Ice Station Zebra

11

The «Dolphin» was an ice-cold tomb. At half-past six that morning, four and a half hours after the outbreak of the fire, there was still only one dead man inside the ship — Bolton. But as I looked with bloodshot and inflamed eyes at the men sitting or lying about the control room — no one was standing any more — I knew that within an hour, two at the most, Bolton would be having company. By ten o'clock at the latest, under those conditions, the «Dolphin» would be no more than a steel coffin with no life left inside her.

As a ship the «Dolphin» was already dead. All the sounds we associated with the living vessel, the murmurous pulsation of great engines, the high-pitched whine of generators, the deep hum of the air-conditioning unit, the unmistakable transmission from the sonar, the clickety-clack from the radio room, the soft hiss of air, the brassy jingle from the juke box, the whirring of fans, the rattle of pots from the galley, the movement of men, the talking of men — all those were gone. All those vital sounds, the heartbeats of a living vessel, were gone; but in their place was not silence but something worse than silence, something that bespoke not living but dying, the frighteningly rapid, hoarse, gasping breathing of lung-tortured men fighting for air and for life.

Fighting for air. That was the irony of it. Fighting for air while there were still many days' supply of oxygen in the giant tanks. There were some breathing sets aboard, similar to the British Built-in Breathing System, which takes a direct oxynitrogen mixture from tanks, but only a few, and all members of the crew had had a chance at those, but only for two minutes at a time. For the rest, for the more than ninety per cent without those systems, there was only the panting, straining agony that leads eventually to death. Some portable closed-circuit sets were still left, but those were reserved exclusively for the fire fighters.

Oxygen was occasionally bled from the tanks directly into the living spaces, and it just didn't do any good at all; the only effect it seemed to have was to make breathing even more cruelly difficult by heightening the atmospheric pressure. All the oxygen in the world was going to be of little avail as long as the level of carbon dioxide given off by our anguished breathing mounted steadily with the passing of each minute. Normally, the air in the Dolphin was cleaned and circulated throughout the ship every two minutes, but the giant 200-ton air conditioner responsible for this was a glutton for the electric power that drove it; and the electricians' estimate was that the reserve of power in the standby battery, which alone could reactivate the nuclear power plant, was already dangerously low. So the concentration of carbon dioxide increased steadily toward lethal levels, and there was nothing we could do about it.

Increasing, too, in what passed now for air, were the Freon fumes from the refrigerating machinery and the hydrogen fumes from the batteries. Worse still, the smoke was now so thick that visibility, even in the for'ard parts of the ship, was down to a few feet, but that smoke had to remain also; there was no power to operate the electrostatic precipitators, and even when those had been briefly tried, they had proved totally inadequate to cope with the concentration of billions of carbon particles held in suspension in the air. Each time the door to the engine room was opened — and that was progressively oftener as the strength of the fire fighters ebbed — fresh clouds of that evil acrid smoke rolled through the submarine. The fire in the engine room had stopped burning over two hours previously; but now what remained of the redly smoldering insulation around the starboard high-pressure turbine gave off far more smoke and fumes than flames ever could have.

But the greatest enemy of all lay in the mounting count of carbon monoxide, that deadly, insidious, colorless, tasteless, odorless gas with its murderous affinity for the red blood cells — 500 times that of oxygen. On board the Dolphin the normal permissible tolerance of carbon monoxide in the air was thirty parts in a million. Now the reading was somewhere between 400 and 500 parts in a million. When it reached a thousand parts, none of us would have more than minutes to live.

And then there was the cold. As Commander Swanson had grimly prophesied, the «Dolphin», with the steam pipes cooled down and all heaters switched off, had chilled down to the sub-freezing temperature of the sea outside, and was ice cold. In terms of absolute cold, it was nothing — a mere two degrees below zero on the centigrade scale. But in terms of cold as it reacted on the human body, it was very cold indeed. Most of the crew were without warm clothing of any kind. In normal operating conditions the temperature inside the «Dolphin» was maintained at a steady 22°C. regardless of the temperature outside. The men were forbidden to move around, but even if they were allowed to, they now lacked the energy to counteract the effects of the cold, and what little energy was left in their rapidly weakening bodies was so wholly occupied in forcing their laboring chest muscles to gulp in more and ever more of that foul and steadily worsening air that they had none at all left to generate sufficient animal heat to ward off that dank and bitter cold. You could actually hear men shivering, could listen to their violently shaking limbs knocking and rat-tat-tatting helplessly against bulkheads and deck, could hear the chattering of their teeth, the sound of some of them, far gone in weakness, whimpering softly with the cold: but always the dominant sound was that harsh, strangled moaning, a rasping and frightening sound, as men sought to suck air down into starving lungs.

