Quickly, she dug into her kit and produced her notebook paper and a pen. After a short greeting explaining who she was, she wrote:
Emmett has been removed from McMurdo under guard, apparently under arrest. I need to talk to you about what happened last year.
Thinking better of this approach, she scribbled that out and tried again. And again. After the fourth try, she realized that she had no idea whose side Lindemann was on, much less whether it was at all smart to contact any of the eight people who had been in the camp, at least in this manner. Several things could go wrong. Her message could be intercepted or lost, or one of them could turn her in to George Bellamy. Or worse yet, if anyone had anything to hide, this would put him or her on the alert.
Her mind burned with negative possibilities. If she was unlucky, she’d get sent north as soon as Wednesday, a disaster not only for her master’s thesis research but also for any hope of helping her professor. At least today she would attend Happy Camp, which would get her out of McMurdo and onto the ice she had dreamed about for so many years, but while there she could do very little to find out what had happened or hope to move toward a reversal of fortunes.
It was time to get moving, to get breakfast so that she could be on time for her class. She got up and was about to leave when it occurred to her that the laptop might be gone when she returned the next day. She pulled her own laptop out of her bag and put it on the desk, folded up his computer, slipped it and its power cord into her bag, and prepared to carry it off to her dorm room.
She turned toward the doorway and almost collided with yet another man. All the long muscles of her body jerked, and she almost dropped the bag.
“Hello,” he said. “You’d be Valena, right?”
“Yes.”
He was tall and blond and no more than five or six years older than she was. He was smiling at her. He was good-looking and very fit. “I’m Cal Hart. Emmett’s assistant.”
So you’re in town. Not at WAIS Divide. Her mind raced. How long had he been standing there? Had he seen her switch the computers? She forgot completely all the questions she wanted to ask him. “I was just going to breakfast,” she said.
“Let’s eat together,” he said.
“Sure, ah… that would be good. I was hoping you could fill me in a little on what happened. You know, to Emmett.”
His smile crumpled, revealing a tender boyishness. “I wanted to ask you the same.” He put his hands in his pockets and hung his head, shaking it in bewilderment. “I got back and he was gone.”
“You were in the high camp last year when it happened,” Valena said. “I was hoping…”
Cal lifted his head and looked at her, his eyes round with surprise and innocence. “It was awful,” he said. “I… I’d never seen a man dead before.”
A third man appeared just outside the office door. This one was middle-aged, slim and bearded. “Cal!” he said. “Can I have a word with you?”
Cal turned. “Sure, Jim.”
“In my office?”
“Sure.” He glanced over his shoulder at Valena. “See you at breakfast,” he said, then he turned his attention to the man named Jim.
The two men walked away, leaving Valena with the weight of the computer in her backpack. Did he see me make the switch? she asked herself again. Should I leave it here? She thought only a moment before hurrying off to her dorm, backpack and computer in hand.
9
MAJOR HUGH W. MULLER, “TRACTOR HUGH” TO SELECT cohorts, sat at his desk in Building 165. He stared into the computer screen in front of him, trying to decide whether to involve himself any further in the mess he and Waylon Bentley had found up in Emmett Vanderzee’s high camp or to let it ride. It was impolitic to say a word. It was unprofessional to even blink. But it was quite possibly immoral to do nothing at all.
Master Sergeant John Lansing appeared at the door. “Got a moment?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“A young woman came looking for Waylon yesterday. She’s a student of that beaker Waylon hauled off the ice on Saturday.”
“I met her, too. Nice kid.”
“I’d sure hate to come all the way down here and have to turn around and go home.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Nothing.” He put his hands in his pockets and began to whistle a little tune.
“Okay, I got you on radar. Get out of here.”
Lansing grinned and disappeared from the doorway.
Deciding on a measured step, Hugh switched to his e-mail screen and typed a few sentences to Major Bentley:
Hey there wise guy. You getting your fill of greenery? Okay, enough frivolity, what happened when you offloaded the professor? Feds still treating him like a criminal?
