“A month. Maybe five weeks. I can’t be sure.”
“How thick?” I asked Hansen.
“Five feet, maybe six. Couldn’t possibly break through it. But the captain’s always had a hankering to try out his torpedoes.” He turned to Zabrinski. “Still able to operate that radio of yours?”
I left them to it. I’d hardly been aware of what I’d been saying, anyway. I felt sick and old and empty and sad and deathly tired. I had my answer now. I’d come 12,000 miles to find it; I’d have gone a million to avoid it. But the inescapable fact was there and now nothing could ever change it. Mary, my sister-in-law, and her three wonderful children–she would never see her husband again; they would never see their father again. My brother was dead, and no one was ever going to see him again. Except me. I was going to see him now.
I went out, closing the door behind me, moved around the corner of the hut, and lowered my head against the storm. Ten seconds later I reached the door of the last hut in the line. I used the flashlight to locate the handle, twisted it, pushed and walked inside.
Once it had been a laboratory; now it was a charnel house, a house of the dead. The laboratory equipment had all been pushed roughly to one side and the cleared floor space covered with the bodies of dead men. I knew they were dead men, but only because Kinnaird had told me so: hideously charred and blackened and grotesquely misshapen as they were,, those carbonized and contorted lumps of matter could have been any form of life or, indeed, no form of life at all. The stench of incinerated flesh and burnt diesel fuel was dreadful. I wondered which of the men in the other hut had had the courage, the iron resolution, to bring those grisly burdens, the shockingly disfigured remains of their former comrades, into this hut. They must have had strong stomachs.
Death must have been swift, swift for all of them. Theirs had not been the death of men trapped by fire; it had been the death of men who had themselves been on fire. Caught, drenched, saturated by a gale-borne sea of burning oil, they must have spent the last few seconds of life as incandescently blazing human torches before dying in insane, screaming agony. They must have died as terribly as men can ever die.
Something about one of the bodies close to me caught my attention. I stooped and focused the flashlight beam on what had once been a right hand, now no more than a blackened claw with the bone showing through. So powerful had been that heat that it had warped, but not melted, the curiously shaped gold ring on the third finger. I recognized that ring; I had been with my sister-in-law when she had bought it.
I was conscious of no grief, no pain, no revulsion. Perhaps, I thought dully, those would come later when the initial shock had worn off. But I didn’t think so. This wasn’t the man I remembered so well, the brother to whom I owed everything, a debt that could now never be repaid. This charred mass of matter before me was a stranger, so utterly different from the man who lived on in my memory, so changed beyond all possibility of recognition that my numbed mind in my exhausted body just could not begin to bridge the gap.
As I stood there, staring down, something ever so slightly off-beat about the way the body lay caught my professional attention. I stooped low, very low, and remained bent over for what seemed a long time. I straightened, slowly, and as I did I heard the door behind me open. I whirled around and saw that it was Lieutenant Hansen. He pulled down his snow mask, lifted up his goggles, and looked at me and then at the man at my feet. I could see shock draining expression and color from his face. Then he looked up at me.
“So you lost out, Doc?” I could hardly hear the husky whisper above the voice of the storm. “God, I’m sorry.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your brother?” He nodded at the man at my feet.
“Commander Swanson told you?”
“Yeah. Just before we left. That’s why we came.” His gaze moved in horrified fascination over the floor of the hut, and his face was gray, like old parchment. “A minute, Doc, just a minute.” He turned and hurried through the doorway.
When be came back he looked better, but not much. He said, “Commander Swanson said that that was why he had to let you go.”
“Who else knows?”
“Skipper and myself. No one else.”
“Keep it that way, will you? As a favor to me.”
“If you say so, Doc.” There was curiosity in his face now, and puzzlement, but horror was still the dominant expression. “My God, have you ever seen anything like it?”
“Let’s get back to the others,” I said. “We’re doing nobody any good by staying here.”
