Whiteout! Read online

  I told him. Then I said, 'Kirton knew who it was. Must have known. That has to be the reason he was killed.'

  'Well, he sure can't tell us.' Kelleher gave a long sigh of irritation, a sigh that suddenly caught in his throat. 'Wait a minute,' he said slowly. 'Maybe he can at that.'

  'Spirit writing or table-tapping?' I said sarcastically. 'Or maybe you're a medium?'

  'Uh-uh,' Kelleher said. 'But Kirton kept a diary.'

  'If he did, it'll be in his quarters. Or it will if our friend hasn't stolen it.'

  'He kept it on him.'

  'How do you know?'

  'I do it, too. Have since I was a kid. We talked about it once.'

  I stared at him in silence, not wanting to contemplate the consequences of this piece of information about Kirton and looking for sensible objections. I said, 'Diaries are paper. If it is Kirton down there, it'll be illegible by now. He's been down there for - '

  Kelleher handed me the sheet of paper I'd given him. 'Look at it. It's wet, sure, but you can read it. The diary's in a pocket, held together. It'll be soaked, but it'll be readable.'

  'Even so, there's no guarantee.'

  He took the sheet from me. 'What's it say here? Listen: "I made a note at the time." That's what it says, and the diary's got to be where he made the note. I know, believe me. I know all the crazy mechanics of writing up a diary. And there's another little thing you've forgotten.'

  'No,' I said. 'I haven't forgotten. But if Kirton was already down there then - '

  He didn't wait for me to finish. 'If! Okay, but if he was dumped later, our friend has fingered his pigeon in the unlikely event that Kirton's found. Don't forget - a new well had to be started immediately.' He looked at me steadily.

  I said defensively, 'It's not on! In any case, there's no power.'

  Kelleher glanced round. 'You can feel it. It's a mite cooler already. It'll get a whole lot colder real fast. One more little accident and Hundred's finished. Maybe it's finished right now. But if the guy can be identified positively, at least there'll be no more sabotage, right ?'

  'There's no power for the motor!'

  'Wrong,' Kelleher said. 'There's power, muscle power on the winding handle.'

  I opened my mouth to speak, but the words didn't come quickly enough and Kelleher went on grimly: 'We need one more guy and him I can get. Only question is, who goes down: you or me?'

  The protesting words came, then, but they were only words, and they rolled off Kelleher's answers. Coveney, he said, wouldn't go for this theorizing. Coveney's hands were full and his antagonism plain; he wouldn't even listen. But the attempted cover-up in the death trench and a body in the well were proof enough of murder, and the diary, if it was there, might well be proof of guilt, powerful if not totally conclusive. Enough to force action. But I knew, and Kelleher knew too, why I was arguing so desperately: it was a matter of relative weight and strength. Kelleher was more than fifteen stone and strong as a horse whereas I, wet through, weighed less than eleven.

  But he was determined to play out the farce of random choice and pulled a quarter from his pocket. 'Call.'

  Whatever I called, the answer would have to be the same, but I went along. As it happened, the forces of chance for once recognized the force of logic, and pointed to me. Suddenly the temperature seemed to drop violently, and I began to tremble.

  Reaching the well trench was not difficult. As we slipped along Main Street there was no one to see us, though the glow of rigged emergency lights from the diesel tunnel cast a pool of light further along. Once inside, we closed and locked the door, and as I turned, the beam from my handlamp illuminated the circle of corrugated iron protecting the old well-head and the metal hoisting frame above. Kelleher fitted the handle quickly. I walked unsteadily towards the well and shone the handlamp down into the unimaginable depths and immediately began to shiver again. Not far below, giant icicles hung into the void like the waiting teeth of some implacably hostile giant, their tips pointing like signposts of death to the black, narrow neck which led through into the second chamber, and more icicles which I couldn't see but knew to be there. And below them . . . Bile climbed abruptly into my throat. I turned away quickly, and said, 'No'.

  Kelleher's 'other guy', a sergeant from the reactor staff named Mulham, said, 'Can't say I blame you.'

