Whiteout!

Chapter 7

Scott, the driver, had tried the starter a dozen times. Each time the engine spun over, but it never fired, never gave a single cough, and already the wind outside was sucking away the interior warmth; in just a minute or two the temperature had dropped noticeably. Suddenly Herschel said angrily: 'Fuel. Damn tank's empty!'

Sure enough the fuel tank gauge needle was pointing right over to the left.

'You check that, Scott?' Herschel was no longer the jolly officer, nor Scott the privileged private. Rank had surfaced.

'When we got aboard, sir. Tank showed full then, sir.'

'You sure?'

'Sir, that needle was right on full.'

'Who filled her up? You?'

'No, sir. She was all done. Sergeant Reilly's boys gassed her up.'

'Sergeant Reilly's boys are gonna shovel snow till their asses drop off,' Herschel said grimly. 'Where are we ? Mile Fifty ?'

'Close to Fifty, sir.'

'Let's move.' Herschel turned. 'There's a wanigan at Forty-Eight, another at Fifty-One. Which way's the wind?'

Scott switched on the dashboard display. 'South of East, sir. Thirty-eight mph.'

'We'll go forward to Forty-Eight. It's a longer walk, but the wind's at our backs.' Herschel turned. 'You guys wearing the whole outfit?'

Foster said, 'Yes, sir.'

'And you?'

'Yes,' I said.

'We'll check that out before we leave the 'cat. Answer me, item by item.1He ran through the list : snow boots, socks, long Johns, woollen trousers, windproof trousers, vests, shirts, woollen jackets, parkas, hats, hoods, silk-lined gloves, over-mittens. As he spoke each word, he checked his own clothing, too.

'Okay, let's get the hell out. This damn Polecat's turning into a deep freeze. When we get out, we stay close to the marker poles and we walk two together. I'll walk ahead with Scott, you and Foster side by side behind us, right?'

We nodded and he said : 'One more thing. Pull the drawstrings of the parka hood tight.' I pulled. 'No, tighter than that. So tight it comes nearly to a point. You only need a one-inch aperture there, so you can see through it. Main thing is it keeps the warmth of your respiration right in there with your face.'

I pulled the strings, gradually drawing the hood closer. The other three, more practised, had already finished and sat encased, with a khaki-green cone pointing forward where their faces should have been. Herschel's voice, when he spoke again, was muffled. 'No halts except for injury. I'll pull the stretcher. Out you go.'

The door opened, the wind howled in, and we clambered down into the freezing darkness and stood for a moment while Herschel and Scott pulled the steel sled-stretcher from the clips on the Polecat's side. When that was done, Scott switched off the lights and slammed the door. Now the other three were no more than dark shapes against the snow.

We set off, the dry snow loose underfoot, and walking was awkward. There was some compression, but the snow didn't bind and it was more like walking on sand. Through the inch aperture, I kept my eyes on the sled as Herschel dragged it along behind him, at once a sensible precaution and a grim warning. Every ten paces or so, Foster tapped me on the shoulder. The first time it happened, I turned towards him enquiringly, but he was continuing to walk, facing forward, his head not turned my way. I understood then. This was a way of maintaining contact with visibility sharply reduced, yet another of the endless list of careful precautions observed by the men who lived and worked high on the Greenland icecap. So it was ten paces, tap, ten paces, tap. And two miles to go, thirty inches to the pace, how many paces? How many taps? I did the mental arithmetic for the sake of something to do. Something over four thousand paces; something over four hundred taps. One, two, three, four . . , eight, nine, tap. One, two, three . . .

In front of us Herschel and Scott marched determinedly on. Nearly thirty years difference in age separated them, but Herschel was the stronger, moving easily, even with the stretcher trailing behind. Occasionally Scott had to hurry to regain his place beside him. Around us the wind snapped, whipping at sleeves and trousers, but also pushing us along. Two miles with the wind was going to be far easier than one against.

