Ice Station Zebra

6

We had been tired, more than tired, even before we had set out. We had been leaden-legged, bone-weary, no more than a short handspan from total exhaustion. But, for all that, we flitted through the howling darkness of that night like two great white ghosts across the dimly seen whiteness of a nightmare lunar landscape. We were no longer bowed under the weight of heavy packs. Our backs were to that gale-force wind, so that for every laborious plodding step we had made on our way to Zebra we now covered five, with so little a fraction of our earlier toil that at first it seemed all but effortless. We had no trouble in seeing where we were going, no fear of falling into an open lead or of crippling ourselves against some unexpected obstacle, for with our useless goggles removed and powerful flashlight beams dancing erratically ahead of us as we jog-trotted along, visibility was seldom less than five yards, more often nearer ten. Those were the physical aids that helped us on our way but even more sharply powerful as a spur to our aching legs was that keen and ever-growing fear that dominated our minds to the exclusion of all else, the fear that Commander Swanson had already been compelled to drop down and that we would be left to die in that shrieking wasteland: with our lacking both shelter and food, the old man with the scythe would not be keeping us waiting too long.

We ran, but we did not run too fast, for to have done that would have been to have the old man tapping us on the shoulder in very short order indeed. In far sub-zero temperatures, there is one thing that the Eskimo avoids as he would the plague — overexertion, in those latitudes more deadly, even, than the plague itself. Too much physical effort while wearing heavy furs inevitably results in sweat, and when the effort ceases, as eventually cease it must, the sweat freezes on the skin: the only way to destroy that film of ice is by further exertion, producing even more sweat, the beginnings of a vicious and steadily narrowing circle that can have only one end. So though we ran it was only at a gentle jog-trot, hardly more than a fast walk; we took every possible precaution against overheating.

After half an hour, perhaps a little more, I called for a brief halt in the shelter of a steep ice wall. Twice in the past two minutes Hansen had stumbled and fallen where there hadn't appeared to be any reason to stumble and fall: and I had noticed that my own legs were more unsteady than the terrain warranted.

"How are you making out?" I asked.

"Pretty bushed, Doc." He sounded it, too, his breathing quick and rasping and shallow. "But don't write me off yet. How far do you think we've come?"

"Three miles, near enough." I patted the ice wall behind us. "When we've had a couple of minutes, I think we should try climbing this. Looks like a pretty tall hummock to me."

"To try to get into the clear above the ice storm?" I nodded my head and he shook his. "Won't do any good, Doc. This ice storm must be at least twenty feet thick, and even if you do get above it the «Dolphin» will still be below it. She's only got the top of her sail clear above the ice."

"I've been thinking," I said. "We've been so lost in our own woes and sorrows that we've forgotten about Commander Swanson. I think we've been guilty of underestimating him pretty badly."

"It's likely enough. Right now I'm having a fulitime job worrying about Lieutenant Hansen. What's on your mind?"

"Just this. The chances are better than fifty-fifty that Swanson believes we're on our way back to the «Dolphin». After all, he's been ordering us to return for quite some time. And if he thinks we didn't get the order because something has happened to us or to the radio, he'll still figure that we will be returning."

"Not necessarily. Radio or not, we might still be heading for Drift Station Zebra."

"No. Definitely not. He'll be expecting us to be smart enough to figure it the way he would, and smart enough to see that that is the way «he» would figure it. He would know that if our radio broke down before we got to Zebra, it would be suicidal for us to try to find it without radio bearing — but that it «wouldn't» be suicidal for us to try to make it back to the «Dolphin», for he would be hoping that we would have sufficient savvy to guess that he would put a lamp in the window to guide the lost sheep home."

"My God, Doc, I think you've got it! Of course he would, of course he would. God, what am I using for brains?" He straightened and turned to face the ice wall.

Pushing and pulling, we made it together to the top. The summit of the rafted ice hummock was less than twenty feet above the level of the ice pack and not quite high enough. We were still below the surface of that gale-driven river of ice spicules. Occasionally, for a brief moment of time, the wind force would ease fractionally and let us have a brief glimpse of the clear sky above: but only occasionally and for a fraction of a second. And if there was anything to be seen in that time, we couldn't see it.

"There'll be other hummocks," I shouted in Hansen's ear. "Higher hummocks." He nodded without answering. I couldn't see the expression on his face but I didn't have to see it. The same thought was in both our minds: we could see nothing because there was nothing to see. Commander Swanson hadn't put a lamp in the window, for the window was gone, the «Dolphin» forced to dive to avoid being crushed by the ice.

