"I know a little," I admitted. "There's nothing mysterious or sinister about what I know. Meteorologists now regard the Arctic and the Antarctic as the two great weather factories of the world, the areas primarily responsible for the weather that affects the rest of the hemispheres. We already know a fair amount about Antarctic conditions, but practically nothing about the Arctic. So we pick a suitable ice floe, fill it with huts crammed with technicians and all sorts of instruments, and let them drift around the top of the world for six months or so. Your own people have already set up two or three of those stations. The Russians have set up at least ten, to the best of my knowledge, most of them in the East Siberian Sea."

"How do they establish those camps, Doc?" Rawlings asked.

"Different ways. Your people prefer to establish them in wintertime, when the pack freezes up enough for plane landings to be made. Someone flies out from, usually, Point Barrow in Alaska and searches around the polar pack till they find a suitable ice floe — even when the ice is compacted and frozen together into one solid mass an expert can tell which pieces are going to remain as good-sized floes when the thaw comes and the break-up begins. Then they fly out all huts, equipment, stores and men by ski plane and gradually build the place up.

"The Russians prefer to use a ship in summertime. They generally use the «Lenin», a nuclear-engined ice-breaker. It just batters its way deep into the summer pack, dumps everything and everybody on the ice, and takes off before the big freeze-up starts. We used the same technique for Drift Ice Station Zebra — our one and only ice station.