We'd gone some distance, more than three-quarters of a mile, I guessed, when I began to feel the cold. The exertion helped, no doubt, our bodies generating warmth that the high insulation properties of several layers of the special Arctic clothing kept in. It was my feet that felt it first. Ten minutes ago, perhaps a little longer, I'd been sitting warm in the speeding Polecat, thinking how snug I was. I now realized the word should have been smug. My feet had been warm. Good and warm. Very warm. Sweating] Which could mean damp in the boots! I began to feel slightly panicky. A night or two ago, I'd seen the ravages of frostbite gruesomely recreated in Scott of the Antarctic. I remembered, too, reading about Maurice Herzog, the French climber who dropped his gloves near the summit of Annapurna and watched them fall away down the mountain and knew in that moment, with total certainty, that he would lose all his fingers. Which he did .., seven, eight, nine, tap; what about the others? Their feet must have been sweating in the Polecat, too. Were they also feeling the cold? My heels no longer seemed to feel much as they came down, and I began to try to stamp harder, but it wasn't like walking on a hard surface; the snow absorbed the impact and still I felt nothing; it was merely increasing the strain on my thigh muscles, so I stopped.

Ahead of me, Scott stumbled and fell, but scrambled up quickly and ran a few steps to catch up with Herschel again. I told myself fiercely not to be stupid. Twenty-five to thirty minutes of hard walking in proper clothing, with the blood circulating briskly, was hardly likely to end in frostbite. I was being neurotic. All the same, the feeling seemed to be going out of my heels. And what was worse, I seemed to be having difficulty keeping up. Herschel and Scott were a bit further ahead, weren't they ? Tap, ten paces, tap. Was it just my heels, where the wind was striking? Or were my toes losing sensation, too? I tried to wiggle my toes. They seemed all right. But my legs were beginning to ache from the effort of walking on the sand-like surface. I wished it were sand, and that I was walking along a beach in warm sunshine! Herschel and Scott were drawing ahead! Tap, tap, on my shoulder. I turned my head to look at Foster and he waved his arm, signalling me to go faster.

We came to the wanigan quite suddenly. I doubt if I'd have seen it, but Scott and Herschel must have been able to judge the distance, or else the marker barrels gave them information, because they suddenly turned to the right, and as I followed, the flat orange rectangle of the safety wanigan loomed out of the dark. Drifted snow lay against it to a height of about eight feet, so that only the top couple of feet was visible. Herschel went quickly over to it and dug with his hands in the snow until he unearthed a shovel. Rank counted. He handed the shovel and the hard work to Scott, who obediently began to shift snow. It took only a couple of minutes, but enough for a chill feeling to begin, before most of the wanigan door showed, and we went in, slamming it behind us, and shutting out the noise. Inside, it was startlingly still and quiet. And Herschel said, 'My goddam feet must have been sweating in the Polecat ! Soon as we get some light around here, we'll have a nice, stinking, feet-rubbing fiesta.'

And we did. The air was full of the smell of feet as we sat on the floor in pairs, with the stove going warmly, rubbing. The same thing had happened to all four of us : there were eight pale heels, each of which began to tingle, then to burn as circulation crept back. There was no damage, nothing permanent, but like Smales's pork chop, it was another demonstration of power and vulnerability. It was also, I thought grimly, further proof of what Smales had said about minds working at only fifty per cent efficiency. Every man in the Polecat, all four of us, had known all about boot hazards, but the heater had been turned high and we'd revelled in it!

But now it was back to comfort. The safety wanigan was, to all intents and purposes, a large and well-fitted caravan and contained everything necessary to sustain the lives of four people for four weeks, including a wall-rack full of big bottles of liquefied gas. With the stove burning, I got a quick guided tour. As it happened, the wanigan we were in was a new type, recently oft the experimental list, and of a novel construction. Its walls were made of expanded polystyrene foam, sandwiched between layers of glass fibre. Foster was engaged on this very project, seeking better designs, but the principles of the thing were breathtaking. The glass fibre/polystyrene walls had tremendous thermal insulation properties, and a single kilowatt of heat was enough to maintain a temperature in the seventies, even if the hut were empty. With four men inside, heat was scarcely needed at all.

Foster said, 'See the implications?'

I shook my head. 'I see the value up here, yes.'

'Bigger than that,' he said. 'This thing's constructed of uniform panels. Floor, walls, roof, all uniform. They just bolt together. More panels, you make bigger huts, okay. But there's something you maybe haven't thought about. Polystrene beads are small. Not when they're expanded, but for transit. Glass fibre's light and can be compressed. And a little resin goes a hell of a long way. Now: you fill a big plane with barrels of beads and resin and bales of fibre. You put in the moulds and the styrene blower -that's the machine that expands the beads - and you can make* these panels anywhere. What'll shake you is how many.'

