery falls below a certain level, our three Sperry gyrocompass systems and the N6A — that's the inertial-guidance machine — just go out of business. After that we're lost, completely. Our magnetic compass is quite useless in those latitudes — it just walks in circles."

"So we would go round and round in circles, too," Jolly said thoughtfully. "Forever and ever under the jolly old ice cap, what? By Jove, Commander, I'm really beginning to wish we'd stayed up at Zebra."

"We're not dead yet, Doctor… Yes, John?" This to Hansen, who had just come up.

"Sanders, sir. On the ice machine. Can he have a smoke mask? His eyes are watering pretty badly."

"Give him anything you like in the ship," Swanson said, "just so long as he can keep his eyes clear to read that graph. And double the watch on the ice machine. If there's a lead up there only the size of a hair, I'm going for it. Immediate report if the ice thickness fails below, say, eight or nine feet."

"Torpedoes?" Hansen asked. "There hasn't been ice thin enough for that in three hours. And at the speed we're drifting, there won't be for three months. I'll go keep the watch myself. I'm not much good for anything else, this hand of mine being the way it is."

"Thank you. First you might tell engineman Harrison to turn off the CO2 scrubber and monoxide burners. Must save every amp of power we have. Besides, it will do this pampered bunch of ours a world of good to sample a little of what the old-time submariners had to experience when they were forced to stay below maybe twenty hours at a time."

"That's going to he pretty rough on our really sick men," I said. "Benson and Folsom in the sick bay, the Harrington twins, Brownell and Bolton in the nucleonics lab right aft. They've got enough to contend with without foul air as well."

"I know," Swanson admitted. "I'm damned sorry about it. Later on, when — and if — the air gets really bad, we'll start up the air-purifying systems again but blank off every place except the lab and the sick bay." He broke off and turned around as a fresh wave of dark smoke rolled in from the suddenly opened after door. The man with the smoke mask was back from the engine room, and even with my eyes streaming in that smoke-filled, acrid atmosphere, I could see he was in a pretty bad way. Swanson and two others rushed to meet him, two of them catching him as he staggered into the control room, the third quickly swinging the heavy door shut against the darkly evil clouds of smoke.

Swanson pulled off the man's smoke mask. It was Murphy, the man who had accompanied me when we'd closed the torpedo tube door. People like Murphy and Rawlings, I thought, always got picked for jobs like this.

His face was white and he was gasping for air, his eyes upturned in his head. He was hardly more than half conscious, but even that foul atmosphere in the control center must have seemed to him like the purest mountain air compared to what he' had just been breathing, for within thirty seconds his head had begun to clear and he was able to grin up painfully from where he'd been lowered into a chair.

"Sorry, Captain," he gasped. "This smoke mask was never meant to cope with the stuff that's in the engine room. Pretty hellish in there, I tell you." He grinned again. "Good news, Captain. No radiation leak."

"Where's the Geiger counter?" Swanson asked quietly.

"It's had it, I'm afraid, sir. I couldn't see what I was doing in there. Honest, sir, you can't see three inches in front of your face. I tripped and damn near fell down into the machinery space. The counter did fall down. But I'd a clear check before then. Nothing at all." He reached up to his shoulder and unclipped his ifim badge. "This'll show, sir."

"Have that developed immediately. That was very well done, Murphy," he said warmly. "Now get for'ard to the mess room. You'll find some really clear air there."

The film badge was developed and brought back in minutes. Swanson took it, glanced at it briefly, smiled, and let out his breath in a long, slow whistle of relief. "Murphy was right. No radiation leak. Thank God for that, anyway. If there had been — well, that was that, I'm afraid."

The for'ard door of the control room opened, a man came in, and the door was as quickly closed. I guessed who it was before I could see him properly.

"Permission from chief torpedoman Patterson to approach you, sir," Rawlings said with brisk formality. "We've just seen Murphy. He's pretty groggy, and both the chief and I think that youngsters like that shouldn't be — "

"Am I to understand that you are volunteering to go next, Rawlings?" Swanson asked. The screws of responsibility and tension were turned down hard on him, but I could see that it cost him some effort to keep his face straight.

