Jon Breen: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 114, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 697 & 698, September/October 1999

“Of course. He can do anything but go under.”

“Harley, do you have specs on the dry suits we’re using? And a current dive manual?”

“Sure. I’ll get them.”

The thought of the next day was already generating bursts of apprehension in Drake’s mind. He had not dived in a dry suit in more than five years. Any recent diving he had done had been in a wet suit, with scuba gear, in Polynesian and Australian waters. With that kind of history, the smart way to approach the ice-shelf exploration would have been to spend half an hour at twenty feet the first day, forty-five minutes at thirty-five the second, an hour at fifty feet the third, then try a deeper dive. He was going to have to spend about ninety minutes at sixty-plus feet the first day. It was going to be not only arduous but dangerous.

But, he had already decided, it was necessary. If there was going to be an individual Nobel prize for the diver who found the algae that conclusively proved the theory, maybe he would be the one to get it.

Later that night, while Drake was carefully reviewing a schematic of the dry suit’s valves and attachments, Owen Foster walked into his tent without knocking.

“Just what the hell are you up to, Drake?” he demanded.

“What are you talking about, Foster? And don’t you know how to knock?”

“Never mind knocking! And you know damn well what I’m talking about! You set it up with Porter to replace Harley with yourself to make you the lead diver. You want to be the one who brings up the conclusive algae, don’t you?”

“That’s absurd,” said Drake. “I don’t care who brings it up, as long as the team gets it—”

“Will you guarantee to let me do the deeper dives first?” Foster challenged.

“No, I can’t do that.” Drake tried to reason with him. “If I see something that’s deeper than you are, or deeper than you’ve been, I have to go for it. This is a scientific endeavor, not some kind of contest, Foster—”

“Yeah, right,” Foster snapped. “I suppose you’re not trying to impress Claire to get her back either?”

“No, I’m not—”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me she hasn’t been to your tent since you got here?”

“She came to my tent just to talk. She said she was worried about the project—”

“You’re a goddamned liar,” Foster said. From under his parka he drew a serrated ice knife and brandished it malevolently. “You listen and you listen good, you son of a bitch. You’re not getting my wife, and you’re not cheating me out of being the one who brings up the algae sample that proves the warming theory. I am going to be the one the scientific world applauds for that. I am going to be the one whose name goes into the history books, and I am going to be the one on this team who gets an individual Nobel prize!”

Drake eyed the knife warily. “You’re sick, Foster. You need therapy.”

“The only thing I need is for you to stay out of my dive depth tomorrow. I’d gut you right now if I wasn’t afraid it would terminate the project. But if you dive past me tomorrow, I swear I’ll cut your air hose and let you die down there!”

With that, the enraged man turned and stalked out.

No sooner was Foster gone than Drake’s tent phone rang. It was Claire.

“Has he been there?” she asked anxiously.

“Yes, he just left.”

“Pat, I’m frightened. He’s losing it. It infuriated him that you were diving with him tomorrow instead of Harley. He’s afraid that you’re going to be the star now, and he’ll be just another team member. Listen, can you come and get me?”

“Come and get you?”

“Just to walk with me from the blockhouse to Sally’s tent. Everyone else is already gone. Sally’s in a two-person tent and said I could bunk with her tonight. She knows that I’m terrified of Owen. Especially since he believes that — well, you and I, you know—”

“I’ll be over in ten minutes,” Drake told her.

When Drake got over to the blockhouse, Claire was not dressed to leave, as he had known she would not be. Instead, she was in the little kitchen with coffee poured for both of them. Drake zipped off his thermals and sat down with her.

“How in hell did you ever get mixed up with a psycho like Foster?” he asked without preliminary.

Claire shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know,” she said sadly. “After you and I broke up, I kind of drifted. I was involved with an aeronautical engineer out in California, until I found out that his fifteen-year-old daughter wasn’t his daughter at all, but a runaway he had been keeping in his home for over a year as an extra bed partner. Then there was a faculty head in Colorado who got me dangerously into the drug scene before I came to my senses and got out. In Texas there was a wealthy rancher, who was the father of one of my students at the University of Houston, who swore that he and his wife were on the brink of a divorce, but whose wife eventually came to me and threatened to gouge my eyes out with her spurs if I didn’t leave her husband alone.” She smiled wistfully. “I just couldn’t seem to connect with anyone who came up to your standards, Pat, which was what I was trying to do. I wanted very badly to come back to you, I even tried to find you—”

“I didn’t know that,” Drake said in surprise.

“It’s true. I called everyone we mutually knew to locate you. I was going to beg you to give us another chance together. But when I finally found out where you were, you were engaged to somebody named Cindy or something—”

“Wendy.”

“—and the two of you had left for Africa on an agriculture project of some kind. So I dropped my desperate quest and started drifting again. When I met Owen, I was down to my last emotion. Unfortunately, I used it on him.” Claire rose and turned off the overhead fluorescents, leaving the little kitchen in subdued countertop light. “Do you mind? I have a raging headache.” Walking to the room’s only window, she pressed a button to electronically raise the thermal shade, and looked out at the ghostly white moonlit night. Drake rose and came over to stand with her.

“So whatever happened to Cindy?” she asked.

“Wendy. She dumped me for a great white hunter. Some guy who worked as a guide for National Geographic. ”

“Did you find anyone else?”

“No,” he answered quietly. “I didn’t try. By then I knew I couldn’t replace you.”

They were in each other’s arms quickly then, moving in tandem away from the window, to the far end of the counter where the light barely reached, and where she could sit up on the counter-top and they could open just enough buttons, just enough zippers, move just enough fabric aside for what they both wanted.

“Don’t hold me too tight, Pat,” she whispered. “My bruises—”

While they were locked together, her head thrown back, his mouth on her throat, Drake made up his mind to kill Owen Foster under the ice shelf the next day.

The dive site the next morning had an unusually ominous aura about it. The frigid air somehow seemed thinner and more difficult to breathe, the stratocumulus clouds looked low enough to reach up and touch, and during the night some extraordinary wave of heat, the kind of phenomenon unique to Antarctica, had thawed an inch of ice on the surface of the shelf to create a slush in which the scientists had to maneuver about. “This is downright spooky,” said big Paul Green, shuddering involuntarily. Along with grounded Harley Neil, he was a dive tech this morning.

“Tell me about it,” Harley agreed.

The two men got the dive equipment in place and the generators running, tested everything, then went into the ready tent where Drake and Foster, warily facing each other without speaking, were suiting up. They had everything on except helmet, gloves, and the utility belt which held, on one side, rubber cases containing sample-collection tubes, and on the other, an assortment of small tools to facilitate removing ice or rock in which a microbial mat had been formed by algae for protection.