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These were Macklin's own figures, and on the morning of the second day, after
their first night aboard the Churchill, the captain had announced at breakfast
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that the trip would last for slightly under twelve days. The "slightly under"
part had already passed, meaning eleven days aboard ship. The Churchill was
capable of speeds greater than thirty-five knots, but that speed was easier to
maintain, and using that as an average would allow for the slower speeds
necessary once they hit the polar ice pack.
"Eleven days?" Mulrooney had groaned. Then she had shrugged in apparent
resignation.
Culhane asked Lieutenant Hardestey to see about borrowing a typewriter.
Over the first day and a half, Culhane had finished the last ten pages of
Takers number seventeen. There was no way to mail them to his publisher, but
at least they would be ready once they had returned. He'd only be a month or
so late, he calculated. But to compensate for that, he began working on the
outline for the next book so that with any luck he would be early on that one
and make his publisher forget how late number seventeen had been.
Mulrooney, too, had borrowed a typewriter and worked up sheaves of material
that she faithfully showed Culhane: pages on the Gladstone Log, on the voyage
of the Madagascar, on the events at San Rafael Island, on the voyage to
Antarctica itself. He'd told her she should write a novel about it, and she'd
suggested they both do it. He'd told her he'd wait to find out the ending
first.
Culhane had developed a schedule for himself. He typed while Hardestey was on
watch and spent the other sixteen hours of the day equally divided between
Mulrooney's company and sleeping, realizing that once they reached Antarctica,
he had no idea what to expect. Sleeping was a preoccupation aboard the
Churchill. There wasn't much else to do except for reading, playing
wall-outlet-type personal video games and watching videotapes played on VCRs
on the televisions in the crew's and officers' messes. It was the only way the
televisions could be put to use, for even if the Churchill had been in range
of a television broadcaster, picking up television and radio was impossible
below the surface.
On the sixth day, Culhane had been asked to speak before a group of officers
and enlisted men, all fans of his books. He enjoyed talking about his writing,
and some of his listeners would occasionally ask good questions. But the key
enlisted man aboard the Churchill, a chief torpedoman's mate, asked one he'd
never encountered: "With all the women Sean Dodge goes to bed with in those
books I won't ask if that's all personal experience how the hell does he
avoid herpes?" Culhane, thinking fast, had replied, "Hell, fellas, all the
girls Dodge makes love to have saved themselves for him to come along." There
had been more laughter and more questions.
On the ninth day, making better time than Macklin had expected going through
the Drake Passage between the tip of South America and the Antarctic
Peninsula, Macklin had called Culhane, Mulrooney and some of the others to the
bridge.
No one watched Macklin. Everyone was watching the color television monitor at
the forwardmost portion of the bridge bulkhead. It showed ice.
"Good thing we made some time. We won't soon," Macklin announced. "Probably
all of you have read about submarines going under the North Pole, and it
sounds exciting. That's 'cause it is exciting. The South Pole is a little
different. As far as we know, there is no way under it, no more than there
would necessarily be a way under Pittsburgh. This is a landmass, not just
floating ice. But we've got many of the same problems. Roughly seventy percent
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of the world's supply of fresh water is right here in icebergs and in the ice
shelf coating the land three miles thick in some places. Surface navigation
is hazardous here. Small icebergs that people just started calling 'bergy
bits' are more dangerous than the large ones. We all remember what happened to
the Titanic; they saw a little bit of the iceberg above the water while the
bigger part below the surface knifed through their hull. U.S. submarines use a
single-pressure hull we bump into the right iceberg at the wrong angle, and
we're kissin' life goodbye. But we won't do that. We have passive sonar that
is constantly monitoring the water around us, above us and below us. We also
have active sonar, and with that we can sketch the shape on a graph and then
estimate the thickness of the ice overhead should we actually wind up under an
ice shelf."
"How soon before we reach the target area, Commander?" Angela Basque, their
closest thing to an Antarctic expert, asked abruptly.
Macklin looked at Culhane, then back to her. "I studied the Madagascar's
logbook backward and forward, and the photographs of the maps Miss Mulrooney
and Mr. Culhane found in the cave on Cumberland Island. I've come to one
conclusion: if the Madagascar found all the stuff Henry Chillingsworth talks
about in his diary, Chillingsworth's uncle Captain Miles Chillingsworth was
the luckiest navigator since Sinbad."
There was laughter from the crew members nearby. "The Antarctic section of the
map is the one we're chiefly concerned with, and it's very difficult to work
from. But I figured from the Madagascar's logbook more or less where she went.
They searched several locations and just about used up all their cannonballs
and gunpowder trying to bust holes in the ice. They were here in a different
season than we are. Plus there's been one hundred years for the ice to change.
I'm sure somebody could come up with some dandy statistics, but the cave the
Gladstone Log mentions finding could be underwater by now, or it could be
several miles back along the ice field."
"What if it is? Either one, I mean," Mulrooney asked.
"Problems," Culhane remarked.
Macklin nodded. "If the cave entrance is under the water level, it depends on
how deep. We've got some divers aboard, and we have insulated, cold-water
diving gear. So maybe we can explore the cave mouth at least. But a detailed
exploration with the gear we have available will be out of the question. I've
got men with guts enough to try it, but I've got more brains than to let
them."
"What about the other way?" Partridge asked.
"If it's across the ice pack, we can't fire a torpedo or a deck gun into the
ice to blow it clear. We'd have to find it, then use conventional explosives.
Which we don't have. But we have conventional explosives available from one of
the torpedoes, and we can use that. So in essence, if we can safely plant a
charge and safely detonate it, blowing a hole through some ice won't be that
tricky. There is one big problem, however. We don't have a helicopter. We
don't have a dog sled or an Arctic Cat. Even with all the cold-weather gear
we've brought along, it'd be dangerous as hell going even a few miles out
there on the ice. I can't order my men to do that, in good conscience. But Mr.
Hardestey has already come up with a list of volunteers if that proves
necessary, and the list is more than adequate."
"And we'd all have to go, wouldn't we?" Margaret Spicer asked quickly. "The
scientific party, I mean."
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"That's a matter for you to decide individually. It would be extremely
hazardous. It's early spring for Antarctica now. Some ice is melting. Risk
factors are high. There are crevasses fall in one, and unless you get out
double-quick, the crevasse'll close and crush you or bury you alive. Icebergs
sometimes melt on the side facing the sun and then topple over like an
axed-through tree and we're talking tons and tons of ice. Those are only two
I don't even know all the dangers. We have only one person who's been to the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]