Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

‘Ah, there you are,’ Rawlings said conversationally. He might have been hailing a neighbour who’d phoned a minute previously to see if he could come across to borrow the lawnmower rather than greeting men he’d been fairly certain he’d never see again. ‘The time is perfect – just about to ring the dinner bell, Captain. Care for some Maryland chicken – I think.’

‘Not just at the moment, thank you,’ Swanson said politely. ‘Sorry about the ankle, Zabrinski. How is it?’

‘Just fine, Captain, just fine. In a plaster cast.’ He thrust out a foot, stiffly. ‘The Doc here – Dr Jolly – fixed me up real nice. Had much trouble last night?’ This was for me.

‘Dr Carpenter had a great deal of trouble last night,’ Swanson said. ‘And we’ve had a considerable amount since. But later. Bring that stretcher in here. You first, Zabrinski. As for you, Rawlings, you can stop making like Escoffier. The Dolphin’s less than a couple of hundred yards from here. We’ll have you all aboard in half an hour.’

I heard a shuffling noise behind me. Dr Jolly was on his feet, helping Captain Folsom to his. Folsom looked even weaker than he had done yesterday: his face, bandaged though it was, certainly looked worse.

‘Captain Folsom,’ I introduced him. ‘Dr Jolly. This is Commander Swanson, captain of the Dolphin. Dr Benson.’

‘Doctor Benson, you said, old boy?’ Jolly lifted an eyebrow. ‘My word, the pill-rolling competition’s getting a little fierce in these parts. And Commander. By jove, but we’re glad to see you fellows.’ The combination of the rich Irish brogue and the English slang of the twenties fell more oddly than ever on my ear, he reminded me of educated Singhalese I’d met with their precise, lilting, standard southern English interlarded with the catch-phrases of forty years ago. Topping, old bean, simply too ripping for words.

‘I can understand that,’ Swanson smiled. He looked around the huddled unmoving men on the floor, men who might have been living or dead but for the immediate and smoky condensation from their shallow breathing, and his smile faded. He said to Captain Folsom: ‘I cannot tell you how sorry I am. This has been a dreadful thing.’

Folsom stirred and said something but we couldn’t make out what it was. Although his shockingly burnt face had been bandaged since I’d seen him last it didn’t seem to have done him any good: he was talking inside his mouth all right but the ravaged cheek and mouth had become so paralysed that his speech didn’t emerge as any recognisable language. The good side of his face, the left, was twisted and furrowed and the eye above almost completely shut. This had nothing to do with any sympathetic neuromuscular reaction caused by the wickedly charred right cheek. The man was in agony. I said to Jolly: ‘No morphine left?’ I’d left him, I’d thought, with more than enough of it.

‘Nothing left,’ he said tiredly. ‘I used the lot. The lot.’

‘Dr Jolly worked all through the night,’ Zabrinski said quietly. ‘Eight hours. Rawlings and himself and Kinnaird. They never stopped once.’

Benson had his medical kit open. Jolly saw it and smiled, a smile of relief, a smile of exhaustion. He was in far worse case than he’d been the previous evening. He hadn’t had all that much in him when he’d started. But he’d worked. He’d worked a solid eight hours. He’d even fixed up Zabrinski’s ankle. A good doctor. Conscientious, Hippocratic, anyway. He was entitled to relax. Now that there were other doctors here, he’d relax. But not before.

He began to ease Folsom into a sitting position and I helped him. He slid down himself, his back to the wall. ‘Sorry, and all that, you know,’ he said. His bearded frostbitten face twisted into the semblance of a grin. ‘A poor host.’

‘You can leave everything to us now, Dr Jolly,’ Swanson said quietly. ‘You’ve got all the help that’s going. One thing. All those men fit to be moved?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jolly rubbed an arm across bloodshot, smudged eyes. ‘I don’t know. One or two of them slipped pretty far back last night. It’s the cold. Those two. Pneumonia, I think. Something an injured man could fight off in a few days back home can be fatal here. It’s the cold,’ he repeated. ‘Uses up ninety per cent of his energy not in fighting illness and infection but just generating enough heat to stay alive.’

‘Take it easy,’ Swanson said. ‘Maybe we’d better change our minds about that half-hour to get you all aboard. Who’s first for the ambulance, Dr Benson?’ Not Dr Carpenter. Dr Benson. Well, Benson was his own ship’s doctor. But pointed, all the same. A regrettable coolness, as sudden in its onset as it was marked in degree, had appeared in his attitude towards me, and I didn’t have to be beaten over the head with a heavy club to guess at the reason for the abrupt change.

‘Zabrinski, Dr Jolly, Captain Folsom and this man here,’ Benson said promptly.

‘Kinnaird, radio operator,’ Kinnaird identified himself. ‘We never thought you’d make it, mate.’ This to me. He dragged himself somehow to his feet and stood there swaying. ‘I can walk.’

‘Don’t argue,’ Swanson said curtly. ‘Rawlings, stop stirring that filthy mush and get to your feet. Go with them. How long would it take you to run a cable from the boat, fix up a couple of big electric heaters in here, some lights?’

‘Alone?’

‘All the help you want, man.’

‘Fifteen minutes. I could rig a phone, sir.’

‘That would be useful. When the stretcher bearers come back bring blankets, sheets, hot water. Wrap the water containers in the blankets. Anything else, Dr Benson?’

‘Not now, sir.’

‘That’s it then. Away you go.’

Rawlings lifted the spoon from the pot, tasted it, smacked his lips in appreciation and shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a crying shame,’ he said mournfully. ‘It really is.’ He went out in the wake of the stretcher bearers.

Of the eight men left lying on the floor, four were conscious. Hewson the tractor-driver, Naseby the cook, and two others who introduced themselves as Harrington. Twins. They’d even been burnt and frostbitten in the same places. The other four were either sleeping or in coma. Benson and I started looking them over, Benson much more carefully than myself, very busy with thermometer and stethoscope. Looking for signs of pneumonia. I didn’t think he’d have to look very far. Commander Swanson looked speculatively around the cabin, occasionally throwing a very odd look in my direction, occasionally flailing his arms across his chest to keep the circulation going. He had to. He didn’t have the fancy furs I had and in spite of the solid-fuel stove the place was like an ice-box.

The first man I looked at was lying on his side in the far right-hand corner of the room. He had half-open eyes, just showing the lower arcs of his pupils, sunken temples, marble-white forehead and the only part of his face that wasn’t bandaged was as cold as the marble in a winter graveyard. I said: ‘Who is this?’

‘Grant. John Grant.’ Hewson, the dark quiet tractor-driver answered me. ‘Radio operator. Kinnaird’s side-kick. How’s it with him?’

‘He’s dead. He’s been dead quite some time.’

‘Dead?’ Swanson said sharply. ‘You sure?’ I gave him my aloof professional look and said nothing. He went on to Benson: ‘Anybody too ill to be moved?’

‘Those two here, I think,’ Benson said. He wasn’t noticing the series of peculiar looks Swanson was letting me have, so he handed me his stethoscope. After a minute I straightened and nodded.

‘Third-degree burns,’ Benson said to Swanson. ‘What we can see of them, that is. Both high temperatures, both very fast, very weak and erratic pulses, both with lung fluids.’