Ice Station Zebra

7

"You realize the seriousness of what you are saying?" Swanson asked. "You are making a grave accusation — "

"Come off it," I said rudely. "This is not a court of law and I'm not accusing anyone. All I say is that murder has been done. Whoever left that bow-cap door open is directly responsible for the death of Lieutenant Mills."

"What do you mean 'left the door open'? Who says anyone left the door open? It could have been due to natural causes. And even if — I can't see it — that door had been left open, you can't accuse a man of murder because of carelessness or forgetfulness or because — "

"Commander Swanson," I said. "I'll go on record as saying that you are probably the best naval officer I have ever met. But being best at that doesn't mean that you're best at everything. There are noticeable gaps in your education, Commander, especially in the appreciation of the finer points of skulduggery. You require an especially low and devious type of mind for that, and I'm afraid that you just haven't got it. Doors left open by natural causes, you say. What natural causes?"

"We've hit the ice a few stiff jolts," Swanson said slowly. "That could have jarred it open. Or when we poked through the ice last night a piece of ice, a stalactite, say, could have — "

"Your tubes are recessed, aren't they? Mighty odd-shaped stalactite that would go down and then bend in at a right angle to reach the door — and even then it would only shut it more tightly."

"The doors are tested every time we're in harbor," Commander Swanson persisted quietly. "They're also opened when we open tubes to carry out surface-trimming tests in dock. Any dockyard has pieces of waste, rope, and other rubbish floating around that could easily have jammed a door open."

"The safety lights showed the doors shut."

"They could have been opened just a crack, not enough to disengage the safety contact."

"Open a crack! Why do you think Mills is dead? If you've ever seen the jet of water that hits the turbine blades in a hydro-electric plant, then you'll know how that water came in. A crank? My God! How are those doors operated?"

"Two ways. Remote control, hydraulic, just press a button: then there are manually operated levers in the torpedo room itself."

I turned to Hansen. He was sitting on the bunk beside me, his face pale as I splinted his broken fingers. I said, "Those hand-operated levers. Were they in the shut position?"

"You heard me say so in there. Of course they were. First thing we always check."

"Somebody doesn't like you," I said to Swanson. "Or somebody doesn't like the «Dolphin». Or somebody knew that the «Dolphin» was going searching for the Zebra survivors and they didn't like that, either. So they sabotaged the ship. You will remember you were rather surprised you didn't have to correct the «Dolphin's» trim? It had been your intention to carry out a slow-time dive to check the underwater trim because you thought that would have been affected by the fact that you had no torpedoes in the for'ard tubes. But surprise, surprise. She didn't need any correction."

"I'm listening," Swanson said quietly. He was with me now. He was with me all the way. He cocked an eyebrow as we heard water flooding back into the tanks. The repeater gauge showed 200 feet; Swanson must have ordered his diving officer to level off at that depth. The Dolphin was still canted nose downward at an angle of about 25°.

"She didn't need any correcting because some of her tubes were already full of water. For all I know, maybe number 3 tube. The one we tested and found okay is the only one that is «not» full of water. Our clever little pal left the doors open, disconnected the hand-operated levers so that they appeared to be in the shut position when they were actually open, and crossed over a few wires in a junction box so that the open position showed green while the closed showed red. A man who knew what he was about could have done it in a few minutes. Two men who knew what they were about could have done it in no time at all. I'll lay anything you like that when you're — eventually in a position to check, you'll find the levers disconnected, the wires crossed, and the inlets of the test cocks blocked with sealing wax, quick-drying paint or even chewing gum, so that when the test cocks were opened, nothing would show and you would assume the tubes to be empty."

"There was a trickle from the test cock in number 4 tube," Hansen objected. -

"Low-grade chewing gum."

"The murderous swine," Swanson said calmly. His restraint was far more effective than the most thunderous denunciations could ever have been. "He could have murdered us all. But for the grace of God and the Groton boatyard shipwrights, he would have murdered us all."

"He didn't mean to," I said. "He didn't mean to kill anyone. You had intended to carry out a slow-time dive to check trim in the Holy Loch before you left that evening. You told me so yourself. Did you announce it to the crew, post it up in daily orders or something like that?"

"Both."

"So. Our pal knew. He also knew that you would carry out those checks when the boat was still awash or just under the surface. When you checked the tubes to see if they were okay, water would come in, too much water to permit the rear doors to be shut again, but not under such high pressure that you wouldn't have time and enough to spare to close the fo'ard collision-bulkhead door and make a leisurely retreat in good order. What would have happened? Not much. At the worst you would have settled down slowly to the bottom and stayed there. Not deep enough to worry the Dolphin. In a submarine of even ten years ago it might have been fatal for all, because of the limited air supply. Not today, when your air-purifying machines can let' you stay down for months at a time. You just float up your emergency-indicator buoy and telephone, tell your story, sit around and drink coffee till a naval diver comes down and replaces the bow cap, pump out the torpedo room and surface again. Our unknown pal — or pals — didn't mean to kill anyone. But they did mean to delay you. And they would have delayed you. We know now that you could have got to the surface under your own steam, but, even so, your top brass would have insisted that you go into dock for a day or two to check that everything was okay."

"Why should anyone want to delay us?" Swanson asked. I thought he had an unnecessarily speculative look in his eyes, but it was hard to be sure; Commander Swanson's face showed exactly what Commander Swanson wanted it to show and no more.

"My God, do you think I know the answer to that one?" I said irritably.

"No. No, I don't think so." He could have been more emphatic about it. "Tell me, Dr. Carpenter, do you suspect some member of the «Dolphin's» crew to be responsible?"

"Do you really need an answer to-that one?"

"I suppose not," he sighed. "Going to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean is not a very attractive way of committing suicide, and if any member of the crew had jinxed things, he'd damn soon have unjinxed them as soon as he realized that we weren't going to carry out trim checks in shallow water. Which leaves only the civilian dockyard workers in Scotland — and every one of them had been checked and rechecked and given a top-grade security clearance."

