Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

He was really laughing now, shoulders shaking. He said, 'Barney forgot. He forgot the requisition.'

I grinned back at him; at least there was one mystery that was no mystery. He said, 'Can you cat-nap?'

'Sometimes.'

'Try it now. You got two hours.'

I doubted whether I could sleep, in that warm, almost un-ventilated, over-insulated wanigan, redolent with the twin smells of heat and feet. But I did, until the sudden blast of cold air from outside broke through with the news of the arrival of the tractor. I rose blearily and began to dress. The bulldozer driver had a problem. He'd been thinking about it for two hours and he thought we all had a problem. He said, 'Sir, we got no crane. How we gonna lift that thing off the flatbed?'

Herschel looked at me. 'Has he got something?'

'No,' I said. 'She'll be all right. But I want to check it. Wait here till I come back.'

I'm coming,' Herschel said. 'You don't go out alone.'

So we went to have a look. There were no great problems, certainly none that couldn't be solved with a few scrapes of the bulldozer blade. We went back inside and I told the driver exactly what I wanted.

'You can push snow towards the side and front of the wanigan?'

He nodded. 'Sure.'

'Okay. I want a ramp made. Not too steep, in fact as flat as you can get it. She can ride over a three-foot vertical obstruction when she's riding the cushion, but I don't want to chance anything when we're moving off from stationary. Got it?'

He nodded. 'Got it, sir. Only take a minute.'

While he was manoeuvring the bulldozer and pushing snow towards the wanigan, I was busy with the chain-strapping that held the TK4 down, fumbling at the metal awkwardly in my heavy felt mitts. It was no use. I couldn't shift the fastenings. The ramp was completed in a few minutes, but the hovercraft remained firmly tied to the flatbed's deck-boarding. The 'dozer driver left his cab, came over and shouted into my hood, 'She frozen down?'

I bellowed back: 'Just the strappings.'

'I got bolt cutters.'

'Thanks.'

He brought them over and I simply sheared through the chains, then kicked them away and climbed up into TK4's cabin. The turbines had been specially adapted, with heaters built in for cold weather starting. I let them warm for a minute, then tried the engines. Vroom, vroom, and a nice, healthy blast of power first time. Pity, I thought, that Barney Smales hadn't been there to see it! By the light of the bulldozer's powerful headlights, I could see the other four standing on the trail, watching. I wound up the feet cautiously. Okay so far. She was riding on the cushion. Suddenly she began to slide back under wind pressure. I corrected, eased her forward on to the ramp and floated downhill to the trail, then turned her round, opened the door, waved an arm, and Herschel, Foster and Scott climbed up too. The bulldozer driver waved and walked off towards the safety wanigan.

Herschel said, 'He'll wait there till the Swing comes up.'

'He's left the engine running,' I pointed out.

'Yep. Safer that way.' I asked him about the crevasses. 'They filled three on the way up here. Two were on the trail up to the cap out of Belvoir, but the other was around Mile Twenty-Eight. Big one. Twenty feet wide and maybe a hundred deep. What's this thing do if we hit one like that?'

'Will there be a snow-bridge T

Herschel said, 'Sometimes. You reckon you can get over a snow-bridge?'

'Moving fast, the pressure per square inch is very low,' I said. 'Remember there's no contact. If the crevasse is big and open, we'll probably have to go round. Narrow ones we could float over.' I grinned at him. 'Don't get worried.'

I gave her a touch more power and let her slide forward, the lights knifing into the empty darkness ahead. The wind was astern at nearly thirty knots, which wouldn't make for easy steering, but I was confident in the TK4.

Scott, sitting beside me, said, 'What can she do?'

'Anything but crossword puzzles,' I said. 'If you mean speed, she can go up to about fifty miles an hour, depending on the skirt clearance from the ground. Use the power to lift and you don't have as much left to push.'

He said, 'Fifty?'

'Fifty.' But I kept her to just over forty, enough so I didn't have to worry too much about wind speed. At the start, snow began building up on the windscreen, and I employed one of the little refinements Thomson-Keegan had built into her - a two-foot wide jet of air, blasting up the outside surface of the glass, that diverted the snow before it even landed. In case of trouble with that, there was also a 12-inch Kent Clearvue rotating panel in the glass, and it could be heated, too. After the Canadian tests, we'd incorporated those two skis forward, to give additional steering control in narrow manoeuvring spaces, but I had no need of them now and kept them retracted. The Trail to Belvoir was a good hundred yards wide, and ran almost dead straight across the immense snowfield. After about twelve minutes a battery of lights became visible and I got my first glimpse of the Swing coming close. I slowed and stopped. It was immense. Imagine three goods trains running side by side; that's what it was like, the only difference being that instead of engines, each train was pulled by a tractor, and the goods wagons had sled runners instead of wheels.

We didn't get out. Instead, we switched the radio to the Swing frequency and talked briefly to Garrison, saying little more than hello and goodbye.

After that we were alone in the dark again, skating fast over the Trail. Scott, in the seat beside me, kept watch ahead with a curious, almost unblinking stare, as the marker poles came one after the other out of the night, to flicker their little orange flags at us, then vanish behind. Once I asked Scott, 'Are those flags real?'

'They're real.'

'If you catch me circling right, stop me.'

He laughed. 'If I see those French broads again, then I'll stop you.'

Herschel told me about the Swing and its awesome statistics. It had now been running, more or less day and night, for about five years. The crews lived aboard for six months at a time, driving six hours on, six hours off. The huge Caterpillar low-ground-pressure diesel tractors could go ninety hours without refuelling and each of them hauled a weight of up to 160 tons.

I said, 'The crews must go slowly mad.'

'Nope. They like it. You know, they got a project on, those guys. Milt Garrison's behind it, but he ain't gonna get it. What he wants to do is take the whole Swing from Thule over to Nome, Alaska.'

'Over the ocean?

'Sure. In winter when it's frozen.'

I said, 'But it's three thousand miles. At least that.'

'Nearly four,' Herschel said cheerfully. 'They could do it, too. But there's a whole bundle of opinion down at Corps of Engineers headquarters, says the US taxpayer won't like it. And he sure won't. But wouldn't that be something!'

'I said, 'You're one of the ones who like the Arctic'

'That's right. Scott too, eh Scott?'

Scott said, 'Sure thing.'

'What about you, Foster?' I said.

He didn't reply for a moment. Then he said, 'I like the work. I like the projects. But it's all too damned angry.'

We had no crevasse trouble at all. The TK4 gave a beautiful performance demonstration, and about an hour and a half after leaving the safety wanigan, even allowing for reduced speed on the gradient down the side of the icecap to the flat coastal strip, we came easily into Camp Belvoir and I ran the hovercraft into its hangar, and turned smugly to Herschel. 'Okay?'

He said, 'Just one thing missing. No stewardess. No scotch.'

I said, 'Nothing's impossible.'

The TK4 had made that fifty-mile trip over the icecap, in high winds and a murderously low temperature, with no more fuss than if it had been skating along a motorway. We all went off to have some food, and after it Herschel went off to see Cohen and to organize the loading of the neoprene piping and perhaps, if he was anything like Barney Smales, to do a little gentle pilfering, too. Scott was playing pool with one of his friends and Foster and I were nursing another cup of hot coffee and waiting for the off.