In Cold Pursuit (43 page)

“I can’t possibly guess,” replied Valena.

“Three thousand kilometers. The length of the Transantarctic Mountains. Imagine all that magma,” she said. “That’s one hell of a lot of liquid rock.”

“All at
once
?”

“Exactly. Mind-bending. It marks the breakup of Gondwanaland. Tear Antarctica away from Africa, South America, Australia
…
and up comes the hot juice.” She indicated with her hands big plates of the earth’s surface ripping apart.

Valena’s jaw dropped. Throughout her undergraduate geology training, she had studied plate tectonics, the unifying theory of geology that described the movement of the earth’s crustal plates, and had understood it. Moreover, she had found the evidence for it compelling, convincing. It had become a cornerstone of her understanding of the world around her. It explained why the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and delicate ferns had been found on this continent, the remains of life that inhabited it when this land was farther north. Then the convection of heat within the earth’s mantle had ruptured the supercontinent of Gondwanaland into its current chunks two hundred million years ago and had moved Antarctica slowly south, then parked it here thirty million years ago.

The Ferrar Dolerite, one long, black cliff of evidence. Data like this was why scientists came to Antarctica, and this was why the nations that had called Antarctica their own had suspended their claims and set it aside, under the Antarctic Treaty, as a scientific and ecological preserve.

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.

T
HE 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.

N
AOMI 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 be 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.