Whiteout!

Chapter 4

For Smales there were now urgent things to be done, the most important being a set of calculations on fuel supplies and consumption rates. He dismissed the Polecat, and told the bulldozer driver to continue sweeping the doorstep and marched off towards the command trench. I, on the other hand, had nothing at all to do. Remembering Dr Kirton's invitation, I strolled towards the hospital trench. I'd just gone inside when Barney's voice came over the loudspeaker to say that all personnel could now move about freely, and should resume their duties. The bear had done some damage, but was not in Camp Hundred. All the same, caution was to be exercised, and if there was any further damage, it must be reported immediately. Kirton raised his eyebrows. 'You hear what Pappa Bear did?'

'Yes. He ripped open two of the fuel tanks.'

Kirton whistled. 'We got problems. Oh well, they're not mine and they're not yours. Not yet. Coffee?'

'Thanks.'

'Cream or straight ? Bach or Mozart ?'

I said, 'I'll take the coffee straight and leave the music to you.'

Kirton was big, bulky and gave an initial impression of clumsiness ; it was belied by the precision of his movements. Just pouring coffee and putting on a record, he showed surgical sure-ness and dexterity. My records tend to have scratchy accidents. I thought enviously that all his would stay perfect.

'We'll soothe ourselves,' he said. 'See if you know this.'

As it happened, I did. I'd known a girl once who was nuts about that piece. I said, 'Albinoni. The adagio for violin and organ.' I settled back in my chair, but I wasn't really listening. Events were totting themselves up in my mind. There was the bear, and the fuel tanks. Yesterday: the coins in the reactor and the contaminated fuel that had stopped one diesel generator. Also yesterday, there was the failure of the landing-strip lights. Quite a list. I sipped my coffee and looked at Kirton, who sat with his eyes closed, looking rapt. But he must have been thinking, too, because as the Albinoni ended he said, 'You sure brought a jinx up here.'

'Blame me if you like. We call our jinxes gremlins."

'So you sure brought a gremlin.'

I said, 'No, the sod was here. While you were having all the accidents, I was happy, ignorant and far away. Tell me, is this place unlucky ?'

He shook his head. 'No, it's not. Or it wasn't. Funny thing, they always reckoned this was a real good-luck operation. They built it without losing a man. Not even a serious injury. Then a few years with a safety record damn near perfect. It's all in the last two weeks.'

I said, 'Tell me I'm mad if you like, but could any of this be deliberate?'

He looked a bit surprised, and then smiled. 'You mean sabotage?'

'Well, could it?'

'Not a chance. Sabotage anything up here and you sabotage yourself. If the machines stop working in a long bad weather phase, people are gonna die. The guy would have to be psychotic'

'You said last night everybody's a little mad.'

'A little maybe. But nobody's that crazy.' He grinned. 'Except, er . . , now look, Mr Bowes, you seen your shrink lately?'

I said, 'I Haven’t got a shrink.'

'No? Well, how about if I read my shrink books and then you come and tell me all about your father? Listen, what you got is the first, faint stirrings of what's known to science as the Hundred Heebies. It's all too complex here for our poor puny minds. Now finish your coffee and the doctor will take you for a nice walk.'

'Where do you want to walk to ?'

'I want to see what the bear did.'

We dressed and walked down Main Street to the fuel trench and Kirton looked at the ripped neoprene and said, 'He's got muscle, that old bear!'

I nodded. I was thinking that the animal's behaviour had been pretty strange, even by the doubtless eccentric standards of hungry bears. Camp Hundred was full of food. Looked at from a hungry bear's point of view, there were a lot of comestibles walking round on two legs, never mind all the orthodox grub in the food stores. So why had he left all the food alone and just slashed the tanks ? 'He certainly seems,' I said, 'to have been cross about something. And not very hungry, either, unless he enjoys drinking diesel oil.'

'Yeah.' Kirton gave me a glance, then said, 'I wonder . . .' He turned, crossed to the door and swung it closed. 'Look at this. He got food all right.'

The floor behind the door was littered with ripped-up tinfoil and torn plastic. I asked what it was.

'Emergency rations,' Kirton said. 'There’s a pack in all the trenches with doors, just in case somebody gets locked in. Hangs on the back of the door.'

