Ice Station Zebra Read online

  ‘Can it be repaired?’ Hansen insisted.

  ‘It’s a transistor set. No valves to smash. I expect it could be repaired. But it might take hours, Lieutenant — I’d even have to fake up a set of tools first.’

  ‘Well, fake them. Anything you like. Only get that thing working.’

  Zabrinski said nothing. He held out the headphones to Hansen. Hansen looked at Zabrinski, then at the phones, took them without a word and listened briefly. Then he shrugged, handed back the phones and said: ‘Well, I guess there is no hurry to repair that radio.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Zabrinski said. ‘Awkward, you might say, Lieutenant.’

  ‘What’s awkward?’ I asked.

  ‘Looks as if we’re going to be next on the list for a rescue party,’ Hansen said heavily. ‘They’re sending a more or less continuous signal: “Ice closing rapidly, return at once.”’

  ‘I was against this madness from the very beginning,’ Rawlings intoned from the floor. He stared down at the already melting lumps of frozen tinned soup and stirred it moodily with a fork. ‘A gallant attempt, men, but foredoomed to failure.’

  ‘Keep your filthy fingers out of that soup and kindly clam up,’ Hansen said coldly. He turned suddenly to Kinnaird. ‘How about your radio set? Of course, that’s it. We have fit men here to crank your generator and -’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Kinnaird smiled the way a ghost might smile. ‘It’s not a hand-powered generator, that was destroyed, it’s a battery set. The batteries are finished. Completely finished.’

  ‘A battery set, you said?’ Zabrinski looked at him in mild surprise. ‘Then what caused all the power fluctuations when you were transmitting?’

  ‘We kept changing over the nickel cadmium cells to try to make the most of what little power was left in them: we’d only fifteen left altogether, most of them were lost in the fire. That caused the power fluctuations. But even Nife cells don’t last for ever. They’re finished, mate. The combined power left in those cells wouldn’t light a pencil torch.’

  Zabrinski didn’t say anything. No one said anything. The ice-spicules drummed incessantly against the east wall, the Coleman hissed, the solid-fuel stove purred softly: but the sole effect of those three sounds was to make the silence inside seem that little bit more absolute. No one looked at his neighbours, everyone stared down at the floor with the fixed and steadfast gaze of an entomologist hunting for traces of woodworm. Any newspaper printing a picture taken at that instant wouldn’t have found it any too easy to convince its readers that the men on Drift Ice Station Zebra had been rescued just ten minutes previously, and rescued from certain death at that. The readers would have pointed out that one might have expected a little more jubilation in the atmosphere, a touch, perhaps, of lighthearted relief, and they wouldn’t have been far wrong at that, there wasn’t very much gaiety around.

  After the silence had gone on just that little too long I said to Hansen: ‘Well, that’s it, then. We don’t have to hire any electronic computer to work this one out. Someone’s got to get back to the Dolphin and get back there now. I’m nominating myself.’

  ‘No!’ Hansen said violently, then more quietly: ‘Sorry, friend, but the skipper’s orders didn’t include giving permission to anyone to commit suicide. You’re staying here.’

  ‘So I stay here,’ I nodded. This wasn’t the time to tell him I didn’t need his permission for anything, far less was it the time to start flourishing the Mannlicher-Schoenauer. ‘So we all stay here. And then we all die here. Quietly, without any fighting, without any fuss, we just lie down and die here. I suppose you reckon that comes under the heading of inspiring leadership. Amundsen would have loved that.’ It wasn’t fair, but then I wasn’t feeling fair-minded at the moment.

  ‘Nobody’s going any place,’ Hansen said. ‘I’m not my brother’s keeper, Doc, but for all that I’ll be damned if I let you kill yourself. You’re not fit, none of us is fit to make the return trip to the Dolphin — not after what we’ve just been through. That’s one thing. The next thing is that without a transmitter from which the Dolphin can pick up our directional bearings, we could never hope to find the Dolphin again. The third thing is that the closing ice will probably have forced the Dolphin to drop down before anyone could get halfway there. And the last thing is that if we failed to find the Dolphin either because we missed her or because she was gone, we could never make our way back to Zebra again: we wouldn’t have the strength and we would have nothing to guide us back anyway.’

