Free Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean Page B

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’swavelength 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 radio-sondes 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