Ice Station Zebra Read online

  I felt my ears pop with the sudden pressure change as the hatch swung up and open and snapped back against its standing latch. Another more distant sound as the second hatch-cover locked open and then we heard Ellis on the voice-tube.

  ‘All clear up top.’

  ‘Raise the antennae,’ Swanson said. ‘John, have them start transmitting and keep transmitting until their fingers fall off. Here we are and here we stay — until we raise Drift Ice Station Zebra.’

  ‘If there’s anyone left alive there,’ I said.

  ‘There’s that, of course,’ Swanson said. He couldn’t look at me. ‘There’s always that.’

  FOUR

  This, I thought, death’s dreadful conception of a dreadful world, must have been what had chilled the hearts and souls of our far-off Nordic ancestors when life’s last tide slowly ebbed and they had tortured their failing minds with fearful imaginings of a bleak and bitter hell of eternal cold. But it had been all right for the old boys, all they had to do was to imagine it, we had to experience the reality of it and I had no doubt at all in my mind as to which was the easier. The latter-day Eastern conception of hell was more comfortable altogether, at least a man could keep reasonably warm there.

  One thing sure, nobody could keep reasonably warm where Rawlings and I were, standing a half-hour watch on the bridge of the Dolphin and slowly freezing solid. It had been my own fault entirely that our teeth were chattering like frenzied castanets. Half an hour after the radio room had started transmitting on Drift Ice Station Zebra’s wavelength and all without the slightest whisper by way of reply or acknowledgment, I had suggested to Commander Swanson that Zebra might possibly be able to hear us without having sufficient power to send a reply but that they might just conceivably let us have an acknowledgment some other way. I’d pointed out that Drift Stations habitually carried rockets — the only way to guide home any lost members of the party if radio communication broke down — and radio-sondes and rockoons. The sondes were radio-carrying balloons which could rise to a height of twenty miles to gather weather information: the rockoons, radio rockets fired from balloons, could rise even higher. On a moonlit night such as this, those balloons, if released, would be visible at least twenty miles away: if flares were attached to them, at twice that distance. Swanson had seen my point, called for volunteers for the first watch and in the circumstances I hadn’t had much option. Rawlings had offered to accompany me.

  It was a landscape — if such a bleak, barren and featureless desolation could be called a landscape — from another and ancient world, weird and strange and oddly frightening. There were no clouds in the sky, but there were no stars either: this I could not understand. Low on the southern horizon a milky misty moon shed its mysterious light over the dark lifelessness of the polar icecap. Dark, not white. One would have expected moonlit ice to shine and sparkle and glitter with the light of a million crystal chandeliers — but it was dark. The moon was so low in the sky that the dominating colour on the ice-cap came from the blackness of the long shadows cast by the fantastically ridged and hummocked ice: and where the moon did strike directly the ice had been so scoured and abraded by the assaults of a thousand ice-storms that it had lost almost all its ability to reflect light of any kind.

  This ridged and hummocked ice-cap had a strange quality of elusiveness, of impermanence, of evanescence: one moment there, definitively hard and harsh and repellent in its coldly contrasting blacks and whites, the next, ghost-like, blurring, coalescing and finally vanishing like a shimmering mirage fading and dying in some icebound desert. But this was no trick of the eye or imagination, it was the result of a ground-level ice-storm that rose and swirled and subsided at the dictates of an icy wind that was never less than strong and sometimes gusted up to gale force, a wind that drove before it a swirling rushing fog of billions of needle-pointed ice-spicules. For the most part, standing as we were on the bridge twenty feet above the level of the ice — the rest of the Dolphin might never have existed as far as the eye could tell — we were above this billowing ground-swell of ice particles; but occasionally the wind gusted strongly, the spicules lifted, drummed demoniacally against the already ice-sheathed starboard side of the sail, drove against the few exposed inches of our skin with all the painfully stinging impact of a sand-blaster held at arm’s length: but unlike a sand-blaster, the pain-filled shock of those spear-tipped spicules was only momentary, each wasp-like sting carried with it its own ice-cold anaesthetic and all surface sensation was quickly lost. Then the wind would drop, the furious rattling on the sail would fade and in the momentary contrast of near-silence we could hear the stealthy rustling as of a million rats advancing as the ice-spicules brushed their blind way across the iron-hard surface of the polar cap. The bridge thermometer stood at -21° F. — 53° of frost. If I were a promoter interested in developing a summer holiday resort, I thought, I wouldn’t pay very much attention to this place.