He nodded without speaking. Together we made our way back to the other hut. Apart from Dr. Jolly and Kinnaird, three other men were on their feet now: Captain Folsom, an extraordinarily tall, thin man, with savagely burnt face and hands, who was second in command of the base; Hewson, a dark-eyed taciturn character, a tractor driver and engineer who had been responsible for the diesel generators; and a cheerful Yorkshireman, Naseby, the camp cook. Jolly, who had opened my medical kit and was applying fresh bandages to the arms of one of the men still lying down, introduced them, then turned back to his job. He didn’t seem to need my help–not for the moment, anyway. I heard Hansen say to Zabrinski: “In contact with the _Dolphin?_”
“Well, no.” Zabrinski stopped sending his call sign and shifted slightly to ease his broken ankle. “I don’t quite know how to put this, Lieutenant, but the fact is that this little ole set here seems to have blown a fuse.”
“Well, now,” Hansen said heavily. “That _is_ clever of you, Zabrinski. You mean you can’t raise them?”
“I can hear them, but they can’t hear me.” He shrugged apologetically. “Me and my clumsy feet, I guess. It wasn’t only my ankle that went when I took that tumble out there.”
“Well, can’t you repair the damn thing?”
“I don’t think so, Lieutenant.”
“Damn it, you’re supposed to be a radioman.”
“That’s so,” Zabrinski acknowledged reasonably. “But I’m not a magician.. And with a couple of numbed and frozen hands, no tools, an old-type set without a printed circuit, and the code signs in Japanese–well, even Marconi would have called it a day.”
“_Can_ it be repaired?” Hansen insisted.
“It’s a transistor set. No valves to smash. I suppose It could be repaired. But it might take hours, Lieutenant. I’d even have to find a set of tools first.”
“Well, find them. Anything you like. Only get that thing working.”
Zabrinski said nothing. He held out the headphones to Hansen. Hansen looked at Zabrinski, then at the phones, took them without a word and listened briefly. Then he shrugged, handed back the phones, and said, “Well, I guess there _is_ no hurry to repair that radio.”
“Yeah,” Zabrinski said. “Awkward, you might say, Lieutenant.”
“What’s awkward?” I asked.
“Looks as if _we’re_ going to be next on the list for a rescue party,” Hansen said heavily. “They’re sending a more or less continuous message: ‘Ice closing rapidly, return at once.'”
“I was against this madness from the very beginning,” Rawlings intoned from the floor. He stared down at the already melting lumps of frozen tinned soup and stirred it moodily with a fork. “A gallant attempt, man, but foredoomed to failure.”
“Keep your filthy fingers out of that soup and kindly shut up,” Hansen said coldly. He turned suddenly to Kinnaird. “How about _your_ radio set? Of course–that’s it. We have men here to crank your generator and–”
“I’m sorry.” Kinnaird smiled the way a ghost might smile. “It’s not a hand-powered generator–that was destroyed–it’s a battery set. The batteries are dead. Completely dead.”
“A battery set, you said?” Zabrinski looked at him in mild surprise. “Then what caused all the power fluctuations when you were transmitting?”
“We kept changing over the nickle cadmium cells to try to make the most of what little power was left in them: we’d only fifteen left altogether: most of them were lost in the fire. That caused the power fluctuations. But even Nife cells don’t last forever. They’re dead, mate. The combined power left in those cells wouldn’t light a pencil torch.”
Zabrinski didn’t say anything. No one said anything. The ice spicules drummed incessantly against the east wall, the Coleman hissed, the solid fuel stove purred softly, but the sole effect of those thiee sounds was to make the silence inside seem that little bit more absolute. No one looked at his neighbors; everyone stared down at the floor with the fixed and steadfast gaze of an entomologist hunting for traces of woodworm. Any newspaper printing a picture taken at that instant wouldn’t have found it any too easy to convince its readers that the men on Drift Ice Station Zebra had been rescued just ten minutes previously, and rescued from certain death at that. The readers would have pointed out that one might have expected a little more jubilation in the atmosphere, a touch, perhaps, of light-hearted relief, and they wouldn’t have been far wrong at that, there wasn’t very much gaiety around.