With the exception of Hansen and myself — both of whom were virtually one-handed — and the sick patients, every man in the «Dolphin» had taken his turn that night in descending into the machinery space and fighting that red demon that threatened to slay us all. The number in each fire-fighting group had been increased from four to eight and the time spent down there shortened to three or four minutes, so that efforts could be concentrated and more energy expended in a given length of time, but because of the increasingly Stygian darkness in the machinery space, the ever-thickening coils of oily black smoke, and the wickedly cramped and confined space in which the men had to work, progress had been frustratingly, maddeningly slow: and entered into it now, of course, was the factor of that dreadful weakness that now assailed us all, so that men with the strength only of little children were tugging and tearing at the 'smoldering insulation in desperate near-futility and seemingly making no progress at all.

I'd been down again in the machinery space, just once, at 5:30 a.m. to attend to Jolly, who had himself slipped, fallen, and laid himself out while helping an injured crewman up the ladder, and I knew I would never forget what I had seen there: dark and spectral figures in a dark and spectral and swirling world, lurching and staggering around like zombies in some half-forgotten nightmare, swaying and stumbling and falling to the deck or down into the bilges now deep-covered in great snow drifts of carbon-dioxide foam and huge, smoking, blackened chunks of torn-off sheathing. Men on the rack, men in the last stages of exhaustion; One little spark of fire, one little spark of an element as old as time itself, and all the brilliant technological progress of the twentieth century was set at nothing, the frontiers of man's striving translated in a moment from the nuclear age to the dark unknown of pre-history.

Every dark hour brings forth its man, and there was no doubt in the minds of the crew of the «Dolphin» that that dark night had produced its own hero: Dr. Jolly. He had made a swift recovery from the effects of his first disastrous entry into the engine room that night, appearing back in the control center only seconds after I had finished setting Ringman's broken leg. He had taken the news of Bolton's death pretty badly, but never, either by word or direct look, did he indicate to either Swanson or myself that the fault lay with us for insisting against his better judgment on bringing on board the ship a man whose life had been hanging in the balance even under the best of conditions. I think Swanson was pretty grateful for that and might even have got around to apologizing to Jolly had not a fire fighter come through from the engine room and told us that one of his team had slipped and either twisted or broken an ankle — the second of many minor accidents and injuries that were to happen down in the machinery space that night. Jolly had reached for the nearest closed-circuit breathing apparatus before we could try to stop him and was gone in a minute.

We eventually lost count of the number of trips he made down there that night. Fifteen at least, perhaps many more, by the time six o'clock had come around, my mind was beginning to get pretty fuzzy around the edges. He certainly had no lack of customers for his medical skill. Paradoxically enough, the two main types of injury that night were diametrically opposite in' nature: burning and freezing, burning from the red-hot sheathing — and, earlier, the steam pipes — and freezing from a carelessly directed jet of carbon dioxide against exposed areas of face or hands. Jolly never failed to answer a call, not even after the time he'd given his own head a pretty nasty crack. He would complain bitterly to the captain, old boy, for rescuing him from the relative safety and comfort of Drift Ice Station Zebra, crack some dry joke, pull on his mask, and leave. A dozen speeches to Congress or Parliament couldn't have done what Jolly did that night in cementing Anglo-American friendship.

About 6:45 a.m. chief torpedoman Patterson came into the control center. I suppose he walked through the doorway, but that was only assumption; from where I sat on the deck between Swanson and Hansen, you couldn't see halfway to the door: but when he came up to Swanson he was crawling on his hands and knees,, head swaying from side to side, whooping painfully, his respiration rate at least fifty to the minute. He was wearing no mask of any kind and was shivering constantly.

"We must do something, Captain," he said hoarsely. He spoke as much when inhaling as when exhaling; when your breathing is sufficiently distressed, one is as easy as the other. "We've got seven men passed out now between the for'ard torpedo room and the crew's mess. They're pretty sick men, Captain."

"Thank you, chief." Swanson, also without a mask, was in as bad a way as Patterson, his chest heaving, his breath hoarsely rasping, tears and sweat rolling down the grayness of his face. "We'll be as quick as possible."

"More oxygen," I said. "Bleed more oxygen into the ship."

"Oxygen? More oxygen?" He shook his head. "The pressure is too high as it is."

