Ice Station Zebra (32 page)

      "Serves me right," he gasped. "Your faces. . . Why do you think I ordered the water-tight doors opened, Doctor?"
      "No idea."
      "John?"
      Hansen shook his head.
      Swanson looked at him quizzically and said, "Speak to the engine room. Tell them to light up the diesel."
      "Yes, sir," Hansen said woodenly. He made no move.
      "Lieutenant Hansen is wondering whether he should get a straitjacket," Swanson said. "Lieutenant Hansen knows that a diesel engine is never, _never_ lit up when a submarine is submerged--unless with a snorkel, which is useless under ice--for a diesel not only uses air straight from the engineroom atmosphere, it gulps it down in great draughts and would soon remove all the air in the ship. Which is what I want. We bleed compressed air under fairly high pressure into the fore part of the ship. Nice, clean, fresh air. We light up the diesel in the after part--it will run rough at first because of the low concentration of oxygen in this poisonous muck--but it will run. It will suck up much of this filthy air, exhausting its gases over the side, and as it does, it will lower the atmospheric pressure aft and the fresh air will make its way through from for'ard. To have done this before now would have been suicidal. The fresh air would only have fed the flames until the fire was out of control. But we can do it now. We can run it for a few minutes only, of course, but a few minutes will be ample. You are with me, Lieutenant Hansen?"
      Hansen was with him, all right, but he didn't answer. He had already left.
      Three minutes passed; then we heard, through the now open passageway above the reactor room, the erratic sound of a diesel starting, fading, coughing, then catching again-- we learned later that the engineers had had to bleed off several ether bottles in the vicinity of the air intake to get the engine to catch. For a minute or two it ran roughly and erratically and seemed to be making no impression at all on that poisonous air; then, imperceptibly almost, at first, then with an increasing degree of definition, we could see the smoke in the control room, illuminated by the single lamp still left burning there, begin to drift and eddy toward the reactor passage. Smoke began to stir and eddy in the corners of the control room as the diesel sucked the fumes aft, and more smoke-laden air, a shade lighter in color, began to move in from the wardroom passageway, pulled in by the decreasing pressure in the control room, pushed in by the gradual buildup of fresh air in the fore part of the submarine as compressed air was bled into the living spaces.
      A few more minutes made the miracle. The diesel thudded away in the engine room, running more sweetly and strongly as air with a higher concentration of oxygen reached its intake, and the smoke in the control room drained steadily away, to be replaced by a thin grayish mist from the fore part of the ship that was hardly deserving of the name of smoke at all. And that mist carried with it air, an air with fresh, life-giving oxygen, an air with a proportion of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that was now almost negligible. Or so it seemed to us.
      The effect upon the crew was just within the limits of credibility. It was as if a wizard had passed through the length of the ship and touched them with the wand of life. Unconscious men, men for whom death had been less than half an hour away, began to stir, some to open their eyes. Sick, exhausted, nauseated, and pain-wracked men who had been lying or sitting on the decks in attitudes of huddled despair sat up straight or stood, their faces breaking into expressions of almost comical wonderment and disbelief as they drew great draughts down into their aching lungs and found that it was not poisonous gases they were inhaling but fresh, breathable air: men who had made up their minds for death began to wonder how they could ever have thought that way. As air went, I suppose, it was pretty substandard stuff, and the Factory Acts would have had something to say about it; but, for us, no pine-drenched mountain air ever tasted half so sweet.
      Swanson kept a careful eye on the gauges recording the air pressure in the submarine. Gradually it sank down to the fifteen pounds at which the atmosphere was normally kept, then below it. He ordered the compressed air to be released under higher pressure, and then, when the atmospheric pressure was back to normal, he ordered the diesel stopped and the compressed air shut off.
      "Commander Swanson," I said. "If you ever want to make admiral, you can apply to me for a reference any time."
      "Thank you." He smiled. "We have been very lucky."
      Sure we had been lucky, the way men who sailed with Swanson would always be lucky.
