Free Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean Page A

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 that 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 upward as gently as thistledown. The camera switched upward, 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 giving that ice a nudge. Are we slewing?"
      "Bearing constant."
      Swanson nodded. The pumps hummed, poured 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 as flat as a piece of tin. Do you want to spend what little's left of your life traveling in steadily decreasing circles under the polar ice cap?"
      I didn't want to spend what little was left of my life in traveling 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 realize, and not slowly, either, that he was a man who didn't give up very easily.
      "That's enough of that," 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_ 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