Ice Station Zebra (13 page)

      I finished tightening the splints and pulled mittens and fur gloves back on my silk-clad but already frozen hands. We divided Zabrinski's load among the three of us, pulled goggles and snow masks back into position, hoisted Zabrinski to his one sound leg, turned into the wind, and went on our way again. It would be truer to say that we staggered on our way again.
      But now, at last and when we most needed it, luck was with us. The ice cap stretched away beneath our feet as level and smooth as the surface of a frozen river. No ridges, no hummocks, no crevasses, not even the tiny cracks one of which had crippled Zabrinski. Just billiard-flat unbroken ice and not even slippery, for its surface had been scoured and abraded by the flying ice storm.
      Each of us took turns at being lead man, the other two supporting a Zabrinski who hopped along in uncomplaining silence on one foot. After maybe three hundred yards of this smooth ice, Hansen, who was in the lead at the moment, stopped so suddenly and unexpectedly that we bumped into him.
      "We're there!" he yelled above the wind. "We've made it. We're there! Can't you smell it?"
      "Smell what?"
      "Burnt fuel oil. Burnt nibber. Don't you get it?"
      I pulled down my snow mask, cupped my hands to my face, and sniffed cautiously. One sniff was enough. I hitched up my mask again, pulled Zabrinski's arm more tightly across my shoulder, and followed Hansen.
      The smooth ice ended in another few feet. The ice sloped up sharply to a level plateau, and it took the three of us all of what pitifully little strength remained to drag Zabrinski up after us. The acrid smell of burning seemed to grow more powerful with every step we took. I moved forward, away from the others, my back to the storm, goggles down, and sweeping the ice with semicircular movements of my flashlight. The smell was strong enough now to make my nostrils wrinkle under the mask. It seemed to be coming from directly ahead. I turned around into the wind, protectively cupped hand over my eyes, and, as I did, my flashlight struck something hard and solid and metallic. I lifted my flashlight and vaguely, through the driving ice, I could just make out the ghostly hooped-steel skeleton, ice-coated on the windward side, fire-charred on the leeward side, of what had once been a Nissen-shaped hut.
      We had found Drift Ice Station Zebra.
      I waited for the others to come up, guided them past the gaunt and burnt-out structure, then told them to turn backs to wind and lift their goggles. For maybe ten seconds we surveyed the ruin in the beam of my flashlight. No one said anything. Then we turned around into the wind again.
      Drift Station Zebra had consisted of eight separate huts, four in each of two parallel rows, thirty feet separating the two rows, twenty feet between each two huts in the rows-- this to minimize the hazard of fire spreading from hut to hut. But the hazard hadn't been minimized enough. No one could be blamed for that. No one, except in the wildest flights of nightmarish imagination, could have envisaged what must indeed have happened: exploding tanks and thousands of gallons of blazing oil being driven through the night by a galeforce wind. And, by a double inescapable irony, fire, without which human life on the polar ice cap cannot survive, is there the most dreaded enemy of all: for although the entire ice cap consists of water, frozen water, there is nothing that can melt that water and so put out the fire. Except fire itself. I wondered vaguely what had happened to the giant chemical fire extinguishers housed in every hut.
      Eight huts, four in each row. The first two on either side were completely gutted. No trace remained 9f the walls, which had been of two layers of weather-proofed bonded ply that had enclosed the insulation of shredded glass fiber and kapok; on all of them even the aluminum sheeted roofs had disappeared. In one of the huts we could see charred and blackened generator machinery, ice-coated on the windward side, bent and twisted and melted almost out of recognition: one could only wonder at the furnace ferocity of the heat responsible.
      The fifth hut--the third on the right-hand side--was a gutted replica of the other four, the framing even more savagely twisted by the heat. We were just turning away from this, supporting Zabrinski and too sick at heart even to speak to each other, when Rawlings called out something unintelligible. I leaned closer to him and pulled back my parka hood.
      "A light!" he shouted. "A light. Look, Doc--across there!"
