As they flew deeper into the continent, the mountains rose above them into minarets and castles. Mammoth tongues of glacial ice licked down wide valleys from the impossibly broad reaches of the Antarctic Plateau. Ice and rock, rock and ice rolled out all around them, a symphony of harsh beauty.
The brute strength and naked vulnerability of the land called Valena to its icy breast, claiming her forever as its own, speaking to her of her tinyness. The frenzied scurryings of civilization did not exist here.
She leaned her face against the cold Plexiglas of the helicopter window, sighing, falling irrevocably in love, grateful to the bottom of her soul that there existed this one place on earth that could not be tamed.
THE LITTLE HELICOPTER CROSSED OVER ANOTHER WILD knuckle of mountains and landed in a wide bowl of snow-covered ice. Naomi spoke over the headphones. “We’ll be about a half-hour here, okay?”
“Right-o,” Paul answered. “Guess I’ll just have to take a break, eh?” He shut down the engine, and all climbed out and turned slowly around, taking in the spectacular scenery. The bowl of glacier rose up on three sides like a great cresting wave lapping against a craggy shore of Ferrar Dolerite. To the east, it fell away in sensuous folds, flowing toward a far range of mountains that flew like sails glimpsed at the mouth of a harbor.
Naomi threw her parka into the helicopter and began to dance a boot-clumsy minuet, arms aloft and legs akimbo, her face blooming in an exquisite smile. “Yes! Yes! I like it, I like it,” she sang.
Paul leaped into the air, whooping, “It’s so beautiful! Three seasons I’ve been coming to Antarctica, and this has got to be the most incredible… ye-ow!”
Valena was quietest in her receipt of beauty. She turned a complete circle slowly, drinking in the landscape. She moaned softly, more a relaxation of breath than an exhalation, the sound rising from deep inside her and drifting away on the breeze.
Paul bounded off along the crusted snow. The air here was still and the sun bright, making it surprisingly warm. He threw off his helmet, and then his gloves, prancing like a great stag.
Naomi said, “I’m going to pace things off here and make my GPS measurements. Why don’t you two take ten?” She walked away across the glacier, singing.
Valena was alone in a world of soft curves. Words ran though her mind: I am home. All the sad confusions of her former life turned into vapor, rose high into the atmosphere, and ceased to be. Time fell away. All dimension froze. There was only ice.
NAOMI WORKED HER WAY BACK DOWN THE BOWL OF ICE, making notes in a book. When she arrived where Valena was standing, she took her by the elbow and walked her farther away from the helicopter. “I hate to bust a high,” she said, “but I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.”
‘And what’s that?” asked Valena.
“You’re not here just to take in the sights. You’re Emmett’s student, right?”
“Uh… well, yes.”
“And word travels here, even way out here in the field camps. A crew hiked up from Wright Valley the other day doing a recon for some kind of organism that lives in between the grains of the rocks, and they told me what happened. So tell me the developments.”
“I don’t have anything much to report,” said Valena. “I arrived a week ago today, and Emmett was gone.”
“And of course you’re trying to get him back. I would, too. So what have you accomplished so far, and who’s helping you?”
“There are some people—we’re—I’m—trying to…”
“Ah. So it’s like that. And you’ve come here to talk to my young idiot.”
“Idiot?”
“Dan Lindemann. He was with Emmett at the high camp last year, so you need to interview him if you’re going to be thorough.”
“Idiot?” Valena asked again.
“Don’t get me wrong, he’s top-notch, and I was lucky to get him as a student, but he’s being an idiot about Emmett’s situation. Is there anything in particular you need from me?”
“Maybe you can tell me this: why did he come to you, instead of sticking with Emmett?”
“I’d like to believe it’s because I’m doing the kind of work he wants to do, but on the face of it… well, he’d finished his master’s with Emmett, or at least, he’s defended his thesis and has just a few things to clean up and hand in to call it complete. So he was all but done and wanted to get on with another Antarctic project, or at least that’s what he said.”
“What are you working on?”