"Which means nothing. There are plushy Moscow hotels and British and American prisons full of people who had top-grade security clearances… What are you going to do now, Commander? About the «Dolphin», I mean?"

"I've been thinking about it. In the normal course of events the thing to do would be to close the bow cap of number 4 and pump out the torpedo room, then go in and close the rear door of number 4. But the bow-cap door won't close. Within a second of John's telling us that number 4 was open to the sea, the diving officer hit the hydraulic button — the one that closes it by remote control. You saw for yourself that nothing happened. It must be jammed."

"You bet your life it's jammed," I said grimly. "A sledge hammer might do some good, but pressing buttons won't."

"I could go back to that lead we've just left, surface again, and send a diver under the ice to investigate and see what he can do, but I'm not going to ask any man to risk his life doing that. I could retreat to the open sea, surface, and fix it there, but not only would it be a damned slow and uncomfortable trip with the «Dolphin» canted at this angle, it might take us days before we got back here again. And some of the Drift Station Zebra men are pretty far gone. It might he too late."

"Well, then," I said. "You have the man at hand, Commander. I told you when I first met you that environmental health studies were my specialty, especially in the field of pressure extremes when escaping from submarines. I've done an awful lot of simulated sub escapes, Commander. I do know a fair amount about pressures, how to cope with them and how I react to them myself."

"How do you react to them, Dr. Carpenter?"

"A high tolerance. They don't worry me much."

"What do you have in mind?"

"You know damn well what I have in mind," I said impatiently. "Drill a hole in the door of the after collision bulkhead, screw in a high-pressure hose, open the door, shove someone in the narrow space between the two collision bulkheads, and turn up the hose until the pressure between the collision bulltheads equals that in the torpedo room. You have the clips eased off the for'ard collision door. When the pressures are equalized, it opens at a touch, you walk inside, close number 4 rear door, and walk away again. That's what you had in mind, wasn't it?"

"More or less," he admitted. "Except that «you» are no part of it. Every man on this• ship has made simulated escapes. They all know the effects of pressure. And most of them are a great deal younger than you."

"Suit yourself," I said. "But age has little to do with the ability to stand stresses. You didn't pick a teen-ager as the first American to orbit the earth, did you? As for simulated escapes, making a free ascent up a hundred-foot tank is a different matter altogether from going inside an iron box, waiting for the slow build-up of pressure, working under that pressure, then waiting for the slow process of decompression. I've seen young men, big, tough, very, very fit young men break up completely under those circumstances and almost go crazy trying to get out. The combination of physiological and psychological factors involved is pretty fierce."

"I think," Swanson said slowly, "that I'd sooner have you — what do the English say, 'batting on a sticky wicket'? — than almost any man I know. But there's a point you've overlooked. What would the Commander of Atlantic Submarines say to me if he knew I'd let a civilian go instead of one of my own men?"

"If you «don't» let me go, I know what he'll say. He'll say, 'We must reduce Commander Swanson to lieutenant, j.g., because he had on board the «Dolphin» an acknowledged expert in this specialty and refused, out of stiff-necked pride, to use him, thereby endangering the lives of his crew and the safety of his ship.'

Swanson smiled, a pretty bleak smile, but with the desperately narrow escape we had just had, the predicament we were still in, and the fact that his torpedo officer was lying dead not so many feet away, I hardly expected him to break into gales of laughter. He looked at Hansen. "What do you say, John?"

"I've seen more incompetent characters than Dr. Carpenter," Hansen said. "Also, he gets about as nervous and panicstricken as a bag of Portland cement."

"He has qualifications you don't expect to find in the average medical man," Swanson agreed. "I shall be glad to accept your offer. One of my men will go with you. That way the dictates of common sense and honor are both satisfied."

It wasn't all that pleasant, not by a long shot, but it wasn't all that terribly bad, either. It went off exactly as it could have been predicted it would go off. Swanson cautiously eased the «Dolphin» up until her stern was just a few feet beneath the ice; this reduced the pressure in the torpedo room to a minimum, but even at that the bows were still about a hundred feet down.

A hole was drilled in the after collision bulkhead door and an armored high-pressure hose screwed into position. Dressed in porous rubber suits and equipped with an aqualung apiece, a young torpedoman by the name of Murphy and I went inside and stood in the gap between the two collision bulkheads. High-powered air hissed into the confined space. Slowly the pressure rose: twenty, thirty, forty, fifty pounds to the square inch. I could feel the pressure on lungs and ears, the pain behind the ears, the slight wooziness that comes from the poisonous effect of breathing pure oxygen under such pressure. But I was used to it; I knew it wasn't going to kill me. I wondered if young Murphy knew that. This was the stage where the combined physical and mental effects became too much for most people, but if Murphy was scared or panicky or suffering from bodily distress, he hid it well. Swanson would have picked his best man, and to be the best man in a company like that, Murphy had to be something very special.

We eased off the clips on the for'ard collision bulkhead door, knocked them off cautiously as the pressures equalized. The water in the torpedo room was about two feet above the level of the sill, and as the door came ajar, the water boiled whitely through into the collision space while compressed air hissed out from behind us to equalize the lowering pressure of the air in the torpedo room. For about ten seconds we had to hang on grimly to hold the door and maintain our balance while water and air fought and jostled in a seething maelstrom to find their own natural levels. The door opened wide. The Water level now extended from about thirty inches up on the collision bulkhead to the for'ard deckhead of the torpedo room. We crossed the sill, switched on our waterproof flashlights, and ducked under.

