North Cape

Barrows tapped his fingers nervously on the console. "All right, let me see if we can come up with something else that will help the deck heaters out. Forty years ago — they tell me — they never worried much about ice build-up. If the deck heaters couldn't keep up, they just gave a hundred or so sailors safety lines and buckets of ashes and told them to go to it. But what the hell can you do with eighty men, sixty of whom are on duty during general quarters at any one time, and no ashes." He shook his head. "Progress. Sometimes it does more to work against you than for you." Folsom grinned and left, after extracting a promise to get the number three engine back on line as soon as possible. He went directly up to the bridge and to the computing table. As he climbed into his high seat again, he switched on the navigation course plot and studied the fine red line that had marked their progress since 1900 the previous evening. The red progress line was superimposed onto the projected course and showed every' litttle deviation from the plot. But it was running fourteen miles behind; it was clearly indicated by an angry red circle encompassing the end point of both lines. He sat at the console, unconsciously tapping a pencil while he tried to figure a way out. Increased speed would apply more pressure to the bow. If they camelate to the turnaround; point, they would be late to the rendezvous. If they stayed behind — and the computer showed that, given the same conditions, at turnaround time they would be thirty-two miles short — they would not be in the lee of the North Cape. And with the ice building up at an ever-increasing rate, it would be far too risky to attempt the turn in the open seas.

Folsom swiveled to stare out the forward ports. The heavy gray sky formed a low-hanging ceiling barely clearing the mountainous seas. It was now nearly 11oo, one hour past sunrise. But the sun, filtering down through thousands of feet of ice and storm cloud, shed very little light to relieve the funeral pall. The wind, throbbing around the ship and even through thick insulation, could be heard clearly above the low-key noises of the bridge. The barometer had dropped to the lowest point that Folsom had ever seen, 28.49 inches of mercury. He knew that the worst of the storm and winds were yet to come. And they were heading directly into the teeth of it — in fact, rushing headlong to meet it. The anemometer, clacking loudly on the masthead, was still registering a fairly steady wind speed of fifty-seven knots, a Force 11 wind, strong enough to blow the crests off the waves. As waves approach shore, an entirely different set of hydrodynamic principles come into play, and the waves become the more familiar breakers, with crests of roiling white water as they break on the beach. In mid-ocean, waves are usually long swells several hundred feet long, with a rounded bosom rolling to the far-distant shore. When the wind is strong, then the water forming the swell is pushed faster toward the crest so that it overshoots and falls free in a mass of white water. Out there, Folsom could see, the wind was blowing so hard that the water that was pushed over the crest was blown free into long streamers for fifty and sixty feet downwind. He shivered involuntarily before the frozen wastes of the Arctic Ocean.

But daydreaming would not solve his navigational problem, and for the hundredth time he damned the destroyer that had ripped their bow, thereby causing all these problems. With an undamaged bow, neither he nor Larkin would have worried about the effects of the angry seas on the bow. They would have put the ship onto a long, rectangular course until rendezvous time and the hell with the pounding on the bow. His thinking was interrupted by the appearance on the bridge of Barrows' electronics crew. They politely elbowed him aside to get at the electrical conduits over his console to run temporary lines from the strain gauges in the bow. With nothing else to do for the moment, Folsom wandered around the bridge and the various consoles as unobtrusively as possible, stymied by the mathematics of the situation.