Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

I laid splints to the injured leg and taped them as tightly as possible over the boot and the furs, trying not to think of the depth of trouble we were in now. Two major blows in one. Not only had we lost the indispensable services of the strongest man in our party, we now had an extra 220 lbs. – at least – of weight, of dead-weight, to carry along with us. Not to mention his 40-lb. pack. Zabrinski might almost have read my thoughts.

‘You’ll have to leave me here, Lieutenant,’ he said to Hansen. His teeth were rattling, with shock and cold. ‘We must be almost there now. You can pick me up on the way back.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Hansen said shortly. ‘You know damn’ well we’d never find you again.’

‘Exactly,’ Rawlings said. His teeth were like Zabrinski’s, stuttering away irregularly like an asthmatic machine-gun. He knelt on the ice to support the injured man’s bulk. ‘No medals for morons. It says so in the ship’s articles.’

‘But you’ll never get to Zebra,’ Zabrinski protested. ‘If you have to carry me–’

‘You heard what I said,’ Hansen interrupted. ‘We’re not leaving you.’

‘The lieutenant is perfectly correct,’ Rawlings agreed. ‘You aren’t the hero type, Zabrinski. You haven’t the face for it, for one thing. Now clam up while I get some of this gear off your back.’

I finished tightening the splints and pulled mittens and fur gloves back on my silk-clad but already frozen hands. We shared out 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 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 rubber. 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 on after 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 torch. The smell was strong enough now to make my nostrils wrinkle under the mask. It seemed to be coming from directly ahead. I turned round into the wind, protectively cupped hand over my eyes, and as I did my torch struck something hard and solid and metallic. I lifted my torch 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 light of my torch. No one said anything. Then we turned round into the wind again.

Drift Station Zebra had consisted of eight separate huts, four in each of two parallel rows, thirty feet between the two rows, twenty feet between each two huts in the rows – this to minimise the hazard of fire spreading from hut to hut. But the hazard hadn’t been minimised 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 gale-force wind. And, by a doubley 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 of the walls, which had been of two layers of weather-proofed bonded ply that had enclosed the insulation of shredded glass-fibre and kapok: on all of them even the aluminium-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 torch 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 passed inside.

Suspended from a hook in the centre of the ceiling a hissing Coleman lamp threw its garish light, amplified by the glittering aluminium ceiling, over every corner and detail of that eighteen by ten hut. A thick but transparent layer of ice sheathed the aluminium 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 door. 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 heart-beat among the lot of them. Lying packed closely together in a rough semicircle at the end of the room remote 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 ice-sheathed eastern wall of the hut.