'Clever old bear, then,' I said. 'I suppose the food's wrapped in the plastic?'

'No problem with claws like his. You and I break our nails trying to open plastic packages, but he sure wouldn't have any trouble.'

'No. But he'd have trouble finding food in the first place, unless he could smell it.'

He said, 'You're doing that thing again, you know. He'll have a big, sensitive, black nose, that old bear, and there'll be some residual smell on the outside of the pack.' Kirton bent and picked up a chunk of some kind of compressed cake from the floor. It still had shreds of foil sticking to it and he looked at it reflectively. 'Gnawed by a polar bear, how about that?'

I said, 'He's certainly a light eater. He walks a hundred miles, has some fruit cake and a couple of bars of chocolate, and goes away.'

Kirton rubbed at his moustache as he looked at me. 'Tell you what I'll do. I'll take some of this junk and do some microscope work. If the bear dined here, there's gonna be saliva on these things, and saliva means bacteria. Maybe I could do a paper on it, how about that ? Saliva analysis of - damn it, what's its Latin name?'

'I don't know. Ursus something.'

'Yeah, well, Saliva Analysis of Ursus something by Joseph Kirton MD, etc. That's one nobody's done before.'

Perhaps he was right. He knew a lot more about the Arctic than I did, he knew the people here, above all he knew the feel of the place. So if Kirton found my suspicions merely amusing, perhaps I'd better forget about them. A lifetime's experience confirmed that accidents came in batches; there'd been gremlins a-plenty round the TK4 Mark One, all of them apparently inexplicable until the reason was finally discovered and we found that this gunge or that scrobbler hadn't been allowed for. He moved off, holding the ripped remnants of the emergency food pack in cupped hands. I glanced at my watch. It was after eleven. Outside the wind whistled and snow seemed to be blowing in several directions at once between the ice walls at the sides of the ramp. Feeling vaguely useless I was about to amble after him when a voice said 'Sir' and I turned to face a man with stripes on his parka who introduced himself as Sergeant Vernon and said Major Smales had instructed him to give Mr Bowes the ten-dollar tour of Camp Hundred, if Mr Bowes would like that. I said Mr Bowes would like it very much and he said it was his pleasure, sir, and we could start with the water well, which I'd probably find interesting. The well was in a trench almost at the centre of Hundred, away from the command hut, next to the mess hall, and not far from Kirton's hospital trench. At first sight, it wasn't impressive, just a four-foot-high circle of corrugated steel with a metal framework above it and a couple of pipes running from it up to the wall. I looked over the edge of the barrier and saw a dark hole. Then Sergeant Vernon flicked on a switch and the hole suddenly turned brilliantly white and beneath me appeared an astonishingly beautiful sight. The hole was only about four feet in diameter but it was very deep, and obviously widened a good deal underneath the narrow entrance.

'What makes Hundred unique in Cold Regions Research installations,' Veron said, 'is that we can turn on heat and water in real quantity. So we have comfort. Heat, as you know, comes from the reactor, and with plenty of it, we can have all the water we need. This is the system that supplies it.'

'By melting snow, of course?'

'That's right. When Hundred opened, this well was started.

What happened was this: they used a jet of steam to bore a hole in the snow right here where we stand, and pumped the resulting water away. So there was this narrow circular hole running down. The melted snow was tested for pollution - radioactivity mainly -and then, when we were past the 1945 snow layer, Hiroshima and so on, they began to widen it.'

'The atom bombs contaminated snow here?'

'Oh yeah. They sure did. But below the 1945 layer, it's clean. Now, imagine the nozzle of a hose pipe, okay ? Well, that's what we got down there, only it's steam that's coming out. The steam melts snow, water gathers in the bottom, and a pump sucks it up. The nozzle rotates slowly, under the pressure of the steam -same principle as a lawn sprinkler, you know those things? - and that means you're cutting into the snow in a circle. You with me?'

'Ingenious,' I said.

'And simple. By regulating the steam pressure, you regulate how far into the snow you're cutting. Don't want to cut too far, for obvious reasons. So then, gradually, the nozzle has been lowered, to melt snow farther down, and what we have right under us here is a structure shaped like . . , well, like a giant onion maybe. Narrow neck, widening out gradually.'

