Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

  ‘Anyhow, you’re all a part of Capricorn now, so we have to find a way to make this work. The first thing is to familiarise you with the base. Mel and I will take you on a quick tour and give you some of the base rules.’

  They helped Richard to dress and lifted him into a wheelchair, then turned to Carl, who had already returned to his bed.

  ‘Are you coming with us?’ Mel asked him.

  Carl’s response was to pull the covers over his head.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Lauren told him. ‘If you want to rest, we’ll take you on the tour when you’re feeling stronger.’

  They wheeled Richard into the mess room, Fitzgerald shuffling behind in a pair of slippers he had borrowed from Frank.

  ‘This is the heart of the base,’ Lauren told them. ‘It’s our meeting place, playroom and dining hall all in one. There’s always coffee on tap here, and Murdo keeps these cookie jars full when he’s not hungover. You can put any music you like on the stereo so long as it’s not Dire Straits or The Carpenters.’

  ‘Those are Frank’s favourites,’ Mel told them with an apologetic smile.

  Lauren opened the television cabinet.

  ‘Mondays and Fridays are movie nights, don’t blame me for the selection, that was down to Mel. There’s chess, go, backgammon and plenty of packs of cards here, and the dartboard’s open to all comers.’

  They crossed to the bar, where Murdo was busy cleaning away the previous night’s beer stains off the formica top.

  ‘This is the sacred temple,’ he told them, ‘and it opens from eight to eleven sharp every night. No alcohol at any other time or we’ll run out of booze long before the fat lady sings.’

  ‘Everyone chose their alcohol allocation before we left Europe,’ Lauren explained, ‘so if you want to drink you’ll be dependent on the generosity of your fellow man.’

  ‘My advice with the tobacco,’ Mel told them, ‘is smoke Murdo’s not mine.’

  ‘The galley’s out of bounds except when you’re on duty with Murdo. We’re strictly rationed on food supplies, and we don’t have the surplus that you can just cook what you want when you want. Meal times are set so that we all eat together. Unless you’re sick, we really want you there at every meal; often it’s the only time we get to see each other.’

  Back in the corridor they stopped at the noticeboard.

  ‘This is the duty rota.’ Lauren read down the list. ‘Laundry, bathrooms, galley, drilling shed, ice cutting for the water maker, balloon duty. As soon as you’re both fit enough, I want you signed on and sharing it with us. It gives you one task a day.’

  ‘Balloon duty?’ Fitzgerald queried.

  ‘All Antarctic bases act as weather stations. We send up a radiosonde every day,’ Lauren explained. ‘It measures temperature, pressure and humidity at different altitudes and radios the data back to us.’

  She showed them into the laboratory, the microscopes neatly dressed with their dust covers, the shelves lined with research manuals.

  ‘This is where the real work happens,’ she told them happily, ‘but the serious drama’s going to come later in the winter when we break through to the lake that’s sitting seven hundred metres beneath us.’

  ‘A lake?’ Richard asked, not quite sure if he’d heard right.

  ‘Don’t get her going,’ Mel warned him. ‘She’ll never stop.’

  ‘I’ll tell you another time,’ Lauren said. ‘As for now, I’m running two small-scale projects, both at the request of other agencies. The first is to construct a microparticle analysis of the ice core that Sean’s bringing up. I’m looking for anions such as sulphates and nitrates, helping to fill in data on volcanic activity in Antarctica.’

  She patted a suitcase-sized instrument which was built into the roof of the lab. ‘And we also have a small spectrophotometer for measuring ozone content above us. Want to know how that works?’

  ‘Another time, maybe.’

  They left the lab, and Lauren opened the door to one of the bathrooms.

  ‘You can take two showers a week, but never more than three minutes at a time. Every litre of water we use in this base has to be melted down from ice and that takes precious energy, so go easy on it.’

  They continued down the corridor to the next room, where a sun bed occupied most of the space.

  ‘This is the sun room. You have to spend two hours a week in here on doctor’s orders.’

