Ice Station Zebra

‘Ninety feet,’ the diving officer said.

‘Thin ice, thin ice,’ Sanders intoned.

‘Switch off the deck flood, leave the sail flood on,’ Swanson said. ‘And keep that camera moving. Sonar?’

‘All clear,’ the sonar operator reported. ‘All clear all round.’ A pause, then: ‘No, hold it, hold it! Contact dead astern!’

‘How close?’ Swanson asked quickly.

‘Too close to say. Very close.’

‘She’s jumping!’ the diving officer called out sharply. ‘80, 75.’ The Dolphin had hit a layer of colder water or extra salinity.

‘Heavy ice, heavy ice!’ Sanders called out urgently.

‘Flood emergency!’ Swanson ordered – and this time it was an order.

I felt the sudden build-up of air pressure as the diving officer vented the negative tank and tons of sea-water poured into the emergency diving tank, but it was too late. With a shuddering jarring smash that sent us staggering the Dolphin crashed violently into the ice above, glass tinkled, lights went out and the submarine started falling like a stone.

‘Blow negative to the mark!’ the diving officer called. High pressure air came boiling into the negative tank – at our rate of falling we would have been flattened by the sea-pressure before the pumps could even have begun to cope with the huge extra ballast load we had taken aboard in seconds. Two hundred feet, two hundred and fifty and we were still falling. Nobody spoke, everybody just stood or sat in a frozen position staring at the diving stand. It required no gift for telepathy to know the thought in every mind. It was obvious that the Dolphin had been struck aft by some underwater pressure ridge at the same instant as the sail had hit the heavy ice above: if the Dolphin had been holed aft this descent wasn’t going to stop until the pressure of a million tons of water had crushed and flattened the hull and in a flicker of time snuffed out the life of every man inside it.

‘Three hundred feet,’ the diving officer called out. ‘Three fifty – and she’s slowing! She’s slowing.’

The Dolphin was still falling, sluggishly passing the four-hundred-foot mark, when Rawlings appeared in the control room, tool-kit in one hand, a crate of assorted lamps in the other.

‘It’s unnatural,’ he said. He appeared to be addressing the shattered lamp above the plot which he had immediately begun to repair. ‘Contrary to the laws of nature, I’ve always maintained. Mankind was never meant to probe beneath the depths of the ocean. Mark my words, those new-fangled inventions will come to a bad end.’

‘So will you, if you don’t keep quiet,’ Commander Swanson said acidly. But there was no reprimand in his face, he appreciated as well as any of us the therapeutic breath of fresh air that Rawlings had brought into that tension-laden atmosphere. ‘Holding?’ he went on to the diving officer.

The diving officer raised a finger and grinned. Swanson nodded, swung the coiled-spring microphone in front of him. ‘Captain here,’ he said calmly. ‘Sorry about that bump. Report damage at once.’

A green light flashed in the panel of a box beside him. Swanson touched a switch and a loudspeaker in the deck-head crackled.

‘Manoeuvring room here.’ The manoeuvring room was in the after end of the upper level engine-room, towards the stern. ‘Hit was directly above us here. We could do with a box of candles and some of the dials and gauges are out of kilter. But we still got a roof over our heads.’

‘Thank you, Lieutenant. You can cope?’

‘Sure we can.’

Swanson pressed another switch. ‘Stern room?’

‘We still attached to the ship?’ a cautious voice inquired.

‘You’re still attached to the ship,’ Swanson assured him. ‘Anything to report?’

‘Only that there’s going to be an awful lot of dirty laundry by the time we get back to Scotland. The washing-machine’s had a kind of fit.’

Swanson smiled and switched off. His face was untroubled, he must have had a special sweat-absorbing mechanism on his face, I felt I could have done with a bath towel. He said to Hansen: ‘That was bad luck. A combination of a current where a current had no right to be, a temperature inversion where a temperature inversion had no right to be, and a pressure ridge where we least expected it. Not to mention the damned opacity of the water. What’s required is a few circuits until we know this polynya like the backs of our hands, a small offset to allow for drift and a little precautionary flooding as we approach the ninety-foot mark.’

‘Yes, sir. That’s what’s required. Point is, what are we going to do?’

‘Just that. Take her up and try again.’