Five times in the next twenty minutes we climbed hummocks, and five times we climbed down, each time more dejected, more defeated. By now I was pretty far gone, moving in a pain-filled nightmare: Hansen was in even worse shape, lurching and staggering around like a drunken man. As a doctor, I knew well the hidden and unsuspected resources that an exhausted man could call on in times of desperate emergency; but I knew too that those resources are not limitless and that we were pretty close to the end. And when that end came we would just lie down in the lee of an ice wall and wait for the old man to come along: he wouldn't keep us waiting long.

Our sixth hummock all but defeated us. It wasn't that it was hard to climb — it was well ridged with foot and hand holds — but the sheer physical effort of climbing came very close to defeating us. And then I dimly began to realize that part of the effort was owing to the fact that this was by far the highest hummock we had found yet. Some colossal pressures had concentrated on this one spot, rafting and logjamming the ice pack until it had risen a clear thirty feet above the general level; the giant underwater ridge beneath must have stretched down close to two hundred feet toward the black floor of the Arctic.

Eight feet below the summit our heads were in the clear: on the summit itself, holding on to each other for mutual support against the gale, we could look down on the ice storm whirling by just beneath our feet, a fantastic sight: a great gray-white sea of undulating turbulence, a giant rushing river that stretched from horizon to horizon. Like so much else in the high Arctic, the scene had an eerie and terrifying strangeness about it, a mindless desolation that belonged not to earth but to some alien and long-dead planet.

We scanned the horizon to the west until our eyes ached. Nothing. Nothing at all. Just that endless desolation. From due north to due south, through 1800, we searched the surface of that great river: and still we saw nothing. Three minutes passed. Still nothing. I began to feel the ice running in my blood.

On the remote off-chance that we might already have bypassed the «Dolphin» to the north or south, I turned and peered toward the east. It wasn't easy, for that gale of wind brought tears to the eyes in an instant of time, but at least it wasn't impossible; we no longer had to contend with the needlepointed lances of the ice spicules. I made another slow 180° sweep of the eastern horizon, and again, and again. Then I caught Hansen's arm.

"Look there," I said. "To the northeast. Maybe a quarter of a mile away, maybe half. Can you see anything?"

For several seconds Hansen squinted along the direction of my outstretched hand, then shook his head. "I see nothing. What do you think you see?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure. I can imagine I see a very faint touch of luminescence on the surface of the ice storm there, maybe just a fraction of a shade whiter than the rest."

For a full half-minute Hansen stared out through cupped hands. Finally he said, "It's hopeless. I don't see it. But then my eyes have been acting up on me for the past halfhour. But I can't even «imagine» I see anything."

I turned away to give my streaming eyes a rest from that icy wind and then looked again. "Damn it," I said, "I can't be sure that there is anything there, but I can't be sure that there isn't, either."

"What do you think it would be?" Hansen's voice was dispirited, with overtones of hopelessness. "A light?"

"A searchlight shining vertically upward. A searchlight that's not able to penetrate that ice storm."

"You're kidding yourself, Doc," Hansen said wearily. "The wish father to the thought. Besides, that would mean that we had already passed the «Dolphin». It's not possible."

"It's not impossible. Ever since we started climbing those damned ice hummocks I've lost track of time and space. It «could» be."

"Do you still see it?" The voice was empty, uninterested, be didn't believe me and he was just making words.

"Maybe my eyes are acting up, too," I admitted. "But, damn it, I'm still not sure that I'm not right."

"Come on, Doc, let's go."

"Go where?"

"I don't know." His teeth chattered so uncontrollably in that intense cold that I could scarcely follow his words. "I guess it doesn't matter very much where — "

With breath-taking abruptness, almost in the center of my imagined patch of luminescence and not more than 400 yards away, a swiftly climbing rocket burst through the rushing river of ice spicules and climbed high into the clear sky trailing behind it a fiery tail of glowing red sparks. Five hundred feet it climbed, perhaps 600, then burst into a brilliantly incandescent shower of crimson stars, stars that fell lazily back to earth again, streaming away to the west on the wings of the gale and dying as they went, till the sky was colder and emptier than ever before.

"You still say it doesn't matter very much where we go?" I asked Hansen. "Or maybe you didn't see that little lot?"

"What I just saw," he said reverently, "was the prettiest ole sight that Ma Hansen's little boy ever did see — or ever will see." He thumped me on the back, so hard that I had to grab him to keep my balance. "We got it made, Doc!" he shouted. "We got it made. Suddenly I have the strength of ten. Home sweet home, here we come."

Ten minutes later we were home,

"God, this is wonderful," Hansen sighed. He stared in happy bemusement from the captain to me to the glass in his hand to the water dripping from the melting ice on his furs onto the corticene decking of the captain's tiny cabin. "The warmth, the light, the comfort and home sweet home. I never thought I'd see any of it again. When that rocket went up, skipper, I was just looking around to pick a place to lay me down and die. And don't think I'm joking, because I'm not."

