Cold, Cold Heart

by Christine Poulson

  He was aware of a figure on the edge of his vision and turned to see Craig signalling that he was ready to take over. He clambered down and Craig climbed up to take his place.

  * * *

  It was seven hours now since the loss of power. Katie had transferred most of her drugs to the kitchen – it wouldn’t do them any good to be deep frozen and the temperature on the rest of the base had already dropped well below freezing. Then she had taken over for Ernesto, though in truth there wasn’t much to do. Ernesto had made vast quantities of soup and several casseroles which he’d stored in thermos flasks. She poured herself a mug of lentil soup.

  There was no running water and they were relying on emergency supplies of bottled water, all arranged close to the stoves so that they wouldn’t freeze. She stood cradling her mug of soup and looking out at where she could see the patch of light in which the digger was working. As she watched, there was a flurry of ice crystals and she lost sight of it for a few moments. It was frustrating that she couldn’t help, but she had had less experience of using the digger than anyone else on the base. She had after all only been out here a couple of months, even if it did seem a lifetime. The world she had left behind, the world of sunlight and living things and the friends she couldn’t contact, seemed as if they might be only a dream. Only the cold and the dark were real. One day, she thought, unimaginably far in the future, as our sun cools, the whole planet will be like this, covered in permafrost. And what about us as a species, we human beings? Will we be long gone, wiped out by our profligacy, too clever for our own good, or will we have fled away and made our home on some distant planet?

  She was overcome by a wave of fatigue. She sat down and closed her eyes and instantly she was walking in the woods near where her mother lived. A sea of bluebells shimmered in the sunlight that filtered through the trees, the bluest blue she’d ever seen. The colour and warmth and light of the May afternoon soaked into her. She wanted to wade into the bluebells and plunge into them as into the Mediterranean sea.

  She woke with a jerk, her mouth dry.

  She’d been disturbed by the door opening. Justin and Adam came in. Adam wasn’t allowed to drive the digger and was helping Justin and Craig in their efforts to salvage data. Hardly anyone was doing the job that they’d come out to Antarctica to do.

  She poured out soup for them and coffee for herself.

  There was a clattering of boots down the corridor and they all looked around. They heard Graeme singing before they saw him. “When this lousy war is over…” But when he came in, he was smiling. He said, “We’ve dug deep enough to work on one section with pickaxes while someone else uses the digger on a different section.”

  Justin put down his mug. “I’ll come.”

  “Can I take over on the digger?” Katie said. She knew that there was no point in offering to wield a pickaxe. She simply didn’t have the upper body strength of the men.

  Graeme said, “I’ll keep you in reserve, Katie. Ernesto’s OK for a bit longer. But the guys hauling the generator are due back for a breather. Could you take soup and coffee down for them?”

  “Sure, we’ll keep the home fires burning, won’t we, Adam?” She smiled at Adam and he smiled wanly back. She knew it was hard on him, but she wouldn’t allow him to take a more active role. She couldn’t risk that wound breaking open.

  * * *

  Alex was cold, so cold. He told himself to focus. Lives depended on his competence. His thoughts kept sliding away to – something he would rather not put into words. It was not that he regretted what he had done to Flora Mitchell. He felt justified. She had done a terrible thing. She had destroyed a brilliant mind. But Sara – how could he have known that she wasn’t involved? It was the joint authorship of the paper that had foxed him, had convinced him that they had been in it together.

  Everything had changed with the other guys. They obeyed his instructions, but that was all. Of course out in the field it wasn’t possible to do more than that. They couldn’t hear themselves speak above the roaring of the wind. In any case no one wanted to open their mouth and suck in searing air that could have you coughing up blood.

  They returned to the garage to warm up the Skidoos – and themselves – every hour. Hot-air blowers, powered by a small diesel generator used to defrost machinery, had been rigged up.

  There was none of the banter or gallows humour that there would have been in the past. Nick and Rhys didn’t speak unless it was essential and they didn’t meet his eye. They were scientists, surely they could understand what a terrible thing Flora had done? And Kieran had been his friend. Such a tepid word for a relationship that had been the most important thing in his life. He saw now that his own relationship with Kieran was so close that he had simply assumed that Sara had been hand in hand with Flora, that they had each been as guilty as the other. And he still thought that was a reasonable assumption. Flora and Sara had worked together for years, after all, and where did Sara think the idea for cytochrome c had come from? Had she really thought that Flora had just plucked it out of the air? Hadn’t that been remarkably unintelligent of her?

  Every hour Katie brought out soup and coffee and she brought it out for him as well. She had asked him one question. “Was it you who tipped over the Monopoly board?” Well, of course it had been: he had been losing and losing was for – well, for losers. And Alex was no loser.

  After that she didn’t speak again and she wouldn’t look at him either. Sara had been her friend – Sara, Sara – like the needle of a compass swinging to magnetic north, he couldn’t stop his thoughts swinging back to Sara. He would wrench them away and then moments later…

  He drained his mug and looked at Nick and Rhys to indicate that it was time to head back out. They nodded and when he turned to go, without a word, they followed him.