I had my pride so I refrained from mopping my brow. They took her up and tried again. At 200 feet and for fifteen minutes Swanson juggled propellers and rudder till he had the outline of the frozen polynya above as accurately limned on the plot as he could ever expect to have it. Then he positioned the Dolphin just outside one of the boundary lines and gave an order for a slow ascent.

‘One twenty feet,’ the diving officer said. ‘One hundred ten.’

‘Heavy ice,’ Sanders intoned. ‘Still heavy ice.’

Sluggishly the Dolphin continued to rise. Next time in the control room, I promised myself, I wouldn’t forget that bath towel. Swanson said: ‘If we’ve overestimated the speed of the drift, there’s going to be another bump I’m afraid.’ He turned to Rawlings who was still busily repairing lights. ‘If I were you, I’d suspend operations for the present. You may have to start all over again in a moment and we don’t carry all that number of spares aboard.’

‘One hundred feet,’ the diving officer said. He didn’t sound as unhappy as his face looked.

‘The water’s clearing,’ Hansen said suddenly. ‘Look.’

The water had cleared, not dramatically so, but enough. We could see the top corner of the sail clearly outlined on the TV screen. And then, suddenly, we could see something else again, heavy ugly ridged ice not a dozen feet above the sail.

Water flooding into the tanks. The diving officer didn’t have to be told what to do, we’d gone up like an express lift the first time we’d hit a different water layer and once like that was enough in the life of any submarine.

‘Ninety feet,’ he reported. ‘Still rising.’ More water flooded in, then the sound died away. ‘She’s holding. Just under ninety feet.’

‘Keep her there.’ Swanson stared at the TV screen. ‘We’re drifting clear and into the polynya – I hope.’

‘Me too,’ Hansen said. ‘There can’t be more than a couple of feet between the top of the sail and that damned ugly stuff.’

‘There isn’t much room,’ Swanson acknowledged. ‘Sanders?’

‘Just a moment, sir. The graph looks kinda funny – no, we’re clear.’ He couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. ‘Thin ice!’

I looked at the screen. He was right. I could see the vertical edge of a wall of ice move slowly across the screen, exposing clear water above.

‘Gently, now, gently,’ Swanson said. ‘And keep the camera on the ice wall at the side, then straight up, turn about.’

The pumps began to throb again. The ice wall, less than ten yards away, began to drift slowly down past us.

‘Eighty-five feet,’ the diving officer reported. ‘Eighty.’

‘No hurry,’ Swanson said. ‘We’re sheltered from that drift by now.’

‘Seventy-five feet.’ The pumps stopped, and water began to flood into the tanks. ‘Seventy.’ The Dolphin was almost stopped now, drifting upwards as gently as thistledown. The camera switched upwards, and we could see the top corner of the sail clearly outlined with a smooth ceiling of ice floating down to meet it. More water gurgled into the tanks, the top of the sail met the ice with a barely perceptible bump and the Dolphin came to rest.

‘Beautifully done,’ Swanson said warmly to the diving officer. ‘Let’s try to give that ice a nudge. Are we slewing?’

‘Bearing constant.’

Swanson nodded. The pumps hummed, pouring out water, lightening ship, steadily increasing positive buoyancy. The ice stayed where it was. More time passed, more water pumped out, and still nothing happened. I said softly to Hansen: ‘Why doesn’t he blow the main ballast? You’d get a few hundred tons of positive buoyancy in next to no time and even if that ice is forty inches thick it couldn’t survive all that pressure at a concentrated point.’

‘Neither could the Dolphin,’ Hansen said grimly. ‘With a suddenly induced big positive buoyancy like that, once she broke through she’d go up like a cork from a champagne bottle. The pressure hull might take it, I don’t know, but sure as little apples the rudder would be squashed flat as a piece of tin. Do you want to spend what little’s left of your life travelling in steadily decreasing circles under the polar ice-cap?’

I didn’t want to spend what little was left of my life travelling in steadily decreasing circles under the ice-cap so I kept quiet. I watched Swanson as he walked across to the diving stand and studied the banked dials in silence for some seconds. I was beginning to become a little apprehensive about what Swanson would do next: I was beginning to realise, and not slowly either, that he was a lad who didn’t give up very easily.