  ‘It’s compulsory?’ Fitzgerald asked.

  ‘Certainly is,’ Mel told him. ‘If you don’t, you’ll end up the far side of winter looking like a cave-dwelling lizard. Oh, and you’d probably have anaemia and vitamin D deficiency thrown in.’

  Lauren pointed out a red alarm button on the wall.

  ‘The one thing we can’t take a chance on here is fire,’ she continued. ‘There’s smoke detectors in every bedroom, and the rule is no smoking whatsoever unless it’s at the table in the mess room. If you do find a fire, the fire alarm buttons are never more than a few steps away. We’ll be running fire drills every week through the winter, and you’ll all be required to participate.’

  ‘Every week?’ Richard questioned. ‘Isn’t that overkill?’

  ‘Fire is the biggest single cause of loss of life in Antarctica,’ Lauren told him. ‘There have been six major bases burned down in the last three decades, so we can’t afford to take any chances.’

  In the radio room, they found Frank manning the machines.

  ‘Good timing,’ he told Fitzgerald. ‘There’s another newspaper wanting to talk to you.’

  He gave the handset to the explorer, who gladly quit the tour. Lauren and Mel wheeled Richard to the dressing area and explained the importance of the thermal weather gear.

  ‘You never leave the base unless you’re properly dressed,’ Mel told him. ‘Take a look out there, and you’ll see why.’

  Richard peered out of the window into the pitch-black world which surrounded them. Ice granules were flying through the air at surprising speed. A small way distant he could see two sheds, each spilling light out of frosted windows. A rope connected each shed to the base via a series of waist-high poles.

  ‘That’s Sean’s department. The shed on the left is the drilling operation and the generator. The right one holds all our fuel supplies. When you’re fitter, you’ll be over there to help him out as part of the rota. The rule is you use the handline at all times, even when conditions seem good. People have been lost from bases when they ignored that rule and got caught in a whiteout.’

  ‘How many days did you say we’ll be trapped here?’ the journalist asked.

  ‘Two hundred. At least. The earliest you’ll be out of here is late September … the end of the Antarctic winter.’

  Mel and Lauren watched a tear roll down Richard’s cheek.

  ‘I’m supposed to be getting married in July. How the hell do you think I’m going to tell my fiancée?’

  32

  The days that followed were a period of adjustment, a shakedown stage during which Lauren and Sean got back into the rhythm of the base and the new arrivals began the monumental task of adjusting to a fate which was, in effect, not far removed from a prison sentence.

  Richard had broken the news to his fiancée in a radio call which he later described as ‘the worst conversation of my life’. Then—partly to distract himself—he set about writing an account of the plane crash and the rescue.

  ‘I have to file my story,’ he told Lauren stubbornly. ‘My editor will be waiting for it, and it’s a type of therapy.’

  They took him into the radio room and kept him stoked up with tea and painkillers as he recounted his incredible tale via satellite to the waiting editor.

  ‘I know a lot more about pain than I knew two weeks ago,’ he dictated, reading from his notes, ‘and I also know a great deal more about the spirit of my fellow man.

  ‘Imagine, if you can, the sensation of coming out of unconsciousness, only to find that the plane I had been travelling in had crashed. Of the cr
ash itself I remember nothing, only coming round to find myself frozen as if in a deep freeze, stuck somewhere in the bowels of a crevasse. In front of me I could see the two pilots had been killed, and I soon realised that my own injuries meant I could not move.’

  Richard paused emotionally. ‘I prepared myself to die, prepared my mind to accept that I would never see my fiancée again and that my story would, indeed, never be told. But then a knock on the fuselage told me that help was at hand. Tears of relief fell down my cheeks as I saw the heroic figure of Julian Fitzgerald swinging through the door of the shattered aircraft. That valiant man saved my life, hauling me—God only knows how—up a single rope to the comparative safety of the glacier surface above.’

  Later Richard got the news that his story had been run on the front page of the next day’s edition.