      And a light there was, a long, narrow, strangely white vertical strip of light from the hut opposite the charred wreck by which we stood. Leaning sideways into the storm, we dragged Zabrinski across 'the intervening gap. For the first time my flashlight showed something that was more than a bare framework of steel. This was a hut. A blackened, scorched, and twisted hut with a roughly nailed-on sheet of plywood where its solitary window had been, but nevertheless a hut. The light was coming from a door standing just ajar at the sheltered end. I laid my hand on the door, the one unscorched thing I'd seen so far in Drift Station Zebra. The hinges creaked like a rusty gate in a cemetery at midnight and the door gave beneath my hand. We went inside.
      Suspended from a hook in the center of the ceiling, a hissing Coleman lamp threw its garish light, amplified by the glittering aluminum ceiling, over every corner and detail of that eighteen-by-ten hut. A thick but transparent layer of ice sheathed the aluminum roof except for a three-foot circle directly above the lamp, and the ice spread from the ceiling down the plywood walls all the way to the floor. The wooden floor, too, was covered with ice, except where the bodies of the men lay. There may have been ice under them as well. I couldn't tell.
      My first thought, conviction rather, and one that struck at me with a heart-sapping sense of defeat, with a chill that even the polar storm outside had been unable to achieve, was that we had arrived too late. I had seen many dead men in my life, I knew what dead men looked like, and now I was looking at just that many more. Shapeless, huddled, lifeless forms lying under a shapeless mass of blankets, mackinaws, duffels and furs; I wouldn't have bet a cent on my chances of finding one heartbeat among the bunch. Lying packed closely together in a rough semicircle at the end of the room, far from the door, they were utterly still, as unmoving as men would be if they had been lying that way for a frozen eternity. Apart from the hissing of the pressure lamp, there was no sound inside the hut other than the metallic drumfire of the ice spicules against the icesheathed eastern wall of the hut.
      Zabrinski was eased down into a sitting position against a wall. Rawlings unslung the heavy load he was carrying on his back, unwrapped the stove, pulled off his mittens, and started fumbling around for the fuel tablets. Hansen pulled the door to behind him, slipped the buckles of his rucksack, and wearily let his load of tinned food drop to the floor of the shack.
      For some reason, the voice of the storm outside and the hissing of the Coleman inside served only to heighten the deathly stillness in the hut, and the unexpected metallic clatter of the falling cans made me jump. It made one of the dead men jump, too. The man nearest me by the left-hand wall suddenly moved, rolled over and sat up, bloodshot eyes staring out unbelievingly from a frost-bitten, haggard and cruelly burned face, the burns patchily covered by a long, dark stubble of beard. For long seconds he looked at us unblinkingly; then, some obscure feeling of pride making him ignore the offer of my outstretched arm, he pushed himself shakily and with obvious pain to his feet. Then the cracked and peeling lips broke into a grin.
      "You've been a bleedin' long time getting here." The voice was hoarse and weak and as cockney as the Bow Bells themselves. "My name's Kinnaird. Radio operator."
      "Whisky?" I asked.
      He grinned again, tried to lick his cracked lips, and nodded. The stiff shot of whisky went down his throat like a man in a barrel going over Niagara Falls: one moment there, the next gone forever. He bent over, coughing harshly until the tears came to his eyes, but when he straightened, life was coming back into those same lackluster eyes and color touching the pale, emaciated cheeks.
      "If you go through life saying 'Hallo' in this fashion, mate," he observed, "then you'll never lack for friends." He bent and shook the shoulder of the man beside whom he had been lying. "C'mon, Jolly, old boy, where's your bleedin' manners. We got company."
      It took quite a few shakes to get Jolly old boy awake, but when he did come to he was completely conscious and on his feet with remarkable speed and nimbleness. He was a short, chubby character with china-blue eyes, and although he was in as much need of a shave as Kinnaird, there was still color in his face, and the round, good-humored face was far from emaciated; but frostbite had made a bad mess of both mouth and nose. The china-blue eyes, flecked with red and momentarily wide in surprise, crinkled into a grin of welcome. Jolly old boy, I guessed, would always adjust fast to circumstances.
      "Visitors, eh?" His deep voice held a rich Irish brogue. "And damned glad we are to see you, too. Do the honors, Jeff."
      "We haven't introduced ourselves," I said. "I'm Dr. Carpenter and this--"
      "Regular meeting of the B.M.A., old boy," Jolly said. I was to find out later that he used the phrase "old boy" in every second or third sentence, a mannerism that went strangely with his Irish accent.
      "Dr. Jolly?"
      "The same. Resident medical officer, old boy."
