Whiteout! Read online

  I took my book with me into the ward and sat beside Kelleher's steel cot. His mouth hung agape and he breathed noisily and wetly under the imposed relaxation of the anaesthetic. But at least he seemed peaceful. Looking at him now, it was hard to imagine Kelleher as he'd been a few short hours earlier, mouth distorted in that rictus grin, grunting and snarling like an animal. My cheek still ached painfully from his bite and I remembered the astounding strength in the man as he flailed on the cot in the reactor hut's office. The hold of mind upon body, I reflected, was a thing one took entirely for granted ; a thing most of us maintain throughout our lives. But Kelleher that morning had demonstrated how tenuous the grip is, and how a mental trip-switch, once released, triggers off things we cannot conceive of. I'm no psychologist. I'm not now and wasn't then, and even in the light of later events, I still find it hard to understand the suicidal compulsion that drove Kelleher when he actually tried to climb into the reactor kettle.

  My first spell on watch in there was uneventful. So was Allen's second. But I'd only been sitting there for a few minutes of my own second spell, reading quietly, when Kelleher muttered something.

  I looked at him, all at once tense and alert. His eyes were closed and he was frowning a little, but the big body lay still under its restraining heavy canvas. I reached for the telephone, unsure whether he was muttering in his sleep or awakening, but anxious for support if the latter were the case.

  He spoke again, before I'd lifted the receiver, and this time the word was clear. 'Jesus,' he said.

  Something - perhaps a feeling that a crowd would upset him -kept my hand off the phone.

  I said gently, 'How do you feel ?'

  He repeated the word, still far away, surfacing very slowly. 'Feel?’ he said. 'Feel?'

  I waited. Perhaps a minute went by. Then, 'Oh, boy, those . ..'

  He was quite calm, as yet barely conscious. I lit a cigarette, deliberately injecting an everyday sound into the stillness. The cigarette was finished before he spoke again, but by now there were small movements of his legs and arms. Quite suddenly, he opened his eyes wide, blinked at the light and turned his head towards me. He said, 'I can't move.'

  'Don't worry. You're all right.'

  He blinked several times more, fighting his way up to consciousness, and said at the end, 'I had an accident?'

  'In a way.' I was watching him carefully for any signs of incipient violence.

  'Radiation?' he said sharply. 'Did I get a blast of radiation?'

  I shook my head. 'No.' I was thinking that at least his mind was clear. He was aware he'd been unconscious, aware of one possible reason for it. I smiled and said, 'It was a kind of collapse. You've been working too hard.'

  He looked suddenly worried. 'Heart? I had a coronary?'

  'No.'

  He relaxed. 'Thank God. I was warned once to get some of this weight off... Why can't I move? He frowned again, fear in his face, and I cursed myself for allowing the delay. I reached for the phone, told Allen he was awake, and stood back while the medic came in and gave him a sedative injection. Kelleher watched, too, as the canvas flap of the straitjacket was peeled back and the hypodermic went into his arm. He said, in brief horror, 'Christ, I'm in a .., in a .., in ...' and he was asleep again before the word could come out.

  Allen looked at me. 'He seems lucid.'

  'Yes,' I said, 'he was lucid all right.'

  'Back to normal ?'

  I said, 'What's normal?' and phoned the command hut to let Barney know. He was properly relieved and said he'd be along later to inspect the patient, but he sounded worried and distracted.

  After that, the vigil continued its silent way. I finished my two hours and Allen took over, then I was back at Kelleher's bedside, and so it went on except that Allen was relieved temporarily by Sergeant Vernon while he went off to handle some minor matter of administration.

  It was around eleven that night when Barney Smales finally came along in response to a message I'd phoned through to the effect that Kelleher was stirring again. He looked drawn and weary as he stood looking down at the cot.

  Kelleher was moving drowsily, in so far as the canvas jacket and leg restraints would let him move at all.

  'How was he before V Barney asked me.

  'He wasn't awake long, and he was still half-way under,' I said, 'But within limits he was rational enough.'