  ‘That was my first front-page byline,’ he told the others at the evening meal. ‘That’s something at least.’

  ‘You earned it,’ Frank told him, sincerely. ‘Big time.’

  Carl was not so quick to recover; in fact, Mel confided in Lauren that she was deeply worried about his mental state.

  ‘It’s almost like he’s lost the will to fight back,’ she observed. ‘He shows no interest in eating, no interest in fighting the infections he’s got, like the ordeal he’s been through has put him into a state of deep shock. He just lies in his bed, sleeping twenty hours a day.’

  ‘Let’s patch a call through for his family to talk to him,’ Lauren suggested. ‘His wife’s been on the radio several times wanting to make contact. That might snap him out of it.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ Carl told them weakly when Lauren proposed the plan.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because I know I have to be stuck here for the whole winter, and I won’t see them for another seven months,’ he said plaintively. ‘It’s easier on my mind not to think about them.’

  ‘I can see your point,’ Lauren told him gently, but added, ‘I think it’s worth doing; if nothing else it will remind you there’s a world out there which is waiting for you. You have to get yourself healed to be ready to go back.’

  But no amount of cajoling could change Carl’s mind. He merely turned over in his bed and resumed his silence.

  Fitzgerald, meanwhile, was spending his time in the way he liked best, virtually living in the radio room as he conducted one interview after another. The passing days did not seem to have diminished the media’s intense interest in the story, and, a week after they had returned to Capricorn, it was still going strong.

  ‘The man’s starting to bug me,’ Frank confided in Lauren. ‘Every time he tells the story he adds a few embellishments. One day the plane is sixty metres down the crevasse, the next it’s a hundred.’

  ‘Just another way of keeping the story alive. Now he’s the hero of the hour, he’s trying to keep his face on the front page.’

  But Lauren’s relaxed attitude changed when she saw the satellite bill. In ten days, Fitzgerald had managed to rack up more than two thousand dollars of satellite time.

  Lauren waited for an opportunity to speak to the explorer alone.

  ‘We’ve got to get some things straight,’ Lauren told him.

  ‘Go on…’ Fitzgerald was wary.

  ‘It’s about your radio use. The first thing is that it’s costing a fortune. Every minute eats up satellite time at seven bucks a go. That doesn’t sound much, but, the amount you’ve been using it, it soon racks up. Basically, I don’t have the budget to pay for it, and you’re costing us a packet. The second thing is that I’m aware from certain feedback I’m getting from the UK that your stories are getting more and more sensational. We are a serious scientific base, Julian, but at the moment we’re not much more than a sideshow to the Fitzgerald media circus.’

  ‘I don’t see what that has to do with you,’ Fitzgerald retorted. ‘I’ll tell my story how I want. And if you think this publicity is bad for Capricorn, then you’re wrong. All publicity is good publicity.’

  ‘That’s not necessarily true,’ Lauren objected. ‘I want the world to be focused on the science, and not on the exploits of Julian Fitzgerald.’

  ‘I’ll use the radio as and when I bloody well like!’

  With that, the explorer stormed off to his room.

  33

  Sean went back to his room for a shower at the end of a long session in the drilling shed, happy that the operation was going well. He’d left Frank in charge and announced he was taking half a day off.

  In the sixteen days since returning from the rescue mission, his time had been devoted almost exclusively to the drilling operation, but now, with the bore sinking smoothly day by day into the ice, he could afford some time for the many personal tasks he’d had to postpone. The film he’d taken on the rescue, for example, was still waiting to be processed. Sean had been looking forward to seeing the pictures.

  Sean dried himself off, dressed and went straight to his bedside locker, where he found the canister of exposed film.

  He took it to the darkroom and prepared the chemicals he would need for the processing. The film was Fujicolor, chosen by Lauren for all the base photography because it was one of the few colour films which could be processed quickly and easily by hand. The developing procedure was one Sean knew well. It would take him about an hour in total.

  He mixed the chemicals and cleaned out the lightproof bath in which he would soak the film. Then he extinguished the lights, working from that point in the infrared developing light which would not fog the film.