"Pressure won't kill them." I was dimly aware, through my cold and misery and burning chest and eyes, that my voice sounded just as strange as did those of Swanson and Patterson. "Carbon monoxide will kill them. Carbon monoxide is what is killing them now. It's the relative proportion of CO2 to oxygen that matters. It's too high, it's far too high. That's what's going to finish us all off."

"More oxygen," Swanson ordered. Even the unnecessary acknowledgment of my words would have cost too much. "More oxygen."

Valves were turned and oxygen hissed into the control room and, I knew, into the crew spaces. I could feel my ears pop as the pressure swiftly built up but that was all I could feel. I certainly couldn't feel any improvement in my breathing, a feeling that was borne out when Patterson, noticeably weaker this time, crawled back and croaked out the bad news that he now had a dozen unconscious men on his hands.

I went for'ard with Patterson and a closed-circuit oxygen apparatus — one of the few unexhausted sets left — and clamped it for a minute or so onto the face of each unconscious man in turn, but I knew it was but a temporary palliative. The oxygen revived them, but within a few minutes of the mask being removed, most of them slipped back into unconsciousness again. I made my way back to the control room, a dark dungeon of huddled men nearly all lying down, most of them barely conscious. I was barely conscious myself. I wondered vaguely if they felt as I did, if the fire from the lungs had now spread to the remainder of the body, if they could see the first slight changes in color in their hands and faces, the deadly blush of purple, the first unmistakable signs of a man beginning to die from carbon-monoxide poisoning. Jolly, I noticed, still hadn't returned from the engine room; he was keeping himself permanently on hand, it seemed, to help those men who were in ever-increasingly greater danger of hurting themselves and their comrades as their weakness increased, as their level of care and attention and concentration slid down toward zero.

Swanson was where I'd left him, propped on the desk against the plotting table. He smiled faintly as I sank down beside him and Hansen.

"How are they, Doctor?" he whispered. A whisper, but a rock-steady whisper. The man's monolithic calm had never cracked, and I realized dimly that here was a man who could never crack: you do find people like that, once in a million or once in a lifetime. Swanson was such a man.

"Far gone," I said. As a medical report, it might have lacked a thought in detail, but it contained the gist of what I wanted to say and it saved me energy. "You will have your first deaths for carbon-monoxide poisoning within the hour."

"So soon?" The surprise was in his red, swollen, streaming eyes as well as in his voice. "Not so soon, Doctor. It's hardly — well, it's hardly started to take effect."

"So soon," I said. "Carbon-monoxide poisoning is very rapidly progressive. Five dead within the hour. Within two hours, fifty. At least fifty."

"You take the choice out of my hands," he murmured. "For which I am grateful. John, where is our main propulsion officer? His hour has come."

"I'll get him." Hansen hauled himself wearily to his feet, an old man making his last struggle to rise from his death bed, and at that moment the engine-room door opened and blackened, exhausted men staggered into the' control room. Waiting men filed out to take their place. Swanson said to one of the men who had just entered, "Is that you, Will?"

"Yes, sir." Lieutenant Raeburn, the navigating officer, pulled off his mask and began to cough, rackingly, painfully. Swanson waited until he had quieted a little.

"How are things down there, Will?"

"We've stopped making smoke, skipper." Raeburn wiped his streaming face, swayed dizzily, and lowered himself groggily to the floor. "I think we've drowned out the sheathing completely."

"How long to get the rest of it off?"

"God knows. Normally, ten minutes. The way we are, an hour. Maybe longer."

"Thank you. Ah!" He smiled faintly as Hansen and Cartwright appeared out of the smoke-filled gloom. "Our main propulsion officer. Mr. Cartwright, I would be glad if you would put the kettle on to boil. What's the record for activating the plant, getting steam up and spinning the turbo generators?"

"I couldn't say, skipper." Red-eyed, coughing, smokeblackened, and obviously in considerable pain, Cartwright nevertheless straightened his shoulders and smiled slowly. "But you may consider it broken."

He left. Swanson heaved himself to his feet with obvious weakness — except for two brief inspection trips to the engine room, he had not once worn any breathing apparatus during those interminable and pain-filled hours. He called for power on the broadcast circuit, unhooked a microphone, and spoke in a calm, clear, strong voice: it was an amazing exhibition in self-control, the triumph of a mind over agonized lungs still starving for air.

"This is your captain speaking," he said. "The fire in the engine room is out. We are already reactivating our power plant. Open all water-tight doors throughout the ship. They are to remain open until further orders. You may regard the worst of our troubles as lying behind us. Thank you for all you have done." He hooked up the microphone and turned to Hansen. "The worst «is» behind, John — if we have enough power left to reactivate the plant."