I looked at the two pipes, one plastic, one flexible steel, that dropped down, from where we stood, into a black circle in the base of the huge ice chamber below. 'I don't see the nozzle, or the pump.'

Vernon smiled. 'This is only the top onion. One little problem we got with this well is that we can't cut the bulbs too wide, otherwise we might start undermining ourselves. So, to be safe, when the top one got down a hundred and fifty feet, we went through the whole process again, cutting a neck, then opening out another onion. So now we have a structure like three onions, one on top of the other, and the steam hose is turning four hundred and some feet down. Down there in the bottom of the third bulb there'll be around a hundred thousand gallons of water and the system's automatic. As the water's drawn up, the steam comes on and melts some more.'

'Very clever,' I said, meaning it.

He shrugged. 'Maybe a bit too clever. We don't want to sink too many wells at Hundred, because ice is plastic and who knows what might happen if it starts to fill its own empty spaces. So we stick with this one. But maintenance gets to be kind of tricky.'

'What kind of maintenance does it need?'

'Maybe I used the wrong word. Should have said inspection. We have to check that everything's okay; be sure the steam jet it cutting a circle and hasn't twisted so it's eating at the snow in one direction only.'

I blinked. 'You mean somebody really has to go down there?'

'Sure.'

'Tricky is an understatement, then. What you mean is dangerous.' I looked down the hole again. 'Are those things icicles?' From under the lip of the entry hole, monster spears of ice hung deep into the chamber like dragon's teeth.

'They're another little problem. Some of the steam floats up, and it either condenses or it melts snow on the way, and icicles form and keep growing.'

'And if one of those fell on somebody ?'

'We got to be careful, sure. In the second and third chambers they're even bigger, but we can't knock them down or they'd smash the equipment.'

'So who goes down ?'

Vernon said, 'A volunteer.'

'I can see why. Have you done it ?'

'Yeah, I have. Twice, as a matter of fact. I kind of liked it in a spooky sort of way. It's interesting. Down there you can see the layers of snow. Every year a new layer and the deeper you go, the more the layer's been compacted by pressure. You can read history down there. If you look real hard, you can see there's a thin black line in bulb two. That's when the volcano Krakatoa erupted.'

'But that was in Java! Did ash really get as far as this?'

He smiled. 'So the experts say. Must have been a hell of a bang, right ? Anyway, they reckon that around five hundred feet we'll be down to snow that fell in 1492 and the major says he's gonna bottle it and market Columbus water. Don't know if we'll make it, though. I reckon - personally, you understand

- that it's gotten too deep. They'll have to start another well.'

He switched off the wall lights, and I looked at him with a certain admiration. Nothing, I thought, would persuade me into the bosun's chair that hung from the well-head framework. 'Well, thanks,' I said.

'Where now?'

I was taken to the reactor trench where, understandably, they were rather too busy to want to entertain guests. Kelleher was already back at work, frowning and preoccupied, visibly tired with only two hours quick sleep behind him and delicate and highly responsible work to do. He looked up briefly and said,

'Come tomorrow and we'll show you the whole deal.' Next we went to the huge tractor shed, cut deep into the snow, where half-a-dozen giant tractors and bulldozers stood, as well as assorted Weasels and Polecats and, incongruous among them, two tiny orange Ski-doos, fast little snow-scooters. There were laboratories, mainly full of electrical and electronic equipment, the sleeping quarters, all like my own, stuffy and sweaty and windowless. There was a separate club for the sergeants, another for the enlisted men, and each had its rows of bottles, its tables for ping-pong and pool. The kitchens were probably as good as any of Mr Hilton's. Vernon explained it all cheerfully, still as impressed by it all as I was. It was even more impressive, as he pointed out, when you realized that every item, from the reactor itself to the knives and forks, had been hauled on sleds across a hundred miles of the icecap. When we'd finished, he invited me into the sergeants' club for a drink and I went with him, knowing what to expect. Nor was I wrong. Sergeants, in any army, are the people who have their affairs properly organized. An officers' mess has a social pyramid and its members range from youth to late middle age, so the social mix isn't naturally comfortable and some strain always shows. Sergeants, on the other hand, give or take a little seniority, are of similar age range, all mature men, and there are no problems about who calls who what. More important, they're the men who make an army work. So, while the officers'

