Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

I went out, closing the door behind me, moved round the corner of the hut and lowered my head against the storm. Ten seconds later I reached the door of the last hut in the line. I used the torch to locate the handle, twisted it, pushed and passed inside.

Once it had been a laboratory: now it was a charnel house, a house of the dead. The laboratory equipment had all been pushed roughly to one side and the cleared floor space covered with the bodies of dead men. I knew they were dead men, but only because Kinnaird had told me so: hideously charred and blackened and grotesquely misshapen as they were, those carbonised and contorted lumps of matter could have been any form of life or indeed no form of life at all. The stench of incinerated flesh and burnt diesel fuel was dreadful. I wondered which of the men in the other hut had had the courage, the iron resolution, to bring those grisly burdens, the shockingly disfigured remains of their former comrades into this hut. They must have had strong stomachs.

Death must have been swift, swift for all of them. Theirs had not been the death of men trapped by fire, it had been the death of men who had themselves been on fire. Caught, drenched, saturated by a gale-borne sea of burning oil, they must have spent the last few seconds of life as incandescently blazing human torches before dying in insane screaming agony. They must have died as terribly as men can ever die.

Something about one of the bodies close to me caught my attention. I stooped and focused the torch beam on what had once been a right hand, now no more than a blackened claw with the bone showing through. So powerful had been that heat that it had warped, but not melted, the curiously shaped gold ring on the third finger. I recognised that ring, I had been with my sister-in-law when she had bought it.

I was conscious of no grief, no pain, no revulsion. Perhaps, I thought dully, those would come later when the initial shock had worn off. But I didn’t think so. This wasn’t the man I remembered so well, the brother to whom I owed everything, a debt that could never now be repaid. This charred mass of matter before me was a stranger, so utterly different from the man who lived on in my memory, so changed beyond all possibility of recognition that my numbed mind in my exhausted body just could not begin to bridge the gap.

As I stood there, staring down, something ever so slightly offbeat about the way the body lay caught my professional attention. I stooped low, very low, and remained bent over for what seemed a long time. I straightened, slowly, and as I did I heard the door behind me open. I whirled round and saw that it was Lieutenant Hansen. He pulled down his snow-mask, lifted up his goggles, looked at me and then at the man at my feet. I could see shock draining expression and colour from his face. Then he looked up at me.

‘So you lost out, Doc?’ I could hardly hear the husky whisper above the voice of the storm. ‘God, I’m sorry.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your brother?’ He nodded at the man at my feet.

‘Commander Swanson told you?’

‘Yeah. Just before we left. That’s why we came.’ His gaze moved in horrified fascination over the floor of the hut, and his face was grey, like old parchment. ‘A minute, Doc, just a minute.’ He turned and hurried through the doorway.

When he came back he looked better, but not much. He said: ‘Commander Swanson said that that was why he had to let you go.’

‘Who else knows?’

‘Skipper and myself. No one else.’

‘Keep it that way, will you? As a favour to me.’

‘If you say so, Doc.’ There was curiosity in his face now, and puzzlement, but horror was still the dominant expression. ‘My God, have you ever seen anything like it?’

‘Let’s get back to the others,’ I said. ‘We’re doing nobody any good by staying here.’

He nodded without speaking. Together we made our way back to the other hut. Apart from Dr Jolly and Kinnaird, three other men were on their feet now, Captain Folsom, an extraordinarily tall thin man with savagely burnt face and hands who was second in command of the base, Hewson, a dark-eyed taciturn character, a tractor driver and engineer who had been responsible for the diesel generators, and a cheerful Yorkshireman, Naseby, the camp cook. Jolly, who had opened my medical kit and was applying fresh bandages to the arms of the men still lying down, introduced them, then turned back to his job. He didn’t seem to need my help, not for the moment, anyway. I heard Hansen say to Zabrinski: ‘In contact with the Dolphin!’

‘Well, no.’ Zabrinski stopped sending his call-sign and shifted slightly to ease his broken ankle. ‘I don’t quite know how to put this, Lieutenant, but the fact is that this little ol’ set here seems to have blown a fuse.’

‘Well, now,’ Hansen said heavily. ‘That is clever of you, Zabrinski. You mean you can’t raise them?’

‘I can hear them, they can’t hear me.’ He shrugged, apologetically. ‘Me and my clumsy feet, I guess. It wasn’t just only my ankle that went when I took that tumble out there.’

‘Well, can’t you repair the damn’ thing?’

‘I don’t think so, Lieutenant.’

‘Damn it, you’re supposed to be a radioman.’

‘That’s so,’ Zabrinski acknowledged reasonably. ‘But I’m not a magician. And with a couple of numbed and frozen hands, no tools, an old-type set without a printed circuit and the code signs in Japanese – well, even Marconi would have called it a day.’

‘Can it be repaired?’ Hansen insisted.

‘It’s a transistor set. No valves to smash. I expect it could be repaired. But it might take hours, Lieutenant – I’d even have to fake up a set of tools first.’

‘Well, fake them. Anything you like. Only get that thing working.’

Zabrinski said nothing. He held out the headphones to Hansen. Hansen looked at Zabrinski, then at the phones, took them without a word and listened briefly. Then he shrugged, handed back the phones and said: ‘Well, I guess there is no hurry to repair that radio.’

‘Yeah,’ Zabrinski said. ‘Awkward, you might say, Lieutenant.’

‘What’s awkward?’ I asked.

‘Looks as if we’re going to be next on the list for a rescue party,’ Hansen said heavily. ‘They’re sending a more or less continuous signal: “Ice closing rapidly, return at once.” ’

‘I was against this madness from the very beginning,’ Rawlings intoned from the floor. He stared down at the already melting lumps of frozen tinned soup and stirred it moodily with a fork. ‘A gallant attempt, men, but foredoomed to failure.’

‘Keep your filthy fingers out of that soup and kindly clam up,’ Hansen said coldly. He turned suddenly to Kinnaird. ‘How about your radio set? Of course, that’s it. We have fit men here to crank your generator and–’

‘I’m sorry.’ Kinnaird smiled the way a ghost might smile. ‘It’s not a hand-powered generator, that was destroyed, it’s a battery set. The batteries are finished. Completely finished.’

‘A battery set, you said?’ Zabrinski looked at him in mild surprise. ‘Then what caused all the power fluctuations when you were transmitting?’

‘We kept changing over the nickel cadmium cells to try to make the most of what little power was left in them: we’d only fifteen left altogether, most of them were lost in the fire. That caused the power fluctuations. But even Nife cells don’t last for ever. They’re finished, mate. The combined power left in those cells wouldn’t light a pencil torch.’

Zabrinski didn’t say anything. No one said anything. The ice-spicules drummed incessantly against the east wall, the Coleman hissed, the solid-fuel stove purred softly: but the sole effect of those three sounds was to make the silence inside seem that little bit more absolute. No one looked at his neighbours, everyone stared down at the floor with the fixed and steadfast gaze of an entomologist hunting for traces of woodworm. Any newspaper printing a picture taken at that instant wouldn’t have found it any too easy to convince its readers that the men on Drift Ice Station Zebra had been rescued just ten minutes previously, and rescued from certain death at that. The readers would have pointed out that one might have expected a little more jubilation in the atmosphere, a touch, perhaps, of lighthearted relief, and they wouldn’t have been far wrong at that, there wasn’t very much gaiety around.