‘That’s enough of that lot,’ he said to the diving officer. ‘If we go through now with all this pressure behind us we’ll be airborne. This ice is even thicker than we thought. We’ve tried the long steady shove and it hasn’t worked. A sharp tap is obviously what is needed. Flood her down, but gently, to eighty feet or so, a good sharp whiff of air into the ballast tanks and we’ll give our well-known imitation of a bull at a gate.’

Whoever had installed the 240-ton air-conditioning unit in the Dolphin should have been prosecuted, it just wasn’t working any more. The air was very hot and stuffy – what little there was of it, that was. I looked around cautiously and saw that everyone else appeared to be suffering from this same shortage of air, all except Swanson, who seemed to carry his own built-in oxygen cylinder around with him. I hoped Swanson was keeping in mind the fact that the Dolphin had cost 120 million dollars to build. Hansen’s narrowed eyes held a definite core of worry and even the usually imperturbable Rawlings was rubbing a bristly blue chin with a hand the size and shape of a shovel. In the deep silence after Swanson had finished speaking the scraping noise sounded unusually loud, then was lost in the noise of water flooding into the tanks.

We stared at the screen. Water continued to pour into the tanks until we could see a gap appear between the top of the sail and the ice. The pumps started up, slowly, to control the speed of descent. On the screen, the cone of light thrown on to the underside of the ice by the flood-lamp grew fainter and larger as we dropped, then remained stationary, neither moving nor growing in size. We had stopped.

‘Now,’ said Swanson. ‘Before that current gets us again.’

There came the hissing roar of compressed air under high pressure entering the ballast tanks. The Dolphin started to move sluggishly upwards while we watched the cone of light on the ice slowly narrow and brighten.

‘More air,’ Swanson said.

We were rising faster now, closing the gap to the ice all too quickly for my liking. Fifteen feet, twelve feet, ten feet.

‘More air,’ Swanson said.

I braced myself, one hand on the plot, the other on an overhead grab bar. On the screen, the ice was rushing down to meet us. Suddenly the picture quivered and danced, the Dolphin shuddered, jarred and echoed hollowly along its length, more lights went out, the picture came back on the screen, the sail was still lodged below the ice, then the Dolphin trembled and lurched and the deck pressed against our feet like an ascending elevator. The sail on the TV vanished, nothing but opaque white taking its place. The diving officer, his voice high with strain that had not yet found relief, called out. ‘Forty feet, forty feet.’ We had broken through.

‘There you are now,’ Swanson said mildly. ‘All it needed was a little perseverance.’ I looked at the short plump figure, the round good-humoured face, and wondered for the hundredth time why the nerveless iron men of this world so very seldom look the part.

I let my pride have a holiday. I took my handkerchief from my pocket, wiped my face and said to Swanson: ‘Does this sort of thing go on all the time?’

‘Fortunately, perhaps, no.’ He smiled. He turned to the diving officer. ‘We’ve got our foothold on this rock. Let’s make sure we have a good belay.’

For a few seconds more compressed air was bled into the tanks, then the diving officer said: ‘No chance of her dropping down now, Captain.’

‘Up periscope.’

Again the long gleaming silver tube hissed up from its well. Swanson didn’t even bother folding down the hinged handles. He peered briefly into the eyepiece, then straightened.

‘Down periscope.’

‘Pretty cold up top?’ Hansen asked.

Swanson nodded. ‘Water on the lens must have frozen solid as soon as it hit that air. Can’t see a thing.’ He turned to the diving officer. ‘Steady at forty?’

‘Guaranteed. And all the buoyancy we’ll ever want.’

‘Fair enough.’ Swanson looked at the quartermaster who was shrugging his way into a heavy sheepskin coat. ‘A little fresh air, Ellis, don’t you think?’

‘Right away, sir.’ Ellis buttoned his coat and added: ‘Might take some time.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Swanson said. ‘You may find the bridge and hatchways jammed with broken ice but I doubt it. My guess is that that ice is so thick that it will have fractured into very large sections and fallen outside clear of the bridge.’

I felt my ears pop with the sudden pressure change as the hatch swung up and open and snapped back against its standing latch. Another more distant sound as the second hatch-cover locked open and then we heard Ellis on the voice-tube.

‘All clear up top.’

‘Raise the antennae,’ Swanson said. ‘John, have them start transmitting and keep transmitting until their fingers fall off. Here we are and here we stay – until we raise Drift Ice Station Zebra.’

