Whiteout!

'Couldn't you,' I'd asked Cohen, 'have brought them out on the Swing?'

He'd shaken his head: 'Camp Hundred's big and the bodies are sealed off in a tunnel. It's an uncomfortable situation, but it's stable. They look at the closed door and think what's behind it, sure they do. But think of that Swing. Only thirty guys, and one of the wanigans is a hearse. No, brother, you couldn't risk the damage to morale.'

It was a shuddery thought that the aircraft that flew up to Camp Hundred carrying Smales and me would be an empty hearse, on its way to collect the bodies.

No less unnerving was the second tragedy, which had happened the day after the helo crash. A man had got lost in a snowstorm and vanished. He'd apparently been on his way back to the camp from a surface hut only three hundred yards away, when a sudden snowstorm had come down. 'Christ knows why!'

Cohen had said angrily. 'There was a guidance line for the guy to move along. You get caught in a bad phase, you clip your belt to the guide line and keep going. That's regulations. I've done it; everybody's done it. But. ..'

But...There was always a but. But meant the weather, or the ice, the wind, or the cold, any of the eternal omnipresent hazards, the dangers that never relented when man was busy surviving in an environment of total hostility. There was so much joking, but only on the surface; below, never forgotten, was the knowledge that only technology and determination, only complete obedience to a carefully charted system of precautions, made life possible at all. For two weeks now Camp Hundred had been cut off, even from radio communication; for two weeks the bodies had been lying there; for two weeks the feelings of claustrophobia and loneliness must have been growing. Daylight was down to less than five hours out of twenty-four and shortening fast. The sense of adventure I had felt the night before had begun to evaporate already.

But next morning the run down to the big Thule base was quick and easy. In the hangar, I checked the TK4 and made sure all the spares were loaded. Then I climbed aboard and started the engines. No problems; she'd stood the trip well. I stopped the engines and went across to Fraser's office. Fraser, for the moment, wasn't there. I helped myself to coffee and sat looking at his copy of Time for a while, then the door opened and Fraser and another man came in.

'Hi,' Fraser said. 'Got me another visitor here. Mr Bowes, meet George Kelleher.' I stood up and shook hands. Kelleher was a big, loosely-built man with a slightly mournful expression. 'Mr Bowes,' Fraser went on, 'drives the hovercraft over there. Mr Kelleher's a nuclear engineer.'

Kelleher said, 'You taking that machine to Hundred?'

'That's the idea.'

He looked doubtful. 'Those things stable in lateral winds?'

'Up to a point.'

Fraser said, 'We've got a tractor and a wanigan standing by. And the mobile crane.'

'If I can,' I said, 'I'd like to run it up to Camp Belvoir myself. If the forecast is - '

'I warned you about forecasts,' Fraser said.

'All the same.'

'Yeah. Well, it's your neck, pal. I just checked it out and you should be okay. Prognostication Phase One for the next three hours, if you want to believe it. That's wind speeds up to thirty-four miles an hour. Shouldn't be that strong, but...'

'Direction?'

'Off the cap. Near enough due east.'

'Headwinds, then,' I said. 'Perfect.'

Fraser turned to Kelleher. 'Seems you've got a choice. There's the Weasel, or you can ride with Mr Bowes.'

Kelleher pointed to the TK4. 'What's it smell of?'

'Paint, mainly,' I said. 'A little oil.'

'You sure?'

'More or less.'

'I'll come with you. These BO machines they got up here make me sick to my stomach. These guys do a six-month stretch up here. They got everything. They got Scotch and they got candy bars, movies, you name it. But they never heard of soap.'

I nosed the TK4 out carefully, following the Weasel round the perimeter to the cut-off track for Camp Belvoir . It was full daylight now, and just for a moment a little beam of sunlight pierced the grey overcast. On the runway a flight of Phantoms suddenly hurled themselves forward then vertically up; black smoke-rings blasted from their after-burners to hang for a second or two until the vortex of following turbulence wiped them away.

The Weasel led me gently away from the base, on to the road to Belvoir, then accelerated up to about thirty-five miles an hour. I let him go for a while before I increased revolutions on the TK4's little twin turbo props. This kind of run, in these conditions, wasn't much different from theCanadatrials. But I was very conscious that this wasn'tCanada, that theGreenlandweather is just about the most capricious and punishing in the world and that, from now on, I would have to operate at ever-greater altitudes and in ever-worsening conditions. When Kelleher had asked me about stability in lateral winds, he'd put his finger on the whole point of the TK4. A hovercraft skims over a surface with hardly any friction. That's their great advantage, but it's also their weakness. Without friction, naturally there's no grip, so a sudden sideways blow can bang you badly off course. If you're running over big areas of water or snow, that may not matter much; it's a bit different if you're suddenly going to be smashed into a wall of rock or over a precipice.

The problem can never be wholly solved. But Thomson-Keegan, my outfit, had built various ideas into the TK4 to increase stability, and it was our belief - borne out, so far, by experience - that in Arctic conditions for which they were designed, our modifications worked. There were three principal ones. The first was a small pair of steering skis. They were retractable because they wouldn't be in permanent use, but when they were lowered, there was another twenty per cent of steering control. What you lost was efficiency; you got less propulsion out of a given power output, and you could no longer ride over large bumps. But on reasonably smooth snowfields, they worked well. The second modification was a steel plate, also retractable, at the tail of the TK.4. It worked like a sailboat's keel, slicing about a foot into the snow surface. It had a similar effect to that of the skis, in effect holding the machine to its course longer, and giving more time for any necessary corrective manoeuvring. The third Thomson-Keegan gimmick was in the engine mountings, which could be swivelled to redirect the propeller wash and enable the pilot to counter wind thrust. None of the mods was particularly original; the point was that they'd been made to work without throwing the whole machine off balance. The US Army was interested, but that's all. My job was to turn interest into a conviction that the TK4 would be a valuable Arctic tool. In other words, I was a salesman, too, on this trip. So, on the trail away from Thule , I was very cautious with the rudders as we slid smoothly along in the wake of the Weasel. I felt at the wind, tested skis and tail plate, and generally motored as cautiously as a maiden aunt worried about the sip of sherry she'd had.

The track, mercifully, was easy to follow, pretty straight and with flags on bamboo poles atop the snowbanks. But a hovercraft is never really at home on any kind of road; there's too long a gap between decision and effect, and when you want to slow or turn, you'd better be certain there's plenty of room. All the same, the wind was steady and without gusts, and after a while I relaxed a bit and moved her along faster, keeping the Weasel just in sight.