Whiteout! Read online

  I blinked at him. It was so easy to duck reality, sitting there in the cheerful mess hall eating good hot food, but too often reality tapped you on the shoulder and looked deep in your eyes.

  Kirton said, 'So eat the steak and get to work.'

  They'd both gone and I was smoking a contemplative cigarette when Smales came in, loaded up a tray and joined me. It was the German accent this time. 'So, Englander,' he said. 'You enffy us zis efficiency, nicht wahr?'

  I grinned at him. 'I hope you're like us. Muddling through in the end.' The grin syndrome had got to me already, I thought. 'But it does seem like quite a little chapter of accidents.'

  'It does,' he agreed affably. 'And we have 'em I admit it, now and then. Good eggs.'

  'One minute you sound like Erich von Stroheim, the next like P. G. Wodehouse,' I said. 'Meantime, I'd like to know about the hovercraft.'

  'M'sieu, m'sieu,' he soothed. 'Ze Swing she leave today. Two days, zree, she is here.'

  'I prefer Bardot. What about the diesel?'

  'Don't you go neurotic on me! You play ping-pong?'

  'It's been known.'

  'Okay, so we'll have some healthy activity. Right after breakfast. You reckon that floating fan of yours will work up there?'

  'It's pretty good.'

  'It'll need to be.'

  I said, 'Before I start, it'd be nice to know where people stand. Don't you like the idea?'

  'I just like things proved, well proved, before I start loading lives aboard.'

  'It's pretty well proved.'

  He looked at me, eyes suddenly hard. 'So are diesels.'

  'Things are bad, then ?*

  'Fuel's contaminated. Some kind of build-up in the combustion chambers and feed lines.'

  I was about to ask what the contamination was, when a soldier appeared at the table, breathing hard, face red with exertion. He saluted. 'Major Smales, sir.'

  "What is it?'

  'Sir, it's the bulldozer, the one that sweeps the doorstep.'

  'Well?'

  'They found tracks, sir. In the overnight snow. Big tracks. Looks like there may be - ' he hesitated, then found the nerve to continue - 'there could be a polar bear in the camp, sir.' He watched Smales with nervous .eyes.

  'A polar bear?' Barney repeated softly, looking at his plate.

  'They're big tracks, sir.'

  Barney swivelled sweet eyes up to look at him. 'You got some kind of a bet on this?'

  The soldier swallowed. 'No, sir.'

  'Because if money's riding on this,' Barney said, 'you'll be shovelling snow till your ass falls off.'

  'Yes, sir. But it's true, Major. Those tracks, they come right in the tunnel entrance.'

  Barney nodded dismissively, pushed his plate away and said, 'Polar bears, yet!' in a stage Yiddish accent. Then he walked over to a wall installation and lifted off a microphone. A moment later his voice was booming out of a loudspeaker. 'Okay, now listen. This is the Commander. I got a report there's a polar bear down here.'

  Subdued laughter erupted at several tables and Smales looked round balefully. 'A real bear, this one, with a white fur coat. All right. Nobody leaves the hut he's in. Any man not in a hut gets inside fast and stays there pending new orders. If the bear's here, he's hungry. He's walked a hundred miles and you'll taste real good to him. I want a Polecat from the vehicle bay outside the mess hall on the double. Await further instructions.' He hung up the mike, returned to the table and shrugged on his parka.

  I asked, 'What exactly do you do now?'

  'You want to come, come.'

  We waited at the mess hall door until the Polecat's engine snarled up outside, then opened the door and took rapid steps across to safety behind metal doors. Smales said, 'Bear can't be here, he'd make for the mess hall.'

  'Has this happened before?'

  He shook his head. 'They saw tracks once, in Chance's time, the last commander. But nobody ever saw a bear. Meanwhile, we aren't exactly equipped for polar bears.' He told the driver to take us to the command hut. 'But if he's here, he's trouble. If he's standing between us and the door of my office, there's no way.'

  I said, 'Damn it, this is the army. You could shoot him.'

  Smales shook his head. 'We're not a fighting army. We're on Danish territory here; there are agreements, terms of use. We've only one stick that spits fire and it's on my office wall. If we can't get it, somebody's got to do battle with fire axes. But not me.'

  The driver turned. 'Trench entrance will be too narrow for the cat, sir.'

