“Steady at seven hundred forty,” Gorov said shortly.
He was more worried about his sweating crew than he was about the sweating bulkhead. They were good men, and he’d had many reasons to be proud of them during the time that they had served under him. They’d been in numerous tight spots before, and without exception they had remained calm and professional. On every previous occasion, however, they had needed nothing but nerve and skill to see them through. This time a big measure of good luck was needed as well. No amount of nerve and skill could save them if the hull cracked under the titanic pressure to which it was currently being subjected. Unable to rely solely on themselves, they were forced to trust also in the faceless engineers who had designed the boat and the shipyard workers who had built it. Perhaps that would not have been too much to ask if they had not been acutely aware that the country’s troubled economy had led to a reduction in the frequency and extent of dry-dock maintenance of the vessel. That was enough to make them a bit crazy—and perhaps careless.
“We can’t go up,” Gorov insisted. “There’s still all that ice above us. I don’t know what’s happening here, how the ice can be receding like this, but we’ll be cautious until I understand the situation.”
“Ice overhead. Two hundred eighty feet.”
Gorov looked again at the surface Fathometer graph.
“Three hundred feet, sir.”
Abruptly the stylus stopped jiggling. It produced a straight, thin, black line down the center of the drum.
“Clear water!” the technician said with obvious astonishment. “No ice overhead.”
“We’re out from under?” Zhukov asked.
Gorov said, “Impossible. That’s a monster berg at least four fifths of a mile long. No more than half of it has passed over us. We can’t—“
“Ice overhead again!” the surface-Fathometer operator called out. “Three hundred feet. Ice at three hundred feet and falling now.”
Gorov watched the stylus closely. The channel of open water between the top of the Pogodin’s sail and the bottom of the iceberg narrowed steadily, rapidly.
Two hundred sixty feet. Two hundred twenty.
One hundred eighty. One forty. One hundred.
Eighty. Sixty.
Separation held at fifty feet for a few seconds but then began to fluctuate wildly: fifty feet, a hundred and fifty feet, fifty feet again, a hundred feet, eighty, fifty feet, two hundred feet, up and down, up and down, in utterly unpredictable peaks and troughs. Then it reached fifty feet of clearance once more, and at last the stylus began to wiggle less erratically.
“Holding steady,” the surface-fathometer technician reported. “Fifty to sixty feet. Minor variations. Holding steady … still holding … holding …”
“Could the Fathometer have been malfunctioning back there?” Gorov asked.
The technician shook his head. “No, sir. I don’t think so, sir. It seems fine now.”
“Then do I understand what just happened? Did we pass under a hole in the middle of the iceberg?”
the technician kept a close watch on the graph drum, ready to call out if the ceiling of ice above them began to drop lower than the fifty-foot mark. “Yes. I think so. From every indication, a hole. Approximately in the middle.”
“A funnel-shaped hole.”
“Yes, sir. It began to register as an inverted dish. But when we were directly under, the upper two thirds of the cavity narrowed drastically.”
With growing excitement, Gorov said. “And it went all the way to the top of the iceberg?”
“I don’t know about that, sir. But it went up at least to sea level.”
The surface Fathometer, of course, couldn’t take readings farther up than the surface of the sea.
“A hole,” Gorov said thoughtfully. “How in the name of God did it get there?”
No one had an answer.
Gorov shrugged. “Perhaps one of the Edgeway people will know. They’ve been studying the ice. The important thing is that it’s there, however it came to be.”
“Why is this hole so important?” Zhukov asked.
Gorov had a seed of an idea, the germ of an outrageously daring plan to rescue the Edgeway scientists. If the hole was—
“Clear water,” the technician announced. “No ice overhead.”