‘If there’s anyone left alive there,’ I said.

‘There’s that, of course,’ Swanson said. He couldn’t look at me. ‘There’s always that.’

FOUR

This, I thought, death’s dreadful conception of a dreadful world, must have been what had chilled the hearts and souls of our far-off Nordic ancestors when life’s last tide slowly ebbed and they had tortured their failing minds with fearful imaginings of a bleak and bitter hell of eternal cold. But it had been all right for the old boys, all they had to do was to imagine it, we had to experience the reality of it and I had no doubt at all in my mind as to which was the easier. The latter-day Eastern conception of hell was more comfortable altogether, at least a man could keep reasonably warm there.

One thing sure, nobody could keep reasonably warm where Rawlings and I were, standing a half-hour watch on the bridge of the Dolphin and slowly freezing solid. It had been my own fault entirely that our teeth were chattering like frenzied castanets. Half an hour after the radio room had started transmitting on Drift Ice Station Zebra’s wavelength and all without the slightest whisper by way of reply or acknowledgment, I had suggested to Commander Swanson that Zebra might possibly be able to hear us without having sufficient power to send a reply but that they might just conceivably let us have an acknowledgment some other way. I’d pointed out that Drift Stations habitually carried rockets – the only way to guide home any lost members of the party if radio communication broke down – and radiosondes and rockoons. The sondes were radio-carrying balloons which could rise to a height of twenty miles to gather weather information: the rockoons, radio rockets fired from balloons, could rise even higher. On a moonlit night such as this, those balloons, if released, would be visible at least twenty miles away: if flares were attached to them, at twice that distance. Swanson had seen my point, called for volunteers for the first watch and in the circumstances I hadn’t had much option. Rawlings had offered to accompany me.

It was a landscape – if such a bleak, barren and featureless desolation could be called a landscape – from another and ancient world, weird and strange and oddly frightening. There were no clouds in the sky, but there were no stars either: this I could not understand. Low on the southern horizon a milky misty moon shed its mysterious light over the dark lifelessness of the polar ice-cap. Dark, not white. One would have expected moonlit ice to shine and sparkle and glitter with the light of a million crystal chandeliers – but it was dark. The moon was so low in the sky that the dominating colour on the ice-cap came from the blackness of the long shadows cast by the fantastically ridged and hummocked ice: and where the moon did strike directly the ice had been so scoured and abraded by the assaults of a thousand ice-storms that it had lost almost all its ability to reflect light of any kind.

This ridged and hummocked ice-cap had a strange quality of elusiveness, of impermanence, of evanescence: one moment there, definitively hard and harsh and repellent in its coldly contrasting blacks and whites, the next, ghost-like, blurring, coalescing and finally vanishing like a shimmering mirage fading and dying in some ice-bound desert. But this was no trick of the eye or imagination, it was the result of a ground-level ice-storm that rose and swirled and subsided at the dictates of an icy wind that was never less than strong and sometimes gusted up to gale force, a wind that drove before it a swirling rushing fog of billions of needle-pointed ice-spicules. For the most part, standing as we were on the bridge twenty feet above the level of the ice – the rest of the Dolphin might never have existed as far as the eye could tell – we were above this billowing ground-swell of ice particles; but occasionally the wind gusted strongly, the spicules lifted, drummed demoniacally against the already ice-sheathed starboard side of the sail, drove against the few exposed inches of our skin with all the painfully stinging impact of a sand-blaster held at arm’s length: but unlike a sand-blaster, the pain-filled shock of those spear-tipped spicules was only momentary, each wasp-like sting carried with it its own ice-cold anaesthetic and all surface sensation was quickly lost. Then the wind would drop, the furious rattling on the sail would fade and in the momentary contrast of near-silence we could hear the stealthy rustling as of a million rats advancing as the ice-spicules brushed their blind way across the iron-hard surface of the polar cap. The bridge thermometer stood at -21° F. – 53° of frost. If I were a promoter interested in developing a summer holiday resort, I thought, I wouldn’t pay very much attention to this place.

