Authors: Alistair MacLean
"There are no medals given for soup-stirring, Rawlings," Hansen said, "which is what you are going to keep on doing. You're staying right here."
"Uh-uh." Rawlings shook his head. "Prepare yourself to deal with your first mutiny, Lieutenant. I'm coming with you. I can't lose. If we get to the _Dolphin_, you'll be too damned glad and happy to have made it to dream of reporting me, apart from being a fair-minded man who will have to admit that our safe arrival back at the ship will be entirely due to torpedoman Rawlings." He grinned. "And if we don't make it--well, you can't very well report it, can you, Lieutenant?"
Hansen walked across to him. He said quietly: "You know that there's more than an even chance that we won't reach the _Dolphin_. That would leave twelve pretty sick men here, not to mention Zabrinski with a broken ankle, and with no one to look after them. They've got to have one able man to look after them. You couldn't be that selfish, now, could you, Rawlings? Look after them, will you? As a favor to me?"
Rawlings looked at him for long seconds, then squatted down and started stirring the soup again. "As a favor to me, you mean," he said bitterly. "Okay, I'll stay. As a favor to me. Also to prevent Zabrinski from tripping over his legs again and breaking another ankle." He stirred the soup viciously. "Well, what are you waiting for? The skipper may be making up his mind to dive any minute."
He had a point. We brushed off protests and attempts to stop us made by Captain Folsom and Dr. Jolly and were ready to leave in thirty seconds. Hansen was through the door first. I turned and looked at the sick and emaciated and injured survivors of Drift Station Zebra. Folsom, Jolly, Kinnaird, Hewson, Naseby and seven others. Twelve men altogether. They couldn't all be in cahoots together, so it had to be a single man, maybe two, acting in concert. I wondered who those men might be, those men I would have to kill, that person or persons who had murdered my brother and six other men on Drift Ice Station Zebra.
I pulled the door to behind me and followed Hansen out into the dreadful night.
6
We had been tired, more than tired, even before we had set out. We had been leaden-legged, bone-weary, no more than a short handspan from total exhaustion. But, for all that, we flitted through the howling darkness of that night like two great white ghosts across the dimly seen whiteness of a nightmare lunar landscape. We were no longer bowed under the weight of heavy packs. Our backs were to that gale-force wind, so that for every laborious plodding step we had made on our way to Zebra we now covered five, with so little a fraction of our earlier toil that at first it seemed all but effortless. We had no trouble in seeing where we were going, no fear of falling into an open lead or of crippling ourselves against some unexpected obstacle, for with our useless goggles removed and powerful flashlight beams dancing erratically ahead of us as we jog-trotted along, visibility was seldom less than five yards, more often nearer ten. Those were the physical aids that helped us on our way but even more sharply powerful as a spur to our aching legs was that keen and ever-growing fear that dominated our minds to the exclusion of all else, the fear that Commander Swanson had already been compelled to drop down and that we would be left to die in that shrieking wasteland: with our lacking both shelter and food, the old man with the scythe would not be keeping us waiting too long.
We ran, but we did not run too fast, for to have done that would have been to have the old man tapping us on the shoulder in very short order indeed. In far sub-zero temperatures, there is one thing that the Eskimo avoids as he would the plague--overexertion, in those latitudes more deadly, even, than the plague itself. Too much physical effort while wearing heavy furs inevitably results in sweat, and when the effort ceases, as eventually cease it must, the sweat freezes on the skin: the only way to destroy that film of ice is by further exertion, producing even more sweat, the beginnings of a vicious and steadily narrowing circle that can have only one end. So though we ran it was only at a gentle jog-trot, hardly more than a fast walk; we took every possible precaution against overheating.
After half an hour, perhaps a little more, I called for a brief halt in the shelter of a steep ice wall. Twice in the past two minutes Hansen had stumbled and fallen where there hadn't appeared to be any reason to stumble and fall: and I had noticed that my own legs were more unsteady than the terrain warranted.
"How are you making out?" I asked.
"Pretty bushed, Doc." He sounded it, too, his breathing quick and rasping and shallow. "But don't write me off yet. How far do you think we've come?"
