"Do you mean what I think you mean?" Swanson said slowly. "Or am I just going nuts?"

"What's this about going nuts?" Hansen had just come through the doorway leading to the for'ard passageway, and the grin on his face was clear enough indication that though he'd caught Swanson's last words, he'd caught neither the intonation nor the expression on the captain's face. "Very serious state of affairs, going nuts. I'll have to assume command and put you in irons, Captain. Something about it in regulations, I daresay."

"Dr. Carpenter is proposing to sling a bag of provisions on his back and proceed to Drift Station Zebra on foot."

"You've picked them up again?" For the moment, Hansen had forgotten me. "You really got them? And a crossbearing?"

"Just this minute. We've hit it almost on the nose. Five miles, Raeburn says."

"My God! Five miles. Only five miles!" Then the elation vanished from voice and face as if an internal switch had been touched. "In weather like this, it might as well be five hundred. Even old Amundsen couldn't have moved ten yards through this stuff."

"Dr. Carpenter evidently thinks he can improve on Amundsen's standards," Swanson said dryly. "He's talking about walking there."

Hansen looked at me for a long and considering moment, then turned back to Swanson. "I think maybe it's Doc Carpenter we should be locking up in irons."

"I think maybe it is," Swanson said.

"Look," I said. "There are men out there on Drift Station Zebra. Maybe not many, not now, but there are some. One, anyway. Men a long way past being sick. Dying men. To a dying man, it takes only the very smallest thing to spell out the difference between life and death. I'm a doctor, I know. The smallest thing. An ounce of alcohol, a few ounces of food, a hot drink, some medicine. Then they'll live. Without those little things, they will surely die. They're entitled to what smallest aid they can get, and I'm entitled to take whatever risks I care to to see they get it. I'm not asking anyone else to go, all I'm asking is that you implement the terms of your orders from Washington to give me all possible assistance without endangering the «Dolphin» or its crew. Threatening to stop me is not my idea of giving assistance. And I am not asking you to endanger your submarine or the lives of your men."

Swanson gazed at the floor. I wondered what he was thinking: the best way to stop me, his orders from Washington, or the fact that he was the only man who knew that the commandant on Zebra was my brother. He said nothing.

"You must stop him, Captain," Hansen said urgently. "Any other man you saw putting a pistol to his head or a razor to his throat, you'd stop that man. This isn't any different. He's out of his mind: he wants to commit suicide." He tapped the bulkhead beside him. "Good God, Doc, why do you think we have the sonar operators in here on duty even when we're stopped. So that they can tell us when the ice wall on the far side of the polynya starts to close in on us, that's why. And that's because it's impossible for any man to last thirty seconds on the bridge or see an inch against the ice storm up there. Just take a quick twenty-second trip up there, up on the bridge, and you'll change your mind fast enough, I guarantee."

"We've just come down from the bridge," Swanson said niatter-of-factly.

"And he still wants to go? It's like I say, he's crazy."

"We could drop down now," Swanson said. "We have the position. Perhaps we can find a polynya within a mile or half a mile of Zebra. That would be a different proposition altogether."

"Perhaps you could find a needle in a haystack," I said. "It took you six hours to find this one, and even at that we were lucky. And don't talk about torpedoes: the ice in this area is rafted anything up to a hundred feet in depth. Pretty much all over. You'd be as well trying to blast your way through with a twenty-two. Might be twelve hours, might be days before we could break through again. I can get there in two, three hours."

"«If» you don't freeze to death in the first hundred yards," Hansen said. "«If» you don't fall down a ridge and break your leg. «If» you don't get blinded in a few minutes. «If» you don't fall into a newly opened polynya that you can't see, where you'll either drown or, if you manage to get out, freeze solid in thirty seconds. And even if you do survive all those things, I'd be grateful if you'd explain to me exactly how you propose to find your way blind to a place five miles away. You can't carry a damn great gyro weighing about half a ton on your back, and a magnetic compass is useless in those latitudes. The magnetic north pole is a good deal «south» of where we are now and a long way to the west. Even if you «did» get some sort of bearing from it, in the darkness and the ice storm you could still miss the camp — or what's left of it — by only a hundred yards and never know it. And even if by one chance in a million you do manage to find your way there, how on earth do you ever expect to find your way back again? Leave a paper trail? A five-mile ball of twine? 'Crazy' is hardly the word for it."

"I may break a leg, drown or freeze," I conceded. "I'll take my chance on that. Finding my way there and back is no great trick. You have a radio bearing on Zebra and know exactly where it lies. You can take a radio bearing on any transmitter. All I have to do is tote a receivertransmitter radio along with me, keep in touch with you, and you can keep me on the same bearing as Zebra. It's easy."

"It would be," Hansen said, "except for one little thing. We don't have any such radio."

"I have a twenty-mile walkie-talkie in my case," I said.

"Coincidence, coincidence," Hansen murmured. "Just happened to bring it along, no doubt. I'll bet you have all sorts of funny things in that case of yours, haven't you, Doc?"

"What Dr. Carpenter has in his case is really no business of ours," Swanson said in mild reproof. He hadn't thought so earlier. "What does concern us is his intention to do away with himself. You really can't expect us to consent to this ridiculous proposal, Dr. Carpenter."

"No one's asking you to consent to anything," I said. "Your consent is not required. All I'm asking you to do is stand to one side. And to arrange for that food-provision package for me. If you won't I'll have to manage without it."

I left and went to my cabin. Hansen's cabin, rather. But even though it wasn't my cabin that didn't stop me from turning the key in the lock as soon as I had passed through the door.

Working on the likely supposition that if Hansen did come down soon he wasn't going to be very pleased to find the door of his own cabin locked against him, I wasted no time. I spun the combination lock on my suitcase and opened the lid. At least three quarters of the available space was taken up by Arctic survival clothing, the very best that money could buy. It hadn't been my money that had bought it.

I stripped off the outer clothes I was wearing, pulled on long underwear, a wool shirt and corduroy trousers, then a triple-knit wool parka lined with pure silk. The parka wasn't quite standard; it had a curiously shaped suede-lined pocket below and slightly to the front of the left armpit, and a differently shaped suede-lined pocket on the right-hand side. I dug swiftly to the bottom of my case and brought up three separate items. The first of these, a nine-millimeter Mannlicher-Schoenauer automatic, fitted into the left-hand pocket as securely and strongly as if the pocket had been specially designed for it, which indeed it had; the other items, spare magazine clips, fitted as neatly into the right-hand pocket.

The rest of the dressing didn't take long. Two pairs of heavy-knit woollen socks, felt undershoes, and then the furs — caribou for the outer parka and trousers, wolverine for the hood, sealskin for the boots, and reindeer for the gloves, which were pulled on over other layers of silk gloves and woollen mittens. Maybe a polar bear would have had a slight edge over me when it came to being equipped to survive an Arctic blizzard, but there wouldn't have been much in it.