  Barney took off his parka and cap and sank sighing on to a chair. He said, 'Not enough, unfortunately. It's this way, and it's a bastard. The reactor we've got was a new design for operations up here. It's still experimental. It's not leased. We bought it. So it's the army's but under certain conditions. One of those conditions is that any major work on the reactor has to be done under the supervision of the civilian manufacturers. That means that when we shut down and refuel, and when we go critical, one of their guys is in complete control. Under the terms of the contract, we can't do it ourselves.'

  'But surely,' I said, 'under circumstances like these - '

  He cut me off. 'The contract says under no circumstances. It's absolutely clear and absolutely specific that in the event of sickness or incapacity of the supervising engineer, work will be discontinued until he can be given a clean bill of health by a doctor. Or until he can be replaced.'

  'So even if Kelleher's okay ...'

  'Even if I think he's okay, even if every man at Camp Hundred thinks he's all jim-dandy, that's no damn good. He's got to be seen by a doctor and certified okay. Or we got to get somebody else flown in here.'

  'And the weather?'

  'Stinks,' Barney said flatly. 'We got a phase three up there and a radio blackout. We're still on that one diesel generator you hauled up here and, boy, we're on the knife edge.' He rubbed his eyes wearily, then looked moodily at Kelleher. 'Thought you said he was coming to.'

  'He was. He was stirring, anyway.' I rose and poured some coffee and handed the cup to Barney. 'That contract,' I said, 'doesn't sound very sensible to me. Not unless the Army's engineers are incompetent.'

  'They're okay. Carson and his assistant both have masters' degrees in nuclear engineering. But Kelleher actually led the design team on this baby. That's the real point. Remember it's all still experimental.'

  I said, 'What if you overrode the contract terms. As commander on the spot? Difficult decision, I know, but taken in the interests of the whole establishment ?'

  Barney mustered a rueful grin. 'The only authority I have over the reactor operation is to order a shutdown. And then only on qualified advice. If I ordered those guys to heat her up to the critical phase, first of all they wouldn't do it, because they know the rules, too. After that, well, maybe it's not the most important thing in the world, but they'd log the order and log their refusal, and when their log goes back, guess who gets the fast chop?'

  Kelleher, after the first twitches, had lapsed again into deep sleep and Barney decided against waiting. He rose, finished his coffee, and left.

  About midnight, Carson came along and peered at the still-sleeping patient. He and one of his technicians were to take over the watch for a few hours while Allen and I got some sleep.

  Alone in my hut, I put on pyjamas and climbed into bed. I myself felt almost anaesthetized; bone weary and fuzzy-headed. But, as so often happens when sleep seems infinitely desirable, it becomes unattainable, and I lay in the dark, full of resentment, with my mind slowly gaining a clarity and energy I didn't damned well want. My need was for sleep, not for a quick mental canter round Camp Hundred and its assorted problems and mysteries. But whichever lobe of the brain controls inquisitiveness was now firmly in the saddle and digging in the spurs, and despite myself, I began to brood. I felt pretty sorry for myself, too; full of those wee-small-hours blues that can sometimes come close to despair. Lying there in the dark, I felt them crowding in, and to drive them back a bit, I put on the light and lit a cigarette, and that brought back thoughts of another cigarette I'd smoked in bed, twenty-four hours or so earlier; the one that had damn near been m
y last.

  I got out of bed and looked at the badly-charred chair on which the ashtray had rested the previous night. It was a perfectly ordinary wooden chair, with the seat upholstered in foam-rubber or plastic foam and covered in some kind of charred plastic sheet, PVC or something. The hole in the sheeting was cigarette-shaped, a couple of inches long, and the cylinder of tobacco ash still lay along it. We've all seen dozens of similar burns, caused by careless handling of cigarette ends, and there was nothing unusual about this one. But still, it puzzled me. When you're a smoker, you tend to have a way of putting out a cigarette, and I always fold the butt over and press down hard, so that the lighted end is crushed out by the tip. That way there are no sparks. Ashtrays I've used tend to contain flattened, V-shaped butts. So why was this one straight? Because I hadn't put it out : that was the obvious answer. I must have left it burning in the ashtray and the damn thing had rolled out of it and on to the upholstery. Well, maybe. But I don't put cigarettes down and let them burn away. Never? Well .., no, I thought defensively, I don't do that. It's a thing I'm careful not to do. And in any case, there was a memory, almost distinct in my mind, of stubbing that cigarette out before I went to sleep.

