“I don’t know. I’m not sure. I can imagine I see a very faint touch of luminescence on the surface of the ice storm there, maybe just a fraction of a shade whiter than the rest.”
For a full half-minute Hansen stared out through cupped hands. Finally he said, “It’s hopeless. I don’t see it. But then my eyes have been acting up on me for the past halfhour. But I can’t even _imagine_ I see anything.”
I turned away to give my streaming eyes a rest from that icy wind and then looked again. “Damn it,” I said, “I can’t be sure that there is anything there, but I can’t be sure that there isn’t, either.”
“What do you think it would be?” Hansen’s voice was dispirited, with overtones of hopelessness. “A light?”
“A searchlight shining vertically upward. A searchlight that’s not able to penetrate that ice storm.”
“You’re kidding yourself, Doc,” Hansen said wearily. “The wish father to the thought. Besides, that would mean that we had already passed the _Dolphin_. It’s not possible.”
“It’s not impossible. Ever since we started climbing those damned ice hummocks I’ve lost track of time and space. It _could_ be.”
“Do you still see it?” The voice was empty, uninterested, be didn’t believe me and he was just making words.
“Maybe my eyes are acting up, too,” I admitted. “But, damn it, I’m still not sure that I’m not right.”
“Come on, Doc, let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t know.” His teeth chattered so uncontrollably in that intense cold that I could scarcely follow his words. “I guess it doesn’t matter very much where–”
With breath-taking abruptness, almost in the center of my imagined patch of luminescence and not more than 400 yards away, a swiftly climbing rocket burst through the rushing river of ice spicules and climbed high into the clear sky trailing behind it a fiery tail of glowing red sparks. Five hundred feet it climbed, perhaps 600, then burst into a brilliantly incandescent shower of crimson stars, stars that fell lazily back to earth again, streaming away to the west on the wings of the gale and dying as they went, till the sky was colder and emptier than ever before.
“You still say it doesn’t matter very much where we go?” I asked Hansen. “Or maybe you didn’t see that little lot?”
“What I just saw,” he said reverently, “was the prettiest ole sight that Ma Hansen’s little boy ever did see–or ever will see.” He thumped me on the back, so hard that I had to grab him to keep my balance. “We got it made, Doc!” he shouted. “We got it made. Suddenly I have the strength of ten. Home sweet home, here we come.”
Ten minutes later we were home,
“God, this is wonderful,” Hansen sighed. He stared in happy bemusement from the captain to me to the glass in his hand to the water dripping from the melting ice on his furs onto the corticene decking of the captain’s tiny cabin. “The warmth, the light, the comfort and home sweet home. I never thought I’d see any of it again. When that rocket went up, skipper, I was just looking around to pick a place to lay me down and die. And don’t think I’m joking, because I’m not.”
“And Dr. Carpenter?” Swanson smiled.
“Defective mental equipment somewhere,” Hansen said. “He doesn’t seem to know how to go about giving up. I think he’s just mule-headed. You get them like that.”
Hansen’s slightly off-beat, slightly irrational talk had nothing to do with the overwhelming relief and relaxation that come after moments of great stress and tension. Hansen was too tough for that. I knew that and I knew that Swanson knew it, too. We’d been back for almost twenty minutes now, we’d told our story, the pressure was off, a happy ending for all seemed in sight, and normalcy was again almost the order of the day. But when the strain is oft and conditions are back to normal, a man has time to start thinking about things again. I knew only too well what was in Hansen’s mind’s eye: that charred and huddled shapelessness that had once been my brother. He didn’t want me to talk about him, and for that I didn’t blame him; he didn’t want me even to think about him, although he must have known that that was impossible. The kindest men nearly always are like that, hard and tough and cynical on the outside, men who have been too kind and showed it.
“However it was,” Swanson smiled, “you can consider yourselves two of the luckiest men alive. That rocket you saw was the third last we had, it’s been a regular fourth of July for the past hour or so. And you think Rawlings, Zabrinski, and the survivors on Zebra are safe for the present?”
“Nothing to worry about for the next couple of days,” Hansen nodded. “They’ll be okay. Cold, mind you, and a good half of them desperately in need of hospital treatment, but they’ll survive.”
“Fine. Well, this is how it is. This lead here stopped closing in about half an hour ago. but it doesn’t matter now: we can drop down any time and still hold our position. What does matter is that we have located the fault in the ice machine. It’s a damned tricky and complicated job, and I expect it will take several hours yet to fix. But I think we’ll wait until it is fixed before we try anything. I’m not too keen on this idea of making a dead-reckoning approach to this lead near Zebra, then letting off a shot in the dark. Since there’s no desperate hurry, I’d rather wait till we got the ice fathometer operating again, make an accurate survey of this lead then fire a torpedo up through the middle. If the ice is only four or five feet thick there, we shouldn’t have much trouble blowing a hole through.”
“That would be best,” Hansen agreed. He finished off his medicinal alcohol–an excellent bourbon–rose stiffly to his feet, and stretched. “Well, back to the old treadmill again. How many torpedoes in working order?”
“Four, at the last count.”
“I may as well go help young Mills load them up now. If that’s okay by you, skipper.”
“It is not okay by me,” Swanson said mildly, “and if you’ll take a quick gander at that mirror there, you’ll understand why. You’re not fit to load a slug into an air rifle, much less a torpedo into its tube. You haven’t just been on a Sundayafternoon stroll, you know. A few hours’ sleep, John, then we’ll see.”
Hansen didn’t argue. I couldn’t imagine anyone arguing with Commander Swanson. He made for the door. “Coming, Doc?”
“In a moment. Sleep well.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” He touched me lightly on the shoulder and smiled through bloodshot and exhausted eyes. “Thanks for everything. Good night, all.”
When he was gone Swanson said, “It was pretty wicked out there tonight?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it for an old ladies’ home Sundayafternoon outing.”
“Lieutenant Hansen seems to imagine he’s under some kind of debt to you,” he went on inconsequentially.
“Imagination, as you say. They don’t come any better than Hansen. You’re damned lucky to have him as an exec.”
“I know that.” He hesitated, then said quietly: “I promise you I won’t mention this again, but, well, I’m damned sorry, Doctor.”
I looked at him and nodded slowly. I knew he meant it, I knew he had to say it, but there’s not much you can say in turn to anything like that. I said: “Six others died with him, Commander.”
He hesitated again. “Do we–do we take the dead back to Britain with us?”
“Could I have another drop of that excellent bourbon, Commander? Been a very heavy run on your medicinal alcohol in the past few hours, I’m afraid.” I waited till he had filled my glass, then went on: “We don’t take them back with us. They’re not dead men, they’re just unrecognizable and unidentifiable lumps of charred matter. Let them stay here.”
His relief was unmistakable and he was aware of it, for he went on hurriedly, for something to say: “All this equipment for locating and tracking the Russian missiles. Destroyed?”
“I didn’t check.” He’d find out for himself soon enough that there had been no such equipment. How he’d react to that discovery in light of the cock-and-bull story I’d spun to him and Admiral Garvie in the Holy Loch I couldn’t even begin to guess. At the moment I didn’t even care. It didn’t seem important; nothing seemed important, not any more. All at once I felt tired, not sleepy, just deathly tired, so I pushed myself stiffly to my feet, said good night, and left.
Hansen was in his bunk when I got back to his cabin, his furs lying where he had dropped them. I checked that he was no longer awake, slipped off my own furs, hung them up, and replaced the Mannlicher-Schoenauer in my case. I lay down in my cot to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. Exhausted though I was, I had never felt less like sleep in my life.