Rawlings and I stamped our feet, flailed our arms across our chests, shivered non-stop, took what little shelter we could from the canvas windbreak, rubbed our goggles constantly to keep them clear, and never once, except when the ice-spicules drove into our faces, stopped examining every quarter of the horizon. Somewhere out there on those frozen wastes was a lost and dying group of men whose lives might depend upon so little a thing as the momentary misting up of one of our goggles. We stared out over those shifting ice-sands until our eyes ached. But that was all we had for it, just aching eyes. We saw nothing, nothing at all. The ice-cap remained empty of all signs of life. Dead.

When our relief came Rawlings and I got below with all the speed our frozen and stiffened limbs would allow. I found Commander Swanson sitting on a canvas stool outside the radio room. I stripped off outer clothes, face coverings and goggles, took a steaming mug of coffee that had appeared from nowhere and tried not to hop around too much as the blood came pounding back into arms and legs.

‘How did you cut yourself like that?’ Swanson asked, concern in his voice. ‘You’ve a half-inch streak of blood right across your forehead.’

‘Flying ice, it just looks bad.’ I felt tired and pretty low. ‘We’re wasting our time transmitting. If the men on Drift Station Zebra were without any shelter it’s no wonder all signals ceased long ago. Without food and shelter no one could last more than a few hours in that lot. Neither Rawlings nor I is a wilting hothouse flower but after half an hour up there we’ve both just about had it.’

‘I don’t know,’ Swanson said thoughtfully. ‘Look at Amundsen. Look at Scott, at Peary. They walked all the way to the Poles.’

‘A different breed of men, Captain. Either that or the sun shone for them. All I know is that half an hour is too long to be up there. Fifteen minutes is enough for anyone.’

‘Fifteen minutes it shall be.’ He looked at me, face carefully empty of all expression. ‘You haven’t much hope?’

‘If they’re without shelter, I’ve none.’

‘You told me they had an emergency power pack of Nife cells for powering their transmitter,’ he murmured. ‘You also said those batteries will retain their charge indefinitely, years if necessary, irrespective of the weather conditions under which they are stored. They must have been using that battery a few days ago when they sent out their first S O S. It wouldn’t be finished already.’

His point was so obvious that I didn’t answer. The battery wasn’t finished: the men were.

‘I agree with you,’ he went on quietly. ‘We’re wasting our time. Maybe we should just pack up and go home. If we can’t raise them, we’ll never find them.’

‘Maybe not. But you’re forgetting your directive from Washington, Commander.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Remember? I’m to be extended every facility and all aid short of actually endangering the safety of the submarine and the lives of the crew. At the present moment we’re doing neither. If we fail to raise them I’m prepared for a twenty-mile sweep on foot round this spot in the hope of locating them. If that fails we could move to another polynya and repeat the search. The search area isn’t all that big, there’s a fair chance, but a chance, that we might locate the station eventually. I’m prepared to stay up here all winter till we do find them.’

‘You don’t call that endangering the lives of my men? Making extended searches of the ice-cap, on foot, in midwinter?’

‘Nobody said anything about endangering the lives of your men.’

‘You mean – you mean you’d go it alone.’ Swanson stared down at the deck and shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to think. I don’t know whether to say you’re crazy or whether to say I’m beginning to understand why they – whoever “they” may be – picked you for the job, Dr Carpenter.’ He sighed, then regarded me thoughtfully. ‘One moment you say there’s no hope, the next that you’re prepared to spend the winter here, searching. If you don’t mind my saying so, Doctor, it just doesn’t make sense.’

‘Stiff-necked pride,’ I said. ‘I don’t like throwing my hand in on a job before I’ve even started it. I don’t know what the attitude of the United States Navy is on that sort of thing.’

He gave me another speculative glance, I could see he believed me the way a fly believes the spider on the web who has just offered him safe accommodation for the night. He smiled. He said: ‘The United States Navy doesn’t take offence all that easily, Dr Carpenter. I suggest you catch a couple of hours’ sleep while you can. You’ll need it all if you’re going to start walking towards the North Pole.’

‘How about yourself? You haven’t been to bed at all to-night.’

‘I think I’ll wait a bit.’ He nodded towards the door of the radio room. ‘Just in case anything comes through.’

‘What are they sending? Just the call sign?’

‘Plus request for position and a rocket, if they have either. I’ll let you know immediately anything comes through. Good night, Dr Carpenter. Or rather, good morning.’

I rose heavily and made my way to Hansen’s cabin.