to travel eight hundred yards anyway before a safety, device unlocks and permits the warhead to be armed. We shall be bows on to the detonation, and with a hull designed to withstand the pressures this one is, the shock effects should be negligible."
"Very heavy ice," Benson intoned. "Thirty feet, forty feet, fifty feet. Very, very heavy ice."
"Just too bad if your torpedo ended up under a pile like the stuff above us just now," I said. "I doubt if it would even chip off the bottom layer."
"We'll take care that doesn't happen. We'll just find a suitably large layer of ice of normal thickness, kind of back off a thousand yards, and then let go."
"Thin ice!" Benson's voice wasn't a shout, it was a bellow. "Thin ice. No, by God, clear water! Clear water! Lovely, clear, clear water!"
My immediate reaction was that either the ice machine or Benson's brain had blown a fuse. But the officer at the diving panel had no such doubts, for I had to grab and hang on hard as the _Dolphin_ heeled over violently to port and came curving around, engines slowing, in a tight circle to bring her back to the spot where Benson had called out. Swanson watched the plot, spoke quietly, and the big bronze propellers reversed and bit into the water to bring the _Dolphin_ to a stop.
"How's it looking now, Doc?" Swanson called out.
"Clear, clear water," Benson said reverently. "I got a good picture of it. It's pretty narrow, but wide enough to hold us. It's long, with a sharp left-hand dogleg, for it followed us around through the first forty-five degrees of our curve."
"One fifty feet," Swanson said.
The pumps hummed. The _Dolphin_ drifted gently upward like an airship rising from the ground. Briefly, water flooded back into the tanks. The _Dolphin_ hung motionless.
"Up periscope," Swanson said.
The periscope hissed up slowly into the raised position. Swanson glanced briefly through the eyepiece, then beckoned to me. "Take a look," he beamed. "As lovely a sight as you'll ever see."
I took a look. If you'd made a picture of what could be seen above and framed it, you couldn't have sold the result even if you added Picasso's name to it; but I could see what he meant. Solid black masses on either side with a scarcely lighter strip of dark jungle green running between them on a line with the fore-and-aft direction of the ship. An open lead in the polar pack.
Three minutes later we were lying on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, just under 250 miles from the Pole.
The rafted, twisted ice pack reared up into contorted ridges almost fifty feet in height, towering twenty feet above the top of the sail, so close you could almost reach out and touch the nearest ridge. Three or four of those broken and fantastically hummocked ice hills stretching off to the west, and then the light of the floodlight failed and we could see no more. Beyond that there was only blackness.
To the east, we could see nothing at all. To have stared Out to the east with opened eyes would have been to be blinded for life in a very few seconds: even goggles became clouded and scarred after the briefest exposure. Close in to the _Dolphin's_ side you could, with bent head and hooded eyes, catch, for a fleeting part of a second, a glimpse of black water, already freezing over; but it was more imagined than seen.
The wind, shrieking and wailing across the bridge and through raised antennae, showed at consistently over sixty mph on the bridge anemometer. The ice storm was no longer the gusting, swirling fog of that morning but a driving wall of stiletto-tipped spears, near-lethal in its ferocity, highspeed ice-spicule lances that would have skewered their way through the thickest cardboard or shattered in a second a glass held in your hand. Over and above the ululating threnody of the wind we could hear an almost constant
"Very heavy ice," Benson intoned. "Thirty feet, forty feet, fifty feet. Very, very heavy ice."
"Just too bad if your torpedo ended up under a pile like the stuff above us just now," I said. "I doubt if it would even chip off the bottom layer."
"We'll take care that doesn't happen. We'll just find a suitably large layer of ice of normal thickness, kind of back off a thousand yards, and then let go."
"Thin ice!" Benson's voice wasn't a shout, it was a bellow. "Thin ice. No, by God, clear water! Clear water! Lovely, clear, clear water!"
My immediate reaction was that either the ice machine or Benson's brain had blown a fuse. But the officer at the diving panel had no such doubts, for I had to grab and hang on hard as the _Dolphin_ heeled over violently to port and came curving around, engines slowing, in a tight circle to bring her back to the spot where Benson had called out. Swanson watched the plot, spoke quietly, and the big bronze propellers reversed and bit into the water to bring the _Dolphin_ to a stop.
"How's it looking now, Doc?" Swanson called out.
"Clear, clear water," Benson said reverently. "I got a good picture of it. It's pretty narrow, but wide enough to hold us. It's long, with a sharp left-hand dogleg, for it followed us around through the first forty-five degrees of our curve."
"One fifty feet," Swanson said.
The pumps hummed. The _Dolphin_ drifted gently upward like an airship rising from the ground. Briefly, water flooded back into the tanks. The _Dolphin_ hung motionless.
"Up periscope," Swanson said.
The periscope hissed up slowly into the raised position. Swanson glanced briefly through the eyepiece, then beckoned to me. "Take a look," he beamed. "As lovely a sight as you'll ever see."
I took a look. If you'd made a picture of what could be seen above and framed it, you couldn't have sold the result even if you added Picasso's name to it; but I could see what he meant. Solid black masses on either side with a scarcely lighter strip of dark jungle green running between them on a line with the fore-and-aft direction of the ship. An open lead in the polar pack.
Three minutes later we were lying on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, just under 250 miles from the Pole.
The rafted, twisted ice pack reared up into contorted ridges almost fifty feet in height, towering twenty feet above the top of the sail, so close you could almost reach out and touch the nearest ridge. Three or four of those broken and fantastically hummocked ice hills stretching off to the west, and then the light of the floodlight failed and we could see no more. Beyond that there was only blackness.
To the east, we could see nothing at all. To have stared Out to the east with opened eyes would have been to be blinded for life in a very few seconds: even goggles became clouded and scarred after the briefest exposure. Close in to the _Dolphin's_ side you could, with bent head and hooded eyes, catch, for a fleeting part of a second, a glimpse of black water, already freezing over; but it was more imagined than seen.
The wind, shrieking and wailing across the bridge and through raised antennae, showed at consistently over sixty mph on the bridge anemometer. The ice storm was no longer the gusting, swirling fog of that morning but a driving wall of stiletto-tipped spears, near-lethal in its ferocity, highspeed ice-spicule lances that would have skewered their way through the thickest cardboard or shattered in a second a glass held in your hand. Over and above the ululating threnody of the wind we could hear an almost constant
Similar Books
