Freezing Point

by Karen Dionne

  “ ‘Dear Iceman,’ ” he read, and looked up. “He calls himself ‘The Iceman’?”

  “Yeah. Isn’t that just so totally cool?” Sarah hugged herself and sighed.

  “Totally.” Ben smiled, then continued: “ ‘I’ve been thinking about what Mr. McMurtry told us, about how every year the ice gets a little thicker at the poles. So what I’m wondering is could it get so thick that the earth starts wobbling and gets knocked out of orbit? Is this crazy? What do you think? Your friend, Sarah.’ ” He refolded the paper and handed it back. “That’s a good question.”

  “I hope he answers tomorrow. He sent Cassie a e-mail today. He signed it ‘love.’ ” She blushed fiercely and looked down at her plate.

  So that was how it was. Ben sagged. His work centered on the Antarctic, and Sarah had never shown the slightest interest in it, but let her get a few e-mails from some scientist who just happened to be working there and she was mooning over him as though he were a rock star.

  The Iceman. What kind of reputable scientist would call himself that?

  Chapter 5

  Raney Station, Antarctic Peninsula

  A strip of sunlight leaking from the edge of the aluminum foil-covered window spilled across Zo Zelinski’s face. It was enough to wake her, which was no surprise considering that was the reason she’d torn away the corner in the first place. She slid out from her husband’s embrace and dressed quickly, layering two pairs of wool socks, blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and a wool sweater over the long underwear she wore as pajamas. Mukluks in hand, she stepped into the hallway, pausing to listen to Elliot’s steady breathing before closing the plywood door.

  In the kitchen, she sat down on one of the long benches flanking the picnic-style table and pulled on her boots. She zipped up her parka, tucked a bottle of water and a handful of saltines into one pocket, and went outside. The cold, dry air froze the moisture on the hairs inside her nose. She sneezed.

  To the east, a crayon box’s worth of red and orange streaked across the sky, rimming the pressure ridges along the shore with neon pink. The katabatic winds sweeping down off the glacier were fierce. Shielding her face with one arm, she tucked the other mittened hand into her pocket and hurried away from the station.

  Every time she trekked toward the glacier, Zo had the same thought: that in a continent as vast and as empty as Antarctica, it was ironic she had to go to such lengths to be alone. But with twenty-five researchers and support staff packed into two undersized sheet-metal buildings like proverbial sardines, she didn’t exactly have options. It was only because they were married that she and Elliot rated a private room. The rest lived dormitory-style in six small bedrooms, sharing a minuscule kitchen and rec room crammed without thought or design among the labs and support systems equipment. At Raney, science was paramount, living quarters an afterthought, and no one ever questioned the arrangement.

  Her stomach twisted, and she broke into a run. There was a small ice cave at the base of the glacier; a bathroom-sized cavern with cerulean walls and a torrent of meltwater running down the middle that was perfect for her needs: far enough away that she couldn’t be seen, yet close enough to run to in a hurry if the need arose.

  Today, she almost didn’t make it. Reaching the entrance, she ducked inside, tossed back her parka hood, tore off one mitten, held her long blond hair out of the way, and vomited.

  Finished, she wiped her mouth on her coat sleeve and sat down on a flat rock overlooking the bay. Far out on the ice, a pair of elephant seals snorted. A flock of Adelies answered, sounding like braying donkeys. She nibbled a cracker and looked back at the station to where Elliot was presumably still sleeping and kicked at the gravel, sending a shower of scree skyward. To say life wasn’t fair didn’t begin to cover it. After two years of filling out enough paperwork to have been responsible for the destruction of the entire Costa Rican rain forest, no sooner had she managed to snag a grant with enough funding to allow her to spend the next three Antarctic summers in the field with her husband instead of ten thousand miles apart, and her birth control defaults the first week.

  Her stomach roiled. She swallowed, then swallowed again. Clapping a hand over her mouth, she dashed back into the cave.

  “So it’s you.”

  She coughed to disguise the sound of her gagging and whirled around. The speaker was backlit by the sun, but she knew who it was by his height and by the way he’d said “you”; a lilting, sing songy cadence that managed to pack enough disdain into a single syllable to do a lesser person’s self-esteem serious damage. She pushed past him, positioning herself in front of the entrance, and forced a smile.

  “Hey, Ross. You’re up early.”

  “I was about to say the same of you.”

  She pointed skyward. “Hard to sleep when the lights are on twenty-four/seven.”

  He laughed. “Don’t worry; after a few seasons, you get used to it. What are you doing back so soon? Forget something?”

  As if. She’d done a great job of setting up her research camp on the other side of the peninsula. She had an old whaling hut for shelter, a kerosene heater for comfort, and enough cases of food and bottled water to last two seasons if necessary. The bottled water part of her shopping list bothered her; she hated to give even a penny of support to the water-sucking megacorporations, but melting snow like they did at Raney for their water needs was too time-consuming a chore for just one person. Because she’d elected to spend her time in the field rather than tending a cookstove, she was stuck with the compromise in the same way every environmentalist was who flushed a toilet or drove a car.