      We could now hear the sounds of pumps and motors as Cartwright started in on the slow process of bringing the nuclear power plant to life again. Everyone knew that it was touch and go whether there would be enough life left in the batteries for that, but, curiously, no one seemed to doubt that Cartwright would succeed: we had been through too much to entertain even the thought of failure now.
      Nor did we fail. At exactly eight o'clock that morning Cartwright phoned to say that he had steam on the turbine blades and that the _Dolphin_ was a going proposition again. I was glad to hear it.
      For three hours we cruised along at slow speed while the air-conditioning plant worked under maximum pressure to bring the air inside the _Dolphin_ back to normal. After that, Swanson slowly stepped up our speed until we had reached about fifty per cent of normal cruising speed, which was as fast as the propulsion officer deemed it safe to go. For a variety of technical reasons it was impractical for the _Dolphin_ to operate without all turbines in commission,, so we were reduced to the speed of the slowest, and, without sheathing on it, Cartwright didn't want to push the starboard highpressure turbine above a fraction of its power. This way, it would take us much longer to clear the ice pack and reach the open sea, but 'the captain, in a broadcast, said that if the limit of the ice pack was where it had been when we'd first moved under it--and there was no reason to think it should have shifted more than a few miles--we should be moving out into the open sea at about four o'clock the following morning.
      By four o'clock that afternoon, members of the crew, working in relays, had managed to clear away from the machinery space all the debris and foam that had accumulated during the long night. After that, Swanson reduced all watches to the barest skeletons required to run the ship, so that as many men as possible might sleep as long as possible. Now that the exultation of victory was over, now that the almost intolerable relief of knowing that they were not, after all, to find their gasping end in a cold iron tomb under the ice cap had begun to fade, the inevitable reaction, when it did come, was correspondingly severe. A long and sleepless night behind them; hours of cruelly back-breaking toil in the metal jungle of the machinery space; that lifetime of tearing tension when they had not known whether they were going to live or die but had believed they were going to die; the poisonous fumes that had laid them all on the rack--all of these combined had taken cruel toll of their reserves of physical and mental energy, and the crew of the _Dolphin_ were now sleep-ridden and exhausted as they had never been. When they lay down to sleep, they slept at once, like dead men.
      I didn't sleep. Not then, not at four o'clock. I couldn't sleep. I had too much to think about: like how it had been primarily my fault, through mistake, miscalculation, or sheer pig-headedness, that the _Dolphin_ and her crew had been brought to such desperate straits; like what Commander Swanson was going to say when he found out how much I'd kept from him, how little I'd told him. Still, if I had kept him in the dark so long, I couldn't see that there would be much harm in it if I kept him in the dark just that little time longer. It would be time enough in the morning to tell him all I knew. His reactions would be interesting, to say the least. He might be striking some medals for Rawlings, but I had the feeling that he wouldn't be striking any for me. Not after I'd told him what I'd have to.
      Rawlings. That was the man I wanted now. I went to see him, told him what I had in mind, and asked him if he would mind sacrificing a few hours' sleep during the night. M always, Rawlings was co-operation itself.
      Later that evening I had a look at one or two of the patients. Jolly, exhausted by his Herculean efforts of the previous night, was fathoms deep in slumber, so Swanson had asked if I would deputize for him. So I did, but I didn't try very hard. With only one exception they were sound asleep, and none of them was in so urgent need of medical attention that there would have been any justification for waking him up. The sole exception was Dr. Benson, who had recovered consciousness late that afternoon. He was obviously on, the mend, but complained that his head felt like a pumpkin with sonieone at work on it with a riveting gun, so I fed him some pills and that was the extent of the treatment. I asked him if he had any idea as to what had been the cause of his fall from the top of the sail, but he was either too woozy to remember or just didn't know. Not that it mattered now. I already knew the answer. -
      I slept for nine hours after that, which was pretty selfish of me, considering that I had asked Rawlings to keep awake half the night; but, then, I hadn't had much option about that, for Rawlings was in a position to perform for me an essential task that I couldn't perform for myself.
      Sometime during the night we passed out from under the ice cap into the open Arctic Ocean again.
