Ice Brothers

by Sloan Wilson

  “I’ve got a lot of spare parts and the chances are I can fix it. Damn it, I’ll build us a new one if I can’t.”

  Reassured some, the men on the wings of the bridge drew away from the doors and a few went forward for coffee.

  Watching Nathan work made Paul nervous, and he was sure that Nathan did not need an audience. He went to his cabin and tried to figure out what he should do if it took Nathan a very long time to make his repairs, or if in the end they proved impossible. Without the eyes of radar the Arluk was certainly in much greater danger. Her edge, in fact, was gone, all the odds changed. Faced with two enemy ships and an enemy shore base, Paul’s instinct was to run or stay hidden in the ice, but now if he was to keep track of the enemy’s position he would have to press close enough to see and be seen.

  Still, the odds were that Nathan could fix the set. Jewish magic, Mowrey had called radar, and the old man had said, “I don’t wonder that the damn thing goes out the minute you get to sea.”

  Nathan, Paul found himself thinking, work your magic now!

  Minutes, then hours went by very slowly. Too restless to stand still or sit down, Paul went to the forecastle for coffee. The men were playing checkers.

  “How’s it coming, skipper?” Guns asked.

  “Mr. Green is working on it. He knows his business.”

  “I bet he really could build a radar set,” Cookie said. “He used to be in that business.”

  Paul marveled at the men’s confidence. With a few tools and spare parts, Nathan could build a whole radar set in a few minutes, they were sure. At times like this they needed to believe that the officers they so often hated were gods. Paul was suddenly sure that now they thought even he had mystical powers. He’d better have …

  Paul finished his coffee and carried a cup up to Nathan, who was still bent over the set. There was no longer a tremor in his long fingers. as he tightened a tiny screw, but he was sweating and paused to wipe his face and hands with a handkerchief.

  “Want some coffee?”

  “Later,” Nathan said, and Paul gave the coffee to the quartermaster …

  Two hours crept by before Nathan sighed and said, “I think I’ve got it.” Paul was standing on the flying bridge.

  “He thinks he’s got it,” Flags said, sticking his head above the top rung of the ladder.

  Paul hurried to the pilothouse in time to see Nathan adjust the knobs. The screen glowed green again, flickered and suddenly snapped into focus, showing a clearly glowing little map of the surrounding ice.

  “I guess that’s it,” Nathan said, grinning.

  The men cheered and Paul found himself pounding Nathan on the back. “Do you want a drink? We can find a bottle somewhere.”

  “No,” Nathan said.

  The beaming approval of the men pleased but embarrassed him. He didn’t know how to respond to it and he suddenly felt exhausted. For about an hour he had fought a growing fear that he never would be able to figure out what was wrong with the set, or that he would find a defective part he couldn’t replace. In the end it had proved to be only a short circuit, a burned out connection that had taken only five minutes to fix after it had been uncovered.

  With the men still congratulating him, Nathan put the gray box back in place and tightened it down. Studying the screen, he said, “Skipper, I can’t see that anything has changed while the set was out but we better keep a close watch on it. I need to lie down for a while. Can you handle it?”

  “I got it,” Paul said. “Get a good rest. Tell Cookie to bring you anything you want. I wish I could give you the Congressional Medal.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Nathan walked slowly to his bunk in the wardroom and stretched out. He remembered the long days when he had lain in that bunk with nothing whatsoever to do because Mowrey had declared him incompetent, and he wished suddenly that he could tell his wife of this triumph, this discovery that he could fight the war well, better than most men. In his own way, he was strong. If Becky was huddled in some concentration camp, he was sure that she would like to know that.

  The thought of his wife starving behind barbed wire was too much for him, and he caught his breath. He was shocked to find that he hoped she was dead, that he could stand the thought of death for her, but not suffering the degradation. Death, after all, came to everyone, it was part of the natural order, and so was suffering at times, but degradation was not natural, it was the ultimate perversion.

  Almost certainly she was dead, he felt in his bones, because like him she would not really be afraid of death. If she was dead, dead at the age of twenty-five, her life would not be wasted any more than the life of a songbird is wasted because it is short, and beyond that, her life continued to have meaning if he could understand it, or so he tried to tell himself. But to understand his wife he had to understand her family, a fact he’d been all too slow to learn. Both her parents had come to Poland from Russia in their early youth. They were the descendants of rabbis and scholars as far back as they knew, and the survivors of pogroms over the ages. They were survivors—that was perhaps the key fact about them. Her father had survived economically by learning almost twenty languages well—there was always a place for him in some university. Beyond that he had survived by retreating into his house and preserving an attitude of aloof, often humorous detachment toward the surrounding world. Perhaps to make up for the pleasures they missed outside their house, he and his wife preserved or invented a ritual of family life which was even more elaborate than their orthodox religion. When Nathan first met them he could not get over how formal and gravely polite this husband and wife were to each other. They raised their daughter as a devoted horticulturist might tend a rare rose. They’d come to America when Becky was nine years old because they were old hands at seeing trouble before it started. Their apartment in Brooklyn was nowhere near as gracious as their house and garden in Warsaw, and Brooklyn College did not treat its professors with the respect given by any Euopean university, but America, despite its noise, clash and confusion, was safe, at least relatively safe. Professor Kochalka and his wife made no attempt to make friends in America. They continued to live as though they were in a fort surrounded by savages and had to invent all the pleasures of life for each other.

