Ice Station Zebra
Page 23
Swanson, sharing Benson’s viewpoint on the crew’s over-sedentary mode of existence and taking advantage of the fine weather, had advised everyone not engaged in actual watch-keeping to take advantage of the opportunity offered to stretch their legs in the fresh air. It said much for Swanson’s powers of persuasion that by eleven that morning the Dolphin was practically deserted; and of course the crew, to whom Drift Ice Station Zebra was only so many words, were understandably curious to see the place, even the shell of the place, that had brought them to the top of the world.
I took my place at the end of the small queue being treated by Dr Jolly. It was close on noon before he got round to me. He was making light of his own burns and frostbite and was in tremendous form, bustling happily about the sick-bay as if it had been his own private domain for years.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘the pill-rolling competition wasn’t so fierce after all, was it? I’m damned glad there was a third doctor around. How are things on the medical front?’
‘Coming along not too badly, old boy,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Benson’s picking up very nicely, pulse, respiration, blood-pressure close to normal, level of unconsciousness very slight now, I should say. Captain Folsom’s still in considerable pain, but no actual danger, of course. The rest have improved a hundred per cent, little thanks to the medical fraternity: excellent food, warm beds and the knowledge that they’re safe have done them more good than anything we could ever do. Anyway, it’s done me a lot of good, by jove!’
‘And then some,’ I agreed. ‘All your friends except Folsom and the Harrington twins have followed most of the crew on to the ice and I’ll wager that if you had suggested to them forty-eight hours ago that they’d willingly go out there again in so short a time, they’d have called for a strait-jacket.’
‘The physical and mental recuperative power of homo sapiens,’ Jolly said jovially. ‘Beyond belief at times, old lad, beyond belief. Now, let’s have a look at that broken wing of yours.’
So he had a look, and because I was a colleague and therefore inured to human suffering he didn’t spend any too much time in molly-coddling me, but by hanging on to the arm of my chair and the shreds of my professional pride I kept the roof from falling in on me. When he was finished he said: ‘Well, that’s the lot, except for Brownell and Bolton, the two lads out on the ice.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ I said. ‘Commander Swanson is waiting pretty anxiously to hear what we have to say. He wants to get away from here as soon as possible.’
‘Me, too,’ Jolly said fervently. ‘But what’s the commander so anxious about?’
‘Ice. You never know the hour or minute it starts to close in. Want to spend the next year or two up here?’
Jolly grinned, thought over it for a bit, then stopped grinning. He said apprehensively: ‘How long are we going to be under this damned ice? Before we reach the open sea, I mean?’
‘Twenty-four hours, Swanson says. Don’t look so worried, Jolly. Believe me, it’s far safer under this stuff than among it.’
With a very unconvinced look on his face Jolly picked up his medical kit and led the way from the sick-bay. Swanson was waiting for us in the control room. We climbed up the hatches, dropped down over the side and walked over to the Drift Station.
Most of the crew had already made their way out there. We passed numbers of them on the way back and most of them looked grim or sick or both and didn’t even glance up as we passed. I didn’t have to guess why they looked as they did, they’d been opening doors that they should have left closed.
With the sharp rise in outside temperature and the effect of the big electric heaters having been burning there for twenty-four hours the bunkhouse hut was now, if anything, overheated, with the last traces of ice long vanished from walls and ceiling. One of the men, Brownell, had recovered consciousness and was sitting up, supported, and drinking soup provided by one of the two men who had been keeping watch over him.
‘Well,’ I said to Swanson, ‘here’s one ready to go —’
‘No doubt about that,’ Jolly said briskly. He bent over the other, Bolton, for some seconds, then straightened and shook his head. ‘A very sick man, Commander, very sick. I wouldn’t care to take the responsibility of moving him.
‘I might be forced to take the responsibility myself,’ Swanson said bluntly. ‘Let’s have another opinion on this.’ His tone and words, I thought, could have been more diplomatic and conciliatory; but if there were a couple of murderers aboard the Dolphin there was a thirty-three and a third per cent chance that Jolly was one of them and Swanson wasn’t forgetting it for a moment.
I gave Jolly an apologetic half-shrug, bent over Bolton and examined him as best I could with only one hand available for the task. I straightened and said: ‘Jolly’s right. He is pretty sick. But I think he might just stand the transfer to the ship.’
‘“Might just” is not quite the normally accepted basis for deciding the treatment of a patient,’ Jolly objected.
‘I know it’s not. But the circumstances are hardly normal either.’
‘I’ll take the responsibility,’ Swanson said. ‘Dr Jolly, I’d be most grateful if you would supervise the transport of those two men back to the ship. I’ll let you have as many men as you want straight away.’
Jolly protested some more, then gave in with good grace. He supervised the transfer, and very competent he was about it too. I remained out there a little longer, watching Rawlings and some others dismantling heaters and lights and rolling up cables and, after the last of them was gone and I was alone, I made my way round to the tractor shed.
The broken haft of the knife was still in the tank of the tractor. But not the gun and not the two magazines. Those were gone. And whoever had taken them it hadn’t been Dr Jolly, he hadn’t been out of my sight for two consecutive seconds between the time he’d left the Dolphin and the time of his return to it.
