Whiteout!

He raised his own. 'The welcome you just had, gentlemen, was not in Camp Hundred's best traditions. We aim to start improving that right now. A votre sant é!With the French toast he gave a little Germanic bow and poured half the contents of the glass down his throat.

I wondered what it was, sipped it, and identified a dry Martini. I said, 'My God, it's cold!'

'Among other things,' Smales said, 'we have perfected the art of Martooni here.' He poured the second half after the first. 'There are people in this club "who call it Martini University . Swallow it. You need one well down to appreciate the velvet texture of the second.' He bustled round producing olives and onions, peanuts and pretzels. 'When I retire from this man's army, I'm gonna open a bar and make a million. Make a better Martooni and sure as hell the world will beat a track to your door. Beats the hell out of the mousetrap. Now, gentlemen. Tonight we dine with class. State your requirements. Cookie's got a whole two hours.'

The man's gaiety was remarkable and infectious. He'd walked in here, fresh from an experience that still had my scalp crawling, and had turned on the good cheer, had literally switched it on. But there was nothing spurious about it. He was back in his kingdom and happy about it, and his natural ebullience placed the experience squarely behind him and would doubtless keep it there. He was an intricate man. But I couldn't forget. It was all too recent and the mental scar tissue would stay with me. When I could, when a suitable moment occurred, I was going to ask what exactly had happened, but the moment refused to occur naturally; Kelleher was telling Irish jokes and Smales was telling Jewish jokes Cohen had told him down at Camp Belvoir . Finally I asked him about it as we stood side by side under the showers an hour or so later.

He said, 'Arctic foxes.'

By that time I was mildly befuddled with his treacherous Martinis and thought he was joking. I laughed politely and he said, 'They're not funny.'

'AH right."

He said, 'It happens this way. The foxes follow the Swings up along the trail, living off garbage. The Swing crews bury it, but the foxes dig it up and follow the source of supply. Here we bury our garbage deep, so those old foxes, they're goddam hungry.'

'Hungry enough to eat electric cable?'

'Not the cable, no. But they chew off the insulating material. We got the lights strung both sides of the runway, but one good bite in the right place and you got a dead fox and a lot of darkness !'

'Can't you get rid of them?'

He said, 'It's a sin of omission. Sure, we could put down poison bait, but Jesus, did you ever see an Arctic fox? They're beautiful, believe me. If I could shoot 'em clean, then sure. But poison, no sir.'

'No matter how dangerous ?'

He put on a heavy Southern accent. 'Ah see yo'all is a logician, sir.' Then switched it oft". 'The answer's no to poison.'

That was the moment the lights went out.

Chapter 3

Barney Smales said, 'Stand still.'

'I wasn't thinking of moving.'

There were slopping noises as he moved round in the darkness and first one shower was turned off, then the other. 'Better hold on to my hand. You'll trip over something and break your limey neck.' He led me quietly across the wooden floor of the big hut and round a partition to where towels and clothes hung.

'It must be nice,' I said, 'to be able to see in the dark. What's caused all this?'

'Generator.'

'Is it serious ?' I found the towel and began to rub myself dry. Smales said, 'It's one out of three. Plenty of back-up. But if the stand-by generator fails to come in, why, then we could be in a little trouble. Just moveyour limey ass, huh?'

I stopped towelling, and began feeling for my clothes, and asked, 'How' long before it matters?'

'Four minutes. Five maybe. No more. After that the water pipes start freezing. They freeze, they bust wide open and then, brother, we got to rebuild the whole damn structure.'

The lights came on again. Smales was fully dressed and fastening his boots. I was still trying to button my shirt. He said, 'Okay now. Take your time. Reckon you can find your way to the club?'

I nodded.

'I want this little explanation about generator breakdown.'

Fully-dressed, snow-booted and parka-ed, I closed the door of the shower hut, stepped out into the chill of the tunnel, and glanced at the pipes that hung up there on the snow wall. The hazard was obvious. The pipes were bound with insulating material, but they hung an inch away from snow so compacted that it was almost ice. There were heaters built in at intervals along the pipes. With the system working, you turned on a tap and hot water came out; after four minutes without power, the men at Hundred would find themselves melting snow in old buckets for drinking water. I shivered briefly in the icy air, stopped looking at the pipes, and hurried off to the club trench. To reach it, I had to go into the big, central tunnel, the one they called Main Street, and there I looked again at the long lines of pipes and electrical conduits suspended from the walls. Camp Hundred ate up a lot of power.

With Smales away at the generators and Kelleher already busy at the reactor, there was nobody I knew in the club. I stood for a moment in the doorway, looking at the little scene of Polar domesticity. Over in a corner, four men sat at a card table, three concentrating hard, one leaning back, hands in pockets, watching his partner. The place was quiet and even the four or five men at the bar were turned towards the card players. Then one of them turned, saw me and came over. 'You're Mr Bowes, from England?'

'Yes.'

'Glad to have you here. I'm George Herschel, engineering.' He was a major, fiftyish, red hair greying, broad and cheerful.

We shook hands and I nodded towards the card players. 'Something important?'

Herschel grinned. 'See the guy in the corner? Well, he's got a kind of weakness for little slams. People listen to the bidding with half an ear and then when he has a slam going, we kinda make a bet or two.'

I smiled. 'Will he make it?'

'He better. They been redoubled. Drink?'

'Thank you.'

'Take your pick.' I looked along the lines of whisky bottles, then began counting. There were more than thirty brands: Scotch, Bourbon, Irish, Canadian.

'Tomatin,' I said, 'since it's there.'

He poured for me. 'Barney. He likes a bar to offer a choice. Ice?'

I shook my head. 'Just water.'

He passed the water jug and said, 'Now, let's see. Just what was happening in England around the middle of the seventeenth century ? Don't wonder why. Just answer.'

I thought for a moment. 'Mayflower? The Pilgrim Fathers?'

He nodded. 'The water you're drinking fell as snow right around that time. Water well's down to over four hundred feet. We melt the snow for water.'

I poured water and raised my glass. 'To the Pilgrim Fathers?'

'Right.' We drank. 'Now come meet some of the guys.'

The little slam went down to mixed jeers and applause, money changed hands and after that I was made to feel very welcome, and also was sharply cross-questioned. I had, after all, been in the real world only a short time ago and they wanted reassurance that it was still there.

'I do seem to recall,' the slam-loser said, 'that they used to have something called girls out there. That right?'

'They used to be there,' I said. 'They've become extinct while you've been away.'

The conversation wasn't exactly elevated, but it was fairly typical. The society was recognizable, and its patterns, or most of them, were familiar. Here was the atmosphere of all the places where men are thrown together, unassorted, in a group, and have to learn to live with it. There was the endless flow of bad jokes and badinage, the careful but occasional and elaborate courtesy, the wall pin-ups and the bar. Claustrophobia in comfort, but claustrophobia.