Whiteout!

Chapter 12

The first shock of realization: the first crawling of the scalp, the first sharp chill around the heart, all wore off after a while. The fear-generated adrenalin coursed round and round and finally wore off too, and I was left with another conclusion : that my great discovery had got me precisely nowhere. To Barney and Westlake, all this would seem like a desperate, not to say crazy, rationalization of my own carelessness. Barney had already muttered, once in my hearing, and probably several times out of it, the word

'paranoid'. If I went to him now and said, 'Look, I've just realized somebody's trying to kill me,' he'd say,

'Prove it.' And I couldn't; my proof rested in the main on self-knowledge, on my own certainty about the way I handled cigarettes, about the way I'd wrestled with the trench door. But to Barney I'd still be the fool who left a cigarette burning. Furthermore, he'd know all the fire and safety regulations backwards that was the nature of the man. He'd know all about the poisonous gases generated in the combustion of plastics and be merely surprised that I didn't. No, Barney wouldn't take my theories at all seriously. But there was one thing he would take very seriously indeed, and that was anything he regarded as spreading alarm and despondency.

All I could do, for the moment at least, was to keep my knowledge to myself. And bloody well watch my back! And then I knew that that wouldn't be enough, because whoever was trying to kill me was also chipping away very effectively indeed at the whole fabric of Camp Hundred. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the medic was right, and that somebody was trying not only to kill me, but to render Hundred uninhabitable. So somehow I must try to find out who was doing it. Above all, why?

I lay back, trying, now that the decision was made, to evolve some method. But my mind must, by that time, have had enough. I drifted off into a confused, disturbed, jumpy kind of shallow doze from which I finally woke with a start of surprise for no reason at all. I'd fallen asleep with the light on and now, forlornly alert, I looked round the little, windowless room, halt expecting trouble. The room was empty. Reassured, I glanced at my watch. I'd promised to go back to duty with Kelleher at five and it was now almost half past. Once again I dressed quickly and hurried out. My nerves jangled an alarm when I went into the hospital hut and discovered that Kirton's office was empty; but in the ward the medic was dozing on one of the spare beds and Carson's corporal sat patiently reading a magazine.

'All well?’ I asked softly.

The corporal nodded towards the medic. 'He gave him another shot around one. All quiet since.'

'Fine,' I said. 'Sorry I'm late. Time you had a sleep.'

'Sure is.' He stretched and rose.

I said, 'Did Mr Kelleher waken?'

'Well, he kinda half-wakened.'

'And?'

'Didn't say much. Just was 1 positive he hadn't had a coronary.'

'He was rational, then?'

'Getting that way. Kinda dopey, you know?'

He left then, and I went to look at the patient. Kelleher seemed completely calm; he was breathing regularly, and so too was the medic. I wished I were as relaxed. I felt unwashed, un-rested and unhappy. A cup of coffee helped a little, but not much. I couldn't settle. As soon as I sat in a chair, it developed lumps and bumps and I developed corns and had to move. The conundrum kept rattling round my head and gave me no peace. Somewhere in this place was a man, or men, intent upon sabotage to the point where Camp Hundred folded up. Who? I thought round and round it, but there seemed to be no pointer anywhere. All right, why? There was an answer, of sorts, to that, but it was a pretty feeble answer. Hundred was cold and not too comfortable; it was a long way from the civilized pleasures; it must seem, perhaps, a bloody awful posting to a lot of the men. But would anybody seriously embark on a campaign of deliberate and expensive sabotage, and, worse, actually kill, just to shorten a posting? Which brought me back to madmen, and I smiled wryly at the thought that the nearest available madman was now sleeping peacefully a few feet away.

The train of thought moved over some points then, as I stood looking at Kelleher. Really, I knew very little about the man, except that from the beginning, and until the previous day's extraordinary seizure, he had struck me as very stable and reliable. It also seemed likely that there was no history of mental illness; had there been, no organization in a field as sensitive as nuclear engineering would have touched him with a very long pole. Come to think of it, I'd be prepared to bet that his company would have any man in Kelleher's line of country examined very closely indeed for chinks in his psychological armour. Lots of American companies, these days, give psychological tests to a salesman's wife before they'll take him on the payroll, let alone a man who's going to design and work on experimental atomic power furnaces. I lit a cigarette and rather self-consciously looked for an ashtray. Two hours or so drifted slowly by in which nothing happened except that the medic awoke to give Kelleher a little tidying-up. While it was going on, I stood by in case Kelleher woke and became violent again, but he slept peacefully while the canvas leg restraints were removed and he was washed. When the straitjacket was back in position and fastened to the bedposts again, such mild tension as there had been vanished. About eight o'clock Barney came along to inspect Kelleher again. He looked very tired, his eyes deep in the sockets and the skin dark below them. But his step was brisk, his manner cheerful, and he gave my shoulder an amiable thump. 'How's the patient?'

