Some of the Zebra survivors had asked if they could look around the ship and Swanson agreed. In light of what I had told him in his cabin that morning, he must have agreed very reluctantly indeed, but no trace of this reluctance showed in his calmly smiling face. To have refused their request would have been rather a churlish gesture, for all the secrets of the _Dolphin_ were completely hidden from the eye of the layman. But it wasn’t good manners that made Swanson give his consent: refusing a reasonable request could have been responsible for making someone very suspicious indeed.
Hansen took them around the ship and I accompanied them, less for the exercise or interest involved than for the opportunity it gave me to keep a very close eye indeed on their reactions to their tour. We made a complete tour of the ship, missing only the reactor room, which no one could visit anyway, and the inertial-navigation room, which had been barred to me also. As we moved around I watched them all, and especially two of them, as closely as it is possible to watch anyone without making him aware of your observation, and I learned precisely what I had expected to learn–nothing. I’d been crazy even to hope I’d learn anything; our friend with the gun was wearing a mask that had been forged into shape and riveted into position. But I’d had to do it anyway; playing in this league, I couldn’t pass up the one chance in a miffion.
Supper over, I helped Jolly as best I could with his evening surgery. Whatever else Jolly was, he was a damned good doctor. Quickly and efficiently he checked and where necessary rebandaged the walking cases, examined and treated Benson and Folsom, then asked me to come right aft with him to the nucleonics laboratory in the stern room, which had been cleared of deck gear to accommodate the four other bed patients, the Harrington twins, Brownell, and Bolton. The sick bay itself had only two cots for invalids, and Benson and Folsom had those.
Bolton, despite Jolly’s dire predictions, hadn’t suffered a relapse because of his transfer from the hut to the ship– which had been due largely to Jolly’s extremely skillful and careful handling of the patient and the stretcher into which he had been strapped. Bolton, in fact, was conscious now and complaining of severe pain in his badly burned right forearm. Jolly removed the burn covering. Bolton’s arm was a mess, all right, no skin left worth speaking of, showing an angry violent red between areas of suppuration. Different doctors have different ideas as to the treatment of burns: Jolly favored a salve-coated aluminum foil which he smoothed across the entire burn area, then lightly bandaged in place. He then gave him a pain-killing injection and some sleeping pills and briskly informed the enlisted man who was keeping watch that he was to be informed immediately of any change or deterioration in Bolton’s condition. A brief inspection of the three others, a changed bandage here and there, and he was through for the night.
So was I. For two nights now I had had practically no sleep; what little had been left for me the previous night had been ruined by the pain in my left hand. I was exhausted. When I got to my cabin, Hansen was already asleep and the engineer officer gone.
I didn’t need any of Jolly’s sleeping pills that night.
I awoke at two o’clock. I was sleep-drugged, still exhausted, and felt as if I had been in bed about five minutes. But I awoke in an instant and in that instant I was fully awake.
Only a dead man wouldn’t have stirred. The racket issuing from the squawk box just above Hansen’s bunk was appalling, a high-pitched, shrieking, atonic whistle, two-toned and altering pitch every half-second, it drilled stiletto-like against my cringing eardrums. A banshee in its death agonies could never have hoped to compete with that racket.
Hansen already had his feet on the deck and was pulling on clothes and shoes in desperate haste. I had never thought to see that slow-speaking laconic Texan in such a tearing hurry, but I was seeing it now.
“What in hell’s name is the matter?” I demanded. I had to shout to make myself heard above the shrieking of the alarm whistle.
“Fire!” His face was shocked and grim. “The ship’s on fire. And under this Goddamned ice!”
Still buttoning his shirt, he hurdled my cot, crashed the door back on its hinges, and was gone.
The atonic screeching of the whistle stopped abruptly and the silence fell like a blow. Then I was conscious of something more than silence–I was conscious of a complete lack of vibration throughout the ship. The great engines had stopped. And then I was conscious of something else again: feathery fingers of ice brushing up and down my spine.
Why had the engines stopped? What could make a nuclear engine stop so quickly and what happened once it did? My God, I thought, maybe the fire is coming from the reactor room itself. I’d looked into the heart of the uranium atomic pile through a heavily leaded glass-inspection port and seen the indescribable unearthly radiance of it, a nightmarish coalescence of green and violet and blue, the new “dreadful light” of mankind. What happened when this dreadful light ran wild? I didn’t know, but I suspected I didn’t want to be around when it happened.
I dressed slowly, not hurrying. My damaged hand didn’t help me much but that wasn’t why I took my time. Maybe the ship was on fire, maybe the nuclear power plant had gone out of kilter. But if Swanson’s superbly trained crew couldn’t cope with every emergency that could conceivably arise, then matters weren’t going to be improved any by Carpenter running around in circles shouting: “Where’s the fire?
Three minutes after Hansen had gone I walked along to the control room and peered in: if I was going to be in the way, then this was as far as I was going to go. Dark, acrid smoke billowed past me and a voice–Swanson’s–said sharply: “Inside and close that door.”
I pulled the door to and looked around the control room. At least, I tried to. It wasn’t easy. My eyes were already steaming as if someone had thrown a bag of pepper into them, and what little sight was left them didn’t help me much. The room was filled with black evil-smelling smoke, denser by far and more throat-catching than the worst London fog. Visibility was no more than a few feet, but what little I could see showed me men still at their stations. Some were gasping, some were half choking, some were cursing softly, all had badly watering eyes, but there was no trace of panic.
“You’d have been better off on the other side of that door,” Swanson said dryly. “Sorry to have barked at you, Doctor, but we want to limit the spread of the smoke as much as possible.”
“Where’s the fire?”
“In the engine room.” Swanson could have been sitting on his front porch at home discussing the weather. “Where in the engine room we don’t know. It’s pretty bad. At least, the smoke is. The extent of the fire we don’t know, because we can’t locate it. Engineer officer says it’s impossible to see your hand in front of your face.”
“The engines,” I said. “They’ve stopped. Has anything gone wrong–”
He rubbed his eyes with a handkerchief, spoke to a man who was pulling on a heavy rubber suit and a smoke mask, then turned back to me.
“We’re not going to be vaporized, if that’s what you mean.” I could have sworn he was smiling. “The atomic pile can only fail safe no matter what happens. If anything goes wrong, the uranium rods slam down in very quick time indeed–a fraction under a thousandth of a second–stopping the whole reaction. In this case, though, we shut it off ourselves. The men in the maneuvering room could no longer see either the reactor dials or the governor for the control rods. No option but to shut it down. The engine-room crew have been forced to abandon the engine and maneuvering rooms and take shelter in the stern room.”
Well, that was something at least. We weren’t going to be blown to pieces, ignobly vaporized on the altar of nuclear advancement: good old-fashioned suffocation, that was to be our lot. “So what do we do?” I asked..
“What we should do is surface immediately. With fourteen feet of ice overhead, that’s not easy. Excuse me, will you?”
He spoke to the now completely masked and suited man, who was carrying a small dialed box in his hands. They walked together past the navigator’s chart desk and ice machine to the heavy door opening on the passage that led to the engine room over the top of the reactor compartment. They unlatched the door, pushed it open. A dense, blinding cloud of dark smoke rolled into the room as the masked man stepped quickly into the passageway and swung the door to behind him. Swanson clamped the door shut, walked, temporarily blinded, back to the control position, and fumbled down a roof microphone.