  “Elliot radioed that another tour ship was on the way, so I came back to help.” Let him make of that what he wanted. Everyone else seemed to think because she was married to the station director, she sublimated her research to his needs; why shouldn’t he? At any rate, she wasn’t about to tell him the real reason: She needed to send out another batch of ICESat scans asap, and the tour ship afforded the perfect excuse to make an extra trip back to the station. Technically, the scans were for scientific purposes only, but in view of the large amount of good her one small disobedience would accomplish, she didn’t see the harm in sharing. A person had to be willing to act on what they believed, and as far as clandestine operations went, hers was definitely low risk: Cull the information, compress it into a zip file, e-mail it to L.A., and delete the record of the transaction from the computer logs. There were plenty of reasons why Soldyne’s iceberg water project needed to succeed—not the least of which was that the alternative was unthinkable.

  “So you don’t mind the station’s being overrun by tourists.”

  “Not at all,” she said. “I know some people think the Antarctic should be set aside as a scientific preserve, but I believe tourism is a good thing. When people can see for themselves how special the continent is, it gives us a chance to sell them on the idea of preserving it.”

  He held up his hand. “You can spare me the lecture; I’m with you on this one. The planet can’t save itself, and Mother Earth needs all the help she can get.”

  “Is that why you set up your Internet classroom? To educate kids about Antarctic issues?”

  “How’d you hear about that? I only started last week.”

  “It’s no big mystery; it’s all in the e-mail logs. Don’t get me wrong, I think an electronic classroom is a great idea; I’m just surprised Elliot agreed to give you satellite time.” Communication had improved dramatically over the old days thanks to e-mail and satellite phones but because of the low satellite angle, transmissions were limited to two four-hour periods a day, with reception sporadic at best.

  “I usually get what I want.” He paused. “And right now, I want to know when you’re going to tell Elliot.”

  So he had heard her. Of all the people to figure it out, it would have to be him. “Tell him what?” she asked on the off chance that she was wrong.

  “That you’re pregnant.”

  “I’m not. I mean, I—Oh,
geez. Okay, so I’m pregnant. How’d you know?”

  “I knew someone was.” He pointed to the station, then to the ice cave. “Doesn’t exactly take an Indian to follow the highway you made to Puke’s Peak. Next time you might take a few minutes to cover your trail.” He clucked his tongue. “So you’re pregnant, and you’re keeping it a secret. Brilliant.”

  “It’s no big deal. Women get pregnant every day.”

  “Not in Antarctica they don’t. Not diabetic women.”

  “Are you the expert on everything? What can you possibly know about diabetes and pregnancy?”

  “I know that a woman with diabetes is more likely to miscarry; that the baby’s likely to be born overly large or with a serious defect; that other complications such as still-birth and jaundice are possible. There’s a high incidence of diabetes among Native Americans,” he explained in answer to her raised eyebrow. “My sister has it. She also has three kids. Please tell me you’ve told Rodriguez.”

  Dr. Luis Rodriguez comprised Raney’s entire medical staff. Like everyone else who’d elected to live and work at the bottom of the earth, he was of above-average intelligence, self-sacrificing, and, most important, good at improvising in a pinch. Zo had considered confiding in him more than once, but the only sure way to keep a secret was to keep it to yourself, so she’d settled for a consultation with his medical books instead. Thanks to Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine she knew how to manage the early weeks of her pregnancy; she also knew that Ross had dredged up the worst-case scenarios to make his point. The complications he was so worried about were all end-stage events; she’d only be four months along when the season was over; plenty of time to seek medical attention then.

  She shook her head.

  “Are you crazy? You’re going to have a baby. How long do you think you can keep that a secret?”

  “As long as I have to. And just in case you’re thinking of taking the law into your own hands, you should remember I’m not the only one with a secret.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe this’ll help: P. O. P.”

  “P-O-P?”

  “Exactly. What do you think would happen if people found out you were a member? Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, World Wildlife, sure, but Preserve Our Planet? No one in the scientific community would take you seriously if they knew. There’s a big difference between being an activist and being a terrorist.” Which was exactly the reason she’d quit the organization three years ago, after Rebecca Sweet took over and the group turned radical. That protest up in Newfoundland where she’d almost sprayed that guy with soda pop—what had she been thinking? He was just trying to make a living—probably had a wife and family. It wasn’t his fault the megacorporations were bleeding the planet dry, and it wasn’t fair or even reasonable of POP to target him. Now POP had graduated to firebombing SUVs and blowing up construction sites, but that wasn’t Zo’s style. She supposed that was the legacy of having been born the change-of-life baby of aging hippies: The tenets of nonviolent protest had been bred into her genes.

  “What in the world makes you think I belong to POP?” Ross’s bemused expression and open palms were innocence personified.

