Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

'I think,' I said, 'that I'm over-reacting too.'

'Sure you are. So am I, really. So's everybody. First time in the cold regions ?'

'Yes.'

'You'll find it grows on you. Two, three years, you won't want to be anywhere else.'

'You do,' I pointed out. 'You want to be at Belvoir.'

'I want,' he said, 'to be in Virginia. But when I get there, I'll want to be right back here.'

'So all this doesn't worry you ?'

'Nope. Can't say it does."

'Morale's low,' I said.

'It'll lift.'

'A chapter of accidents.'

'It'll end.'

I laughed. 'You're an optimistic fatalist?'

'I'm a glaciologist,' Vale said. 'In my game you get to take the long view.'

It was a reassuring little conversation. Vale was a quiet, competent man who'd seen it all. If he wasn't worried, why should I be worried? But the memory of Barney Smales nagged at me. I said, 'The Heebies

- how do they show?'

'I'm no psychologist.'

'Even so?'

'Well . . .' he hesitated. 'People start going flat. They get obsessive about little things and ignore the big ones. Then that stops and they sit and stare at their boots or something hours at a stretch. Like I say, I'm no psychologist, but I'd say it's close to classical depression.' He rose, slapped my shoulder, and added,

'Meantime, the coffee's hot, there's booze in the club, soft beds and movies. Don't worry about it. You'll live.'

I watched him go, conscious of my own confusion. Vale was so manifestly confident, his confidence based on long experience, that it was absurd to doubt him. Indeed I didn't doubt him. But along with all the reassurance, he'd handed me one disquieting thought. People, he'd said, became obsessive about little things. And a ballpoint pen was little enough.

Chapter 10

We all have our neuroses; everybody's a little nuts in some direction or another. But I've always liked to think of myself as reasonably sane. I don't feel uncontrollable urges to murder people who step in front of me in bus queues and I don't turn into Frankenstein's monster once I get behind a car wheel; by and large I sleep undisturbed by conscience. But after a few days at Hundred I was beginning to entertain some doubts about myself. Walking away from the mess hall after my talk with Captain Vale, I was feeling more or less reassured. I remember telling myself inside my head to stop trying to make patterns out of random events and concentrate on the TK4 and the urgent need to sell the damn thing to the American gentlemen. Little nod of determination for my own benefit; conscious setting of jaw. And then the conversation with Master Sergeant Allen came back, with all its doubts, hesitations and possible overtones, and I realized that my mental state was changing by the second like a well-shaken kaleidoscope. Every time I talked to anybody, damn it, I took on a new viewpoint. One man said, don't worry, and I told myself not to worry. Another was mildly enigmatic and I started looking for the puzzle inside the enigma. Barney Smales was polite but withdrawn and I imagined . . . The hell with it, I decided. It was their business, not mine. If the United States Army was having its troubles, at least it was equipped to handle them ; I had a job of my own to do and at the moment there seemed no likelihood of its getting done. The weather was lousy up top and apparently relentless. I'd been told before I left England that there should be a few days within the following four weeks when the TK4 could give performance demonstrations. Past experience and weather records said so. But apart from the fast runs to and from Camp Belvoir there'd been no opportunity at all for me to demonstrate what she could do. Agreed that she'd done all that had been asked of her; the trouble was that nobody had seen her in action, and performance demonstrations, by definition, need witnesses; more important, they need witnesses who are going to influence the great decision to buy or not to buy. I'd set off intending to give the TK.4 a swift once-over-lightly, but the weather office was on the way. I decided I might as well go there first.

The weather office was Sergeant Vernon's home ground and I smiled to myself as I went in. Like the sergeants' club, this was old-soldier territory; it smelled of floor polish and pine and on a wall was a window framing one of the big, blown-up colour pictures, this time of a picnic site beside a lake somewhere. An electric coffee percolator gurgled contentedly on a side bench and the ashtrays were many and wiped clean.

Vernon returned my smile. 'Something I can do for you, sir?'

'I take it,' I said, 'that you'll have all the records here.'

'We try to calculate it every which way. If it's not in the form you want, sir, we can work it out.'

'Fine. Look, I'm wondering whether there's going to be a break soon. I realize you can't forecast with any great accuracy, but maybe past records will give some kind of indication.'

'Be a pleasure,' Vernon said. He crossed to a filing cabinet and began hefting folders. 'We got anemometers going round and round. We got mercury and alcohol thermometers going up and down. We got barometric readings, snowfall records, you name it. But - ' the corners of his mouth turned down sympathetically -'it's gonna be a statistical answer you get.'

'I know,' 1 said. 'But I can cling on to a hope if you'll give me one.'

'So okay. Here's the plots for the last five years.' He unfolded the charts and spread them on the bench.

'Temperature right here. Wind velocity. This one's humidity. We plotted wind and temperature into a windchill factor on this one. Here's snowfall. Now . . .'

Twenty minutes poring over the charts gave the statistical answer. Some time within the next twenty-eight days it was reasonable to expect there'd be four when the wind was down to thirty miles an hour or less. Two more with wind under twenty.

I said, 'Well, it's encouraging.'

'Just so you don't get too encouraged,' Vernon said. 'A lot of that's gonna break down into short slots. Two, three, four hours maybe as a front goes through.'

'How much warning ?'

'Do what I can, sir. When the radio's open, I can get the satellite picture up from Thule. That can tell us a little more.'

'And pressure?'

Vernon shook his head. 'Highs and lows, they fill and empty too damn fast. You just gotta make a personal judgment here; data won't do it.'

I said, 'Do me a favour, Mr Vernon. Exercise your best judgment for me? An hour's notice, if I can get it, of a two-hour break. I need that to give any kind of demonstration.'

'Minimum?'

I nodded. 'The problem is that your people have to see what she can do. We've got to have time for a bulldozer to roughen the snow surface and build a few steps for the TK4 to climb. Once everybody's sold on that, we can take a few rides in rougher conditions, but I can't get to stage two before stage one's over.'

'Sure,' Vernon said. 'Coffee?'

We drank coffee while I answered his questions about the TK4. It struck me that Vernon was more open-minded about the potential of air-cushion vehicles than Barney Smales, not that his approval was much use. All the same, it was a comfort, and his promise to give me as much warning as possible of any potential weather break could be valuable.

I left him then and went to tidy up the TK4. I'd simply left her at the end of the trip back from Belvoir and I wanted her cleaned out, ship-shape and shiny, for demonstration time. The sergeant syndrome isn't far below the surface in me ; a coating of dirt on the outside of an engine casing doesn't make the engine any less efficient, but for me at least it removes some of the enjoyment. I looked her over carefully and the TK4 was in pretty good nick. In the rear hold a few drops of oil had dripped off the generator, but a handful of waste and a couple of brisk rubs soon shifted that. Otherwise the hold was like a new pin. The cabin wasn't bad, either, though it smelled a little of sweat and old tobacco smoke. I got a hand brush and cleaned the cabin floor of cigarette ash and spent matches, emptied the ashtrays and put a discarded matchbook on the screen sill for future use. Then I leathered the windows. Forty minutes' mindless work, satisfying in its way, and the job was finished, except for a routine check on oil and fuel levels, both of which were fine.