by JE Gurley
“They’re okay,” Brad replied.
“They think they’re jocks, always hogging the basketball court and gym …”
Walls continued speaking, but Brad ignored him as he focused his attention on Liz as she walked in. She stood for a moment at the door looking around before heading to the food line. Her long blonde hair now hung down to her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing glasses. He wondered if she wore contacts or only used the glasses for lab work. She had discarded her lab coat and sweat suit for a light blue skirt and white blouse. Of the entire crowd, she was the only one dressed in a professional manner. Her eyes caught Brad, lingering briefly before smiling at him. To his disappointment, she passed his table and joined Shelia Meyers and Barbara Connelly, one of the lesbian couples.
“You don’t think she’s, uh …,” Walls suggested, raising an eyebrow and grinning.
Brad whirled on Walls. “No way. She’s … she’s a lady.”
Walls held up his hands defensively. “Geez. Okay. Just a thought.”
“Don’t even think it,” Brad warned.
Walls smiled broadly. “I see. Smitten are we?”
Caught like a lovesick teenager, Brad fought to keep his cheeks from turning red. “Just interested.”
“Well, good luck.”
Walls dug hungrily into his food. Brad slowly sipped his coffee, sneaking an occasional glance at Liz as she conversed with Meyers and Connelly. The way her throat gently fluttered when she laughed, the way she brushed her hair away from her ears, even how she sat with her ankles crossed excited him. Why then, he asked himself, am I so damned afraid of her? He had never thought himself frightened by women. His studies and his work had demanded most of his attention, but he had found the time for a few girlfriends over the years. Of course, they had been interested mainly in sex, just as he had been. None of the relationships had lasted more than a few months. Maybe he was frightened that Liz presented more than simply a conquest, but a potential mate.
“I’m out of here.”
Brad blinked his eyes and realized that Walls had cleaned his plate while he had been musing about Liz. He briefly wondered where the telecommunications expert, not lean and trim but certainly not fat, could put all that food.
“A cigar and then bed,” Walls added. “What about you?”
“Oh, I’ll read for a while.”
“Is it your time to get chilly today?”
“Daryl lost the toss.” He had flipped a coin with Daryl the previous night to determine who would make the long, cold trek out to the telescope. He had won.
“Good news on the toss. It’s minus sixty-two Fahrenheit out there with thirty-mile-per-hour gusts.”
Walls rose from the table, deposited his tray and dirty dishes at the dish pit, gave a final longing glance at Faith, and left. Brad finished his coffee as the galley slowly emptied, waiting for Liz. Finally, she finished her meal and walked by. Brad cleared his throat to attract her attention.
“About last night – I didn’t mean to sound so stupid. I just …”
She laughed. “Don’t worry. I knew what you meant, at least, I hope an invitation to sleep with you would be presented with more finesse than you displayed last night.”
“Oh, it would be,” he replied.
She looked into his eyes for a long moment, making him giddy, and then said, “Good. I have to go now. See you later.”
“Uh, yeah, later,” he stammered, cursing himself for his awkwardness around her. When she was gone, he smacked himself in the forehead with the palm of his hand. “Dunce,” he groaned. “How many times are you going to make an ass of yourself?”
At the next table, Charles Lester, one of the engineers working for Raytheon, the company that ran the station, pecked frantically at his laptop keyboard and began cursing. “Son of a bitch, I lost my connection.” He turned to Brad. “I was sending an e-mail to my wife,” he explained.
Brad shrugged sympathetically. “Mark said the comm system had a few bugs in it. It should be back up soon.”
Lester raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, right. Shimoda said something funny’s going on.”
Matsu Shimoda was a visiting researcher from Japan’s Center for Climate Change Action, studying the effects of global warming.
“What do you mean, funny?”
“Pirelli had a long meeting by radio with McMurdo Base this morning before breakfast. Shimoda overheard Pirelli talking about a lockdown at McMurdo.”
In the remote wastes of the South Pole, the station rumor mill was usually uncannily accurate. “Lockdown? For what?”