"Surely the worst is still to come," I said. "It'll take you how long — three quarters of an hour, maybe an hour? — to get your turbo generators going and your air-purifying equipment working again. How long do you think it will take your air cleaners to make any noticeable effect on this poisonous air?"

"Half an hour. At least that. Perhaps more."

"There you are, then." My mind was so woolly and doped now that I had difficulty in finding words to frame my thoughts, and I wasn't even sure that my thoughts were worth thinking. "An hour and a half at least — and you said the worst was over. The worst hasn't even begun." I shook my head, trying to remember what it was that I had been going to say next, then remembered. "In an hour and a half, one out of every four of your men will be gone."

Swanson smiled. He actually, incredibly, smiled. He said, "As Sherlock used to say to Moriarty, 'I think not, Doctor.' Nobody's going to die of monoxide poisoning. In fifteen minutes' time we'll have fresh, breathable air throughout the ship."

Hansen glanced at me just as I glanced at him. The strain had been too much; the old man had gone off his rocker. Swanson caught our interchange of looks and laughed, the laugh changing abruptly to a bout of convulsive coughing as he inhaled too much of that poisoned, smoke-laden atmosphere. He coughed for a long time, then gradually quieted down.

"Serves me right," he gasped. "Your faces… Why do you think I ordered the water-tight doors opened, Doctor?"

"No idea."

"John?"

Hansen shook his head.

Swanson looked at him quizzically and said, "Speak to the engine room. Tell them to light up the diesel."

"Yes, sir," Hansen said woodenly. He made no move.

"Lieutenant Hansen is wondering whether he should get a straitjacket," Swanson said. "Lieutenant Hansen knows that a diesel engine is never, «never» lit up when a submarine is submerged — unless with a snorkel, which is useless under ice — for a diesel not only uses air straight from the engineroom atmosphere, it gulps it down in great draughts and would soon remove all the air in the ship. Which is what I want. We bleed compressed air under fairly high pressure into the fore part of the ship. Nice, clean, fresh air. We light up the diesel in the after part — it will run rough at first because of the low concentration of oxygen in this poisonous muck — but it will run. It will suck up much of this filthy air, exhausting its gases over the side, and as it does, it will lower the atmospheric pressure aft and the fresh air will make its way through from for'ard. To have done this before now would have been suicidal. The fresh air would only have fed the flames until the fire was out of control. But we can do it now. We can run it for a few minutes only, of course, but a few minutes will be ample. You are with me, Lieutenant Hansen?"

Hansen was with him, all right, but he didn't answer. He had already left.

Three minutes passed; then we heard, through the now open passageway above the reactor room, the erratic sound of a diesel starting, fading, coughing, then catching again — we learned later that the engineers had had to bleed off several ether bottles in the vicinity of the air intake to get the engine to catch. For a minute or two it ran roughly and erratically and seemed to be making no impression at all on that poisonous air; then, imperceptibly almost, at first, then with an increasing degree of definition, we could see the smoke in the control room, illuminated by the single lamp still left burning there, begin to drift and eddy toward the reactor passage. Smoke began to stir and eddy in the corners of the control room as the diesel sucked the fumes aft, and more smoke-laden air, a shade lighter in color, began to move in from the wardroom passageway, pulled in by the decreasing pressure in the control room, pushed in by the gradual buildup of fresh air in the fore part of the submarine as compressed air was bled into the living spaces.

A few more minutes made the miracle. The diesel thudded away in the engine room, running more sweetly and strongly as air with a higher concentration of oxygen reached its intake, and the smoke in the control room drained steadily away, to be replaced by a thin grayish mist from the fore part of the ship that was hardly deserving of the name of smoke at all. And that mist carried with it air, an air with fresh, life-giving oxygen, an air with a proportion of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that was now almost negligible. Or so it seemed to us.

The effect upon the crew was just within the limits of credibility. It was as if a wizard had passed through the length of the ship and touched them with the wand of life. Unconscious men, men for whom death had been less than half an hour away, began to stir, some to open their eyes. Sick, exhausted, nauseated, and pain-wracked men who had been lying or sitting on the decks in attitudes of huddled despair sat up straight or stood, their faces breaking into expressions of almost comical wonderment and disbelief as they drew great draughts down into their aching lungs and found that it was not poisonous gases they were inhaling but fresh, breathable air: men who had made up their minds for death began to wonder how they could ever have thought that way. As air went, I suppose, it was pretty substandard stuff, and the Factory Acts would have had something to say about it; but, for us, no pine-drenched mountain air ever tasted half so sweet.