  'Turn her round,' Smales ordered, 'so the lights shine down the trench. Main beams. Blind the bastard if he's in there.'

  'Okay, sir.' The driver busied himself with the track levers, manoeuvring the little vehicle into position across Main Street. 'Can't see anything, sir.'

  'Right.' Smales put his hand on the door handle. 'If he's in here, at least we got him blocked.'

  The driver said, 'Want me to go, sir?'

  'So you can read what's on my desk?' Smales said. 'Not in a million years.'

  He slipped suddenly out of the cab and sprinted across the fifteen yards that separated us from the command hut, stood for a long few moments fumbling with the key, then slid inside, slamming the door. The driver and I both let our breath go at the same moment.

  Smales reappeared quickly and again sprinted for the Polecat. Safely back inside, he patted the rifle, an old-fashioned .303 wooden-stocked army weapon and said, 'This is what the Danish Government allows us. It was captured from Sitting Bull. I'm the only guy here old enough to remember how to use it. Now, let's look at that doorstep.'

  At the tunnel entrance one of the big, fifty-six-inch-track bulldozers stood snorting and thumping. As we got out, a corporal climbed down from the cab and pointed. Six deep prints, already partly filled, showed in the fresh snow that had blown in during the night beneath the shelter of the roof. Beyond the overhang, where there was more snow, no tracks were to be seen. The tunnel floor, where the snow had long ago been churned into dirty ice crystals, carried no tracks.

  'Think it's a bear, sir?' the corporal asked Smales.

  'How the hell do I know. I'm not an Eskimo tracker! But whatever made those tracks had big feet. So we've sure got to act like Mr Bear's inside here.'

  He turned and looked back along the deserted length of Main Street.

  'Perhaps,' I said, 'the bear came in here, went all the way along, and out the other end.'

  Smales turned to the corporal. 'You swept the step up there yet?'

  'No, sir.'

  'Okay. What we'll do, we'll start at the far end. If there are tracks going out, that's all jim-dandy. If not, we work our way right back here, checking trenches as we go.'

  'What do you want me to do, sir?'

  'Get back in the 'dozer,' Smales said, 'and stay right here. If we flush him out and he comes this way, you put a scare in him with the dozer, a real scare. But don't try to kill him, polar bears are getting kinda rare.'

  We climbed back into the Polecat and roared rapidly along Main Street to inspect the other ramp. No tracks showed in the smooth white slope of new snow. Smales and I looked at one another. Tracks leading into Camp Hundred, no tracks leading out; if a polar bear had made the tracks, he was in among us.

  The search began. There were seventeen trenches to examine, most of them constructed in the same fashion. They had been cut originally with Peters snow-ploughs, the Swiss machines which throw snow out of a kind of chimney and pile it to one side. Each time the plough had made a pass, it had cut deeper and piled the snow higher. When the trenches were thirty feet deep, they had simply been roofed over with curved corrugated steel and snow heaped on top. Where each trench connected with Main Street, a wall of snow bricks had been built to narrow the entrance. Some of the walls had doors in them, others were merely arched openings, depending on the use made of the trench. Storage tunnels, by and large, could be locked. The ones holding living quarters, laboratory huts and recreation facilities remained open.
Most trenches had one additional refinement, an escape stair at the far end so that in case of fire or some other disaster, the men could climb out through a hatch on to the icecap outside. If you could call that escape.

  Where trench doors were locked, Smales didn't bother opening them. Where the entrances stood open, he'd repeat the process he had followed at the Command tunnel and wait until the Polecat's lights were glaring inside before peering cautiously round the corner of the snow wall. Then he'd go in. A minute later, maybe two minutes later, he'd reappear, shake his head, and wave the Polecat on to the next trench. The minutes he spent in the trenches were long minutes, even to me, secure, warm and safe inside the Polecat. What they must have seemed like to him, I can't imagine, but as an exhibition of cold courage, what Barney Smales was doing was impressive. Oh, he had the gun, right enough, but polar bears are white, and so were the tunnel walls, and there were shadows and bright reflections and piles of things the bear could have been behind, and the animal would have the faster reflexes.

