Whiteout!

I did find something, though, before I left the hospital. The torn lumps of tinfoil and plastic wrapping from the emergency rations lay discarded in a waste basket by his desk. But there was nothing else: no pad with notes on it, no torn-up scraps of paper in the waste basket. So Kirton had looked and found nothing to interest him? It could only be that. Nothing worthy of remark, nothing to make notes about. The whole thing negative. But then I thought: Nothing? No bacteria? Yet the morning before, when he'd said he'd use his microscope, he'd said also that if the bear had eaten the stuff, there'd be saliva and therefore bacteria. I collected the wrappings, found an envelope, put them inside and tucked them in my pocket. They were certainly no use to me, but if I left them, they'd be thrown out. I left, aware that I was jumping to conclusions and that some of them were pretty wild.

Then I collected the two fat volumes of the TK4 maintenance manual, took them along to the tractor shed and introduced myself to the top sergeant there, a bulky cigar-smoker called Reilly. He looked at me and the manuals, took the cigar from his mouth, spat out a flake of tobacco and said, 'This all we get?'

'The principle is that it's all you need,' I said.

'Jesus!' he said. 'No project engineer. Not even a coupla lectures?'

I explained about the TK4 and its great simplicity. It was designed on the basis that any bunch of competent mechanics with reasonable workshop facilities could do all that was necessary by way of repairs, servicing and maintenance.

Reilly said, 'Yeah?' on a rising note, full of disbelief.

I smiled. 'If you buy the TK4 - '

'I'm not buying, son.'

'If the army buys, then?' He nodded. 'If that happens, naturally we'll send a whole crew over to see her through the first operations. But the idea of the trials is to see how well it can be operated without all that. We tried it in Canada and it worked pretty well.'

Reilly grinned behind the cigar. 'This ain't Canada, son.'

I said, 'But that's the idea.'

He hefted the manuals, about six pounds of assorted paper, and said, 'And this here's a little bedtime reading?'

'I'm afraid so.'

Reilly looked at me out of small blue eyes. 'Answer me a question, willya? If this TK4 of yours goes over a guy, what's it do?'

I said soberly, 'He'd be a bit battered by the air. The rubber skirts might scrape some skin off. It wouldn't kill him, if that's what you mean.'

'That's what I mean. I just been clearing the doc offa them tracks.'

He was already turning away. 'Don't worry, son, I'll read the books.'

I said quickly, 'Who found Doc Kirton ?'

He turned back. 'I did. So?'

'You were driving?'

'Right.'

'And the bear tracks. Who found those?'

He took a step towards me, almost aggressively.

'Why you wanna know?'

'I wondered, that's all.'

He said, 'Kid name of Hansen.'

'He's got a nasal polyp,' I said.

'Had. The doc fixed it yesterday. Just before . . .' he stopped. I said, 'Yes, I know,' and walked away, but I could feel his eyes on my back. Because I was an interloper? Or for some other reason?

As I went in to lunch, Barney Smales was leaving the mess hall. He stopped and looked at me thoughtfully, then said, 'When you've eaten, come and talk to me, huh?'

'No time like the present."

He said, 'Not now. The food's necessary. Eat first.'

I wasn't hungry, but I ate a little, then went to the command hut. Smales took me into his office and closed the door. He was frowning, but his tone was friendly enough as he said, 'Are you normally this suspicious?'

I said, 'I'm renowned for my sunny outlook.'

'You are? I'd take convincing. Listen to me a minute, Bowes. When you run a place like this, there's plenty of problems. They come up all the time. Old problems, new problems, recurrent problems. You come in category two. You're a new problem and I want to know what's eating you.'

I said, 'It simply seems to me that too many dangerous things have been happening for it all to be coincidence.'

'And you think maybe there's murder, sabotage, the whole works ?'

'I began to wonder.'

He sat back in his chair, toying with a ruler from his desk, then said, surprisingly, 'I can see how you might think it.'

'I'm relieved to hear it.

'But I don't think it.'

'I gathered that.'

'So what I want to do is go over it with you, right? Tell you what I think and why I think it. What's the first one, the runway lights?'

'If you take them in sequence, yes.'

'Okay. Well, this morning I went out there in a Weasel with Herschel and two electricians and we had a look at the cables. Wanna know what we found?'

'Of course.'

'They'd been chewed. Not in just one place, either. There were more than forty places. Damn foxes just keep on chewing. Sooner or later, there's a short circuit and bang go the lights. We renew those cables, we have to, around every six months. That satisfy?'

I said, 'Not entirely, no. The short circuit happened at the exact moment a plane was coming in. A plane with you in it. And Kelleher.'

'Yeah. Okay. But it was the first plane in two weeks, right? Two weeks since the lights were used.'

I wasn't satisfied. 'But the lights did go on. It was when the plane was coming in that they failed.'

'That's right. That's why I inspected the cables myself. Because I'm not as green and trusting as you think I am. But you get all the teeth marks and you get a dead fox - '

'Did you?'

'Oh, sure. There he was, right beside the cable. You see, Mr Bowes?'

'I do now.'

'Okay, next problem's the diesel generator, right?'

'Certainly.'

'And you say to yourself, how in hell did the fuel get contaminated? Well, I can't tell you.'

'But. Therem a but?'

He laughed. 'Sure there is. It happens up here. Fuel comes in to Thule by tanker. It's pumped ashore into storage tanks. Then when they bring it up here, it's pumped out again into neoprene. Then it's brought up here and stored, also in neoprene. But rubber pipes are used in pumping, and rubber can go solid and crack in bad cold. Pieces flake off the inside of the pipe and get in the fuel. It's happened with Swing-haul tractors, too. Just one of the hazards.'

'It's not as convincing as the dead fox.'

'I can see I got to work on you, Sherlock. Let's put it this way. It's happened a few times at Thule, and at Belvoir, and on the Trail up here. And here. We know this one. It's one of the standing hazards.'

I shrugged and moved on. 'The coins in the reactor?'

'Carelessness. That's what Kelleher says and I believe it. Tell you why I believe it, too. Not because we had that problem before. We haven't. But because carelessness and lack of concentration are standard here. You're not the man you were three or four days ago and neither am I. You're affected by the altitude, by claustrophobia; you resent the necessity to put heavy clothing on to go to the can.'

I shook my head. 'There's a good reason. I can understand it well enough.'

'Okay,' he said. 'But you resent it. You wish you didn't have to do it. It's a goddam drag. There's a million things. We eat a lot but we get no proper exercise. There's no sun, no space, damn little privacy. We don't take enough fluid and dehydration's a constant hazard, so don't forget to drink your milk. People don't sleep well here. There's no visible difference between night and day down here - or up on the cap, for that matter, through the winter darkness. We've had all the tests done. Doctors, shrinks, efficiency people. Know what they found ?'