Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

He braced himself against the rock, laid his shoulder on it, and pressed hard-then harder; he could hear the popping and grinding of the joint, as the parts sought to regain their proper places, and though the pain was excruciating, he kept thinking only of Kristin, and pressed up, then down, then sideways. With each motion, he felt the parts realigning, until, like the pieces of a puzzle all of a sudden falling into place, he heard the shoulder click back to where it belonged. He gasped several times, and waited, terrified, to see if it would hold… but it did. His entire body was drenched in sweat.

He took a swig of water from the bottle in his backpack, then began the laborious process, a few inches at a time, of hauling Kristin up to the ledge. He had tried calling to her again and again, but ominously there had been no answer. He prayed that she had only been knocked unconscious and would come to her senses soon. But when her head appeared above the rim, and he saw that even the yellow safety helmet had been pulverized as if by a giant mallet, he knew that things were bad. Very bad indeed.

Once he had her body all the way up, he unfastened her harness and removed her backpack, which had ripped open in the fall; everything, including their cell phone, had spilled somewhere far below. He checked her heartbeat and her breathing, then unfurled his sleeping bag and laid it over her. He felt his own body going into a kind of delayed shock, and he stopped to take four Tylenol from their first-aid kit, then tried to eat another protein bar to keep his energy levels up. But his mouth was so dry he could barely chew, and he wound up just breaking it into pieces and washing them down with sips of water. He debated trying to give Kristin some water, but he was afraid of making her choke. Instead, he simply elevated her head on a mound of dirt and gravel he'd gathered, and waited.

The last rays of the sun were tingeing the Western Cascades a pale pink, and Big Lake, far below, was as black as obsidian. He remembered thinking that it was a beautiful sight, and that Kristin should really sit up and enjoy it. She loved sunsets, especially when she was off in the wilds somewhere; she used to say that she slept better under the stars than she did at the four-star hotels where her family sometimes stayed. The stars that night were out in profusion.

But the temperatures were dropping.

Michael made a windbreak out of whatever loose rocks he could assemble, then tucked his nylon jacket carefully around Kristin's head, leaving her shattered helmet in place. Her face was blissfully unmarred, and she looked peaceful. Not in pain. And for that at least he was grateful. Until the first light of dawn, when it would be possible to begin the descent, he would just have to stifle his own fears, hunker down and try to keep her as warm as possible. For what it was worth, he blew on the whistle one more time, and as the sound faded away among the surrounding peaks, he scrunched up next to her under the sleeping bag, and whispered in her ear, “Don't worry-I'll get you home. I promise I'll get you home.”

December 9, 1 p.m.

Darryl felt a lot like an astronaut who'd just been told he couldn't take his space shot.

“But I feel fine,” he repeated as he watched Dr. Barnes make another note on his chart.

“That's not what your body temp indicates,” she said. “You're still suffering some hypothermia from yesterday's dive, and I'm not letting you go down today, no matter what you say.”

As Darryl had predicted to Michael, the chief had indeed authorized another dive, to retrieve the sunken chest if nothing else. And as for the ice princess, he'd said they should bring her up, too, if she wanted to come.

“But you're letting Michael go,” Darryl now complained to Charlotte in a last-ditch appeal.

“Michael is fine,” she said, “and besides, if Michael leapt off a bridge, would you do that, too?” She laughed, scrawled something else on his chart, and Darryl knew that he wasn't going to get anywhere with her.

He buttoned his shirt up and hopped off the examination table. In his heart, he knew that Charlotte was right-he was still feeling the effects of the dive. No matter how much hot tea he drank, and how many pancakes smothered in syrup and butter he ate, there was still some spot at his core that remained chilly. Last night, he'd slept under every blanket in the room, and at around 3 a.m. he'd awakened, nonetheless, with his teeth chattering.

“Killjoy,” Darryl said, as he left the infirmary. In the hall outside, he bumped into Michael, just coming back from delivering his own medical clearance papers to Murphy's office.

“You coming?” Michael asked, and Darryl had to give him the bad news.

Michael looked surprised. “You want me to talk to her for you?” he said, nodding at Charlotte's office.

“Wouldn't do any good. The woman is made of stone. You just go out and make the discovery of a lifetime without me-I'll be in the lab guzzling your bottle of wine. It ought to be safely thawed by now.”

Michael clapped him on the shoulder and loped off down the hall. Darryl pulled on his parka and his hat-even the shortest excursions, from one module to another, required protection from the elements-and, after a quick stop in the kitchen, headed back to the marine biology lab.

Although he had a lot of more important things to do, the bottle of wine was waiting for him, right in front of his lab stool, and he did find the damn thing strangely intriguing. True, it wasn't going to make his name or his reputation in the scientific community, but how many times did you get the chance to study some historic artifact? He felt like the guys who scraped the encrustations from the Titanic's dishes just to see the doomed ship's name appear again. And this bottle had a good chance of being far older than anything from the White Star line.

He reached into the tank, filled with room-temperature seawa-ter, and lifted out the bottle. Illegible shreds of the label hung down into the water. When he held it up to the light and tilted it, he could see the liquid sloshing around inside. Plenty of wine left-and possibly aged to perfection-for a victory toast that night. All he would need for his routine tests were a few drops. And it would be nice to know-if he ever did submit a small piece on the find to a scholarly journal-what kind of wine it had been.

The cork had held, reinforced as it had been by a quick and durable coating of polar ice. He took out the corkscrew that he'd just borrowed from the commons kitchen, but he was afraid to just insert it into the bottleneck and start drilling away. He wanted to go slow, and make sure the wine remained as uncontami-nated as possible. First, he secured the bottle in the vise attached to the counter; the clamp was normally used on reluctant bivalve shells. After a quick survey of the lab and its instruments, he selected a scalpel freshly sterilized in the autoclave and used it to cut away the remnants of the red sealing wax around the tip of the bottle. When had the wax been applied, and by whom? A French peasant in the time of Louis XVI? An Italian winemaker during the Risorgimento? A Spaniard, perhaps, and contemporary of Goya?

He placed the waxy bits in a pile to one side, then inserted the tip of the scalpel between the cork and the bottleneck and began gently to cut around the edge. He wanted the cork to be as loose as he could make it before employing the corkscrew. When the circle had been completed, he put the scalpel aside and stopped just long enough to put the triumphal march from Aida on the Bose audio system; then, to its opening flourishes, he placed the mechanical corkscrew to the cork and began to turn the handle. There was a moment of resistance, followed by a smooth entry-so smooth that Darryl was afraid the cork was going to disintegrate, after all. But the corkscrew eventually made it all the way through, and its lateral wings began to rise as the cork came up and out in one sustained motion. There was even an audible pop as the cork broke entirely free.