  He worked his way doggedly along the length of Main Street, finding nothing. Each time he came out of a trench he'd shake his head and I'd sigh with relief and the driver would move the Polecat along. One tunnel he didn't even approach. It housed the six bodies and was locked. Finally we were back where we started, by the bulldozer. There was only one tunnel left now, a few yards in from the bottom of the ramp, with the words 'Reserve Fuel Store' in stencilled paint on the wooden door. I saw Smales glance at it, then glance again and finally walk over and push the door. It swung open and he looked inside, then came out and waved his arm. I climbed out of the Polecat and joined him. 'What do you make of that?' he said.

  I looked, then went inside, stepping over the coaming. This was one of the shorter trenches, no more than thirty yards long and on two levels. The floor of the rear half of the tunnel had been cut a couple of feet deeper to accommodate two of those big neoprene-plastic fuel tanks that look a little like very big black rubber dinghies. But these two no longer looked like that, indeed were barely visible in the huge pool of diesel oil that had leaked out of them and now lay in a dark lake that rose half-way up the two-foot sides. Where the neoprene of the collapsed flexible tanks was visible above the oil, I could see slashes in the plastic. I pointed and Smales said, 'Yeah, I saw.'

  'Would a bear do that?'

  'A zoologist I'm not. But nobody else would, that's for sure.' He was silent for a moment, then said, 'There's forty thousand gallons right there.'

  I'd been looking at the slashes and thinking about the claws that could have made them and the strength of the beast. Now I looked at Smales and said, 'This oil can't be used?'

  He nodded. 'Damn right.'

  'So you're short of oil?'

  'Let's just say,' Smales said, 'that the way things stand right now, the oil we got is six whits more precious than rubies . . .

  Chapter 4

  For Smales there were now urgent things to be done, the most important being a set of calculations on fuel supplies and consumption rates. He dismissed the Polecat, and told the bulldozer driver to continue sweeping the doorstep and marched off towards the command trench. I, on the other hand, had nothing at all to do. Remembering Dr Kirton's invitation, I strolled towards the hospital trench. I'd just gone inside when Barney's voice came over the loudspeaker to say that all personnel could now move about freely, and should resume their duties. The bear had done some damage, but was not in Camp Hundred. All the same, caution was to be exercised, and if there was any further damage, it must be reported immediately.

  Kirton raised his eyebrows. 'You hear what Pappa Bear did?'

  'Yes. He ripped open two of the fuel tanks.'

  Kirton whistled. 'We got problems. Oh well, they're not mine and they're not yours. Not yet. Coffee?'

  'Thanks.'

  'Cream or straight ? Bach or Mozart ?'

  I said, 'I'll take the coffee straight and leave the music to you.'

  Kirton was big, bulky and gave an initial impression of clumsiness ; it was belied by the precision of his movements. Just pouring coffee and putting on a record, he showed surgical sure-ness and dexterity. My records tend to have scratchy accidents. I thought enviously that all his would stay perfect.

  'We'll soothe ourselves,' he said. 'See if you know this.'

  As it happened, I did. I'd known a girl once who was nuts about that piece. I said, 'Albinoni. The adagio for violin and organ.' I settled back in my chair, but I wasn't really listening. Events were totting themselves up in my mind. There was the bear, and the fuel tanks. Yesterday: the coins in the reactor and the contaminated fuel that had stopped one diesel generator. Also yesterday, there was the failure of the landing-strip lights. Quite a list. I sipped my coffee and looked at Kirton, who sat with his eyes closed, looking rapt. But he must have been thinking, too, because as the Albinoni ended he said, 'You sure brought a jinx up here.'

  'Blame me if you like. We call our jinxes gremlins."

  'So you sure brought a gremlin.'

  I said, 'No, the sod was here. While you were having all the accidents, I was happy, ignorant and far away. Tell me, is this place unlucky ?'

  He shook his head. 'No, it's not. Or it wasn't. Funny thing, they always reckoned this was a real good-luck operation. They built it without losing a man. Not even a serious injury. Then a few years with a safety record damn near perfect. It's all in the last two weeks.'

  I said, 'Tell me I'm mad if you like, but could any of this be deliberate?'

  He looked a bit surprised, and then smiled. 'You mean sabotage?'

  'Well, could it?'

  'Not a chance. Sabotage anything up here and you sabotage yourself. If the machines stop working in a long bad weather phase, people are gonna die. The guy would have to be psychotic'

  'You said last night everybody's a little mad.'