  There was a moment's heavy silence. Then Kelleher spoke. 'Okay, then, I'll do it. You turn the handle.' He reached for the bosun's chair, swung it up and out. 'Let's have some light here,' he said, as he began to strap himself in.

  'I'm sorry.'

  'Christ, you're a limey, you're not even involved here! I sure don't blame you, brother. This is an American problem.' He bent his legs, letting the bosun's chair take the weight. 'Okay, let's have the hard hat and the rest of that gear.'

  Numbly, guiltily, I took off the hard hat. It had been picked to fit me and on him it was ludicrously small, wobbling and liable to fall off. I thought about the extra four stones of Kelleher's weight, the other things to be carried, the back-breaking physical labour involved in the long lowering and raising, and suddenly heard myself say, 'I'll go.' To this day I don't know how I came to speak. It was some involuntary, impromptu impulse beyond either my control or understanding.

  Kelleher's hands stopped moving and he turned to me.

  'You sure?'

  I nodded, committed now and resentful of it. 'Yes,' I said, and my voice caught on a rusty nail. I cleared my throat and said yes again.

  'Think about it for a minute. Be sure.' He was all consideration and sympathy and somehow that enmeshed me further.

  'I'll do it.'

  He grunted and began to unfasten himself from the seat. Two minutes later 1 was poised over the well opening, swaying gently, with my heart in my mouth. I glanced back over my shoulder at the two of them, waiting at the handle. Kelleher reached across, stopped the swinging motion. 'Okay?'

  I nodded and swallowed. 'Lower away.'

  'Good luck.'

  Looking upwards a few seconds later, I couldn't even see them, and the metallic click of the ratchet on the lowering mechanism was growing fainter. As I lowered my eyes, I realized that even the action of looking up had imparted a little swing to the cable, and concentrated on sitting very still and holding the equipment close to my body to minimize the possibility of contact with those fearful icicles that were now sliding slowly past me. We'd discussed and abandoned the idea of knocking them down before making the descent. The trip would have been safer, but the great falling masses of ice, ripping more off as they crashed down through three chambers, might well make it impossible to see what lay in the bottom.

  My left leg felt briefly uncomfortable. As I moved it I must have touched the chain saw, where it hung beneath the seat, because suddenly I was swinging again, and Kelleher's voice came sharply out of the little battery-powered walkie-talkie slung around my neck. 'Keep still, Harry, for Chrissake!'

  My breath hissed out as I came within inches of a ton or more of sharp-pointed ice, and swung away again. I sat rigid, paralysed with fear, feeling the chill of the thing. Slowly the pendulum swing eased.

  'You okay?'

  'Okay.' Stiffening muscles would bloody well have to stiffen. The longer the length of cable above me, the wider the arc of swing and the greater the danger of tapping one of these monsters and tripping it from its seating.

  The ticking of the ratchet grew fainter and vanished as I dropped deeper into the first chamber. The beam of my lamp, endlessly reflected from the ice surface all around me, miraculously gave illumination to the whole, immense, onion-shaped cavern. It was difficult now even to know if I were moving; the lowering was so slow, the distance so great and the time so endless that I seemed suspended immobile in the middle of that huge, cold space. But slowly the curving bottom came up to meet me, and every few feet Kelleher's voice asked softly if I was all right. When he wasn't speaking, I ached for the reassuring sound of his voice; as soon as he spoke I was terrified that some trick of re
verberating sound would precipitate one of the vast ice-spears from high above to smash me down for ever into the depths of the icecap.

  Below me, very slowly, the dark hole widened as I slid soundlessly down towards it. I whispered into the walkie-talkie, 'Entering the neck soon.'

  'How far?'

  'Four feet.'

  'Try communication soon as you're through.'

  'Right.'

  The lowering continued, and soon I was no longer in an immense space, but in a tight, white bottleneck that inspired sudden, panicky claustrophobia. If an icicle had fallen earlier, it just might have gone by, giving me only a glancing blow as it passed; but here, the whole shape of the structure would guide any falling weight directly on to me.

  Slowly the neck widened, the walls of the second chamber beginning to slope down and away from where I hung. 'Through the neck now,' I muttered softly.

  'You okay ?'

  'Yes. Keep lowering.'

