Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

Valena asked, “What are you diving for? I mean, are you looking for specimens or something?”

“Foraminifera,” said the man. “ Adamussium colbecki. They’re little—”

“Single-celled animals,” she said, completing his sentence. “My undergraduate degree is in geology. We studied them in paleontology class.”

“Well, then, your professor should have taught you to call them protists, not animals. Or single-celled creatures, or organisms. But not animals. Gah!”

Valena smiled at his chiding. “Are they just lying around on the bottom?”

“Oh, hell no. These encrust other organisms, in this case Antarctic scallops. Cheeky little devils. And they’re not so small, by foram standards; they’re in fact considered giants.”

“Why are you studying them?”

“What interests us is that they secrete a sort of superglue that works in salty water. Not to mention cold water. That glue has important medical applications. Salty human armpits are perfect for delivering drugs to humans who don’t want to deal with suppositories, but we can’t figure out how to get the meds to stick. This glue will hold the meds in place.”

Matt said, “Amazing what we learn from creatures adapted to extreme environments. Like that fellow who’s studying the Weddell seals.”

“Yes. Their diving physiology changes from pup to adult. From looking at that, he learned how their muscles change over their lifetimes, and that has relevance to human cardiac patients. And there’s a group studying the Antarctic codfish. How do they survive twenty-eight-degree water? It’s got to do with the way they metabolize salt, and also they have a natural antifreeze. Again the cardiac patients win.”

Valena asked, “Well, better you than me. You’d never get me into that water, much less down such a narrow hole.”

“Neal here just loves that part. The tighter the better for him. Once the bore is cut, it starts freezing in again, making it tighter and tighter. Of course, we didn’t bring him along because he was sane.”

Another diver grinned. “Oh, yes, we’re regular heroes. We usually just come out for the dive—forty-five minutes, at these temperatures—but the other day we got pinned down out here by that storm and had to eat the rations in our survival bags. That sure sucked.”

“Yeah,” said Neal. “Sam here snored all night. At least we had the heater and all, and the trash novels they put in the survival bags were pretty good once we figured out to read them aloud with proper theatric modifications.”

“We read parts. Henry played the part of the ingenue. He was a natural.”

“So you were out here Monday night?” asked Valena.

“Yeah, that was it. Condition 1. We weren’t expecting it for hours. Caught us with our pants down.”

“Or our dry suits, as the case may be,” said Sam.

“Notice anything strange out here Tuesday morning?” asked Valena.

“No, we just rigged up and took another dive while we waited for the weather to clear.”

“I saw something strange,” said the dive tender. “I stepped outside the shack a moment to see if the weather was clearing. Seemed to be breaking up in the west first. Anyway, I swear I saw some nut zooming by out there on the flag route. It was still snowing some, just not anywhere near so hard.”

“What was nutty about that? asked Valena. “Was he going too fast for the visibility?”

“Well, that, and he was alone,” said the tender. “Going hell-bent on a snow machine.”

“That is strange. Did you tell anyone about it?”

The man shook his head. “Nope. Henry here came up with a leak in his suit, so it sort of slipped my mind until just now, when you asked.” He laughed. “Henry’s suit was flooded clear up to his chest. I asked him if he was cold! Tell them, Henry.”

Henry said, “I told him, ‘My feet are numb, my legs are numb, and when I started to lose the feeling in my penis, I figured it’s time to come up.’”

They all laughed. Good, cold fun. All in a day’s Antarctic dive.

“That snow machine,” said Valena. “Which way was it going, and when?”

The tender said, “When did we dive, boys? About nine a.m.?”

“Yeah, that was it.”

“Yeah, so call it 9:30. He was heading south.”

“Towards McMurdo,” said Valena.

“I suppose so. I figured he was going to turn around though, because it was still snowing pretty thick over toward Hut Point.”

“What color parka?”

“Red. That’s why I could see him. Red parka, black pants, blue boots. Your basic beaker.”

Valena thought, Not just beakers wear the red parkas. She asked, “How far could you see from here?”

The dive tender thought for a moment. “Now and then, I could just make out Tent Island, very vaguely. That’s about two kilometers. An hour later, it was all but clear.”

Sam slid into the dive hole, raised a thumbs-up, and descended out of sight. A boil of bubbles filled the opening in the ice, then subsided. Neal followed, giving a merry wave, and finally Henry.

Matt said, “Well, that’s the show, I guess. We’d better get going.”

The tender saw them to the door as they walked out to the Pisten Bully. Dave opened the shotgun door for Valena.

She stood ten feet from it, trying to decide what to do. The day before, she had ridden for hours with this man alone across the ice, but today, everything was in a jumble. She had been told point-blank not to trust him, but by someone she in turn no longer felt she could trust. And yet someone had ridden past this point heading toward the place where Steve had been found. Could that have been Dave?

Taking a deep breath, she climbed up over the treads into the shotgun seat. Matt climbed into the passenger compartment.

Dave climbed into the driver’s seat, buckled up, restarted the vehicle, and turned the vehicle into a vector that would intersect the flag route around Cape Evans.

Valena said, “Could that man on the snow machine have been Steve Myer?”

“I don’t think so. Steve was in a Challenger. Or he’d taken one out to the sea ice runway that morning, anyways.”

“But he didn’t take the Challenger to where you found him?”

“No, it was pretty near the runway galley.”

“Where exactly did you find him, Dave?”

Dave stared out through the windshield. “We passed the place before we got to the seals. Why?”

“Why’s Cupcake on your case?”

His voice came out tight and angry. “I do not know.”

“Did you say no to her once?”

He let out an ironic chuckle. “Let’s call it more than once. But that don’t separate me from the crowd.”

Valena didn’t say anything for a while.

Dave shifted uneasily in his seat. “I have a lot of respect for the Cake, but…” He let the subject drop.

Valena wanted to change the subject, too. “What would anyone be doing bombing along here in a snow machine by himself in a blizzard?”

“Wouldn’t I like to know.”

“You think that man at the dive shack was hallucinating?”

“No.”

“Did you see something where you found Steve that fit with that?”

“It was still blowing. Some of the time I couldn’t see my own feet.”

Valena said, “I notice that some… tradesmen here wear a big red parka instead of Carhartts.” She forced herself not to look at Dave’s red parka.

Dave glanced at her. “At Clothing Issue, we’re given our choice,” he said. He drove onward, his face set in silence.

He knows what I was thinking , thought Valena.

They came back onto the flagged route and rounded Cape Evans. The route swung toward shore again, leading them up into a shallow cove that held a splendid view of Mount Erebus in its embrace. Dave pulled the Pisten Bully to a stop at the edge of the ice, where it formed a shallow heave against the land, and parked it next to another tracked vehicle that was painted a soft ocher. “This is as close as we can get,” he said, climbing out.