Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

So was I. For two nights now I had had practically no sleep - what little had been left for me the previous night had been ruined by the pain in my left hand. I was exhausted. When I got to my cabin, Hansen was already asleep and the engineer officer gone.

I didn’t need any of Jolly’s sleeping pills that night.

I awoke at two o’clock. I was sleep-drugged, still exhausted and felt as if I had been in bed about five minutes. But I awoke in an instant and in that instant I was fully awake.

Only a dead man wouldn’t have stirred. The racket issuing from the squawk box just above Hansen’s bunk was appalling: a high-pitched, shrieking, atonic whistle, two-toned and altering pitch every half-second, it drilled stiletto-like against my cringing eardrums. A banshee in its death agonies could never have hoped to compete with that lot.

Hansen already had his feet on the deck and was pulling on clothes and shoes in desperate haste. I had never thought to see that slow-speaking laconic Texan in such a tearing hurry, but I was seeing it now.

‘What in hell’s name is the matter?’ I demanded. I had to shout to make myself heard above, the shrieking of the alarm whistle.

‘Fire!’ His face was shocked and grim. ‘The ship’s on fire. And under this goddamned ice!’

Still buttoning his shirt, he hurdled my cot, crashed the door back on its hinges and was gone.

The atonic screeching of the whistle stopped abruptly and the silence fell like a blow. Then I was conscious of something more than silence – I was conscious of a complete lack of vibration throughout the ship. The great engines had stopped. And then I was conscious of something else again: feathery fingers of ice brushing up and down my spine. Why had the engines stopped? What could make a nuclear engine stop so quickly and what happened once it did? My God, I thought, maybe the fire is coming from the reactor room itself. I’d looked into the heart of the uranium atomic pile through a heavily leaded glass inspection port and seen the indescribable unearthly radiance of it, a nightmarish coalescence of green and violet and blue, the new ‘dreadful light’ of mankind. What happened when this dreadful light ran amok? I didn’t know, but I suspected I didn’t want to be around when it happened.

I dressed slowly, not hurrying. My damaged hand didn’t help me much but that wasn’t why I took my time. Maybe the ship was on fire, maybe the nuclear power plant had gone out of kilter. But if Swanson’s superbly trained crew couldn’t cope with every emergency that could conceivably arise then matters weren’t going to be improved any by Carpenter running around in circles shouting: ‘Where’s the fire?’

Three minutes after Hansen had gone I walked along to the control room and peered in: if I was going to be in the way then this was as far as I was going to go. Dark acrid smoke billowed past me and a voice – Swanson’s – said sharply: ‘Inside and close that door.’

I pulled the door to and looked around the control room. At least, I tried to. It wasn’t easy. My eyes were already streaming as if someone had thrown a bag of pepper into them and what little sight was left them didn’t help me much. The room was filled with black evil-smelling smoke, denser by far and more throat-catching than the worst London fog. Visibility was no more than a few feet, but what little I could see showed me men still at their stations. Some were gasping, some were half-choking, some were cursing softly, all had badly watering eyes, but there was no trace of panic.

‘You’d have been better on the other side of that door,’ Swanson said dryly. ‘Sorry to have barked at you, Doctor, but we want to limit the spread of the smoke as much as possible.’

‘Where’s the fire?’

‘In the engine-room.’ Swanson could have been sitting on his front porch at home discussing the weather. ‘Where in the engine-room we don’t know. It’s pretty bad. At least, the smoke is. The extent of the fire we don’t know, because we can’t locate it. Engineer officer says it’s impossible to see your hand in front of your face.’

‘The engines,’ I said. ‘They’ve stopped. Has anything gone wrong?’

He rubbed his eyes with a handkerchief, spoke to a man who was pulling on a heavy rubber suit and a smoke-mask, then turned back to me.

‘We’re not going to be vaporised, if that’s what you mean.’ I could have sworn he was smiling. ‘The atomic pile can only fail safe no matter what happens. If anything goes wrong the uranium rods slam down in very quick time indeed – a fraction under a one-thousandth of a second – stopping the whole reaction. In this case, though, we shut it off ourselves. The men in the manoeuvring-room could no longer see either the reactor dials or the governor for the control rods. No option but to shut it down. The engine-room crew have been forced to abandon the engine and manoeuvring-rooms and take shelter in the stern room.’

Well, that was something at least. We weren’t going to be blown to pieces, ignobly vaporised on the altar of nuclear advancement: good old-fashioned suffocation, that was to be our lot. ‘So what do we do?’ I asked.

‘What we should do is surface immediately. With fourteen feet of ice overhead that’s not easy. Excuse me, will you?’

He spoke to the now completely masked and suited man who was carrying a small dialled box in his hands. They walked together past the navigator’s chart desk and ice-machine to the heavy door opening on the passage that led to the engine-room over the top of the reactor compartment. They unclipped the door, pushed it open. A dense blinding cloud of dark smoke rolled into the room as the masked man stepped quickly into the passageway and swung the door to behind him. Swanson clamped the door shut, walked, temporarily blinded, back to the control position and fumbled down a roof microphone.

‘Captain speaking.’ His voice echoed emptily through the control centre. ‘The fire is located in the engine-room. We do not know yet whether it is electrical, chemical or fuel oil: the source of the fire has not been pin-pointed. Acting on the principle of being prepared for the worst, we are now testing for a radiation leak.’ So that was what the masked man had been carrying, a Geiger counter. ‘If that proves negative, we shall try for a steam leak; and if that is negative we shall carry out an intensive search to locate the fire. It will not be easy as I’m told visibility is almost zero. We have already shut down all electrical circuits in the engine-room, lighting included, to prevent an explosion in the event of atomised fuel being present in the atmosphere. We have closed the oxygen intake valves and isolated the engine-room from the air-cleaning system in the hope that the fire will consume all available oxygen and burn itself out.

‘All smoking is prohibited until further notice. Heaters, fans, and all electrical circuits other than communication lines to be switched off – and that includes the juke-box and the ice-cream machine. All lamps to be switched off except those absolutely essential. All movement is to be restricted to a minimum. I shall keep you informed of any progress we may make.’

I became aware of someone standing by my side. It was Dr Jolly, his normally jovial face puckered and woebegone, the tears flowing down his face. Plaintively he said to me: ‘This is a bit thick, old boy, what? I’m not sure that I’m so happy now about being rescued. And all those prohibitions – no smoking, no power to be used, no moving around – do those mean what I take them to mean?’

‘I’m afraid they do indeed.’ It was Swanson who answered Jolly’s question for him. ‘This, I’m afraid, is every nuclear submarine captain’s nightmare come true – fire under the ice. At one stroke we’re not only reduced to the level of a conventional submarine – we’re two stages worse. In the first place, a conventional submarine wouldn’t be under the ice, anyway. In the second place, it has huge banks of storage batteries, and even if it were beneath the ice it would have sufficient reserve power to steam far enough south to get clear of the ice. Our reserve battery is so small that it wouldn’t take us a fraction of the way.’