The temperature of that water was about 28°F. — 4° below freezing. Those porous rubber suits were specially designed to cope with icy waters, but, even so, I gasped with the shock of it — as well as one can gasp when breathing pure oxygen under heavy pressure. But we didn't linger, for the longer we remained there, the longer we would have to spend decompressing afterward. We half walked, half swam toward the fore end of the compartment, located the rear door on number 4 tube, and closed it, but not before I had a quick look at the inside of the pressure cock. The door itself seemed undamaged: the body of the unfortunate Lieutenant Mills had absorbed its swinging impact and prevented it from being wrenched off its hinges. It didn't seem distorted in any way, and fitted snugly into place. We forced its retaining lever back into place and left.

Back in the collision compartment we gave the prearranged taps on the door. Almost at once we heard the subdued hum of a motor as the high-speed extraction pumps in the torpedo room got to work, forcing the water out through the hull. Slowly the water level dropped, and as it dropped, the air pressure as slowly decreased. Degree by degree the «Dolphin» began to come back on even keel. When the water was finally below the level of the for'ard sill, we gave another signal and the remaining over-pressure air was slowly bled out through the hose.

A few minutes later, as I was stripping off the rubber suit, Swanson asked, "Any trouble?"

"None. You picked a good man in Murphy."

"The best. Many thanks, Doctor." He lowered his voice. "You wouldn't by any chance — "

"You know damned well I would," I said. "I did. Not sealing wax, not chewing gum, not paint. Glue, Commander Swanson. That's how they blocked the test-cock inlet. The oldfashioned animal-hide stuff that comes out of a tube. Ideal for the job."

"I see," he said, and walked away.

The «Dolphin» shuddered along its entire length as the torpedo hissed out of its tube — number 3 tube, the only one in the submarine Swanson could safely rely upon.

"Count it down," Swanson said to Hansen. "Tell me when we should hit, when we should hear it hit."

Hansen looked at the stop watch in his bandaged hand and nodded. The seconds passed slowly. I could see Hansen's lips move silently. Then he said, "We should be hitting — now," and two or three seconds later, "We should be hearing — now."

Whoever had been responsible for the settings and time calculations on that torpedo had known what he was about. Just at Hansen's second "now" we felt as much as heard the clanging vibration along the «Dolphin's» hull as the shock waves from the exploding warhead reached us. The deck shook briefly beneath our feet, but the impact was nowhere nearly as powerful as I had expected. I was relieved. I didn't have to be a clairvoyant to know that everyone was relieved. No submarine bad ever before been in the vicinity of a torpedo detonating under the ice pack; no one had known to what extent the tamping effect of overhead ice might have increased the pressure and destructive effect of the lateral shock waves.

"Nicely," Swanson murmured. "Very nicely done indeed. Both ahead one third. I hope that bang had considerably more effect on the ice than it had on our ship." He said to Benson at the ice machine, "Let us know as soon as we reach that lead, will you?"

He moved to the plotting table. Raeburn looked up and said: "Five hundred yards gone, five hundred to go."

"All stop," Swanson said. The slight vibration of the engines died away. "We'll just mosey along very carefully. That explosion may have sent blocks of ice weighing a few tons apiece pretty far down into the sea. I don't want to be doing any speed at all if we meet any of them on the way up."

"Three hundred yards to go," Raeburn said.

"All clear. All clear all around," the sonar room reported.

"Still thick ice," Benson intoned. "Ah! That's it. We're under the lead. Thin ice. Well, five or six feet."

"Two hundred yards," Raeburn said. "It checks."

We drifted slowly onward. At Swanson's orders the propellers kicked over once or twice, then stopped again.

"Fifty yards," Raeburn said. "Close enough."

"Ice reading?"

"No change. Five feet, about."

"Speed?"

"One knot."

"Position?"

"One thousand yards exactly. Passing directly under target area." -

"And nothing on the ice machine? Nothing at all?"

"Not a thing." Benson shrugged and looked at Swanson. The captain walked across and watched the inked stylus draw its swiftly etched vertical lines on the paper.

"Peculiar, to say the least," Swanson murmured. "Seven hundred pounds of very high-grade amatol in that torpedo. Must be unusually tough ice in those parts. Again, to say the least. We'll go up to ninety feet and make a few passes under the area. Floodlights on, TV on."

So we went up to ninety feet and made a few passes and nothing came of it. The water was completely opaque, the floods and camera useless. The ice machine stubbornly registered four to six feet — it was impossible to be more accurate — all the time.

"Well, that seems to be it," Hansen said. "We back off and try again?"

"Well, I don't know," Swanson said pensively. "What do you say we just try to shoulder our way up?"

"'Shoulder our way up?'" Hansen wasn't with him; neither was I. "What kind of shoulder is going to heave five feet of ice to one side?"

"I'm not sure. The thing is, we've been working from unproved assumptions and that's always a dangerous basis. We've been assuming that if the torpedo didn't blow the ice to smithereens, it would at least blow a hole in it. Maybe it doesn't happen that way at all. Maybe there's just a big upward pressure of water distributed over a sizable area that heaves the ice up and breaks it into pretty big chunks that just settle back into the water again in their original position in the pattern of a dried-up mud hole with tiny cracks all around the isolated sections. But with cracks all around. Narrow cracks, but there. Cracks so narrow that the ice machine couldn't begin to register them even at the slow speed we were doing." He turned to Raeburn. "What's our position?"

"Still in the center of the target area, sir."

"Take her up till we touch the ice," Swanson said.

He didn't have to add any cautions about gentleness. The diving officer took her up like floating thistledown until we felt a gentle bump.

"Hold her there," Swanson said. He peered at the TV screen, but the water was so opaque that all definition vanished halfway up the sail. He nodded to the diving officer. "Kick her up — hard."

Compressed air roared into the ballast tanks. Seconds passed without anything happening; then all at once the «Dolphin» shuddered as something very heavy and very solid seemed to strike the hull. A moment's pause, another solid shock, and then we could see the edge of a giant segment of ice sliding down the face of the TV screen.

"Well, now, I believe I might have had a point there," Swanson remarked. "We seem to have hit a crack between two chunks of ice almost exactly in the middle. Depth?"