  There was never a child more protected, encouraged and loved than Becky, but she was not spoiled because she tried to please her parents as hard as they tried to please her. She spoke softly, as everyone else in that house did, and when her mother was ill, as she often was, Becky soon learned to cook the familiar elaborate meals for her father. Nathan at the age of sixteen was astonished to see that before she brought her father a half grapefruit for dessert, she often carved it into the shape of a little basket, as her mother did.

  Becky, of course, had to go to school, and she was perhaps surprised to find that outside her familiar fort there actually were few real savages. Most people in Brooklyn treated this gravely polite little dark-eyed girl with affection. Her teachers and most of the neighbors loved her. She was quiet but her eyes danced with mischief and she got on well with other children. It was almost impossible for people to dislike her because Becky obviously was in love with the world.

  “You’re like the three monkeys,” Nathan said to her once when they were about nineteen. “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “If you sit there covering your eyes, your ears and your mouth, you’re pretty helpless, aren’t you?”

  “I can run. I always keep my eyes and ears open when I run. Often my mouth too.”

  It was true that running was always her solution to any troubles that she couldn’t escape by smiling. She wouldn’t even argue with other students at college if their voices grew strident. She would just smile and go.

  Yet she wasn’t really meek, as Nathan soon discovered. If she thought she was right she usually found ways to get her own way. She liked being the center of attention, and worked hard to earn the approval of other
s. She danced exuberantly and gracefully, she played the piano almost professionally, and she always dressed with a quiet elegance. Both in high school and college she was popular with groups which hardly spoke to each other.

  She was transparently happy—that was always her greatest attraction. Although she was beautiful to Nathan, she was not an unusually pretty girl, but her face so often radiated a kind of delight with everything and everyone. People felt liked when talking to her and they were right.

  The first conflict she was unable to escape concerned Nathan and her parents. Sometimes he thought that she expected him to move into her father’s home when they got married, like a brother. She never seemed to enjoy their own apartment much, and could not understand why he didn’t want to eat most of his meals with her parents. It was possible that the reason her father decided to go back to Poland was not only his growing homesickness, but his realization that his daughter had to learn to live without him.

  But Becky was not just an ordinary bride who was too immature to leave her parents, Nathan slowly realized. The fact was that her parents’ ways of life offered a kind of serenity that she needed and which she wanted Nathan to learn. The telephone was not always ringing in Professor Kochalka’s house—the old man had installed a switch in the wire and kept it turned off almost all the time. He had disconnected the doorbell, and there was something about the professor which did not encourage people to drop in without an invitation. The radio was never turned on in that house except for special programs chosen from the newspaper. Heavy curtains closed out most street sounds. There was always a healing kind of quiet there, unlike any house Nathan had ever known, and completely unlike the crisis center his father and mother ran.

  Conversation in Professor Kochalka’s house was a leisurely art. No one raged, no one tried to convince anyone of anything. The food was always prepared both to taste and look good and was served on handsome china. Although the professor was far from rich, he served good wine in crystal glasses, and the family kept drinking toasts to celebrate Becky’s good marks at school, a paper her father had just published, a wedding anniversary, a birthday—it seemed to Nathan that they were forever drinking toasts to each other. Professor Kochalka and his wife were stout, middle-aged people, but they acted almost like a courting couple, jumping to do little errands for each other, holding open doors, and exchanging compliments. Nathan admired them, and if he hadn’t wanted to spend most of his time alone with his wife, would have been a willing guest.

  No, that was not entirely true. Nathan had been brought up in a house where people argued passionately, and where everyone was too busy to waste time over elaborate meals. He could not help himself from eating fast and trying to start political debates.

  “You certainly have some very interesting opinions,” the professor would say.

  “Do you agree with them?”

  “With many parts of them. Are you a student of Kant?”

  Nathan was not a student of Kant. Almost his entire education had been technical. Professor Kochalka made him feel ignorant, immature and uncivilized, the Great American Boor.

  But Becky was right—her parents had invented an enviable style of life, and it was not surprising that she missed it when they went back to Warsaw. Because Nathan had many friends and several jobs and hobbies at the same time, their own apartment was always a bedlam in contrast, no matter how much he tried to learn from the professor.

  Lying in his bunk now, Nathan thought that Becky might have known more real happiness in her twenty-five years than most people experienced in a long lifetime. She had in a profound sense lived well, and had added to the happiness of almost everyone her life had touched. The fact that such a life was short did not make it meaningless.

  No, but the bastards still killed her or locked her up, Nathan thought, and fury shot through him like an electric shock. The image of his wife in a grave or in a concentration camp made all his attempts to accept her loss philosophically seem ridiculous. She was Jewish and the Germans had made the cold decision that the Jews weren’t really people, they could be killed like rats. And right now two German ships lay in the ice less than ten miles away.