"Three miles, near enough." I patted the ice wall behind us. "When we've had a couple of minutes, I think we should try climbing this. Looks like a pretty tall hummock to me."
"To try to get into the clear above the ice storm?" I nodded my head and he shook his. "Won't do any good, Doc. This ice storm must be at least twenty feet thick, and even if you do get above it the _Dolphin_ will still be below it. She's only got the top of her sail clear above the ice."
"I've been thinking," I said. "We've been so lost in our own woes and sorrows that we've forgotten about Commander Swanson. I think we've been guilty of underestimating him pretty badly."
"It's likely enough. Right now I'm having a fulitime job worrying about Lieutenant Hansen. What's on your mind?"
"Just this. The chances are better than fifty-fifty that Swanson believes we're on our way back to the _Dolphin_. After all, he's been ordering us to return for quite some time. And if he thinks we didn't get the order because something has happened to us or to the radio, he'll still figure that we will be returning."
"Not necessarily. Radio or not, we might still be heading for Drift Station Zebra."
"No. Definitely not. He'll be expecting us to be smart enough to figure it the way he would, and smart enough to see that that is the way _he_ would figure it. He would know that if our radio broke down before we got to Zebra, it would be suicidal for us to try to find it without radio bearing--but that it _wouldn't_ be suicidal for us to try to make it back to the _Dolphin_, for he would be hoping that we would have sufficient savvy to guess that he would put a lamp in the window to guide the lost sheep home."
"My God, Doc, I think you've got it! Of course he would, of course he would. God, what am I using for brains?" He straightened and turned to face the ice wall.
Pushing and pulling, we made it together to the top. The summit of the rafted ice hummock was less than twenty feet above the level of the ice pack and not quite high enough. We were still below the surface of that gale-driven river of ice spicules. Occasionally, for a brief moment of time, the wind force would ease fractionally and let us have a brief glimpse of the clear sky above: but only occasionally and for a fraction of a second. And if there was anything to be seen in that time, we couldn't see it.
"There'll be other hummocks," I shouted in Hansen's ear. "Higher hummocks." He nodded without answering. I couldn't see the expression on his face but I didn't have to see it. The same thought was in both our minds: we could see nothing because there was nothing to see. Commander Swanson hadn't put a lamp in the window, for the window was gone, the _Dolphin_ forced to dive to avoid being crushed by the ice.
Five times in the next twenty minutes we climbed hummocks, and five times we climbed down, each time more dejected, more defeated. By now I was pretty far gone, moving in a pain-filled nightmare: Hansen was in even worse shape, lurching and staggering around like a drunken man. As a doctor, I knew well the hidden and unsuspected resources that an exhausted man could call on in times of desperate emergency; but I knew too that those resources are not limitless and that we were pretty close to the end. And when that end came we would just lie down in the lee of an ice wall and wait for the old man to come along: he wouldn't keep us waiting long.
Our sixth hummock all but defeated us. It wasn't that it was hard to climb--it was well ridged with foot and hand holds--but the sheer physical effort of climbing came very close to defeating us. And then I dimly began to realize that part of the effort was owing to the fact that this was by far the highest hummock we had found yet. Some colossal pressures had concentrated on this one spot, rafting and logjamming the ice pack until it had risen a clear thirty feet above the general level; the giant underwater ridge beneath must have stretched down close to two hundred feet toward the black floor of the Arctic.
Eight feet below the summit our heads were in the clear: on the summit itself, holding on to each other for mutual support against the gale, we could look down on the ice storm whirling by just beneath our feet, a fantastic sight: a great gray-white sea of undulating turbulence, a giant rushing river that stretched from horizon to horizon. Like so much else in the high Arctic, the scene had an eerie and terrifying strangeness about it, a mindless desolation that belonged not to earth but to some alien and long-dead planet.
We scanned the horizon to the west until our eyes ached. Nothing. Nothing at all. Just that endless desolation. From due north to due south, through 1800, we searched the surface of that great river: and still we saw nothing. Three minutes passed. Still nothing. I began to feel the ice running in my blood.
