Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

‘So soon?’ The surprise was in his red, swollen streaming eyes as well as in his voice. ‘Not so soon, Doctor. It’s hardly – well, it’s hardly started to take effect.’

‘So soon,’ I said. ‘Carbon monoxide poisoning is very rapidly progressive. Five dead within the hour. Within two hours fifty. At least fifty.’

‘You take the choice out of my hands,’ he murmured. ‘For which I am grateful. John, where is our main propulsion officer? His hour has come.’

‘I’ll get him.’ Hansen hauled himself wearily to his feet, an old man making his last struggle to rise from his deathbed, and at that moment the engine-room door opened and blackened exhausted men staggered into the control room. Waiting men filed out to take their place. Swanson said to one of the men who had just entered: ‘Is that you, Will?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Lieutenant Raeburn, the navigating officer, pulled off his mask and began to cough, rackingly, painfully. Swanson waited until he had quieted a little.

‘How are things down there, Will?’

‘We’ve stopped making smoke, Skipper.’ Raeburn wiped his streaming face, swayed dizzily and lowered himself groggily to the floor. ‘I think we’ve drowned out the lagging completely.’

‘How long to get the rest of it off?’

‘God knows. Normally, ten minutes. The way we are – an hour. Maybe longer.’

‘Thank you. Ah!’ He smiled faintly as Hansen and Cartwright appeared out of the smoke-filled gloom. ‘Our main propulsion officer. Mr Cartwright, I would be glad if you would put the kettle on to boil. What’s the record for activating the plant, getting steam up and spinning the turbo-generators?’

‘I couldn’t say, Skipper.’ Red-eyed, coughing, smoke-blackened and obviously in considerable pain, Cartwright nevertheless straightened his shoulders and smiled slowly. ‘But you may consider it broken.’

He left. Swanson heaved himself to his feet with obvious weakness – except for two brief inspection trips to the engine-room he had not once worn any breathing apparatus during those interminable and pain-filled hours. He called for power on the broadcast circuit, unhooked a microphone and spoke in a calm clear strong voice: it was an amazing exhibition in self-control, the triumph of a mind over agonised lungs still starving for air.

‘This is your captain speaking,’ he said. ‘The fire in the engine-room is out. We are already reactivating our power plant. Open all watertight doors throughout the ship. They are to remain open until further orders. You may regard the worst of our troubles as lying behind us. Thank you for all you have done.’ He hooked up the microphone, and turned to Hansen. ‘The worst is behind, John – if we have enough power left to reactivate the plant.’

‘Surely the worst is still to come,’ I said. ‘It’ll take you how long, three-quarters of an hour, maybe an hour to get your turbine generators going and your air-purifying equipment working again. How long do you think it will take your air cleaners to make any noticeable effect on this poisonous air?’

‘Half an hour. At least that. Perhaps more.’

‘There you are, then.’ My mind was so woolly and doped now that I had difficulty in finding words to frame my thoughts, and I wasn’t even sure that my thoughts were worth thinking. ‘An hour and a half at least – and you said the worst was over. The worst hasn’t even begun.’ I shook my head, trying to remember what it was that I had been been going to say next, then remembered. ‘In an hour and a half one out of every four of your men will be gone.’

Swanson smiled. He actually, incredibly, smiled. He said: ‘As Sherlock used to say to Moriarty, I think not, Doctor. Nobody’s going to die of monoxide poisoning. In fifteen minutes’ time we’ll have fresh breathable air throughout the ship.’

Hansen glanced at me just as I glanced at him. The strain had been too much, the old man had gone off his rocker. Swanson caught our interchange of looks and laughed, the laugh changing abruptly to a bout of convulsive coughing as he inhaled too much of that poisoned smoke-laden atmosphere. He coughed for a long time then gradually quietened down.

‘Serves me right,’ he gasped. ‘Your faces . . . Why do you think I ordered the watertight doors opened, Doctor?’

‘No idea.’

‘John?’

Hansen shook his head. Swanson looked at him quizzically and said: ‘Speak to the engine-room. Tell them to light up the diesel.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Hansen said woodenly. He made no move.

‘Lieutenant Hansen is wondering whether he should fetch a strait-jacket,’ Swanson said. ‘Lieutenant Hansen knows that a diesel engine is never never lit up when a submarine is submerged – unless with a snorkel which is useless under ice – for a diesel not only uses air straight from the engine-room atmosphere, it gulps it down in great draughts and would soon clear away all the air in the ship. Which is what I want. We bleed compressed air under fairly high pressure into the forepart of the ship. Nice clean fresh air. We light up the diesel in the after part – it will run rough at first because of the low concentration of oxygen in this poisonous muck – but it will run. It will suck up much of this filthy air, exhausting its gases over the side, and as it does it will lower the atmospheric pressure aft and the fresh air will make its way through from for’ard. To have done this before now would have been suicidal, the fresh air would only have fed the flames until the fire was out of control. But we can do it now. We can run it for a few minutes only, of course, but a few minutes will be ample. You are with me, Lieutenant Hansen?’

Hansen was with him all right, but he didn’t answer. He had already left.

Three minutes passed, then we heard, through the now open passageway above the reactor room, the erratic sound of a diesel starting, fading, coughing, then catching again – we learned later that the engineers had had to bleed off several ether bottles in the vicinity of the air intake to get the engine to catch. For a minute or two it ran roughly and erratically and seemed to be making no impression at all on that poisonous air: then, imperceptibly, almost, at first, then with an increasing degree of definition, we could see the smoke in the control room, illuminated by the single lamp still left burning there, begin to drift and eddy towards the reactor passage. Smoke began to stir and eddy in the corners of the control room as the diesel sucked the fumes aft, and more smoke-laden air, a shade lighter in colour, began to move in from the wardroom passageway, pulled in by the decreasing pressure in the control room, pushed in by the gradual build-up of fresh air in the forepart of the submarine as compressed air was bled into the living spaces.

A few more minutes made the miracle. The diesel thudded away in the engine-room, running more sweetly and strongly as air with a higher concentration of oxygen reached its intake, and the smoke in the control room drained steadily away to be replaced by a thin greyish mist from the forepart of the ship that was hardly deserving of the name of smoke at all. And that mist carried with it air, an air with fresh life-giving oxygen, an air with a proportion of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that was now almost negligible. Or so it seemed to us.

The effect upon the crew was just within the limits of credibility. It was as if a wizard had passed through the length of the ship and touched them with the wand of life. Unconscious men, men for whom death had been less than half an hour away, began to stir, some to open their eyes: sick, exhausted, nauseated and pain-racked men who had been lying or sitting on the decks in attitudes of huddled despair sat up straight or stood, their faces breaking into expressions of almost comical wonderment and disbelief as they drew great draughts down into their aching lungs and found that it was not poisonous gases they were inhaling but fresh breathable air: men who had made up their minds for death began to wonder how they could ever have thought that way. As air went, I suppose, it was pretty sub-standard stuff and the Factory Acts would have had something to say about it; but, for us, no pine-clad mountain air ever tasted half so sweet.