"And Dr. Carpenter?" Swanson smiled.

"Defective mental equipment somewhere," Hansen said. "He doesn't seem to know how to go about giving up. I think he's just mule-headed. You get them like that."

Hansen's slightly off-beat, slightly irrational talk had nothing to do with the overwhelming relief and relaxation that come after moments of great stress and tension. Hansen was too tough for that. I knew that and I knew that Swanson knew it, too. We'd been back for almost twenty minutes now, we'd told our story, the pressure was off, a happy ending for all seemed in sight, and normalcy was again almost the order of the day. But when the strain is oft and conditions are back to normal, a man has time to start thinking about things again. I knew only too well what was in Hansen's mind's eye: that charred and huddled shapelessness that had once been my brother. He didn't want me to talk about him, and for that I didn't blame him; he didn't want me even to think about him, although he must have known that that was impossible. The kindest men nearly always are like that, hard and tough and cynical on the outside, men who have been too kind and showed it.

"However it was," Swanson smiled, "you can consider yourselves two of the luckiest men alive. That rocket you saw was the third last we had, it's been a regular fourth of July for the past hour or so. And you think Rawlings, Zabrinski, and the survivors on Zebra are safe for the present?"

"Nothing to worry about for the next couple of days," Hansen nodded. "They'll be okay. Cold, mind you, and a good half of them desperately in need of hospital treatment, but they'll survive."

"Fine. Well, this is how it is. This lead here stopped closing in about half an hour ago. but it doesn't matter now: we can drop down any time and still hold our position. What does matter is that we have located the fault in the ice machine. It's a damned tricky and complicated job, and I expect it will take several hours yet to fix. But I think we'll wait until it is fixed before we try anything. I'm not too keen on this idea of making a dead-reckoning approach to this lead near Zebra, then letting off a shot in the dark. Since there's no desperate hurry, I'd rather wait till we got the ice fathometer operating again, make an accurate survey of this lead then fire a torpedo up through the middle. If the ice is only four or five feet thick there, we shouldn't have much trouble blowing a hole through."

"That would be best," Hansen agreed. He finished off his medicinal alcohol — an excellent bourbon — rose stiffly to his feet, and stretched. "Well, back to the old treadmill again. How many torpedoes in working order?"

"Four, at the last count."

"I may as well go help young Mills load them up now. If that's okay by you, skipper."

"It is not okay by me," Swanson said mildly, "and if you'll take a quick gander at that mirror there, you'll understand why. You're not fit to load a slug into an air rifle, much less a torpedo into its tube. You haven't just been on a Sundayafternoon stroll, you know. A few hours' sleep, John, then we'll see."

Hansen didn't argue. I couldn't imagine anyone arguing with Commander Swanson. He made for the door. "Coming, Doc?"

"In a moment. Sleep well."

"Yeah. Thanks." He touched me lightly on the shoulder and smiled through bloodshot and exhausted eyes. "Thanks for everything. Good night, all."

When he was gone Swanson said, "It was pretty wicked out there tonight?"

"I wouldn't recommend it for an old ladies' home Sundayafternoon outing."

"Lieutenant Hansen seems to imagine he's under some kind of debt to you," he went on inconsequentially.

"Imagination, as you say. They don't come any better than Hansen. You're damned lucky to have him as an exec."

"I know that." He hesitated, then said quietly: "I promise you I won't mention this again, but, well, I'm damned sorry, Doctor."

I looked at him and nodded slowly. I knew he meant it, I knew he had to say it, but there's not much you can say in turn to anything like that. I said: "Six others died with him, Commander."

He hesitated again. "Do we — do we take the dead back to Britain with us?"

"Could I have another drop of that excellent bourbon, Commander? Been a very heavy run on your medicinal alcohol in the past few hours, I'm afraid." I waited till he had filled my glass, then went on: "We don't take them back with us. They're not dead men, they're just unrecognizable and unidentifiable lumps of charred matter. Let them stay here."

His relief was unmistakable and he was aware of it, for he went on hurriedly, for something to say: "All this equipment for locating and tracking the Russian missiles. Destroyed?"

"I didn't check." He'd find out for himself soon enough that there had been no such equipment. How he'd react to that discovery in light of the cock-and-bull story I'd spun to him and Admiral Garvie in the Holy Loch I couldn't even begin to guess. At the moment I didn't even care. It didn't seem important; nothing seemed important, not any more. All at once I felt tired, not sleepy, just deathly tired, so I pushed myself stiffly to my feet, said good night, and left.

