just been through. That's the first thing. The next is that without a transmitter from which the «Dolphin» can pick up our directional bearings, we could never hope to find the «Dolphin» again. The third is that the closing ice will probably have forced the «Dolphin» to drop down before anyone could get halfway there. And the last is that if we failed to find the «Dolphin», either because we missed her or because she was gone, we could never make our way back to Zebra again: we wouldn't have the strength and we would have nothing to guide us back, anyway.'
'The odds offered aren't all that attractive,' I admitted. 'What odds are you offering on the ice machine being repaired?'
Hansen shook his head, said nothing. Rawlings started stirring his soup again, carefully not looking up, he didn't want to meet the anxious eyes, the desperate eyes, in that circle of haggard and frost-bitten faces any more than I did. But he looked up as Captain Folsom pushed himself away from the support of a wall and took a couple of unsteady steps toward us. It didn't require any stethoscope to see that Folsom was in a pretty bad way.
'I am afraid that we don't understand,' he said. His voice was slurred and indistinct, the puffed and twisted lips had been immobilized by the savage charring of his face: I wondered bleakly how many months of pain would elapse, how many visits to the surgeon's table, before Folsom could show that face to the world again. In the very remote event, that was, of our ever getting him to a hospital. 'Would you please explain? What is the difficulty?'
'Simply this,' I said. 'The «Dolphin» has an ice fathometer, a device for measuring the thickness of the overhead ice. Normally, even if Commander Swanson — the captain of the «Dolphin» — didn't hear from us, we could expect him on our doorstep in a matter of hours. He has the position of this drift station pinned down pretty closely. All he would have to do is drop down, come under us here, start a grid search with his ice fathometer, and it would be only minutes before he located the relatively thin ice out in that lead there. But things aren't normal. The ice machine has broken down, and if it stays that way he'll never find that lead. That's why I want to go back there. Now. Before Swanson's forced to dive by the closing ice.'
'Don't see it, old boy,' Jolly said. 'How's that going to help? Can «you» fix this ice whatyoumaycallit?'
'I don't have to. Commander Swanson knows his distance from this camp, give or take a hundred yards. All I have to do is tell him to cover the distance less quarter of a mile and fire a torpedo. That ought — '
'Torpedo?' Jolly asked. 'Torpedo? To break through the ice from beneath?'
'That's it. It's never been tried before. I suppose there's no reason why it shouldn't work if the ice is thin enough, and it won't be all that thick in the lead out there. I don't really know.'
'They'll be sending planes, you know, Doc,' Zabrinski said quietly. 'We started transmitting the news as soon as we broke through, and everybody will know by now that Zebra has been found — at least, they'll know exactly where it is. They'll have the big bombers up here in a few hours.'
'Doing what?' I asked. 'Sculling around uselessly in the darkness up above? Even if they do have the exact position, they still won't be able to see what's left of this station because of the darkness and the ice storm. Perhaps they can with radar, it's unlikely, but even if they do, what then? Drop supplies? Maybe. But they won't dare drop supplies directly on us for fear of killing us. They'd have to drop them some distance off — and even a quarter mile would be too far away for any chance we'd ever have of finding stuff in those conditions. As for landing — even if weather conditions were perfect, no plane big enough to have the range to fly here could ever hope to land on the ice cap. You know that.'
'What's your middle name, Doc?' Rawlings asked dolefully. 'Jeremiah?'
'The greatest good of the greatest number,' I said. 'The old yardstick, but there's never been a better one. If we just hole up here without making any attempt to help ourselves and the ice machine remains useless, then we're all dead. All sixteen of us. If I make it there safely, then we're all alive. Even if I don't, the ice machine may be fixed and there would only be one lost then.' I started pulling on my mittens. 'One is less than sixteen.'
