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get there.
    ‘Outside the Drift Station itself,’ I said, ‘I doubt if a dozen people in the world know what goes on there. But now you know. And you can appreciate how vitally important it is to the free world that this base be maintained in being. If anything has happened to it we want to find out just as quick as possible
what
has happened so that we can get it operating again.’
    ‘I still maintain that you’re not an ordinary doctor,’ Garvie smiled. ‘Commander Swanson, how soon can you get under way?’
    ‘Finish loading the torpedoes, move alongside the
Hunley,
load some final food stores, pick up extra Arctic clothing and that’s it, sir.’
    ‘Just like that? You said you wanted to make a slow-time dive out in the loch to check the planes and adjust the underwater trim — those missing torpedoes up front are going to make a difference you know.’
    ‘That’s before I heard Dr Carpenter. Now I want to get up there just as fast as he does, sir. I’ll seeif immediate trim checks are necessary: if not, we can carry them out at sea.’
    ‘It’s your boat,’ Garvie acknowledged. ‘Where are you going to accommodate Dr Carpenter, by the way?’
    ‘There’s space for a cot in the Exec’s and Engineer’s cabin.’ He smiled at me. ‘I’ve already had your suitcase put in there.’
    ‘Did you have much trouble with the lock?’ I inquired.
    He had the grace to colour slightly. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a combination lock on a suitcase,’ he admitted. ‘It was that, more than anything else — and the fact that we couldn’t open it — that made the admiral and myself so suspicious. I’ve still one or two things to discuss with the admiral, so I’ll take you to your quarters now. Dinner will be at eight to-night.’
    ‘I’d rather skip dinner, thanks.’
    ‘No one ever gets seasick on the
Dolphin,
I can assure you,’ Swanson smiled.
    ‘I’d appreciate the chance to sleep instead. I’ve had no sleep for almost three days and I’ve been travelling non-stop for the past fifty hours. I’m just tired, that’s all.’
    ‘That’s a fair amount of travelling.’ Swanson smiled. He seemed almost always to be smiling, and I supposed vaguely that there would be some people foolish enough to take that smile always at its face value. ‘Where were you fifty hours ago, Doctor?’
    ‘In the Antarctic’
    Admiral Garvie gave me a very old-fashioned look indeed, but he let it go at that.

TWO
    When I awoke I was still heavy with sleep, the heaviness of a man who has slept for a long time. My watch said nine-thirty, and I knew it must be the next morning, not the same evening: I had been asleep for fifteen hours.
    The cabin was quite dark. I rose, fumbled for the light switch, found it and looked around. Neither Hansen nor the engineer officer was there: they must have come in after I had gone to sleep and left before I woke. I looked around some more, and then I listened. I was suddenly conscious of the almost complete quiet, the stillness, the entire lack of any perceptible motion. I might have been in the bedroom of my own house. What had gone wrong? What hold-up had occurred? Why in God’s name weren’t we under way? I’d have sworn the previous night that Commander Swanson had been just as conscious of the urgency as I had been.
    I had a quick wash in the folding Pullman-typebasin, passed up the need for a shave, pulled on shirt, trousers and shoes and went outside. A few feet away a door opened to starboard off the passage. I went along and walked in. The officers’ wardroom, without a doubt, with one of them still at breakfast, slowly munching his way through a huge plateful of steak, eggs and French fries, glancing at a magazine in a leisurely fashion and giving every impression of a man enjoying life to the luxurious full. He was about my own age, big, inclined to fat — a common condition, I was to find, among the entire crew who ate so well and exercised so little —