The same old ice core stuff. The oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in the ice will tell us about temperature. The chemistry of the dust will tell us how hard the wind was blowing, and the amount of salt tells us how far the sea ice extended into the ocean, and we’re working with a dozen or more other stable isotopes and trace elements. But it’s otherwise a different game from WAIS Divide. Emmett and his team picked a spot on the ice sheet as flat and white as spilled milk on glass. The scenery sucks, but he wanted ice that does not have much of a local climate signal. WAIS is more of a global record. My sites here in the mountains have lots of local influences caused by wind and ice flow through the mountains. To figure out what’s been going on around here—to understand how the ocean, sea ice, and land ice interact and form climate—we need to have a varied array of ice cores. We are collecting five cores around the Dry Valleys so we can make sure the changes we see are widespread and not caused by some little bump in topography.”
“Trace elements. That’s what I hope to work on with Emmett’s cores. Though if I can’t get him back down here…”
“You’ll get him back,” said Naomi. “He didn’t do it.”
“How do you know that?” asked Valena, keeping her voice as level as she could. “I don’t mean to sound like I suspect him—Jim Skehan already bit my head off for that—but the reality is that I don’t really know him. I replaced Dan, just as Taha replaced Bob. Which gets me back to my original question: why did Dan come to you instead of staying with Emmett? Clearly he had the work for him.”
Naomi considered the question. “On the face of it, there’s nothing mysterious about that. Dan put in his application clear last year. February, I think it was. Well, come to think of it that would have been about five minutes after he got off the plane returning from Antarctica. Hmm. Anyway, I was delighted to get one of Emmett’s students for a PhD. I’m still starting out in the profession myself, you know, not all that well established, and it was a feather in my cap to get the baton handed off from the great Emmett Vanderzee. He wrote Dan a brilliant recommendation, when asked. Of course I had heard about the trouble, but… well, I prefer to keep my nose out of other peoples’ troubles.”
‘And Bob Schwartz? He jumped ship, too.” “That does not tally with my experience of him,” Naomi said, the precision in her choice of words the only hint that she might be perturbed. “He began talking with the PI he’s with clear back in March… my husband, to be precise… and they had an understanding by the time the funding for their part of the WAIS Divide project was confirmed in early April.”
“Did Emmett write him a recommendation, too?” “It did not occur to my husband to ask. Bob is a fully fledged professional. My husband had heard him speak at WAIS Workshop meetings, and it was clear that Emmett thought highly of his work. We read Bob’s dissertation.” She narrowed her eyes as she stared out across the ice.
“Maybe I have all of that wrong,” said Valena, knowing damned well that she didn’t. Taha had told her. Had described Emmett’s shock at his departure. She did not speak of this to Naomi. It was not her place to do so. Naomi asked, “Emmett picked you up when?” “September. After I returned to school in late August at the end of the summer break. I had to withdraw from my classes and add thesis-study units to be available for this deployment, another reason I’d very much like this field season to end happily. Spring term starts the fourth week in January, and I have ten more units of classwork to take before I can qualify to hand in my thesis, which of course will b
e all about nothing if I can’t get any data.”
“I can fix you up with enough data to keep you going for a doctorate,” said Naomi. “But don’t worry, you’ll get your master’s with Emmett. And he may expect that you’ll simply hand in your master’s thesis, keep taking classes, and swap over into a doctoral program.”
Valena turned and gazed into Naomi’s eyes. “You’re willing to help me out? But I haven’t even applied for your program, you haven’t seen my transcripts, I—”
“If Emmett took you on, you’re qualified, last minute or no. Weren’t there other students lined up for the spot?”
“Yes, but—”
“He chose you. There are people who’ve been through PhD programs and several fellowships who would jump at the chance to work with him. There are professors who’d take the semester off from work to come down here with him. He chose you. End of topic. If this debacle leaves you stuck for a degree program, I’ll take you on and figure I’ve made out like a bandit. But first, let’s get the poor man out of jail. You’d be better served to finish your master’s with him anyway. His name still looks better on your vita than mine, controversy or no.” She grinned and swept her arms out across the scenery. “And then come back here with me for your doctorate. Much nicer weather than WAIS Divide.”