  The one I was smoking now had burned low, and I was putting it out automatically, when I caught myself in the act and examined what I'd done. It was in the middle of the ashtray, as always; bent over, as always. Hmm ...

  I bent and blew away the ash so I could look more closely at the chair seat. Inside, beneath the two-inch hole, the plastic foam upholstery was badly charred. Pushing my finger through the hole I tried to guess at the size of the burned area. It wasn't big. The burn had cut through the PVC cover and smouldered steadily through quite a few cubic inches of the foam. As I pulled my fingers out again, they were covered in a dark, dusty smear. I tried to brush it off, and couldn't, because the ash was moist.

  Moist?

  I rubbed my fingers together, the moisture and fine ash turning into a thin black paste on thumb and forefinger. How in hell had it become moist? Half-digested bits of long-ago chemistry lessons came back as I looked for the answer. Did carbon absorb moisture from the atmosphere? I thought so, but couldn't quite remember. Probably it did. On the other hand, this hut was heated. What effect would that have? The truth was that I simply didn't know, ill-educated lout that I am. But one thing I did know: water puts out fires!

  Okay, I thought. Look at it that way. When I'd stumbled out of the hut, there had been smoke and fumes. The thing was smouldering hard enough then. But when I'd returned later with the duty officer, Westlake, it had been out. And now it was moist.

  Also.., well, also the tunnel door had been locked, and wasn't when Westlake and I returned. Even allowing for my state of near-panic at the time, I was reasonably certain of that.

  So...?

  I stepped away from the chair and deliberately tried to empty my mind of the conclusion that was swarming all over it; tried to forget the conversation with the medic; tried to be logical and reasonable as I thought it through. I tried it all ways, looking for every possible reason for the sequence of events. But at the end, after half an hour spent resisting it, I found myself accepting the conclusion that fitted. To accept any other, I'd have had to accept, too, the fact that the habits of a lifetime had been temporarily suspended: that I'd mistaken a closed door for a locked one; that I hadn't been able to think straight.

  I dressed quickly and left the hut. The lights in Main Street were very dim, keeping the load on the generator low, and the whole length was deserted. I turned into the command trench and went into the hut. Westlake was sitting at Master Sergeant Allen's desk. He looked up from Red Star Over China, saw who it was, and said, 'Start another fire ?'

  I smiled. 'No.'

  'So what can I do for you ?'

  'Is there,' I asked him, 'a fire manual? I'd like to do some reading.'

  He grinned. 'More joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth -’

  'The manual,' I said.

  'Sure.' He passed it over from a rack of heavy army-issue books on the wall behind his chair.

  'Thanks.' I took the plastic-bound volume. 'Mind if I borrow it?'

  'Not if it comes back.'

  I returned to my hut, lay on the bed and began to try to find my way through about three pounds of assorted fire regulations. Finally I found what I wanted: a complete paper on the effect of fire on plastics. It laid heavy emphasis, as they always do, on the dangers of cigarettes, the need for ashtrays everywhere. Then it went on to describe the particular hazards. PVC, I learned, produced a wide variety of highly toxic gases during combustion, among them phosgene and benzene. But it wasn't PVC that really concerned me. The seat cover was PVC, but the foam inside wasn't. Then I found the bit about polyurethane foam, and read that. Having done so, I read it again. And I wonder, dear reader, as the Victorian novelists used to say, whether you quite realize what it is you're sitting on when you relax in your soft, squashy armchair?

  Because polyurethane foam, when it burns, produces, if I may quote the manual 'extremely large volumes from small quantities' of a) carbon monoxide, and b) hydrogen cyanide.' Just to underline the point, carbon monoxide is lethal. All those people who commit suicide by running a hose pipe from the exhaust into the car are making use of carbon monoxide's handy properties. But compared with hydrocyanic gas, carbon monoxide is gentle. Hydrogen cyanide is the stuff they used in American gas chambers to execute murderers - literally the quickest of all gaseous killers.