I said, 'Having the sleep of a lifetime. Whatever else he feels when he wakes up, it won't be tired. What about the diesels?'

He grinned and turned into a German engineer. 'Ve now haff ze Number Two chenerator vorking, mein herr. Und viz luck and maybe a toch or two of chenious, ve skveeze somezing out from ze Number Vun before too many hours, nicht wahr?"

'Good for you.'

'Sure is,' he agreed cheerfully. 'And that's not all. They'll run the Swing in here tomorrow and we’ve radio contact right now. 1 talked to Cohen at Belvoir, and they got two new generators ready and crated at Thule to be flown up by Caribou at the first weather break. Can't be more than a few days now.'

I felt myself relax. 'Better and better,' I said, and thought that perhaps the odds were now readjusting themselves in Barney's favour.

He, meanwhile, was prodding the sleeping medic awake with a persistent finger. The medic, eyes closed, first said, 'Hey, knock it off!' in sleepy protest, and then, at the next prod, opened his eyes and shot off the bunk to rigid and embarrassed attention.

'Beg pardon, sir.'

'Blood pressure, pulse rate and whatever else you need,' Barney said, 'then move your goddam ass to the radio room and talk to the shrinks down at Thule. We got the channel open.'

'Yes, sir.'

He turned back to me. I'll have you relieved, Englander, and you can come and have some breakfast. For once, I'm good and hungry.'

I was far from hungry, my appetite dulled by too many cigarettes, irregular hours, broken sleep and a generally morbid outlook, but I nodded and promised to join him. Barney, cheerful, was better company than my own and I was more than ready for an hour or so of gregariousness and good humour. But the pleasant future didn't materialize. I don't know whether Barney had got as far as dipping a spoon into his cornflakes before the bad news came. As for me, I'd put on my out-of-doors clothing and was waiting, and when Sergeant Vernon came briskly in, I assumed he was there to relieve me, but one glance at his face told me there was more bad news in the offing. He said urgently, 'Sir, when did you last see Captain Carson ?'

I was covered in Arctic clothing, and beginning to sweat, but the warmth was wiped instantly away.

'Why?'

'When did you see him, sir? What time?'

I thought for a moment. 'About midnight. When he came to relieve me.' I asked again: 'Why?'

'He just - well, sir, he doesn't seem to be around. Major Smales asked me - '

'You mean,' I said harshly, 'that Carson has vanished?'

Vernon said, 'Major Smales's compliments, sir, and will you remain right here.'

'Has he?'

He gave a little puzzled shake of the head. 'Captain Carson, sir, he isn't in his quarters, or the officers'

club, or the mess hall, or the reactor trench. But it's too soon to say - '

I said, 'Tell Major Smales, please, that when I came back here, around half past five, Captain Carson wasn't here.'

'He should have been here, sir?'

'Yes,' I said bitterly. Why the hell had I ignored it at the time? 'He should have been here.'

Vernon nodded. 'I'll tell the major, sir. Did you report Captain Carson's absence to the duty officer?'

I said, 'No,' guiltily, adding feebly, 'I thought he'd just gone off to bed.'

'Yes, sir.' Vernon was looking at me bleakly. 'I'll tell the major, sir.' He walked out, rigid with disapproval. After the door closed behind him, I swore, angrily and aloud. A minute later I went to the door and turned the key. When Barney came, I'd open it and face the music, but for the moment I felt safer behind a locked door.

I paced up and down. Somehow I didn't doubt for a second that Carson had disappeared. But how, and why ? What the hell was going on in the reactor trench ? Yesterday it was Kelleher, solid as a rock, who'd gone stark raving mad. Now, less than twenty-four hours later, it was Carson, also a nuclear engineer and also a solid citizen, who'd ...