  As he stepped out into the bitter Antarctica night, he understood that no amount of hot soup, no layers of thermals, or heavy-duty parkas could protect him from a chill that seemed to penetrate to his very core.

  CHAPTER 39

  It was ten hours since the loss of power and this was the third time that Katie had taken soup down for Nick and Rhys and Alex. She fought her way around the entrance to the platform, passing on the way the little island of light, where the guys were labouring to uncover the pipe, two at the bottom of the trench and one on the digger. It was impossible to know who was who. Their faces were covered by balaclavas and goggles, without which the ice on their eyelashes would freeze their eyes shut.

  Inside in the kitchen Adam was asleep in a chair. Justin on his rest break was sitting at the table, resting his head on his folded arms. He looked up when she came in and she saw that he was almost too exhausted to speak. She made him tea with plenty of sugar in it and sat next to him while he drank it. There was ice in his beard and his eyes were red-rimmed. She took one of his cold hands and rubbed it in hers.

  They were still sitting in companionable silence, when there was a commotion in the corridor and the next moment the room seemed full of great hulking figures, bringing with them a rush of cold air.

  One of them pushed back his parka hood and pulled off his balaclava. It was Graeme.

  “We’ve found it!” he said. “We’ve found the break. There’s a thirty centimetre split down one side of the pipe.”

  “Can we fix it?” Katie asked.

  “Yep. We can use the MIG welder. But not till the others get back with the backup generator.”

  Ernesto and Craig were emerging from their parka cocoons, but they didn’t remove any of their other layers. The temperature in the kitchen was above freezing, but not by much.

  Adam had woken up. He began bustling about, dishing out soup.

  “How could that have happened, how could the pipe split when it’s protected by all that insulation?” he wondered. “That’s what I can’t figure out.”

  Graeme said, “The insulation’s split too.”

  “That unusual seismic activity last week,” Justin said. “It
might have done more damage than we realized.”

  “Time for post-mortems later,” Graeme said. “Coffee for me, please, with a dollop of brandy. When are the others due back for their next break?”

  In all the excitement Katie had failed to keep track of the time.

  She looked at her watch. “Well, around now actually.”

  Adam said, “You’re alright, Katie. Stay where you are. I’ll keep a lookout.”

  He went to the windows to watch for the lights of the Skidoos. Their appearance was the signal to go down to the garage with the flasks of soup and tea. No one wanted to be outdoors a minute longer than they had to.

  Time passed. Katie began to feel uneasy and she could see that the others were too. The conversation grew sporadic and faded away. Alex was punctilious about sticking to time. Why were they late?

  “Ay up! They’re coming,” Adam exclaimed and then a moment later: “But there’s only two of them!”

  Already Graeme was on his feet, pulling on his parka.

  * * *

  Katie went with him. When they reached the garage the Skidoos had already arrived. One of the figures had dismounted and was supporting the other who had slumped to one side on his vehicle. Katie and Graeme rushed to help.

  The one helping spoke. It was Nick and his voice was hoarse.

  “Rhys came off his Skidoo – he’s hurt –”

  “OK,” Katie said. “I need to know if he hit his head. Did he lose consciousness?”

  Nick said, “He hit a hump at an awkward angle and the Skidoo flipped over. I was just behind him when it happened. I don’t think he hit his head and he certainly didn’t lose consciousness. I got to him right away and he was already cursing.”

  “No – no, it’s just my side,” Rhys said and gasped. “I think I might have cracked a rib. I can walk – I think.”

  Katie thought quickly. Impossible to examine him here. “We’d better get you inside.”

  They got him back to the dining room. The others got a mattress and helped him to lie down. Kneeling beside him, she was able to examine him. Rhys was badly bruised and it was likely that he had fractured a rib – maybe more than one. She would need to get the X-ray machine up and running before she could be sure about that, but she was fairly confident that he hadn’t punctured a lung or sustained any serious internal damage. For now all she could do was give him a painkilling injection. As she did so, she was aware that the wind had grown worse and was making a sound at the windows like someone knocking to get in. She looked around for Graeme to tell him her verdict, but couldn’t see his face among the faces clustered around.

  “Where’s Graeme?” she asked.

  Nick told her. “He and Justin have gone to look for Alex. We’d got to the telescope and we’d attached the generator to the bulldozer. Alex sent us back for our break. He was about to start back to base on the bulldozer. He should be back soon. Though it is getting a bit breezy,” he added.

  When Katie went to the window she saw that as a masterly understatement, that could hardly be improved on. Just in the time it had taken them to get Rhys inside and get him examined, the world outside had become a whirling mass of snow. The lights rigged up over the trench had all but disappeared.

  * * *

  The swirling snow, visible only in the lights of the bulldozer, combined with the continual slow judder of the engine had a hypnotic effect. And though Alex wasn’t much of a one for poetry, a piece of verse that he couldn’t quite grasp was running in his head to the same tempo. Something about a man on a horse and woods filling up with snow. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” Yes, that was it, they had learned it at school. Now that he had grasped one thread, the rest was coming. “But I have promises to keep, and tum te tum te tum te tum.” What was that last bit? Yes! “And miles to go before I sleep.” He wanted sleep, he craved sleep. If only he could escape those tormenting thoughts about Sara. A couple of times he had felt himself slipping away, had almost fallen asleep at the wheel, but the jolting had jerked him awake. He had to keep going. He had miles to go before he could sleep. And promises to keep, yes, and woods were filling up with snow and they were lovely, dark and deep.