  Oh, he was good. Zo might even have bought his O. J. act if she hadn’t seen the evidence for herself.

  “If you don’t want people to know you’re chatting with ecoterrorists,” she said, adopting his trademark condescending tone. “You might take a few minutes to erase your e-mail trail.”

  Chapter 6

  For the fourth time in as many hours, Zo shoved the Hägglunds tracked ATV into park, opened the door, and jumped to the ground. The moment her feet touched down, she bent double, retching her peanut butter and jelly sandwich onto the snow. Straightening, she wiped her mouth on her jacket sleeve and leaned against the vehicle’s track to catch her breath. Then another cramp seized her, and she bent forward again.

  Once her stomach was empty, she climbed back into the driver’s seat, still hungry, still nauseated, and leaned her head against the steering wheel, thinking how ridiculous it was that something as normal as pregnancy should make a woman so sick. At least now that she was on the road, she could throw up wherever and whenever she liked. During the past few days at the station, she’d choked down so much bile she felt as though her stomach had gone permanently sour. Add to that the stress of having to keep her pregnancy secret, and it was no wonder her gut was a wreck. Ross seemed to have accepted the terms of her blackmail and was keeping his mouth shut, and hiding her condition from the others under the bulky sweaters everyone wore was a no-brainer, but keeping it from the man who expected her to climb naked into his bed was another matter. There were two kinds of lies: sins of omission and blatant, overt untruths, and faking her period to avoid having sex with her husband definitely had her guilty of the latter.

  She eyed the remaining half of her sandwich; then looked down at the brown-and-purple Rorschach blot in the snow and sealed the sandwich in a Ziploc bag—force of habit, since the Antarctic climate was so dry, an open bag of chips stayed fresh for months. Shifting the Hägglunds into gear, she started forward with one eye on the flag line and the other on the GPS, the mountains on either side rising up out of the snow like miniature Himalayas. She hummed the theme to Star Wars as she drove, tapping dum, dum, da-da-da DUM dum on the steering wheel and wondering if when Lucas created Hoth, he’d had Antarctica in mind. The peninsula was definitely inspiring: a geographic extension of the Andes, just fifty miles wide, rugged and desolate, with nameless, majestic peaks rising to five thousand feet under a china blue sky.

  A pterodactyl-shaped shadow passed over the ground. Zo traced it back to an albatross flying overhead. Seabirds never came very far inland, which meant she was close. She was tempted to roll down the window to sample the salt-smell in the air, but the exterior readout of minus two degrees Fahrenheit and the frequent spindrifts of snow counseled otherwise. She reached down to pick up her thermos of hot chocolate instead—correction: “lukewarm chocolate,” since even the best Stanley steel couldn’t compete with Antarctic cold—and poured half a cup, sipping it slowly to give her recalcitrant stomach time to acquiesce. When she finished, she licked the cup dry and screwed it back onto the thermos using both hands, steering the Hägglunds expertly with one knee.

  After half an hour of jostling and bumping during which she somehow managed to keep the hot chocolate down, she arrived at the Larson. In front of her, the glacier pooled between two rocky promontories like melted ice cream, spilling carelessly out onto the ocean where at some point it ceased being a glacier and became the Larson Ice Shelf. Viewed from a distance, the surface was deceptively smooth, but ice shelves floated up and down with the tides, grating against the rocks and opening up cracks and fissures capable of swallowing an entire fleet of Hägglunds. Icebergs the size of apartment buildings regularly broke off from the leading edge in a process that was as natural as the seasons. It was only in recent years that chunks as big as small countries had begun falling into the sea. Laymen pointed their confident fingers at global warming as the cause, but lacking definitive empirical evidence, scientists were divided. Zo’s physical survey was intended to add to their body of knowledge; unfortunately, one season’s data wasn’t going to amount to much of a contribution.

  As she drove out onto the glacier, she followed her previous tracks closely, fully aware of the sacrilege she was committing by scarring the face of the object she’d come to study. For all its harshness, Antarctica’s was a delicate ecosystem where change came slowly and even a footprint lasted for decades. The whalers’ hut she’d commandeered for her research base was a case in point. The first time she entered was like opening a time capsule. A cast-iron skillet lay on the stove exactly where it had been left a hundred years before; wooden boxes held candles; fur sleeping bags covered the bunks; stoppered glass medicine bottles containing the previous century’s latest high-tech remedies lined a high shelf. Faded photographs of King Edw
ard VII and Queen Alexandra presided over a cache of food tins with appetizing labels like “Lunch Tongue” and “Pea Powder.” The exterior boards were so wind-scoured, the nail heads that had once been pounded flush stuck out half an inch, but the walls were sound. Quaint as it was, the National Science Foundation assured her the hut had no particular historical significance, and she was free to make any changes she wished. Mac, her best friend at the station and the one who had mapped out the flag line for her, had suggested swaddling the whole thing in plastic to up its R-rating, but Zo preferred the natural look, even if it was a little drafty.