Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

I felt a hand on my shoulder and Barney Smales's voice said, 'Get the hell out of here, Mr Bowes.' He spoke gently, but he meant it.

I retched dryly once more, then straightened, and asked, 'Who?'

Smales said, 'It's kinda hard to tell. We think it's Doc Kirton. Now go !'

Chapter 5

I went, not looking back. One look had been more than enough. In the officers' club I found a bottle of brandy and poured a large slug down my throat. Inevitably, it merely made me sick again. Apart from that it did nothing and my mind continued to present me with its snapshot of the scene, of Kirton, plastered in bloody fragments over the ice floor and the bulldozer's track. I shivered and tried the brandy again and this time, thankfully, it stayed down. Then I went to find the master sergeant and said, 'Give me some work. Manual work.'

He looked at me sympathetically. 'You saw, huh?'

'I saw.'

'Shovelling snow is good,' he said, and actually ran with me to the other end of Main Street, where he gave me a spade and pointed to the ramp and said, 'You can't dig it all away, but you can try.'

I worked like a dog until I was exhausted, until sweat streamed down my body, attacking the snow with deliberate fury to try to drive the other scene from my mind, until my body and mind were protesting not at memory but at strain. At last, still feeling foul but with some degree of self-control restored, I replaced the shovel on its wall bracket and staggered back along Main Street to the command trench and went in to see Barney Smales.

He scowled at me and said, 'I told you to get the hell out!'

'And sit twiddling my thumbs thinking about it!'

'Nothing else you can do. Nothing any of us can do.'

'You can tell me how it happened!'

He said wearily, 'How can I? I don't know myself. 'Dozer went right over him. More than once. Driver didn't see him, so it looks like he was covered in snow.'

I stared at him. 'You mean he was already dead?'

Barney Smales sighed and his lips tightened.

'Don't you think it's rather important to know?'

His eyes snapped angrily. 'And don't you think,Mr Bowes, that you're being just a little bit insubordinate!

You amorbid pathologist as well as a fan flyer?'

'Of course not. But if he was dead - '

He interrupted furiously. 'Don't say it!'

'I'll say it,' I said. 'It could be murder.'

'Sure it could. And it could have been a heart attack or a cerebral haemorrhage, too. You're so damn smart, you tell me how I can find out!' He broke off and sniffed. 'You've been drinking,' he said accusingly.

I said, 'Brandy.'

'In the morning? He'd done it well and the roles were changed; I was firmly on the defensive now, a morning drunk making trouble.

Still, I tried once more. Or began, anyway. I said, 'Kirton was - '

But Smales wasn't having it, dismissal and disgust combining in a single gesture of his hand as he said,

'Sleep it off.'

But I didn't sleep. I lay on my bunk and thought a lot and finished up with a conclusion or two. One was that Camp Hundred, with all its hazards, was now without a doctor. But it was Kirton I thought about most. If he'd had a stroke or a heart attack, as Smales had said, then perhaps I was being foolish. But Kirton had been no more than thirty, and a relaxed, strong-looking man at that and the odds, surely, were against it. There was perhaps a possibility that he'd been killed accidentally, blundering into a moving tractor or something like that, and an even more remote possibility of suicide, which I included in my mental list only to dismiss it. If he hadn't died of natural causes, an accident, or killed himself, then somebody else had done it.

There were also the nasty little coincidences. Kirton's body had been only yards away from the entrance to the Reserve Fuel Store, where the polar bear had slashed the tanks and eaten the emergency rations. And it had been the morning doorstep sweeper who'd first discovered both the bear's tracks and Kirton's body. The same man? I decided that was one of the things I ought to find out. I'd go into the tractor sheds and talk propulsion and ask questions. But first there was something else. The hospital was my first stop. It was unlocked and I went in, switched on the lights, and stood by the partition between the office and the theatre. What was it Kirton had shouted? That he had something to show me, or tell me; something like that. And that he'd see me later, because he was busy. Had he had a patient in there? If so who? An appointments book lay on the desk and I flipped it open. There weren't many entries anywhere, and only one for the previous day, at 3.30 p.m. It said, Pfc Hansen, nasal polyp.'

Well, I'd try to check on Pfc Hansen, too. But I was more concerned about the microscopic examination Kirton had promised to do on the food wrapping. His microscope was in a wooden box which stood on a side workbench, but there was no slide on the clips though there were plenty in a special rack beside it. However, they were only numbered, not labelled, so I'd neither any way of identifying the right one, nor the knowledge to understand it if I did.

I did find something, though, before I left the hospital. The torn lumps of tinfoil and plastic wrapping from the emergency rations lay discarded in a waste basket by his desk. But there was nothing else: no pad with notes on it, no torn-up scraps of paper in the waste basket. So Kirton had looked and found nothing to interest him? It could only be that. Nothing worthy of remark, nothing to make notes about. The whole thing negative. But then I thought: Nothing? No bacteria? Yet the morning before, when he'd said he'd use his microscope, he'd said also that if the bear had eaten the stuff, there'd be saliva and therefore bacteria. I collected the wrappings, found an envelope, put them inside and tucked them in my pocket. They were certainly no use to me, but if I left them, they'd be thrown out. I left, aware that I was jumping to conclusions and that some of them were pretty wild.

Then I collected the two fat volumes of the TK4 maintenance manual, took them along to the tractor shed and introduced myself to the top sergeant there, a bulky cigar-smoker called Reilly. He looked at me and the manuals, took the cigar from his mouth, spat out a flake of tobacco and said, 'This all we get?'

'The principle is that it's all you need,' I said.

'Jesus!' he said. 'No project engineer. Not even a coupla lectures?'

I explained about the TK4 and its great simplicity. It was designed on the basis that any bunch of competent mechanics with reasonable workshop facilities could do all that was necessary by way of repairs, servicing and maintenance.

Reilly said, 'Yeah?' on a rising note, full of disbelief.

I smiled. 'If you buy the TK4 - '

'I'm not buying, son.'

'If the army buys, then?' He nodded. 'If that happens, naturally we'll send a whole crew over to see her through the first operations. But the idea of the trials is to see how well it can be operated without all that. We tried it in Canada and it worked pretty well.'

Reilly grinned behind the cigar. 'This ain't Canada, son.'

I said, 'But that's the idea.'

He hefted the manuals, about six pounds of assorted paper, and said, 'And this here's a little bedtime reading?'

'I'm afraid so.'

Reilly looked at me out of small blue eyes. 'Answer me a question, willya? If this TK4 of yours goes over a guy, what's it do?'

I said soberly, 'He'd be a bit battered by the air. The rubber skirts might scrape some skin off. It wouldn't kill him, if that's what you mean.'

'That's what I mean. I just been clearing the doc offa them tracks.'

He was already turning away. 'Don't worry, son, I'll read the books.'