  ‘The odds offered aren’t all that attractive,’ I admitted. ‘What odds are you offering on the ice-machine being repaired?’

  Hansen shook his head, said nothing. Rawlings started stirring his soup again, carefully not looking up, he didn’t want to meet the anxious eyes, the desperate eyes, in that circle of haggard and frost-bitten faces any more than I did. But he looked up as Captain Folsom pushed himself away from the support of a wall and took a couple of unsteady steps towards us. It didn’t require any stethoscope to see that Folsom was in a pretty bad way.

  ‘I am afraid that we don’t understand,’ he said. His voice was slurred and indistinct, the puffed and twisted lips had been immobilised by the savage charring of his face: I wondered bleakly how many months of pain would elapse, how many visits to the surgeon’s table, before Folsom could show that face to the world again. In the very remote event, that was, of our ever getting him to hospital. ‘Would you please explain? What is the difficulty?’

  ‘Simply this,’ I said. ‘The Dolphin has an ice fathometer, a device for measuring the thickness of the overhead ice. Normally, even if Commander Swanson — the captain of the Dolphin — didn’t hear from us, we could expect him on our doorstep in a matter of hours. He has the position of this Drift Station pinned down pretty closely. All he would have to do is to drop down, come under us here, start a grid search with his ice fathometer and it would be only minutes before he would locate the relatively thin ice out in that lead there. But things aren’t normal. The ice-machine has broken down and if it stays that way he’ll never find that lead. That’s why I want to go back there. Now. Before Swanson’s forced to dive by the closing ice.’

  ‘Don’t see it, old boy,’ Jolly said. ‘How’s that going to help? Can you fix this ice what-you-may-call-it?’

  ‘I don’t have to. Commander Swanson knows his distance from this camp give or take a hundred yards. All I have to do is to tell him to cover the distance less quarter of a mile and loose off a torpedo. That ought -’

  ‘Torpedo?’ Jolly asked. ‘Torpedo? To break through the ice from beneath?’

  ‘That’s it. It’s never been tried before. I suppose there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work if the ice is thin enough and it won’t be all that thick in the lead out there. I don’t really know.’

  ‘They’ll be sending planes, you know, Doc,’ Zabrinski said quietly. ‘We started transmitting the news as soon as we broke through and everybody will know by now that Zebra has been found — at least, they’ll know exactly where it is. They’ll have the big bombers up here in a few hours.’

  ‘Doing what?’ I asked. ‘Sculling around uselessly in the darkness up above? Even if they do have the exact position, they still won’t be able to see what’s left of this station because of the darkness and the ice-storm. Perhaps they can with radar, it’s unlikely, but even if they do, what then? Drop supplies? Maybe. But they won’t dare drop supplies directly on us for fear of killing us. They’d have to drop them some distance off — and even a quarter-mile would be too far away for any chance we’d ever have of finding stuff in those conditions. As for landing — even if weather conditions were perfect, no plane big enough to have the range to fly here could ever hope to land on the ice-cap. You know that.’

  ‘What’s your middle name, Doc?’ Rawlings asked dolefully. ‘Jeremiah?’

  ‘The greatest good of the greatest number,’ I said. ‘The old yardstick, but there’s never been a better one. If we just hole up here without mak
ing any attempt to help ourselves and the ice-machine remains useless, then we’re all dead. All sixteen of us. If I make it there safely, then we’re all alive. Even if I don’t, the ice-machine may be fixed and there would only be one lost then.’ I started pulling on my mittens. ‘One is less than sixteen.’

  ‘We might as well make it two,’ Hansen sighed and began to pull on his own gloves. I was hardly surprised, when he’d last spoken he’d talked at first of ‘you’ having no chance and finished by saying that ‘we’ had none and it hadn’t required any psychiatrist to follow his quick shift in mental orientation: whatever men like Hansen were hand-picked for, it wasn’t for any predilection for shifting the load to others’ shoulders when the going became sticky.

  I didn’t waste time arguing with him.

  Rawlings got to his feet.

