cease it must, the sweat freezes on the skin: the only way to destroy that film of ice is by further exertion, producing even more sweat, the beginnings of a vicious and steadily narrowing circle that can have only one end. So though we ran it was only at a gentle jog-trot, hardly more than a fast walk; we took every possible precaution against overheating.
After half an hour, perhaps a little more, I called for a brief halt in the shelter of a steep ice wall. Twice in the past two minutes Hansen had stumbled and fallen where there hadn't appeared to be any reason to stumble and fall: and I had noticed that my own legs were more unsteady than the terrain warranted.
'How are you making out?' I asked.
'Pretty bushed, Doc.' He sounded it, too, his breathing quick and rasping and shallow. 'But don't write me off yet. How far do you think we've come?'
'Three miles, near enough.' I patted the ice wall behind us. 'When we've had a couple of minutes, I think we should try climbing this. Looks like a pretty tall hummock to me.'
'To try to get into the clear above the ice storm?' I nodded my head and he shook his. 'Won't do any good, Doc. This ice storm must be at least twenty feet thick, and even if you do get above it the «Dolphin» will still be below it. She's only got the top of her sail clear above the ice.'
'I've been thinking,' I said. 'We've been so lost in our own woes and sorrows that we've forgotten about Commander Swanson. I think we've been guilty of underestimating him pretty badly.'
'It's likely enough. Right now I'm having a fulitime job worrying about Lieutenant Hansen. What's on your mind?'
'Just this. The chances are better than fifty-fifty that Swanson believes we're on our way back to the «Dolphin». After all, he's been ordering us to return for quite some time. And if he thinks we didn't get the order because something has happened to us or to the radio, he'll still figure that we will be returning.'
'Not necessarily. Radio or not, we might still be heading for Drift Station Zebra.'
'No. Definitely not. He'll be expecting us to be smart enough to figure it the way he would, and smart enough to see that that is the way «he» would figure it. He would know that if our radio broke down before we got to Zebra, it would be suicidal for us to try to find it without radio bearing — but that it «wouldn't» be suicidal for us to try to make it back to the «Dolphin», for he would be hoping that we would have sufficient savvy to guess that he would put a lamp in the window to guide the lost sheep home.'
'My God, Doc, I think you've got it! Of course he would, of course he would. God, what am I using for brains?' He straightened and turned to face the ice wall.
Pushing and pulling, we made it together to the top. The summit of the rafted ice hummock was less than twenty feet above the level of the ice pack and not quite high enough. We were still below the surface of that gale-driven river of ice spicules. Occasionally, for a brief moment of time, the wind force would ease fractionally and let us have a brief glimpse of the clear sky above: but only occasionally and for a fraction of a second. And if there was anything to be seen in that time, we couldn't see it.
'There'll be other hummocks,' I shouted in Hansen's ear. 'Higher hummocks.' He nodded without answering. I couldn't see the expression on his face but I didn't have to see it. The same thought was in both our minds: we could see nothing because there was nothing to see. Commander Swanson hadn't put a lamp in the window, for the window was gone, the «Dolphin» forced to dive to avoid being crushed by the ice.
Five times in the next twenty minutes we climbed hummocks, and five times we climbed down, each time more dejected, more defeated. By now I was pretty far gone, moving in a pain-filled nightmare: Hansen was in even worse shape, lurching and staggering around like a drunken man. As a doctor, I knew well the hidden and unsuspected resources that an exhausted man could call on in times of desperate emergency; but I knew too that those resources are not limitless and that we were pretty close to the end. And when that end came we would just lie down in the lee of an ice wall and wait for the old man to come along: he wouldn't keep us waiting long.
