Ice Station Zebra

"How's it looking now, Doc?" Swanson called out.

"Clear, clear water," Benson said reverently. "I got a good picture of it. It's pretty narrow, but wide enough to hold us. It's long, with a sharp left-hand dogleg, for it followed us around through the first forty-five degrees of our curve."

"One fifty feet," Swanson said.

The pumps hummed. The «Dolphin» drifted gently upward like an airship rising from the ground. Briefly, water flooded back into the tanks. The «Dolphin» hung motionless.

"Up periscope," Swanson said.

The periscope hissed up slowly into the raised position. Swanson glanced briefly through the eyepiece, then beckoned to me. "Take a look," he beamed. "As lovely a sight as you'll ever see."

I took a look. If you'd made a picture of what could be seen above and framed it, you couldn't have sold the result even if you added Picasso's name to it; but I could see what he meant. Solid black masses on either side with a scarcely lighter strip of dark jungle green ru

Three minutes later we were lying on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, just under 250 miles from the Pole.

The rafted, twisted ice pack reared up into contorted ridges almost fifty feet in height, towering twenty feet above the top of the sail, so close you could almost reach out and touch the nearest ridge. Three or four of those broken and fantastically hummocked ice hills stretching off to the west, and then the light of the floodlight failed and we could see no more. Beyond that there was only blackness.

To the east, we could see nothing at all. To have stared Out to the east with opened eyes would have been to be blinded for life in a very few seconds: even goggles became clouded and scarred after the briefest exposure. Close in to the «Dolphin's» side you could, with bent head and hooded eyes, catch, for a fleeting part of a second, a glimpse of black water, already freezing over; but it was more imagined than seen.

The wind, shrieking and wailing across the bridge and through raised ante

"Are we both mad? Let's get below." Swanson cupped his hands to my ear and had to shout, but, even so, I could hardly hear him above that hellish bedlam of sound.

We clambered down into the comparatively sudden stillness of the control room. Swanson untied his parka hood and pulled off the scarf and goggles that had completely masked his face. He looked at me and shook his head wonderingly.

"And some people talk about the white silence of the Arctic, My God, a boilermaker's shop is like a library reading room compared to that." He shook his head again. "We stuck our noses out a few times above the ice pack last year, but we never saw anything like this. Or heard it. Winter, too. Cold, sure, damned cold, and windy, but never so bad that we couldn't take a brief stroll on the ice, and I used to wonder about those stories of explorers being stuck in their tents for days on end, unable to move. But I know now why Captain Scott died."

"It is pretty nasty," I admitted. "How safe are we here, Commander?"

"That's anybody's guess." Swanson shrugged. "The wind's got us jammed hard against the west wall of this polynya, and there's maybe fifty yards of open water to starboard. For the moment we're safe. But you can hear and see that that pack is on the move, and not slowly, either. The lead we're in was torn open less than an hour ago. How long? Depends on the configuration of the ice, but those polynyas can close up damned quickly at times, and while the hull of the Dolphin can take a good deal of pressure, it can't take a million tons of ice leaning against it. Maybe we can stay here for hours, maybe only for minutes. Whichever it is, as soon as that east wall comes within ten feet of the starboard side, we're dropping down out of it. You know what happens when a ship gets caught in the ice."

"I know. It gets squeezed flat, is carried around the top of the world for a few years, and then one day it's released, and drops to the bottom, two miles straight down. The U. S. government wouldn't like it, Commander."

"The prospects of further promotion for Commander Swanson would be poor," Swanson admitted. "I think — "

"Hey!" The shout came from the radio room. "Hey, come 'ere."

"I think Zabrinski wants me," Swanson murmured. He moved off with his usual deceptive speed, and I followed him into the radio room. Zabrinski was sitting half turned in his chair, an ear-to-ear beam on his face, the earphones extended in his left hand. Swanson took them, listened briefly, then nodded.

"DSY," he said softly. "DSY, Dr. Carpenter. We have them. Got the bearing? Good." He turned to the quartermaster. "Ellis, ask the navigating officer to come here as soon as possible."

"We'll pick 'em all up yet, Captain," Zabrinski said jovially. The smile on the big man's face, I could see now, didn't extend as far as his eyes. "They must be a pretty tough bunch of boys out there."

"Very tough, Zabrinski," Swanson said absently. His eyes were remote, and I knew he was listening to the metallic ca

Zabrinski shook his head and turned away. He'd stopped smiling. Raeburn came in, and was handed a sheet of paper, and left for his plotting table. We went with him. After a minute or two he looked up and said, "If anyone likes a Sunday afternoon's walk, this is it."

"So close?" Swanson asked.

"So very close. Five miles due east, give or take half a mile. Pretty fair bloodhounds, aren't we?"

"We're just lucky," Swanson said shortly. He walked back to the radio room. "Talking to them yet?"

"We've lost them altogether."

"Completely?"

"We only had 'em a minute, Captain. Then they faded. Got weaker and weaker. I think Doc Carpenter here is right: they're using a hand-cranked generator." He paused, then said idly, "i've a six-year-old daughter who could crank one of those machines for five minutes without turning a hair."

Swanson looked at me, then turned away without a word. I followed him to the unoccupied diving stand. From the bridge-access hatch we could hear the howl of the storm, the grinding ice with its boom and scream that spa

"Too long. I have a medical kit in my cabin, a fifty-ounce flask of medicinal alcohol, and cold-weather clothes. Could you supply me with a thirty-pound package of emergency rations, high-protein, high-calory concentrates? Benson will know what I mean."