Whiteout!

'Where?'

'Here. Medical records.'

I shook my head. 'I thought of it earlier. The filing cabinets are all locked.'

'Keys must be around some place.'

We searched for a while and failed to find any keys at all. I said, 'Doc Kirton must have carried them with him. Presumably all his personal effects would have been taken from his body. They'll be wherever things like that are kept.'

'Barney has a safe,' Kelleher said.

'Which will also require keys.'

'Yeah.' The corners of his mouth turned down, then he rose and went over to the steel cabinets. 'Time was,' he said, 'when you could just drill a little hole, right here above the lock, and push a paper clip in and work the lock-spring.' He examined the cabinet closely. 'Nope. Not any more. Uncle Sam only buys the best"!'

'We could lever it open,' I said. 'Burst the lock.'

Kelleher jerked his head towards the ward. 'No need. Allen's in there.'

'Allen,' I said, 'is a very sick man.'

'Sure. But he'll know where the keys are. Allen knows everything.'

'Except who's doing all this.'

We went through into the ward. It stank of sweat and vomit, and two young soldiers who'd volunteered to act as nurses looked almost as ill as the patients. Kelleher said to one of them, 'Take a half-hour break, son. We'll watch out."

The boy looked grateful, wasted no time in accepting, and took his partner with him. We crossed to Allen's bed. He looked bad; skin still grey and sickly, sweat shining on his face, and he was dozing. I didn't want to awaken him; Kelleher didn't hesitate; he put his big hand on Allen's shoulder and shook it gently.

After a moment, Allen's eyes opened. He blinked, then gave a little groan.

'You strong enough to talk?" Kelleher asked quietly.

Allen blinked again, swallowed in that awful way of the nauseated, when it's a toss-up whether the forced swallow will overcome the regurgitative reflex. He looked a little relieved, and nodded faintly.

'What is it?' His voice was weak, not quite a whisper.

Kelleher said, 'When Doc Kirton died, what happened to his possessions ?'

Allen's eyes widened. 'What do you want?'

Kelleher glanced round the ward. Not all the men were asleep. He said very softly, 'Mr Bowes and I, we think all this, the food poisoning, Captain Carson's disappearance, the whole deal, we think it's all been done by one guy.'

Allen looked at him steadily. 'You - ' he swallowed again -'you got reasons for that?'

Kelleher said, 'What happened to me was a bad acid trip. Somebody slipped me acid. There are too many accidents now. Too much to explain. It's got to be tracked down. We want to see the medical records but the files are locked.'

'A bad trip,' Allen repeated. He paused, then turned his head to look at me. 'You saw . . , yesterday.'

'Saw what?'

'Major Smales. Right early. He was - ' again that suspenseful swallow - 'real strange. You noticed.'

1 stared at him, recalling the interview that had so puzzled me, and the oblique conversation with Allen in his office afterwards.

'Yes,' I said, 'I noticed. Barney told me he had a migraine.'

'Migraine, huh?' Kelleher said. 'Tell you something. I'm a migraine man myself. One effect is a kind of flashing light, it's like you've just been dazzled.'

'It seemed to wear off quickly.'

'Maybe he only got a real small shot.'

'Maybe. How did he get it?'

Allen had struggled to sit up. Now, speech made difficult by the continuing stomach contractions, he managed to explain that Barney slept badly and always woke early and kept a flask of coffee at his bedside. He could have woken in the middle of the night, taken coffee, and slept again.

'Which means,' Kelleher said, 'that the stuff could already have been wearing off?'

'Right.' Allen turned, put his feet on the floor.

'Stay where you are,' I said.

He shook his head weakly. 'I can go into the command office for the keys. You guys can't do that.'

'You'd never make it,' Kelleher said.

Allen swallowed again painfully. 'I'll make it.'

I glanced at Kelleher. We were both reluctant even to let Allen try. All the same, weak and shaky though he was, he'd forced himself to his feet and now he took two or three slow steps. 'I ain't gonna win no marathons,' Allen said, 'but I'll make it.'

He was determined and Kelleher and I conceded, feeling guilty about it. We helped Allen into his parka and boots, and went to the door with him. As he was about to go, I said, 'Doc Kirton's effects. Where will they be?'

He turned. 'They're still on his body. What's left of it. We figured we'd leave all that. He was kind of a mess.'

Kelleher patted his shoulder. 'Listen, take your time.'

'Sure.' Allen looked as though he was about to be sick again, but he fought it and won. Then he said,

'Reckon I'll try talking to Major Smales.'

'Don't,' I said.

'Maybe he'll listen to me.'

'Don't bank on it.'

He went down the two steps and slowly off along the trench. We watched through the open door until he reached Main Street and turned towards the command hut.

There was nothing we could do, except wait for Allen's return. We talked desultorily, almost pointlessly, going over the ground again and again. Kelleher, who knew Camp Hundred and its personnel far better than I, found himself totally unable to pick out a suspect. All I got from him was a new light on Barney's character: new and rather revealing. Ten years earlier, it seemed, when Darney had been in Antarctica on Operation Deep Freeze, he and half a dozen men had spent a winter on a big ice-floe. There had been trouble of various kinds: one man had fallen into super-cooled water off the edge of the floe, and the shock had killed him; another had died of peritonitis following a ruptured appendix, and there had been a fire in one of the huts. Barney had sent out anSOS

and Deep Freeze had mounted a massive, difficult and wildly expensive operation to lift off the five remaining men. It had been held at the time that theSOShad been unnecessary; that Captain Smales, as he then was, had not shown sufficient durability. He'd almost been thrown off Cold Regions Research and it had taken him a long time to work himself back into favour. I said, 'He worked himself back, though. They'd never have given him Camp Hundred otherwise.'

'Oh sure. But it's in his record, and he knows it. So he won't be exactly keen to admit it if things start slipping beyond his control.'

The minutes ticked by. Twice I went to the door and looked along the trench, hoping to see Allen returning, but there was no sign of him. After half an hour, when the two soldiers returned to duty in the ward, Allen still had not shown up and, what made it worse, there was no message from him. By now both of us were worried. It seemed to us that there were three possibilities : that Allen had collapsed somewhere and was being looked after; that he'd collapsed and was not being looked after. Or, the possibility that loomed in the forefront of both our minds, that he had been attacked and disposed of in some way.

At length Kelleher rose, crossed to the wall speaker, moved the switch and spoke into the address system. 'Will Master Sergeant Allen please report at once to the medical block.' He repeated the message and switched off. 'He ought to hear that.'

'If he's in a position to hear it.'

'Yeah.' Kelleher sat down heavily, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. He was frowning, staring straight ahead. After a moment he said, 'There's one thing's bugged me from the start.'

'Go on.'

'The water. Impurities in the water. That's what stopped us on the reactor, and I just don't understand it. Look, normally we use distilled water because you can't afford any contamination in the reactor. But melted snow, in effect, is distilled. It's been sucked up from the ocean, turned to vapour and then precipitated. So up here there's no need for distillation. Nowadays there's maybe some smoke mixed up in new snow, some pollution. But the snow that fell a hundred, two hundred years ago, well, water from that's as pure as you can get, right?'