I stumbled over my unfastened bootlaces, swore, and moved slowly forward again. The stumble must have thrown me slightly off course, because instead of reaching the door directly, I came first to the corner of the ice wall and had to work my way by touch.
Why was I in darkness anyway?
Then an icy little thought struck me. The door wasn't normally closed. I should have been able to see the lights of Main Street outside! I shouldn't be in darkness at all! I remembered the generator trouble, and thought that perhaps the lights were off as a precaution, and it was the middle of the night, with nobody moving about.
All the same, when my fumbling fingers found the door, it was locked. For long minutes, I attacked that damned door. I tried to pull it, to push it; I swung my weight against it, hauled on the handle as hard as I could. I shouted, screamed and kicked, with no result at all, except that I became hoarse with shouting and my fists grew sore with banging. Nobody heard me. There would be nobody to hear me, not at that hour when almost everybody at Camp Hundred would be soundly asleep and those who weren't, the men on duty, would be warm inside their various huts and staying there. I looked at my watch, grateful for the little points of luminosity, and discovered it was three-twenty, twenty minutes since I had awakened, and with more than three hours to go before I could reasonably expect some passer-by to hear me. And by God, but it was cold. My clothes weren't properly fastened either, which didn't help; there were plenty of little places where the chill air was getting at my unprotected skin, and though in the tunnel that was scarcely dangerous, it was most certainly damned uncomfortable. I spent the next few minutes putting myself in some sort of order, straightening wrinkles and tucking myself in, while I thought about the smoke and where it had come from. The obvious source was a fire somewhere in my part of the hut, but no fire had been visible. There was no red glow, no pinpoint of flickering light to suggest burning, and surely in twenty minutes a fire in a wooden hut would have spread? Or perhaps gone out? Yes, that was more likely. Certainly I was going to get very cold and uncomfortable standing where I was for three hours and more. I made my way back to the hut, more confident now in the dark, found the doorknob and opened it. My nostrils told me instantly that the place was still full of fumes and the small whiff I got set me coughing again. My lungs felt bruised, as though somebody had stamped on them, and I closed the door quickly. I couldn't use the hut, that was certain. I'd had a faint, crazy idea that if I could see what was burning I could perhaps dash in and pull it out to the trench, but that was certainly impossible. I felt my way along the side of the hut to the second wooden building, deeper in the trench. That was also a dormitory hut and the two weren't connected so there should be no fumes, and there ought to be beds in there, even if there were no blankets.
But even before I reached it, I'd changed my mind. If I'd been thinking with reasonable clarity, the idea of going into the other hut for the night ought to have been rejected, because both sense and duty told me that any kind of fire in Camp Hundred, even one I couldn't see, was a matter of importance and potential danger. And, anyway, when I did find the door of the second hut, it was locked. I'd been hiding away from the thought, but now there was no alternative. It was clear what I must do. All too clear. Clear and frightening. Because the only way out of that trench was through the escape hatch, up on to the icecap.
Chapter 9
It had to be done; I knew it, but still I hesitated. The last time, indeed the only time I had been out through an escape hatch on to the surface, there had been that bloodcurdling demonstration from Smales of how to deep-freeze a pork chop. This time, I could be the pork chop, as Lieutenant Foster's cousin had been. And Charlie Foster was still up there somewhere, frozen meat now, his body not recovered and by now probably so well entombed in snow it would never be found. While I hesitated, I tried to think. On the surface there would be a line of escape hatches, one at the end of most of the trenches, and the line would be parallel to Main Street. All right, but would I see them ? Hours earlier, when I had piloted TK4 into Hundred, the weather break was already ending, the wind rising. Now there was no way of knowing what was happening up there.
I remember the sound my throat gave as I swallowed, standing at the foot of the spiral stair, holding on to the handrail. One part of my mind was still telling me to wait until morning, until I was found, and the other, which had made the decision and should have been prepared to implement it, was wavering in face of what lay ahead. Then, in some extraordinary way, my feet began to climb and I was committed ; there was no deliberate order from brain to foot, it just happened, and I was climbing in the dark up that steel stair, feeling my way ahead, stopping when my up-stretched hand had touched the hatch cover to fumble for the winding wheel.
A few turns and it was open and at least there was a little light. Not much, for any moon or star there may have been was totally obscured, but where the world consists entirely of white snow, it is never-wholly dark. As I poked my head up through the hatch, that faint light was the only friendly thing. The Arctic wind scoured across the snowfield, whistling madly, driving hard snow crystals before it like a sand-blaster. And it was wickedly cold. I paused there to draw the parka close about my face, turning the back of my head to the wind, and once that was done, tried to find landmarks, or some way of guiding myself. I knew there were guide lines out there. Charlie Foster had died because he failed to keep hold of one. But no guide lines were visible; almost nothing was visible in the impenetrable screen of flying snow.
I made myself stand, pointed my right shoulder at where I believed Main Street to be, and took five careful paces, then glanced back. The open hatch was still visible, but my footmarks were already indistinct, blown away, or filling. I took five more, then another five. Now I could no longer see the hatch cover. Fifteen paces and already I was alone, without landmarks, with nothing to hang on to but a vague sense of direction. Five more paces, one foot placed carefully in front of the other, pause, and a glance back to see the snow flying off my footmarks. I swallowed again and forced myself to move. 1 had calculated that between thirty and forty yards should separate the hatches, but after fifty paces there was still no sign of one. Even that was proof of nothing. Not every trench had an escape hatch. Most had, but not all. So the distance between them might be sixty to eighty yards, even a hundred and twenty if I was bloody unlucky, and I was feeling bloody unlucky. I knew only one thing with certainty: that Main Street, far beneath the surface, lay somewhere to my right, and the knowledge was scant comfort because the ramp down to Main Street lay at least a quarter of a mile away and my chances of finding it were remote indeed. Long before I'd walked a quarter-mile, I'd have wandered, or been blown, far off course. Anxiously, five paces at a time, I edged forward, trying to line up the new five with the last five. Every step I counted, and at seventy the relief of seeing something sticking out of the snow was enough to make my whole body tremble. It was an escape hatch, all right, but even the way I found it was frightening, for it was to my right and very faint and I'd almost missed it. And if I had missed it .., well, then it would have been a long, despairing walk to death.