  I tried to envisage the two of them up there. This, for them, was the easy part, with the ratchet taking the strain. Coming up would be another matter, with muscles wearying through the long haul and the pressure of time always goading them to further effort.

  All round me another crop of immense icicles hung like an inverted and petrified forest, gleaming and winking in the light of my lamp. They were, I thought soberly, even worse than those at the entrance to the upper chamber: longer, thinner, some distorted in shape like twisted fangs. Here the rising vapour from the steam hose would have been denser and warmer, its action stronger on the snow of centuries and adding drop by frozen drop to the tip of each rod of ice. I held my breath as the bosun's chair slipped past, concentrating on stillness. The need to tear my eyes away from their hypnotic menace was almost irresistible, but to look up or down seemed now to be to risk setting off a pendulum swing. If the icicles had been anchored to something solid, as the normal small icicle clings to a gutter, the danger would have been small. But they clung only to compacted snow.

  Minutes passed and 1 moved beyond their threatening points, slowly down into the centre of the onion-shaped bulb, and again there came the feeling that I had ceased to move, that the world had stopped and that I would remain for ever strapped to my tiny seat in a bubble in the immensity of the icecap.

  'You okay?'

  'Yes.'

  'How far?'

  I glanced carefully downwards. Below me the walls were beginning to close a little towards the black eye of the third chamber. 'Forty feet.'

  As I sat helplessly, inching downwards, anger welled up in me: anger at myself for embarking on this crazy descent; anger at the lunatic somewhere above me whose brilliant and implacable malevolence made it necessary; most of all, though, at Smales, who should long ago have closed off this death trap, and hadn't. It was a natural enough anger, born of danger and fear, but its intensity frightened me, constricting my throat, tensing my muscles, tripping a pulse in my temple that thumped in my head like a drum. Shutting my eyes tight, 1 tried to force the anger from me, but it had its effect. On a head full of blood the hard hat felt uncomfortably tight. I raised a hand to ease the pressure, took too deep a breath of icy air, and coughed. The hat tilted, slid quickly over my scalp, and fell. I made a grab for it, missed and began to swing a little as it fell.

  I sat rigid, waiting for disaster. The hat bounced and bounced again, skittering round the sloping ice before it fell into the hole, and then a silence followed until, seconds later, it hit the bottom of the third bulb. I'd have expected a splash, but it bounced repeatedly. The water at the bottom of the well must have frozen again ! The clattering could only have lasted a few seconds, but it seemed to go on and on as the steel hat ricocheted from one ice surface to another and the ice-bulb below me magnified the sound and funnelled it upwards through the neck. Sweating, even in the icy cold, I waited for it to end, but when it did, another sound remained .., a high-pitched hum that seemed to have no source, but vibrated like a tuning-fork .., and then an icy breath swirled round me and I knew and cowered as, with a soft whoosh, a huge icicle fell past. A tiny movement of my hand would have let me touch it as the white, shining projectile dropped slowly past, its forty-foot length seeming to fall in slow motion, to go on for ever. Miraculously it didn't touch me, but I watched it continue its fall, down into the neck, and through it like an arrow, not even touching the sides, then disappearing into blackness until it landed with an immense crash in the icy base of the bulb.

  Again noise crashed below me, reverberating upwards, and again the singing, tuning-fork sound began. I wrapped my arms around my unprotected head in an instinctive but futile gesture, and waited for death. For the next icicle wouldn't miss, and if the fall of the hat had been enough to unseat one of them, the monstrous impact of the ice-spear crashing down must surely loosen the others.

  The ringing tone seemed to last so long as to be a permanent part of the atmosphere, then slowly, it began to fade. And nothing had happened ! The forest of ice above had rung to the music of death, and yet had stilled! Slowly, disbelievingly, scarcely daring to move, I lowered my arms. The light of the lamp shone back at me from the great, shining walls; the silence was total. I let out a great, shuddering breath and cringed at the sound of it.

  'Harry, Harry!' Kelleher's voice crackled urgently from the walkie-talkie on my chest.

  I said, 'I'm okay.'

  'What happened?'

  'Icicle,' I whispered.