'Go on.'

'We can get enough materials in one Galaxy freighter right now,' Foster said, 'to build a camp for three thousand men.'

'Three thousand?

'Right on. What's that? Big village or a small town. Tell you who's interested, the United Nations, that's who. Think of the potential of this in a disaster area, floods, typhoons, earthquakes. One plane comes in and they start fabricating panels and in a few days you got three thousand people housed!'

I nodded, fascinated.

'And well housed.' Foster, talking about this project, was a changed man, full of enthusiasm. 'You go outside and kick the wall, the sound can't hardly be heard inside. Twenty people in a thirty-two-foot hut, sleeping ten each side, and you need no heating at all, even up here.'

Herschel interrupted good-humouredly, 'You gonna place your order now, sucker, or hold out till this hustler's taken you to a nightclub?'

'I think I'd buy,' I said.

He nodded. 'Me, too. I'm gonna try to build a house of this stuff home in Maryland if the regulations'll let me. Be cheaper than bricks and lumber. But before we build the house - ' He went to a radio set in the corner, switched on and called Camp Hundred. There was a lot of crackling static, but they answered.

'Wanigan Fifteen to Hundred. Polecat inoperative, repeat Polecat inoperative. We are sheltering Wanigan Fifteen. Inform Commander.'

'Roger Wanigan Fifteen. Stand by.'

Smales came on a couple of minutes later. There was no jargon from him. He said, 'Herschel, it's Barney. What in hell went wrong?'

'We ran out of gas.'

'Out of-Jesus Christ!'

Herschel said, 'We'll wait for the Swing, Barney. Ride on up with Milt Garrison.'

'Yeah, but he's got no neoprene on board. This Swing's all food and fuel and we're in a little trouble here.'

I felt myself stiffen.

Herschel asked, 'What trouble?'

'We lost another generator.'

It was an hour before I thought of it - that fifty-per-cent mind, 1 suppose. But it ought to have hit me earlier; it ought to have hit a three-year-old. I said to Herschel, 'Can you contact the Swing?'

'Sure. Be doing that real soon. Swing can't be more than ten miles off. We'll have to tell them we're here. They won't see the Polecat until they're two miles on. Remember, we walked here.'

'Look,' I said, 'we still have one way of getting to Camp Belvoir.'

He shook his head. 'Swing can't spare - ' He stopped then, looking at me, then grinning. 'ThatACVof yours is on the Swing, right?' But the grin faded almost as soon as it had appeared. 'No,' he said, 'can't risk that. It's not proven up here. Once the Swing's gone by you've fifty miles in the open.'

I said, 'She can do it. And unless we use the TK4, there's no way of getting the pipe up to Hundred. How long before the Swing reaches us ?'

He gave a little shrug of annoyance. 'Can't calculate it. They're ten, maybe twelve miles away. Best speed is three miles an hour -just like the old time Conestoga wagons on the plains heading West.'

'Progress,' I said.

'Sure. But they don't hold a speed like that. Every three miles the bulldozers uncouple to pull these safety wanigans out on top of the snow, so they don't get buried. Takes a few minutes every time. Then they got to couple up again. They stop to change drivers. Maybe they run across a new crevasse. Five to six hours if we're lucky. Could be twelve or fourteen if they have a rough stretch. Could be days if it's real bad.'

'For ten or twelve miles ?'

'I told you once before, Harry. There's been times it's taken six whole weeks to get a Swing up here.'

It would be quicker, I thought, for Smales to send another Polecat from Hundred. Or, for that matter, for Cohen to send one from Camp Belvoir.

Herschel said, 'No dice. No Polecats at Belvoir, only Weasels, and this time of year they're too small.'

'All right,' I said. 'But isn't there a spare tractor with the Swing?'

He nodded. 'Two loose bulldozers for crevasse filling. And they take over in a tractor breakdown, too.'

'Couldn't one of them bring the wanigan with the TK.4 on it? Detach that one wanigan from the train? What speed could it make?'

He said, 'Five, maybe six miles an hour.'

'Here in two hours,' I said. 'Two more after that and we'd be at Belvoir. Turn and come back and we'd probably have made the whole trip before the Swing even reaches this point.'