'We might as well make it two,' Hansen sighed and began to pull on his own gloves. I was hardly surprised, when he'd last spoken he'd talked at first of 'you' having no chance and finished by saying that 'we' had none, and it hadn't required any psychiatrist to follow his quick shift in mental orientation: whatever men like Hansen were handpicked for, it wasn't for any predilection for shifting the load to others' shoulders when the going became sticky.
I didn't waste any time arguing with him.
Rawlings got to his feet.
'One skilled volunteer for the soup-stirring,' he requested. 'Those two wouldn't get as far as that door without my holding their hands. I'll probably get a medal for this. What's the highest decoration awarded in peacetime, Lieutenant?'
'There are no medals given for soup-stirring, Rawlings,' Hansen said, 'which is what you are going to keep on doing. You're staying right here.'
'Uh-uh.' Rawlings shook his head. 'Prepare yourself to deal with your first mutiny, Lieutenant. I'm coming with you. I can't lose. If we get to the «Dolphin», you'll be too damned glad and happy to have made it to dream of reporting me, apart from being a fair-minded man who will have to admit that our safe arrival back at the ship will be entirely due to torpedoman Rawlings.' He grinned. 'And if we don't make it — well, you can't very well report it, can you, Lieutenant?'
Hansen walked across to him. He said quietly: 'You know that there's more than an even chance that we won't reach the «Dolphin». That would leave twelve pretty sick men here, not to mention Zabrinski with a broken ankle, and with no one to look after them. They've got to have one able man to look after them. You couldn't be that selfish, now, could you, Rawlings? Look after them, will you? As a favor to me?'
Rawlings looked at him for long seconds, then squatted down and started stirring the soup again. 'As a favor to me, you mean,' he said bitterly. 'Okay, I'll stay. As a favor to me. Also to prevent Zabrinski from tripping over his legs again and breaking another ankle.' He stirred the soup viciously. 'Well, what are you waiting for? The skipper may be making up his mind to dive any minute.'
He had a point. We brushed off protests and attempts to stop us made by Captain Folsom and Dr. Jolly and were ready to leave in thirty seconds. Hansen was through the door first. I turned and looked at the sick and emaciated and injured survivors of Drift Station Zebra. Folsom, Jolly, Kinnaird, Hewson, Naseby and seven others. Twelve men altogether. They couldn't all be in cahoots together, so it had to be a single man, maybe two, acting in concert. I wondered who those men might be, those men I would have to kill, that person or persons who had murdered my brother and six other men on Drift Ice Station Zebra.
I pulled the door to behind me and followed Hansen out into the dreadful night.
6
We had been tired, more than tired, even before we had set out. We had been leaden-legged, bone-weary, no more than a short handspan from total exhaustion. But, for all that, we flitted through the howling darkness of that night like two great white ghosts across the dimly seen whiteness of a nightmare lunar landscape. We were no longer bowed under the weight of heavy packs. Our backs were to that gale-force wind, so that for every laborious plodding step we had made on our way to Zebra we now covered five, with so little a fraction of our earlier toil that at first it seemed all but effortless. We had no trouble in seeing where we were going, no fear of falling into an open lead or of crippling ourselves against some unexpected obstacle, for with our useless goggles removed and powerful flashlight beams dancing erratically ahead of us as we jog-trotted along, visibility was seldom less than five yards, more often nearer ten. Those were the physical aids that helped us on our way but even more sharply powerful as a spur to our aching legs was that keen and ever-growing fear that dominated our minds to the exclusion of all else, the fear that Commander Swanson had already been compelled to drop down and that we would be left to die in that shrieking wasteland: with our lacking both shelter and food, the old man with the scythe would not be keeping us waiting too long.
We ran, but we did not run too fast, for to have done that would have been to have the old man tapping us on the shoulder in very short order indeed. In far sub-zero temperatures, there is one thing that the Eskimo avoids as he would the plague — overexertion, in those latitudes more deadly, even, than the plague itself. Too much physical effort while wearing heavy furs inevitably results in sweat, and when the effort ceases, as eventually
