In Cold Pursuit (17 page)

Valena headed down the hallway toward the dormitory rooms and the hot shower and clean underwear that awaited her there. She told herself that, after showering, she would check her e-mails and would find a message from Taha or even one from Emmett, saying that everything had been
straightened out and that they would join her just as quickly as they could. She would then celebrate by going to the little store she had spotted near the entrance to the galley and get some postcards to send to her grandpa and the teacher from grade school who had first gotten her interested in science. And then she would take a walk in the wind and the snow.

Taped to her dormitory room door she found a note from an administrator at the Chalet, which read:

Valena let herself into the room, dumped her duffel, and trudged sullenly toward the Chalet.

“It’s the earliest we could get you out,” the administrator explained when she got there. “Sorry. But your situation is rather unusual. We’re used to people staying here a bit longer before they redeploy.”

“I don’t mind staying, really. In fact, I’d like to stay. Prefer it.
Greatly
prefer it. I was hoping there’d be some word from Dr. Vanderzee. That he’d be coming back.”

The woman gave her a you-poor-thing look. “Sorry,” she said. “At least you don’t have to go through any more in-briefs. Or out-briefs, for that matter. You haven’t been anywhere and you’re not a PI, so there’s no paperwork to fill out.”

Right, I haven’t been anywhere at all.
Suddenly, a thought occurred to Valena. “Could I become the PI?”

“I don’t think so.” She looked across the assembly room toward George Bellamy’s office. “I suppose you could ask, but… well, no. I don’t think so, dear.”

Valena stared at Bellamy’s door. The expression “a snowball’s chance in hell” filled her mind, consuming all hope. “Well, if for any reason you need to bump me from that flight, you just feel free to do so, okay? I’m supposed to be doing research for my master’s thesis, and I can just hunker down in the library at Crary and get plenty done. Really.”

The woman fixed her stare on her computer screen. “Welcome to Antarctica,” she said.

Valena said good-bye and headed out the door and turned away from 155 and away from the heartbeat of McMurdo before the tears began to roll down her cheeks. She was not given to fits of crying. Tears were pure humiliation: hot; useless; sad evidence of the collapse of her dreams. Right now she needed privacy. She ached for solace. She sought the out-of-doors.

The weather was clearing, the sky opening wide in its blinding pale blue. She followed a road up past several weather-beaten Quonset huts toward the conical prominence of Observation Hill. With each step away from the strange ant-hive of human endeavor called McMurdo, she felt more safe, more self-contained. It was difficult to make the hike in the enormous blue boots she had been issued. They were designed for staying warm while standing still on the ice, but the soft sides provided no ankle support, and the thick, stiff soles and layers of felt provided no arch support and the quilted liners tended to work around sideways, making her socks bunch up.

She was high above McMurdo when she heard the engine of one of the helicopters down on the pad below Crary Lab whine into life. She turned and looked down on the scene. The rotors began to turn. Was this a crew of scientists heading out across the ice toward the continent? They could be geologists going out to study the history of the landforms in the Dry Valleys, biologists on a mission to study the single-celled life forms that scraped out a meager existence in one of the frozen lakes there, or perhaps a team of glaciologists on their way to study a giant iceberg that had calved off the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.

She surveyed the severe landscape. The wind had dropped to its usual nattering levels and the snow had stopped falling. The clouds were breaking up in the south, replaced by a high, scattered overcast. She could now see beyond the ice runway, clear past Black Island, and the first of the peaks on the Transantarctic Range were beginning to resolve themselves from the clouds.

Even though the blades were now turning so quickly that she could see only a blur, people were just loading into the helicopter. She thought that strange until she noticed their sense of urgency and a white van parked nearby. An ambulance? Was this a medical crew departing? Did that mean that search and rescue had found the missing man?

The helicopter lifted off, pivoted, and skimmed along the contours of the hill, then turned and accelerated away toward the end of Hut Point, staying so low that it skimmed barely fifty feet over a small wooden hut that was parked on the ice. It thudded heroically as it shrank into a dot and disappeared around the point.