      I awoke shortly after seven, washed, shaved, and dressed as carefully as I could with one hand out of commission-- for I believe a judge owes it to his public to be decently turned out when he goes to conduct a trial--then breakfasted well in the wardroom. Shortly before nine o'clock I walked into the control room. Hansen had the watch. I went up to him and said quietly, so that I couldn't be overheard: "Where is Commander Swanson?"
      "In his cabin."
      "I'd like to speak to him and you. Privately."
      Hansen looked at me speculatively, nodded, handed over the watch to the navigator, and led the way to Swanson's cabin. We knocked, went in, and closed the door behmd us. I didn't waste any time in preamble.
      "I know who the killer is," I said. "I've no proof, but I'm going to get it now. I would like you to be on hand--if you can spare the time."
      They had used up all their emotional responses and reactions during the previous thirty hours, so they didn't throw up their hands or do startled double-takes or make any of the other standard signs of incredulousness. Instead, Swanson just looked thoughtfully at Hansen, rose from his table, folded the chart he'd been studying, and said dryly: "I think we might spare the time, Dr. Carpenter. I have never met a murderer." His tone was impersonal, even light, but the clear gray eyes had gone very cold indeed. "It will be quite an experience to meet a man with eight deaths on his conscience."
      "You can count yourself lucky that it is only eight," I said. "He almost brought it up to the hundred mark yesterday morning."
      This time I did get them. Swanson stared at me, then said softly, "What do you mean?"
      "Our friend with the gun also carries a box of matches around with him," I said. "He was busy with them in the engine room in the early hours of yesterday morning."
      "Someone _deliberately_ tried to set the ship on fire?" Hansen looked at me in open disbelief. "I don't buy that, Doe."
      "I buy it," Swanson said. "I buy anything Dr. Carpenter says. We're dealing with a madman. Only a madman would risk losing his life along with the lives of a hundred others."
      "He miscalculated," I said mildly. "Come along."
      They were waiting for us in the wardroom as I'd arranged, eleven of them in all: Rawlings, Zabrinski, Captain Folsom, Dr. Jolly, the two Harrington twins, who were now just barely well enough to be out of bed, Naseby, Hewson, Hassard, Kinnaird and Jeremy. Most of them were seated around the wardroom table except for Rawlings, who opened the door for us, and Zabrinski, his foot still in the cast, who was sitting in a chair in one corner of the room studying an issue of the _Dolphin Daze_, the submarine's own mimeographed newspaper. Some of them made to get to their feet as we came in, but Swanson waved them down. They sat silently, all except Dr. Jolly, who boomed out a cheerful "Good morning, Captain. Well, well, this is an intriguing summons. Most intriguing. What is it you want to see us about, Captain?"
      I cleared my throat. "You must forgive a small deception. It is I who wants to see you, not the captain."
      "You?" Jolly pursed his lips and looked at me speculatively. "I don't get it, old boy. Why you?"
      "I have been guilty of another small deception. I am not, as I gave you to understand, attached to the Ministry of Supply. I am an agent of the British government. An officer of M.I.6, counter-espionage."
      Well, I got my reaction, all right. They just sat there, mouths wide open like newly landed fish, staring at me. It was Jolly, always a fast adjuster, who recovered first.
      "Counter-espionage, by Jove! Counter-espionage! Spies and cloaks and daggers and beautiful blondes tucked away in the wardrobes--or wardroom, should I say. But why--why are you _here?_ What do you--well, what _can_ you want to see us about, Dr. Carpenter?"
      "A small matter of murder," I said.
      "Murder!" Captain Folsom spoke for the first time since coming aboard ship, the voice issuing from that savagely burnt face no more than a strangled croak. "Murder?"
      "Two of the men lying up there now in the drift station lab were dead _before_ the fire. They had been shot through the head. A third had been knifed. I would call that murder, wouldn't you?"
      Jolly groped for the table and lowered himself shakily into his seat. The rest of them looked as if they were very glad that they were already sitting down.
      "It seems too superfluous to add," I said, adding it all the same, "that the murderer is in this room now."
      You wouldn't have thought it, not to look at them. You could see at a glance that none of those high-minded citizens could possibly be a killer. They were as innocent as life's young morning, the whole lot of them, pure and white as the driven snow.