Hansen was in his bunk when I got back to his cabin, his furs lying where he had dropped them. I checked that he was no longer awake, slipped off my own furs, hung them up, and replaced the Mannlicher-Schoenauer in my case. I lay down in my cot to sleep, but sleep wouldn't come. Exhausted though I was, I had never felt less like sleep in my life.

I was too restless and unsettled for sleep, too many problems coming all at once were causing a first-class log jam in my mind. I got up, pulled on a shirt and denim pants, and made my way to the control room. I spent the better part of what remained of the night there, pacing up and down, watching two technicians repairing the vastly complicated innards of the ice machine, reading the messages of congratulation which were still coming in, talking desultorily to the officer on deck, and drinking endless cups of coffee. It passed the night for me, and although I hadn't closed an eye. I felt fresh and almost relaxed by the time morning came.

At the wardroom breakfast table that morning everyone seemed quietly cheerful. They knew they had done a good job, the whole world was telling them they had done a magnificent job, and you could see that they all regarded that job as being as good as over. No one appeared to doubt Swanson's ability to blow a hole through the ice. If it hadn't been for the presence of the ghost at the feast, myself, they would have been positively jovial.

"We'll pass up the extra cups of coffee this morning, gentlemen," Swanson said. "Drift Station Zebra is still waiting for us, and even though I'm assured everyone there will survive, they must be feeling damned cold and miserable. The ice machine has been in operation for almost an hour now, at least we hope it has. We'll drop down right away and test it, and after we've loaded the torpedoes — two should do it, I think — we'll blow our way up into this lead at Zebra."

Twenty minutes later the «Dolphin» was back where she belonged, 150 feet below the surface of the sea — or the ice cap. After ten minutes' maneuvering, with a close check being kept on the plotting table to maintain our position relative to Drift Station Zebra, it was clear that the ice machine was behaving perfectly normally again, tracing out the inverted ridges and valleys in the ice with its usual magical accuracy. Commander Swanson nodded his satisfaction.

"That's it, then." He nodded to Hansen and Mills, the torpedo officer. "You can go ahead now. Maybe you'd like to accompany them, Dr. Carpenter. Or is loading torpedoes old hat to you?"

"Never seen it," I said truthfully. "Thanks, I'd like to go along." Swanson was as considerate toward men as he was toward his beloved «Dolphin», which was why every man in the ship swore by him. He knew, or suspected, that apart from the shock I felt at my brother's death, I was worried stiff about other things. He would have heard, although he hadn't mentioned it to me and hadn't even asked me how I had slept, that I'd spent the night prowling aimlessly and restl?ssly about the control room; he knew I would be grateful for any distraction, for anything that would relieve my mind, however temporarily, of whatever it was that was troubling it. I wondered just how much that extraordinarily keen brain knew or guessed. But that was an unprofitable line of thought so I put it out of my mind and went along with Hansen and Mills. Mills was another like Raeburn, the navigation officer; he looked to me more like a college undergraduate than the highly competent officer he was, but I supposed it was just another sign that I was growing old.

Hansen crossed to a panel by the diving console and studied a group of lights. The night's sleep had done him a great deal of good and, apart from the abraded skin on his forehead and around the cheekbones where the ice spicules of last night had done their work, he was again his normal, cheerfully cynical, relaxed self, fresh and rested and fit. He waved his hand at the panel.

"The torpedo safety lights, Dr. Carpenter. Each green light represents a closed torpedo tube door. Six doors that open to the sea — bow caps, we call them — six rear doors for loading the torpedoes. Only twelve lights, but we study them very, very carefully — just to make sure that all the lights are green. For if any of them were red — any of the top six, that is, which represent the sea doors — well, that wouldn't be so good, would it?" He looked at Mills. "All green?"

"All green." Mills echoed.

We moved for'ard along the wardroom passage and dropped down the wide companionway into the crew's mess. From there we moved into the for'ard torpedo-storage room. Last time I'd been there, on the morning after our departure from the Clyde, nine or ten men had been sleeping in their bunks; now all the bunks were empty. Five men were waiting for us: four seamen and a petty officer, Bowen, whom Hansen, no stickler for protocol, addressed as Charlie.

"You will see now," Hansen observed to me, "why officers are more highly paid than enlisted men, and deservedly so. While Charlie and his gallant men skulk here behind two sets of collision bulkheads, we must go and test the safety of the tubes. Regulations. Still, a cool head and an iron nerve: we do it gladly for our men."

Bowen grinned and unlatched the first collision-bulkhead door. We stepped over the eighteen-inch sill, leaving the five men behind, and waited until the door had been latched again before opening the for'ard collision-bulkhead door and stepping over the second sill into the cramped torpedo room. This time the door was swung wide open and hooked back on a heavy standing catch.