At three o’clock that afternoon we dropped down below the ice and headed south for the open sea.
TEN
The afternoon and evening passed quickly and pleasantly enough. Closing our hatches and dropping down from our hardly won foothold in that lead had had a symbolic significance at least as important as the actual fact of leaving itself. The thick ceiling of ice closing over the hull of the Dolphin was a curtain being drawn across the eye of the mind. We had severed all physical connection with Drift Ice Station Zebra, a home of the dead that might continue to circle slowly about the Pole for mindless centuries to come; and with the severance had come an abrupt diminution of the horror and the shock which had hung palllike over the ship and its crew for the past twenty-four hours. A dark door had swung to behind us and we had turned our backs on it. Mission accomplished, duty done, we were heading for home again and the sudden upsurge of relief and happiness among the crew to be on their way again, their high anticipation of port and leave, was an almost tangible thing. The mood of the ship was close to that of lighthearted gaiety. But there was no gaiety in my mind, and no peace: I was leaving too much behind. Nor could there be any peace in the minds of Swanson and Hansen, of Rawlings and Zabrinski: they knew we were carrying a killer aboard, a killer who had killed many times. Dr Benson knew also, but for the moment Dr Benson did not count: he still had not regained consciousness and I held the very unprofessional hope that he wouldn’t for some time to come. In the twilight world of emergence from coma a man can start babbling and say all too much.
Some of the Zebra survivors had asked if they could see around the ship and Swanson agreed. In light of what I had told him in his cabin that morning, he must have agreed very reluctantly indeed, but no trace of this reluctance showed in his calmly smiling face. To have refused their request would have been rather a churlish gesture, for all the secrets of the Dolphin were completely hidden from the eye of the layman. But it wasn’t good manners that made Swanson give his consent: refusing a reasonable request could have been responsible for making someone very suspicious indeed.
Supper over, I helped Jolly as best I could with his evening surgery. Whatever else Jolly was, he was a damn’ good doctor. Quickly and efficiently he checked and where necessary rebandaged the walking cases, examined and treated Benson and Folsom then asked me to come right aft with him to the nucleonics laboratory in the stern room which had been cleared of deck gear to accommodate the four other bed patients, the Harrington twins, Brownell and Bolton. The sick-bay itself had only two cots for invalids and Benson and Folsom had those.
Bolton, despite Jolly’s dire predictions, hadn’t suffered a relapse because of his transfer from the hut to the ship - which had been due largely to Jolly’s extremely skilful and careful handling of the patient and the stretcher into which he had been lashed. Bolton, in fact, was conscious now and complaining of severe pain in his badly burned right forearm. Jolly removed the burn covering and Bolton’s arm was a mess all right, no skin left worth speaking of, showing an angry violent red between areas of suppuration. Different doctors have different ideas as to the treatment of burns: Jolly favoured a salve-coated aluminium foil which he smoothed across the entire burn area then lightly bandaged in place. He then gave him a painkilling injection and some sleeping tablets, and briskly informed the enlisted man who was keeping watch that he was to be informed immediately of any change or deterioration in Bolton’s condition. A brief inspection of the three others, a changed bandage here and there and he was through for the night.
So was I. For two nights now I had had practically no sleep - what little had been left for me the previous night had been ruined by the pain in my left hand. I was exhausted. When I got to my cabin, Hansen was already asleep and the engineer officer gone.
I didn’t need any of Jolly’s sleeping pills that night.
I awoke at two o’clock. I was sleep-drugged, still exhausted and felt as if I had been in bed about five minutes. But I awoke in an instant and in that instant I was fully awake.
Only a dead man wouldn’t have stirred. The racket issuing from the squawk box just above Hansen’s bunk was appalling: a high-pitched, shrieking, atonic whistle, two-toned and altering pitch every half-second, it drilled stiletto-like against my cringing eardrums. A banshee in its death agonies could never have hoped to compete with that lot.
Hansen already had his feet on the deck and was pulling on clothes and shoes in desperate haste. I had never thought to see that slow-speaking laconic Texan in such a tearing hurry, but I was seeing it now.
‘What in hell’s name is the matter?’ I demanded. I had to shout to make myself heard above, the shrieking of the alarm whistle.
‘Fire!’ His face was shocked and grim. ‘The ship’s on fire. And under this goddamned ice!’
Still buttoning his shirt, he hurdled my cot, crashed the door back on its hinges and was gone.
The atonic screeching of the whistle stopped abruptly and the silence fell like a blow. Then I was conscious of something more than silence — I was conscious of a complete lack of vibration throughout the ship. The great engines had stopped. And then I was conscious of something else again: feathery fingers of ice brushing up and down my spine. Why had the engines stopped? What could make a nuclear engine stop so quickly and what happened once it did? My God, I thought, maybe the fire is coming from the reactor room itself. I’d looked into the heart of the uranium atomic pile through a heavily leaded glass inspection port and seen the indescribable unearthly radiance of it, a nightmarish coalescence of green and violet and blue, the new ‘dreadful light’ of mankind. What happened when this dreadful light ran amok? I didn’t know, but I suspected I didn’t want to be around when it happened.