      "I see. This is Lieutenant Hansen, of the U. S. Navy submarine _Dolphin_--"
      "Submarine?" Jolly and Kinnaird stared at each other, then at us. "You said 'submarine,' old top?"
      "Explanations can wait. Torpedoman Rawlings. Radioman Zabrinski." I glanced down at the huddled men on the floor, some of them already stirring at the sound of voices, one or two propping themselves up on their elbows. "How are they?"
      "Two or three pretty bad burn cases," Jolly said. "Two or three pretty far gone with cold and exhaustion, but not so far gone that food and warmth wouldn't have them right as rain in a few days. I made them all huddle together like this for mutual warmth."
      I counted them. Including Jolly and Kinnaird, there were twelve all told. I said: "Where are the others?"
      "The others?" Kinnaird looked at me in momentary surprise, then his face went bleak and cold. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. "In the next hut, mate."
      "Why?"
      "Why?" He rubbed a weary forearm across bloodshot eyes. "Because we don't fancy sleeping with a roomful of corpses, that's why."
      "Because you don't--" I broke off and stared down at the men at my feet. Seven of them were awake now, three of them propped on elbows, four still lying down, all seven registering various degrees of dazed bewilderment. The three who were still asleep--or unconscious--had their faces covered by blankets. I said slowly, "There were nineteen of you."
      "Nineteen of us," Kinnaird echoed emptily. "The others-- well, they never had a chance."
      I said nothing. I looked carefully at the faces of the conscious men, hoping to find among them the one face I wanted to see, hoping that perhaps I had not immediately recognized it because frostbite or hunger or burns had made it temporarily unrecognizable. I looked very carefully indeed, and I knew that I had never seen any of those faces before.
      I moved over to the first of the three still sleeping figures and lifted the blanket covering the face. The face of a stranger. I let the blanket drop. Jolly said in puzzlement: "What's wrong? What do you want?"
      I didn't answer him. I picked my way around recumbent men, all staring uncomprehendingly at me, and lifted the blanket from the face of the second sleeping man. Again I let the blanket drop and I could feel my mouth go dry, the slow, heavy pounding of my heart. I crossed to the third man, then stood there hesitating, knowing I must find out, dreading what I must find. Then I stooped quickly and lifted the blanket. A man with a heavily bandaged face. A man with a broken nose and a thick blond beard. A man I had never seen in my life before. Gently I spread the blanket back over his face and straightened up. Rawlings, I saw, already had the solid-fuel stove going.
      "That should bring the temperature up to close to freezing," I said to Dr. Jolly. "We've plenty of fuel. We've also brought food, alcohol, a complete medical kit. If you and Kinnaird want to start in on those things now, I'll give you a hand in a minute. Lieutenant, that was a polynya, that smooth stretch we crossed just before we got here? A frozen lead?"
      "Couldn't be anything else." Hansen was looking at me peculiarly, a wondering expression on his face. "These people are obviously in no fit state to travel a couple of hundred yards, much less four or five miles. Besides, the skipper said be was going to be squeezed down pretty soon. So we call the _Dolphin_ and have them surface at the back door?"
      "Can he find that polynya--without the ice machine, I mean?"
      "Nothing simpler. I'll take Zabrinski's radio, move a measured two hundred yards to the north, send a bearing signal, move two hundreds to the south, and do the same. They'll have our range to a yard. Take a couple of hundred yards off that and the _Dolphin_ will find itself smack in the middle of the polynya."
      "But still under it. I wonder how thick that ice is. You had an open lead to the west of the camp some time ago, Dr. Jolly. How long ago?"
      "A month. Maybe five weeks. I can't be sure."
      "How thick?" I asked Hansen.
      "Five feet, maybe six. Couldn't possibly break through it. But the captain's always had a hankering to try out his torpedoes." He turned to Zabrinski. "Still able to operate that radio of yours?"
      I left them to it. I'd hardly been aware of what I'd been saying, anyway. I felt sick and old and empty and sad and deathly tired. I had my answer now. I'd come 12,000 miles to find it; I'd have gone a million to avoid it. But the inescapable fact was there and now nothing could ever change it. Mary, my sister-in-law, and her three wonderful children--she would never see her husband again; they would never see their father again. My brother was dead, and no one was ever going to see him again. Except me. I was going to see him now.