  Rawlings and I stamped our feet, flailed our arms across our chests, shivered non-stop, took what little shelter we could from the canvas windbreak, rubbed our goggles constantly to keep them clear, and never once, except when the ice-spicules drove into our faces, stopped examining every quarter of the horizon. Somewhere out there on those frozen wastes was a lost and dying group of men whose lives might depend upon so little a thing as the momentary misting up of one of our goggles. We stared out over those shifting ice-sands until our eyes ached. But that was all we had for it, just aching eyes. We saw nothing, nothing at all. The ice-cap remained empty of all signs of life. Dead.

  When our relief came Rawlings and I got below with all the speed our frozen and stiffened limbs would allow. I found Commander Swanson sitting on a canvas stool outside the radio room. I stripped off outer clothes, face coverings and goggles, took a steaming mug of coffee that had appeared from nowhere and tried not to hop around too much as the blood came pounding back into arms and legs.

  ‘How did you cut yourself like that?’ Swanson asked, concern in his voice. ‘You’ve a half-inch streak of blood right across your forehead.’

  ‘Flying ice, it just looks bad.’ I felt tired and pretty low. ‘We’re wasting our time transmitting. If the men on Drift Station Zebra were without any shelter it’s no wonder all signals ceased long ago. Without food and shelter no one could last more than a few hours in that lot. Neither Rawlings nor I is a wilting hothouse flower but after half an hour up there we’ve both just about had it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Swanson said thoughtfully. ‘Look at Amundsen. Look at Scott, at Peary. They walked all the way to the Poles.’

  ‘A different breed of men, Captain. Either that or the sun shone for them. All I know is that half an hour is too long to be up there. Fifteen minutes is enough for anyone.’

  ‘Fifteen minutes it shall be.’ He looked at me, face carefully empty of all expression. ‘You haven’t much hope?’

  ‘If they’re without shelter, I’ve none.’

  ‘You told me they had an emergency power pack of Nife cells for powering their transmitter,’ he murmured. ‘You also said those batteries will retain their charge indefinitely, years if necessary, irrespective of the weather conditions under which they are stored. They must have been using that battery a few days ago when they sent out their first S O S. It wouldn’t be finished already.’

  His point was so obvious that I didn’t answer. The battery wasn’t finished: the men were.

  ‘I agree with you,’ he went on quietly. ‘We’re wasting our time. Maybe we should just pack up and go home. If we can’t raise them, we’ll never find them.’

  ‘Maybe not. But you’re forgetting your directive from Washington, Commander.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Remember? I’m to be extended every facility and all aid short of actually endangering the safety of the submarine and the lives of the crew. At the present moment we’re doing neither. If we fail to raise them I’m prepared for a twenty-mile sweep on foot round this spot in the hope of
locating them. If that fails we could move to another polynya and repeat the search. The search area isn’t all that big, there’s a fair chance, but a chance, that we might locate the station eventually. I’m prepared to stay up here all winter till we do find them.’

  ‘You don’t call that endangering the lives of my men? Making extended searches of the ice-cap, on foot, in midwinter?’

  ‘Nobody said anything about endangering the lives of your men.’

  ‘You mean — you mean you’d go it alone.’ Swanson stared down at the deck and shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to think. I don’t know whether to say you’re crazy or whether to say I’m beginning to understand why they — whoever “they” may be — picked you for the job, Dr Carpenter.’ He sighed, then regarded me thoughtfully. ‘One moment you say there’s no hope, the next that you’re prepared to spend the winter here, searching. If you don’t mind my saying so, Doctor, it just doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Stiff-necked pride,’ I said. ‘I don’t like throwing my hand in on a job before I’ve even started it. I don’t know what the attitude of the United States Navy is on that sort of thing.’