On the remote off-chance that we might already have bypassed the _Dolphin_ to the north or south, I turned and peered toward the east. It wasn't easy, for that gale of wind brought tears to the eyes in an instant of time, but at least it wasn't impossible; we no longer had to contend with the needlepointed lances of the ice spicules. I made another slow 180° sweep of the eastern horizon, and again, and again. Then I caught Hansen's arm.
"Look there," I said. "To the northeast. Maybe a quarter of a mile away, maybe half. Can you see anything?"
For several seconds Hansen squinted along the direction of my outstretched hand, then shook his head. "I see nothing. What do you think you see?"
"I don't know. I'm not sure. I can imagine I see a very faint touch of luminescence on the surface of the ice storm there, maybe just a fraction of a shade whiter than the rest."
For a full half-minute Hansen stared out through cupped hands. Finally he said, "It's hopeless. I don't see it. But then my eyes have been acting up on me for the past halfhour. But I can't even _imagine_ I see anything."
I turned away to give my streaming eyes a rest from that icy wind and then looked again. "Damn it," I said, "I can't be sure that there is anything there, but I can't be sure that there isn't, either."
"What do you think it would be?" Hansen's voice was dispirited, with overtones of hopelessness. "A light?"
"A searchlight shining vertically upward. A searchlight that's not able to penetrate that ice storm."
"You're kidding yourself, Doc," Hansen said wearily. "The wish father to the thought. Besides, that would mean that we had already passed the _Dolphin_. It's not possible."
"It's not impossible. Ever since we started climbing those damned ice hummocks I've lost track of time and space. It _could_ be."
"Do you still see it?" The voice was empty, uninterested, be didn't believe me and he was just making words.
"Maybe my eyes are acting up, too," I admitted. "But, damn it, I'm still not sure that I'm not right."
"Come on, Doc, let's go."
"Go where?"
"I don't know." His teeth chattered so uncontrollably in that intense cold that I could scarcely follow his words. "I guess it doesn't matter very much where--"
With breath-taking abruptness, almost in the center of my imagined patch of luminescence and not more than 400 yards away, a swiftly climbing rocket burst through the rushing river of ice spicules and climbed high into the clear sky trailing behind it a fiery tail of glowing red sparks. Five hundred feet it climbed, perhaps 600, then burst into a brilliantly incandescent shower of crimson stars, stars that fell lazily back to earth again, streaming away to the west on the wings of the gale and dying as they went, till the sky was colder and emptier than ever before.
"You still say it doesn't matter very much where we go?" I asked Hansen. "Or maybe you didn't see that little lot?"
"What I just saw," he said reverently, "was the prettiest ole sight that Ma Hansen's little boy ever did see--or ever will see." He thumped me on the back, so hard that I had to grab him to keep my balance. "We got it made, Doc!" he shouted. "We got it made. Suddenly I have the strength of ten. Home sweet home, here we come."
Ten minutes later we were home,
"God, this is wonderful," Hansen sighed. He stared in happy bemusement from the captain to me to the glass in his hand to the water dripping from the melting ice on his furs onto the corticene decking of the captain's tiny cabin. "The warmth, the light, the comfort and home sweet home. I never thought I'd see any of it again. When that rocket went up, skipper, I was just looking around to pick a place to lay me down and die. And don't think I'm joking, because I'm not."
"And Dr. Carpenter?" Swanson smiled.
"Defective mental equipment somewhere," Hansen said. "He doesn't seem to know how to go about giving up. I think he's just mule-headed. You get them like that."
Hansen's slightly off-beat, slightly irrational talk had nothing to do with the overwhelming relief and relaxation that come after moments of great stress and tension. Hansen was too tough for that. I knew that and I knew that Swanson knew it, too. We'd been back for almost twenty minutes now, we'd told our story, the pressure was off, a happy ending for all seemed in sight, and normalcy was again almost the order of the day. But when the strain is oft and conditions are back to normal, a man has time to start thinking about things again. I knew only too well what was in Hansen's mind's eye: that charred and huddled shapelessness that had once been my brother. He didn't want me to talk about him, and for that I didn't blame him; he didn't want me even to think about him, although he must have known that that was impossible. The kindest men nearly always are like that, hard and tough and cynical on the outside, men who have been too kind and showed it.