"Forty-five."

"Fifteen feet showing. And I don't think we can expect to lift the hundreds of tons of ice lying over the rest of the hull. Plenty of positive buoyancy?"

"All we'll ever want."

"Then we'll call it a day. Okay, quartermaster, away you go up top and tell us what the weather is like."

I didn't wait to hear what the weather was like. I was interested enough in it, but I was even more interested in making sure that Hansen didn't come along to his cabin in time to find me putting on the Mannlicher-Schoenauer along with my furs. But this time I stuck it not in its special holster but in the outside pocket of my caribou trousers. I thought it might come in handier there.

It was exactly noon when I clambered over the edge of the bridge and used a dangling rope to slide down a great rafted chunk of ice that slanted up almost to the top of the sail. The sky had about as much light in it as a late twilight in winter when the sky is heavy with gray cloud. The air was as bitter as ever, but, for all that, the weather had improved. The wind was down now, backed around to the northeast, seldom gusting at more than twenty mph, the ice spicules rising no more than two or three feet above the ice cap. Nothing to tear your eyes out. To be able to see where you were going on that damned ice cap made a very pleasant change.

There were eleven of us altogether: Commander Swanson himself, Dr. Benson, eight enlisted men and myself. Four of the men were carrying stretchers with them.

Even 700 pounds of the highest grade conventional explosive on the market hadn't managed to do very much damage to the ice in that lead. Over an area of seventy yards square or thereabouts the ice had fractured into large fragments curiously uniform in size and roughly hexagonal in shape but fallen back so neatly into position that you couldn't have put a hand down most of the cracks between the adjacent fragments of ice: many of the cracks, indeed, were already beginning to come together. A poor enough performance for a torpedo warhead — until you remembered that though most of its disruptive power must have been directed downward, it had still managed to lift and fracture a chunk of the ice cap weighing maybe 5,000 tons. Looked at that way, it didn't seem such a puny effort after all. Maybe we'd been pretty lucky to achieve what we had.

We walked across to the eastern edge of the lead, scrambled up onto the ice pack proper, and turned around to get our bearings, to line up on the unwavering white finger of the searchlight that reached straight up into the gloom of the sky. No chance of getting lost this time. While the wind stayed quiet and the spicules stayed down, you could see that lamp in the window ten miles away.

We didn't even need to take any bearings. A few steps away and up from the edge of the lead and we could see it at once. Drift Station Zebra. Three huts, one of them badly charred, five blackened skeletons of what had once been huts. Desolation.

"So that's it," Swanson said in my ear. "Or what's left of it. I've come a long way to see this."

"You nearly went a damned sight longer and never saw it," I said. "To the floor of the Arctic, I mean. Pretty, isn't it?"

Swanson shook his head slowly and moved on. There were only a hundred yards to go. I led the way to the nearest intact hut, opened the door, and walked inside.

The hut was about thirty degrees warmer than the last time I had been there, but still bitterly cold. Only Zabrinski and Rawlings were awake. The hut smelled of burnt fuel, disinfectant, iodine, morphine and a peculiar aroma arising from a particularly repulsive-looking hash that Rawlings was industriously churning around in a large iron pot on the low stove.

"Ah, there you are," Rawlings said conversationally. He might have been greeting a neighbor who'd phoned a minute previously to see if he could come across to borrow the lawn mower, rather than greeting men he'd been fairly certain he'd never see again. "The timing is perfect — just about to ring the dinner bell, Captain. Care for some Maryland chicken — I think?"

"Not just at the moment, thank you," Swanson said politely. "Sorry about the ankle, Zabriaski. How is it?"

"Just fine, Captain, just fine. In a plaster cast." He thrust out a foot, stiffly. "The doc here — Dr. Jolly — fixed me up real nice. Had much trouble last night?" This was for me.

"Dr. Carpenter had a great deal of trouble last night," Swanson said. "And we've had a considerable amount since. But later. Bring that stretcher in here. You first, Zabrinski. As for you, Rawlings, you can stop making like Escoffier. The «Dolphin's» less than a couple of hundred yards from here. We'll have you all aboard in half an hour."

I heard a shuffling noise behind me. Dr. Jolly was on his feet, helping Captain Folsom to his. Folsom looked even weaker than he had yesterday; his face, bandaged though it was, certainly looked worse.

"Captain Folsom," I said by way of introduction. "Dr. Jolly. This is Commander Swanson, captain of the «Dolphin». Dr. Benson."

"'«Dr».' Benson, you said, old boy?" Jolly lifted an eyebrow. "My word, the pill-rolling competition's getting a little fierce in these parts. And 'Commander.' By Jove, but we're glad to see you fellows." The combination of the rich Irish brogue and the English slang of the twenties fell more oddly than ever on my ear; he reminded me of educated Singhalese I'd met with their precise, lilting, standard southern English interlarded with the catch phrases of forty years ago. Topping, old bean, simply too ripping for words.

"I can understand that." Swanson smiled. He looked around at the huddled, unmoving men on the floor, men who might have been living or dead but for the immediate and smoky condensation from their shallow breathing, and his smile faded. He said to Captain Folsom, "I cannot tell you how sorry I am. This has been a dreadful thing."

Folsom stirred and said something, but we couldn't make out what it was. Although his shockingly burnt face had been bandaged since I'd seen him last, it didn't seem to have done him any good; he was talking inside his mouth, all right, but the ravaged cheek and mouth had become so paralyzed that his speech didn't emerge as any recognizable language. The good side of his face, the left, was twisted and furrowed, and the eye above almost completely shut. This had nothing to do with any sympathetic neuro-muscular reaction caused by the wickedly charred right cheek. The man was in agony. I said to Jolly, "No morphine left?" I'd left him, I'd thought, with more than enough of it.-

"Nothing left," he said tiredly. "I used it all. All of it."

