Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

‘Me, too,’ Jolly said fervently. ‘But what’s the commander so anxious about?’

‘Ice. You never know the hour or minute it starts to close in. Want to spend the next year or two up here?’

Jolly grinned, thought over it for a bit, then stopped grinning. He said apprehensively: ‘How long are we going to be under this damned ice? Before we reach the open sea, I mean?’

‘Twenty-four hours, Swanson says. Don’t look so worried, Jolly. Believe me, it’s far safer under this stuff than among it.’

With a very unconvinced look on his face Jolly picked up his medical kit and led the way from the sick-bay. Swanson was waiting for us in the control room. We climbed up the hatches, dropped down over the side and walked over to the Drift Station.

Most of the crew had already made their way out there. We passed numbers of them on the way back and most of them looked grim or sick or both and didn’t even glance up as we passed. I didn’t have to guess why they looked as they did, they’d been opening doors that they should have left closed.

With the sharp rise in outside temperature and the effect of the big electric heaters having been burning there for twenty-four hours the bunkhouse hut was now, if anything, overheated, with the last traces of ice long vanished from walls and ceiling. One of the men, Brownell, had recovered consciousness and was sitting up, supported, and drinking soup provided by one of the two men who had been keeping watch over him.

‘Well,’ I said to Swanson, ‘here’s one ready to go–’

‘No doubt about that,’ Jolly said briskly. He bent over the other, Bolton, for some seconds, then straightened and shook his head. ‘A very sick man, Commander, very sick. I wouldn’t care to take the responsibility of moving him.’

‘I might be forced to take the responsibility myself,’ Swanson said bluntly. ‘Let’s have another opinion on this.’ His tone and words, I thought, could have been more diplomatic and conciliatory; but if there were a couple of murderers aboard the Dolphin there was a thirty-three and a third per cent chance that Jolly was one of them and Swanson wasn’t forgetting it for a moment.

I gave Jolly an apologetic half-shrug, bent over Bolton and examined him as best I could with only one hand available for the task. I straightened and said: ‘Jolly’s right. He is pretty sick. But I think he might just stand the transfer to the ship.’

‘ “Might just” is not quite the normally accepted basis for deciding the treatment of a patient,’ Jolly objected.

‘I know it’s not. But the circumstances are hardly normal either.’

‘I’ll take the responsibility,’ Swanson said. ‘Dr Jolly, I’d be most grateful if you would supervise the transport of those two men back to the ship. I’ll let you have as many men as you want straight away.’

Jolly protested some more, then gave in with good grace. He supervised the transfer, and very competent he was about it too. I remained out there a little longer, watching Rawlings and some others dismantling heaters and lights and rolling up cables and, after the last of them was gone and I was alone, I made my way round to the tractor shed.

The broken haft of the knife was still in the tank of the tractor. But not the gun and not the two magazines. Those were gone. And whoever had taken them it hadn’t been Dr Jolly, he hadn’t been out of my sight for two consecutive seconds between the time he’d left the Dolphin and the time of his return to it.

At three o’clock that afternoon we dropped down below the ice and headed south for the open sea.

The afternoon and evening passed quickly and pleasantly enough. Closing our hatches and dropping down from our hardly won foothold in that lead had had a symbolic significance at least as important as the actual fact of leaving itself. The thick ceiling of ice closing over the hull of the Dolphin was a curtain being drawn across the eye of the mind. We had severed all physical connection with Drift Ice Station Zebra, a home of the dead that might continue to circle slowly about the Pole for mindless centuries to come; and with the severance had come an abrupt diminution of the horror and the shock which had hung palllike over the ship and its crew for the past twenty-four hours. A dark door had swung to behind us and we had turned our backs on it. Mission accomplished, duty done, we were heading for home again and the sudden upsurge of relief and happiness among the crew to be on their way again, their high anticipation of port and leave, was an almost tangible thing. The mood of the ship was close to that of lighthearted gaiety. But there was no gaiety in my mind, and no peace: I was leaving too much behind. Nor could there be any peace in the minds of Swanson and Hansen, of Rawlings and Zabrinski: they knew we were carrying a killer aboard, a killer who had killed many times. Dr Benson knew also, but for the moment Dr Benson did not count: he still had not regained consciousness and I held the very unprofessional hope that he wouldn’t for some time to come. In the twilight world of emergence from coma a man can start babbling and say all too much.

Some of the Zebra survivors had asked if they could see around the ship and Swanson agreed. In light of what I had told him in his cabin that morning, he must have agreed very reluctantly indeed, but no trace of this reluctance showed in his calmly smiling face. To have refused their request would have been rather a churlish gesture, for all the secrets of the Dolphin were completely hidden from the eye of the layman. But it wasn’t good manners that made Swanson give his consent: refusing a reasonable request could have been responsible for making someone very suspicious indeed.

Hansen took them around the ship and I accompanied them, less for the exercise or interest involved than for the opportunity it gave me to keep a very close eye indeed on their reactions to their tour. We made a complete circuit of the ship, missing out only the reactor room, which no one could visit, anyway, and the inertial navigation room which had been barred to me also. As we moved around I watched them all, and especially two of them, as closely as it is possible to watch anyone without making him aware of your observation, and I learned precisely what I had expected to learn – nothing. I’d been crazy even to hope I’d learn anything, our pal with the gun was wearing a mask that had been forged into shape and riveted into position. But I’d had to do it, anyway: playing in this senior league I couldn’t pass up the one chance in a million.

Supper over, I helped Jolly as best I could with his evening surgery. Whatever else Jolly was, he was a damn’ good doctor. Quickly and efficiently he checked and where necessary rebandaged the walking cases, examined and treated Benson and Folsom then asked me to come right aft with him to the nucleonics laboratory in the stern room which had been cleared of deck gear to accommodate the four other bed patients, the Harrington twins, Brownell and Bolton. The sick-bay itself had only two cots for invalids and Benson and Folsom had those.

Bolton, despite Jolly’s dire predictions, hadn’t suffered a relapse because of his transfer from the hut to the ship - which had been due largely to Jolly’s extremely skilful and careful handling of the patient and the stretcher into which he had been lashed. Bolton, in fact, was conscious now and complaining of severe pain in his badly burned right forearm. Jolly removed the burn covering and Bolton’s arm was a mess all right, no skin left worth speaking of, showing an angry violent red between areas of suppuration. Different doctors have different ideas as to the treatment of burns: Jolly favoured a salve-coated aluminium foil which he smoothed across the entire burn area then lightly bandaged in place. He then gave him a painkilling injection and some sleeping tablets, and briskly informed the enlisted man who was keeping watch that he was to be informed immediately of any change or deterioration in Bolton’s condition. A brief inspection of the three others, a changed bandage here and there and he was through for the night.