Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

I said quickly, 'Who found Doc Kirton ?'

He turned back. 'I did. So?'

'You were driving?'

'Right.'

'And the bear tracks. Who found those?'

He took a step towards me, almost aggressively.

'Why you wanna know?'

'I wondered, that's all.'

He said, 'Kid name of Hansen.'

'He's got a nasal polyp,' I said.

'Had. The doc fixed it yesterday. Just before . . .' he stopped. I said, 'Yes, I know,' and walked away, but I could feel his eyes on my back. Because I was an interloper? Or for some other reason?

As I went in to lunch, Barney Smales was leaving the mess hall. He stopped and looked at me thoughtfully, then said, 'When you've eaten, come and talk to me, huh?'

'No time like the present."

He said, 'Not now. The food's necessary. Eat first.'

I wasn't hungry, but I ate a little, then went to the command hut. Smales took me into his office and closed the door. He was frowning, but his tone was friendly enough as he said, 'Are you normally this suspicious?'

I said, 'I'm renowned for my sunny outlook.'

'You are? I'd take convincing. Listen to me a minute, Bowes. When you run a place like this, there's plenty of problems. They come up all the time. Old problems, new problems, recurrent problems. You come in category two. You're a new problem and I want to know what's eating you.'

I said, 'It simply seems to me that too many dangerous things have been happening for it all to be coincidence.'

'And you think maybe there's murder, sabotage, the whole works ?'

'I began to wonder.'

He sat back in his chair, toying with a ruler from his desk, then said, surprisingly, 'I can see how you might think it.'

'I'm relieved to hear it.

'But I don't think it.'

'I gathered that.'

'So what I want to do is go over it with you, right? Tell you what I think and why I think it. What's the first one, the runway lights?'

'If you take them in sequence, yes.'

'Okay. Well, this morning I went out there in a Weasel with Herschel and two electricians and we had a look at the cables. Wanna know what we found?'

'Of course.'

'They'd been chewed. Not in just one place, either. There were more than forty places. Damn foxes just keep on chewing. Sooner or later, there's a short circuit and bang go the lights. We renew those cables, we have to, around every six months. That satisfy?'

I said, 'Not entirely, no. The short circuit happened at the exact moment a plane was coming in. A plane with you in it. And Kelleher.'

'Yeah. Okay. But it was the first plane in two weeks, right? Two weeks since the lights were used.'

I wasn't satisfied. 'But the lights did go on. It was when the plane was coming in that they failed.'

'That's right. That's why I inspected the cables myself. Because I'm not as green and trusting as you think I am. But you get all the teeth marks and you get a dead fox - '

'Did you?'

'Oh, sure. There he was, right beside the cable. You see, Mr Bowes?'

'I do now.'

'Okay, next problem's the diesel generator, right?'

'Certainly.'

'And you say to yourself, how in hell did the fuel get contaminated? Well, I can't tell you.'

'But. Therem a but?'

He laughed. 'Sure there is. It happens up here. Fuel comes in to Thule by tanker. It's pumped ashore into storage tanks. Then when they bring it up here, it's pumped out again into neoprene. Then it's brought up here and stored, also in neoprene. But rubber pipes are used in pumping, and rubber can go solid and crack in bad cold. Pieces flake off the inside of the pipe and get in the fuel. It's happened with Swing-haul tractors, too. Just one of the hazards.'

'It's not as convincing as the dead fox.'

'I can see I got to work on you, Sherlock. Let's put it this way. It's happened a few times at Thule, and at Belvoir, and on the Trail up here. And here. We know this one. It's one of the standing hazards.'

I shrugged and moved on. 'The coins in the reactor?'

'Carelessness. That's what Kelleher says and I believe it. Tell you why I believe it, too. Not because we had that problem before. We haven't. But because carelessness and lack of concentration are standard here. You're not the man you were three or four days ago and neither am I. You're affected by the altitude, by claustrophobia; you resent the necessity to put heavy clothing on to go to the can.'

I shook my head. 'There's a good reason. I can understand it well enough.'

'Okay,' he said. 'But you resent it. You wish you didn't have to do it. It's a goddam drag. There's a million things. We eat a lot but we get no proper exercise. There's no sun, no space, damn little privacy. We don't take enough fluid and dehydration's a constant hazard, so don't forget to drink your milk. People don't sleep well here. There's no visible difference between night and day down here - or up on the cap, for that matter, through the winter darkness. We've had all the tests done. Doctors, shrinks, efficiency people. Know what they found ?'

'Well, obviously that people aren't as efficient,'

'That's right. They're just about half as efficient. Half! And that's everybody. Officers, enlisted men, visiting scientists and engineers. Everybody, including you, Bowes, is at roughly fifty per cent of normal. Give you two instances. There was a guy up here last winter working on ice movement, a specialist in glaciers. He was also a hot shot bridge player. Not just good, he's a real top player, gets his name in the New York Times. He's sitting in the club one night playing a contract and he suddenly turns nine colours of green and red.'

Smales waited for me to ask why, and I obliged.

'Because he'd forgotten what trumps were, or if it was a no trump hand, and even whether he was trying to make a contract or defending. There's the dummy hand sitting there opposite, and he didn't even know that. His mind had gone blank. What is it, Bowes, is it carelessness? Now the other guy, he was an officer here. Civil engineer. Had been here six weeks and he'd lost the ability to add up, right? Two and two he could do, but fifty-eight and thirty-seven he had to get a pencil. Those coins in the reactor kettle, they're a nuisance, sure. And worse. If I knew who'd done it, I'd kick his ass from here to Fort Belvoir, Virginia. But I have to accept that things like that are gonna happen.'

'And the helicopter crash? And the man lost on the surface? And Doc Kirton?'

He sighed and ran his hand wearily across his forehead. Then he said, 'Okay. I got no explanations. But. There's been five years of operations up here. That was the first air crash. The first. It was bound to happen sooner or later. It makes me sick to my stomach, but statistically it was coming. Same with the guy lost on top. We got nearly three hundred men here. Five hundred sometimes. They live and work in the worst weather conditions in the world. It's a miracle it hasn't happened before. Can you accept that ?'

'I suppose so.' I couldn't accept it quite as readily as he apparently did, but there was obvious truth in what he said and I'd no wish to be needlessly offensive, especially as this was olive-branch time. 'And Kirton ?'

'Doc Kirton's death,' he said, 'is a mystery to me too. I don't know how he died, or why. Nor have I any way of finding out. For that you need an autopsy and we'll damn well have an autopsy as soon as I can get a pathologist flown in here, or Kirton's body flown out. Then, maybe, we'll know. Meantime, I refuse to speculate. Okay?'

'No,' I said. 'It's not okay. Not until you've had the pathologist’s report. If Kirton's death was natural, or some kind of accident, then of course you're right. If it wasn't, if he was killed, then - '

He said dangerously, 'You trying to tell me my duty?'