"Dr. Jolly worked all through the night," Zabrinski said quietly. "Eight hours. Rawlings and himself and Kinnaird. They never stopped once."

Benson had his medical kit open. Jolly saw it and smiled, a smile of relief, a smile of exhaustion. He was in far worse shape than he'd been the previous evening. He hadn't had all that much in him when he'd started. But he'd worked. He'd worked a solid eight hours. He'd even fixed up Zabrinski's ankle. A good doctor. Conscientious. Hippocratic, anyway. He was entitled to relax. Now that there were other doctors here, he'd relax. But not before.

He began to ease Folsom into a sitting position and I helped him. He slid down himself, his back to the wall. "Sorry and all that, you know," he said. His bearded frost-bitten face twisted into the semblance of a grin. "A poor host."

"You can leave everything to us now, Dr. Jolly," Swanson said quietly. "You've got all the help that's going. One thing. All those men fit to be moved?"

"I don't know." Jolly rubbed an arm across bloodshot, smudged eyes. "I don't know. One or two of them slipped pretty far back last night. It's the cold. Those two. Pneumonia, I think. Something an injured man could fight off in a few days back home can be fatal here. It's the cold," he repeated. "Uses up ninety per cent of his energy, not in fighting illness and infection, but just generating enough heat to stay alive."

"Take it easy," Swanson said. "Maybe we'd better change our minds about that half-hour to get you all aboard. Who's first for the ambulance, Dr. Benson?" Not Dr. Carpenter. Dr. Benson. Well, Benson was his own ship's doctor. But pointed, all the same. A regrettable coolness, as sudden in its onset as it was marked in degree, had appeared in his attitude toward me, and I didn't have to be beaten over the head with a heavy club to guess at the reason for the abrupt change.

"Zabrinski, Dr. Jolly, Captain Folsom, and this man here," Benson said promptly.

"Kinnaird, radio operator," Kinnaird identified himself. "We never thought you'd make it, mate." This to me. He dragged himself somehow to his feet and stood there swaying. "I can walk."

"Don't argue," Swanson said curtly. "Rawlings, stop stirring that filthy mush and get to your feet. Go with them. How long would it take you to run a cable from the boat, fix up a couple of big electric heaters in here, some lights?"

"Alone?"

"All the help you want, man."

"Fifteen minutes. I could rig a phone, sir."

"That would be useful. When the stretcher bearers come back, bring blankets, sheets, hot water. Wrap the water containers in the blankets. Anything else, Dr. Benson?"

"Not now, sir."

"That's it, then. Away you go."

Rawlings lifted the spoon from the pot, tasted it, smacked his lips in appreciation, and shook his head sadly. "It's a crying shame," he said mournfully. "It really is." He went out in the wake of the stretcher bearers.

Of the eight men left lying on the floor, four were conscious. Hewson, the tractor driver, Naseby, the cook, and two others who introduced themselves as Harrington. Twins. They were as alike as two freshly minted pennies, they'd even been burnt and frost-bitten in the same places. The other four were either sleeping or in coma. Benson and I started looking them over, Benson much more carefully than myself, very busy with thermometer and stethoscope. Looking for signs of pneumonia. I didn't think he'd have to look very far. Commander Swanson looked speculatively around the cabin, occasionally throwing a very odd look in my direction, occasionally flailing his arms across his chest to keep the circulation going. He had to. He didn't have the fancy furs I had, and in spite of the solid-fuel stove, the place was like an icebox.

The first man I looked at was lying on his side in the far right-hand corner of the room. He had half-open eyes, iust showing the lower arcs of his pupils, sunken temples, marblewhite forehead, and the only part of his face that wasn't bandaged was as cold as the marble in a winter graveyard. I said, "Who is this?"

"Grant. John Grant." Hewson, the dark, quiet tractor driver, answered me. "Radio operator. Kinnaird's sidekick. How's it with him?"

"He's dead. He's been dead quite some time."

"Dead?" Swanson said sharply. "You sure?" I gave him my aloof professional look and said nothing. He said to Benson, "Anybody too ill to be moved?"

"Those two here, I think," Benson said. He wasn't noticing the series of peculiar looks SWanson was letting me have, so he handed me his stethoscope. After a minute I straightened and nodded.

"Third-degree burns," Benson said to Swanson. "What we can see of them, that is. Both high temperatures, both very fast, very weak, and erratic pulses, both with lung fluids."

"They'd have a better chance inside the «Dolphin»," Swanson said.

"You'd kill them getting there," I said. "Even if you could wrap them up warmly enough to take them back to the ship, hauling them up to the top of the sail and -then lowering them vertically through those hatchways would finish them off."

"We can't stay out in that lead indefinitely," Swanson said. "I'll take the responsibility for moving them."

"Sorry, Captain." Benson shook his head gravely. "I agree with Dr. Carpenter."

Swanson shrugged and said nothing. Moments later the stretcher bearers were back, followed soon after by Rawlings and three other enlisted men carrying cables, heaters, lamps, and a telephone. It took only a few minutes to connect the heaters and lamps on to the cable. Rawlings cranked the callup generator of his field phone and spoke briefly into the mouthpiece. Bright lights came on and the heaters started to crackle and, after a few seconds, glow.

Hewson, Naseby, and the Harrington twins left by stretcher. When they'd gone, I unhooked the Coleman lantern. "You won't be needing this now," I said. "I won't be long."

"Where are you going?" Swanson's voice was quiet.

"I won't be long," I repeated. "Just looking around."

He hesitated, then stood to one side. I went out, moved around a corner of the hut, and stopped. I heard the whirr of the call-up bell, a voice on the telephone. It was only a murmur to me, I couldn't make out what was being said. But I'd expected this.

The Coleman storm lantern flickered and faded in the wind but didn't go out. Stray ice spicules struck against the glass, but it didn't crack or break; it must have been one of those specially toughened glasses immune to a couple of hundred degrees' temperature range between the inside and the outside.

