Ice Station Zebra (11 page)

      "No one's asking you to consent to anything," I said. "Your consent is not required. All I'm asking you to do is stand to one side. And to arrange for that food-provision package for me. If you won't I'll have to manage without it."
      I left and went to my cabin. Hansen's cabin, rather. But even though it wasn't my cabin that didn't stop me from turning the key in the lock as soon as I had passed through the door.
      Working on the likely supposition that if Hansen did come down soon he wasn't going to be very pleased to find the door of his own cabin locked against him, I wasted no time. I spun the combination lock on my suitcase and opened the lid. At least three quarters of the available space was taken up by Arctic survival clothing, the very best that money could buy. It hadn't been my money that had bought it.
      I stripped off the outer clothes I was wearing, pulled on long underwear, a wool shirt and corduroy trousers, then a triple-knit wool parka lined with pure silk. The parka wasn't quite standard; it had a curiously shaped suede-lined pocket below and slightly to the front of the left armpit, and a differently shaped suede-lined pocket on the right-hand side. I dug swiftly to the bottom of my case and brought up three separate items. The first of these, a nine-millimeter Mannlicher-Schoenauer automatic, fitted into the left-hand pocket as securely and strongly as if the pocket had been specially designed for it, which indeed it had; the other items, spare magazine clips, fitted as neatly into the right-hand pocket.
      The rest of the dressing didn't take long. Two pairs of heavy-knit woollen socks, felt undershoes, and then the furs-- caribou for the outer parka and trousers, wolverine for the hood, sealskin for the boots, and reindeer for the gloves, which were pulled on over other layers of silk gloves and woollen mittens. Maybe a polar bear would have had a slight edge over me when it came to being equipped to survive an Arctic blizzard, but there wouldn't have been much in it.
      I hung snow mask and goggles around my neck, stuck a rubberized water-proof flashlight into the inside pocket of my fur parka, unearthed my walkie-talkie, and closed the case. I set the combination again. There was no need to set the combination any more, not now that I had the Mannlicher-Schoenauer under my arm, but it would give Swanson something to do while I was away. I shoved my medicine case and a steel flask of alcohol in a rucksack and unlocked the door.
      Swanson was exactly where I'd left him in the control room. So was Hansen. So were two others who had not been there when I had left: Rawlings and Zabrinski. Hansen, Rawlings, and Zabrinski, the three biggest men in the ship. The last time I'd seen them together was when Swanson had summoned them up from the _Dolphin_ in the Holy Loch to see to it that I didn't do anything he didn't want me to do. Maybe Commander Swanson had a one-track mind. Hansen, Rawlings and Zahrinski. They looked bigger than ever.
      I said to Swanson, "Do I get those iron rations or not?"
      "One last formal statement," Swanson said. His first thoughts, as I came waddling into the control center, must have been that a grizzly bear was loose inside his submarine, but he hadn't batted an eyelid. "For the record. Your intentions are suicidal, your chances nonexistent. I cannot give my consent."
      "All right, your statement is on record, witnesses and all. The iron rations."
      "I cannot give my consent because of a new and dangerous development. One of our electronics technicians was carrying out a routine calibration test on the ice machine just now and an overload coil didn't function. Electric motor burnt out. No spares: it will have to be rewired. You realize what that means. If we're forced to drop down, I can't find my way to the top again. Then it's curtains for everybody-- everybody left above the ice, that is."
      I didn't blame him for trying, but I was vaguely disappointed in him: he'd had time to think up a better one than that. I said, "The iron rations, Commander. Do I get them?"
      "You intend to go through with this? After what I've said?"
      "Oh, for God's sake. I'll do without the food."
      "My executive officer, torpedoman Rawlings and radioman Zabrinski," Swanson said formally, "don't like this."
      "I can't help what they like or don't like."
      "They feel that they can't let you go through with it," he persisted.
      They were more than big. They were huge. I could get past them the way a lamb gets past a starving lion. I had a gun, all right, but with that one-piece parka I was wearing I'd practically have to undress myself to get at it, and Hansen, in that Holy Loch canteen, had shown just how quickly he could react when he saw anyone making a suspicious move, And even if I did get my gun out, what then? Men like Hansen, like Rawlings and Zabrinski, didn't scare. I couldn't bluff them with a gun. And I couldn't use the gun. Not against men who were just doing their duty.