"All laid down in the book of rules," Hansen said. "The only time the two doors can be opened at the same time is when we're actually loading the torpedoes." He checked the position of metal handles at the rear of the tubes, reached up, swung down a steel-spring microphone, and flicked a switch, "Ready to test tubes. All manual levers shut. All lights showing green?"

"All lights still green." The answering voice from the overhead squawk box was hollow, metallic, queerly impersonal.

"You already checked," I said mildly.

"So we check again. Same old book of rules." He grinned. "Besides, my grandpa died at ninety-seven and I am out to beat his record. Take no chances and you run no risks. What are they to be, George?'

"Three and four."

I could see the brass plaques on the circular rear doors of the tubes, 2, 4, and 6 on the port side, 1, 3, and 5 on the starboard. Lieutenant Mills was proposing to use the central tubes on each side.

Mills unhooked a rubberized flashlight from the bulkhead and approached number 3 first. Hansen said, "Still no chances. First of all George opens the test cock in the rear door, which will show if there is any water at all in the tubes. Shouldn't be, but sometimes a little gets past the bow caps. If the test cock shows nothing, then he opens the door and shines his light up to examine the bow cap and see that there is no obstruction in the tube. How is it, George?"

"Okay, number 3." Three times Mills lifted the test-cock handle and no trace of water appeared. "Opening the door flow."

He hauled on the big lever at the rear, pulled it clear, and swung back the heavy circular door. He shone his kam up the gleaming inside length of the tube, then straightened. "Clean as a whistle and dry as a bone."

"That's not the way he was taught to report it," Hansen said sorrowfully. "I don't know what the young officers are cornmg to these days. Right, George, number 4."

Mills grinned, secured the rear door on number 3, and crossed to number 4. He lifted the test-cock handle and said, "Oh-oh."

"What is it?" Hansen asked.

"Water," Mills said tersely.

"Is there much? Let's see."

"Just a trickle."

"Is that bad?" I asked.

"It happens," Hansen said briefly. He joggled the handle up and down and another spoonful of water appeared. "You can get a slightly imperfect bow cap, and if you go deep enough to build up sufficient outside pressure you can get a trickle of water coming in. Probably what has happened in this case. If the bow cap was open, friend, at this depth the water would come out of that spout like a bullet. But no chances, no chances." He reached for the microphone again. "Number four bow cap still green? We have a little water here."

"Still green."

Hansen looked down at Mills. "How's it coming?"

"Not so much now."

"Control center," Hansen said into the microphone. 'Check the trim chit, just to make sure."

There was a pause, then the box crackled again.

"Captain speaking. All tubes showing 'empty.' Signed by Lieutenant Hansen and the foreman engineer."

"Thank you, sir." Hansen switched off and grinned. "Lieutenant Hansen's word is good enough for me any day. How's it now?"

"Stopped."

Mills tugged the heavy lever. It moved an inch or two, then struck. "Pretty stiff," he commented.

"You torpedomen never heard of anything called lubricating oil?" Hansen demanded. "Weight, George, weight."

Mills applied more weight. The lever moved another couple of inches. Mills scowled, shifted his feet to get maximum leverage, and heaved just as Hansen shouted, "No! Stop! For God's sake, stop!"

He was too late. He was a lifetime too late. The lever snapped clear, the heavy circular rear door smashed open as violently as if it had been struck by some gigantic battering ram, and a roaring torrent of water burst into the for'ard torpedo room. The sheer size, the enormous power and frightening speed of that almost horizontally traveling column of water was staggering. It was like a giant hose pipe, like one of the outlet pipes of the Boulder Dam. It caught up Lieutenant Mills, already badly injured by the flailing sweep of that heavy door, and swept him back across the torpedo room to smash heavily against the after bulkhead; for a moment he half stood there, pinned by the power of that huge jet, then slid down limply to the deck.

"Blow all main ballast!" Hansen shouted into the microphone. He was hanging on a rear-torpedo door to keep from being carried away, and, even above the thunderous roar of the waters, his voice carried clearly. "Emergency. Blow all main ballast. Number 4 tube open to the sea. Blow all main ballast!" He released his grip and staggered across the deck, trying to keep his balance in the madly swirling already footdeep water. "Get out of here, for God's sake."

He should have saved his energy and breath. I was already on my way out of there. I had Mills under the arms and was trying to drag him over the high sill of the for'ard collision bulkhead and I was making no headway at all. The proper trim of a submarine is a delicate thing at the best of times, and even after those few seconds, the nose of the «Dolphin», heavy with the tons of water that had already poured in, was beginning to cant sharply downward. Trying to drag Mills and at the same time keep my balance on that sloping deck with knee-high water boiling around me was more than I could do: but suddenly Hansen had Mills by the feet, and I stumbled off balance, tripped over the high sill, and fell backward into the confined space between the two collison bulkheads, dragging Mills after me.

