Whiteout! Page 12

  He said, 'It's my duty to tell you a thing like that. I'll also tell you - ' he paused again and it was a long pause - 'that I don't want air-cushion vehicles up here.'

  I felt my scalp click back. I knew perfectly well that Barney Smales didn't approve of the hovercraft as Arctic transport; I knew also that he was the last man to say so before the trials had taken place. There was something wrong here and I'd better disengage myself before it became worse.

  I said, 'Well, thanks for telling me,' keeping my tone carefully cheerful, turning for the door.

  He didn't stop me. 'You ought to be told,' he said, as the door opened and closed behind me.

  I found myself looking into Master Sergeant Allen's eyes. He said, 'Okay, Mr Bowes ?'

  I hesitated. Allen looked calm, competent . . , was there an enquiring look somewhere behind the formality? I said, 'I'm not sure.'

  He regarded me steadily. 'Not sure?'

  I thought about it, and Allen sat there, still and intelligent, watching me think. If I said anything, however mild, however delicate the hint, the meaning would be the same; I'd be saying, 'Your boss is going weird.' The phrases ran through my mind: 'a little strange this morning; did you notice anything? He must be tired.' All meaning the same, and if spoken by this possibly paranoid stranger who'd been seeing spooks ever since he arrived, further proof of a perhaps dangerous instability.

  I searched for some lame phrase. Finally, I said, 'I wouldn't want to job!'

  Unhelpfully, Allen said, 'Why's that, sir?'

  'Not at a time like this. The strain . ..' Strain! The word had slid out. Your boss is going weird.

  Allen lit a cigarette. He said slowly, 'The responsibility is very great.'

  I thought about that. Was I reading more into all this than could possibly be there? Or was Allen coming to meet me? I looked at his face. It was calm, the dark brown skin uncreased, smooth on the planes and curves of his face. Allen was the senior non-commissioned officer, very senior, high-quality, but.., but non-commissioned. Experienced, though, and knowing the rule-book backwards. I realized suddenly that it was possible this conversation was even more difficult for him than for me. He was outranked by a lot of men at Camp Hundred and all of them would react with hostility at the merest suggestion . . . No, there had to be another approach, an oblique one. And it was up to me, the civilian, to make it.

  But what if I were mistaken ? What if Allen weren't moving to meet me, and all these supposed undertones were part of my paranoid imaginings ? In that case, I thought, he'd merely think I was a little nuttier than he'd thought in the first place.

  But how to start? The atmosphere in the little office felt electric, but perhaps only I felt it. Allen still looked totally unruffled, except that there seemed to be something in his eyes, some gleam of - of what ?

  I said, 'What's tonight's movie, Mr Allen?'

  'No decision yet, sir.'

  'What,' I asked, 'do you have in stock ?'

  He looked at me for a moment, then rose and went to a filing cabinet. 'I have a list. If you've got some kind of request, I'll do what I can.'

  'I'm a Bogart fancier,' I said. 'Got any Bogey pictures?'

  He looked at the list. 'African Queen, Casablanca.'

  'I've seen them both too many times,' I said. I hesitated, knowing the hesitation would add emphasis when I spoke, but unable for a moment to force out the words. Then I made myself say, 'There's one performance I liked best of all.'

  'What was that, sir?'

  'Captain Queeg,' I said. 'In The Caine Mutiny.'

  Allen gave me a glance. 'Guess we don't have that picture, sir.'

  'You've seen it, though?'

  'No.'

  I pushed on quickly. 'Oddly enough,' I said, 'it's about what we were talking about. The responsibilities of command in dangerous situations.'

  Did Allen's dark face soften a little? He said, 'I didn't see the movie, sir, but I did read the novel. As I recall, it was more about the responsibilities of subordinates.'

  'None of whom,' I said, 'showed up very well at the court martial.'

  'Yeah, that's right.' He was non-committal again.

  Well, I thought, it was early days. Barney was benign and it was perfectly possible nothing was wrong and that he was merely playing psychological games. We'd all know soon enough if anything was seriously wrong with him. And that would be time enough. I said, 'Breakfast time,' and left.