I made my way diagonally across to the only hut left on the south side. No trace of burning, charring, or even smokeblackening on the outside walls. The fuel store must have been the one next to it, on the same side and to the west, straight downwind; that almost certainly must have been its position judging by the destruction of all the other huts, and the grotesquely buckled shape of its remaining girders made this strong probability a certainty. Here had been the heart of the fire.

Hard against the side of the undamaged hut was a lean-to shed, solidly built. Six feet high, six wide, eight long. The door opened easily. Wooden floor, gleaming aluminum for the sides and ceiling, big black heaters bolted to the inside and outside walls. Wires led from those, and it was no job for an Einstein to guess that they led — or had led — to the now destroyed generator house. This lean-to shed would have been warm night and day. The squat, low-slung tractor that took up nearly all the floor space inside would have started any time at the touch of a switch. It wouldn't start at the turn of a switch now; it would take three or four blowtorches and the same number of strong men even to turn the engine over once. I closed the door and went into the main hut.

It was packed with metal tables, benches, machinery, and every modern device for the automatic recording and interpretation of every conceivable observed detail of the Arctic weather. I didn't know what the functions of most of the instruments were and I didn't care. This was the meteorological office and that was enough for me. I examined the hut carefully but quickly, and there didn't seem to be anything odd or out of place that I could see. In one corner, on an empty wooden packing case, was a portable radio transmitter with listening phones — "transeivers," they called them nowadays. Near it, in a box of heavy oiled wood, were fifteen Nife cells connected up in series. Hanging from a hook on the wall was a two-volt test lamp. I touched its bare leads to the outside terminals of the battery formed by the cells. Had those cells left in them even a fraction of their original power, that test lamp should have burnt out in a white flash. It didn't even begin to glow. I tore a piece of flex from a nearby lamp and touched its ends to.the terminals. Not even the minutest spark. Kinnaird hadn't been lying when he had said that his battery had been completely dead. But, then, I hadn't for a moment thought he'd been lying.

I made niy way to the last hut — the hut that held the charred remnants of the seven men who had died in the fire. The stench of charred flesh and burnt diesel seemed stronger, more nauseating than ever. I stood in the doorway and the last thing I wanted to do was to approach even an inch closer. I peeled off fur and woollen mittens, set the lamp on a table, pulled out my flashlight, and knelt by the first dead man.

Ten minutes passed and all I wanted was out of there. There are some things that doctors, even hardened pathologists, will go a long way to avoid. Bodies that have been too long in the sea is one; bodies that have been in the immediate vicinity of underwater explosion is another; and men who have literally been burned alive is another. I was beginning to feel more than slightly sick: but I wasn't going to leave there until I was finished.

The door creaked open. I turned and watched Commander Swanson come in. He'd been a long time, I'd expected him before then. Lieutenant Hansen, his damaged left hand wrapped in some thick woollen material, came in after him. That was what the phone call had been about — the Commander calling up reinforcements. Swanson switched off his flashlight, pushed up his snow goggles, and pulled down his mask. His eyes narrowed at the scene before him, his nostrils wrinkled in involuntary disgust, and color drained swiftly from his ruddy cheeks. Both Hansen and I had told him what to expect, but he hadn't been prepared for this: not often can the imagination encompass the reality. For a moment I thought he was going to be sick, but then I saw a slight tinge of color touch his cheekbones and I knew he wasn't.

"Dr. Carpenter," Swanson said in a voice in which the unsteady huskiness seemed only to emphasize the stilted formality, "I wish you to return at once to the ship, where you will remain confined to your quarters. I would prefer you went voluntarily, accompanied by Lieutenant Hansen here. I wish no trouble. I trust you don't, either. If you do, we can accommodate you. Rawlings and Murphy are waiting outside that door."

"Those are fighting words, Commander," I said, "and very unfriendly. Rawlings and Murphy are going to get uncommonly cold out there." I put my right hand in my caribou pants pocket — the one with the gun in it — and surveyed him unhurriedly. "Have you had a brainstorm?"

Swanson looked at Hansen and nodded in the direction of the door. Hansen half turned, then stopped as I said, "Very high-handed, aren't we. I'm not worth an explanation, is that it?"

Hansen looked uncomfortable. He didn't like any part of this. I suspected Swanson didn't, either, but he was going to do what he had to do and let his feelings look elsewhere.

"Unless you're a great deal less intelligent than I believe — and I credit you with a high intelligence — you know exactly what the explanation is. When you came aboard the «Dolphin» in the Holy Loch, both Admiral Garvie and myself were highly suspicious of you. You spun us a story about being an expert in Arctic conditions and of having helped set up this station here. When we wouldn't accept that as sufficient authority or reason to take you along with us, you told a highly convincing tale about this being an advanced missilewarning outpost, and even though it was peculiar that Admiral Garvie had never heard of it, we accepted it. The huge dish aerial you spoke of, the radar masts, the electronic computers — what's happened to them, Dr. Carpenter? A little insubstantial, weren't they? Like all figments of the imagination."

I looked at him, considering, and let him go on.

"There never were any of those things, were there? You're up to your neck in something very murky indeed, my friend. What it is I don't know, nor, for the moment, do I care. All I care for is the safety of the ship, the welfare of the crew, and bringing the Zebra survivors safely back home, and I'm taking no chances at all."

"The wishes of the British Admiralty, the orders from your own Director of Underseas Warfare — those mean nothing to you?"

"I'm beginning to have very strong reservations about the way those orders were obtained," Swanson said grimly. "You're altogether too mysterious for my liking, Dr. Carpenter — as well as being a fluent liar."

"Those are harsh, harsh words, Commander."

"The truth not infrequently sounds that way. Will you please come?"

"Sorry. I'm not through here yet."

"I see. John, will you — "

"I can give you an explanation. I see I have to. Won't you listen?"

"A third fairytale?" A head shake. "No."