Thinking better of it, he backed up and erased like a criminal and typed in the same. He smiled. He was rather enjoying this cloak-and-dagger stuff, speaking in code and so forth. Waylon would know what he meant. Waylon had been ready to drop the feds out the cargo door at altitude, the way they’d spoken to the professor up there at the high camp. This was Antarctica, where people depended on each other or went down fast. It was ridiculous to go after them like they did.
Hugh typed,
So here’s the latest: it seems that Herr Doktor Professor has two students this year, and they only managed to stop one of them from coming south. The other one’s here, and wow is she a pistol. Wants to clear his name.
Hugh thought for only a few tenths of a second before adding,
You want to play?
He signed himself “TH” and hit send. Then he leaned back in his chair, arching his back into a big, much-needed stretch. The tension of that visit to the high camp—and what they’d found there—had bitten holes in his sleep every night since. Something had to give.
10
AT TEN MINUTES TO NINE, VALENA SETTLED INTO A SEAT in a small classroom on the second floor of the Science Support Center. She had time to burn, enough to begin to fidget and replay the conversation with Ted and Cupcake for the hundredth time, the conversation with Taha’s wife for the tenth, and begin to chew on the visits from Bob Schwartz and Cal Hart.
She itched to ask someone whether she would be back from Happy Camp in time to attend the Tractor Club meeting, whatever that was, so that she could meet Major Bentley, but she didn’t want to draw attention to herself or in any way seem anything but gung ho about survival training for fear that, considering her status as a short-timer, they would decide that she didn’t need the training.
All she knew about Happy Camp was that she would be required to demonstrate that she could sleep in a tent on the ice and light a camp stove without igniting the tent or herself. She presumed that her ECWs were warm enough that she would in fact survive, but she was yet to be convinced that a sleeping bag and a tent were going to keep her warm enough to actually sleep. Sleeping aside, if it was true that everyone in McMurdo went through this training sooner or later, and she had so far not seen anyone with missing fingers or toes, then it must be that survival training was… well, effective.
Promptly at nine o’clock, two young men came into the room and announced that they were Happy Camper School teachers. One had black hair and eyes and skin that was a burnished mahogany brown everywhere his clothes, hat, and glacier goggles did not touch. His nose, cheeks, chin, and lower forehead made a rich, dark contrast to the paler skin around his eyes, making him look like a negative image of a raccoon. He said, “Hi, I’m Manny, and this is Dustin.” He gestured toward the other instructor, whose freckled skin seemed more chapped than tanned. “We’re going to have an hour or so of lecture here where it’s warm, and then we’ll be heading out to Snow Mound City.” With that, he picked up a dry marker, approached the erasable board at the front of the room, and launched into a discussion of the five mechanisms of heat loss: conduction (wet clothes), convection (moving air), radiation (keep covered up), evaporation (don’t get so warm that you sweat), and respiration (heat that you exhale i
s just plain gone). This last was important also because exhaled air was replaced with air that was incredibly dry. It seemed that dehydration was a big problem in Antarctica. (“Drink, drink, drink. Your pee should be clear and copious.”)
Valena dug in her pack for her water bottle and took a swig. She found herself preoccupied with little things, such as what it was going to be like to pee, and what kind of sleeping bag would be issued, and what they might have for lunch. These were all things that Emmett Vanderzee had not thought to explain to her. She had thought that he would show her the ropes. But he was not here.
Her attention wandered to her classmates. Michael from Crary Lab was there but was studiously taking notes, so she checked out various young men in the class. None particularly grabbed her interest, so she got to examining the visual aids, such as a mock-up of a helicopter seat and harness, which they were expected to learn how to exit in a hurry. Her gaze came to rest on a second dry-mark board toward the back of the room. The lecture from a previous class had not been erased. The subject was altitude sickness. Symptoms. Triage. Treatment. Valena wanted to get up and examine it more closely but, again, did not wish to attract attention to herself. Over the next two days, she wanted to be just another face in the crowd, not that poor kid whose professor got hauled off in handcuffs.
