Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

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 mean 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 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 will 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 has always 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 United States 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 is a man cast in a heroic mould.’

‘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 talk of 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 realised that I would be very glad indeed to have those three men along with me.

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 round my waist and let me move ahead again. For the past two and a half hours Hansen, Rawlings and I had each taken his 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 already had 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 armour inside seconds, an armour 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 having withstood the thermal shock of the body 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 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 realised 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 torch 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 grey-white river. Rawlings, sitting on my left, pushed up his goggles, looked down at his ice-sheathed furs and started to beat himself with his fist across the chest to break up the covering. I reached out a hand and caught his arm.

‘Leave it alone,’ I said.

‘Leave it alone?’ Rawlings’s 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 armour 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.’