“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.”
“Well, we can’t expect a polynya to fall into our laps right away,” Swanson said reasonably. “We’re almost there. We’ll make a grid search. Five miles east, five miles west, a quarter mile farther to the north each time.”
The search began. An hour passed, two, then three. Raeburn and his assistant hardly ever raised their heads from the plotting table, where they were meticulously tracing every movement the _Dolphin_ was making in her criss-cross search under the sea. Four o’clock in the afternoon. The normal background buzz of conversation, the occasional small talk from various groups in the control center, died away completely. Benson’s occasional “Heavy ice, still heavy ice,” growing steadily quieter and more dispirited, served only to emphasize and deepen the heavy, brooding silence that had fallen. Only a case-hardened undertaker could have felt perfectly at home in that atmosphere. At the moment, undertakers were the last people I wanted to think about.
Five o’clock in the afternoon. People weren’t looking at each other any more, much less talking. Heavy ice, still heavy ice. Defeat, despair hung heavy in the air. Heavy ice, still heavy ice. Even Swanson had stopped smiling. I wondered if he had in his mind’s eye what I now constantly had in mine: the picture of a haggard, emaciated, bearded man with his face all but destroyed with frostbite, a frozen, starving, dying man draining away the last few ounces of his exhausted strength as he cranked the handle of his generator and tapped out his call sign with lifeless fingers, his head bowed as he strained to listen above the howl of the ice storm for the promise of aid that never came. Or maybe there was no one tapping out a call sign any more. They were no ordinary men who had been sent to man Drift Ice Station Zebra, but there comes a time when even the toughest, the -bravest, the most enduring will abandon all hope and lie down to die. Perhaps he had already lain down to die. Heavy ice, still heavy ice.