Swanson almost glared at me. Watching his submarine plummeting out of control beyond the 1,000-feet mark was something that rated, maybe the lift of an eyebrow; but this was something else again. He said: “Very well, then, we’ll let the killer run loose and wreck the _Dolphin_ at his leisure. I must have very considerable confidence in you, Dr. Carpenter. I feel sure my confidence will not be misplaced. Tell me one last thing. I assume you are a highly skilled investigator. But I was puzzled by one omission in your questioning. A vital question, I should have thought.”
“Who suggested moving the corpses into the lab, knowing that by doing so he would be making his hiding place for the cached material a hundred per cent fool-proof?”
“I apologize.” He smiled faintly. “You had your reasons, of course.”
“Of course. You’re not sure whether or not the killer is on to the fact that we are on to him. I’m sure. I know he’s not. But had I asked that question, he’d have known immediately that there could be only one reason for my asking it. Then he would have known I was on to him. Anyway, it’s my guess that Captain Folsom gave the order, but the original suggestion, carefully camouflaged so that Folsom may no longer be able to pin it down, would have come from another quarter.”
Had it been a few months earlier, with the summer Arctic sun riding in the sky, it would have been a brilliant day. As it was, there was no sun, not in that latitude and so late in the year; but, for all that, the weather was about as perfect as it was possible for it to be. Thirty-six hours–the time that had elapsed since Hansen and I had made that. savage trip back to the _Dolphin_–had brought about a change that seemed pretty close’ to miraculous. The knifing east wind had died completely. That flying sea of ice spicules was no more. The temperature had risen at least twenty degrees, and the visibility Was as perfect as visibility on the winter ice pack ever is.
Swanson, sharing Benson’s viewpoint on the crew’s oversedentary mode of existence and taking advantage of the fine weather, had advised everyone not engaged in actual watch-keeping to take advantage of the opportunity offered to stretch their legs in the fresh air. It said much for Swanson’s powers of persuasion that by eleven that morning the _Dolphin_ was practically deserted; and of course the crew, to whom Drift Ice Station Zebra was only so many words, were understandably curious to see the place, even the shell of the place, that had brought them to the top of the world.
I took my place at the end of the small line being treated by Dr. Jolly. It was close to noon .before he got around to me. He was making light of his own burns and frostbite and was in tremendous form, bustling happily about the sick bay as if it had been his own private domain for years.
‘Well,” I said, “the pill-rolling competition wasn’t so fierce after all, was it? I’m damned glad there was a third doctor around. How are things on the medical front?”
“Coming along not too badly, old boy,” he said cheerfully. “Benson’s picking up very nicely. Pulse, respiration, blood pressure close to normal, level of unconsciousness very slight now, I should say. Captain Folsom’s still in considerable pain, but no actual danger, of course. The rest have improved a hundred per cent, little thanks to the medical fraternity. Excellent food, warm beds, and the knowledge that they’re safe have done them more good than anything we could ever do. Anyway, it’s done me a lot of good, by Jove!”
“And them,” I agreed. “All your friends except Folsom and the Harrington twins have followed most of the crew on to the ice, and I’ll wager that if you had suggested to them forty-eight hours ago that they’d willingly go out there again in so short a time, they’d have called for a straitjacket.”
“The physical and mental recuperative power of homo sapiens,” Jolly said jovially. “Beyond belief at times, old lad, beyond belief. Now, let’s have a look at that broken wing of, yours.”
So he had a look, and because I was a colleague and therefore inured to human suffering, he didn’t spend any too much time in molly-coddling me, but by hanging on to the arm of my chair and the shreds of my professional pride, I kept the roof from falling in on me. When he was finished he said, “Well, that’s the. lot, except for Brownell and Bolton, the two lads out on the ice.”
“I’ll come with you,” I said. “Commander Swanson is waiting pretty anxiously to hear what we have to say. He wants to get away from here as soon as possible.”
“Me too,” Jolly said fervently. “But what’s the commander so anxious about?”
“Ice. You never know the hour or minute it starts to close in. Want to spend the next year or two up here?”