For a few moments I wondered whether there'd possibly been some radiation leak; whether some unknown effect of exposure induced madness ? But Carson hadn't gone mad, not, at any rate, so far as I knew. Vernon had said only that there was no sign ofhim. Once was happenstance, twice coincidence, the third time . . . My eyes went to Kelleher. First Kirton, then Kelleher, now Carson; doctor and two engineers. Without them, Hundred had no medical resources and no reactor. In one of the coldest and most dangerous places on the face of the earth, those three men were vital both to physical and mental comfort. So if Kirton had been killed, and Carson had . . . But no. Kelleher didn't fit. Kelleher hadn't been attacked. Kelleher had simply cracked under the strain of day and night work. His mind had gone, bent or broken by pressure.

I was hanging up my outdoor clothes when the phone rang.

It was Barney. Or rather, it was Major Barnet M. Smales, US Army, formally correct, his tone icy. 'A few questions, Mr Bowes. One, you arranged with Captain Carson that you would relieve him at five?'

'Yes?'

'And this you failed to do?'

'I was late.'

'Captain Carson was not there when you arrived?'

'No.'

'No message?'

'No.'

'And you did nothing about it?'

I said, 'It was five-thirty a.m. I made the reasonable assumption that he'd gone to bed. What about Carson's corporal? Didn't Carson say anything to him?'

He didn't answer. Instead, 'You will remain where you are, in the hospital, until further notice. Under no circumstances will you leave it except under my direct instructions, until you will leave Camp Hundred by the first available means.'

'That's ridic - '

He cut me off. 'Do you understand ?'

'Yes.'

He hung up. So, after a moment, did I. I was in the wrong, certainly, but not that much in the wrong. I should have reported Carson's absence, no doubt about that. No doubt now, at any rate; no doubt even in retrospect. But at the time . . .? And now I'd wrecked my whole purpose in being there. The TK4 wouldn't get its demonstration, the US Army wouldn’t buy, the order was lost. I wandered morosely back to the ward, cursing Barney, Camp Hundred, and myself, and as I went in through the door, Kelleher said, 'Get a guy a cup of coffee ?'

I went over to the bed and looked down at him with something approaching suspicion. My cheek, where Kelleher's teeth had ripped at it the day before, still ached dully. The frantic strength he'd displayed as we struggled to pin him down was vivid in my memory, and I'd no way of knowing his state of mind. He'd been quiet enough; he'd slept peacefully; he'd spoken almost rationally. Almost. Also he was about three stones heavier and a great deal stronger than I.

'C'mon,' he croaked, 'I got a mouth like they been shovelling ashes around inside.'

I said, 'All right,' and went to get it. When I came back, I said, 'Raise your head.'

He blinked at me. 'I'm in a straitjacket, right, Harry?'

'You are. Raise your head.'

I held the coffee while he sipped, straining upwards to get his lips to the cup. He swilled the hot liquid round his mouth, swallowed, and lay back. 'Why?'

'Yesterday,' I said, 'you acted somewhat strangely."

'I did, huh?'

'You did. More coffee?'

He nodded and drank again. He seemed strangely resigned. Looking down at him, I tried to imagine what it must be like to awaken in a straitjacket: the surprise, the sudden fear that would probably turn to panic. Kelleher showed none of that. 'No sugar in the coffee,' he said.

'How do you feel ?'

'Feel? Relaxed, I think,'

'Good.'

He lay thinking for a moment. Then said suddenly, 'It was dust. I had to get the dust out.'

Out of what? I wondered. 'Out of the reactor?'

'Well, sure. It was like rocks in there. Big boulders of goddam dust. It got inside there while the lid was off.'

'Did it ? Have some more coffee.'

After he'd drunk he lay still for a while, but his eyes were restless. I took the empty cup and rinsed it out and when I returned, Kelleher said, 'But it couldn't be. Not like boulders!'

'Probably not.'

'I can see 'em, you know, right here in my head.'

'Boulders of dust?'

'Sure.'

'What else can you see ?'

He thought about it. 'You know steel's got pores? Pores like skin?'

'I didn’t know.' His rationality was open to considerable question, I'd decided, and the passing minutes reinforced my decision: the jacket would stay on.

'Well, it sure has.'

'What for? It doesn't sweat.'

Kelleher considered that. 'No, that's right. It seemed like the dust was blocking the pores, though, and '

'And?' I prompted, after a moment.

'Well, I had to clean it away.' His eyes swivelled up at me, wide, suddenly appalled. 'This straitjacket!