“I don’t know, but a lot of people are getting sick there.”
A sudden chill passed through Brad. Disease and fire were the two direst threats in an Antarctic base. Of the two, he feared an outbreak most. “Great. A flu epidemic. That’s all we need.”
He took a sip of his cold coffee and winced. He considered re-heating it, but the coffee didn’t seem to be perking him up as much as it usually did. He had only slept four hours and felt sluggish. His conversation with Lester was not improving his mood.
“I’ve got to go,” he told Lester.
He placed his dirty cup on the counter at the dish pit. Like everyone, he had taken his turn in the ‘dish pit’ washing dirty dishes, up to his elbows in dish suds and greasy pots and pans, a detail he tried to avoid whenever possible, once resorting to bribing a mechanic to take his place with a bottle of rum. With forty-eight personnel available, each person’s turn came every six weeks. A quick scan of the duty roster posted above the table showed that his turn was due in six days, and he had nothing left with which to barter.
Outside in the corridor, he tried to decide if he needed more sleep or something to wake him up. He flipped a mental coin and chose entertainment.
“Maybe there’s something good on television,” he said to no one in particular, but knew from experience that it was unlikely. Because of the base’s position so far south of most geosynchronous satellites, they received satellite transmission for only a few hours each day, and the cable from Concordia was far from reliable. After six months, he had seen most recorded movies more than once, even the ones that he had forced himself to sit through the first time.
Entering Pod B headed toward the television lounge, he spotted the Ice Cube crew near the exit donning their outdoor gear for the cold journey to the lab – wool sweaters and fleece-lined pants over their base core layer of warm-up pants and t-shirts, and heavy anoraks, wool pants, and insulated Wellington boots over that. They looked like overstuffed ninjas with their face-covering balaclavas. Only their eyes remained visible. He waved in greeting. One of them, he couldn’t tell who, responded by waving an oversized mittened hand.
“You going out to the telescope today?”
He recognized the voice of the waver as belonging to Guy Hughes, a technician against whom he occasionally played pool.
“Not today. It’s Overton’s turn. Tomorrow.”
Hughes grinned. “Too bad. It’s going to be a bitchin’ day out there today.”
Brad watched them file out the door, glad he was remaining inside. He suspected that Hughes got off on the biting cold, even found it embracing, as did many of the overwintering crowd. Though he had grown up in North Dakota where winters often reached double-digits below zero, he had always preferred the milder spring and summer seasons.
Before he reached the television lounge, he saw Walls racing down the corridor toward the communications room. He didn’t look happy.
“What’s up?” he asked as Walls passed.
Without stopping, Walls replied, “We’ve lost all the damned satellites and the fiber optic feed from Concordia.”
4
August 22, 35 kilometers north of Amundsen-Scott Base
Ravi Chopra urged the snowmobile across the featureless flat plain of ice toward home. His eyes remained glued to the GPS reading. The forty-five-mph wind was kicking up the snow from the ground and driving it into his face. His nose felt frozen
beneath the balaclava. He gritted his teeth to keep them from chattering. Ice rimming his goggles made seeing difficult. The blowing snow blotted out the stars, leaving only the dim headlamp of the snowmobile to illuminate his path. He knew well the hazards of checking on his remote weather stations during a blow, but he had postponed the duty for two extra days waiting on the wind to die down. Left unattended, the anemometers for measuring wind speed tended to freeze up. Even his snowmobile was running a bit sluggish in the minus-sixty-degree temperature, when oil became as thick as molasses.
Preoccupied with the GPS, he didn’t see the big red Russian thirty-five-ton Kharkovchanka blocking his path until the last moment. “Gandu,” he cursed in his native Hindi as he jerked the handlebars of the snowmobile to the right and just avoided clipping the rear of the thirty-foot-long treaded snow tractor, barely remaining upright. He brought the snowmobile to a stop and stared at the Russian vehicle. The Kharkovchanka was a mobile home on treads, with sleeping quarters, a galley, and storage areas. The Russians preferred it to the smaller, more maneuverable American Sno-Cats.
