Whiteout!

'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 compressed 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.

'What makes Hundred unique in Cold Regions Research installations,' Veron said, 'is that we can turn on heat and water in real quantity. So we have comfort. Heat, as you know, comes from the reactor, and with plenty of it, we can have all the water we need. This is the system that supplies it.'

'By melting snow, of course?'

'That's right. When Hundred opened, this well was started.

What happened was this: they used a jet of steam to bore a hole in the snow right here where we stand, and pumped the resulting water away. So there was this narrow circular hole running down. The melted snow was tested for pollution - radioactivity mainly -and then, when we were past the 1945 snow layer, Hiroshima and so on, they began to widen it.'

'The atom bombs contaminated snow here?'

'Oh yeah. They sure did. But below the 1945 layer, it's clean. Now, imagine the nozzle of a hose pipe, okay ? Well, that's what we got down there, only it's steam that's coming out. The steam melts snow, water gathers in the bottom, and a pump sucks it up. The nozzle rotates slowly, under the pressure of the steam -same principle as a lawn sprinkler, you know those things? - and that means you're cutting into the snow in a circle. You with me?'

'Ingenious,' I said.

'And simple. By regulating the steam pressure, you regulate how far into the snow you're cutting. Don't want to cut too far, for obvious reasons. So then, gradually, the nozzle has been lowered, to melt snow farther down, and what we have right under us here is a structure shaped like . . , well, like a giant onion maybe. Narrow neck, widening out gradually.'

I looked at the two pipes, one plastic, one flexible steel, that dropped down, from where we stood, into a black circle in the base of the huge ice chamber below. 'I don't see the nozzle, or the pump.'

Vernon smiled. 'This is only the top onion. One little problem we got with this well is that we can't cut the bulbs too wide, otherwise we might start undermining ourselves. So, to be safe, when the top one got down a hundred and fifty feet, we went through the whole process again, cutting a neck, then opening out another onion. So now we have a structure like three onions, one on top of the other, and the steam hose is turning four hundred and some feet down. Down there in the bottom of the third bulb there'll be around a hundred thousand gallons of water and the system's automatic. As the water's drawn up, the steam comes on and melts some more.'

'Very clever,' I said, meaning it.

He shrugged. 'Maybe a bit too clever. We don't want to sink too many wells at Hundred, because ice is plastic and who knows what might happen if it starts to fill its own empty spaces. So we stick with this one. But maintenance gets to be kind of tricky.'

'What kind of maintenance does it need?'

'Maybe I used the wrong word. Should have said inspection. We have to check that everything's okay; be sure the steam jet it cutting a circle and hasn't twisted so it's eating at the snow in one direction only.'

I blinked. 'You mean somebody really has to go down there?'

'Sure.'

'Tricky is an understatement, then. What you mean is dangerous.' I looked down the hole again. 'Are those things icicles?' From under the lip of the entry hole, monster spears of ice hung deep into the chamber like dragon's teeth.

'They're another little problem. Some of the steam floats up, and it either condenses or it melts snow on the way, and icicles form and keep growing.'

'And if one of those fell on somebody ?'

'We got to be careful, sure. In the second and third chambers they're even bigger, but we can't knock them down or they'd smash the equipment.'

'So who goes down ?'

Vernon said, 'A volunteer.'

'I can see why. Have you done it ?'

'Yeah, I have. Twice, as a matter of fact. I kind of liked it in a spooky sort of way. It's interesting. Down there you can see the layers of snow. Every year a new layer and the deeper you go, the more the layer's been compacted by pressure. You can read history down there. If you look real hard, you can see there's a thin black line in bulb two. That's when the volcano Krakatoa erupted.'

'But that was in Java! Did ash really get as far as this?'

He smiled. 'So the experts say. Must have been a hell of a bang, right ? Anyway, they reckon that around five hundred feet we'll be down to snow that fell in 1492 and the major says he's gonna bottle it and market Columbus water. Don't know if we'll make it, though. I reckon - personally, you understand

- that it's gotten too deep. They'll have to start another well.'

He switched off the wall lights, and I looked at him with a certain admiration. Nothing, I thought, would persuade me into the bosun's chair that hung from the well-head framework. 'Well, thanks,' I said.

'Where now?'

I was taken to the reactor trench where, understandably, they were rather too busy to want to entertain guests. Kelleher was already back at work, frowning and preoccupied, visibly tired with only two hours quick sleep behind him and delicate and highly responsible work to do. He looked up briefly and said,