Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

“Emmett wanted to get back in there to find that damned chute and document what had happened, but NSF was in no hurry to run another flight in there. The risk of getting stuck was too great. Then in no time flat it was the end of the season, and everyone went home. Maybe you don’t understand yet what a narrow weather window we have here. It’s already the end of November. Even if Emmett were here, you’d be lucky to mobilize into your camp within the next week. First it’s storms and then it’s fog. Once the fog lifts, then there’s a backup of everybody trying to get where they want to go. Then you get the first really good day of flying weather, and it’s Sunday and the pilots are on their days off. Antarctica is the place where they invented the expression ‘hurry up and wait.’”

“Let me guess: the News thought it was all a cover-up.”

“They made it sound like he lured the guy down here and ran him up that mountain with the express purpose of killing him.”

Valena shook herself to work her muscles and create heat. “Well, did he? I mean, is there any truth to it at all?”

Skehan snorted. “Oh, ye of little faith. You’re kidding me, right? I can’t believe you would have come here with him if you believe him capable of that.”

Valena stared into Skehan’s goggles and frozen beard. She said, “What’s faith got to do with science? Look, I don’t really know the man. He’s got a great reputation as a scientist. I was thrilled to get onto his project. But now here I am without him, and if Bellamy gets his way I’m on the next plane home. I don’t want to go. I want to stay! I’m here to do science, not perform acts of faith.”

Skehan sighed. “Emmett wanted the guy to wait in Mac Town until they were done at the high camp and ready to move lower down, but with the storms and all, they were behind schedule. Sweeny said he was on a tight schedule himself, and if he did not get into the field in two more days he was going to return to Wall Street and write his story. NSF freaked at the thought of what he would write after coming all that way and not getting to the field. So they sent him up. Emmett really did not have much choice in the matter. He could have refused, but every project has to do media outreach, so a refusal could have come back to haunt him. The guy insisted that he had done plenty of high-elevation mountaineering and knew what he was good for. And maybe that’s all true. Maybe he already had a respiratory infection going into it and didn’t even know it. A lot of people show up here with the crud after all those hours in a commercial jet, or they catch it as soon as they get to McMurdo.”

Valena said, “So the man got sick and they couldn’t get him out fast enough.”

“Emmett ordered a Gamow bag. The Airlift Wing flew it in on an LC-130 and dropped it on a chute. It was blowing to beat the band. Eighty knots sustained, gusting to who knows what. Emmett went out to get it. He took Cal Hart. They saw the chute in the distance, blowing, apparently dragging its cargo. They chased it, but suddenly the gusts got so huge that they were blowing along like sheets of newspaper. They had to use their ice axes to stay fixed, to keep the tents in sight. Then things deteriorated to condition 1. They had to claw their way back to the tents and hunker down so they didn’t get lost. When the weather lifted, Emmett went out again, but he couldn’t find anything, not the chute, not its payload, nothing.”

“So he ordered another one.”

Skehan’s face remained aimed at Valena’s for several seconds. “I don’t know the answer to that question.”

“I mean—”

“You mean did he just let the guy die. Listen, you go ahead and think what you want, but try to get one thing straight: down here it’s tragedy when someone dies, no matter how little you might like him. It’s a personal loss. And just because you’re a wet-behind-the-ears grad student is no excuse to miss the really important point here: scientists don’t go around killing people just because they’re mad at them. That’s for mafiosos and presidents, not scientists. Scientists want their adversaries to stay alive, so they can prove them wrong !”

Valena opened her mouth to say something, but Skehan had jumped to his feet. With one last unreadable stare, he stalked off into the gathering storm.

VALENA WOKE DURING THE NIGHT WITH A DESPERATE need to pee and lay in her caterpillar-thick mound of sleeping bag considering her options. She read her wristwatch. It was one o’clock in the morning. She had climbed into the quinzy early because she had discovered, after her disastrous discussion with James Skehan, that she had let herself get dangerously cold. After dancing around and swinging her arms to warm up, she had swilled one last cup of hot chocolate and retired to her sleeping bag. Once inside its enormously thick wrapping of synthetic fibers, she had discovered that she was also extremely tired and had gone to sleep.

Now that the call of nature had brought her awake, with no idea what time it was, the illumination coming through the snow walls being nearly identical to what was there when she fell asleep, she realized that she was no longer alone. Doris snored gently to her right, and Michael from Crary Lab was sleeping to her left.

Realizing that there was no way she was going to get back to sleep if she did not relieve herself, she unzipped her bag as quietly as she could and struggled into her ECWs. She had gone to bed wearing two layers of long underwear, wool socks, and a fleece hat, with her big red parka pulled over the bottom half of her bag for an extra layer of warmth. She wiggled into her wind pants, raised their suspenders to her shoulders, shrugged her way into the parka, pulled on her boots, hat, and gloves, then stepped down inside the exit tunnel and crawled outside.

She popped up into a world that was even less welcoming than the one in which she had gone to sleep. The sky had gone low and wooly, though even in this tiny hour of the night it was as bright out as four o’clock in the afternoon back home.

It was blowing thirty knots, she estimated, kicking up loose snow that slithered as blurred white snakes across the packed surface of the ground. She counted flags along the route that led to the latrine and could see five. Given that they were spaced about twenty feet apart, that meant that visibility was down to less than one hundred feet.

Valena considered just hopping over the wall and taking care of business right there but did not want to find out the hard way how cold or unpopular that was going to make her. Five flags was good enough for her, though it was time to get moving or the point was going to be moot.

It seemed a long walk to the little wooden shack that housed the latrine. Ten flags out from camp, she looked back. The camp had disappeared. Everything was a blurry grayish white, a world of snarling wind and uncertain footing.

Turning back toward her goal, she continued into the murk, buoyed by a growing sense of liberation. This wildness was what she had come ten thousand miles to experience, and her sense of glory was diminished only by the increasing urgency of her bladder. At length the little wooden shack appeared, resolving itself from the soft grayness first as a brownish smudge and then as increasingly distinct edges gathering into a solid form.

When she pulled the pin from the clasp that kept it closed, the plywood door to the latrine flew out of her hand and banged open. Backing into the building, she had to use both arms to pull the door shut. As if anyone could see me , she thought, but I’m not dropping my pants in this wind. After pulling almost hard enough to give herself a hernia, she got the door closed and lowered the drop seat of her wind pants and the layers of underwear beneath it. The Styrofoam seat on the latrine was a shock for only a moment.