  The top of the canister came off easily with a little help from his Swiss army knife. Sean extracted the length of negative, wound the film onto the spindle and slid the result into the lightproof cylinder. He agitated it gently to ensure the film was evenly coated, then screwed on the top of the processing chamber.

  He switched the light back on and, satisfied with the work, left the film to sit in the bath. Thirty minutes should do it, he calculated, enough time for a quick coffee in the mess room.

  Half an hour later, he was back, ready to extract the film, wash off the outer residue of chemicals and dry the emulsion.

  But as soon as he unscrewed the lid of the lightproof chamber, Sean knew that something had gone wrong. He held the film up to the light, hoping he was mistaken.

  He was not; the film was blank, every frame black, as if no picture had ever been taken.

  Sean swore beneath his breath, wondering how the hell he had made such a mistake. Perhaps the film had never engaged on the sprocket inside the camera? But he could clearly remember the tension as he had rewound it before extracting the film. Or maybe the camera shutter had a fault?

  Sean took the strip of duff film back to his room and checked out his camera. The shutter seemed to be working fine. So what on earth had gone wrong?

  Perhaps he’d processed the wrong film.

  He had to make sure. He searched again, taking out the books and notepads which filled the drawer, but he couldn’t find another roll of film. He sat, perplexed, on the bed, going back over the events of the last few days to try and remember if he’d moved it for some reason, but he was absolutely certain he’d placed the film in that drawer.

  Sean examined the canister itself, looking for the tiny cross he habitually scratched with his knife into the bottom of the casing when he took the film out of the camera. It was an old habit, learned from a professional photographer he’d once travelled with, a trick to ensure that an exposed film would never be mistaken for a fresh one and reloaded into a camera.

  The cross wasn’t there. The bottom of the canister was unmarked. Sean shook his head, totally perplexed, then decided he must have made a mistake somewhere along the line.

  ‘Midwinter madness already,’ he told himself, then turned to other tasks.

  34

  Julian Fitzgerald waited until three a.m., long after he judged the last of the crew were asleep, before quietly pushing open his bedroom door. He tiptoed down the diml
y lit corridor, making his way silently to the medical room where he waited for a few moments with his ear to the door. Satisfied that there was no untoward noise or murmured conversation from within, he entered the room as stealthily as he could and stood there for a minute or so to let his eyes adjust.

  The room was a simple medical ward, equipped with just two beds and a curtained examination area. Richard was sleeping in the nearer of the berths, his head buried deep beneath the covers, his two plastered legs raised on pillows. Carl was in the berth nearer to the window, snoring lightly, with his head turned to face the wall.

  Fitzgerald took a few steps towards Carl’s bed, then froze in midstep as a sudden noise broke the calm. At first the explorer thought it was Carl moaning in his sleep, then he realised it was the window, reverberating as volleys of wind pounded against the base. He waited until the thrumming noise died down, then crouched down next to the bed, cursing the slight clicking of his joints as his knees bent.

  The kitbag was pushed back against the wall. Fitzgerald had to extend his arm quite a way beneath the bed to get a grip on the fabric and slide it out. He waited a few moments to consider what was safest: open the bag here and risk the noise of the zip? Or take it out into the corridor where he could search it at leisure?

  He decided on the latter, padding back out of the medical bay and rummaging through the bag until he found what he was looking for. Then he zipped the bag shut and returned it to its position beneath Carl’s bed, slipping safely back into his own room less than a minute later.

  Fitzgerald switched on the sidelight and lay back on the bed with Carl’s diary in his hands. He flipped it open and scanned the pages, noting with some relief that it had been written in English. Carl had told him it was a habit of his to write his expedition diaries in English so that his wife Sally could share in the journey on his return, but Fitzgerald had feared the Norwegian might have lapsed back into his mother tongue if he wanted the contents to be secret.

  But he hadn’t, and Fitzgerald now turned to the first page and began to read: