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fascination of psychology.
    “What’s your course, Mister?” barked the Admiral, as if never in his life before had he whispered, wondered, or called upon God.
    “One eight oh, sir.”
    “Good.” Nelson strode back to the console and barked into the grille, “Damage control: report!”
    “One eight oh,” said Cathy to the doctor. “That’s south. We’re getting out of this.”
    The sonar squealed. The men around the console leapt to action. Range—engines—”Hard left!”: a tense pulsing moment of silence, and a great white mountain, mounding up out of the blackness below, disappearing silently into the darkness above the port bow. And everybody breathing again.
    “What would make icebergs come up from the bottom like that?”
    “Tell me first, Sue, what would make them be down there in the first place.”
    “No big ones now,” said someone at the board.
    They looked forward into the green-white glare ahead. Chunks rose—pebble size, football size, automobile size. They came thickly, a strange slow upside-down hailstorm, kissing and stroking the sleek sides of the submarine, knocking impatiently, scraping softly, sometimes like shoes on a coconut mat, sometimes urgently, like a dog which wanted so much to get in.
    “Watch your depth,” said Nelson. “It’ll hold at about three hundred and then shelve off to six, maybe seven. And when it does you’ll see the end of that ice.”
    “Admiral,” said the Captain, “if you know anything at all about what’s happening here, for the love of heaven let us in on it.”
    “I don’t know anything,” said Nelson, “but I’ve been doing the old trick of reading the instruments for the last half hour without thinking. That way you get the data that are, and not the ones you think ought to be.”
    “Three ten, sir,” said O’Brien at the depth gauge. “Thirty. Eighty. Four ten. That’s not a shelf, sir, it’s a cliff. Holding at four ten, give or take a little . . . uh! four sixty. Five. Five hundred thirty . . . and holding . . .”
    “And where’s your ice?” asked the old man with something approaching smugness.
    All hands swung forward and looked—at the greenish blaze ahead, clear water, a sudden flurry of fish.
    “Slow ahead, Captain.”
    “Slow ahead, sir.” To the grille, Lee Crane said, “Slow ahead,” and heard it repeated.
    “Will you tell us, sir?” asked the Captain, sounding very like a small boy whose uncle had just done a coin trick.
    “I’ll check it out. Commander, set up a grid chart on that screen, if you please. I want our maneuvering area for the past two hours.”
    “Yes, sir.” Chip Morton worked expertly with the controls, and in a moment the big central screen flickered, flared, and settled down to be a sounding map of their area, with isobars drawn at ten-fathom intervals. It showed deep water, shelving upward sharply to a long curved ridge, some of it no more than forty feet from the surface. Over the whole area was the cross-hatched symbol of unbroken pack ice.
    “Very good,” said Nelson.
    “A moment, sir,” said the Captain. He spoke into a grille, listened, spoke again. Then, “Damage control, sir. Hull and seams sound. Cookie’s cleaning up a mess in the galley; his stove guards will handle a thirty-degree list and apparently we did better than that.”
    “Twice,” said Nelson. “What else?”
    “Nothing, sir. She held up.”
    “Of course she did. Casualties?”
    “Commander Emery reports one bruised porpoise.”
    Chip Morton laughed abruptly, too loud, and shut it off too quickly. Cathy Connors thought Dr. Hiller nodded slightly. She did not smile.
    “Very good,” said the admiral. “Now, Commander, superimpose our course for the last hour onto that grid.”
    “Aye, sir.” Chip Morton’s fingers flew over a cluster of buttons. The information was extracted from the course recorder, coded for the flying cathode beam, and placed neatly on the map, a black, wavy line, meandering up to the