  He gave me another speculative glance, I could see he believed me the way a fly believes the spider on the web who has just offered him safe accommodation for the night. He smiled. He said: ‘The United States Navy doesn’t take offence all that easily, Dr Carpenter. I suggest you catch a couple of hours’ sleep while you can. You’ll need it all if you’re going to start walking towards the North Pole.’

  ‘How about yourself? You haven’t been to bed at all to-night.’

  ‘I think I’ll wait a bit.’ He nodded towards the door of the radio room. ‘Just in case anything comes through.’

  ‘What are they sending? Just the call sign?’

  ‘Plus request for position and a rocket, if they have either. I’ll let you know immediately anything comes through. Good night, Dr Carpenter. Or rather, good morning.’

  I rose heavily and made my way to Hansen’s cabin.

  The atmosphere round the 8 a.m. breakfast table in the wardroom was less than festive. Apart from the officer on deck and the engineer lieutenant on watch, all the Dolphin’s officers were there, some just risen from their bunks, some just heading for them, none of them talking in anything more than monosyllables. Even the ebullient Dr Benson was remote and withdrawn. It seemed pointless to ask whether any contact had been established with Drift Station Zebra, it was painfully obvious that it hadn’t. And that after almost five hours’ continuous sending. The sense of despondency and defeat, the unspoken knowledge that time had run out for the survivors of Drift Station Zebra hung heavy over the wardroom.

  No one hurried over his meal — there was nothing to hurry for — but by and by they rose one by one and drifted off, Dr Benson to his sickbay call, the young torpedo officer, Lieutenant Mills, to supervise the efforts of his men who had been working twelve hours a day for the past two days to iron out the faults in the suspect torpedoes, a third to relieve Hansen, who had the watch, and three others to their bunks. That left only Swanson, Raeburn and myself. Swanson, I knew, hadn’t been to bed at all the previous night, but for all that he had the rested clear-eyed look of a man with eight solid hours behind him.

  The steward, Henry, had just brought in a fresh pot of coffee when we heard the sound of running footsteps in the passageway outside and the quartermaster burst into the wardroom. He didn’t quite manage to take the door off its hinges, but that was only because the Electric Boat Company put good solid hinges on the doors of their submarines.

  ‘We got it made!’ he shouted, and then perhaps recollecting that enlisted men were expected to conduct themselves with rather more decorum in the wardroom, went on: ‘We’ve raised them, Captain, we’ve raised them!’

  ‘What!’ Swanson could move twice as fast as his comfortable figure suggested and he was already half-out of his chair.

  ‘We are in radio contact with Drift Ice Station Zebra, sir,’ Ellis said formally.

  Commander Swanson got to the radio room first, but only because he had a head start on Raeburn and myself. Two operators were on watch, both leaning forward towards their transmitters, one with his head bent low, the other with his cocked to one side, as if those attitudes of concentrated listening helped them to isolate and amplify the slightest sounds coming through the earphones clamped to their heads. One of them was scribbling away mechanically on a signal pad. DSY, he was writing down, DSY repeated over and over again, DSY. The answering call-sign of Drift Station Zebra. He stopped writing as he caught sight of Swanson out of the corner of one eye.

  ‘We’ve got ‘em, Captain, no question. Signal very weak and intermittent but —’

  ‘Never mind the signal!’ It was Raeburn who made this interruption without any by-your-leave from Swanson. He tried, and failed, to keep the rising note of excitement out of his voice and he looked more than ever like a youngster playing hookey from high school. ‘The bearing? Have you got their bearing? That’s all that matters.’

  The other operator swivelled in his seat and I recognised my erstwhile guard, Zabrinski. He fixed Raeburn with a sad and reproachful eye.

  ‘Course we got their bearing, Lieutenant. First thing we did. O-forty-five, give or take a whisker. North-east, that is.’

  ‘Thank you, Zabrinski,’ Swanson said dryly. ‘O-forty-five is north-east. The navigating officer and I wouldn’t have known. Position?’