"Well, not exactly volunteering, sir. But, well — who else is there?"

"The torpedo department aboard this ship," Swanson observed acidly, "always did have a phenomenally high opinion of itself."

"Let him try an underwater oxygen set," I said. "Those smoke masks seem to have their limitations."

"A steam leak, Captain?" Rawlings asked. "That what you want me to check on?"

"Well, you seem to have been nominated, voted for, and elected by yourself," Swanson said. "Yes, a steam leak."

"That the suit Murphy was wearing?" Rawlings pointed to the clothes on the deck.

"Yes. Why?"

"You'd have thought there would be some signs of moisture or condensation if there had been a steam leak, sir."

"Maybe. Maybe soot and smoke particles are holding the condensing steam in suspension. Maybe it was hot enough in there to dry off any moisture that did reach his suit. Maybe a lot of things. Don't stay too long in there."

"Just as long as it takes me to get things fixed up," Rawlings said confidently. He turned to Hansen and grinned. "You stopped me once back out there on the ice cap, Lieutenant, but sure as little apples I'm going to get that little old medal this time. Bring undying credit to the whole ship, I will."

"If torpedoman Rawlings will ease up with his ravings for a moment," Hansen said, "I have a suggestion to make, Captain. I know he won't be able to take off his mask inside there but if he gave a call-up signal on the engine telephone or rang through on the engine answering telegraph every four or five minutes we'd know he was okay. If he doesn't, someone can go in after him."

Swanson nodded. Rawlings pulled on suit and oxygen apparatus and left. That made it the third time the door leading to the engine compartment had been opened in a few minutes and each time fresh clouds of that black and biting smoke had come rolling in. Conditions were now very bad inside the control room, but someone had issued a supply of goggles all around and a few were wearing smoke masks.

A phone rang. Hansen answered, spoke briefly, and hung up.

"That was Jack Cartwright, skipper." Lieutenant Cartwright was the main-propulsion officer, who had been on watch in the maneuvering room and had been forced to retreat to the stern room. "Seems he was overcome by the fumes and was carried back into the stern room. Says he's okay now and could we send smoke masks or breathing apparatus for him and one of his men. They can't get at the ones in the engine room. I told him yes."

"I'd certainly feel a lot happier if Jack Cartwright was in there investigating in person," Swanson admitted. "Send a man, will you?"

"I thought I'd take them myself. Someone else can double on the ice machine."

Swanson glanced at Hansen's injured hand, hesitated, then nodded. "Right. But straight through the engine room and straight back."

Hanson was on his way in a minute. Five minutes later he was back again. He stripped off his breathing equipment. His face was pale and covered with sweat.

"There's fire in the engine room, all right," he said grimly. "Hotter than the hinges of hell. No trace of sparks or flames, but that doesn't mean a thing, the smoke in there is so thick that you couldn't see a blast furnace a couple of feet away."

"See Rawlings?" Swanson asked.

"No. Hasn't he rung through?"

"Twice, but — " He broke off as the engine-room telegraph rang. "So. He's still okay. How about the stern room, John?"

"Damn sight worse than it is here. The sick men aft there are in a pretty bad way, especially Bolton. Seems the smoke got in before they could get the door shut."

"Tell Harrison to start up his air scrubbers. But for the lab only. Shut off the rest of the ship."

Fifteen minutes passed, fifteen minutes during which the engine-room telegraph rang three times, fifteen minutes during which the air became thicker and fouler and steadily less breathable, fifteen minutes during which a completely equipped fire-fighting team was assembled in the control center, then another billowing cloud of black smoke announced the opening of the after door.

It was Rawlings. He was very weak and had to be helped out of his breathing equipment and his suit. His face was white and streaming sweat, his hair and clothes so saturated with sweat that he might easily have come straight from an immersion in the sea. But he was grinning triumphantly.

"No steam leak, Captain, that's for certain." It took him three breaths to get that out. "But fire down below in the machinery space. Sparks flying all over the shop. Some flame, not much. I located it, sir. Starboard high-pressure turbine. The sheathing's on fire."