      "They _won't_ let you go through with it," Swanson went on, "unless, that is, you permit them to accompany you, which they have volunteered to do."
      "Volunteered." Rawlings sniffed. "You, you and you."
      "I don't want them," I said.
      "Gracious, ain't he?" Rawlings asked of no one in particular. "You might at least have said thanks, Doc."
      "You are putting the lives of your men in danger, Commander Swanson. You know what your orders said."
      "Yes. I also know that in Arctic travels, as in mountaineering and exploring, a party always has double the chances of the individual. I also know that if it became known that we had permitted a civilian doctor to set off on his own for Drift Station Zebra while we were all too scared to stir from our nice warm sub, the name of the U. S. Navy would become pretty muddy."
      "What do your men think of your making them risk their lives to save the good name of the submarine service?"
      "You heard the captain," Rawlings said. "We're volunteers. Look at Zabrinski there: anyone can see that he's a man cast in a heroic mold."
      "Have you thought of what happens," I said, "if the ice closes in when we're away and the captain has to take the ship down?"
      "Don't even mention it," Zabrinski urged. "I'm not all that heroic."
      I gave up. I'd no option but to give up. Besides, like Zabrinski, I wasn't all that heroic and I suddenly realized that I would be very glad indeed to have those three men along with me.
5
      Lieutenant Hansen was the first man to give up. Or perhaps "give up" is wrong: the meaning of the words was quite unknown and the thought totally alien to Hansen. It would be more accurate to say that he was the first of us to show any glimmerings of common sense. He caught my arm, brought his head close to mine, pulled down his snow mask, and shouted, "No farther, Doc. We must stop."
      "The next ridge," I yelled back. I didn't know whether he'd heard me or not, as soon as he'd spoken he'd pulled his mask back up into position again to protect the momentarily exposed skin against the horizontally driving ice storm, but he seemed to understand for he eased his grip on the rope around my waist and let me move ahead again. For the past two and a half hours Hansen, Rawlings and I had each taken our turn at being the lead man on the end of the rope, while the other three held on to it some ten yards behind, the idea being not that the lead man should guide the others but that the others should save the life of the lead man, should the need arise. And the need had already arisen, just once. Hansen, slipping and scrambling on all fours across a fractured, and upward-sloping raft of ice, had reached gropingly forward with his arms into the blindness of the night and the storm and found nothing there. He had fallen eight vertical feet before the rope had brought him up with a vicious jerk that had been almost as painful for Rawlings and myself, who had taken the brunt of the shock, as it had been for Hansen. For nearly two minutes he'd dangled above the wind-torn black water of a freshly opened lead before we'd managed to drag him back to safety. It had been a close thing, far too close a thing, for in far sub-zero temperatures with a gale-force wind blowing, even a few seconds' submersion in water makes the certainty of death absolute, the process of dissolution as swift as it is irreversible. In those conditions the clothes of a man pulled from the water become a frozen and impenetrable suit of armor inside seconds, an armor that can neither be removed nor chipped away. Petrified inside this ice shroud, a man just simply and quickly freezes to death--in the unlikely event, that is, of his heart's having withstood the thermal shock of the body's surface being exposed to an almost instantaneous hundred-degree drop in temperature.
      So now I stepped forward very cautiously, very warily indeed, feeling the ice ahead of me with a probe we'd devised after Hansen's near-accident--a chopped-off five-foot length of rope which we'd dipped into the water of the lead and then exposed to the air until it had become as rigid as a bar of steel. At times I walked, at times I stumbled, at times, when a brief lull in the gale-force wind, as sudden as it was unexpected, would catch me off balance, I'd just fall forward and continue on hands and knees, for it was quite as easy that way. It was during one of those periods when I was shuffling blindly forward on all fours that I realized that the wind had, for the time being, lost nearly all of its violence and that I was no longer being bombarded by that horizontally driving hail of flying ice spicules. Moments later my probe made contact with some solid obstacle in my path: the vertical wall of a rafted ice ridge. I crawled thankfully into its shelter, raised my goggles, and pulled out and switched on my flashlight as the others came blindly up to where I lay.
