"I would suggest——" Teddy begin.
"We'll fire a trench-mortar bomb," said the young lieutenant.
The heavy winged projectile flew up into the air, and then descended squarely into the opening in the ice. Those standing fifty yards away could hear the crash as it struck, and then a sound as of musical splintering. The young lieutenant swore.
"The fuses are no good. Try once more."
"You can shoot all day and they won't go off," said Teddy mildly. "It's too cold down there."
The officer said nothing, but supervised the firing of a second mortar bomb with precisely the same result. He swore again.
"It's probably quite as cold as liquid air down there," said Teddy. "In fact, there's quite possibly a pool of liquified air at the bottom of the hole. Your bombs fall into that air and are frozen so solidly before they strike that the metal gets brittle and simply falls to powder from the shock. You can't do anything going on this way."
The young lieutenant hesitated, then turned to Teddy somewhat sulkily.
"What do you suggest, then?"
"We'd better enlarge the hole first. Blast down the walls of the present cavity, then use wrapped dynamite until we have a shallow crater. Then we'll place our explosives by long poles, keeping them warm by running resistance wires around them and heating them electrically."