  He was aware that it was hard to marshal his thoughts and wondered in a detached way if he were suffering from hypothermia, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was keeping his promise and getting back to the base. He would be there soon. He had only to follow the flag-line and… where was the flag-line?

  Cautiously he pulled back on the throttle and peered ahead. He could see nothing but whirling snow. He turned – with difficulty, he was so bulky in his outdoor gear – but there was nothing to be seen behind him. Somehow he had managed to veer away from the flag-line. Was he still more or less on course for the base or was he heading out across the vast ice shelf? There was no way of knowing. If he had lost his way, the bulldozer, towing the generator, would simply trundle on until it ran out of fuel. He would be dead, frozen behind the wheel, long before that happened.

  * * *

  Graeme and Justin were ready. Every possible layer had been donned including neoprene face guards and they had their VHF radios strapped on. Once outside they would be deafened by the roar and shriek of the wind, so Graeme gave Justin his final instructions. There was only one instruction that really mattered. Don’t let go of the flag-line.

  And yet still Graeme hesitated.

  Again he ran over the possibilities in his mind. How likely was it that Alex had realized how perilous the weather was becoming and had decided to stay at the telescope – or had retreated there, if he’d already begun the journey? He was their most experienced outdoors man and he had climbed Everest. If anyone could be trusted to survive out there it had to be him.

  Even in the time it had taken them to get kitted up, the weather had worsened. The wind was ferocious, gusting, Graeme guessed, at maybe a hundred miles an hour and visibility was virtually nil. Justin, he knew, would not hang back. He was raring to go, fired up by a sense of adventure. When the guys called Graeme the Boss, he was secretly pleased and even a little bit proud. Because of all the Antarctic explorers, Shackleton was the one he most admired and wanted to emulate. Shackleton had never lost a single man under his command. He had stopped within a hundred miles of being the first to the South Pole and had called a halt to the expedition because he knew there was not enough food to get his men back alive. “Better a living donkey than a dead lion,” he had said.

  Most likely Alex was safe and sound at the telescope. In which case Graeme was not justified in going out in a blizzard like this and even less in taking Justin with him.

  He decided to wait until the storm blew itself out.

  * * *

  Alex tried to reason it out. The flag-line had been on his left, therefore he must have veered right. The question was how far right? If he swung round to the left, he ought to get back to the flag-line. The danger was that he would swing round too far and end up moving away from the base – or even going round in a circle. It was hard to think clearly. The roaring of the wind filled his ears. It was as if the blizzard had got inside his head and was muffling his thoughts.

  Yes, he must go left. He turned the steering wheel.

  In all the years he had climbed mountains in many different types of weather he had never known anything like this. He was in a world of white and it was in constant motion. He could no longer see even the headlights of the bulldozer.

  It was then that he realized that he wasn’t alone. The sense of a presence was so strong that he was sure he would see someone when he turned his head. Had Nick come back on a Skidoo? But there was no one there. He had heard of this phenomenon. It wasn’t uncommon among mountain climbers and others in circumstances of extreme danger. It must be a hallucination brought on by fatigue and stress. Yet the sense of having a companion was overwhelming. He couldn’t shake off the feeling that someone was beside him. More: that they were giving him instructions, telling him to correct his steering, to go r
ight. He couldn’t ignore the voice. It seemed to know what to do. It told him to look up. He did and what he saw astonished him.

  At ground level he was in the grip of the storm and could see no further than the end of his arm, but a few feet overhead the layer of drift had thinned. He brushed the snow from his goggles and gazed up at a swathe of starlit sky. In the centre was the Southern Cross. By that he could orientate himself.

  The voice had been right. Somehow he had got on the other side of the flag-line. He was on the right-hand side instead of the left and had been heading out onto the ice shelf. Knowing this he was able to compensate and hold the steering steady. It seemed too that the wind was dropping a little.

  Fifteen minutes later he glimpsed the lights of the garage and knew that he had made it.

  People were waiting there. They were helping him off the bulldozer and uncoupling the generator. Katie was helping him to take off his gloves so that he could drink his soup. She was Sara’s friend and he was touched that she would do that, after what had happened…

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep. I have kept my promise, he thought. Now I can sleep.

  * * *

  Katie waited with the others in the dining room. They sat in silence, too drained to talk.

  It hadn’t taken long to weld the pipe and repair the insulation. After that they used the digger to fill in the trench. The coolant in the expansion tank had been replenished and now it was time for the moment of truth: Adam and Graeme had gone to restart the generator.

  Rhys was lying in a nest of sleeping bags on a mattress on the floor. He was fast asleep, doped up to the eyeballs with painkillers. For everyone else Ernesto provided espressos all round.