"And I'm not ready to leave. Impasse."

Swanson looked at Hansen, who turned to go. I said, "Well, if you're too stiff-necked to listen to me, call up the bloodhounds. Isn't it just luck, now, that we have three fully qualified doctors here?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean this." Guns have different characteristics in appearance. Some look relatively harmless, some ugly, some businesslike, some wicked. The Mannlicher-Schoenauer in my hand just looked plain downright wicked. Very wicked indeed. The white light from the Coleman glittered off the blued metal, menacing and sinister. It was a great gun to terrify people with.

"You wouldn't use it," Swanson said flatly.

"I'm through talking. I'm through asking for a hearing. Bring on the bailiffs, friend."

"You're bluffing, mister," Hansen said savagely. "You don't dare."

"There's too much at stake for me not to dare. Find out now. Don't be a coward. Don't hide behind your enlisted men's backs. Don't order them to get themselves shot." I snapped off the safety catch. "Come and take it from me yourself."

"Stay right where you are, John," Swanson said sharply. "He means it. I suppose you have a whole armory in that combination-lock suitcase of yours," he added bitterly.

"That's it. Automatic carbines, six-inch naval guns, the works. But for a small-size situation, a small-size gun. Do I get my hearing?"

"You get your hearing."

"Send Rawlings and Murphy away. I don't want anyone else to know anything about this. Anyway, they're probably freezing to death."

Swanson nodded. Hansen went to the door, opened it, spoke briefly, and returned. I laid the gun on a table, picked up my flashlight, and moved some paces away. I said, "Come and have a look at this."

They came. Both of them passed by the table with the gun lying there and didn't even look at it. I stopped before one of the grotesquely misshapen charred lumps lying on the floor. Swanson came close and stared down. His face bad lost whatever little color it had regained. He made a queer noise in his throat.

"That ring, that gold ring — " he began, then stopped short.

"I wasn't lying about that."

"No. No, you weren't. I — I don't know what to say. I'm most — "

"It doesn't matter," I said roughly. "Look here. At the back. I'm afraid I had to remove some of the carbon."

"The neck," Swanson whispered. "It's broken." -

"Is that what you think?"

"Something heavy, I don't know, a beam from one of the huts, must have fallen — "

"You've just seen one of those huts. They have no beams. There's an inch and a half of the vertebrae missing. If anything sufficiently heavy to smash off an inch and a half of the backbone had struck him, the broken piece would be imbedded in his neck. It's not. It was blown out. He was shot from the front, through the base of the throat. The bullet went out the back of the neck. A soft-nosed bullet — you can tell by the size of the exit hole-from a powerful gun, something like a thirty-eight Colt or Luger or Mauser."

"Good God above!" For the first time, Swanson was badly shaken. He stared at the thing on the floor, then at me. "Murdered. You mean he was murdered."

"Who would have done this?" Hansen said hoarsely. "Who, man, who? And in God's name, why?"

"I don't know who did it."

Swanson looked at me, his eyes strange. "You just found this out?" -

"I found out last night."

"You found out last night." The words were slow, farspaced, a distinct hiatus between each two. "And all the time since, aboard the ship, you never said… you never showed… My God, Carpenter, you're inhuman."

"Sure," I said. "See that gun there? It makes a loud bang, and when I use it to kill the man who did this, I won't even blink. I'm inhuman, all right."

"I was speaking out of turn. Sorry." Swanson was making a visible effort to bring himself under normal control. He looked at the Mannlicher-Schoenauer, then at me, then back at the gun. "Private revenge is out, Carpenter. No one is going to take the law into his own hands."

"Don't make me laugh out loud. A morgue isn't a fit place for it. Besides, I'm not through showing you things yet. There's more. Something that I've just found out now. Not last night." I pointed to another huddled black shape on the ground, "Care to have a look at this man here?"

"I'd rather not," Swanson said steadily. "Suppose you tell us?"

"You can see from where you are. The head. I've cleaned it up. Small hole in the front, in the middle of the face and slightly to the right: larger exit hole at the back of the top of the head. Same gun. Same man behind the gun."

Neither man said anything. They were too sick, too shocked to say anything.

"Queer path the bullet took," I went on. "Ranged sharply upwards. As if the man who fired the shot had been lying or sitting down while his victim stood above him."

"Yes." Swanson didn't seem to have heard me. "Murder, Two murders. This is a job for the authorities, for the police."

"Sure," I said. "For the police. Let's just ring the sergeant at the local station and ask him if he would mind stepping this way for a few minutes."

"It's not a job for us," Swanson persisted. "As captain of an American naval vessel, with a duty to discharge, I am primarily interested in bringing my ship and the Zebra survivors back to Scotland again."

"Without endangering the ship?" I asked. "With a murderer aboard, the possibility of endangering the ship does not arise?"

"We don't know he is — or will be — aboard."

"You don't even begin to believe that yourse1f. You know he will be. You know as well as I do why this fire broke out and you know damn well that it was no accident. If there was any accidental element about it, it was just the size and extent of the fire. The killer may have miscalculated that. But both time and weather conditions were against him: I don't think he had very much option. The only possible way in which he could obliterate all traces of his crime was to have a fire of sufficient proportions to obliterate those traces. He would have got away with it, too, if I hadn't been here, if I hadn't been convinced before we left port that something was very much wrong indeed. But he would take very good care that he wouldn't obliterate himself in the process. Like it or not, Commander, you're going to have a killer aboard your ship."

"But all of those men have been burned, some very severely — "

"What the hell did you expect? That the unknown X would go about without a mark on him, without as much as a cigarette burn, proclaiming to the world that he had been the one who had been throwing matches about and had then thoughtfully stood to one side? Local color. He «had» to get himself burned." -

"It doesn't necessarily follow," Hansen said. "How was he to know that anyone was going to get suspicious and start investigating?"

