Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

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 grey-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 180°, 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 towards the east. It wasn’t easy, for that far subzero 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 needle-pointed 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 north-east. Maybe quarter of a mile away, maybe half a mile. 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 no good. I don’t see it. But then my eyes have been acting up on me for the past half-hour. 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 fancy it would be?’ Hansen’s voice was dispirited, with overtones of hopelessness. ‘A light?’

‘A searchlight shining vertically upwards. 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, he 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 centre of my imagined patch of luminescence and not more than four hundred 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 six hundred, 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 ol’ 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 on to 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, for I’m not.’

‘And Dr Carpenter?’ Swanson smiled.

‘Defective mental equipment somewhere,’ Hansen said. ‘He doesn’t seem to know how to set 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 comes after moments of great stress and tension. Hansen was too tough for that. I knew that and I knew that Swanson knew it also. 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 off 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.

‘However it was,’ Swanson smiled, ‘you can consider yourselves two of the luckiest men alive. That rocket you saw was the third last we had, it’s been a regular fourth of July for the past hour or so. And you reckon Rawlings, Zabrinski and the survivors on Zebra are safe for the present?’

‘Nothing to worry about for the next couple of days,’ Hansen nodded. ‘They’ll be O.K. Cold, mind you, and a good half of them desperately in need of hospital treatment, but they’ll survive.’

‘Fine. Well, this is how it is. This lead here stopped closing in about half an hour ago, but it doesn’t matter now, we can drop down any time and still hold our position. What does matter is that we have located the fault in the ice-machine. It’s a damnably tricky and complicated job and I expect it will take several hours yet to fix. But I think we’ll wait until it is fixed before we try anything. I’m not too keen on this idea of making a dead reckoning approach to this lead near Zebra then loosing off a shot in the dark. Since there’s no desperate hurry, I’d rather wait till we got the ice fathometer operating again, make an accurate survey of this lead then fire a torpedo up through the middle. If the ice is only four or five feet thick there, we shouldn’t have much trouble blowing a hole through.’

‘That would be best,’ Hansen agreed. He finished off his medicinal alcohol – an excellent bourbon – rose stiffly to his feet and stretched. ‘Well, back to the old treadmill again. How many torpedoes in working order?’

‘Four, at the last count.’

‘I may as well go help young Mills load them up now. If that’s O.K. by you, Skipper.’

‘It is not O.K. by me,’ Swanson said mildly, ‘and if you’ll take a quick gander at that mirror there you’ll understand why. You’re not fit to load a slug into an airgun far less a torpedo into its tube. You haven’t just been on a Sunday afternoon stroll, you know. A few hours’ sleep, John, then we’ll see.’