Our sixth hummock all but defeated us. It wasn't that it was hard to climb — it was well ridged with foot and hand holds — but the sheer physical effort of climbing came very close to defeating us. And then I dimly began to realize that part of the effort was owing to the fact that this was by far the highest hummock we had found yet. Some colossal pressures had concentrated on this one spot, rafting and logjamming the ice pack until it had risen a clear thirty feet above the general level; the giant underwater ridge beneath must have stretched down close to two hundred feet toward the black floor of the Arctic.
Eight feet below the summit our heads were in the clear: on the summit itself, holding on to each other for mutual support against the gale, we could look down on the ice storm whirling by just beneath our feet, a fantastic sight: a great gray-white sea of undulating turbulence, a giant rushing river that stretched from horizon to horizon. Like so much else in the high Arctic, the scene had an eerie and terrifying strangeness about it, a mindless desolation that belonged not to earth but to some alien and long-dead planet.
We scanned the horizon to the west until our eyes ached. Nothing. Nothing at all. Just that endless desolation. From due north to due south, through 1800, we searched the surface of that great river: and still we saw nothing. Three minutes passed. Still nothing. I began to feel the ice running in my blood.
On the remote off-chance that we might already have bypassed the «Dolphin» to the north or south, I turned and peered toward the east. It wasn't easy, for that gale of wind brought tears to the eyes in an instant of time, but at least it wasn't impossible; we no longer had to contend with the needlepointed lances of the ice spicules. I made another slow 180° sweep of the eastern horizon, and again, and again. Then I caught Hansen's arm.
'Look there,' I said. 'To the northeast. Maybe a quarter of a mile away, maybe half. Can you see anything?'
For several seconds Hansen squinted along the direction of my outstretched hand, then shook his head. 'I see nothing. What do you think you see?'
'I don't know. I'm not sure. I can imagine I see a very faint touch of luminescence on the surface of the ice storm there, maybe just a fraction of a shade whiter than the rest.'
For a full half-minute Hansen stared out through cupped hands. Finally he said, 'It's hopeless. I don't see it. But then my eyes have been acting up on me for the past halfhour. But I can't even «imagine» I see anything.'
I turned away to give my streaming eyes a rest from that icy wind and then looked again. 'Damn it,' I said, 'I can't be sure that there is anything there, but I can't be sure that there isn't, either.'
'What do you think it would be?' Hansen's voice was dispirited, with overtones of hopelessness. 'A light?'
'A searchlight shining vertically upward. A searchlight that's not able to penetrate that ice storm.'
'You're kidding yourself, Doc,' Hansen said wearily. 'The wish father to the thought. Besides, that would mean that we had already passed the «Dolphin». It's not possible.'
'It's not impossible. Ever since we started climbing those damned ice hummocks I've lost track of time and space. It «could» be.'
'Do you still see it?' The voice was empty, uninterested, be didn't believe me and he was just making words.
'Maybe my eyes are acting up, too,' I admitted. 'But, damn it, I'm still not sure that I'm not right.'
'Come on, Doc, let's go.'
'Go where?'
'I don't know.' His teeth chattered so uncontrollably in that intense cold that I could scarcely follow his words. 'I guess it doesn't matter very much where — '
With breath-taking abruptness, almost in the center of my imagined patch of luminescence and not more than 400 yards away, a swiftly climbing rocket burst through the rushing river of ice spicules and climbed high into the clear sky trailing behind it a fiery tail of glowing red sparks. Five hundred feet it climbed, perhaps 600, then burst into a brilliantly incandescent shower of crimson stars, stars that fell lazily back to earth again, streaming away to the west on the wings of the gale and dying as they went, till the sky was colder and emptier than ever before.
'You still say it doesn't matter very much where we go?' I asked Hansen. 'Or maybe you didn't see that little lot?'
'What I just saw,' he said reverently, 'was the prettiest ole sight that Ma Hansen's little boy ever did see — or ever will see.' He thumped me on the back, so hard that I had to grab him to keep my balance. 'We got it made, Doc!' he shouted. 'We got it made. Suddenly I have the strength of ten. Home sweet home, here we come.'