Swanson kept a careful eye on the gauges recording the air pressure in the submarine. Gradually it sank down to the fifteen pounds at which the atmosphere was normally kept, then below it. He ordered the compressed air to be released under higher pressure, and then, when the atmospheric pressure was back to normal, he ordered the diesel stopped and the compressed air shut off.

"Commander Swanson," I said. "If you ever want to make admiral, you can apply to me for a reference any time."

"Thank you." He smiled. "We have been very lucky."

Sure we had been lucky, the way men who sailed with Swanson would always be lucky.

We could now hear the sounds of pumps and motors as Cartwright started in on the slow process of bringing the nuclear power plant to life again. Everyone knew that it was touch and go whether there would be enough life left in the batteries for that, but, curiously, no one seemed to doubt that Cartwright would succeed: we had been through too much to entertain even the thought of failure now.

Nor did we fail. At exactly eight o'clock that morning Cartwright phoned to say that he had steam on the turbine blades and that the «Dolphin» was a going proposition again. I was glad to hear it.

For three hours we cruised along at slow speed while the air-conditioning plant worked under maximum pressure to bring the air inside the «Dolphin» back to normal. After that, Swanson slowly stepped up our speed until we had reached about fifty per cent of normal cruising speed, which was as fast as the propulsion officer deemed it safe to go. For a variety of technical reasons it was impractical for the «Dolphin» to operate without all turbines in commission,, so we were reduced to the speed of the slowest, and, without sheathing on it, Cartwright didn't want to push the starboard highpressure turbine above a fraction of its power. This way, it would take us much longer to clear the ice pack and reach the open sea, but 'the captain, in a broadcast, said that if the limit of the ice pack was where it had been when we'd first moved under it — and there was no reason to think it should have shifted more than a few miles — we should be moving out into the open sea at about four o'clock the following morning.

By four o'clock that afternoon, members of the crew, working in relays, had managed to clear away from the machinery space all the debris and foam that had accumulated during the long night. After that, Swanson reduced all watches to the barest skeletons required to run the ship, so that as many men as possible might sleep as long as possible. Now that the exultation of victory was over, now that the almost intolerable relief of knowing that they were not, after all, to find their gasping end in a cold iron tomb under the ice cap had begun to fade, the inevitable reaction, when it did come, was correspondingly severe. A long and sleepless night behind them; hours of cruelly back-breaking toil in the metal jungle of the machinery space; that lifetime of tearing tension when they had not known whether they were going to live or die but had believed they were going to die; the poisonous fumes that had laid them all on the rack — all of these combined had taken cruel toll of their reserves of physical and mental energy, and the crew of the «Dolphin» were now sleep-ridden and exhausted as they had never been. When they lay down to sleep, they slept at once, like dead men.

I didn't sleep. Not then, not at four o'clock. I couldn't sleep. I had too much to think about: like how it had been primarily my fault, through mistake, miscalculation, or sheer pig-headedness, that the «Dolphin» and her crew had been brought to such desperate straits; like what Commander Swanson was going to say when he found out how much I'd kept from him, how little I'd told him. Still, if I had kept him in the dark so long, I couldn't see that there would be much harm in it if I kept him in the dark just that little time longer. It would be time enough in the morning to tell him all I knew. His reactions would be interesting, to say the least. He might be striking some medals for Rawlings, but I had the feeling that he wouldn't be striking any for me. Not after I'd told him what I'd have to.

Rawlings. That was the man I wanted now. I went to see him, told him what I had in mind, and asked him if he would mind sacrificing a few hours' sleep during the night. M always, Rawlings was co-operation itself.

Later that evening I had a look at one or two of the patients. Jolly, exhausted by his Herculean efforts of the previous night, was fathoms deep in slumber, so Swanson had asked if I would deputize for him. So I did, but I didn't try very hard. With only one exception they were sound asleep, and none of them was in so urgent need of medical attention that there would have been any justification for waking him up. The sole exception was Dr. Benson, who had recovered consciousness late that afternoon. He was obviously on, the mend, but complained that his head felt like a pumpkin with sonieone at work on it with a riveting gun, so I fed him some pills and that was the extent of the treatment. I asked him if he had any idea as to what had been the cause of his fall from the top of the sail, but he was either too woozy to remember or just didn't know. Not that it mattered now. I already knew the answer. -

I slept for nine hours after that, which was pretty selfish of me, considering that I had asked Rawlings to keep awake half the night; but, then, I hadn't had much option about that, for Rawlings was in a position to perform for me an essential task that I couldn't perform for myself.