"You'd be well advised to join your captain in keeping out of the detecting racket," I said shortly. "The men behind this are top-flight experts with far-reaching contacts — part of a criminal octopus with tentacles so long that it can even reach out and sabotage your ship in the Holy Loch. Why they did that, I don't know. What matters is that top-flight operators like those «never» take chances. They always operate on the assumption that they «may» be found out. They take every possible precaution against every possible eventuality. Besides, when the fire was at its height — we don't know the story of that yet — the killer would have had to pitch in and rescue those trapped. It would have seemed damned odd if he hadn't. And so he got burned."

"My God." Swanson's teeth were beginning to chatter with the cold but he didn't seem to notice it. "What a hellish set-up."

"Isn't it? I dare say there's nothing in your Navy regulations to cover this."

"But what — what are we going to do?"

"We call the cops. That's me."

"What do you mean?"

"What I say. I have more authority, more official backing, more scope, more power and more freedom of action than any cop you ever saw. You must believe me. What I say is true."

"I'm beginning to believe it «is» true," Swanson said in slow thoughtfulness. "I've been wondering more and more about you in the past twenty-four hours. I've kept telling myself I was wrong, even ten minutes before I kept telling myself. You're a policeman? Or detective?"

"Naval officer. Intelligence. I have credentials in my suitcase which I am empowered to show in an emergency." It didn't seem the time to tell him just how wide a selection of credentials I did have. "This is the emergency."

"But — but you are a doctor."

"Sure I am. A Navy doctor — on the side. My specialty is investigating sabotage in the U.K. armed forces. The cover-up of research doctor is the ideal one. My duties are deliberately vague, and I have the power to poke and pry into all sorts of corners and situations and talk to all sorts of people on the grounds of being an investigating psychologist which would be impossible for the average officer."

There was a long silence; then Swanson said bitterly, "You might have told us before this."

"I might have broadcast it all over your tannoy system. Why the hell should 1? I don't want to trip over blundering amateurs every step I take. Ask any cop. The biggest menace of his life — is the self-appointed Sherlock. Besides, I couldn't trust you, and before you start getting all hot and bothered about that I might add that I don't mean you'd deliberately give me away or anything like that but that you may inadvertently give me away. Now I've no option but to tell you what I can and chance the consequences. Why couldn't you just have accepted that directive from your Chief of Naval Operations and acted accordingly?"

"Directive?" Hansen looked at Swanson. "What directive?"

"Order from Washington to give Dr. Carpenter here carte blanche for practically everything. Be reasonable, Carpenter. I don't like operating in the dark and I'm naturally suspicious. You came aboard in highly questionable circumstances. You knew too damn much about submarines. You were as evasive as hell. You had this sabotage theory all cut and dried. Damn it, man, of course I had reservations. Wouldn't you have had, in my place?"

"I suppose so. I don't know. Me, I obey orders."

"Uh-huh. And your orders in this case?"

"Meaning what exactly is all this about?" I sighed. "It would have to come to this. You must be told now, and you'll understand why your Chief of Naval Operations was so anxious that you give me every help possible."

"We can believe this one?" Swanson asked.

"You can believe this one. The story I spun you back in the Holy Loch wasn't all malarkey. I just dressed it up a bit to make sure you'd take me along. They did indeed have a very special item of equipment here-an electronic marvel that was used for monitoring the count-down of Soviet missiles and pinpointing their locations. This machine was kept in one of the huts now destroyed — the second from the west in the south row. Night and day a giant captive radio-sonde balloon reached thirty thousand feet up into the sky — but it had no radio attached. It was just a huge aerial. Incidentally, I should think that this is the reason why the oil fuel appears to have been flung over so large an area — an explosion caused by the bursting of the hydrogen cylinders used to inflate the balloons. They were stored in the fuel hut."

"Did everybody in Zebra know about this monitoring machine?"

"No. Most of them thought it a device for investigating cosmic rays. Only four people knew what it really was — my brother and the three others who all slept in the hut that housed this machine. Now the hut is destroyed. The free world's most advanced listening post. You wonder why your C.N.O. was so anxious?"

"Four men?" Swanson looked at me, a faint speculation still in his eye. "Which four men, Dr. Carpenter?"

"Do you have to ask? Four of the seven men you see lying here, Commander."

He stared down at the floor, then looked quickly away. He said: "You mentioned that you were convinced even before we left port that something was wrong. Why?"

"My brother had a top-secret code. We had messages sent by him: he was an expert radio operator. One said that there had been two separate attempts to wreck the monitor. He didn't go into details. Another said that he had been attacked and left unconscious when making a midnight check and finding someone bleeding off the gas from the hydrogen cylinders: without the radio-sonde aerial, the monitor would have been useless. He was lucky, he was out for only a few minutes, as long again and he would have frozen to death. In the circumstances did you expect me to believe that the fire was unconnected with the attempts to sabotage the monitor?"

"But how would anyone know what it was?" Hansen objected. "Apart from your brother and the other three men, that is?" Like Swanson, he glanced at the floor and, like Swanson, looked as hurriedly away. "For my money, this is the work of a psycho. A madman. A coldly calculating criminal would — well, he wouldn't go in for wholesale murder like this. But a psycho would."

"Three hours ago," I said, "before you loaded the torpedo into number 3 tube, you checked the manually controlled levers and the warning lights for the tube bow caps. In the one case, you found that the levers had been disconnected in the open position: in the other, you found that the wires had been crossed in a junction box. Do you think that was the work of a psycho? Another psycho?"

He said nothing. Swanson said, "What can I do to help, Dr. Carpenter?"

"What are you willing to do, Commander?"

"I will not hand over command of the «Dolphin»." He smiled, but he wasn't feeling like smiling. "Short of that, I — and the crew of the «Dolphin» — am at your complete disposal. You name it, Doctor, that's all."

"This time you believe my story?"

"This time I believe your story."

I was pleased about that; I almost believed it myself.