Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

Kelleher unfolded the wet paper carefully. The note had been written with a ball-pen and fortunately remained legible. He read it slowly. 'Where'd it come from?'

I told him. Then I said, 'Kirton knew who it was. Must have known. That has to be the reason he was killed.'

'Well, he sure can't tell us.' Kelleher gave a long sigh of irritation, a sigh that suddenly caught in his throat.

'Wait a minute,' he said slowly. 'Maybe he can at that.'

'Spirit writing or table-tapping?' I said sarcastically. 'Or maybe you're a medium?'

'Uh-uh,' Kelleher said. 'But Kirton kept a diary.'

'If he did, it'll be in his quarters. Or it will if our friend hasn't stolen it.'

'He kept it on him.'

'How do you know?'

'I do it, too. Have since I was a kid. We talked about it once.'

I stared at him in silence, not wanting to contemplate the consequences of this piece of information about Kirton and looking for sensible objections. I said, 'Diaries are paper. If it is Kirton down there, it'll be illegible by now. He's been down there for - '

Kelleher handed me the sheet of paper I'd given him. 'Look at it. It's wet, sure, but you can read it. The diary's in a pocket, held together. It'll be soaked, but it'll be readable.'

'Even so, there's no guarantee.'

He took the sheet from me. 'What's it say here? Listen: "I made a note at the time." That's what it says, and the diary's got to be where he made the note. I know, believe me. I know all the crazy mechanics of writing up a diary. And there's another little thing you've forgotten.'

'No,' I said. 'I haven't forgotten. But if Kirton was already down there then - '

He didn't wait for me to finish. 'If! Okay, but if he was dumped later, our friend has fingered his pigeon in the unlikely event that Kirton's found. Don't forget - a new well had to be started immediately.' He looked at me steadily.

I said defensively, 'It's not on! In any case, there's no power.'

Kelleher glanced round. 'You can feel it. It's a mite cooler already. It'll get a whole lot colder real fast. One more little accident and Hundred's finished. Maybe it's finished right now. But if the guy can be identified positively, at least there'll be no more sabotage, right ?'

'There's no power for the motor!'

'Wrong,' Kelleher said. 'There's power, muscle power on the winding handle.'

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words didn't come quickly enough and Kelleher went on grimly:

'We need one more guy and him I can get. Only question is, who goes down: you or me?'

The protesting words came, then, but they were only words, and they rolled off Kelleher's answers. Coveney, he said, wouldn't go for this theorizing. Coveney's hands were full and his antagonism plain; he wouldn't even listen. But the attempted cover-up in the death trench and a body in the well were proof enough of murder, and the diary, if it was there, might well be proof of guilt, powerful if not totally conclusive. Enough to force action. But I knew, and Kelleher knew too, why I was arguing so desperately: it was a matter of relative weight and strength. Kelleher was more than fifteen stone and strong as a horse whereas I, wet through, weighed less than eleven. But he was determined to play out the farce of random choice and pulled a quarter from his pocket.

'Call.'

Whatever I called, the answer would have to be the same, but I went along. As it happened, the forces of chance for once recognized the force of logic, and pointed to me. Suddenly the temperature seemed to drop violently, and I began to tremble.

Reaching the well trench was not difficult. As we slipped along Main Street there was no one to see us, though the glow of rigged emergency lights from the diesel tunnel cast a pool of light further along. Once inside, we closed and locked the door, and as I turned, the beam from my handlamp illuminated the circle of corrugated iron protecting the old well-head and the metal hoisting frame above. Kelleher fitted the handle quickly. I walked unsteadily towards the well and shone the handlamp down into the unimaginable depths and immediately began to shiver again. Not far below, giant icicles hung into the void like the waiting teeth of some implacably hostile giant, their tips pointing like signposts of death to the black, narrow neck which led through into the second chamber, and more icicles which I couldn't see but knew to be there. And below them . . . Bile climbed abruptly into my throat. I turned away quickly, and said,

'No'.

Kelleher's 'other guy', a sergeant from the reactor staff named Mulham, said, 'Can't say I blame you.'

There was a moment's heavy silence. Then Kelleher spoke. 'Okay, then, I'll do it. You turn the handle.'

He reached for the bosun's chair, swung it up and out. 'Let's have some light here,' he said, as he began to strap himself in.

'I'm sorry.'

'Christ, you're a limey, you're not even involved here! I sure don't blame you, brother. This is an American problem.' He bent his legs, letting the bosun's chair take the weight. 'Okay, let's have the hard hat and the rest of that gear.'

Numbly, guiltily, I took off the hard hat. It had been picked to fit me and on him it was ludicrously small, wobbling and liable to fall off. I thought about the extra four stones of Kelleher's weight, the other things to be carried, the back-breaking physical labour involved in the long lowering and raising, and suddenly heard myself say, 'I'll go.' To this day I don't know how I came to speak. It was some involuntary, impromptu impulse beyond either my control or understanding.

Kelleher's hands stopped moving and he turned to me.

'You sure?'

I nodded, committed now and resentful of it. 'Yes,' I said, and my voice caught on a rusty nail. I cleared my throat and said yes again.

'Think about it for a minute. Be sure.' He was all consideration and sympathy and somehow that enmeshed me further.

'I'll do it.'

He grunted and began to unfasten himself from the seat. Two minutes later 1 was poised over the well opening, swaying gently, with my heart in my mouth. I glanced back over my shoulder at the two of them, waiting at the handle. Kelleher reached across, stopped the swinging motion. 'Okay?'

I nodded and swallowed. 'Lower away.'

'Good luck.'

Looking upwards a few seconds later, I couldn't even see them, and the metallic click of the ratchet on the lowering mechanism was growing fainter. As I lowered my eyes, I realized that even the action of looking up had imparted a little swing to the cable, and concentrated on sitting very still and holding the equipment close to my body to minimize the possibility of contact with those fearful icicles that were now sliding slowly past me. We'd discussed and abandoned the idea of knocking them down before making the descent. The trip would have been safer, but the great falling masses of ice, ripping more off as they crashed down through three chambers, might well make it impossible to see what lay in the bottom. My left leg felt briefly uncomfortable. As I moved it I must have touched the chain saw, where it hung beneath the seat, because suddenly I was swinging again, and Kelleher's voice came sharply out of the little battery-powered walkie-talkie slung around my neck. 'Keep still, Harry, for Chrissake!'

My breath hissed out as I came within inches of a ton or more of sharp-pointed ice, and swung away again. I sat rigid, paralysed with fear, feeling the chill of the thing. Slowly the pendulum swing eased.

'You okay?'

'Okay.' Stiffening muscles would bloody well have to stiffen. The longer the length of cable above me, the wider the arc of swing and the greater the danger of tapping one of these monsters and tripping it from its seating.

The ticking of the ratchet grew fainter and vanished as I dropped deeper into the first chamber. The beam of my lamp, endlessly reflected from the ice surface all around me, miraculously gave illumination to the whole, immense, onion-shaped cavern. It was difficult now even to know if I were moving; the lowering was so slow, the distance so great and the time so endless that I seemed suspended immobile in the middle of that huge, cold space. But slowly the curving bottom came up to meet me, and every few feet Kelleher's voice asked softly if I was all right. When he wasn't speaking, I ached for the reassuring sound of his voice; as soon as he spoke I was terrified that some trick of reverberating sound would precipitate one of the vast ice-spears from high above to smash me down for ever into the depths of the icecap.