Whiteout!

'No'.

Kelleher's 'other guy', a sergeant from the reactor staff named Mulham, said, 'Can't say I blame you.'

There was a moment's heavy silence. Then Kelleher spoke. 'Okay, then, I'll do it. You turn the handle.'

He reached for the bosun's chair, swung it up and out. 'Let's have some light here,' he said, as he began to strap himself in.

'I'm sorry.'

'Christ, you're a limey, you're not even involved here! I sure don't blame you, brother. This is an American problem.' He bent his legs, letting the bosun's chair take the weight. 'Okay, let's have the hard hat and the rest of that gear.'

Numbly, guiltily, I took off the hard hat. It had been picked to fit me and on him it was ludicrously small, wobbling and liable to fall off. I thought about the extra four stones of Kelleher's weight, the other things to be carried, the back-breaking physical labour involved in the long lowering and raising, and suddenly heard myself say, 'I'll go.' To this day I don't know how I came to speak. It was some involuntary, impromptu impulse beyond either my control or understanding.

Kelleher's hands stopped moving and he turned to me.

'You sure?'

I nodded, committed now and resentful of it. 'Yes,' I said, and my voice caught on a rusty nail. I cleared my throat and said yes again.

'Think about it for a minute. Be sure.' He was all consideration and sympathy and somehow that enmeshed me further.

'I'll do it.'

He grunted and began to unfasten himself from the seat. Two minutes later 1 was poised over the well opening, swaying gently, with my heart in my mouth. I glanced back over my shoulder at the two of them, waiting at the handle. Kelleher reached across, stopped the swinging motion. 'Okay?'

I nodded and swallowed. 'Lower away.'

'Good luck.'

Looking upwards a few seconds later, I couldn't even see them, and the metallic click of the ratchet on the lowering mechanism was growing fainter. As I lowered my eyes, I realized that even the action of looking up had imparted a little swing to the cable, and concentrated on sitting very still and holding the equipment close to my body to minimize the possibility of contact with those fearful icicles that were now sliding slowly past me. We'd discussed and abandoned the idea of knocking them down before making the descent. The trip would have been safer, but the great falling masses of ice, ripping more off as they crashed down through three chambers, might well make it impossible to see what lay in the bottom. My left leg felt briefly uncomfortable. As I moved it I must have touched the chain saw, where it hung beneath the seat, because suddenly I was swinging again, and Kelleher's voice came sharply out of the little battery-powered walkie-talkie slung around my neck. 'Keep still, Harry, for Chrissake!'

My breath hissed out as I came within inches of a ton or more of sharp-pointed ice, and swung away again. I sat rigid, paralysed with fear, feeling the chill of the thing. Slowly the pendulum swing eased.

'You okay?'

'Okay.' Stiffening muscles would bloody well have to stiffen. The longer the length of cable above me, the wider the arc of swing and the greater the danger of tapping one of these monsters and tripping it from its seating.

The ticking of the ratchet grew fainter and vanished as I dropped deeper into the first chamber. The beam of my lamp, endlessly reflected from the ice surface all around me, miraculously gave illumination to the whole, immense, onion-shaped cavern. It was difficult now even to know if I were moving; the lowering was so slow, the distance so great and the time so endless that I seemed suspended immobile in the middle of that huge, cold space. But slowly the curving bottom came up to meet me, and every few feet Kelleher's voice asked softly if I was all right. When he wasn't speaking, I ached for the reassuring sound of his voice; as soon as he spoke I was terrified that some trick of reverberating sound would precipitate one of the vast ice-spears from high above to smash me down for ever into the depths of the icecap.

Below me, very slowly, the dark hole widened as I slid soundlessly down towards it. I whispered into the walkie-talkie, 'Entering the neck soon.'

'How far?'

'Four feet.'

'Try communication soon as you're through.'

'Right.'

The lowering continued, and soon I was no longer in an immense space, but in a tight, white bottleneck that inspired sudden, panicky claustrophobia. If an icicle had fallen earlier, it just might have gone by, giving me only a glancing blow as it passed; but here, the whole shape of the structure would guide any falling weight directly on to me.

Slowly the neck widened, the walls of the second chamber beginning to slope down and away from where I hung. 'Through the neck now,' I muttered softly.

'You okay ?'

'Yes. Keep lowering.'

I tried to envisage the two of them up there. This, for them, was the easy part, with the ratchet taking the strain. Coming up would be another matter, with muscles wearying through the long haul and the pressure of time always goading them to further effort.

All round me another crop of immense icicles hung like an inverted and petrified forest, gleaming and winking in the light of my lamp. They were, I thought soberly, even worse than those at the entrance to the upper chamber: longer, thinner, some distorted in shape like twisted fangs. Here the rising vapour from the steam hose would have been denser and warmer, its action stronger on the snow of centuries and adding drop by frozen drop to the tip of each rod of ice. I held my breath as the bosun's chair slipped past, concentrating on stillness. The need to tear my eyes away from their hypnotic menace was almost irresistible, but to look up or down seemed now to be to risk setting off a pendulum swing. If the icicles had been anchored to something solid, as the normal small icicle clings to a gutter, the danger would have been small. But they clung only to compacted snow.

Minutes passed and 1 moved beyond their threatening points, slowly down into the centre of the onion-shaped bulb, and again there came the feeling that I had ceased to move, that the world had stopped and that I would remain for ever strapped to my tiny seat in a bubble in the immensity of the icecap.

'You okay?'

'Yes.'

'How far?'

I glanced carefully downwards. Below me the walls were beginning to close a little towards the black eye of the third chamber. 'Forty feet.'

As I sat helplessly, inching downwards, anger welled up in me: anger at myself for embarking on this crazy descent; anger at the lunatic somewhere above me whose brilliant and implacable malevolence made it necessary; most of all, though, at Smales, who should long ago have closed off this death trap, and hadn't. It was a natural enough anger, born of danger and fear, but its intensity frightened me, constricting my throat, tensing my muscles, tripping a pulse in my temple that thumped in my head like a drum. Shutting my eyes tight, 1 tried to force the anger from me, but it had its effect. On a head full of blood the hard hat felt uncomfortably tight. I raised a hand to ease the pressure, took too deep a breath of icy air, and coughed. The hat tilted, slid quickly over my scalp, and fell. I made a grab for it, missed and began to swing a little as it fell.

I sat rigid, waiting for disaster. The hat bounced and bounced again, skittering round the sloping ice before it fell into the hole, and then a silence followed until, seconds later, it hit the bottom of the third bulb. I'd have expected a splash, but it bounced repeatedly. The water at the bottom of the well must have frozen again ! The clattering could only have lasted a few seconds, but it seemed to go on and on as the steel hat ricocheted from one ice surface to another and the ice-bulb below me magnified the sound and funnelled it upwards through the neck. Sweating, even in the icy cold, I waited for it to end, but when it did, another sound remained .., a high-pitched hum that seemed to have no source, but vibrated like a tuning-fork .., and then an icy breath swirled round me and I knew and cowered as, with a soft whoosh, a huge icicle fell past. A tiny movement of my hand would have let me touch it as the white, shining projectile dropped slowly past, its forty-foot length seeming to fall in slow motion, to go on for ever. Miraculously it didn't touch me, but I watched it continue its fall, down into the neck, and through it like an arrow, not even touching the sides, then disappearing into blackness until it landed with an immense crash in the icy base of the bulb.