“You?” I asked Rawlings.
“I’m conserving my energy,” Rawlings announced. “I expect to have to carry Zabrinski later on.”
We pulled the scarred, abraded and now thoroughly useless snow goggles over our eyes again, hoisted ourselves stiffly to our feet and moved off to the south to find the end of and round the high ridge that had blocked our path. It was by far the longest and most continuous ridge we’d encountered yet, but we didn’t mind; we needed to make a good offing to get us back on course, and not only were we doing just that, but we were doing it in comparative shelter and saving our strength by so doing. After perhaps four hundred yards the ice wall ended so abruptly, leading to so sudden and unexpected an exposure to the whistling fury of the ice storm that I was bowled completely off my feet. An express train couldn’t have done it any better. I hung on to the rope with one hand, clawed and scrambled my way back to my feet with the help of the others, shouted a warning to the others, and then we were fairly into the wind again, holding it directly in our faces and leaning far forward to keep our balance.
We covered the next mile in less than half an hour. The going was easier now, much easier than it had been, although we still had to make small detours around rafted, compacted and broken ice: on the debit side, all of us, Zabrinski excepted, were near complete exhaustion, stumbling and falling far more often than was warranted by the terrain and the strength of the ice gale. For myself, my leaden, ‘dragging legs felt as if they were on fire; each step now sent a shooting pain stabbing from my ankle clear to the top of my thigh. For all that, I think I could have kept going longer than any of them, even Zabrinski, for I had the motivation, the driving force that would have kept me going hours after my legs would have told me that it was impossible to carry on a step further. Major John Halliwell. My elder, my only brother. Alive or dead. Was he alive or was he dead, this one man in the world to whom I owed everything I had or had become? Was he dying, at that very moment when I was thinking of him, was he dying? His wife, Mary, and his three children, who spoiled and mined their bachelor uncle as I spoiled and ruined them: whatever way it was, they would have to know, and only I could tell them. Alive or dead? My legs weren’t mine; the stabbing fire that tortured them belonged to some other man, not to me. I had to know, I had to know, and if I had to find out by covering whatever miles lay between me and Drift Ice Station Zebra on my hands and knees, then I would do just that. I would find out. And over and above the tearing anxiety as to what had happened to my brother there was yet another powerful motivation, a motivation that the world would regard as of infinitely greater importance than the life or death of the commandant of the station. As infinitely more important than the living or dying of the score of men who manned that desolate polar outpost. Or so the world would say.
The demented drumming of the spicules on my mask and ice-sheathed furs suddenly eased, the gale wind fell away, and I found myself standing in the shelter of an ice ridge even higher than the last one we’d used for shelter. I waited for the others to come up, asked Zabrinski to make a position check with the _Dolphin_, and doled out some more of the medicinal alcohol. More of it than on the last occasion. We were in more need of it. Both Hansen and Rawlings were in a very distressed condition, their breath whistling in and out of their lungs in the rapid, rasping, shallow panting of a long-distance runner in the last tortured moments of his final exhaustion. I became gradually aware that the speed of my own breathing matched theirs almost exactly; it required a concentrated effort of willpower to bold my breath even for the few seconds necessary to gulp down my drink. I wondered vaguely if perhaps Hansen hadn’t been right after all; maybe the alcohol wasn’t good for us. But it certainly tasted as if it were.
Zabrinski was already talking through cupped hands into the microphone. After a minute or so he pulled the earphone out from under his parka and buttoned up the walkie-talkie set. He said: “We’re either good or lucky or both. The _Dolphin_ says we’re exactly on the course we ought to be on.” He drained the glass I handed him and sighed in satisfaction. “Well, that’s the good part of the news. Here comes the bad part. The sides of the polynya the _Dolphin_ is lying in are beginning to close together. They’re closing pretty fast. The captain estimates he’ll have to get out of it in two hours. Two at the most.” He paused, then finished slowly: “And the ice machine is still on the blink.”
“The ice machine,” I said stupidly. Well, anyway, I felt stupid, I don’t know how I sounded. “Is the ice–”
“It sure is, brother,” Zabrinski said. He sounded tired. “But you didn’t believe the skipper, did you, Dr. Carpenter? You were too clever for that.”
“Well, that’s a help,” Hansen said heavily. “That makes everything just dandy. The _Dolphin_ drops down, the ice closes up, and there we are, the _Dolphin_ below, us on top, and the whole of the polar ice cap between us. They’ll almost certainly never manage to find us again, even if they do fix the ice machine. Shall we just lie down and die now or shall we first stagger around in circles for a couple of hours and then lie down and die?”
“It’s tragic,” Rawlings said gloomily. “Not the personal aspect of it, I mean the loss to the U.S. Navy. I think I may fairly say, Lieutenant, that we are–or were–three promising young men. Well, you and me, anyway. I think Zabrinski there had reached the limit of his potentialities. He reached them a long time ago.”
Rawlings got all this out between chattering teeth and still painful gasps of air. Rawlings, I reflected, was very much the sort of person I would like to have by my side when things began to get awkward, and it looked as if things were going to become very awkward indeed. He and Zabrinski had, as I’d found out, established themselves as the homespun if slightly heavy-handed humorists on the _Dolphin_. For reasons known only to themselves, both men habitually concealed intelligences of a high order and advanced education under a cloak of genial buffoonery.
“Two hours yet,” I said. “With this wind at our backs we can be back in the sub in well under an hour. We’d be practically blown back there.”
“And the men on Drift Station Zebra?” Zabrinski asked.
“We’d have done our best. Just one of those things.”
“We are profoundly shocked, Dr. Carpenter,” Rawlings said. The tone. of genial buffoonery was less noticeable than usual.
“Deeply dismayed,” Zabrinsld added, “by the very idea.” The words were light, but the lack of warmth in the voice had nothing to do with the bitter wind.
“The only dismaying thing around here is the level of intelligence of certain simple-minded sailors,” Hansen said with some asperity. He went on, and I wondered at the conviction in his voice: “Sure, Dr. Carpenter thinks we should go back. That doesn’t include him. Dr. Carpenter wouldn’t turn back now for all the gold in Fort Knox.” He pushed himself wearily to his feet. “Can’t be much more than half a mile to go now. Let’s get it over with.”
In the backwash of light from my flashlight I saw Rawlings and Zabrinski glance at each other, saw them shrug their shoulders at the same moment. Then they, too, were on their feet and we were on our way again.
Three minutes later Zabrinski broke his ankle.
It happened in an absurdly simple fashion, but for all its simplicity it was a wonder that nothing of the same sort had happened to any of us in the previous three hours. After starting off again, instead of losing our bearing by working to the south or north until we had rounded the end of the ice ridge blocking our path, we elected to go Over it. The ridge was all of ten feet high but by boosting and pulling each other we reached the top without much difficulty. I felt my way forward cautiously, using the ice probe; the flashlight was useless in that ice storm, and my goggles completely opaque. After twenty feet of crawling across the gently downward-sloping surface, I reached the fax side of the ridge and stretched down with the probe.