Back at the front of the room, Manny was discussing how to recognize hypothermia (“Pay attention if your partner develops the ‘umbles’—fumble, mumble, grumble, stumble”) and the early stages of frostbite (“You’ll get pink and numb, then next comes a white patch. After that, it goes stiff and sounds wooden when you hit it. If it goes beyond that, we’re talking blisters and blackening”), how to keep warm (“You are the furnace, and you need fuel—eat, eat, eat”) but not too warm (“If your goggles steam up, your core temperature is too high: take off a layer”), and so on. The three mechanisms of heat gain were metabolic (eat more than you burn), exercise (both voluntary and involuntary… such as shivering), and radiation (cuddle up to something warm; the old saw about getting naked with somebody warm was apparently no longer as popular a solution).
Finally, they were told to exit through the back of the building and load into the Delta.
What’s a Delta? Valena wondered, until she stepped out through the doorway and got her first view of their over-the-snow transportation. It was another mammoth vehicle with fat rubber tires that loomed taller than she was. This one had a cab that was cantilevered out in front of the front tires, which in turn sat in front of a huge pivot point; the front wheels did not swivel, but instead the whole front end swung to make the vehicle turn. Mounted on the after end of the frame was a big, rear-entry passenger box with a chain ladder hanging below the door to permit awkward entry. They clambered up the ladder and packed in together tightly, Manny cheering the twenty students on with, “Come on, you can cuddle in tighter than that!”
Valena felt a hard shove in her ribs. She turned to recognize Doris, the computer person, trying to cram in closer to her. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
Doris gave her an exasperated look. “I managed to escape this last year, but they’ve finally caught up with me,” she said. “And don’t ask me why I’m in Antarctica if I don’t like the out-of-doors, okay?”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
Manny had the last few firemen hoist in cardboard boxes full of flight lunches. “Hold those on your laps. Okay, now when we get there, don’t go opening this door from the inside. We’ll be opening it from outside, and you could take our heads off with it. But if something goes wrong, like we crash or something, there’s an emergency exit in the roof.” He pointed. “Okay, everybody happy?”
Several Happy Campers gave a thumbs-up.
Manny slammed the door.
Suddenly they were twenty people packed as tight as sardines in conditions that were brand new to each of them. Gazes turned inward, and all conversation stopped. Valena heard the muffled sounds of Manny and Dustin climbing into the cab and starting the engine, and a moment later, the whole rig lurched into motion, bouncing and rolling on its giant tires.
They wallowed off toward the east, up around Observation Hill, and down toward Scott Base, the New Zealand research station that lay three miles by road from McMurdo. Valena craned her neck to look through the battered windows, anxious to see whatever she could of this fantastical environment. Ob Hill was formed of more of the black volcanic rock, with bands of reddish scoria. As they came around the far side of the divide that lay between the two research stations, she caught a new view across the ice, looking south toward Minna Bluff. She noted with some dismay that it appeared to be clouding up. We’ve got two hours to find cover, thought Valena. Or create it, out of snow and ice.
Valena listened to discussions that sprang up around her. There were several firefighters aboard, a raft of scientists, and miscellaneous office personnel from McMurdo, all wound up and excited to be getting their basic training in Antarctic survival. The firefighters were all men and looked like they needed a fire to fight. They were twitchy and restive and talked only to each other but immediately proved their worth. “Damn!” one of them cussed. “We’re filling up with fumes.” He pounded on the front of the box for a moment, trying to get the driver’s attention, but soon gave up.
“They can’t hear us,” said another. “They’re in a separate compartment, and they’re probably listening to tunes.”