  ‘One skilled volunteer for the soup-stirring,’ he requested. ‘Those two wouldn’t get as far as the door there without my holding their hands. I shall probably get a medal for this. What’s the highest decoration awarded in peace-time, Lieutenant?’

  ‘There are no medals given for soup-stirring, Rawlings,’ Hansen said, ‘which is what you are going to keep on doing. You’re staying right here.’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Rawlings shook his head. ‘Prepare yourself to deal with your first mutiny, Lieutenant. I’m coming with you. I can’t lose. If we get to the Dolphin you’ll be too damned glad and happy to have made it to dream of reporting me, apart from being a fair-minded man who will have to admit that our safe arrival back at the ship will be entirely due to Torpedoman Rawlings.’ He grinned. ‘And if we don’t make it — well, you can’t very well report it, can you, Lieutenant?’

  Hansen walked across to him. He said quietly: ‘You know that there’s more than an even chance that we won’t reach the Dolphin. That would leave twelve pretty sick men here, not to mention Zabrinski with a broken ankle, and with no one to look after them. They must have one fit man to look after them. You couldn’t be that selfish, now, could you, Rawlings? Look after them, will you? As a favour to me?’

  Rawlings looked at him for long seconds, then squatted down and started stirring the soup again.

  ‘As a favour to me, you mean,’ he said bitterly. ‘O.K., I’ll stay. As a favour to me. Also to prevent Zabrinski tripping over his legs again and breaking another ankle.’ He stirred the soup viciously. ‘Well, what are you waiting for? The skipper may be making up his mind to dive any minute.’

  He had a point. We brushed off protests and attempts to stop us made by Captain Folsom and Dr Jolly and were ready to leave in thirty seconds. Hansen was through the door first. I turned and looked at the sick and emaciated and injured survivors of Drift Station Zebra. Folsom, Jolly, Kinnaird, Hewson, Naseby and seven others. Twelve men altogether. They couldn’t all be in cahoots together, so it had to be a single man, maybe two, acting in concert. I wondered who those men might be, those men I would have to kill, that person or persons who had murdered my brother and six other men on Drift Ice Station Zebra.

  I pulled the door to behind me and followed Hansen out into the dreadful night.

  SIX

  We had been tired, more than tired, even before we had set out. We had been leaden-legged, bone-weary, no more than a short hand-span from total exhaustion. But for all that we flitted through the howling darkness of that night like two great white ghosts across the dimly seen whiteness of a nightmare lunar landscape. We were no longer bowed under the weight of heavy packs. Our backs were to that gale-force wind so that for every laborious plodding step we had made on our way to Zebra, we now covered five, with so little a fraction of our earlier toil that at first it seemed all but effortless. We had no trouble in seeing where we were going, no fear of falling into an open lead or of crippling ourselves against some unexpected obstacle, for with our useless goggles removed and powerful torch beams dancing erratically ahead of us as we jog-trotted along, visibility was seldom less than five yards, more often near to ten. Those were the physical aids that helped us on our way but even more sharply powerful as a spur to our aching legs was that keen and ever-growing fear that dominated our minds to the exclusion of all else, the fear that Commander Swanson had already been compelled to drop down and that we would be left to die in that shrieking wasteland: with our lacking both shelter and food, the old man with the scythe would not be keeping us waiting too long.

  We ran, but we did not run too fast, for to have done that would have been to have the old man tapping us on the shoulder in very short order indeed. In far sub-zero temperatures, there is one thing that the Eskimo avoids as he would the plague — over-exertion, in those latitudes more deadly, even, than the plague itself. Too much physical effort while wearing heavy furs inevitably results in sweat, and when the effort ceases, as eventually cease it must, the sweat freezes on the skin: the only way to destroy that film of ice is by further exertion, producing even more sweat, the beginnings of a vicious and steadily narrowing circle that can have only one end. So though we ran it was only at a gentle jog-trot, hardly more than a fast walk: we took every possible precaution against overheating.

  After half an hour, perhaps a little more, I called for a brief halt in the shelter of a steep ice-wall. Twice in the past two minutes Hansen had stumbled and fallen where there hadn’t appeared to be any reason to stumble and fall: and I had noticed that my own legs were more unsteady than the terrain warranted.

