Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

But even before I reached it, I'd changed my mind. If I'd been thinking with reasonable clarity, the idea of going into the other hut for the night ought to have been rejected, because both sense and duty told me that any kind of fire in Camp Hundred, even one I couldn't see, was a matter of importance and potential danger. And, anyway, when I did find the door of the second hut, it was locked. I'd been hiding away from the thought, but now there was no alternative. It was clear what I must do. All too clear. Clear and frightening. Because the only way out of that trench was through the escape hatch, up on to the icecap.

Chapter 9

It had to be done; I knew it, but still I hesitated. The last time, indeed the only time I had been out through an escape hatch on to the surface, there had been that bloodcurdling demonstration from Smales of how to deep-freeze a pork chop. This time, I could be the pork chop, as Lieutenant Foster's cousin had been. And Charlie Foster was still up there somewhere, frozen meat now, his body not recovered and by now probably so well entombed in snow it would never be found. While I hesitated, I tried to think. On the surface there would be a line of escape hatches, one at the end of most of the trenches, and the line would be parallel to Main Street. All right, but would I see them ? Hours earlier, when I had piloted TK4 into Hundred, the weather break was already ending, the wind rising. Now there was no way of knowing what was happening up there.

I remember the sound my throat gave as I swallowed, standing at the foot of the spiral stair, holding on to the handrail. One part of my mind was still telling me to wait until morning, until I was found, and the other, which had made the decision and should have been prepared to implement it, was wavering in face of what lay ahead. Then, in some extraordinary way, my feet began to climb and I was committed ; there was no deliberate order from brain to foot, it just happened, and I was climbing in the dark up that steel stair, feeling my way ahead, stopping when my up-stretched hand had touched the hatch cover to fumble for the winding wheel.

A few turns and it was open and at least there was a little light. Not much, for any moon or star there may have been was totally obscured, but where the world consists entirely of white snow, it is never-wholly dark. As I poked my head up through the hatch, that faint light was the only friendly thing. The Arctic wind scoured across the snowfield, whistling madly, driving hard snow crystals before it like a sand-blaster. And it was wickedly cold. I paused there to draw the parka close about my face, turning the back of my head to the wind, and once that was done, tried to find landmarks, or some way of guiding myself. I knew there were guide lines out there. Charlie Foster had died because he failed to keep hold of one. But no guide lines were visible; almost nothing was visible in the impenetrable screen of flying snow.

I made myself stand, pointed my right shoulder at where I believed Main Street to be, and took five careful paces, then glanced back. The open hatch was still visible, but my footmarks were already indistinct, blown away, or filling. I took five more, then another five. Now I could no longer see the hatch cover. Fifteen paces and already I was alone, without landmarks, with nothing to hang on to but a vague sense of direction. Five more paces, one foot placed carefully in front of the other, pause, and a glance back to see the snow flying off my footmarks. I swallowed again and forced myself to move. 1 had calculated that between thirty and forty yards should separate the hatches, but after fifty paces there was still no sign of one. Even that was proof of nothing. Not every trench had an escape hatch. Most had, but not all. So the distance between them might be sixty to eighty yards, even a hundred and twenty if I was bloody unlucky, and I was feeling bloody unlucky. I knew only one thing with certainty: that Main Street, far beneath the surface, lay somewhere to my right, and the knowledge was scant comfort because the ramp down to Main Street lay at least a quarter of a mile away and my chances of finding it were remote indeed. Long before I'd walked a quarter-mile, I'd have wandered, or been blown, far off course. Anxiously, five paces at a time, I edged forward, trying to line up the new five with the last five. Every step I counted, and at seventy the relief of seeing something sticking out of the snow was enough to make my whole body tremble. It was an escape hatch, all right, but even the way I found it was frightening, for it was to my right and very faint and I'd almost missed it. And if I had missed it .., well, then it would have been a long, despairing walk to death.

For a few moments I busied myself clearing snow from round it, then I levered up the protecting lid and began to turn the handle. As the hatch cover came up, I prayed for a friendly gleam of light. The prayers, this time, drew no response; I was looking down into darkness. All the same, it was the way back and I climbed through the open hatch and down the stair, leaving the hatch open to admit any faint gleam of light it could. By the time I stood on the trench floor it was apparent that no light penetrated and I had to feel my way forward again. I stayed close to the trench wall, placing my feet carefully, with no idea what lay ahead. This could be a storage tunnel, there could be huts or machinery, packing cases, anything. Then my foot, instead of coming down on snow, bumped into some obstruction. I bent and felt it, trying to decide whether I could step over it, or would have to find a way round. Whatever it was was wrapped in cloth of some kind and my hands, in their thick felt mittens, told me nothing, except that there was also a steel frame round it.., and that it was about two yards long . . , a nd two feet wide. Jesus Christ, I was in with the corpses!

For a while it all happened, just the way people say it does: my scalp crawled, cold impulses fled over my back, my hair stood vertical, parka hood or no parka hood. And I trembled violently. The sudden panic may have been irrational, but it was there, great waves of it that went for my guts and my mind simultaneously, and set me blundering in the darkness just to get away, to get some distance between me and what lay on the trench floor. What lay there, inevitably, was another body, and I tripped and sprawled full-length on it, my grabbing hands gripping something hard as a drainpipe, and which was probably an arm. My senses didn't return to anything like normal, but fear induced a desire, if not a capacity to reason, and I sat there among all the hobgoblins and devils my imagination conjured into the air around me, frantically trying to think what to do.

Very little presented itself. I was completely disorientated and whichever way I moved I'd be falling over bodies, or crawling past them. How many were there? I couldn't even remember. Six, I thought. No, seven, because .., because Doc Kirton, what was left of him, was in here, too. And then I remembered something else. This trench, too, was locked.

I looked wildly around me. Far back at the end of the trench was the pale oval of the open hatch, leading back to the surface, and I laughed, I know I laughed once, loudly and hysterically, at the choice before me. I could stay there in the dark with seven dead bodies, or go back up into the blizzard and the gale and the unnervingly strong chance of joining these seven in whatever frozen Valhalla they might have found. I've wondered since, sitting comfortably, drink in hand, why I didn't stay, It would, after all, only have been for a few hours. The corpses couldn't have harmed me. But it's different, believe me, when you're saying it to yourself in a black snow tunnel and they're lying all round you, frozen hard as planks. Though one wasn't. When I started crawling on hands and knees towards that grey patch of dim light, somehow or other I contrived to put my knee into an indentation in the floor and roll sideways on to one of the bodies, and in recoiling, put my weight on it. Where the others were hard, this one gave sickeningly under pressure, and my stomach squirmed with the realization that this could only be Kirton, or what was left of him, carefully wrapped.