Valena sat down on the clinkered ground, watching it go. Then she noticed that someone else was on the trail below her. Not ready to give up her privacy, she rose and continued up the steep slope toward Scott’s cross. The other person continued to gain on her. She picked up her pace, but still the other lone hiker overtook her before she reached the summit. Only as he came quite close and she saw his wild hat did she recognize him. It was Peter, the energy conservation engineer whom she had met in the galley during Sunday brunch.

“They’ve found Steve Myer,” he said. “Isn’t that a relief! I thought I’d come up here and watch them bring him in, offer my spiritual support.”

“Do they usually send a helicopter?”

“There’s nothing
usual
about this. In fact, nothing like this has ever happened, not so far as I can recall.”

“It looked like they sent a medical crew. That must mean he’s alive. Maybe he’s really cold and they need to warm him quickly.”

Peter looked uncertain. “Maybe that explains why he wandered off. Like maybe he’s all confused or something.”

“Does that happen much?”

Peter shook his head. He had kind, inquisitive eyes.

They stood together at the cross for several minutes in silence. Finally, they heard the return passage of the helicopter. It began as a faint pattering and grew again into a thunderous rumble as it emerged around the point, flying low and fast
toward the helicopter pad. Someone had turned the white van around and opened its rear doors, waiting to receive the patient. The wild mechanical bird settled, and, even before the whine of its engine changed pitch or the whirl of the blades diminished from a blur to the spinning of individual blades, the personnel on board disembarked. In one quick motion, they transferred a stretcher from the helicopter to the van. Someone closed its doors, and they were off uphill toward the hospital.

“Well, they’re hurrying,” said Peter. “That means he’s still breathing. But what was he doing clear out around the point? I mean, even if you’re confused from some kind of injury, you don’t wander that far.” He shook his head. “I don’t know Steve except to say hi, but he seemed a reasonably smart man. Better than smart. In fact, he used to be a pharmacist.”

Valena cocked her head in question.

Peter chattered on. “Oh, yeah, you get all kinds down here. PhDs driving Cats just to be here. People get jealous of me because I’m actually doing what I was trained for.” He smiled shyly and looked intently into her eyes, as if mapping her.

Uncomfortable with this scrutiny, Valena turned toward the cross that dominated the top of the hill. “So this is a monument to Sir Robert Falcon Scott,” she said.

“Oh yeah. Right. He didn’t make it. Died just a hundred miles or so out there on the ice shelf, coming back from the pole.”

“They didn’t have helicopters back then.”

“Or radios to call for help. Or McMurdo Station, for that matter.”

They stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the amphitheater of buildings, Quonset huts, gravel roads, fuel tanks, miscellaneous vehicles, and layout yards that was McMurdo. “What a strange place,” said Valena. “It’s kind of like a mining camp, only without the mine.”

“Oh, it’s ugly as hell, there’s no way around that. But we call it home.”

Valena turned her attention back toward the far distance
from whence the helicopter had returned. “What’s out there, anyway?”

“There’s a flag route leading around to the north toward Cape Evans and Cape Royds, with a fork continuing straight west to the Penguin Ranch. Beyond that there’s a drilling project… something about the ocean floor.”

“The ANDRILL Project,” Valena said.

“Yeah.”

“They’re gathering data from the sediments that are dropped by the ice as it slides off the edge of the continent. The ice carries all sorts of clues about climate variation.”

“That’s what you’re doing here, right? Gathering climate data from the ice?”

“Yes. When we get our core back to the States we’ll analyze the stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in the water, the gasses caught in the bubbles, and also the fine dust that settled out of the air into the ice.” She began to walk back down along the trail, descending the hill.

“Peter followed her. I didn’t know that there were different isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in water,” he said.

“Oh, yes, there are,” she said, bending down to tighten the laces on the soft FDX boots in the hope that her feet would not slide forward inside them. “Most of the O in the H
2O
that makes up the snow that recrystallizes to form all this ice is good old oxygen 16—eight protons and eight neutrons—but a small percentage of oxygen has extra neutrons, making oxygen 18, which is heavier. The thing is, the ratio between the two—how much 16 versus 18—is governed by the temperature of the clouds from which the snow falls.”

