'We'll ask them to send a captive balloon up to five thousand feet,' Swanson decided. 'With flares. If they're within thirty or forty miles, we ought to see it, and if we get its elevation and make an allowance for the effect of wind on it, we should get a fair estimate of distance… What is it, Brown?' This to the man Zabrinski called 'Curly.'
'They're sending again,' Curly said. 'Very broken, fades a lot. 'God's sake hurry.' Just like that, twice over. 'God's sake hurry.''
'Send this,' Swanson said. He dictated a brief message about the balloons. 'And send it real slow.'
Curly nodded and began to transmit. Raeburn came running back into the radio room.
'The moon's not down yet,' he said quickly to Swanson. 'Still a degree or two above the horizon. I'm taking a sextant up top and taking a moon-sight. Ask them to do the same. That'll give us the latitude difference, and if we know they're oh forty-five of us, we can pin them down to a mile.'
'It's worth trying,' Swanson said. He dictated another message to Brown. Brown transmitted the second message immediately after the first. We waited for the answer. For all of ten minutes we waited. I looked at the men in the radio room: they all had the same remote, withdrawn look of men who are there only physically, men whose minds are many miles away. They were all at the same place and I was too, wherever Drift Ice Station Zebra was.
Brown started writing again, not for long. His voice this time was still matter-of-fact but with overtones of emptiness. He said, ''All balloons burned. No moon.''
''No moon.'' Raeburn couldn't hide the bitterness, the sharpness of his disappointment. 'Damn! Must be pretty heavy overcast up there. Or a bad Storm.'
'No,' I said. 'You don't get local weather variations like that on the ice cap. The conditions will be the same over fifty thousand square miles. The moon is down. For them, the moon is down. Their latest estimated position must have been pure guesswork, and bad guesswork at that. They must be at least a hundred miles farther north and east than we bad thought.'
'Ask them if they have any rockets,' Swanson said to Brown.
'You can try,' I said. 'It'll be a waste of time. If they're as far off as I think, their rockets would never get above our horizon. Even if they did, we wouldn't see them.'
'It's always a chance, isn't it?' Swanson asked.
'Beginning to lose contact, sir,' Brown reported. 'Something there about food but it faded right out.'
'Tell them if they have any rockets to fire them at once,' Swanson said. 'Quickly, now, before you lose contact.'
Four times in all Brown sent the message before he managed to pick up a reply. Then he said: 'Message reads 'Two minutes.' Either this guy is pretty far gone or his transmitter batteries are. That's all. 'Two minutes,' he said.'
Swanson nodded wordlessly and left the room. I followed. We picked up coats and binoculars and clambered up to the bridge. After the warmth and comfort of the control room, the cold seemed glacial, the flying ice spicules more lancetlike than ever. Swanson uncapped the gyro-repeater compass, gave us the line of 045, and told the two men who had been keeping watch what to look for and where.
A minute passed, two minutes, five. My eyes began to ache from staring into the ice-filled dark; the exposed part of my face had gone completely numb, and I knew that when I removed those binoculars I was going to take a fair amount of skin with them.
A phone bell rang. Swanson lowered his glasses, leaving two peeled and bloody rings around his eyes — he seemed unaware of it; the pain wouldn't come until later — and picked up the receiver. He listened briefly, hung up.
'Radio room,' he said. 'Let's get below. All of us. The rockets were fired three minutes ago.'
We went below. Swanson caught sight of his face reflected in a glass gauge and shook his head. 'They must have shelter,' he said quietly. 'They must. Some hut left. Or they would have been gone long ago.' He went into the radio room. 'Still in contact?'
'Yeah.' It was Zabrinski. 'Off and on. It's a funny thing. When a bum contact like this starts to fade, it usually gets lost and stays lost. But this guy keeps coming back. Funny.'
'Maybe he hasn't even got batteries left,' I said. 'Maybe all they have is a hand-cranked generator. Maybe these's no one left with the strength to crank it for more than a few moments at a time.'
