In Cold Pursuit vw-1

by Sarah Andrews

  The snow fascinated Valena. She had grown up in Colorado and Utah, where snow was usually light and fluffy unless it was allowed to sit around city curbs too long, in which case a few cycles of freezing and thawing turned it to ice and slush. This snow had a completely different quality, being born colder and kept frozen. The wind packed it into slabs, which Dustin now demonstrated could be quarried into blocks. This they did, piling them three courses high to form a wall that surrounded the little city of dome tents, connecting the Scott tents to the quinzy. When they had started to build it, Valena had thought it a mere exercise in survival training, but now she realized that it would provide a serious and important part of their comfort in the coming hours as the wind was gusting up to twenty knots now.

  It was getting on toward the end of the afternoon, and Minna Bluff had long since disappeared entirely. Two of the firemen had gotten one of the little bivouac stoves going inside the Scott tent, so Valena joined them by climbing in through the sphincter of fabric that formed its airlock and availed herself of a cup of instant hot chocolate. Its warmth was welcome and the sugar hit her like a bomb. Settling herself on the small wooden crate in which the instant drinks had been packed, she allowed herself a short break.

  One of the firemen said, “I don’t know about that Dustin fella. He has the latest outdoor gear, but I think he’s more show than go.”

  The other said, “Manny’s okay, though. He’s had a lot of experience down here. He’s been a mountaineer other seasons.”

  “Yeah, so why’s he teaching Happy Camp instead of getting the hell out of Dodge?”

  “I hear he was out at this high elevation camp last year when somebody died of altitude sickness. It wasn’t good.”

  Valena jumped into the conversation. “Really?” she said. “Do you mean Emmett Vanderzee’s camp?”

  The man nodded. “Mm-hm. First time they’ve lost someone in years.”

  So Manny is Manuel Roig, one of the people Ted told me were in camp with Vanderzee when the reporter died! Quickly she got up and wiggled back out through the airlock in search of the instructor.

  Outside, the wind had increased another five knots and low clouds were beginning to press downward into the scene. Manny and Dustin were in the center of the corral, waving people together for a chat.

  “Okay, you’re on your own,” Manny informed them, crouched down into the lee of the snow-block wall. “Dustin and I are going over to the instructor’s hut for the night. You’ve got shelter, food, water, and a latrine. Do not, I repeat, do not leave the flag route while transiting to the latrine. As you can see, we are no longer in condition 3. This is getting toward condition 2. If it gets down to condition 1—if you can’t see the flags—do not go to the latrine, you’re bound to get disoriented and lost. Everybody understand?”

  “What do we do if we can’t get there?” someone asked, provoking a smattering of nervous laughter.

  “Well, then you get creative,” said Manny. “Bottom line, if you have to choose between peeing your pants and risking your life, what would you do? Okay, so Dustin and I are just half a mile down the road in the I-hut. Doris here has a radio, so anyone needs us, just call. See you at nine tomorrow morning for the next part of training. Have your stomachs full, the tents down and your sleep kits packed. Sleep well!” And off he went, with the redoubtable Dustin trudging along behind him.

  Valena huddled down behind the snow-block wall and tried to reason out what to do next. On the face of it, there was very little that she could do except prepare something to eat and then climb into her sleeping bag inside the quinzy so that she could stay warm, the better to survive the night. The idea had strong appeal. She was jet-lagged, short on sleep, and now physically exhausted from shoveling snow. Sleep was the cure for all, and then she would be ready to question Manny when “morning”—that period of slightly brighter light that came after the period of slightly less bright light—arrived.

  But first, she had to eat. She headed into the Scott tent and dug around through the food box, hoping for something palatable. There was nothing there but freeze-dried instant backpacker’s dinners, granola bars, and chocolate bars. Black Bart chili with beans sounded like a bad idea in the tight confines of the quinzy, so she chose a packet that claimed to produce beef stroganoff. Following the lead of others around her, she tore open the top of the bag, ladled in a cup or so of boiling water, zipped the bag shut, and stuffed it inside her parka to keep it from growing cold before the contents rehydrated enough to become edible. She then located an eating implement—a sort of spoon with teeth—and headed back outside to again huddle inside the wall.