  I walked out of the command trench and into Main Street on my way to the mess hall. The lighting along the huge principal trench was down, the snow walls were grey rather than white, and the few men who moved along it looked dulled and depressed. In the mess hall, too, the atmosphere was heavy and voices low. On the night of my arrival - the only night, come to think of it, when things had been fairly normal at Hundred - there had been a kind of boisterous noise, a defiant good humour. There was none of that now. I sat at a table with one of the scientific officers, a captain named Vale, to whom I'd been introduced one night in the officers' club. Like most of the other scientists at Hundred, he worked for CRREL, the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory of the United States Army Terrestrial Sciences Centre. Captain Vale was not pleased with me, he said.

  'Why not?'

  'You made it to Belvoir, so I hear?'

  'In my little hovercraft,' I nodded.

  'Wish I'd known you were going. I'd have hitched a ride out.'

  'Your tour over?'

  He smiled. 'No tour's ever over till you make it out. Don't worry, I'm used to it. I been stuck a few times before.'

  'For long?'

  'Six weeks up here, one time. But in the other place it can be longer.'

  'What other place?'

  'The Antarctic. I've done two tours on Deep Freeze down there. One time we were three months overdue.'

  'Depressing,' I said.

  'It's okay if you can work. If you can't, the Heebies get you.'

  'The Heebies," I said, 'seem to be very much present.'

  He glanced round the mess hall. A scattering of men were sitting over coffee or breakfast, some talking quietly, most silent. He said, 'I've known worse.'

  'Here?'

  'Hell, no. In huts in the Antarctic' He gave a rueful grin. 'These guys are too used to the good life. They're over-reacting.'

  'I think,' I said, 'that I'm over-reacting too.'

  'Sure you are. So am I, really. So's everybody. First time in the cold regions ?'

  'Yes.'

  'You'll find it grows on you. Two, three years, you won't want to be anywhere else.'

  'You do,' I pointed out. 'You want to be at Belvoir.'

  'I want,' he said, 'to be in Virginia. But when I get there, I'll want to be right back here.'

  'So all this doesn't worry you ?'

  'Nope. Can't say it does."

  'Morale's low,' I said.

  'It'll lift.'

  'A chapter of accidents.'

  'It'll end.'

  I laughed. 'You're an optimistic fatalist?'

  'I'm a glaciologist,' Vale said. 'In my game you get to take the long view.'

  It was a reassuring little conversation. Vale was a quiet, competent man who'd seen it all. If he wasn't worried, why should I be worried? But the memory of Barney Smales nagged at me. I said, 'The Heebies - how do they show?'

  'I'm no psychologist.'

  'Even so?'

  'Well . . .' he hesitated. 'People start going flat. They get obsessive about little things and ignore the big ones. Then that stops and they sit and stare at their boots or something hours at a stretch. Like I say, I'm no psychologist, but I'd say it's close to classical depression.' He rose, slapped my shoulder, and added, 'Meantime, the coffee's hot, there's booze in the club, soft beds and movies. Don't worry about it. You'll live.'

  I watched him go, conscious of my own confusion. Vale was so manifestly confident, his confidence based on long experience, that it was absurd to doubt him. Indeed I didn't doubt him. But along with all the reass
urance, he'd handed me one disquieting thought. People, he'd said, became obsessive about little things. And a ballpoint pen was little enough.

  Chapter 10

  We all have our neuroses; everybody's a little nuts in some direction or another. But I've always liked to think of myself as reasonably sane. I don't feel uncontrollable urges to murder people who step in front of me in bus queues and I don't turn into Frankenstein's monster once I get behind a car wheel; by and large I sleep undisturbed by conscience. But after a few days at Hundred I was beginning to entertain some doubts about myself. Walking away from the mess hall after my talk with Captain Vale, I was feeling more or less reassured. I remember telling myself inside my head to stop trying to make patterns out of random events and concentrate on the TK4 and the urgent need to sell the damn thing to the American gentlemen. Little nod of determination for my own benefit; conscious setting of jaw. And then the conversation with Master Sergeant Allen came back, with all its doubts, hesitations and possible overtones, and I realized that my mental state was changing by the second like a well-shaken kaleidoscope. Every time I talked to anybody, damn it, I took on a new viewpoint. One man said, don't worry, and I told myself not to worry. Another was mildly enigmatic and I started looking for the puzzle inside the enigma. Barney Smales was polite but withdrawn and I imagined . . .