  'A little maybe. But nobody's that crazy.' He grinned. 'Except, er . . , now look, Mr Bowes, you seen your shrink lately?'

  I said, 'I Haven’t got a shrink.'

  'No? Well, how about if I read my shrink books and then you come and tell me all about your father? Listen, what you got is the first, faint stirrings of what's known to science as the Hundred Heebies. It's all too complex here for our poor puny minds. Now finish your coffee and the doctor will take you for a nice walk.'

  'Where do you want to walk to ?'

  'I want to see what the bear did.'

  We dressed and walked down Main Street to the fuel trench and Kirton looked at the ripped neoprene and said, 'He's got muscle, that old bear!'

  I nodded. I was thinking that the animal's behaviour had been pretty strange, even by the doubtless eccentric standards of hungry bears. Camp Hundred was full of food. Looked at from a hungry bear's point of view, there were a lot of comestibles walking round on two legs, never mind all the orthodox grub in the food stores. So why had he left all the food alone and just slashed the tanks ? 'He certainly seems,' I said, 'to have been cross about something. And not very hungry, either, unless he enjoys drinking diesel oil.'

  'Yeah.' Kirton gave me a glance, then said, 'I wonder . . .' He turned, crossed to the door and swung it closed. 'Look at this. He got food all right.'

  The floor behind the door was littered with ripped-up tinfoil and torn plastic. I asked what it was.

  'Emergency rations,' Kirton said. 'There’s a pack in all the trenches with doors, just in case somebody gets locked in. Hangs on the back of the door.'

  'Clever old bear, then,' I said. 'I suppose the food's wrapped in the plastic?'

  'No problem with claws like his. You and I break our nails trying to open plastic packages, but he sure wouldn't have any trouble.'

  'No. But he'd have trouble finding food in the first place, unless he could smell it.'

  He said, 'You're doing that thing again, you know. He'll have a big, sensitive, black nose, that old bear, and there'll be some residual smell on the outside of the pack.' Kirton bent and picked up a chunk of some kind of com
pressed cake from the floor. It still had shreds of foil sticking to it and he looked at it reflectively. 'Gnawed by a polar bear, how about that?'

  I said, 'He's certainly a light eater. He walks a hundred miles, has some fruit cake and a couple of bars of chocolate, and goes away.'

  Kirton rubbed at his moustache as he looked at me. 'Tell you what I'll do. I'll take some of this junk and do some microscope work. If the bear dined here, there's gonna be saliva on these things, and saliva means bacteria. Maybe I could do a paper on it, how about that ? Saliva analysis of - damn it, what's its Latin name?'

  'I don't know. Ursus something.'

  'Yeah, well, Saliva Analysis of Ursus something by Joseph Kirton MD, etc. That's one nobody's done before.'

  Perhaps he was right. He knew a lot more about the Arctic than I did, he knew the people here, above all he knew the feel of the place. So if Kirton found my suspicions merely amusing, perhaps I'd better forget about them. A lifetime's experience confirmed that accidents came in batches; there'd been gremlins a-plenty round the TK4 Mark One, all of them apparently inexplicable until the reason was finally discovered and we found that this gunge or that scrobbler hadn't been allowed for.

  He moved off, holding the ripped remnants of the emergency food pack in cupped hands. I glanced at my watch. It was after eleven. Outside the wind whistled and snow seemed to be blowing in several directions at once between the ice walls at the sides of the ramp. Feeling vaguely useless I was about to amble after him when a voice said 'Sir' and I turned to face a man with stripes on his parka who introduced himself as Sergeant Vernon and said Major Smales had instructed him to give Mr Bowes the ten-dollar tour of Camp Hundred, if Mr Bowes would like that. I said Mr Bowes would like it very much and he said it was his pleasure, sir, and we could start with the water well, which I'd probably find interesting. The well was in a trench almost at the centre of Hundred, away from the command hut, next to the mess hall, and not far from Kirton's hospital trench. At first sight, it wasn't impressive, just a four-foot-high circle of corrugated steel with a metal framework above it and a couple of pipes running from it up to the wall. I looked over the edge of the barrier and saw a dark hole. Then Sergeant Vernon flicked on a switch and the hole suddenly turned brilliantly white and beneath me appeared an astonishingly beautiful sight. The hole was only about four feet in diameter but it was very deep, and obviously widened a good deal underneath the narrow entrance.