Whiteout!

Chapter 8

We were supposed to leave immediately, but the Arctic had done its unpredictable worst. In the area of Siberia that's sometimes called the Weather Kitchen, a pinch of something fizzy had been added to the brew and conditions in Northern Greenland had deteriorated savagely. Even at Belvoir, at the foot of the icecap, winds were somewhere over sixty, gusting up to ninety miles an hour. On the cap a full-blown Arctic hurricane was raging, accompanied by temperatures dropped to sixty below. There was no question of setting off back; it wasn't even sensible to leave the hut, for the accommodation at Belvoir stands out in the open. Grimly we settled down to drink more coffee and talk the night away, but we were all too tired. Finally, we fought our way along hand-lines in a raging blizzard and screaming icy wind across twenty yards of deep snow to a dormitory hut and went to sleep. Twenty yards doesn't sound much, but I got an idea of how Charlie Foster had died.

When we woke next morning the weather was, if anything, worse, but we stumbled back to the mess hall to eat and do our waiting in a little more comfort than we'd have done in the dormitory. And we learned that, remarkably, radio contact with Camp Hundred was good. However, the news wasn't. The diesel generator that had broken down was severely damaged, it seemed, and one of the others was running rough. With the reactor still out of action, Camp Hundred's power resources were dangerously stretched. Accordingly the big decision had been made and a new well was being opened up. Herschel had a long radio talk with Smales about it and learned that a length of the neoprene from the old well was to be used, cleaned out as well as possible. The snag was that to get below the level of snow which had fallen since the first atom bomb went off in 1945, they'd have to cut through seventy feet. Above that, radiation contaminated the snow layers.

I asked Herschel how the pipe was to be cleaned. 'They're only using a hundred and ten feet,' he said.

'They're gonna thread a line down the pipe, then pull clean cloth through like cleaning a rifle barrel, then wash it out with water melted from snow.

'In weather like that?' I said.

'They'll cut snow blocks from the walls with chain saws and melt the blocks,' he said. 'That part shouldn't be bad. Take a while to sink the well, though, and pump the water away.' He was frowning. I said, 'It's serious now, isn't it?'

He thought about it. 'Too near the margins. A whole lot too near. There's a generator out and another running rough. That leaves one serviceable generator and the whole place running off it. Anything happens to that. . .'

Foster said, 'Reckon it'd close the Camp, sir?'

'It might,' Herschel said. 'And it'd be mighty uncomfortable in there. They're protected from winds, right enough. But the water system would go out fast without heating. The research programme would be finished for the winter. Unless they can get that reactor going real soon. Somebody's going to be making a big decision. There's three hundred guys up there. Oh, sure, they got fuel and food. They can sit all day round carry-stoves melting snow, they won't die exactly, but there won't be much left of the Camp Hundred operation.'

All our conversations over the next thirty-six hours, while the storm raged on, remained on the same gloomy level, becoming less frequent and more desultory as time went on. Reports from Camp Hundred, when they came in, were not particularly reassuring. The well was being sunk, but the needs of the Camp itself made the heat requirements of the pressure steam hose just one of many competing factors. If they switched off everything and concentrated on cutting the well, there wouldn't be enough heat to keep the water pipes from freezing. The steam, therefore, was being used in short bursts, and the progress on the new well was slow. There was a good deal of talk between Cohen and Herschel about the possibility of having a couple of small standby generators flown up from Thule Air Base and parachuted down to Camp Hundred, but it was just talk ; the idea wasn't practical. In that hellish blizzard on the icecap, the aircraft's crew would never see Hundred, let alone hit it. And if by some miracle they did drop the generators somewhere near, it was unlikely that the people at Hundred would be able to see the drop, or recover them. They'd only be able to go out in tractors; visibility, minimal anyway, would be nil through glass; in any case, the blizzard would cover the machinery in snow in a few minutes. I asked whether the tractor engines couldn't be harnessed for power generation, but the answer was no.

'They're pulling machines,' Herschel said. 'With the standard Caterpillar you can draw off power, but not these.' He forced a wry grin. 'We eliminated all that. We're so smart. We got a reactor!'

There was some talk, too, about flying an aircraft in when the weather dropped a little, but it was wild talk. All the weather prognostications were bad, though the lethal severity of the storm might ease a little in a few hours. There was a possibility that the winds on the cap might actually drop low enough to be on the Beaufort Scale within twenty-four hours but no possibility at all of flying weather. I learned that flying up to the cap has, in any case, its own particular additional dangers. A standard compass is all but useless, because when you're in Northern Greenland, magnetic North lies to the west and its influence on the needle is erratic. Then there's the little matter of altimeter readings, which are thoroughly inaccurate over deep snow, because the electronic impulses beamed at the ground penetrate the snow to indeterminate depths. In fact, it's pretty well impossible to judge altitude or distance with any accuracy. And on top of all that, sudden weather changes can blot out visibility entirely, or make sky and ground the same shade of grey or white, so that it's impossible to distinguish one from the other and there's no way to tell up from down.