'You're good and confident,' he said.

'I've reason to be. I know the machine.'

'But not the icecap.'

I said, 'You know it. Scott knows it. Foster, too. You can each hold my hand in turn.'

He gave a sudden nod, rose, went to the radio and switched frequencies. 'Safety Wanigan Fifteen to Swing.' He repeated it and waited.

'Swing to Wanigan Fifteen. Who's holed up?'

'Holed up is right,' he said. 'Major Herschel here. Get me Warrant Officer Garrison on the double.'

There was a pause, then a new voice came over the transceiver. 'Garrison, Major. Sorry you're all holed up there. Be right with you by morning.'

Herschel said, 'I want better than that, Milt. Your traction fully operational? Or have any units gone down?'

'We're okay.'

'Then you can spare a 'dozer ?'

'Spare - hey, what for?' Garrison's voice had hardened.

Quite distinctly we all heard another voice, presumably the radio operator's, say, 'Is that guy nuts !'

Herschel chuckled. 'Tell him no, just a major.'

Garrison laughed, too. 'Got a real white-faced boy here, Major. Will you explain, please?'

Herschel said, 'The hovercraft wanigan. I want the 'dozer to haul it up here fast. Then we can head right on to Belvoir.'

Garrison said, 'She's only on trials, Major. And not ours. You know how to pilot that thing?'

*No, but I got the driver right here.'

'Well, okay. I'll fix it.'

'How long d'you reckon, Milt?'

'We're near on Mile Forty, but we been hitting a crevasse or two. I'll have the guys move it, that's a promise.'

Herschel thanked him and switched off.

'What about Major Smales ?' I said.

Herschel's eyes crinkled. 'He ain't here.'

'Meaning?'

'Meaning he'd say no. Barney's a belt-and-suspenders man. Wouldn't go for this kind of a half-ass game. Barney doesn't trust that machine of yours anyway. He told me. What he likes is lots of steel and lots of diesel power and lots of back-up, and lots of precautions. He's right, too. So was Chance, Luke Chance, commander before him. That's why Hundred's got the safety record it has.'

'Had,' I said.

He looked at me. 'Stay off it, huh?'

'Apart from one thing.' I nodded. 'But there's something I'd like to know.'

'Go on.'

I said, 'If Barney Smales is as logistics-conscious as you say, if he's that cautious, if he insists on triple-banking even lavatory seats, then why the hell isn't there a spare pipe?'

Herschel's brows came down. 'That's classified.'

'Neoprene? Don't be - '

'Not neoprene. The information.' But 1 could see now that those frowning brows were having trouble staying down. They kept twitching and revealing a glint in Herschel's blue eyes. I said, 'Come on. Let's have it.'

He was really laughing now, shoulders shaking. He said, 'Barney forgot. He forgot the requisition.'

I grinned back at him; at least there was one mystery that was no mystery. He said, 'Can you cat-nap?'

'Sometimes.'

'Try it now. You got two hours.'

I doubted whether I could sleep, in that warm, almost un-ventilated, over-insulated wanigan, redolent with the twin smells of heat and feet. But I did, until the sudden blast of cold air from outside broke through with the news of the arrival of the tractor. I rose blearily and began to dress. The bulldozer driver had a problem. He'd been thinking about it for two hours and he thought we all had a problem. He said, 'Sir, we got no crane. How we gonna lift that thing off the flatbed?'

Herschel looked at me. 'Has he got something?'

'No,' I said. 'She'll be all right. But I want to check it. Wait here till I come back.'

I'm coming,' Herschel said. 'You don't go out alone.'

So we went to have a look. There were no great problems, certainly none that couldn't be solved with a few scrapes of the bulldozer blade. We went back inside and I told the driver exactly what I wanted.

'You can push snow towards the side and front of the wanigan?'

He nodded. 'Sure.'

'Okay. I want a ramp made. Not too steep, in fact as flat as you can get it. She can ride over a three-foot vertical obstruction when she's riding the cushion, but I don't want to chance anything when we're moving off from stationary. Got it?'

He nodded. 'Got it, sir. Only take a minute.'