I'm crazy?'

I tried to put it carefully. 'These ideas, the dust boulders, the pores, seem very strong.'

Panicky now, voice taut with fear. 'I've gone crazy!'

'You saw the fallacy,' I said, 'but afterwards.'

Muscles and tendons tightened in his neck and I was suddenly apprehensive of another seizure. I said hastily, 'Don't worry!'

'It's like it's in the front of my head. Dead wrong, but up there in front.' His eyes met mine head on. 'You afraid of me?'

I shook my head, but not quickly enough.

'Jesus!' he sagged back.

I reached for my cigarettes and was lighting one when he said, 'They wouldn't let me do it ?'

'No,' I said, 'they wouldn't.'

Kelleher gave a harsh little laugh. 'For Christ's sake, why - ' Then he broke off, paused, and added quietly, 'I was fighting. Fighting to get .., to get inside?' I nodded. 'You tried.'

'Yeah, well, they wouldn't let me - !' He exhaled strongly through his nostrils. 'Maybe my life got saved. Who did it, you?'

'One or two people.' I added encouragingly, 'You're seeing the fallacies more quickly now.'

He was suddenly anxious. 'I hurt anybody?'

'A knock or two. Nothing much.'

'Well, they wouldn't let me ... Jesus, I can't think straight!"

'Straighter all the time. What else is in the front of your head?'

His eyes closed. Behind the lids there was no movement. Then he opened them. 'Well, did you see that space movie?'

'Which one?'

'With the waltz. What was it? The Blue Danube?'

"Two Thousand and One,the film was called.'

'Yeah. Remember the end. Kinda weird. Just going straight ahead through all the planes and patterns. Just through space. No meaning, you know?'

'I remember.'

'Well, like that.'

I said, 'Where were you going ?'

Kelleher thought about it, then shook his head. 'I just don't know. Away, maybe.'

'From what?'

'Who knows?' He gave a sudden grin. 'Camp Hundred, huh? Look, do me a favour.'

'If I can.'

'Ask me some questions. About myself. I want to know how crazy I am.'

He answered all the questions easily and quickly. He knew where he'd been born, educated, employed; all the personal details were tabulated neatly inside him and came out pat. He was clearly relieved to find he could do it. I took a sourer view. If he hadn't been able to remember, he'd certainly have been in worse condition; the fact that he could did nothing to relieve my anxieties about his thought processes. When the quiz was over, he said, 'You're not gonna take off the jacket, right?'

'No. I'm sorry.'

'You're a bastard, you know that? I'm gonna be okay.' But he wasn't angry. Anyway, I'd had enough for the time being and removed myself to the office to give both Kelleher and myself a little peace.

I felt low enough to limbo dance under a cellar door, depressed both by the futility of my whole trip to Greenland, and by the wreckage of a tough mind a couple of doors away. I didn't share his certainty that he'd recover. In my limited experience - I had an aunt once who had a nervous breakdown, and there was a bloke I worked with who'd turned all of a sudden into a manic depressive - damaged minds seemed to stay damaged. Brains go on working, keeping the lid on the stresses, but once the stresses do burst out, they stay out. Primitive reasoning. I sat smoking moodily, wondering what had triggered the break. In Kelleher's case it was probably simple overstrain, but even so it was dismal to think that a first-class man, solidly sane one moment, had his mind in pieces the next. Well, perhaps not smashed. Not even broken, but bent out of true. I remember thinking that it seemed a good analogy: an iron bar, bent to an angle, and no matter how carefully you tried to straighten it, there'd always be a weakness where the bend had been.

I began to think, with foreboding, then, of the journey back, of the long uncomfortable haul across the icecap on the Swing, of the long faces at Thomson-Keegan when the news of my foul-up came through, and of the way Jim Keegan would be careful to be forgiving. And then, quite suddenly, out of the lumber-room of random thoughts, a couple of words squirmed out on to the surface of my brain and interrupted the train of thought. The first word was mind. The second, already linked to it, was 'bent'. Mind-bending - wasn't that how people described the effects of drugs? Minds were 'bent' or 'blown", weren't they? Certainly in the newspapers. And there were other words: 'psychedelic' and 'trip' .., all related to the drugs that bent minds. Mainly to LSD, which was . . , what? Some acid, wasn't it? The name escaped me, but there was another phrase: 'acid-heads'. I sat there trying to recall what I'd read and came up with nothing but a mish-mash of half-digested newspaper stories about people claiming they could hear tastes and smell sounds. And an inquest on somebody who, on an LSD trip, had walked cut of a top-floor window in the belief he could . . .