Hansen was still on the other side of the bulkhead. I could hear him cursing steadily, monotonously, and as if he meant it as he struggled to unhook the heavy door from its standing catch. Because of the steep downward pitch of the Dolphin's deck, he had to lean all his weight against the massive steel door to free the catch, and with his insecure footing among the swirling waters on that sloping, slippery deck, he was obviously having the devil's own time trying to release it. I let Mills go, jumped over the sill, flung my shoulder against the door, and with the suddenly added pressure, the latch clicked free. The heavy door at once swung half shut, carrying us along with it and knocking us both off our feet into the battering-ram path of that torrent still gqshing from number 4 tube. Coughing and spluttering, we scrambled upright again, crossed the sill, and, hanging on to a latch handle apiece, tried to drag the door shut.

Twice we tried and twice we failed. The water boiled in through the tube, and its level was now almost Jipping the top of the sill. With every second that passed, the downward angle of the «Dolphin» increased, and with every extra degree of steepness the task of pulling that door uphill against the steadily increasing gravity became more and more difficult.

The water began to spill over the sill onto our feet.

Hansen grinned at me. At least I thought for a moment he was grinning, but the white teeth were clamped tightly together and there was no amusement at all in his eyes. He shouted above the roar of the water: "It's now or never."

A well-taken point. It was indeed now or never. At a signal from Hansen, we flung our combined weights on to those latch handles, each with one hand to a latch while the other braced against the bulkhead to give maximum leverage. We got the door to within four inches. It swung open. We tried again. Still four inches, and I knew that all our strength had gone into that one.

"Can you hold it for a moment?" I shouted.

He nodded. I shifted both hands to the lower corner latch, dropped to the deck, braced my feet against the sill, and straightened both legs in one convulsive jerk. The door crashed shut, Hansen jammed his latch home, I did the same with mine, and we were safe. For the moment we were safe.

I left Hansen to secure the remaining latches and started knocking those of the after collision-bulkhead door. I'd only got as far as the first one when the others started falling off by themselves. Petty officer Bowen and his men, on the other side of that door, needed no telling that we wanted out of there just as fast as possible. The door was pulled open and my eardrums popped with the abrupt fall in air pressure. I could hear the steady echoing roar of air blasting into the ballast tanks under high pressure. I hoisted Mills by the shoulders, strong, competent hands lifted him out and over the sill, and a couple of seconds later Hansen and I were beside him.

"In God's name!" Bowen said to Hansen. "What's gone wrong?"

"Number 4 tube open to the sea."

"Jesus!"

"Secure that door," Hansen ordered. "But good." He left at a dead run, clawing his way up the sharply sloping deck of the torpedo storage room. I took a look at Lieutenant Mills — one short look was all I needed — and followed after Hansen. Only I didn't run. Running wasn't going to help anybody now.

The roar of compressed air filled the ship, the ballast tanks were rapidly emptying, but still the «Dolphin» continued on its deadly dive, arrowing down for the dark depths of the Arctic. Not even the massive compressed-air banks of the submarine could hope to cope so soon with the effects of the scores of tons of sea water that had already flooded into the for'ard torpedo room: I wondered bleakly if they would ever be able to cope at all. As I walked along the wardroom passage, using the hand rail to haul myself up that crazily canted deck, I could feel the entire submarine shudder beneath my feet. No doubt about what that was: Swanson had the great turbines turning over at maximum revolutions, the big bronze propellers threshing madly in reverse, trying to bite deep into the water to slow up the diving submarine.

You can smell fear. You can smell it and you can see it, and I could do both as I hauled my way into the control center of the «Dolphin» that morning. Not one man as much as flickered an eye in my direction as I passed by the sonar room. They had no eyes for me. They had no eyes for anybody: tense, strained, immobile, with hunted faces, they had eyes for one thing only — the plummeting needle on the depth gauge.

The needle was passing the six-hundred-feet mark. Six hundred feet. No conventional submarine I'd ever been on could have operated at this depth. Could have survived at this depth. Six hundred and fifty. I thought of the fantastic outside pressure that represented and I felt far from happy. Someone else was feeling far from happy also: the young seaman manning the inboard diving seat. His fists, were clenched till the knuckles showed, a muscle was jumping in his cheek, a nerve twitching in his neck, and he had the look of a man who sees the bony finger of death beckoning.

Seven hundred feet. Seven hundred and fifty. Eight hundred. I'd never heard of a submarine that had reached that depth and lived. Neither, apparently, had Commander Swanson.

