“You don’t call that endangering the lives of my men? Making extended searches of the ice cap, on foot, in midwinter?”
“Nobody said anything about endangering the lives of your men.” –
“You mean–you mean you’d go it alone?” Swanson stared down at the deck and shook his head. “I don’t know what to think. I don’t know whether to say you’re crazy or whether to say I’m beginning to understand why they– whoever ‘they’ may be–picked you for the job, Dr. Carpenter.” He sighed, then regarded me thoughtfully. “One moment you say there’s no hope, the next that you’re prepared to spend the winter here, searching. If you don’t mind my saying so, Doctor, it just doesn’t make sense.”
“Stiff-necked pride,” I said. “I don’t like throwing my hand in on a job before I’ve even started it. I don’t know what the attitude of the U. S. Navy is on that sort of thing.”
He gave me another speculative glance; I could see that he believed me the way a fly believes the spider on the web who has just offered him safe accommodation for the night. He smiled. He said: “The U. S. Navy doesn’t take offense all that easily, Dr. Carpenter. I suggest you catch a couple of hours’ sleep while you can. You’ll need it if you’re going to start walking toward the North Pole.”
“How about yourself? You haven’t been to bed at all tonight.”
“I think I’ll wait a while.” He nodded toward the door of the radio room. “Just in case anything comes through.”
“What are they sending? Just the call sign?”
“Plus request for position and a rocket, if they have either. I’ll let you know immediately anything comes through. Good night, Dr. Carpenter. Or, rather, good morning.”
I rose heavily and made my way to Hansen’s cabin.
The atmosphere around the 8:00 a.m. breakfast table in the wardroom was less than festive. Apart from the officer on deck and the engineer lieutenant on watch, all the _Dolphin’s_ officers were there, some just risen from their bunks, some just heading for them, none of them talking in anything more than monosyllables. Even the ebullient Dr. Benson was remote and withdrawn. It seemed pointless to ask whether any contact had been established with Drift Station Zebra; it was painfully obvious that it hadn’t. And that after almost five hours of continuous sending. The sense of despondency and defeat, the unspoken knowledge that time had run out for the survivors of Drift Station Zebra hung heavy over the wardroom.
No one hurried over his meal–there was nothing to hurry for–but by and by they rose one by one and drifted off, Dr. Benson to his sick-bay call, the young torpedo officer, Lieutenant Mills, to supervise the efforts of his men who had been working twelve hours a day for the past two days to iron out the faults in the suspect torpedoes, a third to relieve Hansen, who had the watch, and three others to their bunks. That left only Swanson, Raeburn and myself. Swanson, I knew, hadn’t been to bed at all the previous night, but for all that he had the rested, clear-eyed look of a man with eight solid hours behind him.
The steward, Henry, had just brought in a fresh pot of coffee when we heard the sound of running footsteps in the passageway outside and the quartermaster burst into the wardroom. He didn’t quite manage to take the door off its hinges, but that was only because the Electric Boat Company put good, solid hinges on the doors of their submarines.
“We got it made!” he shouted, and then, perhaps recollectmg that enlisted men were expected to conduct themselves with rather more decorum in the wardroom, “We’ve raised them, Captain, we’ve raised them!”
“What!” Swanson could move twice as fast as his comfortable figure suggested, and he was already half out of his chair.
“We are in radio contact with Drift Ice Station Zebra, sir,” Ellis said formally.
Commander Swanson got to the radio room first, but only because he had a head start on Raeburn and myself. Two operators were on watch, both leaning forward toward their transmitters, one with his head bent low, the other with his cocked to one side, as if those attitudes of concentrated listening helped them to isolate and amplify the slightest sound coming through the earphones clamped to their heads. One of them was scribbling away mechanically on a -message pad. “DSY,” he was writing down, “_DSY_” repeated over and over and over again. DSY. The answering call sign of Drift Station Zebra. He stopped writing as he caught sight of Swanson out of the corner of his eye.
“We’ve got ’em, Captain, no question. Signal very weak and intermittent, but–”
“Never mind the signal!” It was Raeburn who made this interruption without any by-your-leave from Swanson. He tried, and failed, to keep the rising note of excitement out. of his voice, and he looked more than ever like a youngster playing hooky from high school. “The bearing? Have you got their bearing? That’s all that matters.”
The other operator swiveled in his seat, and I recognized my erstwhile guard, Zabrinski. He fixed Raeburn with a sad and reproachful eye.
“Course we got their bearing, Lieutenant. First thing we did. Oh forty-five, give or take a whisker. Northeast, that is.”
“Thank you, Zabrinski,” Swanson said dryly. “Oh fortyfive is northeast. The navigating officer and I wouldn’t have known. Position?”
Zabrinski shrugged and turned to his watchmate, a man with a red face, leather neck and a shining, polished dome where his hair ought to have been. “What’s the word, Curly?”
“Nothing. Just nothing.” Curly looked at Swanson. “Twenty times I’ve asked for his position. No good. All he does is send out his call sign. I don’t think he’s hearing us at all, be doesn’t even know we’re listening, he just keeps sending his call sign over and over again. Maybe he hasn’t switched his aerial in to receive.”
“It isn’t possible,” Swanson said.
“It is with this guy,” Zabrinski said. “At first Curly and I thought it was the signal that was weak, then we thought it was the operator who was weak or sick, but we were wrong: he’s just a ham-handed amateur.”
“You can tell?” Swanson asked.
“You can always tell. You can–” he broke off, stiffened and touched his watchmate’s arm.
Curly nodded. “I got it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Position unknown, the man says.”
Nobody said anything, not just then. It didn’t seem important that he couldn’t give us his position; all that mattered was that we were in direct contact. Raeburn turned and ran forward across the control room. I could hear him speaking rapidly on the bridge telephone. Swanson turned to me.
“Those balloons you spoke of earlier. The ones on Zebra. Are they free or captive?”
“Both.”
“How do the captive ones work?”
“A free-running winch, nylon cord marked off in hundreds and thousands of feet.”
“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.”