Jolly grinned, thought it over for a moment, then stopped grinning. He said apprehensively, “How long are we going to be under this damned ice? Before we reach the open sea, I mean?”
“Twenty-four hours, Swanson says. Don’t look so worried, Jolly. Believe me, it’s far safer under this stuff than among it.”
With a very unconvinced look on his face, Jolly picked up his medical kit and led the way from the sick bay. Swanson was waiting for us in the control room. We climbed up the hatches, dropped down over the side, and walked over to the drift station.
Most of the crew had already made their way out there. We passed numbers of them on the way back; most of them looked grim or sick or both, and didn’t even glance up as we passed. I didn’t have to guess why they looked as they did; they’d been opening doors that they should have left closed.
With the sharp rise in outside temperature and the effect of the big electric heaters having been burning there for twenty-four hours, the bunkhouse hut was now, if anything, overheated, with the last traces of ice long vanished from walls and ceiling. One of the men, Brownell, had recovered consciousness and was sitting up, supported, drinking soup provided by one of the two men who had been keeping watch over him.
“Well,” I said to Swanson, “here’s one ready to go.”
“No doubt about that,” Jolly said briskly. He bent over the other, flolton, for some seconds, then straightened and shook his head. “A very sick man, Commander, very sick. I wouldn’t care to take the responsibility of moving him.”
“I might be forced to take the responsibility myself,” Swanson said bluntly. “Let’s have another opinion on this.” His tone and words, I thought, could have been more diplomatic and conciliatory; but if there were a couple of murderers aboard the _Dolphin_, there was a thirty-three and a third per cent chance that Jolly was one of them, and Swanson wasn’t forgetting it for a moment.
I gave Jolly an apologetic half-shrug, bent over Bolton, and examined him as best I could with only one hand available for the task. I straightened and said, “Jolly’s right. He is pretty sick. But I think he might just stand the transfer to the ship.”
“‘Might just’ is not quite the normally accepted basis for deciding the treatment of a patient,” Jolly objected.
“I know it’s not. But the circumstances are hardly normal, either.”
“I’ll take the responsibility,” Swanson said. “Dr. Jolly, I’d be most grateful if you would supervise the transport of those two men back to the ship. I’ll let you have as many men as you want right away.”
Jolly protested some more, then gave in with good grace. He supervised the transfer, and very competent he was about it, too. I remained out there a little longer, watching Rawlings and some others dismantling heaters and lights and rolling up cables, and after the last of them was gone and I was alone, I made my way around to the tractor shed.
The broken shaft of the knife was still in the tank of the tractor. But not the gun and not the two magazines. Those were gone. And whoever had taken them, it hadn’t been Dr. Jolly; he hadn’t been out of my sight for two consecutive seconds between the time he’d left the _Dolphin_ and the time of his return to it.
At three o’clock that afternoon we dropped down below the ice and headed south for the open sea.
10
The afternoon and evening passed quickly and pleasantly enough. Closing our hatches and dropping down from our hardly won foothold in that lead had had a symbolic significance at least as important as the actual fact of leaving itself. The thick ceiling of ice closing over the hull of the _Dolphin_ was a curtain being drawn across the eye of the mind. We had severed all physical connection with Drift Ice Station Zebra, a home of the dead that might continue to circle slowly around the Pole for mindless centuries to come; and with the severance had come an abrupt diminution of the horror and the shock that had hung pall-like over the ship and its crew for the past twenty-four hours. A dark door had swung to behind us, and we had turned our backs on it. Mission accomplished, duty done, we were heading for home again, and the’ sudden upsurge of relief and happiness among the crew to be on their way again, their high anticipation of port and leave, was an almost tangible thing. The mood of the ship was close to that of light-hearted gaiety. But there was no gaiety in my mind, and no peace: I was leaving too much behind. Nor could there be any peace in the minds of Swanson and Hansen, of Rawlings and Zabrinski: they knew we were carrying a killer aboard, a killer who had killed many times. Dr. Benson knew also, but for the moment Dr. Benson did not count: he still had not regained consciousness, and I held the very unprofessional hope that he wouldn’t for some time to come. In the twilit world of emergence from coma, a man can start babbling and say all too much.