Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

THE 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.

NAOMI 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.”