'What it comes down to,' Cohen said wearily, 'is that flying's out, and I mean out, unless the pilot can see both the Trail and the horizon the whole damn way.'

'It also means,' Herschel said grimly, 'that the whole shebang could be finished for want of a two-thousand-pound payload.'

'Two thousand?' I said, as an idea struck me. From what I'd seen of those big generators up at Camp Hundred, they weighed a lot more than two thousand pounds.

Cohen nodded. 'Yeah. It's a smallermodel, lower output, too-'

Isaid, 'That weight's okay in the TK4.'

They looked hard at me and I felt a little like a doorstep salesman. So I behaved like one and started on the facts and figures. 'Furthermore,' I added finally, 'forty-knot winds won't hold me back. Nor will snow.'

They looked at one another. Herschel said, 'Two and a half thousand total payload, right?'

'Yes. Two thousand for the generator. Two hundred more for me and all the heavy clothing. There's room,' I said, 'for just one more inside. Ting, ting.'

Cohen and Herschel looked at me in puzzlement. 'English joke,' I said. 'Not very good. But the TK4's not an English joke, and she's very good indeed.'

They weren't used to light, fast machinery up there. Herschel had told me that Barney Smales believed in masses of steel and lots of power and so, basically, did all of them, probably rightly. The principle of meeting powerful onslaughts with powerful resistance is obvious sense, and the theory that says if you put a flyweight in the ring with a heavyweight, he may run away successfully for a while, but sooner or later, he'll be flattened, is also correct, almost all the time. But I was confident in the TK4. The run down to Belvoir had been so efficient that I had very little doubt of her ability to cruise back again in the right conditions. All I needed was a weather slot, about three hours long, and finally we got it. The decision to take the generator meant, of course, that other things must be left behind. Three, in fact: two human and one neoprene, and the final decision was not made by us, or by Cohen, but by Barney Smales on the radio from Hundred. The radio contact was a lot worse now. The signal quality seemed to bear no relation to weather conditions. During the worst of the storm, they'd come over sharp and clear, yet when the weather was easing, the contact was weak and loaded with mush. Still, it was enough for us to hear. At Hundred the short length of neoprene had been cleaned, more or less satisfactorily, and would suffice. But the diesel fitters, striving to cannibalize two unsatisfactory machines and assemble one good one, were having a very hard time. Barney wanted the generator. 'And George Herschel,' he said.

'Foster and Scott can wait at Belvoir.'

'Sorry,' I said. 'I'm bringing Scott.'

There was a pause. Then he said flatly, 'Bring Herschel, Mi Bowes. That's an order.'

'Which I'm disobeying,' I said. 'I want an experienced driver's eyes. I don't want to wander off the Trail. I'm bringing Scott or I'm not coming.'

He didn't like it. From that moment, I rather think he didn't like anything I did, but he was wrong and T, fortunately, wasn't in his army. Cohen and Herschel didn't like it very much, either, but they had the sense, and the grace, to accept my reasons. What they didn't like was my deliberate disobedience of direct orders.

Thule Air Base had done their best with the weather forecast. The weather observation aircraft patrolling the Eastern Greenland coast and the satellite weather survey both suggested there were a few hours ahead in which winds would slacken and the weight of snowfall lessen. So off we went. The brief daylight was over, the night black and moonless, the wind getting stronger as TK4 made the long climb out of Belvoir, up to the edge of the icecap. I stuck the two front skis down to counter any awkward gusts, warmed up the motors, and we belted off into the brutal darkness. If I have sounded overconfident, even a little flip, about the TK4's performance to this point, it's not because I'm a wild optimist or full of blind faith; it's because the TK4 is a damn good machine, beautifully designed, well built and thoroughly tested and modified until she's as good as we can get her. In spite of all that, I faced the hundred-mile dash across the icecap in a very sober mood indeed. Having spent a lifetime working with machines, I know very well that mankind hasn't yet succeeded in building one that won't break down, whether it's an electric toothbrush or a Rolls-Royce car. A good watch is probably the most reliable thing there is, but for all the dustproof, waterproof casings, the jewelled movements, the technical refinement, every watch can stop, and sooner or later it does. So, sooner or later, would the TK4, but not, I prayed, within the next hundred miles, or on the icecap with me or anybody else aboard. What happened was, I suppose, testimony to the power of prayer. We'd just passed the Mile Fifty marker, after about two hours on the Trail, when I found my vision disintegrating into a mass of little flickering lights, lightning-shaped, migraine-style. I told Scott about it and he made me stop and let the engines idle. When I'd done that, he had me lie back in my seat, head dangling over the seat back.