'Maybe,' Zabrinski agreed. 'Tell the captain that last message, Curly.'
''Can't late many tours,'' Brown said. 'That's how the message came through. 'Can't late many tours.' I think it should read 'Can't last many hours.' Don't see what else it could have been.'
Swanson looked at me briefly, and glanced away again. I hadn't told anyone else that the commandant of the base was my brother and I knew he hadn't told anyone, either. He said to Brown: 'Give them a time check. Ask them to send their call signs five minutes every hour on the hour. Tell them we'll contact them again within six hours at the most, maybe only four. Zabrinski, how accurate was that bearing?'
'Dead accurate, Captain. I've had plenty of rechecks. Oh forty-five exactly.'
Swanson moved out into the control center. 'Drift Station Zebra can't see the moon. If we take Dr. Carpenter's word for it that weather conditions are pretty much the same all over, that's because the moon is below their horizon. With the elevation we have of the moon, and knowing their bearing, what's Zebra's minimum distance from us?'
'A hundred miles, as Dr. Carpenter said,' Raeburn confirmed after a short calculation. 'At least that.'
'So. We leave here and take a course oh forty. Not enough to take us very far from their general direction, but it will give us enough off-set to take a good cross-bearing eventually. We will go exactly a hundred miles and try for another polynya. Call the executive officer, secure for diving.' He smiled at me. 'With two cross-bearings and an accurately measured base line, we can pin them down to a hundred yards.'
'How do you intend to measure a hundred miles under the ice? Accurately, I mean?'
'Our inertial-navigation computer does it for me. It's very accurate: you wouldn't believe just how accurate. I can dive the «Dolphin» off the eastern coast of the United States and surface again in the eastern Mediterranean within five hundred yards of where I expect to be. Over a hundred miles I don't expect to be twenty yards out.'
Radio aerials were lowered, hatches screwed down, and within five minutes the «Dolphin» had dropped down from her hole in the ice and was on her way. The two helmsmen at the diving stand sat idly smoking, doing nothing: the steering controls were in automatic interlock with the inertial-navigation system, which steered the ship with a degree of accuracy and sensitivity impossible to human hands. For the first time I could feel a heavy jarring vibration rumbling throughout the length of the ship. 'Can't last many hours,' the message had said. The «Dolphin» was under full power.
I didn't leave the control room that morning. I spent most of the time peering over the shoulder of Dr. Benson, who had passed his usual five minutes in the sick bay waiting for the patients who never turned up and then had hurried to his seat by the ice machine. The readings on that machine meant living or dying to the Zebra survivors. We had to find another polynya to surface in to get a cross-bearing on Zebra's position: no polynya, no cross- bearing; no cross-bearing, no hope. I wondered for the hundredth time how many of the survivors of the fire were still alive. From the quiet desperation of the few garbled messages that Brown and Zabrinski had managed to pick up, I couldn't see that there would be many.
The pattern traced out by the hissing stylus on the chart was hardly an encouraging sight. Most of the time it showed the ice overhead to be of a thickness of ten feet or more. Several times the stylus dipped to show thicknesses of thirty to forty feet, and once it dipped down almost clear of the paper, showing a tremendous inverted ridge of at least 150 feet in depth. I tried to imagine what kind of fantastic pressures created by piled-up log jams of rafted ice on the surface must have been necessary to force ice down to such a depth; but I just didn't have the imagination to cope with that sort of thing.
Only twice in the first eighty miles did the stylus trace out the thin black line that meant thin ice overhead. The first of those polynyas might have accommodated a small row boat, but it would certainly never have looked at the «Dolphin»; the other had hardly been any bigger.
Shortly before noon the hull vibration died away as Swanson gave the order for a cut-back to a slow cruising speed. He said to Benson, 'How does it look?'
'Terrible. Heavy ice all the way.'
