After the silence had gone on just that little too long I said to Hansen: “Well, that’s it, then. We don’t have to hire any electronic computer to work this one out. Someone’s got to get back to the _Dolphin_ and get back there now. I’m nominating myself.”
“No!” Hansen said violently, then more quietly, “Sorry, friend, but the skipper’s orders didn’t include giving permission to anyone to commit suicide. You’re staying here.”
“So I stay here,” I nodded. This wasn’t the time to tell him I didn’t need his permission for anything; much less was it the time to start flourishing the Mannlicher-Schoenauer. “So we all stay here. And then we all die here. Quietly, without any fighting, without any fuss, we just lie down and die here. I suppose you reckon that comes under the heading of inspiring leadership. Amundsen would have loved that.” It wasn’t fair, but then I wasn’t feeling fair-minded at the moment.
“Nobody’s going anyplace,” Hansen said. “I’m not my brother’s keeper, Doc, but, even so, I’ll be damned if I let you kill yourself. You’re not fit, none of us is fit to make the return trip to the _Dolphin_–not after what we’ve just been through. That’s the first thing. The next is that without a transmitter from which the _Dolphin_ can pick up our directional bearings, we could never hope to find the _Dolphin_ again. The third is that the closing ice will probably have forced the _Dolphin_ to drop down before anyone could get halfway there. And the last is that if we failed to find the _Dolphin_, either because we missed her or because she was gone, we could never make our way back to Zebra again: we wouldn’t have the strength and we would have nothing to guide us back, anyway.”
“The odds offered aren’t all that attractive,” I admitted. “What odds are you offering on the ice machine being repaired?”
Hansen shook his head, said nothing. Rawlings started stirring his soup again, carefully not looking up, he didn’t want to meet the anxious eyes, the desperate eyes, in that circle of haggard and frost-bitten faces any more than I did. But he looked up as Captain Folsom pushed himself away from the support of a wall and took a couple of unsteady steps toward us. It didn’t require any stethoscope to see that Folsom was in a pretty bad way.
“I am afraid that we don’t understand,” he said. His voice was slurred and indistinct, the puffed and twisted lips had been immobilized by the savage charring of his face: I wondered bleakly how many months of pain would elapse, how many visits to the surgeon’s table, before Folsom could show that face to the world again. In the very remote event, that was, of our ever getting him to a hospital. “Would you please explain? What is the difficulty?”
“Simply this,” I said. “The _Dolphin_ has an ice fathometer, a device for measuring the thickness of the overhead ice. Normally, even if Commander Swanson–the captain of the _Dolphin_–didn’t hear from us, we could expect him on our doorstep in a matter of hours. He has the position of this drift station pinned down pretty closely. All he would have to do is drop down, come under us here, start a grid search with his ice fathometer, and it would be only minutes before he located the relatively thin ice out in that lead there. But things aren’t normal. The ice machine has broken down, and if it stays that way he’ll never find that lead. That’s why I want to go back there. Now. Before Swanson’s forced to dive by the closing ice.”
“Don’t see it, old boy,” Jolly said. “How’s that going to help? Can _you_ fix this ice whatyoumaycallit?”
“I don’t have to. Commander Swanson knows his distance from this camp, give or take a hundred yards. All I have to do is tell him to cover the distance less quarter of a mile and fire a torpedo. That ought–”
“Torpedo?” Jolly asked. “Torpedo? To break through the ice from beneath?”
“That’s it. It’s never been tried before. I suppose there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work if the ice is thin enough, and it won’t be all that thick in the lead out there. I don’t really know.”
“They’ll be sending planes, you know, Doc,” Zabrinski said quietly. “We started transmitting the news as soon as we broke through, and everybody will know by now that Zebra has been found–at least, they’ll know exactly where it is. They’ll have the big bombers up here in a few hours.”
“Doing what?” I asked. “Sculling around uselessly in the darkness up above? Even if they do have the exact position, they still won’t be able to see what’s left of this station because of the darkness and the ice storm. Perhaps they can with radar, it’s unlikely, but even if they do, what then? Drop supplies? Maybe. But they won’t dare drop supplies directly on us for fear of killing us. They’d have to drop them some distance off–and even a quarter mile would be too far away for any chance we’d ever have of finding stuff in those conditions. As for landing–even if weather conditions were perfect, no plane big enough to have the range to fly here could ever hope to land on the ice cap. You know that.”
“What’s your middle name, Doc?” Rawlings asked dolefully. “Jeremiah?”
“The greatest good of the greatest number,” I said. “The old yardstick, but there’s never been a better one. If we just hole up here without making any attempt to help ourselves and the ice machine remains useless, then we’re all dead. All sixteen of us. If I make it there safely, then we’re all alive. Even if I don’t, the ice machine may be fixed and there would only be one lost then.” I started pulling on my mittens. “One is less than sixteen.”
“We might as well make it two,” Hansen sighed and began to pull on his own gloves. I was hardly surprised, when he’d last spoken he’d talked at first of “you” having no chance and finished by saying that “we” had none, and it hadn’t required any psychiatrist to follow his quick shift in mental orientation: whatever men like Hansen were handpicked for, it wasn’t for any predilection for shifting the load to others’ shoulders when the going became sticky.
I didn’t waste any time arguing with him.
Rawlings got to his feet.
“One skilled volunteer for the soup-stirring,” he requested. “Those two wouldn’t get as far as that door without my holding their hands. I’ll probably get a medal for this. What’s the highest decoration awarded in peacetime, Lieutenant?”
“There are no medals given for soup-stirring, Rawlings,” Hansen said, “which is what you are going to keep on doing. You’re staying right here.”
“Uh-uh.” Rawlings shook his head. “Prepare yourself to deal with your first mutiny, Lieutenant. I’m coming with you. I can’t lose. If we get to the _Dolphin_, you’ll be too damned glad and happy to have made it to dream of reporting me, apart from being a fair-minded man who will have to admit that our safe arrival back at the ship will be entirely due to torpedoman Rawlings.” He grinned. “And if we don’t make it–well, you can’t very well report it, can you, Lieutenant?”
Hansen walked across to him. He said quietly: “You know that there’s more than an even chance that we won’t reach the _Dolphin_. That would leave twelve pretty sick men here, not to mention Zabrinski with a broken ankle, and with no one to look after them. They’ve got to have one able man to look after them. You couldn’t be that selfish, now, could you, Rawlings? Look after them, will you? As a favor to me?”
Rawlings looked at him for long seconds, then squatted down and started stirring the soup again. “As a favor to me, you mean,” he said bitterly. “Okay, I’ll stay. As a favor to me. Also to prevent Zabrinski from tripping over his legs again and breaking another ankle.” He stirred the soup viciously. “Well, what are you waiting for? The skipper may be making up his mind to dive any minute.”
He had a point. We brushed off protests and attempts to stop us made by Captain Folsom and Dr. Jolly and were ready to leave in thirty seconds. Hansen was through the door first. I turned and looked at the sick and emaciated and injured survivors of Drift Station Zebra. Folsom, Jolly, Kinnaird, Hewson, Naseby and seven others. Twelve men altogether. They couldn’t all be in cahoots together, so it had to be a single man, maybe two, acting in concert. I wondered who those men might be, those men I would have to kill, that person or persons who had murdered my brother and six other men on Drift Ice Station Zebra.
I pulled the door to behind me and followed Hansen out into the dreadful night.