Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

he said.

I looked, then went inside, stepping over the coaming. This was one of the shorter trenches, no more than thirty yards long and on two levels. The floor of the rear half of the tunnel had been cut a couple of feet deeper to accommodate two of those big neoprene-plastic fuel tanks that look a little like very big black rubber dinghies. But these two no longer looked like that, indeed were barely visible in the huge pool of diesel oil that had leaked out of them and now lay in a dark lake that rose half-way up the two-foot sides. Where the neoprene of the collapsed flexible tanks was visible above the oil, I could see slashes in the plastic. I pointed and Smales said, 'Yeah, I saw.'

'Would a bear do that?'

'A zoologist I'm not. But nobody else would, that's for sure.' He was silent for a moment, then said,

'There's forty thousand gallons right there.'

I'd been looking at the slashes and thinking about the claws that could have made them and the strength of the beast. Now I looked at Smales and said, 'This oil can't be used?'

He nodded. 'Damn right.'

'So you're short of oil?'

'Let's just say,' Smales said, 'that the way things stand right now, the oil we got is six whits more precious than rubies . . .

Chapter 4

For Smales there were now urgent things to be done, the most important being a set of calculations on fuel supplies and consumption rates. He dismissed the Polecat, and told the bulldozer driver to continue sweeping the doorstep and marched off towards the command trench. I, on the other hand, had nothing at all to do. Remembering Dr Kirton's invitation, I strolled towards the hospital trench. I'd just gone inside when Barney's voice came over the loudspeaker to say that all personnel could now move about freely, and should resume their duties. The bear had done some damage, but was not in Camp Hundred. All the same, caution was to be exercised, and if there was any further damage, it must be reported immediately. Kirton raised his eyebrows. 'You hear what Pappa Bear did?'

'Yes. He ripped open two of the fuel tanks.'

Kirton whistled. 'We got problems. Oh well, they're not mine and they're not yours. Not yet. Coffee?'

'Thanks.'

'Cream or straight ? Bach or Mozart ?'

I said, 'I'll take the coffee straight and leave the music to you.'

Kirton was big, bulky and gave an initial impression of clumsiness ; it was belied by the precision of his movements. Just pouring coffee and putting on a record, he showed surgical sure-ness and dexterity. My records tend to have scratchy accidents. I thought enviously that all his would stay perfect.

'We'll soothe ourselves,' he said. 'See if you know this.'

As it happened, I did. I'd known a girl once who was nuts about that piece. I said, 'Albinoni. The adagio for violin and organ.' I settled back in my chair, but I wasn't really listening. Events were totting themselves up in my mind. There was the bear, and the fuel tanks. Yesterday: the coins in the reactor and the contaminated fuel that had stopped one diesel generator. Also yesterday, there was the failure of the landing-strip lights. Quite a list. I sipped my coffee and looked at Kirton, who sat with his eyes closed, looking rapt. But he must have been thinking, too, because as the Albinoni ended he said, 'You sure brought a jinx up here.'

'Blame me if you like. We call our jinxes gremlins."

'So you sure brought a gremlin.'

I said, 'No, the sod was here. While you were having all the accidents, I was happy, ignorant and far away. Tell me, is this place unlucky ?'

He shook his head. 'No, it's not. Or it wasn't. Funny thing, they always reckoned this was a real good-luck operation. They built it without losing a man. Not even a serious injury. Then a few years with a safety record damn near perfect. It's all in the last two weeks.'

I said, 'Tell me I'm mad if you like, but could any of this be deliberate?'

He looked a bit surprised, and then smiled. 'You mean sabotage?'

'Well, could it?'

'Not a chance. Sabotage anything up here and you sabotage yourself. If the machines stop working in a long bad weather phase, people are gonna die. The guy would have to be psychotic'

'You said last night everybody's a little mad.'

'A little maybe. But nobody's that crazy.' He grinned. 'Except, er . . , now look, Mr Bowes, you seen your shrink lately?'

I said, 'I Haven’t got a shrink.'