  ‘How are you making out?’ I asked.

  ‘Pretty bushed, Doc.’ He sounded it, too, his breathing quick and rasping and shallow. ‘But don’t write me off yet. How far do you reckon we’ve come?’

  ‘Three miles, near enough.’ I patted the ice-wall behind us. ‘When we’ve had a couple of minutes I think we should try climbing this. Looks like a pretty tallish hummock to me.’

  ‘To try to get into the clear above the ice-storm?’ I nodded my head and he shook his. ‘Won’t do you any good, Doc. This ice-storm must be at least twenty feet thick, and even if you do get above it the Dolphin will still be below it. She’s only got the top of her sail clear above the ice.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said. ‘We’ve been so lost in our own woes and sorrows that we have forgotten about Commander Swanson. I think we have been guilty of underestimating him pretty badly.’

  ‘It’s likely enough. Right now I’m having a full-time job worrying about Lieutenant Hansen. What’s on your mind?’

  ‘Just this. The chances are better than fifty-fifty that Swanson believes we are on the way back to the Dolphin. After all, he’s been ordering us to return for quite some time; and if he thinks we didn’t get the order because something has happened to us or to the radio, he’ll still figure that we will be returning.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Radio or not, we might still be pushing on for Drift Station Zebra.’

  ‘No. Definitely not. He’ll be expecting us to be smart enough to figure it the way he would; and smart enough to see that that is the way he would figure it. He would know that if our radio broke down before we got to Zebra that it would be suicidal for us to try to find it without radio bearing — but that it wouldn’t be suicidal for us to try to make it back to the Dolphin, for he would be hoping that we would have sufficient savvy to guess that he would put a lamp in the window to guide the lost sheep home.’

  ‘My God, Doc, I believe you’ve got it! Of course he would, of course he would. Lordy, lordy, what am I using for brains?’ He straightened and turned to face the ice-wall.

  Pushing and pulling, we made it together to the top. The summit of the rafted ice hummock was less than twenty feet above the level of the icepack and not quite high enough. We were still below the surface of that gale-driven river of ice-spicules. Occasionally, for a brief moment of time, the wind force would ease fractionally and let us have a brief glimpse of the clear sky above but only occasionally and for a fraction of a second. And if there was anything to be seen in that time, we couldn’t see it.

  ‘There’ll be other
hummocks,’ I shouted in Hansen’s ear. ‘Higher hummocks.’ He nodded without answering. I couldn’t see the expression on his face but I didn’t have to see it. The same thought was in both our minds: we could see nothing because there was nothing to see. Commander Swanson hadn’t put a lamp in the window, for the window was gone, the Dolphin forced to dive to avoid being crushed by the ice.

  Five times in the next twenty minutes we climbed hummocks, and five times we climbed down, each time more dejected, more defeated. By now I was pretty far gone, moving in a pain-filled nightmare: Hansen was in even worse case, lurching and staggering around like a drunken man. As a doctor, I knew well of the hidden and unsuspected resources that an exhausted man can call on in times of desperate emergency; but I knew, too, that those resources are not limitless and that we were pretty close to the end. And when that end came we would just lie down in the lee of an ice-wall and wait for the old man to come along: he wouldn’t keep us waiting long.

  Our sixth hummock all but defeated us. It wasn’t that it was hard to climb, it was well ridged with foot-and handholds in plenty, but the sheer physical effort of climbing came very close to defeating us. And then I dimly began to realise that part of the effort was due to the fact that this was by far the highest hummock we had found yet. Some colossal pressures had concentrated on this one spot, rafting and log-jamming the ice-pack until it had risen a clear thirty feet above the general level: the giant underwater ridge beneath must have stretched down close on two hundred feet towards the black floor of the Arctic.

  Eight feet below the summit our heads were in the clear: on the summit itself, holding on to each other for mutual support against the gale, we could look down on the ice-storm whirling by just beneath our feet: a fantastic sight, a great grey-white sea of undulating turbulence, a giant rushing river that stretched from horizon to horizon. Like so much else in the high Arctic the scene had an eerie and terrifying strangeness about it, a mindless desolation that belonged not to earth but to some alien and long-dead planet.