Sometime during the night we passed out from under the ice cap into the open Arctic Ocean again.

I awoke shortly after seven, washed, shaved, and dressed as carefully as I could with one hand out of commission — for I believe a judge owes it to his public to be decently turned out when he goes to conduct a trial — then breakfasted well in the wardroom. Shortly before nine o'clock I walked into the control room. Hansen had the watch. I went up to him and said quietly, so that I couldn't be overheard: "Where is Commander Swanson?"

"In his cabin."

"I'd like to speak to him and you. Privately."

Hansen looked at me speculatively, nodded, handed over the watch to the navigator, and led the way to Swanson's cabin. We knocked, went in, and closed the door behmd us. I didn't waste any time in preamble.

"I know who the killer is," I said. "I've no proof, but I'm going to get it now. I would like you to be on hand — if you can spare the time."

They had used up all their emotional responses and reactions during the previous thirty hours, so they didn't throw up their hands or do startled double-takes or make any of the other standard signs of incredulousness. Instead, Swanson just looked thoughtfully at Hansen, rose from his table, folded the chart he'd been studying, and said dryly: "I think we might spare the time, Dr. Carpenter. I have never met a murderer." His tone was impersonal, even light, but the clear gray eyes had gone very cold indeed. "It will be quite an experience to meet a man with eight deaths on his conscience."

"You can count yourself lucky that it is only eight," I said. "He almost brought it up to the hundred mark yesterday morning."

This time I did get them. Swanson stared at me, then said softly, "What do you mean?"

"Our friend with the gun also carries a box of matches around with him," I said. "He was busy with them in the engine room in the early hours of yesterday morning."

"Someone «deliberately» tried to set the ship on fire?" Hansen looked at me in open disbelief. "I don't buy that, Doe."

"I buy it," Swanson said. "I buy anything Dr. Carpenter says. We're dealing with a madman. Only a madman would risk losing his life along with the lives of a hundred others."

"He miscalculated," I said mildly. "Come along."

They were waiting for us in the wardroom as I'd arranged, eleven of them in all: Rawlings, Zabrinski, Captain Folsom, Dr. Jolly, the two Harrington twins, who were now just barely well enough to be out of bed, Naseby, Hewson, Hassard, Kinnaird and Jeremy. Most of them were seated around the wardroom table except for Rawlings, who opened the door for us, and Zabrinski, his foot still in the cast, who was sitting in a chair in one corner of the room studying an issue of the «Dolphin Daze», the submarine's own mimeographed newspaper. Some of them made to get to their feet as we came in, but Swanson waved them down. They sat silently, all except Dr. Jolly, who boomed out a cheerful "Good morning, Captain. Well, well, this is an intriguing summons. Most intriguing. What is it you want to see us about, Captain?"

I cleared my throat. "You must forgive a small deception. It is I who wants to see you, not the captain."

"You?" Jolly pursed his lips and looked at me speculatively. "I don't get it, old boy. Why you?"

"I have been guilty of another small deception. I am not, as I gave you to understand, attached to the Ministry of Supply. I am an agent of the British government. An officer of M.I.6, counter-espionage."

Well, I got my reaction, all right. They just sat there, mouths wide open like newly landed fish, staring at me. It was Jolly, always a fast adjuster, who recovered first.

"Counter-espionage, by Jove! Counter-espionage! Spies and cloaks and daggers and beautiful blondes tucked away in the wardrobes — or wardroom, should I say. But why — why are you «here?» What do you — well, what «can» you want to see us about, Dr. Carpenter?"

"A small matter of murder," I said.

"Murder!" Captain Folsom spoke for the first time since coming aboard ship, the voice issuing from that savagely burnt face no more than a strangled croak. "Murder?"

"Two of the men lying up there now in the drift station lab were dead «before» the fire. They had been shot through the head. A third had been knifed. I would call that murder, wouldn't you?"

Jolly groped for the table and lowered himself shakily into his seat. The rest of them looked as if they were very glad that they were already sitting down.

"It seems too superfluous to add," I said, adding it all the same, "that the murderer is in this room now."

You wouldn't have thought it, not to look at them. You could see at a glance that none of those high-minded citizens could possibly be a killer. They were as innocent as life's young morning, the whole lot of them, pure and white as the driven snow.