Icebound

“Any indication of buckling?”

“No, sir.”

“Keep me informed,” he said, without revealing the depth of his concern, and he let go of the microphone.

The technician seated at the surface Fathometer said, “I'm picking up a partial blockage of the hole again.”

“Divers?”

The technician studied the graph for a moment. “Yes. That could be the interpretation. Divers. I've got downward movement on all the blips.”

The good news affected everyone. The men were no less tense than they had been a minute ago. For the first time in several hours, however, their tension was qualified by guarded optimism.

“Torpedo room to captain.”

Gorov surreptitiously blotted his damp hands on his slacks and pulled down the microphone once more. “Go ahead.”

The voice was controlled, though an underlying note of distress was apparent. “The sweat on the bulkhead between number four tube and number five tube is getting worse, Captain. I don't like the looks of it.”

“Worse to what extent?”

“Water's trickling down to the deck now.”

“How much water?” Gorov asked.

The overhead speaker hissed as the torpedo officer assessed the situation. Then: “An ounce or two.”

“That's all?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any buckling?”

“Nothing visible.”

“The rivets?”

“No distortion of the rivet line.”

“Any sounds of metal fatigue?”

“We've been going over it with a stethoscope, sir. No alarming noise, no fatigue signatures, just the usual.”

“Then why do you sound so concerned?” Gorov demanded, getting directly to the heart of the issue.

The torpedo officer didn't respond immediately but finally he said, “Well, sir, when you lay your hand against the steel… there's a strange vibration.”

“Engine vibrations.”

From the squawk box, the torpedo room officer said, “No, sir. It's something else. I don't know just what. But something I've never felt before. I think…”

“What?”

“Sir?”

“What do you think,” Gorov demanded. “Spit it out. What do you think you feel when you put your hand to the steel?”

“Pressure.”

Gorov was aware that the control-room crew had already lost its guarded optimism. To the torpedo officer, he said, “Pressure? You can't feel pressure through the steel. I suggest you control your imagination. There's no reason to panic. Just keep a close watch on it.”

The torpedo officer evidently had expected more of a reaction. Morosely, he said, “Yes, sir.”

Zhukov's lupine face was distorted by fear but also by doubt and anger, a mosaic of emotions that were dismayingly distinct and readable. A first officer needed to have better control of his expressions if he hoped to become a captain. He spoke so softly that Gorov had to strain to hear: “One pinhole, one hairline crack in the pressure hull, and the boat will be smashed flat.”

True enough. And it could all happen in a fracture of a second. It would be over before they even realized that it had begun. At least death would be mercifully swift.

“We'll be all right,” Gorov insisted.

He saw the confusion of loyalties in the first officer's eyes, and he wondered if he was wrong. He wondered if he should take the Pogodin up a few hundred feet to lessen the crushing pressure on it, and abandon the Edgeway scientists.

He thought of Nikki. He was a stern enough judge of himself to face the possibility that saving the Edgeway expedition might have become an obsession with him, an act of personal atonement, which was not in the best interest of his crew. If that was the case, he had lost control of himself and was no longer fit to command. Are we all going to die because of me? he wondered.

11:27 DETONATION IN THIRTY-THREE MINUTES

The descent along the communications wire proved to be far more difficult and exhausting than Harry Carpenter had anticipated. He was not a fraction as experienced in the water as were Brian and Roger, although he had used scuba gear on several occasions over the years and had thought that he knew what to expect. He had failed to take into account that a diver ordinarily spent the larger part of his time swimming more or less parallel to the ocean floor; their headfirst descent on that seven-hundred-foot line was perpendicular to the seabed, which he found to be tiring. Inexplicably tiring, in fact, because there was no physical reason why it should have been markedly more difficult than any other diving he'd ever done. At any angle, he was essentially weightless when he was underwater, and the flippers were as useful as they would have been had he been swimming parallel to the seabed. He suspected that his special weariness was largely psychological, but he could not shake it. In spite of the suit's lead weights, he constantly seemed to be fighting his natural buoyancy. His arms ached. Blood pounded at his temples and behind his eyes. He soon realized that he would have to pause periodically, reverse his position, and get his head up to regain equilibrium; otherwise, although his weariness and growing disorientation were no doubt entirely psychological, he would black out.

In the lead, Roger Breskin appeared to progress effortlessly. He slid his left hand along the communications wire as he descended, held the lamp in his other hand, and relied entirely on his legs to propel him, kicking smoothly. His technique wasn't substantially different from Harry's, but he had the advantage of muscles built through regular diligent workouts with heavy weights.

As he felt his shoulders crack, as the back of his neck began to ache, and as sharp new currents of pain shot down his arms, Harry wished that he had spent as much time in gyms as Roger had put in over the past twenty years.

He glanced over his shoulder to see if Brian and Rita were all right. The kid was trailing him by about twelve feet, features barely visible in the full-face diving mask. Eruptions of bubbles steamed out of Brian's scuba vent, were briefly tinted gold by the backwash from Roger's lamp, and quickly vanished into the gloom above. In spite of all that he'd endured in the past few hours, he seemed to be having no trouble keeping up.

Behind Brian, Rita was barely visible, only fitfully back lighted by the lamp that George Lin carried in her wake. The yellowish beams were defeated by the murky water; against the eerily luminous but pale haze, she was but a rippling shadow, at times so indistinct and strange that she might have been not human but an unknown denizen of the polar seas. Harry couldn't get a glimpse of her face, but he knew that her psychological suffering, at least, must be great.

* * *

Cryophobia: fear of ice.

The frigid water in the tunnel was as dark as if it had been tainted with clouds of squid ink, for it was thick with diatoms and specks of ice and inorganic particulates. Rita wasn't able to see the ice that lay only twenty feet from her in every direction, but she remained acutely aware of it. At times her fear was so overwhelming that her chest swelled and her throat tightened and she was unable to breathe. Each time, however, on the shuddering edge