Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

Her mind burned with negative possibilities. If she was unlucky, she’d get sent north as soon as Wednesday, a disaster not only for her master’s thesis research but also for any hope of helping her professor. At least today she would attend Happy Camp, which would get her out of McMurdo and onto the ice she had dreamed about for so many years, but while there she could do very little to find out what had happened or hope to move toward a reversal of fortunes.

It was time to get moving, to get breakfast so that she could be on time for her class. She got up and was about to leave when it occurred to her that the laptop might be gone when she returned the next day. She pulled her own laptop out of her bag and put it on the desk, folded up his computer, slipped it and its power cord into her bag, and prepared to carry it off to her dorm room.

She turned toward the doorway and almost collided with yet another man. All the long muscles of her body jerked, and she almost dropped the bag.

“Hello,” he said. “You’d be Valena, right?”

“Yes.”

He was tall and blond and no more than five or six years older than she was. He was smiling at her. He was good-looking and very fit. “I’m Cal Hart. Emmett’s assistant.”

So you’re in town. Not at WAIS Divide. Her mind raced. How long had he been standing there? Had he seen her switch the computers? She forgot completely all the questions she wanted to ask him. “I was just going to breakfast,” she said.

“Let’s eat together,” he said.

“Sure, ah… that would be good. I was hoping you could fill me in a little on what happened. You know, to Emmett.”

His smile crumpled, revealing a tender boyishness. “I wanted to ask you the same.” He put his hands in his pockets and hung his head, shaking it in bewilderment. “I got back and he was gone.”

“You were in the high camp last year when it happened,” Valena said. “I was hoping…”

Cal lifted his head and looked at her, his eyes round with surprise and innocence. “It was awful,” he said. “I… I’d never seen a man dead before.”

A third man appeared just outside the office door. This one was middle-aged, slim and bearded. “Cal!” he said. “Can I have a word with you?”

Cal turned. “Sure, Jim.”

“In my office?”

“Sure.” He glanced over his shoulder at Valena. “See you at breakfast,” he said, then he turned his attention to the man named Jim.

The two men walked away, leaving Valena with the weight of the computer in her backpack. Did he see me make the switch? she asked herself again. Should I leave it here? She thought only a moment before hurrying off to her dorm, backpack and computer in hand.

MAJOR HUGH W. MULLER, “TRACTOR HUGH” TO SELECT cohorts, sat at his desk in Building 165. He stared into the computer screen in front of him, trying to decide whether to involve himself any further in the mess he and Waylon Bentley had found up in Emmett Vanderzee’s high camp or to let it ride. It was impolitic to say a word. It was unprofessional to even blink. But it was quite possibly immoral to do nothing at all.

Master Sergeant John Lansing appeared at the door. “Got a moment?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“A young woman came looking for Waylon yesterday. She’s a student of that beaker Waylon hauled off the ice on Saturday.”

“I met her, too. Nice kid.”

“I’d sure hate to come all the way down here and have to turn around and go home.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Nothing.” He put his hands in his pockets and began to whistle a little tune.

“Okay, I got you on radar. Get out of here.”

Lansing grinned and disappeared from the doorway.

Deciding on a measured step, Hugh switched to his e-mail screen and typed a few sentences to Major Bentley:

Hey there wise guy. You getting your fill of greenery? Okay, enough frivolity, what happened when you offloaded the professor? Feds still treating him like a criminal?

Thinking better of it, he backed up and erased like a criminal and typed in the same. He smiled. He was rather enjoying this cloak-and-dagger stuff, speaking in code and so forth. Waylon would know what he meant. Waylon had been ready to drop the feds out the cargo door at altitude, the way they’d spoken to the professor up there at the high camp. This was Antarctica, where people depended on each other or went down fast. It was ridiculous to go after them like they did.

Hugh typed,

So here’s the latest: it seems that Herr Doktor Professor has two students this year, and they only managed to stop one of them from coming south. The other one’s here, and wow is she a pistol. Wants to clear his name.

Hugh thought for only a few tenths of a second before adding,

You want to play?

He signed himself “TH” and hit send. Then he leaned back in his chair, arching his back into a big, much-needed stretch. The tension of that visit to the high camp—and what they’d found there—had bitten holes in his sleep every night since. Something had to give.

AT TEN MINUTES TO NINE, VALENA SETTLED INTO A SEAT in a small classroom on the second floor of the Science Support Center. She had time to burn, enough to begin to fidget and replay the conversation with Ted and Cupcake for the hundredth time, the conversation with Taha’s wife for the tenth, and begin to chew on the visits from Bob Schwartz and Cal Hart.

She itched to ask someone whether she would be back from Happy Camp in time to attend the Tractor Club meeting, whatever that was, so that she could meet Major Bentley, but she didn’t want to draw attention to herself or in any way seem anything but gung ho about survival training for fear that, considering her status as a short-timer, they would decide that she didn’t need the training.

All she knew about Happy Camp was that she would be required to demonstrate that she could sleep in a tent on the ice and light a camp stove without igniting the tent or herself. She presumed that her ECWs were warm enough that she would in fact survive, but she was yet to be convinced that a sleeping bag and a tent were going to keep her warm enough to actually sleep. Sleeping aside, if it was true that everyone in McMurdo went through this training sooner or later, and she had so far not seen anyone with missing fingers or toes, then it must be that survival training was… well, effective.

Promptly at nine o’clock, two young men came into the room and announced that they were Happy Camper School teachers. One had black hair and eyes and skin that was a burnished mahogany brown everywhere his clothes, hat, and glacier goggles did not touch. His nose, cheeks, chin, and lower forehead made a rich, dark contrast to the paler skin around his eyes, making him look like a negative image of a raccoon. He said, “Hi, I’m Manny, and this is Dustin.” He gestured toward the other instructor, whose freckled skin seemed more chapped than tanned. “We’re going to have an hour or so of lecture here where it’s warm, and then we’ll be heading out to Snow Mound City.” With that, he picked up a dry marker, approached the erasable board at the front of the room, and launched into a discussion of the five mechanisms of heat loss: conduction (wet clothes), convection (moving air), radiation (keep covered up), evaporation (don’t get so warm that you sweat), and respiration (heat that you exhale is just plain gone). This last was important also because exhaled air was replaced with air that was incredibly dry. It seemed that dehydration was a big problem in Antarctica. (“Drink, drink, drink. Your pee should be clear and copious.”)

Valena dug in her pack for her water bottle and took a swig. She found herself preoccupied with little things, such as what it was going to be like to pee, and what kind of sleeping bag would be issued, and what they might have for lunch. These were all things that Emmett Vanderzee had not thought to explain to her. She had thought that he would show her the ropes. But he was not here.