  'We'll bring you up.'

  I heard the words with a vast sense of relief. More than anything in the world I wanted to be lifted out of that ghastly place, to stand once more on something firm, to be free of the interminable menace of that battery of deadly, pointed, hanging spears above me. I knew that, even though they had not fallen, they must have been loosened by the long vibration; that the chance of a fall had immeasurably increased. I sat trembling in the chair, my mind whirling with both fear and a resurgence of fury.

  Fury.

  Fury that directed itself suddenly at the man who had done all this to me. The man who wanted Camp Hundred closed, and was on the edge of succeeding.

  Damn him!

  I gritted my teeth. 'Continue lowering.'

  Chapter 17

  'Harry?'

  'Continue, damn it!'

  A tiny jerk and I was off again, a little bundle of rage and revenge dangling at the end of a long, long cable, helpless in the space and cold, yet feeling suddenly like a hunter. I would reach the bottom, and if the answer lay there, I'd damn well find it.

  I was going to get that bastard!

  Into the neck, through it, and the light picked out another thick clump of icicles, slung like so many giant stilettos from beside the opening.

  'Kelleher?'

  'Yeah?' His voice was faint. 'Still okay?'

  'I'm into the bottom chamber. Keep lowering.'

  The chair slid slowly past the hanging ice fingers. Here, where the rising steam from the hose had been densest, there were more of them; they were larger, and thicker too, reaching more than half-way down the entire height of the chamber. They were almost more than I could bear, and I closed my eyes and counted slowly to two hundred before I opened them again. Then I sighed with relief. I was past, dropping steadily towards the base of the great cavern.

  The speaker crackled. 'Repeat?' I turned up the volume to maximum.

  'How far?' The words were almost indistinguishable.

  'Thirty feet,' I said, and turned the lamp beam downwards to study the base of the ice chamber.

  As the beam played across the surface of the frozen pool, it glittered back at me from ten thousand facets of shattered ice. The huge icicle, as it fell, had done several things: its initial impact had penetrated the ice layer and starred the smoothness of the whole sheet. New cracks radiated from its crash-point out towards the edges. It had also exploded into thousands of tiny, diamond-bright fragments that littered the entire surface, in an opaque, reflecting layer.

  'Hold it!' I said urge
ntly, and the downward movement stopped. An indecipherable mutter came from the speaker.

  I ignored it, and began to examine the surface yard by yard. I could see precious little even from where I sat; lower down it would be impossible to see anything through the ice.

  Looking for shapes, I saw only shadows as the ice played tricks with the light. The hard hat, though, was visible, a bright orange blob, apparently undamaged, lying to one side of the almost perfectly circular ice sheet.

  Minutes ticked by as my eyes swept slowly across every inch of the ice, searching for a dark shape that could be the body of a man. Nothing. I began again, aware that the cracks, white streaks down into the ice sheet, prevented my seeing large portions of the pool, and that the angle of sight reduced my chances. What was needed was what I dared not do : to set the bosun's chair swinging, to take me directly above other areas and to change the line of sight.

  Nothing. I stared down, angry and frustrated. Directly below me lay the ten-foot white star where the icicle had crashed down, where the thick ice had crazed like a car's windscreen when a stone hits it. I reasoned that anything falling through the neck must crash on to the ice where the icicle had crashed. However it fell through the chamber neck, gravity would see to that.

  'Lower me again,' I said into the handset. 'Stop when I tell you. Can you hear me?'

  The sounds that came back were not distinguishable as words any more, but the sequence and pattern told me my instructions were being repeated.

  I swung lower, down towards the centre of the star, trying not to think of it as it was : as the central spot of a target, where any crashing ice would fall directly on to me.

  'Stop.' I said it with careful clarity, but had to repeat it before movement ceased. I thought for a moment, and said slowly, 'One tap like this' - I rapped the microphone sharply, 'means lower. Two means stop. Three, start hauling me up. Understood?'

  A vague crackle.

  'Tap if you understand.'

  One tap.

  I tapped twice, waited, repeated it, and after a moment began to move downward. With my boots three feet from the ice, I tapped sharply twice, and stopped. Nice to know it worked!