"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 hooky from high school. "The bearing? Have you got their bearing? That's all that matters."

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

"Course we got their bearing, Lieutenant. First thing we did. Oh forty-five, give or take a whisker. Northeast, that is."

"Thank you, Zabrinski," Swanson said dryly. "Oh fortyfive is northeast. 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, be 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 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 speaking 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 five thousand 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 oh 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 burned. 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 fifty thousand 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 bad thought."

"Ask them if they have any rockets," Swanson said to Brown.

"You can try," I said. "It'll be a waste of time. If they're as far off as I think, their rockets would never get above our horizon. Even if they did, we wouldn't see them."

"It's always a chance, isn't it?" Swanson asked.

"Beginning to lose contact, sir," Brown reported. "Something there about food but it faded right out."

"Tell them if they have any rockets to fire them at once," Swanson said. "Quickly, now, before you lose contact."

Four times in all Brown sent the message before he managed to pick up a reply. Then he said: "Message reads 'Two minutes.' Either this guy is pretty far gone or his transmitter batteries are. That's all. 'Two minutes,' he said."

Swanson nodded wordlessly and left the room. I followed. We picked up coats and binoculars and clambered up to the bridge. After the warmth and comfort of the control room, the cold seemed glacial, the flying ice spicules more lancetlike than ever. Swanson uncapped the gyro-repeater compass, gave us the line of 045, and told the two men who had been keeping watch what to look for and where.

A minute passed, two minutes, five. My eyes began to ache from staring into the ice-filled dark; the exposed part of my face had gone completely numb, and I knew that when I removed those binoculars I was going to take a fair amount of skin with them.

A phone bell rang. Swanson lowered his glasses, leaving two peeled and bloody rings around his eyes — he seemed unaware of it; the pain wouldn't come until later — and picked up the receiver. He listened briefly, hung up.

"Radio room," he said. "Let's get below. All of us. The rockets were fired three minutes ago."

We went below. Swanson caught sight of his face reflected in a glass gauge and shook his head. "They must have shelter," he said quietly. "They must. Some hut left. Or they would have been gone long ago." He went into the radio room. "Still in contact?"

"Yeah." It was Zabrinski. "Off and on. It's a funny thing. When a bum contact like this starts to fade, it usually gets lost and stays lost. But this guy keeps coming back. Funny."

"Maybe he hasn't even got batteries left," I said. "Maybe all they have is a hand-cranked generator. Maybe these's no one left with the strength to crank it for more than a few moments at a time."

"Maybe," Zabrinski agreed. "Tell the captain that last message, Curly."

"'Can't late many tours,'" Brown said. "That's how the message came through. 'Can't late many tours.' I think it should read 'Can't last many hours.' Don't see what else it could have been."

Swanson looked at me briefly, and glanced away again. I hadn't told anyone else that the commandant of the base was my brother and I knew he hadn't told anyone, either. He said to Brown: "Give them a time check. Ask them to send their call signs five minutes every hour on the hour. Tell them we'll contact them again within six hours at the most, maybe only four. Zabrinski, how accurate was that bearing?"

"Dead accurate, Captain. I've had plenty of rechecks. Oh forty-five exactly."

Swanson moved out into the control center. "Drift Station Zebra can't see the moon. If we take Dr. Carpenter's word for it that weather conditions are pretty much the same all over, that's because the moon is below their horizon. With the elevation we have of the moon, and knowing their bearing, what's Zebra's minimum distance from us?"