I thought carefully about that. Kelleher hadn't walked out of any top-floor windows, but he'd certainly achieved a fair equivalent. If any person in his senses knew a long drop was fatal, any nuclear engineer in his senses knew the dangers of the reactor.

There was something else, too, that I recalled reading somewhere: that any competent sixth-form chemistry student could manufacture LSD in a school laboratory if he knew how and had the materials. I didn't know what the materials were, but Camp Hundred certainly had its laboratories ! Then another thought : colour came into it, too, surely? I seemed to remember that vivid colours were part of the LSD hallucination.

Kelleher looked up at me gravely as I approached his bed. I said, 'How much do you remember about yesterday?'

'When was yesterday ?'

'That's when it happened. Yesterday morning. Do you remember it ?'

He pursed his lips. 'I itch like crazy and I can't scratch.'

'Do you remember?'

He considered it. 'Let me think. Yeah, I remember. We worked through the night, then I had a cup of coffee and crawled on to a cot for a half-hour. I do that sometimes. Take a little break. And then ...' He frowned.

'Go on.'

'I'm not too sure. I think . . , yeah, I got the idea about dust, that's right. So I went out and there it was. And I went to clear it. And - '

I interrupted. 'The cup of coffee. Where did it come from ?'

'We got an ever-hot machine in there.'

'And sugar? You take sugar?'

'In my desk. Why?'

'Just answer,' I said urgently.

'I got those paper sugar bags in a little box.'

'You just took the top one and poured it in ?'

'Well, why not?'

'Think about it,' I said. 'You stir sugar into your coffee. Then you drink it and lie down. And shortly afterwards you start having bloody great hallucinations about boulders of dust and steel that looks like skin, and you see colours whirling about. What does that little lot suggest?'

Kelleher stared at me. 'Welcome to the crazy club.'

'Go on. Tell me what it sounds like.'

He told me. He told me I was nuts, that it was impossible, that nobody at Hundred would do a goddam crazy thing like that.

'Like what?'

'Like putting acid in my coffee.'

'In your sugar,' I said. 'I believe sugar's the classic medium.'

In the next few moments, a variety of expressions came and went on his face. The only one that stayed there was the last, and it was relief.

He said, 'I told you I'd be okay. Now we tell Barney.'

'Not yet,' I said.

'Why the hell not?'

'Because he'll choose not to believe it.'

'Barney? Sure he'll believe it. He'll believe me, I know that.'

I said, 'Look, Barney saw you. After you tried to climb into the reactor, while you were fighting everybody off, Barney was there. If your nose feels sore, it's because Barney thumped it.'

'Oh, c'mon. I've known Barney years.'

I shook my head. 'He told me yesterday about the reactor contract. He's already made up his mind not to let you near the thing again. Barney is not going to listen.'

'Talk all you want,' Kelleher said. 'I still want to see him, right?'

I conceded. 'I'll telephone the command office.'

Master Sergeant Allen told me Barney wasn't there; he was out checking and rechecking every hut, supervising the search for Carson. I asked Allen to pass on to Barney a message that Mr Kelleher was awake and anxious to talk to him.

We waited, talking desultorily. Out of plain self-defence I didn't mention my theory to Kelleher. If he could convince Barney of what must have been done to him, that was fine; but if Kelleher quoted me to Barney, his own story would be damned from that moment. Kelleher seemed content to think that the LSD had been fed to him, if indeed it had, out of personal spite or malice. Maybe he'd been driving people too hard.

He dozed off again after a while, and I tiptoed out to the office to avoid wakening him. If sleep could knit his ravelled mind, I was all for sleep.

The medic came back eventually, having spent a lot of time on a very poor radio line to some Air Force psychiatrist at Thule base. It hadn't, I gathered, been a very profitable consultation. The psychiatrist had approved what had been done, had prescribed specified sedation as necessary, and wanted Kelleher flown out to the base hospital as soon as possible.

I said, 'Well, there's no need for sedation at the moment. He's asleep.'

He nodded. He, too, was out of his depth. I glanced at my watch and said, 'Why don't you get something to eat?'

He brightened a little and went to lunch. There was no way I could have guessed it was already too late

- for him and many more.