“How do they establish those camps, Doc?” Rawlings asked.
“Different ways. Your people prefer to establish them in wintertime, when the pack freezes up enough for plane landings to be made. Someone flies out from, usually, Point Barrow in Alaska and searches around the polar pack till they find a suitable ice floe–even when the ice is compacted and frozen together into one solid mass an expert can tell which pieces are going to remain as good-sized floes when the thaw comes and the break-up begins. Then they fly out all huts, equipment, stores and men by ski plane and gradually build the place up.
“The Russians prefer to use a ship in summertime. They generally use the _Lenin_, a nuclear-engined ice-breaker. It just batters its way deep into the summer pack, dumps everything and everybody on the ice, and takes off before the big freeze-up starts. We used the same technique for Drift Ice Station Zebra–our one and only ice station. The Russians lent us the _Lenin_–all countries are only too willing to concentrate on meteorological research, since everyone benefits by it–and took us pretty deep into the ice pack north of Franz Josef Land. Zebra has already moved a good bit from its original position–the polar ice cap, just sitting on top of the Arctic Ocean, can’t quite manage to keep up with the west-east spin of the earth, so that it has a slow westward movement in relation to the earth’s crust. At the present moment It’s about four- hundred miles due north of Spitsbergen.”
“They’re still crazy,” Zabrinski said. He was silent for a moment, then looked speculatively at me. “You in the limey Navy, Doc?”
“You must forgive Zabrinski’s manners, Dr. Carpenter,” Rawlings said coldly. “But he’s been denied the advantages that the rest of us take for granted. I understand he was born in the Bronx.”
“No offense,” Zabrinski said equably. “Royal Navy, I meant. Are you, Doc?”
“Attached to it, you- might say.”
“Loosely, no doubt.” Rawlings nodded. “Why so keen on an Arctic holiday, Doc? Mighty cool up there, I can tell you.”
“Because the men on Drift Station Zebra are going to be badly in need of medical aid. If there are any survivors, that is.”
“We got our own medic on board and he’s no slouch with a stethoscope, or so I’ve heard from several who have survived his treatment. A well-spoken-of quack.”
“‘Doctor,’ you ill-mannered lout,” Zabrinski said severely.
“That’s what I meant,” Rawlings apologized. “It’s not often that I get the chance to talk to an educated man like myself, and it just kinda slipped out. The point is, the Dolphin’s already all buttoned up on the medical side.”
“I’m sure it is,” I smiled, “but any survivors we might find are going to be suffering from advanced exposure, frostbite, and probably gangrene. The treatment of those is rather a specialty of mine.”
“Is it now?” Rawlings surveyed the depths of his coffee cup. “I wonder how a man gets to be a specialist in those things?”
Hansen stirred and withdrew his gaze from the darkly white world beyond the canteen windows.
“Dr. Carpenter is not on trial for his life,” he said mildly. “The counsel for the prosecution will kindly shut up.”
This air of easy familiarity between officer and men, the easy camaraderie, the mutually tolerant disparagement with the deceptively misleading overtones of music-hall comedy, was something very rare in my experience but not unique. I’d seen it before, in first-line R.A.F. bomber crews, a relationship found only among a close-knit, close-living group of superbly trained experts, each of whom is keenly aware of his complete interdependence on the others. The casually informal and familiar attitude was a token not of the lack of discipline but the complete reverse, it was the badge of a very high degree of self-discipline, of the regard one man held for another not only as a highly skilled technician in his own field but also as a human being. It was clear, too, that a list of unwritten rules governed their conduct. Offhand and frequently completely lacking in outward respect though Rawlings and Zabrinski were in their attitude toward Lieutenant Hansen, there was an invisible line of propriety over which it was inconceivable that they would ever step: for Hansen’s part, he scrupulously avoided any use of his authority when making disparaging remarks at the expense of the two enlisted men. It was also clear, as now, who was boss.
Rawlings and Zabrinski had stopped questioning me and had just embarked upon an enthusiastic discussion of the demerits of the Holy Loch in particular and Scotland in general as a submarine base, when a jeep swept past the canteen windows, the snow whirling whitely, thickly, through the swathe of the headlights. Rawlings jumped to his feet in mid-sentence, then subsided slowly and thoughtfully into his chair.