  In the time it had taken her to get dinner, the world beyond the small grouping of tents had narrowed to a soft bluish gray, the sky and the surface of the snow-covered ice all one tone with the faintest darker line marking the seam between them. In this soothingly minimal environment, she took a moment to try to sort through her feelings. Ever since the shock that had awaited her arrival, she had been obsessed with disappointment and her determination to avoid being sent home. Oppressive cold with little shelter brought both exhilaration and a sense of desperation to her mood. She wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed the foil packet of food closer to her chest, holding it to her heart. Surely there was a solution.

  Another human swollen with red parka and black wind pants shuffled to her side and sat down. The parka hood turned her way, revealing a pair of goggles, a rime of ice-encrusted beard, and the tip of a very red nose. The ice crimped briefly into a smile, then split horizontally, revealing a mouth. “Hi,” the man said. “You’re Valena, eh? Emmett’s student?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah, I heard you were here. Bum deal. Makes no sense at all.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with you…ah…”

  Noting her attempt to figure out who he was, he moved his left arm away from his chest, revealing his name tag. DR. JAMES w. SKEHAN, it read. “Folks call me Jim,” he told her. “Emmett and I are at DRI together.”

  “Sure, I know who you are,” she said, embarrassed that she had not known who he was when he snagged Cal Hart from her office door before breakfast that morning. “I wrote to you last year to see if you were accepting students.”

  “I’m glad you were able to get on with Emmett. You should be proud. Your record looked very good, and he doesn’t take many master’s candidates.”

  She wanted to say, Yeah, and it looks like it was my bad luck that he did, but instead she said, “I’m truly glad to meet you.”

  Skehan unzipped his parka just enough to produce his dinner, which he opened up and drank, having put in more liquid than Valena had. He chugged it down in two long swills, then folded up the bag and tucked it into one of the four big patch pockets on the front of his big red.

  “I hadn’t thought of that technique,” said Valena.

  “You can only do it with certain ones,” he said. “They ought to supply a large-diameter straw.”

  “What are you doing in Happy Camp? You’ve done tons of work down here.”

  “They’ve got a rule about how many years you can go without a refresher. It doesn’t matter that I’ve spent those years working in Greenland. No, back to Happy Camp, my boy!” He did not sound happy at all.

  “Perhaps you can help me understand what happened in Emmett’s camp last year,” Valena said. “I knew there had been a death, but—”

  “I sat down with you because I was going to ask you what you knew about this whole mess. I just got here Thursday. Emmett was in the field, so I didn’t see him. Then he came back, and… well, I didn’t hear anything until midday Saturday, when Emmett was already on the plane going north. They really kept things quiet.”

  Valena pondered this statement. If the rest of McMurdo had the news, why was Skehan ignorant of it? Didn’t the townies talk to the beakers? “What exactly was the gripe between Emmett and the journalist?”

  “When the now-famous article appeared in the Financial News
calling Emmett’s work on rapid climate change a hoax, he—”

  “He called it what?”

  “Yeah, imagine that, a newspaper decides to debunk careful scientific research. Last time I checked, scientific findings were juried by peer scientists, people who understand the data and methods; but no, now our findings are to be judged in the newspapers by people who don’t know data from dung, or worse yet, people who are pushing a political or business agenda.”

  “Sweeny took it on himself to say Emmett didn’t know how to do science?”

  “It wasn’t Sweeny. The article was written by Howard Frink, who’s making quite a name for himself for bashing science. His technique is to quote things out of context and misstate findings by applying them to things they obviously don’t fit, the same way the religious right attacks the Theory of Evolution. It’s like throwing out half the rules so you can change the game into whatever suits you.”

  “So Emmett invited him to come to Antarctica so he could educate him?”

  “Sure, but did he come? No. No, he sent Sweeny. Frink couldn’t be troubled to come to the source. Can’t risk that, he might learn something contrary to his precious beliefs.”

