So now I stepped forward very cautiously, very warily indeed, feeling the ice ahead of me with a probe we’d devised after Hansen’s near-accident–a chopped-off five-foot length of rope which we’d dipped into the water of the lead and then exposed to the air until it had become as rigid as a bar of steel. At times I walked, at times I stumbled, at times, when a brief lull in the gale-force wind, as sudden as it was unexpected, would catch me off balance, I’d just fall forward and continue on hands and knees, for it was quite as easy that way. It was during one of those periods when I was shuffling blindly forward on all fours that I realized that the wind had, for the time being, lost nearly all of its violence and that I was no longer being bombarded by that horizontally driving hail of flying ice spicules. Moments later my probe made contact with some solid obstacle in my path: the vertical wall of a rafted ice ridge. I crawled thankfully into its shelter, raised my goggles, and pulled out and switched on my flashlight as the others came blindly up to where I lay.
Blindly. With arms outstretched they pawed at the air before them like sightless men, which for the past two and a half hours was exactly what they had been. For all the service our goggles had given us, we might as well have stuck our heads in gunny sacks before leaving the Dolphin. I looked at Hansen, the first of the three to come up. Goggles, snow mask, hood, clothing–the entire front part of his body from top to toe was deeply and solidly encrusted in a thick and glittering layer of compacted ice, except for some narrow cracks caused by joint movements of legs and arms. As he drew close to me, I could hear him splintering and crackling a good five feet away. Long ice feathers streamed back from his head, shoulders, and elbows: as an extra-terrestrial monster from one of the chillier planets, such as Pluto, he’d have been a sensation in any horror movie. I suppose I looked much the same.
We huddled close together in the shelter of the wall. Only four feet above our heads the ice storm swept by in a glittering gray-white river. Rawlings, sitting on my left, pushed up his goggles, looked down at his ice-sheathed furs, and started to beat his chest with his fist to break up the covering. I reached out a hand and caught his arm.
“Leave it alone,” I said.
“Leave it alone?” Rawlings’ voice was muffled by his snow mask, but not so muffled that I couldn’t hear the chattering of his teeth. “This damn suit of armor weighs a ton. I’m out of training for this kind of weight-lifting, Doc.”
“Leave it alone. If it weren’t for that ice, you’d have frozen to death by this time: it’s insulating you from that wind and the ice storm. Let’s see the rest of your face. And your hands.”
I checked him and the two others for frostbite, while Hansen checked me. We were still lucky. Blue and mottled and shaking with the cold, but no frostbite. The furs of the other three might not have been quite as fancy as mine, but they were very adequate indeed. Nuclear subs always got the best of everything, and Arctic clothing was no exception. But although they weren’t freezing to death, I could see from their faces and hear from their breathing that they were pretty far gone in exhaustion. Thrusting into the power of that ice storm was like wading upstream against the current of a river of molasses; that was energy-sapping enough, but the fact that we had to spend most of our time clambering over, slipping on, sliding and falling across fractured ice or making detours around impassable ridges while being weighed down with forty-pound packs on our backs and heaven only knew how many additional pounds of ice coating our furs in front, had turned our trudge across that contorted, treacherous ice into a dark and frozen nightmare.
“The point of no return, I think,” Hansen said. His breathing, like Rawlings’, was very quick, very shallow, almost gasping. “We can’t take much more of this, Doc.”
“You ought to listen to Dr. Benson’s lectures a bit more,” I said reprovingly. “All this ice cream and apple pie and lolling around in your bunks is no training for this sort of thing.”
“Yeah?” He peered at me. “How do _you_ feel?”
“A mite tired,” I admitted. “Nothing much to speak of.” Nothing much to speak of! My legs felt as if they were falling off, that was all, but the goad of pride was always a useful one to have at hand. I slipped off my rucksack and brought out the medicinal alcohol. “I suggest fifteen minutes’ break. Any more and we’ll just start stiffening up completely. Meantime, a little drop of what we fancy will help keep the old blood corpuscles trudging around.”
“I thought medical opinion was against alcohol in low temperatures,” Hansen said doubtfully. “Something about opening the pores.”
“Name me any form of human activity,” I said, “and I’ll find you a group of doctors against it. Spoilsports. Besides, this isn’t alcohol, it’s very fine Scotch whisky.”
“You should have said so in the first place. Pass it over. Not too much for Rawlings and Zabrinski: they’re not used to the stuff. Any word, Zabrinski?”
Zàbrinski, with the walkie-talkie’s aerial up and one earphone tucked in below the hood of his parka, was talking into the microphone through cupped hands. As the radio expert, Zabrinski had been the obvious man to handle the walkie-talkie, and I’d given it to him before leaving the submarine. This was also the reason why Zabrinski wasn’t at any time given the position of lead man in our trudge across the ice. A heavy fall or immersion in water would have finished the radio he was carrying slung on his back; and if the radio were finished, so would we be, for without the radio, not only had we no hope of finding Drift Station Zebra; we wouldn’t have a chance in a thousand of ever finding our way back to the _Dolphin_ again. Zabrinski was built on the size and scale of a medium-sized gorilla and was about as durable; but we couldn’t have treated him more tenderly had he been made of Dresden china.
“It’s difficult,” Zabrinski said. “Radio’s okay, but this ice storm causes such damn distortion and squeaking–no, wait a minute, though, wait a minute.”
He bent his head over the microphone, shielding it from the sound of the storm, and spoke again through cupped hands. “Zabrinski speaking. . . Zabrinski. Yeah, we’re all kinda tuckered out, but Doc here seems to think we’ll make it. .. . Hang on, I’ll ask him.”
He turned to me. “How far do you think we’ve come, they want to know.”
“Four miles.” I shrugged. “Three and a half, four and a half. You guess it.”
Zabrinski spoke again, looked interrogatively at Hansen and me, saw our head shakes, and signed off. He said: “Navigating officer says we’re four, five degrees north of where we should be and that we’ll have to cut south if we don’t want to miss Zebra by a few hundred yards.”
It could have been worse. Over an hour had passed since we’d received the last bearing position from the _Dolphin_, and, between radio calls, our only means of navigating had been by judging the strength and direction of the wind in our faces. When a man’s face is completely covered and largely numb, it’s not a very sensitive instrument for gauging wind direction–and, for all we knew, the wind might be either backing or veering. It could have been a lot worse, and I said so to Hansen.
“It could be worse,” he agreed heavily. “We could be traveling in circles or we could be dead. Barring that, I don’t see how it could be worse.” He gulped down the whisky, coughed, and handed the flask top back to me. “Things look brighter now. You honestly think we can make it?”
“A little luck, that’s all. You think maybe our packs are too heavy? That we should abandon some of it here?” The last thing I wanted to was to abandon any of the supplies we had along with us: eighty pounds of food, a stove, thirty pounds of compressed-fuel tablets, a hundred ounces of alcohol, a tent, and a very comprehensive medical kit. But if it was to be abandoned, I wanted it to be their suggestion, and I was sure they wouldn’t make it.
“We’re abandoning nothing,” Hansen said. Either the rest or the whisky had done him good; his voice was stronger, his teeth hardly chattering at all.
“Let the thought die still-born,” Zabrinski said. When I’d first seen him in Scotland, he had reminded me of a polar bear, and now out here on the ice cap, huge and crouched in his ice-whitened furs, he resembled one even more. He had the physique of a bear, too, and seemed completely tireless; he was in far better shape than any of us. “This weight on my bowed shoulders is like a bad leg: an old friend that gives me pain, but I wouldn’t be without it.”