  Nathan could not sleep. He took a hot shower, shaved and put on clean clothes. Then he went to the bridge. “I’ve had all the rest I need, skipper,” he said. “I’ll be glad to take over for a while.”

  CHAPTER 37

  All that night Nathan and Paul took turns watching the radar. The German ships lay motionless until about two in the morning, when they made another attempt to escape. The small ship twisted her way to a lead which soon came to a dead end. It explored the situation like a rat in a maze. She could push her way, twist and turn through crevasses which stopped the larger vessel, and she kept running out a few miles in every direction, first east, then south, west and finally north as she looked for broader leads. For a half hour she was headed directly toward the Arluk, and Paul had his finger on the button for the general quarters alarm when she turned east again.

  Tired as he was, Nathan would not leave the radar set. To prepare himself for what might be a big day, Paul turned in. He had slept less than three hours when Nathan called him.

  “Skipper, I’ve lost the little one,” he said. “She might be lying on the other side of the big one, or behind any of the big bergs.”

  “Could she be headed this way?”

  “She might dodge from berg to berg for a while, but I’d pick her up if she kept moving for long. Both ships are playing possum, I guess. The only reason I haven’t lost the big one is that I’ve learned to recognize her blip even when she’s not moving.”

  They’re playing a waiting game, Paul thought, but what did they have to wait for? Stepping to the wing of the bridge, he stared into the darkness. The fog was not quite as thick as before, not overhead, anyway. The moon was invisible, but a faint glow was managing to get through.

  If the fog cleared before morning or on subsequent nights, the Lightnings could attack if Paul could illuminate their target with star shells. The tiny three-inch gun on his bow was the only one he had that could fire those, and he was ashamed to realize that he did not know its effective range.

  “Quartermaster, get Guns up here.”

  When Guns arrived on the bridge he was blinking sleepily. His long hair and black beard looked as though they had not been combed in weeks.

  “Guns, how close do I have to be to a target before you can put a star shell over it?”

  “Well, that three-inch twenty-three ain’t much good, sir. A mile maybe? I don’t trust it.”

  “At a mile how many shells would you have to fire before you got one over the target?”

  “You couldn’t count on the first one, or the second. Maybe the third.”

  “If the enemy has six-inch guns and good fire control, we wouldn’t last long if he was only a mile away, would we?”

  “Not if he could see us, sir, and not if he had radar.”

  If there was no fog, the German would see the flash of the three-inch gun, and would be quick to respond. Why take such a chance when the Lightnings could do the job almost without risk on the first clear dawn?

  Doing nothing was obviously the best course of action, if it could be called that. The large German ship almost certainly was stuck again and the smaller one was remaining motionless to achieve invisibility in the ice pack on radar. The Arluk remained within radar range, but too far away to hit or be hit. This was a battle without motion, without sound and without anything that could be seen, except for the glow of the Arluk’s radar. The weather remained the same, foggy with some small evidence of clearing overhead. The weather reports GreenPat forwarded to them every hour kept prophesying continued fog for at least forty-eight hours.

  The big question in Paul’s mind was how long the small ship would stick with the larger one. Would the skipper of the German trawler, if that’s what she was, feel obligated to aid his charge in a hopeless fight against Lightnings to the point of sinking with her
, or would he cut and run? And when might he cut and run, at the last possible moment, or at the first sign of clearing skies? If he cut and ran, would he try to hide from the planes, a job which would not be impossible for a well-camouflaged ship in the ice pack? Or would he try just to put as much distance between himself and the doomed supply ship as possible? Would his main objective be to escape or to attack the Arluk when the planes returned to their base?

  Paul tried to imagine what he would do if he was the captain of the smaller German ship. I wouldn’t let myself be sunk with the supply vessel, he decided—that would be pointless bravado. As soon as I saw that the weather was starting to clear I’d run and hide. I’d jam the ship between two big icebergs, cover her decks with snow and hang white canvas or even sheets over the guns. As soon as the planes had gone I’d try to kill my enemy before he got to my base.

  Of course the captain of the smaller ship probably would not be the man to make the final decision. The senior officer in charge of the whole operation probably was aboard the larger ship. If he were a coward he might order the smaller ship to stand by, but it was not wise to count on a Kraut senior officer being cowardly. Stupidity, Paul felt he probably could count on, though. A stupid, brave officer might decide to let both his ships go down together in a blaze of glory.

  Except of course I really don’t know what the hell they are going to do, Paul thought—uncertainty is my only certainty. Right now the odds are in my favor, or appear to be, and so I just wait …

  Nathan did not sleep at all that night. He was so afraid that some motion of the ships would not be detected by others that he sat on the stool crouched over the radar hood until he literally could not keep his eyes open anymore. He did not trust Paul to take his place for the simple reason that as captain Paul had too many responsibilities and might be called away from the screen at a crucial time. After reminding Sparks of the necessity to remain alert, Nathan turned the machine over to him and staggered to his bunk. Only two hours later he was back on the bridge, drinking coffee and staring at the screen. Nothing on it had changed. The larger ship was still motionless, the small one invisible in the ice.