"You'll get that medal, Rawlings," Swanson said, "even if I have to make the damn thing myself." He turned to the waiting firemen. "You heard. Starboard turbine. Four at a time, fifteen minutes maximum. Lieutenant Raeburn, the first party. Knives, claw hammers, pliers, crow bars, CO2. Saturate the sheathing first, then rip it off. Watch out for flash flames when you're pulling it off. I don't have to warn you about the steam pipes. Now, on your way."

They left. I said to Swanson: "Doesn't sound so much. How long will it take? Ten minutes, quarter of an hour?"

He looked at me somberly. "A minimum of three or four hours — if we're lucky. It's hell's own maze down in the machinery space there. Valves, tubes, condensers, and miles of that damned steam piping that would burn your hands off if you touched it. Working conditions even normally are so cramped as to be almost impossible. Then there's that huge turbine housing with all that thick insulation sheathing wrapped all around it, and the engineers who fitted it meant it to stay there for keeps. Before they start, they have to douse the fire with the CO2 extinguishers, and even that won't help much. Every time they rip off a piece of charred insulation, the oil-soaked stuff below will burst into flames again as soon as it comes into contact with the oxygen in the atmosphere."

"'Oil-soaked'?"

"That's where the whole trouble must lie," Swanson explained. "Wherever you have moving machinery, you must have oil for lubrication. There's no shortage of machinery, down in the machine space — and no shortage of oil, either. And just as certain materials are strongly hygroscopic, so that damned insulation has a remarkable affinity for oil. Where there's any around, whether in its normal fluid condition or in fine suspension in the atmosphere, that sheathing attracts it as a magnet does iron ffiings. And it's as absorbent as blotting paper."

"But what could have caused the fire?"

"Spontaneous combustion. There have been cases before. We've gone over fifty thousand miles in this ship now, and in that time I suppose the sheathing has become thoroughly saturated. We've been going at top speed ever since we left Zebra, and the excess heat generated has set the damn thing off… John, no word from Cartwright yet?"

"Nothing."

"He must have been in there for the better part of twenty minutes now."

"Maybe. But he was just beginning to put his suit on — he and Ringman — when I left, and maybe, they didn't go into the engine room right away. I'll call the stern room." He did, then hung up, his face grave. "Stern room says they've been gone twenty-five minutes. Shall I investigate, sir?"

"You stay right here. I'm not — "

He broke off as the after door opened with a crash and two men came staggering out — rather, one staggering, the other supporting him. The door was heaved shut and the men's masks, removed. One man I recognized as an enlisted man who had accompanied Raeburn; the other was Cartwright.

"Lieutenant Raeburn sent me out with the lieutenant here," the enlisted man said. "He's not so good, I think, Captain."

It was a pretty fair diagnosis. He wasn't so good and that was a fact. He was barely conscious but nonetheless fighting grimly to hang on to what few shreds of consciousness were left him.

"Ringman," he jerked out. "Five minutes — five minutes ago. We were going back — "

"Ringman," Swanson prompted with a gentle insistence. "What about Ringman?"

"He fell. Down into the machinery space. I — I went after him, tried to lift him up the ladder. He screamed. God, he screamed. I — he — "

He slumped in his chair, was caught before he fell to the floor. I said: "Ringman. Either a major fracture or internal injuries.

"Damn!" Swanson swore softly. "Damn it all! A fracture. Down there. John, have Cartwright carried through to the crew's mess. A fracture!"

"Please have a mask and suit ready for me," Jolly said briskly. "I'll fetch Dr. Benson's emergency kit from the sick bay."

"You?" Swanson shook his head. "Damned decent, Jolly. I appreciate it, but I can't let you — "

"Just for once, old boy, the hell with your Navy regulations," Jolly said politely. "The main thing to remember, Commander, is that I'm aboard this ship, too. Let us remember that we all — urn — sink or swim together. No joke intended."

"But you don't know how to operate those sets — "

"I can learn, can't I?" Jolly said with some asperity. He turned and left.

Swanson looked at me. He was wearing goggles, but they couldn't hide the concern in his face. He said, curiously hesitant: "Do you think — "

"Of course Jolly's right. You've no option. If Benson were fit you know very well you'd have him down there in no time. Besides, Jolly is a damned fine doctor."