club was comfortable and faintly scruffy, the sergeants' club gleamed. While the officers poured their own drinks, the sergeants had a white-jacketed barman, who'd clearly been drilled and drilled again and who, when he left the army, would undoubtedly get a job in some first-class hotel, because he was skilful and had style, and was kept steady to the mark by knowledgeable eyes. I was welcomed formally by the black master sergeant, who wore a collar and tie and well-pressed khaki, and who said it was his privilege to give me my first drink, sir, and what was its name. I smiled to myself and asked how the sergeants had solved the problem of stuffy bedrooms, and Master Sergeant Allen said it wasn't entirely solved but would I care to see ? He showed me his own room. The pi èce de résistancewas a mock window complete with curtains, and behind the glass was a huge blown-up photograph of treetops and blue sky. They had, he said, nearly a hundred such photographs, and the view was changed regularly. 'Why,' I asked, 'don't the officers have pictures, too ?'

He smiled politely. 'Maybe they didn't think about it.'

He also explained that they had discovered how much colour helped and had arranged to have kapok sleeping bags covered in bright material, to look like quilts. Then there was the matter of starched sheets, and a faint smell of pines and the humidifiers hanging on the central heating radiator. It was all, he said, mainly psychological.

We went back to the bar then, and the steward made Martinis, with everything coming from a big freezer behind the bar : glasses, bottles, ice, shaker. The sergeants were impressive people. I asked Vernon how long he'd been at Hundred. He said it was his third tour of duty.

'Third?' I said. 'I thought people couldn't wait to get away.'

'No, sir, it's not like that. I enjoy my duty here. I wanted to come back.'

'And will you again ?'

He frowned. 'I better explain, sir. A little over two weeks back, we lost a man. Only a kid really, but I reckon it was my fault. No, sir, I won't be coming back this time. I'm quitting the army.'

The master sergeant said, 'Nobody blames him, excepting him. Major Smales told him that, I told him, everybody told him.'

'These things happen,' I said uncomfortably. I liked Vernon. He seemed a solid citizen, dependable and strong. 'What will you do when you leave the army?'

'Home to Wichita,' he said. 'Look around. Find some job. I'll be okay. But let's talk about something else, huh ? Tell us about that air-cushion vehicle of yours.'

I did, and with some relief. The two of them were deeply aware of the need for faster transport over the icecap, knew the problems and gave me as much information as I gave them. After I left the sergeants' club I went over to the radio room to see if there was any news of the Swing's progress. There wasn't; the last contact had been atmidnightand the radio operator suspected the snow train had run into a white-out, which would make contact unlikely and almost certainly stop the train.

'I thought nothing stopped it.'

'Just white-outs, sir. Bad one, you get just no visibility at all. Air's full of minute ice particles and it looks like milk. No sky, no horizon, no ground. You just have to wait till it goes away.'

'How long does that take?'

'Minutes, hours, days, who knows ? Then you get a wind and pfft, it's over.'

I went in to lunch. Neither Kelleher nor Barney Smales was present, but the silent young officer I'd sat beside the previous day was there.

'May I join you?'

'Surely. Guess I owe you some kind of apology.'

'No,' I said.

He made an effort to be friendly, but his heart wasn't in it. He apologized again and said he couldn't seem to throw off the gloom.

'Can't the doctor help?'

'Happy pills ? Gets a whole lot worse when they wear off, so I stopped them. Sounds crazy, I know, but what I really want is a good long walk.'

'Difficult.'

'Impossible. But I guess it's kind of an id ée fixe.Something in my head says if I can take the walk, it will be okay. But I can't, so round I go in circles.' He smiled faintly, embarrassed at the revelation. I said, 'It's claustrophobia, really.'

'Yeah, I know.'

'Everybody's got it, more or less.'

'I know that, too. It's just. . , you know what happened?'

I shook my head.

'They were out at the seismology hut, that's around three hundred yards out on the cap. There was a sudden bad phase and they were trapped three days in there. When it cleared a little they started back and hit a white-out. Three hundred goddam yards and they hit a white-out ! Daylight, clear air, but it just fell on them. Didn't last but a few hours, either, but somehow Charlie got loose from the guide-line. Sergeant Vernon, he's a real good man, he stayed there an hour, damn near froze to death; he shouted and he damn well waited, but Charlie was gone! Just vanished right into the cap.'

