Whiteout!

'Well, obviously that people aren't as efficient,'

'That's right. They're just about half as efficient. Half! And that's everybody. Officers, enlisted men, visiting scientists and engineers. Everybody, including you, Bowes, is at roughly fifty per cent of normal. Give you two instances. There was a guy up here last winter working on ice movement, a specialist in glaciers. He was also a hot shot bridge player. Not just good, he's a real top player, gets his name in the New York Times. He's sitting in the club one night playing a contract and he suddenly turns nine colours of green and red.'

Smales waited for me to ask why, and I obliged.

'Because he'd forgotten what trumps were, or if it was a no trump hand, and even whether he was trying to make a contract or defending. There's the dummy hand sitting there opposite, and he didn't even know that. His mind had gone blank. What is it, Bowes, is it carelessness? Now the other guy, he was an officer here. Civil engineer. Had been here six weeks and he'd lost the ability to add up, right? Two and two he could do, but fifty-eight and thirty-seven he had to get a pencil. Those coins in the reactor kettle, they're a nuisance, sure. And worse. If I knew who'd done it, I'd kick his ass from here to Fort Belvoir, Virginia. But I have to accept that things like that are gonna happen.'

'And the helicopter crash? And the man lost on the surface? And Doc Kirton?'

He sighed and ran his hand wearily across his forehead. Then he said, 'Okay. I got no explanations. But. There's been five years of operations up here. That was the first air crash. The first. It was bound to happen sooner or later. It makes me sick to my stomach, but statistically it was coming. Same with the guy lost on top. We got nearly three hundred men here. Five hundred sometimes. They live and work in the worst weather conditions in the world. It's a miracle it hasn't happened before. Can you accept that ?'

'I suppose so.' I couldn't accept it quite as readily as he apparently did, but there was obvious truth in what he said and I'd no wish to be needlessly offensive, especially as this was olive-branch time. 'And Kirton ?'

'Doc Kirton's death,' he said, 'is a mystery to me too. I don't know how he died, or why. Nor have I any way of finding out. For that you need an autopsy and we'll damn well have an autopsy as soon as I can get a pathologist flown in here, or Kirton's body flown out. Then, maybe, we'll know. Meantime, I refuse to speculate. Okay?'

'No,' I said. 'It's not okay. Not until you've had the pathologist’s report. If Kirton's death was natural, or some kind of accident, then of course you're right. If it wasn't, if he was killed, then - '

He said dangerously, 'You trying to tell me my duty?'

'It was you,' I said carefully, 'who said we're all working at fifty per cent.'

Smales grinned suddenly. 'Okay, okay,' he said. 'Maybe you got something. I get defensive about this place. I know it.'

I said, 'Did anybody dislike Kirton ?'

'Who knows? I doubt it. Kirton was a good guy. Look, I'm not an idiot, I'm not naive, I'm not smug, or I hope not. But when you raise the matter of my duties, you're on a tricky spot, because I'm not even sure what they are. Oh, there's administration, the rest of the paper work. Discipline, sure. Normal commander's routine. But beyond that there's the area of morale, of keeping this joint working, and that's a knife edge. Standard military discipline won't work up here. You've seen all the beards ?'

I nodded.

'Beards aren't allowed in the US Army. But a lot of the men get sore faces, real sore, if they shave every day. Other guys feel dirty if they don't. So I give the option. I give every little lift I can. If some eighteen-year-old kid wants to grow a beard, gets to feeling a little proud of it, that's fine by me. It helps him keep going. But it's all fragile. Nobody knows how the doc died, right? Maybe, here and there, people are doing some speculating. But what if I took your line? What if I say, "Look, this could be murder, fellas, but there's no way of knowing and no way of finding out." Then they all start looking over their shoulders and the place starts to fall apart. But if you want to know what I believe, I think it could only be some kind of accident. Why? Well, I'll tell you. Doc Kirton was a self-contained sort of guy. He stayed in his hospital and did his job, when there was work to do. Otherwise he played music, a little chess, and kept to himself. He wasn't the kind to make enemies. He was a good doctor and a good guy. Period. I haven't satisfied you, have I?' He smiled.

I smiled back. 'Not entirely.'

'Well, I'll tell you. This morning I thought you were paranoid, then I thought you were drunk. Now I don't think either of those things. But I do think you're wrong, and I can't afford to have suspicion flying round this camp.'

'So shut up?'

He looked at me. 'Not even that. You want to listen while people talk, you do that. You're not busy, you're wandering around, that's natural. I could stop you, but I won't. And I'm interested in every little thing that happens in this place, so you hear something, you tell me. Okay? Now come with me.'

We put on parkas and over-trousers and went out, along Main Street and into the kitchens. Smales went over to one of the cooks and said, 'I want a pork chop.'

The cook said, 'Major Smales, sir, you got the wrong guy. I'm the kosher cook.'

Smales laughed, apologized and tried another man, then returned with the chop in his hand, held in a pair of cooking tongs. 'Right, come on. Get the mitts on, the parka hood up and tied tight.'

We went along the trench to the escape hatch, and up the metal spiral staircase, and Smales pushed back the hatchcover bolts, then wound the handle that raised it. As the lid opened, wind and snow howled in. He looked down at me and shouted, 'Wind's forty miles an hour. Temperature's fifteen below. Keep your back to the wind.' Then he climbed out on to the icecap, and I followed, and we stood side by side, backs to the Arctic wind, feeling the hard snow crystals pattering continuously on the cloth of the parkas.

Smales raised the tongs, keeping his hand carefully in the shelter of his shoulder, the pork chop poked upwards into the wind. He bellowed, 'Start counting seconds. One, two, three...'

We shouted in unison. By the time we'd reached thirty, I could feel the cold beginning to reach my heels, even inside the felt boots. By fifty, my feet were beginning to be cold. At sixty, Smales waved me back to the hatch cover and climbed in after me, then wound the cover down again. The noise of wind and snow receded, then disappeared, and he handed me the pork chop. It was frozen solid. He said, 'That's what we live with. Don't forget it. It explains a lot.'

And he left me standing there, at the base of the stair, looking at an inch-thick pork chop that had become hard as a plank in sixty seconds. We hadn't moved more than six feet from the hatch-cover up there, and it had been an impressive glimpse of the implacably hostile environment in which Camp Hundred managed to exist. More than any words could have done, those sixty seconds underscored the nature of the job Barney Smales had to do.

After that I drifted round to the radio room. There'd been contact with the Swing during the morning and good news : it was under way again, but, having been held up by the white-out and two big crevasses that opened on the trail, it was still only thirty miles on, with seventy still to go. Several days would probably be needed yet before my TK.4 arrived at Camp Hundred.

It may have been auto-suggestion, following the talk, with Barney, or it may have been reaction to the morning's horror, but I certainly felt fifty per cent below normal. I was headachy, listless and generally out-of-sorts. It was one of those don't-feel-like times. I didn't feel like lying down and reading; didn't feel like going for some coffee; didn't feel anything much except uselessness and dissatisfaction; the Hundred Heebies, Doc Kirton had called it, and I decided I'd better snap out. I made myself march with reasonable briskness along to the reactor trench. Kelleher had said, 'Come back tomorrow' and it was tomorrow. I went in and could see at once from the faces that something was wrong. One of the technicians came over and handed me a radiation badge and I pinned it on automatically. There's a little piece of film inside which records radiation exposure and when it's developed they can tell if you've had too much. It's a bit late by then, of course, but the practice is universal.