  The hell with it, I decided. It was their business, not mine. If the United States Army was having its troubles, at least it was equipped to handle them ; I had a job of my own to do and at the moment there seemed no likelihood of its getting done. The weather was lousy up top and apparently relentless. I'd been told before I left England that there should be a few days within the following four weeks when the TK4 could give performance demonstrations. Past experience and weather records said so. But apart from the fast runs to and from Camp Belvoir there'd been no opportunity at all for me to demonstrate what she could do. Agreed that she'd done all that had been asked of her; the trouble was that nobody had seen her in action, and performance demonstrations, by definition, need witnesses; more important, they need witnesses who are going to influence the great decision to buy or not to buy.

  I'd set off intending to give the TK.4 a swift once-over-lightly, but the weather office was on the way. I decided I might as well go there first.

  The weather office was Sergeant Vernon's home ground and I smiled to myself as I went in. Like the sergeants' club, this was old-soldier territory; it smelled of floor polish and pine and on a wall was a window framing one of the big, blown-up colour pictures, this time of a picnic site beside a lake somewhere. An electric coffee percolator gurgled contentedly on a side bench and the ashtrays were many and wiped clean.

  Vernon returned my smile. 'Something I can do for you, sir?'

  'I take it,' I said, 'that you'll have all the records here.'

  'We try to calculate it every which way. If it's not in the form you want, sir, we can work it out.'

  'Fine. Look, I'm wondering whether there's going to be a break soon. I realize you can't forecast with any great accuracy, but maybe past records will give some kind of indication.'

  'Be a pleasure,' Vernon said. He crossed to a filing cabinet and began hefting folders. 'We got anemometers going round and round. We got mercury and alcohol thermometers going up and down. We got barometric readings, snowfall records, you name it. But - ' the corners of his mouth turned down sympathetically -'it's gonna be a statistical answer you get.'

  'I know,' 1 said. 'But I can cling on to a hope if you'll give me one.'

  'So okay. Here's the plots for the last five years.' He unfolded the charts and spread them on the bench. 'Temperature right here. Wind velocity. This one's humidity. We plotted wind and temperature into a windchill factor on this one. Here's snowfall. Now . . .'

  Twenty minutes poring over the charts gave the statistical answer. Some time within the next twenty-eight days it was reasonable to expect there'd be four when the wind was down to thirty miles an hour or less. Two more with wind under twenty.

  I said, 'Well, it's encouraging.'

  'Just so you don't get too encouraged,' Vernon said. 'A lot of that's gonna break down into short slots. Two, three, four hours maybe as a front goes through.'

  'How much warning ?'

  'Do what I can, sir. When the radio's open, I can get the satellite picture up from Thule. That can tell us a little more.'

  'And pressure?'

  Vernon shook his head. 'Highs and lows, they fill and empty too damn fast. You just gotta make a personal judgment here; data won't do it.'

  I said, 'Do me a favour, Mr Vernon. Exercise your best judgment for me? An hour's notice, if I can get it, of a two-hour break. I need that to give any kind of demonstration.'

  'Minimum?'

  I nodded. 'The problem is that your people have to see what she can do. We've got to have time for a bulldozer to roughen the snow surface and build a few steps for the TK4 to climb. Once everybody's sold on that, we can take a few rides in rougher conditions, but I can't get to stage two before stage one's over.'

  'Sure,' Vernon said. 'Coffee?'

  We drank coffee while I answered his questions about the TK4. It struck me that Vernon was more open-minded about the potential of air-cushion vehicles than Barney Smales, not that his approval was much use. All the same, it was a comfort, and his promise to give me as much warning as possible of any potential weather break could be valuable.

  I left him then and went to tidy up the TK4. I'd simply left her at the end of the trip back from Belvoir and I wanted her cleaned out, ship-shape and shiny, for demonstration time. The sergeant syndrome isn't far below the surface in me ; a coating of dirt on the outside of an engine casing doesn't make the engine any less efficient, but for me at least it removes some of the enjoyment.