“What are the Russians doing nearly eight hundred miles from Vostok?” he said to himself. He had developed the habit of speaking to himself while out on the ice to relieve the isolation.
The vehicle wasn’t running, and snow drifted against the treads showed it had not moved in several days. Frost on the windows indicated that the temperature inside was freezing. He approached the door carefully and knocked. There was no reply. He tried the door and found it frozen fast. He kicked at it with his boot until it loosened enough to pry it open. Inside, three frozen bodies stared at him. One sat in the driver’s compartment, hands still gripping the steering wheel. Two others lay in the floor. He gingerly stepped over them and checked the rest of the cabin, but found no other passengers. He wiped a layer of frost from the fuel gauge. It read empty.
“Were you headed to Amundsen?” he asked them. “Sorry I can’t carry you there on my snowmobile, but I’ll send someone out for you. We’ll get you back to Vostok with your comrades.”
He closed the door to the Kharkovchanka and climbed aboard his snow mobile. He glanced over his shoulder as he drove away, just to make certain the big red vehicle was still there and not a mirage dreamed up by his cold-numbed mind. It was real.
“A real mystery,” he mumbled.
* * * *
August 22, Amundsen-Scott Base
Liz made a cursory examination of the three Russian bodies while Tony Pirelli watched over her shoulder. His concern showed in his dark eyes and furrowed brow visible over the top edge of the surgical masks they both wore at his insistence.
“No visible wounds that I can see, except a peculiar black patch covering two of the men’s chests.” She pointed to a series of black lines radiating from just above the sternum of one of the cadavers. “They seem to have frozen to death.”
“No disease?” Pirelli asked. He had asked casually, but Liz detected a raised level of trepidation in his voice.
“I’ll do cultures if you wish, but there’s no way to tell from a visual examination. The black patches concern me. I’ve never seen anything like it. It could be some kind of vitamin deficiency, I suppose.”
“But you don’t think so,” Pirelli pushed.
She hesitated. “No, it looks more like blood clotting in the surface veins, and the surrounding skin is slightly necrotic.” She stared at Pirelli. “It might help if you shared what you thought I might find.”
Pirelli shook his head. “I’m not sure. During McMurdo’s last communication, they spoke of an outbreak but didn’t give me any details. Now, we’ve lost all communication from everyone.”
This last bit of news stunned Liz. “All of them? How could that happen?”
“It could be solar flares.”
Liz tried to read the supervisor’s worried face. He didn’t look convinced by his own suggestion. “You don’t believe that,” she suggested.
His jaw twitched. “No. Besides, the cable with Concordia is out as well.”
She reread Pirelli’s face and realized that he was more than simply worried; he was frightened. She covered the body she had been examining with a sheet. “I’ll do full autopsies on all three bodies when they thaw. Any idea as to why they were coming here? They’ve been dead for several days. They had to have left before we lost the satellite feed. Why not simply radio us?”
Pirelli grabbed his forehead with his hand and shook his head. “I have no idea.” He peered at Liz. “Don’t release the results of the autopsies to anyone but me.”
She cocked her head at this. “All right.”
“In the meantime, I’ll send someone to keep an eye on the bodies.”
“They’re not going anywhere, Tony.”
Pirelli scratched at his chin as he walked out the door. “I don’t want anyone near them until we find out what happened to them.”
After Pirelli left, she dropped her gloves and mask in the trash, and glanced at her hand-written notes. They revealed surprisingly little about the three corpses. Their ages ran from twenty-eight or twenty-nine to over fifty. All had been healthy individuals before their deaths. One had a recent appendectomy scar. For someone living in the Antarctic where emergency medical help could be days away, this was a common practice. They appeared to have run out of fuel and simply frozen to death. Pirelli’s bizarre behavior worried her. Could it be that he knew more than he was telling her?
