“Five feet,” I called to the others as they came up. “It’s only five feet.” I swung over the edge, dropped down, and waited for the others to follow. Hansen came first, then Rawlings, both sliding down easily beside me. What happened to Zabrinski was impossible to see: he either misjudged his distance from the edge or a sudden easing of the wind made him lose his footing. Whatever the cause, I heard him call out, the words whipped away and lost by the wind, as he jumped down beside us. He seemed to land squarely and lightly enough on his feet, then cried out sharply and fell heavily to the ground.
I turned my back to the ice storm, raised the useless snow goggles, and pulled out my flashlight. Zabrinski was half sitting, half lying on the ice, propped up on his right elbow and cursing steadily and fluently and, as far as I could tell, because of the muffling effect of his snow mask, without once repeating himself. His right heel was jammed in a fourinch crack in the ice, one of the thousands of such fractures and fissures that criss-crossed the pressure areas of the pack; his right leg was bent over at an angle to the outside, an angle normally impossible for any leg to assume. I didn’t need to have a medical diploma hung around my neck to tell that the ankle was gone: either that or the lowermost part of the tibia, for the ankle was so heavily encased in a stout boot with lace binding that most of the strain must have fallen on the shinbone. I hoped it wasn’t a compound fracture, but it was an unreasonable hope: at that acute angle the snapped bone could hardly have failed to pierce the skin. Compound or not, it made no immediate difference; I’d no intention of examining it. A few minutes’ exposure of the lower part of his leg in those temperatures was as good a way as any of ensuring that Zabrinski went through the rest of his life with one foot missing.
We lifted his massive bulk, eased the useless foot out of the crack in the ice, and lowered him gently to a sitting position. I unslung the medical kit from my back, knelt beside him and asked: “Does it hurt badly?”
“No, it’s numb, I hardly feel a thing.” He swore disgustedly. “What a crazy thing to do. A little crack like that. How stupid can a man get?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Rawlings said acidly. He shook his head. “I prophesied this, I prophesied this. I said it would end up with me carrying this gorilla here.”
I laid splints to the injured leg and taped them as tightly as possible over the boot and the furs, trying not to think of the depth of trouble we were in now. Two major blows in one: not only had we lost the indispensable services of the strongest man in our party, we now had an extra 220 pounds–at least–of weight, of deadweight, to carry along with us. Not to mention his forty-pound pack. Zabrinski might almost have read my thoughts.
“You’ll have to leave me here, Lieutenant,” he said to Hansen. His teeth were rattling with shock and cold. “We must be almost there now. You can pick me up on the way back.”
“Don’t talk rubbish,” Hansen said shortly. “You know damn well we’d never find you again.”
“Exactly,” Rawlings said. His teeth were like Zabrinski’s, stuttering away irregularly like an asthmatic machine gun. He knelt on the ice to support the injured man’s bulk. “No medals for morons. It says so in the ship’s articles.”
“But you’ll never get to Zebra,” Zabrinski protested. “If you have to carry me–”
“You heard what I said,” Hansen interrupted. “We’re not leaving you.”
“The lieutenant is perfectly correct,” Rawlings agreed. “You aren’t the hero type, Zabrinski. You haven’t got the face for it, for one thing. Now shut up while I get some of this stuff off my back.”
I finished tightening the splints and pulled mittens and fur gloves back on my silk-clad but already frozen hands. We divided Zabrinski’s load among the three of us, pulled goggles and snow masks back into position, hoisted Zabrinski to his one sound leg, turned into the wind, and went on our way again. It would be truer to say that we staggered on our way again.
But now, at last and when we most needed it, luck was with us. The ice cap stretched away beneath our feet as level and smooth as the surface of a frozen river. No ridges, no hummocks, no crevasses, not even the tiny cracks one of which had crippled Zabrinski. Just billiard-flat unbroken ice and not even slippery, for its surface had been scoured and abraded by the flying ice storm.