'Now,' he said, 'just close your eyes and concentrate on looking into your head. Try to see the inside of your skull.' I obeyed meekly. It didn't seem to be doing any good, though. Then I heard a lighter scrape beside me and smelt smoke, and a cigarette was placed between my lips. 'Smoke it,' Scott said. 'Don't let your eyes move till it's finished.'

So I smoked, and tried to imagine the inside of my head, and felt my eye muscles begin to ache. When I could feel the cigarette's heat on my fingers, Scott said, 'Okay. Now try opening your eyes.'

I did, and raised my head, and promptly felt dizzy. But when the dizziness cleared, after a couple of rather sickening minutes, my vision was clear, too.

'Thanks,' I said. 'Who thought that one up?'

'Folklore,' Scott said. 'Handed down driver to driver through the long, long generations. Sure works, though.'

'It sure does,' I said. And we were off again as soon as I'd retracted the TK4's feet. Five miles later we went past the Swing like a bee buzzing past a beetle, exchanging headlight greetings, but not stopping. The wind got up a bit more, and for the last twenty miles the TK4 took rather more holding straight. We veered a bit, but no more than we might driving on an exposed road in strong winds, and then the marker flags ceased to flow at us in a straight line, and guided us round the approach into Camp Hundred. The trip had taken three hours twenty minutes, including the stop for impromptu eye treatment, and I was feeling pleased with myself, the TK4 and the world in general.

But I was also tired after all the concentration, and not particularly anxious to meet Smales that night. As soon as the TK4 was safely parked in the traction shed, I left the unloading of the portable generator in Reilly's big and capable hands and went off to bed where, despite the pail of weariness that hung over my mind, or perhaps because of it, I couldn't get to sleep and lay in the darkness, while the sheets gradually wrinkled themselves and imaginary corrugations developed in the mattress and I became progressively more uncomfortable. Finally, I switched on the light and lit a cigarette, and reached for the novel I'd started a few days earlier. I read for perhaps an hour, not taking in anything much, but forcing myself to keep going until, with my eyelids feeling like heavy steel shutters just waiting to clang down, I put out the last cigarette, stopped resisting gravity, let my eyes close and drifted off. I must have been down very deep because, though I was coughing, it didn't waken me, at any rate not immediately. When I did click into consciousness I was really coughing hard, almost choking and feeling dizzy, and there was an acrid smell of fumes in the air. I reached for the light switch, turned it on, but there was no light. A glance at the luminous hands of my watch told me it was 3 a.m., but that luminosity was all I could see. Meanwhile there was fire somewhere, though I could see no flame, and since the hut was wooden, I'd better get out of it quick. I began to fumble round in the dark, between cough spasms, trying to find the clothes I'd thrown round when I went to bed, and found some, but not all; in particular, I couldn't find trousers, and the thought of going out into the icy tunnels without them, fire or no fire, smoke or no smoke, wasn't attractive. Then my hand struck my book of matches, knocking them, naturally, to the floor, where I had to get down on my hands and knees and feel across the shiny linoleum for them. If anything I was coughing even harder, gasping for breath and beginning to feel woozy, and I broke two of the three remaining matches before I got the third one lit. By its light I saw smoke hanging in the air, but I'd known that it was there and I wasted no time looking at it, and concentrated instead on finding my trousers, socks and boots. Then I dressed hurriedly and with increasing difficulty, not bothering overmuch with buttons, zips or snap fasteners, because my head felt light and seemed ready to float away from me and it was as much as I could do to dress at all. When I tried to walk I lurched and fell and was violently sick, gasping and retching as I lay on the floor. I knew I was close to passing out, and what was worse, I'd lost all sense of direction. There were four walls in the room and I didn't know which held the door. My arms and legs were like collapsing balloons, my head was hardly there at all, and where the willpower came from, I don't know, but somehow I forced myself up on to my knees, felt for the edge of the bed, got some idea of my bearings, and set off across a million miles of linoleum for the door. About half-way, I thought I was going to pass out in the middle of the floor and die, and I remember that I no longer even cared. But then my knee landed on something pointed, a nail head sticking up through the linoleum, and the sudden sharp pain refocused my senses long enough to get me to the door, to find the handle, to turn it...