“This is… so kind of you!”
“Think nothing of it,” said Naomi. “We are family down here.” She turned and hiked back over the rough sastrugi toward the helicopter. “Okay, Paul, sorry to break up your nap,” she said, nudging the sunbathing pilot with her boot. “I’m sure you want to be back in Mac Town for Saturday night with all your girlfriends. Come on.”
“Right-o,” said Paul. “Home for tea and medals.”
Paul flew Valena and Naomi back to Clark and then lifted back up into the pale blue Antarctic sky. The overwhelming buffeting of the rotor wash diminished into a flutter and the AS tar into a tiny spec as it sailed away over the hard knuckles of the Olympic Range.
Valena turned to Naomi. “Put me to work,” she said.
Naomi sent her off with another of her students to make a radar survey of the glacier, a task that involved dragging a transmitter across its surface to record reflections off the rock beneath it. When she returned, Naomi asked, “Are you any kind of a cook?”
“I haven’t had many complaints.”
“Good. We share the work here, so you’re expected to contribute, and to be frank, we’re sick of our own cooking.”
One of the drillers said, “How about she whips up some stir-fry? We still have a kilo of prawns, and I keep coming across bags of mixed veggies in the freezer pit.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Valena.
The other driller picked up the bucket of drill cuttings and carried it down to the cook tent to show Valena around. “The dry food is all here, in these boxes we use to weigh down the skirts of the tent so it won’t blow away—no problem with critters getting into it, as there aren’t any this far inland, not even skuas—and you’ll find a storage pit out the back door.” He grinned. “Refrigeration is not a problem when you work on glaciers. We use the drill cuttings for drinking and cooking water. This particular ice fell as snow about two thousand years ago.”
“Vintage water,” said Valena.
“You know to put some water in the bottom of the pan before you start to melt the ice?”
“Yeah, so it doesn’t scorch the pan.”
“Good. There’s some water in the half-gallon thermoses in the cook tent. We set them up boiling, morning and night, so we always have some starter water.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
As Valena set to work creating dinner, she noticed that she had all but forgotten her urgency to find out who had killed the journalist in Emmett Vanderzee’s camp or, for that matter, who had stolen the eggs and bottles from Cape Royds. The riveting importances of the preceeding days seemed months in the past and light-years distant. This was why she had come to Antarctica!
The stove was a two-burner Coleman that ran on propane. She lit the right-hand burner and set to work melting the chipped ice, listening with amazement as the bubbles of ancient atmospheres popped.
It proved difficult to thaw the prawns. While she had adjusted to the constant cold, the prawns still seemed to know that ten degrees Fahrenheit was well below the point of freezing. When she had some water heated, she poured some into a second pan and put the prawns into it, but the water cooled so quickly in the Antarctic air that the little arthropods still floated as a solid brick and refused to thaw.
Even rebellious prawns could not dampen her mood. She turned toward the open door flap to admire the wide sweep of snow that had been blown and scoured into zigzagging sastrugi in wild fractal variations, coating glacial ice that swept up to the rocky peaks of the Olympus Range in curves unbroken by the devices of humankind. She could glimpse the float of Mount Erebus, paled almost to invisibility in the frigid distance.
The sound of a footfall jerked her from the sweetness of the moment.
Dan Lindemann entered the tent. He dug through the litter of snacks that had been left out on the dining table and selected a Pecan Sandie cookie. Watching her with brooding interest, he shoved it into his mouth in two bites and chewed. Still staring, he unscrewed the cap on an insulated water bottle and emptied half of it down his throat in one long guzzle, behavior that might have struck her as grotesque in the real world. Food and drink was not a social matter in Antarctica; it was requisite, a job to get done, and if it felt or tasted good going down, that was a bonus. Dan swallowed the last of the cookie he had ingested. Still staring, he addressed her with an abrupt, “Why are you here?”