With the internet down, she couldn’t check any medical databases for information on the black rashes. The closest she could come from memory were the black, necrotic lesions of survivors of the bubonic plague, but no one had seen the Yersimia pestis bacillus that caused it for decades. The Russians had been drilling into Lake Vostok, some 2.2 miles beneath the ice. She supposed it was possible that they had discovered some new bacteria or virus dormant for millennia, but it was unlikely. Puzzled, she closed the door to the examination room and perused the books of her small medical library for anything she could find.
True to his word, Pirelli sent Trevin Sage, a janitor, to guard the bodies. He didn’t seem thrilled with the duty and spent most of his time casting surreptitious glances in Liz’s direction. She had been able to ignore him while reading, but now his presence and lecherous gaze irritated her. Frustrated by her lack of progress and Sage’s unwanted attention, she abandoned the breached sanctity of her office.
Word of the dead Russians had spread throughout the base quickly, feeding the rumor mill. With the discovery of the bodies and the unexplained loss of communications, the air of the base had become thick with apprehension. People had forsaken their duties and wandered the corridors like furtive onlookers at the scene of an accident. Half were frightened by events beyond their control, and the other half were excited by the variation in the normally dull daily routine. A crowd had gathered outside the communications room waiting for any word from the outside world.
Winter at the pole was a time of physical isolation. The freezing temperatures and six months of darkness prevented any planes from McMurdo from reaching the base. In such extreme cold, engines often failed and stressed metal could snap like wood. Landing skis could not handle the drifting snow. Planes froze to the ice. For the same reasons, snowmobiles and Sno-Cats were useless, and hiking the eight hundred miles to McMurdo was difficult in the summer and impossible in the winter. They were isolated from the real world as effectively as a base on the moon.
She spotted Brad leaning against the wall of the stairway leading to the television lounge. He glanced up at her approach.
“Still no word?” she asked.
“Not a sound since yesterday. What about the Russians?”
She hesitated, unsure of how much she should reveal. “I, uh …”
Brad held up his hand. “Never mind. I’ll just bet Pirelli put the kibosh on any information you might reveal. I could see he was frightened.” He stared at her. “How about you?”
“All this,” she waved her hand
s in the air, “frightens me. We’ve lost the signal before but only for a few hours. This time …” She shuddered.
“Yeah, I know. I can’t help but wonder what the Russians were doing this far out.”
“I wish I knew.” She rubbed her hands together to prevent their trembling. “I need a martini.”
Brad smiled. “Can’t help you there, but I do have most of a bottle of ten-year-old scotch in my room.”
Liz returned his smile. She suspected Brad’s nervousness was more due to her presence than a fear of the unknown. He didn’t strike her as someone easily frightened. “That sounds perfect.”
Returning to Pod A, she was dismayed to see that the heavy concrete-filled steel emergency door separating the two pods was sealed. Such an action was usually only taken during a fire drill. Brad swung the door open, ushered her through, and then resealed it behind them. The loud clang as it shut caused her to jump. If Pirelli was trying to prevent a panic, closing the emergency door was not helping.
Brad’s room resembled hers, except where her walls contained photos of friends and places from her home state of California and a shelf overcrowded with mementoes of her past, Brad’s room was very little different from any of the empty rooms in the cold storage section. A red anorak hung from the wall. A pair of heavy boots sat at the foot of the unmade bed. Several magazines topped a pile of dirty laundry in one corner. She suppressed a smile as he quickly kicked the clothes under the bed and cleared a stack of books from the desk chair for her.
“Sorry,” he said. “The maid’s day off.”
He rummaged through a nylon backpack and withdrew an opened bottle of Dewar’s scotch. “No ice, I’m afraid,” he said as he poured a liberal amount in each of two glasses. He handed her one.
“Neat is fine,” she replied. She eyed the amber liquid hesitantly. Scotch was not her favorite liquor, but having no vodka or gin, it would do nicely. He waited as she took a sip. The flavor was slightly smoky with a hint of vanilla. It was not as strong as she had thought it would be. “Not bad,” she said.