“The plot,” he announced, “thickens.”
“You saw who it was?” Hansen asked.
“I did indeed. Andy Bandy, no less.”
“I didn’t hear that, Rawlings,” Hansen said coldly.
“Vice-Admiral John Garvie, U. S. Navy, sir.”
“Andy Bandy, eh?” Hansen said pensively. He grinned at me. “Admiral Garvie. Officer Commanding U. S. Naval Forces in Nato. Now, this is very interesting, I submit. I wonder what he’s doing here.”
“World War III has just broken out,” Rawlings announced. “It’s just about time for the admiral’s first Martini of the day, and no lesser crisis–”
“He didn’t by any chance fly down with you in that chopper from Renfrew this afternoon?” Hansen interrupted shrewdly.
“No.”
“Know him, by any chance?”
“Never even heard of him until now.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Hansen murmured.
A few minutes passed in desultory talk–the minds of Hansen and his two men were obviously very much on the reason for the arrival of Admiral Garvie–and then a snowfilled gust of chilled air swept into the canteen as the door opened and a blue-coated sailor came in and crossed to our table.
“The captain’s compliments, Lieutenant. Would you bring Dr. Carpenter to his cabin, please?”
Hansen nodded, rose to his feet and led the way outside. The snow was beginning to lie now, the darkness was coming down fast and the wind from the north was bitingly cold. Hansen made for the nearest gangway, halted at its head as he saw seamen and dockyard workers, insubstantial and spectral figures in the swirling, flood-lit snow, carefully easing a slung torpedo down the for’ard hatch, turned and headed toward the after gangway. We clambered down and at the foot Hansen said: “Watch your step, Doc. It’s a little slippery hereabouts.”
It was all that, but with the -thought of the ire-cold waters of the Holy Loch waiting for me if I put a foot wrong I made no mistake. We passed through the hooped canvas shelter covering the after hatch and dropped down a steep metal ladder into a warm, scrupulously clean and gleaming engine room packed with a baffling complexity of gray-painted ma. chinery and instrument panels, its every corner brightly illuminated with shadowless fluorescent lighting.
“Not going to blindfold me, Lieutenant?” I asked.
“No need.” He grinned. “If you’re on the up and up, it’s not necessary. if you’re not on the up and up, it’s still not necessary, for you can’t talk about what you’ve seen–not to anyone that matters–if you’re going to -spend the next few years staring out from behind a set of prison bars.”
I saw his point. I followed him for’ard, our feet soundless on the black rubber decking, past the tops of a couple of huge machines readily identifiable as turbo-generator sets for producing electricity. More heavy banks of instruments, a door, then a thirty-foot-long very narrow passageway. As we passed along its length I was conscious of a heavy vibrating hum from beneath my feet. The _Dolphin’s_ nuclear reactor had to be somewhere. This would be it, here. Directly beneath us. There were circular hatches on the passageway deck and those could only be covers for the heavily leaded glass windows, inspection ports that would provide the nearest and only approach to the nuclear furnace far below.
The end of the passage, another heavily clamped door, and then we were into what was obviously the control center of the _Dolphin_. To the left was a partitioned-off radio room, to the right a battery of machines and dialed panels of incomprehensible purpose, and straight ahead, a big chart table. Beyond that again, in the center, were massive mast housings and, still further on, the periscope stand with its twin periscopes. The whole control room was twice the size of any I’d ever seen in a conventional submarine but, even so, every square inch of bulkhead space seemed to be taken up by one type or another of highly complicated looking machines or instrument banks: even the deckhead was almost invisible, lost to sight above thickly twisted festoons of wires, cables and pipes of a score of different kinds.
The for’ard port side of the control room was for all the world like a replica of the flight deck of a modern multiengined jet airliner. There were two separate yoke aircrafttype control columns, facing on to banks of hooded calibrated dials. Behind the yokes were two padded leather chairs, each chair, I could see, fitted with a safety belt to hold the helmsman in place. I wondered vaguely what type of violent maneuvers the _Dolphin_ might be capable of when such safety belts were obviously considered essential to strap the helmsman down.