Ice Station Zebra

Commander Swanson got to the radio room first, but only because he had a head start on Raeburn and myself. Two operators were on watch, both leaning forward towards their transmitters, one with his head bent low, the other with his cocked to one side, as if those attitudes of concentrated listening helped them to isolate and amplify the slightest sounds coming through the earphones clamped to their heads. One of them was scribbling away mechanically on a signal pad. DSY, he was writing down, DSY repeated over and over again. DSY. The answering call-sign of Drift Station Zebra. He stopped writing as he caught sight of Swanson out of the corner of one eye.

‘We’ve got ’em, Captain, no question. Signal very weak and intermittent but –’

‘Never mind the signal!’ It was Raeburn who made this interruption without any by-your-leave from Swanson. He tried, and failed, to keep the rising note of excitement out of his voice and he looked more than ever like a youngster playing hookey from high school. ‘The bearing? Have you got their bearing? That’s all that matters.’

The other operator swivelled in his seat and I recognised my erstwhile guard, Zabrinski. He fixed Raeburn with a sad and reproachful eye.

‘Course we got their bearing, Lieutenant. First thing we did. O-forty-five, give or take a whisker. North-east, that is.’

‘Thank you, Zabrinski,’ Swanson said dryly. ‘O-forty-five is north-east. The navigating officer and I wouldn’t have known. Position?’

Zabrinski shrugged and turned to his watchmate, a man with a red face, leather neck and a shining polished dome where his hair ought to have been. ‘What’s the word, Curly?’

‘Nothing. Just nothing.’ Curly looked at Swanson. ‘Twenty times I’ve asked for his position. No good. All he does is send out his call-sign. I don’t think he’s hearing us at all, he doesn’t even know we’re listening, he just keeps sending his call-sign over and over again. Maybe he hasn’t switched his aerial in to “receive”.’

‘It isn’t possible,’ Swanson said.

‘It is with this guy,’ Zabrinski said. ‘At first Curly and I thought that it was the signal that was weak, then we thought it was the operator who was weak or sick, but we were wrong, he’s just a ham-handed amateur.’

‘You can tell?’ Swanson asked.

‘You can always tell. You can –’ He broke off, stiffened and touched his watchmate’s arm.

Curly nodded. ‘I got it,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Position unknown, the man says.’

Nobody said anything, not just then. It didn’t seem important that he couldn’t give us his position, all that mattered was that we were in direct contact. Raeburn turned and ran forward across the control room. I could hear him speak rapidly on the bridge telephone. Swanson turned to me.

‘Those balloons you spoke of earlier. The ones on Zebra. Are they free or captive?’

‘Both.’

‘How do the captive ones work?’

‘A free-running winch, nylon cord marked off in hundreds and thousands of feet.’

‘We’ll ask them to send a captive balloon up to 5,000 feet,’ Swanson decided. ‘With flares. If they’re within thirty or forty miles we ought to see it, and if we get its elevation and make an allowance for the effect of wind on it, we should get a fair estimate of distance … What is it, Brown?’ This to the man Zabrinski called ‘Curly’.

‘They’re sending again,’ Curly said. ‘Very broken, fades a lot. “God’s sake, hurry.” Just like that, twice over. “God’s sake hurry.”’

‘Send this,’ Swanson said. He dictated a brief message about the balloons. ‘And send it real slow.’

Curly nodded and began to transmit. Raeburn came running back into the radio room.

‘The moon’s not down yet,’ he said quickly to Swanson. ‘Still a degree or two above the horizon. I’m taking a sextant up top and taking a moon-sight. Ask them to do the same. That’ll give us the latitude difference and if we know they’re o-forty-five of us we can pin them down to a mile.’

‘It’s worth trying,’ Swanson said. He dictated another message to Brown. Brown transmitted the second message immediately after the first. We waited for the answer. For all of ten minutes we waited. I looked at the men in the radio room, they all had the same remote withdrawn look of men who are there only physically, men whose minds are many miles away. They were all at the same place and I was too, wherever Drift Ice Station Zebra was.

Brown started writing again, not for long. His voice this time was still matter-of-fact, but with overtones of emptiness. He said: ‘“All balloons burnt. No moon.”’

‘No moon.’ Raeburn couldn’t hide the bitterness, the sharpness of his disappointment. ‘Damn! Must be pretty heavy overcast up there. Or a bad storm.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t get local weather variations like that on the ice-cap. The conditions will be the same over 50,000 square miles. The moon is down. For them, the moon is down. Their latest estimated position must have been pure guesswork, and bad guesswork at that. They must be at least a hundred miles farther north and east than we had thought.’