The handle turned, but the door did not move. I remember the dim hopelessness of the moment, hearing a weird distorted voice mumble the word 'locked', then another racking cough spasm that doubled me over . . , and suddenly the door was open and I was tumbling forward, somersaulting from the two-step-high level of the hut floor to the granulated ice crystals in the trench. There was precious little breath in my body, but the fall knocked what there was out of me, and I may or may not have blacked out for a second or two. Then I was gasping and coughing, lying among all that crystalline ice, but feeling cold air flood into my aching lungs. With my mind clearing, I realized why the door had appeared to be locked. It was because the Americans made doors that opened outwards, not inwards in the British fashion. Gradually I began to feel better. Not much better, but a little. My head ached fiercely, my lungs and stomach felt like half-perished rubber and the same rubbery, chemical flavour lay thickly in my mouth.

Also I was still in darkness. I sat up and got a whiff of smoke that made me cough again. Since the smoke must be coming from inside the hut, I must close the door. Getting to my feet started another spasm of giddiness and I sat down heavily, waited a few moments, breathing cautiously, then tried again. This time there was less giddiness; I swayed, but remained upright. After a minute or so, I stretched my arms out in front of me and began trying to feel my way towards something that would give me a basis for orientation. The snow wall didn't, and it was the first thing I encountered. Damn! The next was the other snow wall. I stood in the black cold, trying to decide whether the hut lay to left or right. It could only be feet away, in any case. Then I found it, sniffed smoke, reached the door and swung it to. With the door at my back, I knew I faced the entrance to the trench and had set off carefully towards it when the thought came that there could be others asleep in other rooms in the hut, who perhaps had not awakened and were even now in process of being suffocated by smoke. But Herschel had the other room in my hut, and beyond that lay a little rest room cum office. With Herschel still at Belvoir, the hut was therefore empty. That was a relief. But what about the other hut, towards the far end of the trench? I vaguely remembered that was empty too. A fair amount of the sleeping accommodation was empty, this late in the year, when most of the summer visitors had returned south. In any case, it was clear enough that whatever was burning was in my hut, not the other, and that the best course of action was to get out of the trench and raise the alarm.

I stumbled over my unfastened bootlaces, swore, and moved slowly forward again. The stumble must have thrown me slightly off course, because instead of reaching the door directly, I came first to the corner of the ice wall and had to work my way by touch.

Why was I in darkness anyway?

Then an icy little thought struck me. The door wasn't normally closed. I should have been able to see the lights of Main Street outside! I shouldn't be in darkness at all! I remembered the generator trouble, and thought that perhaps the lights were off as a precaution, and it was the middle of the night, with nobody moving about.

All the same, when my fumbling fingers found the door, it was locked. For long minutes, I attacked that damned door. I tried to pull it, to push it; I swung my weight against it, hauled on the handle as hard as I could. I shouted, screamed and kicked, with no result at all, except that I became hoarse with shouting and my fists grew sore with banging. Nobody heard me. There would be nobody to hear me, not at that hour when almost everybody at Camp Hundred would be soundly asleep and those who weren't, the men on duty, would be warm inside their various huts and staying there. I looked at my watch, grateful for the little points of luminosity, and discovered it was three-twenty, twenty minutes since I had awakened, and with more than three hours to go before I could reasonably expect some passer-by to hear me. And by God, but it was cold. My clothes weren't properly fastened either, which didn't help; there were plenty of little places where the chill air was getting at my unprotected skin, and though in the tunnel that was scarcely dangerous, it was most certainly damned uncomfortable. I spent the next few minutes putting myself in some sort of order, straightening wrinkles and tucking myself in, while I thought about the smoke and where it had come from. The obvious source was a fire somewhere in my part of the hut, but no fire had been visible. There was no red glow, no pinpoint of flickering light to suggest burning, and surely in twenty minutes a fire in a wooden hut would have spread? Or perhaps gone out? Yes, that was more likely. Certainly I was going to get very cold and uncomfortable standing where I was for three hours and more. I made my way back to the hut, more confident now in the dark, found the doorknob and opened it. My nostrils told me instantly that the place was still full of fumes and the small whiff I got set me coughing again. My lungs felt bruised, as though somebody had stamped on them, and I closed the door quickly. I couldn't use the hut, that was certain. I'd had a faint, crazy idea that if I could see what was burning I could perhaps dash in and pull it out to the trench, but that was certainly impossible. I felt my way along the side of the hut to the second wooden building, deeper in the trench. That was also a dormitory hut and the two weren't connected so there should be no fumes, and there ought to be beds in there, even if there were no blankets.

But even before I reached it, I'd changed my mind. If I'd been thinking with reasonable clarity, the idea of going into the other hut for the night ought to have been rejected, because both sense and duty told me that any kind of fire in Camp Hundred, even one I couldn't see, was a matter of importance and potential danger. And, anyway, when I did find the door of the second hut, it was locked. I'd been hiding away from the thought, but now there was no alternative. It was clear what I must do. All too clear. Clear and frightening. Because the only way out of that trench was through the escape hatch, up on to the icecap.