Duncan Kyle: Whiteout!

'Yes.'

'Drop by tomorrow. I got an operating room, the acoustics are great. Good coffee too and beautiful blondes.'

'The blondes are on the walls,' Herschel said.

The door opened and closed. I glanced round. Barney Smales was hanging up his parka by the door and silence fell. For a moment I thought it was in deference to his rank, but when Kirton said, 'So who threw the switch, Barney?' all he got was little looks of irritation. The silence sprang from tension; they were waiting for Smales's news, anxious about it.

He said, 'Fuel, they reckon. Fitters are stripping it right down.'

Somebody behind me asked, 'How long?'

Smales shrugged. 'All night maybe. Feed pipes may be clogged. Who knows? Hey, Doc, give those fitters something so they stay awake, huh?'

'Sure,' Kirton said. He turned to me and winked. 'An opportunity, they said in the army literature, to practise real medicine in on-the-spot conditions. They really said that. Benzedrine for diesel fitters !'

Smales said, 'Meanwhile, in honour of our British guest, we're having a change of movie tonight.' He looked at me with bright-eyed amusement. 'We're gonna run Scott of the Antarctic. And for those of you who are always complaining about too many dames, I'll tell you. After half-way through reel one, it's all men with beards. Great, great, great entertainment!' He came over and clapped me on the shoulder.

'Just want to make you popular.'

At dinner, I found myself seated next to a young lieutenant named Foster, clean-cut, well-pressed and shiny. Also morose, or perhaps my choice of word is poor; but certainly I thought him morose at the time. Later I learned he was depressed with goodreason : the man who'd been lost on the surface a couple of weeks earlier had been a young cousin of his. At any rate, he didn't much want to talk and I was beginning by now to feel tired. Seven thousand feet up on the icecap, weariness settles easily. Later, like the rest of them, I endured the Antarctic manfully, contrasting the appalling suffering of Scott's party with the thirty brands of whisky in the club. Everybody else, everybody, that is, who stayed awake, must have done the same. When the lights came up, Barney Smales was on his feet quickly, looking at faces, smiling a little to himself. Even his choice of films had psychological purpose. Then I went to bed. I switched off the light and lay in the darkness, eyes open, thinking about this weird place and the people I'd been put among. They were proud of Camp Hundred, yet it sat on them like lead weights. They tried so hard to create a tolerable environment where nature was deeply unwilling to tolerate life. They had beaten back nature, but not very far, and it lay outside, up above, all around, snarling and whistling and waiting. Above me was the ceiling, above that the tunnel roof, and above that forty-knot winds and forty-minus temperatures and a million or so square miles of snow. I snuggled lower in the warm bed and thought soberly that the TK4's trials would be trials indeed, and not just for the machine.

Next morning the room was stuffy and sweaty. Too warm, too airless and four blank walls with only the outline of the door frame for relief. I dressed, walked to the shower hut, undressed, showered and shaved, dressed, went to the mess hall, took off two layers of clothing and saw Kelleher champing stolidly at a plateful of steak and eggs. Picking up a moulded plastic tray, 1 moved along the cafeteria line, making my selections. Corn flakes, milk that was cold and delicious and apparently fresh but which I later learned was reconstituted, ham and eggs and tomatoes, fresh bread rolls that were still warm from the oven, fruit juice, coffee. Then I joined Kelleher and said the logistics were impressive. He nodded, unimpressed, and said he thought the tomatoes were showing their age. I said it was miraculous they were thereat all, since they'd had to travel umpteen thousand miles in conditions ill-tuned to the well-being of tomatoes.

Kelleher said, 'Well, I'll tell you, bud. This is not a day you'll find me whistling in admiration of the miracles of technology.'

'Trouble with the reactor?'

'That's what that thing is ? You could have fooled me. It looks like a goddam junk yard.'

I waited. He flicked a sour glance at me. 'You'd think, maybe, that a guy wouldn't carry money in a top pocket when he's working in clean environments. So what happens is this. We renew the uranium rods, we get the water in all nice and clean. No spillages, no bumps, no problems. We're all ready to start warming, right? Go critical in a few hours, right? So I take a last look around first before we throw the switches, and what do I see?'

I said I couldn't imagine.

'Two quarters and a goddam nickel, that's what I see. Right there in the kettle. What do those guys think they're gonna do in there, dive for pennies?'

'So what happens now ?'

He forked egg into his mouth and washed it down with coffee. 'Sleep, that's what. Then we take the goddam thing apart again, then we work all night again, and then tomorrow maybe, if some idiot don't drop his knife and fork in there, we start thinking about going critical again.'

I said, 'Tough luck.'

Kelleher put down his fork. 'No,' he said. 'I can take tough luck. Buddy, I know all about the psychology problems they got. Sure they get tired. Concentration gets thin. Sure. But this is carelessness and, what's worse, it's dangerous carelessness. You get outside metallic contamination when that baby's critical and you really got problems.'

Kirton joined us then, nursing a cup of coffee. Kelleher said, 'What you'll do, Doc, is you'll get pale and thin and die. Where's your two thousand calories ?'

Kirton said, 'I'm not like you. I lie around all day getting fat. Sometimes I think I might as well take the ice-cream and the bread and apply them direct to my waistline here. That's where they finish up anyway and it would sure take a load off my digestive system. How's the steam engine?'

Kelleher made a rude noise.

'Oh yeah! And number one diesel?'

'Who knows!' Kelleher looked round the mess hall, then pointed with his fork. 'Either they just finished, or they're still working on it. See over there? Those guys with the oil there are diesel fitters.'

I looked across. Three men sat at a table in near silence, eating, and looking unhappy. I said, 'I don't think they've finished.'

'Half systems go,' Kirton said.

'Half?' I was conscious all the time of being the new boy, the one full of naive questions, the one who sat quietly and listened.

Kelleher said, 'One reactor, three diesel generators. Belt, suspenders and two hands to hold the pants up, right ? So now the belt's broken and the suspenders have gone. Two diesel generators left and we're holding our own pants up.'

I blinked at him. It was so easy to duck reality, sitting there in the cheerful mess hall eating good hot food, but too often reality tapped you on the shoulder and looked deep in your eyes. Kirton said, 'So eat the steak and get to work.'

They'd both gone and I was smoking a contemplative cigarette when Smales came in, loaded up a tray and joined me. It was the German accent this time. 'So, Englander,' he said. 'You enffy us zis efficiency, nicht wahr?'

I grinned at him. 'I hope you're like us. Muddling through in the end.' The grin syndrome had got to me already, I thought. 'But it does seem like quite a little chapter of accidents.'

'It does,' he agreed affably. 'And we have 'em I admit it, now and then. Good eggs.'

'One minute you sound like Erich von Stroheim, the next like P. G. Wodehouse,' I said. 'Meantime, I'd like to know about the hovercraft.'

'M'sieu, m'sieu,' he soothed. 'Ze Swing she leave today. Two days, zree, she is here.'

'I prefer Bardot. What about the diesel?'