  And polyurethane foam had been smouldering quietly about a foot from my nose!

  'Careless fellow,' they'd have said at the inquest, if there had been an inquest. 'He left a cigarette burning.'

  What I was suddenly burning to know was the name of said careless fellow.

  Because I was sure now that somebody had tried to kill me!

  Chapter 12

  The first shock of realization: the first crawling of the scalp, the first sharp chill around the heart, all wore off after a while. The fear-generated adrenalin coursed round and round and finally wore off too, and I was left with another conclusion : that my great discovery had got me precisely nowhere. To Barney and Westlake, all this would seem like a desperate, not to say crazy, rationalization of my own carelessness. Barney had already muttered, once in my hearing, and probably several times out of it, the word 'paranoid'. If I went to him now and said, 'Look, I've just realized somebody's trying to kill me,' he'd say, 'Prove it.' And I couldn't; my proof rested in the main on self-knowledge, on my own certainty about the way I handled cigarettes, about the way I'd wrestled with the trench door. But to Barney I'd still be the fool who left a cigarette burning. Furthermore, he'd know all the fire and safety regulations backwards - that was the nature of the man. He'd know all about the poisonous gases generated in the combustion of plastics and be merely surprised that I didn't. No, Barney wouldn't take my theories at all seriously. But there was one thing he would take very seriously indeed, and that was anything he regarded as spreading alarm and despondency.

  All I could do, for the moment at least, was to keep my knowledge to myself. And bloody well watch my back! And then I knew that that wouldn't be enough, because whoever was trying to kill me was also chipping away very effectively indeed at the whole fabric of Camp Hundred. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the medic was right, and that somebody was trying not only to kill me, but to render Hundred uninhabitable. So somehow I must try to find out who was doing it. Above all, why?

  I lay back, trying, now that the decision was made, to evolve some method. But my mind must, by that time, have had enough. I drifted off into a confused, disturbed, jumpy kind of shallow doze from which I finally woke with a start of surprise for no reason at all. I'd fallen asleep with the light on and now, forlornly alert, I looked round the little, windowless room, halt expecting trouble. The room was empty. Reassured, I glanced at my watch. I'd promised to go back to duty with Kelleher at five and it was now almost half
past. Once again I dressed quickly and hurried out.

  My nerves jangled an alarm when I went into the hospital hut and discovered that Kirton's office was empty; but in the ward the medic was dozing on one of the spare beds and Carson's corporal sat patiently reading a magazine.

  'All well?’ I asked softly.

  The corporal nodded towards the medic. 'He gave him another shot around one. All quiet since.'

  'Fine,' I said. 'Sorry I'm late. Time you had a sleep.'

  'Sure is.' He stretched and rose.

  I said, 'Did Mr Kelleher waken?'

  'Well, he kinda half-wakened.'

  'And?'

  'Didn't say much. Just was 1 positive he hadn't had a coronary.'

  'He was rational, then?'

  'Getting that way. Kinda dopey, you know?'

  He left then, and I went to look at the patient. Kelleher seemed completely calm; he was breathing regularly, and so too was the medic. I wished I were as relaxed. I felt unwashed, un-rested and unhappy. A cup of coffee helped a little, but not much. I couldn't settle. As soon as I sat in a chair, it developed lumps and bumps and I developed corns and had to move. The conundrum kept rattling round my head and gave me no peace. Somewhere in this place was a man, or men, intent upon sabotage to the point where Camp Hundred folded up. Who? I thought round and round it, but there seemed to be no pointer anywhere. All right, why? There was an answer, of sorts, to that, but it was a pretty feeble answer. Hundred was cold and not too comfortable; it was a long way from the civilized pleasures; it must seem, perhaps, a bloody awful posting to a lot of the men. But would anybody seriously embark on a campaign of deliberate and expensive sabotage, and, worse, actually kill, just to shorten a posting? Which brought me back to madmen, and I smiled wryly at the thought that the nearest available madman was now sleeping peacefully a few feet away.