  “Is Frink a fundamentalist?”

  “Fundamentalist, neo-con, flat-earther, who knows? He’s in with anything to the right of Attila the Hun. We’re all going to hell. Ironically, he called Emmett’s work ‘the interpretations of an alarmist.’”

  “Wow, that’s scary.”

  “It’s the fact that he could get that printed in the Financial News that’s scary. Frink’s in with the industrialist camp that doesn’t want to think about all those nasty little correlations between increased atmospheric CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels and the rise in global temperatures, reduced water resources, nastier storms, and environmental refugees. Thinks all our data that indicate that climate can change dramatically in just a few years is some wacked-out conspiracy to destabilize the saintly progress of commerce.”

  “He said all that? I always thought the Financial News was a conservative paper, as in, not into sensationalism.”

  “He made his statements in the kind of terms you have to read twice to spot how scathing they are. All about how liberals who rest on university salaries are undermining marketplace competition with skewed data and conjecture. Sure, let’s just pump even more carbon into the atmosphere in the name of competing with the Chinese. Before that, it was Japan. Next, it’s India. It’s always somebody we’re supposed to be afraid of. I say it’s just the money maggots—excuse me, magnates—wanting to keep on living beyond what’s reasonable, zipping around in private jets and running huge pumps to keep their swimming pools pristine and chill or heat their houses to seventy degrees.” He shifted slightly, working a kink out of his back. “The other problem with printing that kind of nonsense is that the other journalists are lulled into thinking that they are correct in the way they are reporting the story.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Skehan said, “In journalism school they are taught to always present the ‘other’ viewpoint. Anything less obvious to them than ‘two jets flew into the Twin Towers today’ requires that they give point and counterpoint, as if science is just a matter of opinion and that any opposing ‘opinion’—that the increased rate of warming is caused by alien abductions, say, or by homosexual marriage—should be presented with equal weight.”

  Valena felt the stiffening cold of the ice-block wall seeping through her clothing. She pulled her neck gaiter up over her nose and spoke through it. “I guess you’re pretty certain that the climate is warming,” she said, intending irony.

  “And you’re not? Whose student is it you said you are?”

  “Emmett Vanderzee’s.” Irritation was seeping into her with the cold. She respected her professor, but also wanted to kick him for getting into trouble. “But I’m supposed to keep an open mind, right? Which also has me asking questions, like how come Sweeny got sick and why did he die?”

  Skehan said, “He got sick because he went to high elevation too fast. The real question is why Emmett was pulled off the ice.”

  “As in, what new evidence points to foul play.”

  He turned his goggles toward Valena. “You really don’t get it. Sweeny’s death was gasoline on the fire. Not having the gear that would save him was a terrible accident, but you can’t convince the media of that. Frink has been using it to build his case against Emmett, keeping the story alive. There’s nothing like a dead journalist to get a story on the front page.”

  “But was it an accident?”

  “Yes, but an accident that happened thirteen thousand miles from New York in a place no New Yorker or Kansan or poodle-walking bridge player from San Diego can possibly imagine. It would have been great if Emmett could have gotten a whole team of media in there immediately to prove what actually happened, but that wasn’t possible. He couldn’t even get back in there to look at the site.”

  “Why not? Why did he leave without knowing what happened to the air drop?”

  “There were more storms forecast, and everyone was already beat up from the last one. Emmett had to pull the whole camp out as soon as he could. And that was a lucky thing—in fact, the sane and rational thing to do, for everybody’s safety—because another did come in right behind it, and then another. Big ones. When they say ‘high winds’ here, they mean hurricane force. If Emmett hadn’t pulled out when he did, they’d all have been pinned down for at least another three weeks. The cook tent would have been torn to shreds, and then maybe even the Scott tents.