  I looked her over carefully and the TK4 was in pretty good nick. In the rear hold a few drops of oil had dripped off the generator, but a handful of waste and a couple of brisk rubs soon shifted that. Otherwise the hold was like a new pin. The cabin wasn't bad, either, though it smelled a little of sweat and old tobacco smoke. I got a hand brush and cleaned the cabin floor of cigarette ash and spent matches, emptied the ashtrays and put a discarded matchbook on the screen sill for future use. Then I leathered the windows. Forty minutes' mindless work, satisfying in its way, and the job was finished, except for a routine check on oil and fuel levels, both of which were fine.

  Reilly, the maintenance chief, wandered over as I was admiring her. The inevitable unlit cigar was clamped in the side of his mouth and he spoke round it as he offered the equally inevitable coffee. I was awash with coffee, and had been so virtually since my arrival at Hundred, but the game has rules and one of them is that it pays to be nice to maintenance crews. Reilly was still reading the manuals and hadn't been round the TK4 on hands and knees yet, but he reckoned there weren't nothin' he couldn't handle. I sensed, too, that he was impressed by the hovercraft's swiftness and efficiency on the Belvoir trip.

  'Tell you what,' I said. 'First chance I get, we'll take a spin in her.'

  He nodded brusquely, but under that matter-of-fact manner an enthusiast lurked. 'If I'm a-goin' in that thing,' he said, 'I'd sure better look after her. That right?'

  'Right,' I said, grinning.

  'You psychin' me, mister ?'

  'I hope so.'

  He walked away, then, tough and hard. But he patted the steel side of the TK.4 as he passed.

  It was the last good moment of that day.

  On my bed, when I got back to my room, lay an envelope. Even before I opened it, I sensed somehow that it was ticking like a time bomb. Inside was a note from Master Sergeant Allen to the effect that Barney Smales wished to see me, and the word immediately was underlined. In the outer office Allen gave me a wry look that contained a trace of sympathy, and pointed to the door.

  I knocked, entered as bidden, and found Barney's eyes directed at me like a pair of shotguns. He gave me two or three minutes of level, low-voiced, furiou
s abuse. It was what I'd expected that morning and hadn't collected - my come-uppance for : a) smoking in bed and carelessly; b) blundering out alone on to the icecap; c) failing to tell anybody I was going; d) behaving in general like a goddam cross between Sherlock Holmes and Captain Oates. My degenerate parents, apart from not enjoying benefit of clergy, had also passed on to me various congenital mental conditions. About thirty seconds into the tirade, I found myself surprisingly unimpressed. After a minute, it would have become almost funny, if the whole TK4 deal hadn't rested in large measure on Barney Smales's assessment.

  Finally, I said, with deliberate rudeness, 'Why wait ? What was wrong with this morning?'

  'What in hell do you mean ?'

  'All that jazz,' I said, 'about the beauties of bloody ballpoint pens.'

  He blinked. 'Now listen, mister, I don't know - '

  I said, 'It's got real functional beauty, that's what you told me.' I grabbed the pen off the desk-top and held it up. 'You liked the pretty colours, remember.'

  He snatched it from my hand. 'Now listen - '

  By now I was almost as angry as he was, but as our eyes met I saw something in his gaze that had no right to be there .. . Fear? Puzzlement? I said, 'You don't remember, do you?'

  'You can forget this morning.'

  I said, 'Why? Were you drunk?'

  I really thought he'd go off pop. His face flushed with rage and his eyes seemed to bulge.

  'Drunk!' he roared. Then he paused and there was one of those abrupt shifts so characteristic of him. 'I looked drunk, eh?' He spoke, for him, gently, interested in the answer.

  'Something like it.'

  He rubbed his temples. 'Woke up this morning with a goddam migraine. White lights, the whole deal. Sick as a dog. Used to have 'em as a kid, but I haven't had one in years.'

  'Has it gone?'

  'Almost.'

  Tm sorry. Sorry about last night, too. It won't happen again. But at the time, the logic seemed compelling.'

  He stood up and bent his brows at me. 'This time, Englishman, we'll forget about it.' His tone was deep and measured, the accent British, and some trick of memory dragged recognition out of the dusty attics of my brain.