I dressed slowly, not hurrying. My damaged hand didn’t help me much but that wasn’t why I took my time. Maybe the ship was on fire, maybe the nuclear power plant had gone out of kilter. But if Swanson’s superbly trained crew couldn’t cope with every emergency that could conceivably arise then matters weren’t going to be improved any by Carpenter running around in circles shouting: ‘Where’s the fire?’
Three minutes after Hansen had gone I walked along to the control room and peered in: if I was going to be in the way then this was as far as I was going to go. Dark acrid smoke billowed past me and a voice — Swanson’s — said sharply: ‘Inside and close that door.’
I pulled the door to and looked around the control room. At least, I tried to. It wasn’t easy. My eyes were already streaming as if someone had thrown a bag of pepper into them and what little sight was left them didn’t help me much. The room was filled with black evil-smelling smoke, denser by far and more throat-catching than the worst London fog. Visibility was no more than a few feet, but what little I could see showed me men still at their stations. Some were gasping, some were half-choking, some were cursing softly, all had badly watering eyes, but there was no trace of panic.
‘You’d have been better on the other side of that door,’ Swanson said dryly. ‘Sorry to have barked at you, Doctor, but we want to limit the spread of the smoke as much as possible.’
‘Where’s the fire?’
‘In the engine-room.’ Swanson could have been sitting on his front porch at home discussing the weather. ‘Where in the engine-room we don’t know. It’s pretty bad. At least, the smoke is. The extent of the fire we don’t know, because we can’t locate it. Engineer officer says it’s impossible to see your hand in front of your face.’
‘The engines,’ I said. ‘They’ve stopped. Has anything gone wrong?’
He rubbed his eyes with a handkerchief, spoke to a man who was pulling on a heavy rubber suit and a smoke-mask, then turned back to me.
‘We’re not going to be vaporised, if that’s what you mean.’ I could have sworn he was smiling. ‘The atomic pile can only fail safe no matter what happens. If anything goes wrong the uranium rods slam down in very quick time indeed — a fraction under a one-thousandth of a second — stopping the whole reaction. In this case, though, we shut it off ourselves. The men in the manoeuvring-room could no longer see either the reactor dials or the governor for the control rods. No option but to shut it down. The engine-room crew have been forced to abandon the engine and manoeuvring-rooms and take shelter in the stern room.’
Well, that was something at least. We weren’t going to be blown to pieces, ignobly vaporised on the altar of nuclear advancement: good old-fashioned suffocation, that was to be our lot. ‘So what do we do?’ I asked.
‘What we should do is surface immediately. With fourteen feet of ice overhead that’s not easy. Excuse me, will you?’
He spoke to the now completely masked and suited man who was carrying a small dialled box in his hands. They walked together past the navigator’s chart desk and ice-machine to the heavy door opening on the passage that led to the engine-room over the top of the reactor compartment. They unclipped the door, pushed it open. A dense blinding cloud of dark smoke rolled into the room as the masked man stepped quickly into the passageway and swung the door to behind him. Swanson clamped the door shut, walked, temporarily blinded, back to the control position and fumbled down a roof microphone.
‘Captain speaking.’ His voice echoed emptily through the control centre. ‘The fire is located in the engine-room. We d
o not know yet whether it is electrical, chemical or fuel oil: the source of the fire has not been pin-pointed. Acting on the principle of being prepared for the worst, we are now testing for a radiation leak.’ So that was what the masked man had been carrying, a Geiger counter. ‘If that proves negative, we shall try for a steam leak; and if that is negative we shall carry out an intensive search to locate the fire. It will not be easy as I’m told visibility is almost zero. We have already shut down all electrical circuits in the engine-room, lighting included, to prevent an explosion in the event of atomised fuel being present in the atmosphere. We have closed the oxygen intake valves and isolated the engine-room from the air-cleaning system in the hope that the fire will consume all available oxygen and burn itself out.
‘All smoking is prohibited until further notice. Heaters, fans, and all electrical circuits other than communication lines to be switched off — and that includes the juke-box and the ice-cream machine. All lamps to be switched off except those absolutely essential. All movement is to be restricted to a minimum. I shall keep you informed of any progress we may make.’
I became aware of someone standing by my side. It was Dr Jolly, his normally jovial face puckered and woebegone, the tears flowing down his face. Plaintively he said to me: ‘This is a bit thick, old boy, what? I’m not sure that I’m so happy now about being rescued. And all those prohibitions — no smoking, no power to be used, no moving around — do those mean what I take them to mean?’
‘I’m afraid they do indeed.’ It was Swanson who answered Jolly’s question for him. ‘This, I’m afraid, is every nuclear submarine captain’s nightmare come true — fire under the ice. At one stroke we’re not only reduced to the level of a conventional submarine — we’re two stages worse. In the first place, a conventional submarine wouldn’t be under the ice, anyway. In the second place, it has huge banks of storage batteries, and even if it were beneath the ice it would have sufficient reserve power to steam far enough south to get clear of the ice. Our reserve battery is so small that it wouldn’t take us a fraction of the way.’