“I need to talk to you,” she replied.
“Well, at least you’re honest.”
“I trust I can expect the same from you.”
He shook his head as if to clear it. “This is about Emmett.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Hell.”
Valena waited, occupying the time by crumbling the mass of frozen vegetables into separate bits.
Dan reached past her to grab a ladle and dipped some hot water from the melting pot into his water bottle, then took another swig. “I hear they arrested his ass.”
“In fact, they arrested his whole body, ass and all.”
“Huh.”
“They took him to Hawaii. He’s been arraigned, or whatever they call it when you get charged with something.”
“What was the charge?”
“Murder.”
“No shit.”
“None whatsoever.”
“Huh.”
She waited.
“Murder one or two?” he asked. “Or is it three? You know, manslaughter. Kind of an accident.”
“I don’t know. NSF is keeping a lid on things, but I suppose by the time I get back to McMurdo the New York Financial News will have it on its front page.”
Dan fumbled another two cookies out of the bag and wolfed them down. He stared out the doorway. He chewed. He swallowed. “So why are you here?”
“Like I said, to talk to you about it.”
“Why?”
“To clear him. I need your help.” Valena was beginning to feel annoyed.
“He got himself into this. I sure can’t help him.”
Valena detected evasion in his voice. Or was it outright deceit? “Don’t you even want to help him?”
“No. In fact, I am not the least bit interested.” He spoke decisively, and with heat.
Valena silently counted to ten, then said, “You know, I’m having a hard time featuring this. The man was your thesis advisor. He gave you the break of a lifetime bringing you down here, and that’s the best you can do? Not even, ‘Wow, the poor guy,’ or, ‘I wish I could help but I’m brain dead?’”
“You weren’t there,” he said. “And yeah, I got my master’s with the guy, but it was supposed to be a PhD, you know? He gets his ass in a crack with these guys and it costs me an ex
tra year to get through graduate school. A man could starve to death. You know?”
Valena fought to keep her voice steady. “I’m still not clear on this. Why did you have to leave? And why was it going to take an extra year?”
Dan Lindemann’s voice rose and cracked. “When that business with the newspaper article hit, it was one big shit-storm. It was all he had on his mind for weeks. Then he had the US Senate dragging his butt into chambers and cutting him to bits. I was doing all the work. Me and Bob. We were running all the lab analyses and even beginning to write the papers.”
“Isn’t that what graduate students do?”
Dan bared his teeth in frustration. “We hardly ever saw him! He was either flying back and forth to Washington to testify, or he was in his office with his door shut. Or God knows where. Bob finally pulled the ripcord. He would have stayed, but no, there was no funding all of a sudden for a postdoc, let alone an actual research associate. Jeez, Valena, don’t you get it? He’s down to running his research on cheap labor! It’s grad students or nothing!”
“I can’t believe this.”
“You don’t want to believe it. Why, have you had a different experience? How many times have you actually had five minutes of Emmett’s time? I’ll bet he had Taha tell you what you needed for coming to Antarctica, and Taha’s never even been here! Just look at you, you’re wearing FDX boots! He didn’t even take enough care to tell you to bring boots you can actually walk in!”
Valena tried to focus on the vegetables. Doggedly, she said, “I came here to talk to you because I’m trying to get a handle on what actually happened last year at the high camp.”
Dan grabbed two more cookies, said, “I’m not even going to talk about that,” and abruptly exited the tent.
DINNER WAS A SILENT AFFAIR, AS MUCH BECAUSE EVERY-one was exhausted from a day’s physical efforts at 4,200 feet above sea level on a glacier as because there was nothing to talk about. All sat about the table in their parkas and fleece hats, eyelids sagging from the week’s work. Naomi Bosch made small talk for a while and then slipped into some puzzle she was working out in her mind. Dan Lindemann stared at his plate. One driller ate with his head bowed over one of the newspaper summaries that the helicopter pilot had dropped off. The other fiddled with little drawings he was making in the margins of page two of another.
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