  “Emmett wanted to get back in there to find that damned chute and document what had happened, but NSF was in no hurry to run another flight in there. The risk of getting stuck was too great. Then in no time flat it was the end of the season, and everyone went home. Maybe you don’t understand yet what a narrow weather window we have here. It’s already the end of November. Even if Emmett were here, you’d be lucky to mobilize into your camp within the next week. First it’s storms and then it’s fog. Once the fog lifts, then there’s a backup of everybody trying to get where they want to go. Then you get the first really good day of flying weather, and it’s Sunday and the pilots are on their days off. Antarctica is the place where they invented the expression ‘hurry up and wait.’”

  “Let me guess: the News thought it was all a cover-up.”

  “They made it sound like he lured the guy down here and ran him up that mountain with the express purpose of killing him.”

  Valena shook herself to work her muscles and create heat. “Well, did he? I mean, is there any truth to it at all?”

  Skehan snorted. “Oh, ye of little faith. You’re kidding me, right? I can’t believe you would have come here with him if you believe him capable of that.”

  Valena stared into Skehan’s goggles and frozen beard. She said, “What’s faith got to do with science? Look, I don’t really know the man. He’s got a great reputation as a scientist. I was thrilled to get onto his project. But now here I am without him, and if Bellamy gets his way I’m on the next plane home. I don’t want to go. I want to stay! I’m here to do science, not perform acts of faith.”

  Skehan sighed. “Emmett wanted the guy to wait in Mac Town until they were done at the high camp and ready to move lower down, but with the storms and all, they were behind schedule. Sweeny said he was on a tight schedule himself, and if he did not get into the field in two more days he was going to return to Wall Street and write his story. NSF freaked at the thought of what he would write after coming all that way and not getting to the field. So they sent him up. Emmett really did not have much choice in the matter. He could have refused, but every project has to do media outreach, so a refusal could have come back to haunt him. The guy insisted that he had done plenty of high-elevation mountaineering and knew what he was good for. And maybe that’s all true. Maybe he already had a respiratory infection going into it and didn’t even know it. A lot of people show up here with the crud after
all those hours in a commercial jet, or they catch it as soon as they get to McMurdo.”

  Valena said, “So the man got sick and they couldn’t get him out fast enough.”

  “Emmett ordered a Gamow bag. The Airlift Wing flew it in on an LC-130 and dropped it on a chute. It was blowing to beat the band. Eighty knots sustained, gusting to who knows what. Emmett went out to get it. He took Cal Hart. They saw the chute in the distance, blowing, apparently dragging its cargo. They chased it, but suddenly the gusts got so huge that they were blowing along like sheets of newspaper. They had to use their ice axes to stay fixed, to keep the tents in sight. Then things deteriorated to condition 1. They had to claw their way back to the tents and hunker down so they didn’t get lost. When the weather lifted, Emmett went out again, but he couldn’t find anything, not the chute, not its payload, nothing.”

  “So he ordered another one.”

  Skehan’s face remained aimed at Valena’s for several seconds. “I don’t know the answer to that question.”

  “I mean—”

  “You mean did he just let the guy die. Listen, you go ahead and think what you want, but try to get one thing straight: down here it’s tragedy when someone dies, no matter how little you might like him. It’s a personal loss. And just because you’re a wet-behind-the-ears grad student is no excuse to miss the really important point here: scientists don’t go around killing people just because they’re mad at them. That’s for mafiosos and presidents, not scientists. Scientists want their adversaries to stay alive, so they can prove them wrong!”

  Valena opened her mouth to say something, but Skehan had jumped to his feet. With one last unreadable stare, he stalked off into the gathering storm.

  11

  VALENA WOKE DURING THE NIGHT WITH A DESPERATE need to pee and lay in her caterpillar-thick mound of sleeping bag considering her options. She read her wristwatch. It was one o’clock in the morning. She had climbed into the quinzy early because she had discovered, after her disastrous discussion with James Skehan, that she had let herself get dangerously cold. After dancing around and swinging her arms to warm up, she had swilled one last cup of hot chocolate and retired to her sleeping bag. Once inside its enormously thick wrapping of synthetic fibers, she had discovered that she was also extremely tired and had gone to sleep.