      Blindly. With arms outstretched they pawed at the air before them like sightless men, which for the past two and a half hours was exactly what they had been. For all the service our goggles had given us, we might as well have stuck our heads in gunny sacks before leaving the Dolphin. I looked at Hansen, the first of the three to come up. Goggles, snow mask, hood, clothing--the entire front part of his body from top to toe was deeply and solidly encrusted in a thick and glittering layer of compacted ice, except for some narrow cracks caused by joint movements of legs and arms. As he drew close to me, I could hear him splintering and crackling a good five feet away. Long ice feathers streamed back from his head, shoulders, and elbows: as an extra-terrestrial monster from one of the chillier planets, such as Pluto, he'd have been a sensation in any horror movie. I suppose I looked much the same.
      We huddled close together in the shelter of the wall. Only four feet above our heads the ice storm swept by in a glittering gray-white river. Rawlings, sitting on my left, pushed up his goggles, looked down at his ice-sheathed furs, and started to beat his chest with his fist to break up the covering. I reached out a hand and caught his arm.
      "Leave it alone," I said.
      "Leave it alone?" Rawlings' voice was muffled by his snow mask, but not so muffled that I couldn't hear the chattering of his teeth. "This damn suit of armor weighs a ton. I'm out of training for this kind of weight-lifting, Doc."
      "Leave it alone. If it weren't for that ice, you'd have frozen to death by this time: it's insulating you from that wind and the ice storm. Let's see the rest of your face. And your hands."
      I checked him and the two others for frostbite, while Hansen checked me. We were still lucky. Blue and mottled and shaking with the cold, but no frostbite. The furs of the other three might not have been quite as fancy as mine, but they were very adequate indeed. Nuclear subs always got the best of everything, and Arctic clothing was no exception. But although they weren't freezing to death, I could see from their faces and hear from their breathing that they were pretty far gone in exhaustion. Thrusting into the power of that ice storm was like wading upstream against the current of a river of molasses; that was energy-sapping enough, but the fact that we had to spend most of our time clambering over, slipping on, sliding and falling across fractured ice or making detours around impassable ridges while being weighed down with forty-pound packs on our backs and heaven only knew how many additional pounds of ice coating our furs in front, had turned our trudge across that contorted, treacherous ice into a dark and frozen nightmare.
      "The point of no return, I think," Hansen said. His breathing, like Rawlings', was very quick, very shallow, almost gasping. "We can't take much more of this, Doc."
      "You ought to listen to Dr. Benson's lectures a bit more," I said reprovingly. "All this ice cream and apple pie and lolling around in your bunks is no training for this sort of thing."
      "Yeah?" He peered at me. "How do _you_ feel?"
      "A mite tired," I admitted. "Nothing much to speak of." Nothing much to speak of! My legs felt as if they were falling off, that was all, but the goad of pride was always a useful one to have at hand. I slipped off my rucksack and brought out the medicinal alcohol. "I suggest fifteen minutes' break. Any more and we'll just start stiffening up completely. Meantime, a little drop of what we fancy will help keep the old blood corpuscles trudging around."
      "I thought medical opinion was against alcohol in low temperatures," Hansen said doubtfully. "Something about opening the pores."
      "Name me any form of human activity," I said, "and I'll find you a group of doctors against it. Spoilsports. Besides, this isn't alcohol, it's very fine Scotch whisky."
      "You should have said so in the first place. Pass it over. Not too much for Rawlings and Zabrinski: they're not used to the stuff. Any word, Zabrinski?"
      Zàbrinski, with the walkie-talkie's aerial up and one earphone tucked in below the hood of his parka, was talking into the microphone through cupped hands. As the radio expert, Zabrinski had been the obvious man to handle the walkie-talkie, and I'd given it to him before leaving the submarine. This was also the reason why Zabrinski wasn't at any time given the position of lead man in our trudge across the ice. A heavy fall or immersion in water would have finished the radio he was carrying slung on his back; and if the radio were finished, so would we be, for without the radio, not only had we no hope of finding Drift Station Zebra; we wouldn't have a chance in a thousand of ever finding our way back to the _Dolphin_ again. Zabrinski was built on the size and scale of a medium-sized gorilla and was about as durable; but we couldn't have treated him more tenderly had he been made of Dresden china.