"We have just set a new record, men," he said. His voice was calm and relaxed, and although he was far too intelligent a man not to be afraid, no trace of it showed in tone or manner. "Lowest recorded dive ever, as far as I am aware. Speed of descent?"

"No change."

"It will change soon. The torpedo room must be about full now — apart from the pocket of air compressed under high pressure." He gazed at the dial and tapped his teeth thoughtfully with a thumbnail — this, for Swanson, was probably the equivalent of going into hysterics. "Blow the diesel tanks: blow the fresh-water tanks." Imperturbable though he sounded, Swanson was close to desperation for this was the counsel of despair: thousands of miles from home and supplies, yet jettisoning all the diesel and drinking water, the lack of either of which could make all the difference between life and death. But, at that moment, it didn't matter; all that mattered was lightening the ship.

"Main ballast tank's empty," the diving officer reported. His voice was hoarse and strained.

Swanson nodded, said nothing. The volume of the sound of the compressed air had dropped at least seventy-five per cent and the sudden comparative silence was sinister, terrifying, as if it meant that the «Dolphin» was giving up the fight. Now we had only the slender reserves of the fresh water and diesel to save us; at the rate at which the Dolphin was still diving, I didn't see how it could.

Hansen was standing beside me. I noticed blood dripping from his left hand to the deck, and when I looked more closely, I could see that two of his fingers were broken. It must have happened in the torpedo room. At the moment, it didn't seem important. It certainly didn't seem important to Hansen. He was entirely oblivious of it.

The pressure gauge fell further and still further. I knew now that nothing could save the «Dolphin». A bell rang. Swanson swung down a microphone and pressed a button.

"Engine room speaking," a metallic voice came through. "We must slow down. Main bearings beginning to smoke. She'll seize up any minute."

"Maintain revolutions." Swanson swung back the microphone. The youngster at the diving console, the one with the jumping cheek muscles and the nervous twitch, started to mumble, "Oh, dear God, oh, dear God," over and over again, softly at first, then the voice climbing up the scale to hysteria. Swanson moved two paces and touched him on the shoulder. "Do you mind, laddie? I can hardly hear myself think." The mumbling stopped and the boy sat quite still, his face carved from gray granite, the nerve in his neck going like a trip hammer.

"How much more of this will she take?" I asked casually. At least, I meant it to sound casual, but it came out like the croak of an asthmatic bullfrog.

"I'm afraid we're moving into the realms of the unknown," Swanson admitted calmly. "One thousand feet plus. If that dial is right, we passed the theoretical implosion point — where the hull should have collapsed — fifty feet ago. At the present moment she's being subjected to well over a million tons of pressure." Swanson's repose, his glacial calm, was staggering, they must have scoured the whole of America to find a man like that. If ever there was the right man in the right place at the right time, it was Commander Swanson in the control room of a runaway submarine diving to depths hundreds of feet below what any submarine had ever experienced before.

"She's slowing," Hansen whispered.

"She's slowing." Swanson nodded.

She wasn't slowing half fast enough for me. It was impossible that the pressure hull could hold out any longer. I wondered vaguely what the end would be like, then put the thought from my mind, I would never know anything about it, anyway. At that depth the pressure must have been about twenty tons to the square foot; we'd be squashed as flat as flounders before our senses could even begin to record what was happening to us.

The engine-room call-up bell rang again. The voice this time was imploring, desperate. "We must ease up, Captain. Switch gear is turning red hot. We can see it glowing."

"Wait till it's white hot, then you can complain about it," Swanson said curtly. If the engines were going to break down, they were going to break down: but until they did, he'd tear the life out of them in an attempt to save the «Dolphin». Another bell rang.

"Control room?" The voice was harsh, high-pitched. "Crew's mess deck speaking. Water is beginning to come in." For the first time, every eye in the control room turned away from the depth gauge and fixed itself on that loudspeaker. The hull was giving at last under the fantastic pressure, the crushing weight. One little hole, one tiny, threadlike crack as a starting point, and the pressure hull would rip and tear and flatten like a toy under a steam hammer. A quick glance at the strained, shocked faces showed this same thought in every mind.

"Where?" Swanson demanded.

"Starboard bulkhead."

"How much?"

"A pint or two, just trickling down the bulkhead. And it's getting worse. It's getting worse all the time. For God's sake, Captain, what are we going to do?"

"What are you going to do?" Swanson echoed. "Mop the damn stuff up, of course. You don't want to live in a dirty ship, do you?" He hung up.

"She's stopped. She's stopped." Four words and a prayer. I'd been wrong about every eye being on that loud-speaker; one pair of eyes had never left the depth gauge, the pair belonging to the youngster at the console.