While he was manoeuvring the bulldozer and pushing snow towards the wanigan, I was busy with the chain-strapping that held the TK4 down, fumbling at the metal awkwardly in my heavy felt mitts. It was no use. I couldn't shift the fastenings. The ramp was completed in a few minutes, but the hovercraft remained firmly tied to the flatbed's deck-boarding. The 'dozer driver left his cab, came over and shouted into my hood, 'She frozen down?'

I bellowed back: 'Just the strappings.'

'I got bolt cutters.'

'Thanks.'

He brought them over and I simply sheared through the chains, then kicked them away and climbed up into TK4's cabin. The turbines had been specially adapted, with heaters built in for cold weather starting. I let them warm for a minute, then tried the engines. Vroom, vroom, and a nice, healthy blast of power first time. Pity, I thought, that Barney Smales hadn't been there to see it! By the light of the bulldozer's powerful headlights, I could see the other four standing on the trail, watching. I wound up the feet cautiously. Okay so far. She was riding on the cushion. Suddenly she began to slide back under wind pressure. I corrected, eased her forward on to the ramp and floated downhill to the trail, then turned her round, opened the door, waved an arm, and Herschel, Foster and Scott climbed up too. The bulldozer driver waved and walked off towards the safety wanigan.

Herschel said, 'He'll wait there till the Swing comes up.'

'He's left the engine running,' I pointed out.

'Yep. Safer that way.' I asked him about the crevasses. 'They filled three on the way up here. Two were on the trail up to the cap out of Belvoir, but the other was around Mile Twenty-Eight. Big one. Twenty feet wide and maybe a hundred deep. What's this thing do if we hit one like that?'

'Will there be a snow-bridge T

Herschel said, 'Sometimes. You reckon you can get over a snow-bridge?'

'Moving fast, the pressure per square inch is very low,' I said. 'Remember there's no contact. If the crevasse is big and open, we'll probably have to go round. Narrow ones we could float over.' I grinned at him. 'Don't get worried.'

I gave her a touch more power and let her slide forward, the lights knifing into the empty darkness ahead. The wind was astern at nearly thirty knots, which wouldn't make for easy steering, but I was confident in the TK4.

Scott, sitting beside me, said, 'What can she do?'

'Anything but crossword puzzles,' I said. 'If you mean speed, she can go up to about fifty miles an hour, depending on the skirt clearance from the ground. Use the power to lift and you don't have as much left to push.'

He said, 'Fifty?'

'Fifty.' But I kept her to just over forty, enough so I didn't have to worry too much about wind speed. At the start, snow began building up on the windscreen, and I employed one of the little refinements Thomson-Keegan had built into her - a two-foot wide jet of air, blasting up the outside surface of the glass, that diverted the snow before it even landed. In case of trouble with that, there was also a 12-inch Kent Clearvue rotating panel in the glass, and it could be heated, too. After the Canadian tests, we'd incorporated those two skis forward, to give additional steering control in narrow manoeuvring spaces, but I had no need of them now and kept them retracted. The Trail to Belvoir was a good hundred yards wide, and ran almost dead straight across the immense snowfield. After about twelve minutes a battery of lights became visible and I got my first glimpse of the Swing coming close. I slowed and stopped. It was immense. Imagine three goods trains running side by side; that's what it was like, the only difference being that instead of engines, each train was pulled by a tractor, and the goods wagons had sled runners instead of wheels.

We didn't get out. Instead, we switched the radio to the Swing frequency and talked briefly to Garrison, saying little more than hello and goodbye.

After that we were alone in the dark again, skating fast over the Trail. Scott, in the seat beside me, kept watch ahead with a curious, almost unblinking stare, as the marker poles came one after the other out of the night, to flicker their little orange flags at us, then vanish behind. Once I asked Scott, 'Are those flags real?'

'They're real.'

'If you catch me circling right, stop me.'

He laughed. 'If I see those French broads again, then I'll stop you.'

Herschel told me about the Swing and its awesome statistics. It had now been running, more or less day and night, for about five years. The crews lived aboard for six months at a time, driving six hours on, six hours off. The huge Caterpillar low-ground-pressure diesel tractors could go ninety hours without refuelling and each of them hauled a weight of up to 160 tons.

I said, 'The crews must go slowly mad.'

'Nope. They like it. You know, they got a project on, those guys. Milt Garrison's behind it, but he ain't gonna get it. What he wants to do is take the whole Swing from Thule over to Nome, Alaska.'