'No? Well, how about if I read my shrink books and then you come and tell me all about your father? Listen, what you got is the first, faint stirrings of what's known to science as the Hundred Heebies. It's all too complex here for our poor puny minds. Now finish your coffee and the doctor will take you for a nice walk.'

'Where do you want to walk to ?'

'I want to see what the bear did.'

We dressed and walked down Main Street to the fuel trench and Kirton looked at the ripped neoprene and said, 'He's got muscle, that old bear!'

I nodded. I was thinking that the animal's behaviour had been pretty strange, even by the doubtless eccentric standards of hungry bears. Camp Hundred was full of food. Looked at from a hungry bear's point of view, there were a lot of comestibles walking round on two legs, never mind all the orthodox grub in the food stores. So why had he left all the food alone and just slashed the tanks ? 'He certainly seems,' I said, 'to have been cross about something. And not very hungry, either, unless he enjoys drinking diesel oil.'

'Yeah.' Kirton gave me a glance, then said, 'I wonder . . .' He turned, crossed to the door and swung it closed. 'Look at this. He got food all right.'

The floor behind the door was littered with ripped-up tinfoil and torn plastic. I asked what it was.

'Emergency rations,' Kirton said. 'There’s a pack in all the trenches with doors, just in case somebody gets locked in. Hangs on the back of the door.'

'Clever old bear, then,' I said. 'I suppose the food's wrapped in the plastic?'

'No problem with claws like his. You and I break our nails trying to open plastic packages, but he sure wouldn't have any trouble.'

'No. But he'd have trouble finding food in the first place, unless he could smell it.'

He said, 'You're doing that thing again, you know. He'll have a big, sensitive, black nose, that old bear, and there'll be some residual smell on the outside of the pack.' Kirton bent and picked up a chunk of some kind of compressed cake from the floor. It still had shreds of foil sticking to it and he looked at it reflectively. 'Gnawed by a polar bear, how about that?'

I said, 'He's certainly a light eater. He walks a hundred miles, has some fruit cake and a couple of bars of chocolate, and goes away.'

Kirton rubbed at his moustache as he looked at me. 'Tell you what I'll do. I'll take some of this junk and do some microscope work. If the bear dined here, there's gonna be saliva on these things, and saliva means bacteria. Maybe I could do a paper on it, how about that ? Saliva analysis of - damn it, what's its Latin name?'

'I don't know. Ursus something.'

'Yeah, well, Saliva Analysis of Ursus something by Joseph Kirton MD, etc. That's one nobody's done before.'

Perhaps he was right. He knew a lot more about the Arctic than I did, he knew the people here, above all he knew the feel of the place. So if Kirton found my suspicions merely amusing, perhaps I'd better forget about them. A lifetime's experience confirmed that accidents came in batches; there'd been gremlins a-plenty round the TK4 Mark One, all of them apparently inexplicable until the reason was finally discovered and we found that this gunge or that scrobbler hadn't been allowed for. He moved off, holding the ripped remnants of the emergency food pack in cupped hands. I glanced at my watch. It was after eleven. Outside the wind whistled and snow seemed to be blowing in several directions at once between the ice walls at the sides of the ramp. Feeling vaguely useless I was about to amble after him when a voice said 'Sir' and I turned to face a man with stripes on his parka who introduced himself as Sergeant Vernon and said Major Smales had instructed him to give Mr Bowes the ten-dollar tour of Camp Hundred, if Mr Bowes would like that. I said Mr Bowes would like it very much and he said it was his pleasure, sir, and we could start with the water well, which I'd probably find interesting. The well was in a trench almost at the centre of Hundred, away from the command hut, next to the mess hall, and not far from Kirton's hospital trench. At first sight, it wasn't impressive, just a four-foot-high circle of corrugated steel with a metal framework above it and a couple of pipes running from it up to the wall. I looked over the edge of the barrier and saw a dark hole. Then Sergeant Vernon flicked on a switch and the hole suddenly turned brilliantly white and beneath me appeared an astonishingly beautiful sight. The hole was only about four feet in diameter but it was very deep, and obviously widened a good deal underneath the narrow entrance.