At half-past five Commander Swanson walked across to the ice machine and peered over Benson’s shoulder. He said, “What’s the average thickness of that stuff above?”
“Twelve to fifteen feet,” Benson said. His voice was low and tired. “Nearer fifteen, I would say.”
Swanson picked up a phone. “Lieutenant Mills? Captain here. What is the state of readiness of those torpedoes you’re working on? Four? Ready to go? Good. Stand by to load. I’m giving this search another thirty minutes, then it’s up to you. Yes, that is correct. We shall attempt to blow a hole through the ice.” He replaced the phone.
Hansen said thoughtfully, “Fifteen feet of ice is a helluva lot of ice. And that ice will have a tamping effect and will direct ninety per cent of the explosive force down the way, You think we _can_ blow a hole through fifteen feet of ice, Captain?”
“I’ve no idea,” Swanson admitted. “How can anyone know until we try it?”
“Nobody ever tried to do this before?” I asked.
“No. Not in the U.S. Navy, anyway. The Russians may have tried it, I wouldn’t know. They don’t,” he added dryly, “keep us very well informed on those matters.”
“Aren’t the underwater shock waves liable to damage the _Dolphin?_” I asked. I didn’t care for the idea at all, and that was a fact.
“If they do, the Electric Boat Company can expect a- pretty strong letter of complaint. We shall explode the warhead electronically about a thousand yards after it leaves the ship: it has to travel eight hundred yards anyway before a safety, device unlocks and permits the warhead to be armed. We shall be bows on to the detonation, and with a hull designed to withstand the pressures this one is, the shock effects should be negligible.”
“Very heavy ice,” Benson intoned. “Thirty feet, forty feet, fifty feet. Very, very heavy ice.”
“Just too bad if your torpedo ended up under a pile like the stuff above us just now,” I said. “I doubt if it would even chip off the bottom layer.”
“We’ll take care that doesn’t happen. We’ll just find a suitably large layer of ice of normal thickness, kind of back off a thousand yards, and then let go.”
“Thin ice!” Benson’s voice wasn’t a shout, it was a bellow. “Thin ice. No, by God, clear water! Clear water! Lovely, clear, clear water!”
My immediate reaction was that either the ice machine or Benson’s brain had blown a fuse. But the officer at the diving panel had no such doubts, for I had to grab and hang on hard as the _Dolphin_ heeled over violently to port and came curving around, engines slowing, in a tight circle to bring her back to the spot where Benson had called out. Swanson watched the plot, spoke quietly, and the big bronze propellers reversed and bit into the water to bring the _Dolphin_ to a stop.
“How’s it looking now, Doc?” Swanson called out.
“Clear, clear water,” Benson said reverently. “I got a good picture of it. It’s pretty narrow, but wide enough to hold us. It’s long, with a sharp left-hand dogleg, for it followed us around through the first forty-five degrees of our curve.”
“One fifty feet,” Swanson said.
The pumps hummed. The _Dolphin_ drifted gently upward like an airship rising from the ground. Briefly, water flooded back into the tanks. The _Dolphin_ hung motionless.
“Up periscope,” Swanson said.
The periscope hissed up slowly into the raised position. Swanson glanced briefly through the eyepiece, then beckoned to me. “Take a look,” he beamed. “As lovely a sight as you’ll ever see.”
I took a look. If you’d made a picture of what could be seen above and framed it, you couldn’t have sold the result even if you added Picasso’s name to it; but I could see what he meant. Solid black masses on either side with a scarcely lighter strip of dark jungle green running between them on a line with the fore-and-aft direction of the ship. An open lead in the polar pack.
Three minutes later we were lying on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, just under 250 miles from the Pole.
The rafted, twisted ice pack reared up into contorted ridges almost fifty feet in height, towering twenty feet above the top of the sail, so close you could almost reach out and touch the nearest ridge. Three or four of those broken and fantastically hummocked ice hills stretching off to the west, and then the light of the floodlight failed and we could see no more. Beyond that there was only blackness.
To the east, we could see nothing at all. To have stared Out to the east with opened eyes would have been to be blinded for life in a very few seconds: even goggles became clouded and scarred after the briefest exposure. Close in to the _Dolphin’s_ side you could, with bent head and hooded eyes, catch, for a fleeting part of a second, a glimpse of black water, already freezing over; but it was more imagined than seen.
The wind, shrieking and wailing across the bridge and through raised antennae, showed at consistently over sixty mph on the bridge anemometer. The ice storm was no longer the gusting, swirling fog of that morning but a driving wall of stiletto-tipped spears, near-lethal in its ferocity, highspeed ice-spicule lances that would have skewered their way through the thickest cardboard or shattered in a second a glass held in your hand. Over and above the ululating threnody of the wind we could hear an almost constant grinding, crashing, and deep-throated booming as millions of tons of racked and tortured ice, under the influence of the gale and some mighty pressure center heaven knew how many hundreds of miles away, reared and twisted and tore and cracked, one moment forming another rafted ridge as a layer of ice, perhaps ten feet thick, screeched and roared and clambered on to the shoulders of another and then another, the next rending apart in indescribably violent cacophony to open up a new lead, black, wind-torn water that started to skim over with ice almost as soon as it was formed.
“Are we both mad? Let’s get below.” Swanson cupped his hands to my ear and had to shout, but, even so, I could hardly hear him above that hellish bedlam of sound.
We clambered down into the comparatively sudden stillness of the control room. Swanson untied his parka hood and pulled off the scarf and goggles that had completely masked his face. He looked at me and shook his head wonderingly.
“And some people talk about the white silence of the Arctic, My God, a boilermaker’s shop is like a library reading room compared to that.” He shook his head again. “We stuck our noses out a few times above the ice pack last year, but we never saw anything like this. Or heard it. Winter, too. Cold, sure, damned cold, and windy, but never so bad that we couldn’t take a brief stroll on the ice, and I used to wonder about those stories of explorers being stuck in their tents for days on end, unable to move. But I know now why Captain Scott died.”
“It is pretty nasty,” I admitted. “How safe are we here, Commander?”
“That’s anybody’s guess.” Swanson shrugged. “The wind’s got us jammed hard against the west wall of this polynya, and there’s maybe fifty yards of open water to starboard. For the moment we’re safe. But you can hear and see that that pack is on the move, and not slowly, either. The lead we’re in was torn open less than an hour ago. How long? Depends on the configuration of the ice, but those polynyas can close up damned quickly at times, and while the hull of the Dolphin can take a good deal of pressure, it can’t take a million tons of ice leaning against it. Maybe we can stay here for hours, maybe only for minutes. Whichever it is, as soon as that east wall comes within ten feet of the starboard side, we’re dropping down out of it. You know what happens when a ship gets caught in the ice.”
“I know. It gets squeezed flat, is carried around the top of the world for a few years, and then one day it’s released, and drops to the bottom, two miles straight down. The U. S. government wouldn’t like it, Commander.”
“The prospects of further promotion for Commander Swanson would be poor,” Swanson admitted. “I think–”
“Hey!” The shout came from the radio room. “Hey, come ‘ere.”
“I think Zabrinski wants me,” Swanson murmured. He moved off with his usual deceptive speed, and I followed him into the radio room. Zabrinski was sitting half turned in his chair, an ear-to-ear beam on his face, the earphones extended in his left hand. Swanson took them, listened briefly, then nodded.
“DSY,” he said softly. “DSY, Dr. Carpenter. We have them. Got the bearing? Good.” He turned to the quartermaster. “Ellis, ask the navigating officer to come here as soon as possible.”