'Over the ocean?

'Sure. In winter when it's frozen.'

I said, 'But it's three thousand miles. At least that.'

'Nearly four,' Herschel said cheerfully. 'They could do it, too. But there's a whole bundle of opinion down at Corps of Engineers headquarters, says the US taxpayer won't like it. And he sure won't. But wouldn't that be something!'

'I said, 'You're one of the ones who like the Arctic'

'That's right. Scott too, eh Scott?'

Scott said, 'Sure thing.'

'What about you, Foster?' I said.

He didn't reply for a moment. Then he said, 'I like the work. I like the projects. But it's all too damned angry.'

We had no crevasse trouble at all. The TK4 gave a beautiful performance demonstration, and about an hour and a half after leaving the safety wanigan, even allowing for reduced speed on the gradient down the side of the icecap to the flat coastal strip, we came easily into Camp Belvoir and I ran the hovercraft into its hangar, and turned smugly to Herschel. 'Okay?'

He said, 'Just one thing missing. No stewardess. No scotch.'

I said, 'Nothing's impossible.'

The TK4 had made that fifty-mile trip over the icecap, in high winds and a murderously low temperature, with no more fuss than if it had been skating along a motorway. We all went off to have some food, and after it Herschel went off to see Cohen and to organize the loading of the neoprene piping and perhaps, if he was anything like Barney Smales, to do a little gentle pilfering, too. Scott was playing pool with one of his friends and Foster and I were nursing another cup of hot coffee and waiting for the off.

The last few hours had made a change in him, and I said so. He said, with a rueful smile, 'Just got on top of me at Hundred, I guess. I keep thinking about when I get back and have to explain what happened to Charlie. To the folks, you know. They're going to want to know why I didn't stop it.'

I said, 'You feel that, too, don't you?'

He shrugged. 'I guess so. Just a little.'

'Well, you were his cousin, not his keeper. That needs to be understood.'

Foster said, 'I was always his keeper. That's part of it.'

'Did he need one?'

'Charlie?' Foster sighed. 'Yeah, I suppose he did. He's .., he was one of those kids who could get in a mess fast. Always.'

'I know the kind.'

'Yeah. Charlie was like that. Funny thing is, though, I thought he'd just got himself straight. Really straight. Permanently.*

'How?'

He looked at me for a moment, hesitating, then told me. He must have thought that talking to a total stranger he was never likely to see again, would do no harm.

'Well,' Foster said, 'when he was maybe sixteen he hit the drug scene. Before that all kinds of trouble. You could've predicted it. You could have said, give Charlie the chance and he'll go on drugs. And he did. Soft stuff. Hash. Then the pills. Didn't even keep it secret. The whole family knew and worried a lot. If he'd been a bad kid - oh, I don't know. But he wasn't. There was this about Charlie, everybody liked him. They liked him, but they couldn't do anything about it. He was going to hell in a bucket. Heroin next stop, because that's the kind of kid he was. And then . . .'

I waited.

'Well, then one of those things happened. We had an old aunt, great-aunt, really. Lived in North Carolina, only one in the whole pack of us with any money. And when she died, we found out what she'd done in her will. What she did, she left Charlie three hundred thousand dollars.'

I whistled. 'Which he frittered away?'

He smiled. 'No, sir. Great Aunt Eleanor had it all worked out. After she died, Charlie had two weeks to join the army. If he didn't, no dough. Well, he joined the army. I was in the Corps of Engineers, so that's what Charlie joined. And she really screwed the lid down. Charlie had to get through a three-year enlistment. And when he came out, his discharge papers had to have the magic word on them: Exemplary.'

'She sounds,' I said, 'like an ingenious old lady.'

'She was all of that. The way she worked it out, if he was going down, he'd go slower in the army. If not, if he could keep his sights on that three-year target and not fall off, it could maybe straighten him out.'

'And it did, that's what you're saying?'

He said, 'Yeah. I guess so. Charlie was a whole lot different. He was even a good soldier. The army suited him. He was doing his third tour up here, and the old Charlie'd never have made it.'

'How long,' 1 asked, 'before he was due to get the money?'

Foster said, 'He'd made it. Five days before . . .' and left the sentence unfinished.