I said, 'Vernon feels badly. You know he's leaving the army?'

'Yeah, I know.'

When we'd finished eating, I said, 'Since you can't go for a walk, how about exercise of a different kind? Ping-pong.'

He started to say no thanks, changed his mind and said, 'Why not ?' and we played for more than an hour, working up a sweat in the heated recreation hut. At first he seemed to have difficulty in keeping his mind on the game, but after a while the old American hatred of being beaten at any game began to assert itself, and he played a good deal better, the lines disappearing from his brow as healthy perspiration gathered on it. Ping-pong seems a pretty feeble palliative, but at least when we'd finished he wasn't any worse and may have been a fraction better.

Afterwards I had a shower, then lay for a while on my bed, reading. I was bored, frustrated by inactivity and conscious of not belonging. Once my TK4 arrived, I'd have a purpose and things to do; meanwhile I was something of a nuisance, a spare body hanging around asking tourist-type questions and wasting time. And if inactivity could bore me so quickly, what must it be like for some of the others, Doc Kirton, for instance, who had to endure it for a whole six-month tour? I decided I'd go and alleviate his boredom and my own, and perhaps find out what kind of bacteria polar bears carried around, so I put on all the layers of clothing and walked round to the hospital. Kirton's outer office was empty, but there was a red light glowing on the door of the operating theatre. He must have heard me come in, though, because he called, 'Who is it ?'

I told him and he called back, 'I got something to show you, but I'm busy right now. See you later.'

So I left. It might have saved a lot of trouble if I'd just sat in his office and waited. Instead I went to the library and got a couple of books, then returned to my room to read. In fact I dozed off, awakening just in time for dinner, and after dinner there were a couple of quick drinks and then the evening's film, the Burton/Taylor Cleopatra, which seemed to go on for ever. Just before I finally went to sleep that night, I remember thinking that for the first time since my arrival, nothing unpleasant had happened that day. The damaged generator was apparently in working order again, the reactor was due to go critical tomorrow. It was a reassuring thought to sleep on. Unfortunately, it wasn't true.

On the way to a late breakfast next morning, I called in at the radio room, hoping for news of the Swing, but there was none; they were still out of radio contact. The operator smiled at my anxiety. 'Don't worry about it; the Swing always makes it. Weather's good, they're quick. Weather's bad, they're slow. But they sure as hell get here.'

I nodded, thanked him, and left. It looked like being another fragmented, tedious day and I really wasn't looking forward to it. The stuffiness in my room had given me a rough mouth and a dull headache and I decided that after I'd eaten, I'd go and get a couple of aspirins from Kirton. Everybody else must have breakfasted earlier. The result was that I ate alone and consequently quickly. I stayed at the table long enough to smoke a cigarette, then put on all the wrappings again and left for the hospital. Kirton wasn't there and I debated rummaging around for aspirin in his cupboards, but decided against it in case what I took turned out to be cascara, or something. So I went to the Officers' Club and drank coffee and read Time magazine while the headache got worse. An hour later, Kirton still hadn't shown up at the Officers'

Club and, when I returned to the hospital, he wasn't there either. Hoping the cool air that blew along Main Street would clear my head, I took a stroll towards the command trench. But I never got there. At the far end of Main Street, where the tunnel led up on to the cap, a group of men were standing beside the bulldozer. I walked towards them and, as I came closer, saw they were looking at something on the ground. I couldn't see what it was, because there were too many people; I just kept walking until I reached them. About five seconds later, I was doubled over by the wall, vomiting my breakfast back, retching until I thought my boots would come up.

A single glance had been enough to tell me what had happened : a man had been ground to pulp under the fifty-six-inch steel track of the bulldozer, and all that was left was a ghastly smear of blood, flesh and ripped clothing.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and Barney Smales's voice said, 'Get the hell out of here, Mr Bowes.' He spoke gently, but he meant it.

I retched dryly once more, then straightened, and asked, 'Who?'

Smales said, 'It's kinda hard to tell. We think it's Doc Kirton. Now go !'