  Zabrinski shrugged and turned to his watch-mate, a man with a red face, leather neck and a shining polished dome where his hair ought to have been. ‘What’s the word, Curly?’

  ‘Nothing. Just nothing.’ Curly looked at Swanson. ‘Twenty times I’ve asked for his position. No good. All he does is send out his call-sign. I don’t think he’s hearing us at all, he doesn’t even know we’re listening, he just keeps sending his call-sign over and over again. Maybe he hasn’t switched his aerial in to “receive”.’

  ‘It isn’t possible,’ Swanson said.

  ‘It is with this guy,’ Zabrinski said. ‘At first Curly and I thought that it was the signal that was weak, then we thought it was the operator who was weak or sick, but we were wrong, he’s just a ham-handed amateur.’

  ‘You can tell?’ Swanson asked.

  ‘You can always tell. You can —’ He broke off, stiffened and touched his watchmate’s arm.

  Curly nodded. ‘I got it,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Position unknown, the man says.’

  Nobody said anything, not just then. It didn’t seem important that he couldn’t give us his position, all that mattered was that we were in direct contact. Raeburn turned and ran forward across the control room. I could hear him speak rapidly on the bridge telephone. Swanson turned to me.

  ‘Those balloons you spoke of earlier. The ones on Zebra. Are they free or captive?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘How do the captive ones work?’

  ‘A free-running winch, nylon cord marked off in hundreds and thousands of feet.’

  ‘We’ll ask them to send a captive balloon up to 5,000 feet,’ Swanson decided. ‘With flares. If they’re within thirty or forty miles we ought to see it, and if we get its elevation and make an allowance for the effect of wind on it, we should get a fair estimate of distance . . . What is it, Brown?’ This to the man Zabrinski called ‘Curly’.

  ‘They’re sending again,’ Curly said. ‘Very broken, fades a lot. “God’s sake, hurry.” Just like that, twice over. “God’s sake hurry.”’

  ‘Send this,’ Swanson said. He dictated a brief message about the balloons. ‘And send it real slow.’

  Curly nodded and began to transmit. Raeburn came running back into the radio room.

  ‘The moon’s not down yet,’ he said quickly to Swanson. ‘Still a degree or two above the horizon. I’m taking a sextant up top and taking a moon-sight. Ask them to do the same. That’ll give us the latitude difference and if we know they’re o-forty-five of us we can pin them down to a mil
e.’

  ‘It’s worth trying,’ Swanson said. He dictated another message to Brown. Brown transmitted the second message immediately after the first. We waited for the answer. For all of ten minutes we waited. I looked at the men in the radio room, they all had the same remote withdrawn look of men who are there only physically, men whose minds are many miles away. They were all at the same place and I was too, wherever Drift Ice Station Zebra was.

  Brown started writing again, not for long. His voice this time was still matter-of-fact, but with overtones of emptiness. He said: ‘“All balloons burnt. No moon.”’

  ‘No moon.’ Raeburn couldn’t hide the bitterness, the sharpness of his disappointment. ‘Damn! Must be pretty heavy overcast up there. Or a bad storm.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t get local weather variations like that on the ice-cap. The conditions will be the same over 50,000 square miles. The moon is down. For them, the moon is down. Their latest estimated position must have been pure guesswork, and bad guesswork at that. They must be at least a hundred miles farther north and east than we had thought.’

  ‘Ask them if they have any rockets,’ Swanson said to Brown.

  ‘You can try,’ I said. ‘It’ll be a waste of time. If they are as far off as I think, their rockets would never get above our horizon. Even if they did, we wouldn’t see them.’

  ‘It’s always a chance, isn’t it?’ Swanson asked.

  ‘Beginning to lose contact, sir,’ Brown reported. ‘Something there about food but it faded right out.’

  ‘Tell them if they have any rockets to fire them at once,’ Swanson said. ‘Quickly, now, before you lose contact.’

  Four times in all Brown sent the message before he managed to pick up a reply. Then he said: ‘Message reads: “Two minutes.” Either this guy is pretty far through or his transmitter batteries are. That’s all. “Two minutes,” he said.’