“Damned surplus equipment,” muttered the first firefighter. He got up and popped the emergency hatch in the roof. The same cold monster that had sucked the warm, humid air out of the C-17 worked its same magic on the fumes.
Valena dug a chocolate bar out of one of the flight lunches. Eat, eat, eat, she told herself, peeling away its wrapper.
HAPPY CAMP WAS NOT AS GREAT A CHALLENGE FOR Valena as it was for the few participants who had never braved wilderness camping before. She already knew how to use the tiny stoves and pitch the dome tents, and while she had never camped on snow she had backpacked in the Rocky Mountains and had done her share of skiing. She had wondered why Vanderzee had asked her how many pairs of skis she owned. She had answered three (one pair downhill, one mountaineering, one skating). He had thought that quiver small, and now, as she shoveled snow to build a crude survival igloo, she understood. He had wanted to gage her level of experience with and enthusiasm for snow.
Antarctic snow was a species apart from any of the broad variation of the white stuff she had experienced before, affording a different range of uses. They built their shelter, or “quinzy,” in the style of the inland Inuit of Canada, by shoveling snow into a heap, packing it until it reset into a lightweight version of concrete, and then hollowing it out. To expedite construction, Manny had them make a heap of all the duffels containing their sleeping bags and mats and shovel the snow on top of them. “We’ll punch a hole in the side and pull them out once we’ve got a good shell,” he said.
Valena took the first shift standing on top of the mound and jumping up and down on it to pack the snow tight. To no one in particular, she called out, “I can’t believe that this is going to create a structure that will stand.”
“The snow here is a lot colder and drier than you may be accustomed to,” said Dustin. “It’s strange stuff. It packs hard.”
Getting the first duffel back out from under the heap was an immense challenge, considering that it was weighted down by four other layers of duffels and a tightly packed shell of snow, but a couple of the firefighters took it as a challenge. When the structure had been emptied, Valena crawled in with a shovel and carved away all excess thickness, smoothing the walls and leaving a flat floor about eight feet in diameter. Then she poked a small air hole through the roof and began to close the hole made to remove the duffels by making a patch out of the snow she had scraped off the inside. It was quiet and snug inside the little arch of snow. The walls were thinner than she had expected, letting light shine right through, which offered a blue glow.
At the same ti
me, Michael dug a tunnel into the wind-packed snow on the downwind side of the hut, under the wall, and up inside it, leaving as much of the floor as possible intact as a platform for sleeping bags. When they were done, there was room for exactly three.
“Snug as a bug in a rug,” said Michael.
Valena smiled. “I’m going to call it home.” She rolled out the two layers of thick neoprene and the enormous sleeping bag that the instructors issued to her, choosing the middle space so that if she rolled over in her sleep, she wouldn’t kiss the frozen wall.
The wind had picked up while they were finishing the inside of the quinzy, but she could not hear so much as a whisper while inside. In fact, the only sounds she heard were her own breathing and the sounds of people walking around in the cold snow outside. It’s less than ten degrees out, she reckoned, recalling how cold it had to get back home before the snow squeaked like that. She was glad that she had chosen the quinzy. It would keep her warmer than a tent.
Most of the other Happy Campers pitched tents. Some pitched two-man mountain dome tents, but Manny also issued them two Scott tents, which were tall, teepee-shaped rigs designed in the early days of Antarctic exploration. “You can stand up in a Scott tent,” he said, explaining its virtues, “and two or three of you can sleep comfortably on its floor, but given that the fabric’s heavy and the poles are not collapsible, the style would be useless anywhere sledges or helicopters were not available to assist transport. They are, however, stable in a high wind.” He demonstrated the fine art of pitching the tent, first laying it out on its side with its top pointing into the wind, then hoisting it up and downwind using two of the guylines. A wide skirt around the base was then laden with snow to prevent the wind from turning it into a parachute, and the ends of the guylines were wrapped around bamboo sticks and buried a foot down into the snow.
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