"You haven't been down there, Carpenter. It's a metal jungle. There isn't room to splint a broken finger, much less — "

"I don't think Dr. Jolly will try to fix or splint anything. He'll just give Ringman a jab that will put him out so that he can be brought up here without screaming in agony all the way."

Swanson nodded, pursed his lips, and walked away to examine the ice fathometer. I said to Hansen, "It's pretty bad, isn't it?"

"You can say that again, friend. It's worse than bad. Normally, there should be enough air in the submarine to last us maybe sixteen hours. But well over half the air in this ship, from here right aft, is already practically unbreathable. What we have left can't possibly last us more than a few hours. Skipper's boxed in on three sides. If he doesn't start the air purifiers up, the men working down in the machinery space are going to have a hell of a job doing anything. Working in near-zero visibility with breathing apparatus on, you're practically as good as blind: the floods will make hardly any difference. If he does start up the purifiers in the engine room, the fresh oxygen will cause the fire to spread. And when he starts them up, of course, that means less and less power to get the reactor working again."

"That's very comforting," I said. "How long will it take you to restart the reactor?"

"At least an hour. That's after the fire has been put out and everything checked for safety. At least an hour."

"And Swanson reckoned three or four hours to put the fire out. Say five, all told. It's a long time. Why doesn't he use some of his reserve power cruising around to find a lead?"

"An even bigger gamble than staying put and trying to put out the fire. I'm with the skipper. Let's fight the devil we know rather than the one we don't."

Medical case in hand, Jolly came coughing and spluttering his way back into the control center and started pulling on a suit and breathing apparatus. Hansen gave him instructions on how to operate it, and Jolly seemed to get the idea pretty quickly. Brown, the enlisted man who'd helped Cartwright into the control center, was detailed to accompany him: Jolly had no idea of the location of the ladder leading down from the upper engine room to the machinery space.

"Be as quick as you can," Swanson said. "Remember, Jolly, you're not trained for this sort of thing. I'll expect you back inside ten minutes."

They were back in exactly four minutes. They didn't have an unconscious Ringman with them, either. The only unconscious figure was that of Dr. Jolly, whom Brown half carried, half dragged over the sill into the control room.

"Can't say for sure what happened," Brown gasped. He was trembling from the effort he had just made; Jolly must have outweighed him by at least thirty pounds. "We'd just got into the engine room and shut the door. I was leading, and suddenly Dr. Jolly fell against me. I think he must have tripped over something. He knocked me down. When I got to my feet, he was lying there behind me. I put the flashlight on him. He was out cold. His mask had been torn loose. I put it on as best I could and pulled him out."

"My God," Hansen said reflectively. "The medical profession on the «Dolphin» «is» having a rough time." He gloomily surveyed the prone figure of Dr. Jolly as it was carried away toward the after door and relatively fresh air. "All three sawbones out of commission now. That's very handy, isn't it, skipper?"

Swanson didn't answer. I said to him, "The injection for Ringman. Would you know what to give, how to give it and where?"

"No."

"Would any of your crew?"

"I'm in no position to argue, Dr. Carpenter."

I opened Jolly's medical kit, hunted among the bottles on the lid rack until I found what I wanted, dipped a hypodermic and injected it in my left forearm, just where the bandage ended. "Pain-killer," I said. "I'm just a softy. But I want to be able to use the forefinger and thumb of that hand." I glanced across at Rawlings, as recovered as anyone could get in that foul atmosphere, and said: "How are you feeling now?"

"Just resting lightly." He rose from his chair and picked up his breathing equipment. "Have no fears, Doc. With torpedoman first class Rawlings by your side — "

"We have plenty of fresh men still available aft, Dr.Carpenter," Swanson said.

"No. Rawlings. It's for his own sake. Maybe he'll get two medals now for this night's work."

Rawlings grinned and pulled the mask over his head. Two minutes later we were inside the engine room.

It was stiflingly hot in there, and visibility, even with the powerful beam of our flashlights, didn't exceed eighteen inches; but for the rest it wasn't too bad. The breathing apparatus functioned well enough, and I was conscious of no discomfort. At first, that was.