Each of us took turns at being lead man, the other two supporting a Zabrinski who hopped along in uncomplaining silence on one foot. After maybe three hundred yards of this smooth ice, Hansen, who was in the lead at the moment, stopped so suddenly and unexpectedly that we bumped into him.
“We’re there!” he yelled above the wind. “We’ve made it. We’re there! Can’t you smell it?”
“Smell what?”
“Burnt fuel oil. Burnt nibber. Don’t you get it?”
I pulled down my snow mask, cupped my hands to my face, and sniffed cautiously. One sniff was enough. I hitched up my mask again, pulled Zabrinski’s arm more tightly across my shoulder, and followed Hansen.
The smooth ice ended in another few feet. The ice sloped up sharply to a level plateau, and it took the three of us all of what pitifully little strength remained to drag Zabrinski up after us. The acrid smell of burning seemed to grow more powerful with every step we took. I moved forward, away from the others, my back to the storm, goggles down, and sweeping the ice with semicircular movements of my flashlight. The smell was strong enough now to make my nostrils wrinkle under the mask. It seemed to be coming from directly ahead. I turned around into the wind, protectively cupped hand over my eyes, and, as I did, my flashlight struck something hard and solid and metallic. I lifted my flashlight and vaguely, through the driving ice, I could just make out the ghostly hooped-steel skeleton, ice-coated on the windward side, fire-charred on the leeward side, of what had once been a Nissen-shaped hut.
We had found Drift Ice Station Zebra.
I waited for the others to come up, guided them past the gaunt and burnt-out structure, then told them to turn backs to wind and lift their goggles. For maybe ten seconds we surveyed the ruin in the beam of my flashlight. No one said anything. Then we turned around into the wind again.
Drift Station Zebra had consisted of eight separate huts, four in each of two parallel rows, thirty feet separating the two rows, twenty feet between each two huts in the rows– this to minimize the hazard of fire spreading from hut to hut. But the hazard hadn’t been minimized enough. No one could be blamed for that. No one, except in the wildest flights of nightmarish imagination, could have envisaged what must indeed have happened: exploding tanks and thousands of gallons of blazing oil being driven through the night by a galeforce wind. And, by a double inescapable irony, fire, without which human life on the polar ice cap cannot survive, is there the most dreaded enemy of all: for although the entire ice cap consists of water, frozen water, there is nothing that can melt that water and so put out the fire. Except fire itself. I wondered vaguely what had happened to the giant chemical fire extinguishers housed in every hut.
Eight huts, four in each row. The first two on either side were completely gutted. No trace remained 9f the walls, which had been of two layers of weather-proofed bonded ply that had enclosed the insulation of shredded glass fiber and kapok; on all of them even the aluminum sheeted roofs had disappeared. In one of the huts we could see charred and blackened generator machinery, ice-coated on the windward side, bent and twisted and melted almost out of recognition: one could only wonder at the furnace ferocity of the heat responsible.
The fifth hut–the third on the right-hand side–was a gutted replica of the other four, the framing even more savagely twisted by the heat. We were just turning away from this, supporting Zabrinski and too sick at heart even to speak to each other, when Rawlings called out something unintelligible. I leaned closer to him and pulled back my parka hood.
“A light!” he shouted. “A light. Look, Doc–across there!”
And a light there was, a long, narrow, strangely white vertical strip of light from the hut opposite the charred wreck by which we stood. Leaning sideways into the storm, we dragged Zabrinski across ‘the intervening gap. For the first time my flashlight showed something that was more than a bare framework of steel. This was a hut. A blackened, scorched, and twisted hut with a roughly nailed-on sheet of plywood where its solitary window had been, but nevertheless a hut. The light was coming from a door standing just ajar at the sheltered end. I laid my hand on the door, the one unscorched thing I’d seen so far in Drift Station Zebra. The hinges creaked like a rusty gate in a cemetery at midnight and the door gave beneath my hand. We went inside.