Whiteout!

I asked Herschel how the pipe was to be cleaned. 'They're only using a hundred and ten feet,' he said.

'They're gonna thread a line down the pipe, then pull clean cloth through like cleaning a rifle barrel, then wash it out with water melted from snow.

'In weather like that?' I said.

'They'll cut snow blocks from the walls with chain saws and melt the blocks,' he said. 'That part shouldn't be bad. Take a while to sink the well, though, and pump the water away.' He was frowning. I said, 'It's serious now, isn't it?'

He thought about it. 'Too near the margins. A whole lot too near. There's a generator out and another running rough. That leaves one serviceable generator and the whole place running off it. Anything happens to that. . .'

Foster said, 'Reckon it'd close the Camp, sir?'

'It might,' Herschel said. 'And it'd be mighty uncomfortable in there. They're protected from winds, right enough. But the water system would go out fast without heating. The research programme would be finished for the winter. Unless they can get that reactor going real soon. Somebody's going to be making a big decision. There's three hundred guys up there. Oh, sure, they got fuel and food. They can sit all day round carry-stoves melting snow, they won't die exactly, but there won't be much left of the Camp Hundred operation.'

All our conversations over the next thirty-six hours, while the storm raged on, remained on the same gloomy level, becoming less frequent and more desultory as time went on. Reports from Camp Hundred, when they came in, were not particularly reassuring. The well was being sunk, but the needs of the Camp itself made the heat requirements of the pressure steam hose just one of many competing factors. If they switched off everything and concentrated on cutting the well, there wouldn't be enough heat to keep the water pipes from freezing. The steam, therefore, was being used in short bursts, and the progress on the new well was slow. There was a good deal of talk between Cohen and Herschel about the possibility of having a couple of small standby generators flown up from Thule Air Base and parachuted down to Camp Hundred, but it was just talk ; the idea wasn't practical. In that hellish blizzard on the icecap, the aircraft's crew would never see Hundred, let alone hit it. And if by some miracle they did drop the generators somewhere near, it was unlikely that the people at Hundred would be able to see the drop, or recover them. They'd only be able to go out in tractors; visibility, minimal anyway, would be nil through glass; in any case, the blizzard would cover the machinery in snow in a few minutes. I asked whether the tractor engines couldn't be harnessed for power generation, but the answer was no.

'They're pulling machines,' Herschel said. 'With the standard Caterpillar you can draw off power, but not these.' He forced a wry grin. 'We eliminated all that. We're so smart. We got a reactor!'

There was some talk, too, about flying an aircraft in when the weather dropped a little, but it was wild talk. All the weather prognostications were bad, though the lethal severity of the storm might ease a little in a few hours. There was a possibility that the winds on the cap might actually drop low enough to be on the Beaufort Scale within twenty-four hours but no possibility at all of flying weather. I learned that flying up to the cap has, in any case, its own particular additional dangers. A standard compass is all but useless, because when you're in Northern Greenland, magnetic North lies to the west and its influence on the needle is erratic. Then there's the little matter of altimeter readings, which are thoroughly inaccurate over deep snow, because the electronic impulses beamed at the ground penetrate the snow to indeterminate depths. In fact, it's pretty well impossible to judge altitude or distance with any accuracy. And on top of all that, sudden weather changes can blot out visibility entirely, or make sky and ground the same shade of grey or white, so that it's impossible to distinguish one from the other and there's no way to tell up from down.

'What it comes down to,' Cohen said wearily, 'is that flying's out, and I mean out, unless the pilot can see both the Trail and the horizon the whole damn way.'

'It also means,' Herschel said grimly, 'that the whole shebang could be finished for want of a two-thousand-pound payload.'

'Two thousand?' I said, as an idea struck me. From what I'd seen of those big generators up at Camp Hundred, they weighed a lot more than two thousand pounds.

Cohen nodded. 'Yeah. It's a smallermodel, lower output, too-'

Isaid, 'That weight's okay in the TK4.'

They looked hard at me and I felt a little like a doorstep salesman. So I behaved like one and started on the facts and figures. 'Furthermore,' I added finally, 'forty-knot winds won't hold me back. Nor will snow.'

They looked at one another. Herschel said, 'Two and a half thousand total payload, right?'

'Yes. Two thousand for the generator. Two hundred more for me and all the heavy clothing. There's room,' I said, 'for just one more inside. Ting, ting.'

Cohen and Herschel looked at me in puzzlement. 'English joke,' I said. 'Not very good. But the TK4's not an English joke, and she's very good indeed.'

They weren't used to light, fast machinery up there. Herschel had told me that Barney Smales believed in masses of steel and lots of power and so, basically, did all of them, probably rightly. The principle of meeting powerful onslaughts with powerful resistance is obvious sense, and the theory that says if you put a flyweight in the ring with a heavyweight, he may run away successfully for a while, but sooner or later, he'll be flattened, is also correct, almost all the time. But I was confident in the TK4. The run down to Belvoir had been so efficient that I had very little doubt of her ability to cruise back again in the right conditions. All I needed was a weather slot, about three hours long, and finally we got it. The decision to take the generator meant, of course, that other things must be left behind. Three, in fact: two human and one neoprene, and the final decision was not made by us, or by Cohen, but by Barney Smales on the radio from Hundred. The radio contact was a lot worse now. The signal quality seemed to bear no relation to weather conditions. During the worst of the storm, they'd come over sharp and clear, yet when the weather was easing, the contact was weak and loaded with mush. Still, it was enough for us to hear. At Hundred the short length of neoprene had been cleaned, more or less satisfactorily, and would suffice. But the diesel fitters, striving to cannibalize two unsatisfactory machines and assemble one good one, were having a very hard time. Barney wanted the generator. 'And George Herschel,' he said.

'Foster and Scott can wait at Belvoir.'

'Sorry,' I said. 'I'm bringing Scott.'

There was a pause. Then he said flatly, 'Bring Herschel, Mi Bowes. That's an order.'

'Which I'm disobeying,' I said. 'I want an experienced driver's eyes. I don't want to wander off the Trail. I'm bringing Scott or I'm not coming.'

He didn't like it. From that moment, I rather think he didn't like anything I did, but he was wrong and T, fortunately, wasn't in his army. Cohen and Herschel didn't like it very much, either, but they had the sense, and the grace, to accept my reasons. What they didn't like was my deliberate disobedience of direct orders.