Rawlings took my arm and guided me to the head of a ladder that reached down to the deck of the machinery space. I heard the penetrating hiss of a fire extinguisher and peered around to locate its source.

A pity they had no submarines in the Middle Ages, I thought; the sight of that little lot down there would have given Dante an extra fillip when he started in on his Inferno. Over on the starboard side, two very powerful floodlights had been slung above the huge turbine: the visibility they gave varied from three to six feet, according to the changing amount of smoke given off by the charred and smoldering insulation. At the moment, one patch of the insulation was deeply covered in a layer of white foam — carbon dioxide released under pressure immediately freezes anything with which it comes in contact. As the man with the extinguisher stepped back, three others moved forward in the swirling gloom and started hacking and tearing away at the insulation. As soon as a sizable strip was dragged loose the exposed lagging below immediately burst into flame reaching the height of a man's head, throwing into sharp relief weird masked figures leaping backward to avoid being scorched by the flames. And then the man with the CO2 would approach again, press his trigger, the blaze would shrink down, flicker, and die, and a coat of creamy white foam would bloom where the fire had been. Then the entire process would be repeated all over again. The whole scene with the repetitively stylized movements of the participants highlit against a smoky, oil-veined background of flickering crimson was somehow weirdly suggestive of the priests of a long-dead and alien culture offering up some burnt sacrifice on their blood-stained pagan altar.

It also made me see Swanson's point: at the painfully but necessarily slow rate at which those men were making progress, four hours would be excellent par for the course. I tried not to think what the air inside the Dolphin would be like in four hours' time.

The man with the extinguisher — it was Raeburn — caught sight of us, came across, and led me through a tangled maze of steam pipes and condensers to where Ringman was lying. He was on his back, very still, but conscious: I could see the movement of the whites of his eyes behind his goggles. I bent down till my mask was touching his.

"Your leg?" I shouted.

He nodded.

"Left?"

He nodded again, reached out gingerly, and touched a spot halfway down the shinbone. I opened the medical case, pulled out scissors, pinched the clothes on his upper arm between finger and thumb, and cut a piece of the material away. The hypodermic came next and within two minutes he was asleep. With Rawlings' help, I laid splints against his leg and bandaged them roughly in place. Two of the fire fighters stopped work long enough to help us drag him up the ladder, and then Rawlings and I took him through the passage above the reactor room. I became aware that my breathing was now distressed, my legs shaking, and my whole body bathed in sweat.

Once in the control center, I took off my mask and immediately began to cough and sneeze uncontrollably, tears streaming down my cheeks. Even in the few minutes we had been gone, the air in the control room had deteriorated to a frightening extent.

Swanson said, "Thank you, Doctor. What's it like in there?"

"Quite bad. Not intolerable, but not nice. Ten minutes is long enough for your fire fighters at one time."

"Fire fighters I have plenty of. Ten minutes it shall be."

A couple of burly enlisted men carried Ringman through to the sick bay. Rawlings had been ordered for'ard for rest and recuperation in the comparatively fresh air of the mess room, but he elected to stop off at the sick bay with me. He'd glanced at my bandaged left hand and said, "Three hands are better than one, even though two of them do happen to belong to Rawlings."

Benson was restless and occasionally murmuring but still below the level of consciousness. Captain Folsom was asleep, deeply so, which I found surprising until Rawlings told me that there were no alarm boxes in the sick bay and that the door was completely sound-proofed.

We laid Ringman down on the examination table, and Rawlings slit his trouser leg with a pair of heavy surgical scissors. It wasn't as bad as I had feared it would be: a clean fracture of the tibia, not compound. With Rawlings doing most of the work, we soon had his leg fixed up. I didn't try to put his leg in traction; when Jolly, with his two good hands, had completely recovered, he'd be able to make a better job of it than I could.

We'd just finished when a telephone rang. Rawlings lifted it quickly before Folsom could hear it, spoke briefly, and hung up.

"Control room," he said. I knew from the wooden expression on his face that whatever news he had for me, it wasn't good. "It was for you. Bolton, the sick man in the nucleonics lab, the one you brought back from Zebra yesterday afternoon. He's gone. About two minutes ago." He shook his head despairingly. "My God, another death."

"No," I said. "Another murder."