"She's stopped," the diving officer confirmed. His voice had a shake in it.

No one spoke. The blood continued to drip unheeded from Hansen's crushed fingers. I thought that I detected, for the first time, a faint sheen of sweat on Swanson's brow, but I couldn't be sure. The deck still shuddered beneath our feet as the giant engines strove to lift the «Dolphin» out of those deadly depths; the compressed air still hissed into the diesel and fresh-water tanks. I could no longer see the depth gauge; the diving officer had drawn himself up so close to it that he obscured most of it from me.

Ninety seconds passed, ninety seconds that didn't seem any longer than a leap year, ninety interminable seconds while we waited for the sea to burst in our hull and take us for its own, then the diving officer said. "Ten feet. Up."

"Are you sure?" Swanson asked.

"A year's pay."

"We're not out of the woods yet," Swanson said mildly. "The hull can still go: it should have gone a damn long time ago. Another hundred feet — that means a couple of tons less pressure to the square foot — and I think we'll have a chance. At least a fifty-fifty chance. And after that the chances will improve with every foot we ascend, and as we ascend, the highly compressed air in the torpedo room will expand, -driving out water and so lightening the ship."

"Still rising," the diving officer said. "Still rising. Speed of ascent unchanged."

Swanson walked across to the diving stand and studied the slow movement of the depth-gauge dial. "How much fresh water left?"

"Thirty per cent."

"Secure blowing fresh-water ballast. Engines all back two thirds."

The roar of compressed air fell away and the deck vibration eased almost to nothing as the engine revolutions fell from emergency power to two-thirds full speed.

"Speed of ascent unchanged," the diving officer reported. "One hundred feet up."

"Secure blowing diesel." The roar of compressed air stopped completely. "All back one third."

"Still rising. Still rising."

Swanson took a silk handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and neck. "I was a little worried there," he said to no one in particular, "and I don't much care who knows it." He reached for a microphone and I could hear his voice booming faintly throughout the ship.

"This is the captain. All right, you can all start breathing again. Everything is under control, we're on our way up. As a point of interest, we're still over three hundred feet deeper than the lowest previous submarine dive ever recorded."

I felt as if I had just been through the rollers of a giant mangle. We all looked as if we'd just been through the rollers of a giant mangle. A voice said: "I've never smoked in my life, but I'm starting now. Someone give me a cigarette." Hansen said: "When we get back to the States, do you know what I'm going to do?"

"Yes," Swanson said. "You're going to scrape together your last cent, go up to Groton, and throw the biggest, the most expensive party ever for the men who built this boat. You're too late, Lieutenant, I thought of it first." He stopped abruptly and said sharply: "What's happened to your hand?"

Hansen lifted his left hand and stared at it in surprise. "I never even knew I'd been scratched. Must have happened with that damn door in the torpedo room. There's a medicalsupply box there, Doc. Would you fix this?"

"You did a damn fine job there, John," Swanson said warmly. "Getting that door closed, I mean. Couldn't have been easy."

"It wasn't. All pats on the back to our friend here," Hansen said. "He got it closed, not me. And if he hadn't got it closed — "

"Or if I'd let you load the torpedoes when you came back last night," Swanson said grimly. "When we were sitting on the surface and the hatches wide open. We'd have been eight thousand feet down now and very, very dead."

Hansen suddenly snatched his hand away. "My God!" he said remorsefully. "I'd forgotten. Never mind this damned hand of mine. George Mills, the torpedo officer. He took a pretty bad sock. You'd better see him first. Or Doc Benson."

I took his hand back. "No hurry for either of us. Your fingers first. Mills isn't feeling a thing."

"Good God!" Astonishment showed in Hansen's face, maybe shock at my callousness. "When he recovers consciousness — "

"He'll never recover consciousness again," I said. "Lieutenant Mills is dead."

"What!" Swanson's fingers bit deeply, painfully into my arm. "'Dead,' did you say?"

"That column of water from number 4 tube came in like an express train," I said tiredly. "Flung him right back against the after bulkhead and smashed in the occiput — the back of his head — like an eggshell. Death must have been instantaneous."

"Young George Mills," Swanson whispered. His face had gone-very pale. "Poor kid. His first trip on the Dolphin. And now, just like that — killed."

"Murdered," I said.

"What!" If Commander Swanson didn't watch out with his fingers, he'd have my upper arm all black and blue. "What was that you said?"

"'Murdered,' I said. 'Murdered' I meant."

Swanson stared at me for a long moment, his face empty of expression but his eyes strained and tired and suddenly somehow old. He wheeled, walked across to the diving officer, spoke a few words to him, and returned. "Come on," he said abruptly. "You can fix up the lieutenant's hand in my cabin."