Peter said, “Oh, I get it. You can figure out when the global climate was warmer and when it was cooler by measuring that ratio.”

Valena shrugged. “The isotope ratios are a proxy for temperature. It’s simple physics. The laws of thermodynamics. The hydrogen in the water molecule is a slightly different story. Hydrogen typically has just one proton, but sometimes two. We call that deuterium. How much deuterium you find in the ice is a reflection of the temperature of the water that
evaporated to form the cloud. So by analyzing the isotopes in the ice, you can read the surface temperature of the ocean waters up in the tropics where the water left the ocean and entered the atmosphere as vapor.”

“So even though you drill in Antarctica, it’s not just about Antarctica.”

Valena laughed. “Why would the taxpayers who are paying for this research care how cold it is in the middle of Antarctica? We chose the WAIS Divide site because it will give us a global record. We’ll study the dust in the ice to figure out where it came from and how hard the wind was blowing. That tells us about atmospheric circulation patterns throughout this hemisphere. The amount of salt tells us how far into the ocean the sea ice extended around Antarctica, another indicator of ocean currents and global temperature. Organic compounds tell us about marine productivity in the southern oceans. The chemical and optical properties of summer snow and winter snow are different, so we can make measurements on the ice core that identify each annual layer of snowfall. It’s like counting tree rings, really
old
tree rings. But the gasses, they rock.”

“Gas in the ice?”

“Yeah, when the old snow gets buried by the new snow, it gets compacted into ice. The gas that was in the snow, like twenty percent of the volume, gets trapped in the ice. Grind up the ice, free the ancient air. You can study methane,
CO2
, nitrogen, free oxygen. The ice is the only way to get pristine samples of the ancient atmosphere.”

“You’re going to do all that?”

“Not me alone. It takes a team of twenty PIs, each with their own research team and lab, working for years to pull this off. We’re just getting started.”

Valena was enjoying sharing her enthusiasm with Peter. He was easygoing and sweet, a soothing companion, and talking about her research topic moved her out of her tangled emotions and into the pleasure of the mind.

They reached the bottom of the hill and began to stroll back down the road that led toward the center of McMurdo.
Valena said, “There are people here who study the way the ice flows off the continent. That’s important because we need to know how fast it moves, so we can know how quickly the ice that’s on the land can flow off into the ocean, and what influences that. Just recently, we at last have really good and complete satellite imagery of the entire continent, but just as we’re really getting things dialed in, NASA gets funding cuts and we can’t get as good coverage to monitor the ice movement, or how fast it’s retreating. It’s all very frustrating.”

“Budget cuts. Not good.”

“Right, and there are people who’d prefer that we not spend even as much as we are to study these things, or who don’t believe there’s any point in it.”

“I’ve heard the argument that the additional greenhouse gasses are a very small percentage.”

“Sure. Greenhouse gasses always exist in the atmosphere—heck, you and I are exhaling
CO2
right now—but it’s that percentage that is added by burning gasoline in our cars or coal to fire electric power plants that makes a profound difference in how much heat is trapped. And right now, the US and China are building several times as many coal-fired plants as we’ve had in the past, and each one is bigger and is going to burn more coal. We’ve learned to scrub the particulates out of the stacks, but still they will emit CO2. Tons and tons and tons of it. And per BTU generated, coal throws a lot more carbon into the atmosphere than other fuels.”

“That’s not good.”

“That, in fact, is bad. They argue also that the global temperature has been rising for other reasons, such as the natural oscillations caused by things like the earth’s orbit and that’s true. Either way, we need to know as much as we can about climate so that we can plan accordingly. During the ten thousand years that our species has gone from a bunch of hunter-gatherers to crop raisers to industrialists and from a world population of a few million to six billion, the climate has been unusually benign, making all that crop growing and industrialism possible. The likelihood that it would continue that way was low. The likelihood that the climate would
become less predictable is high. But why kick it over the moon? Answer me that.”