suffered from mild forms of all three phobias. Frequent confrontation with the sources of her anxieties, like inoculations against influenza, had ensured that she usually suffered only minor discomfort, uneasiness, seldom flat-out terror. Sometimes, however, she was overwhelmed by memories against which no number of inoculations was sufficient protection. Like now. The tumultuous white sky seemed to descend at the speed of a falling rock, to press relentlessly upon her as though the air and the clouds and the sheeting snow had magically metamorphosed into a massive slab of marble that would crush her into the unyielding, frozen plain. Her heart pounded hard and fast, then much harder and faster than before, then faster still, until its frantic cadence drummed, drummed, drummed so loudly in her ears that it drowned out the quarrelsome moaning of the wind.
Outside the igloo entrance, she halted and held her ground, refusing to run from that which terrified her. She required herself to endure the isolation of that bleak and gloom-shrouded realm, as someone who had an irrational fear of dogs might force himself to pet one until the panic passed.
That isolation, in fact, was the aspect of the Arctic that most troubled Rita. In her mind, since she was six years old, winter had been inextricably associated with the fearful solitude of the dying, with the gray and distorted faces of corpses, with the frost-glazed stares of dead and sightless eyes, with graveyards and graves and suffocating despair.
She was trembling so violently that the beam of her flashlight jittered across the snow at her feet.
Turning away from the inflatable shelter, she faced not into the wind but crosswise to it, studying the narrow plain that lay between the plateau and the pressure ridge. Eternal winter. Without warmth, solace, or hope.
It was a land to be respected, yes, all right. But it was not a best, possessed no awareness, had no conscious intention to do her harm.
She breathed deeply, rhythmically, through her knitted mask.
To help quell her irrational fear of the icecap, she told herself that she had a greater problem waiting in the igloo beside her. Franz Fischer.
She had met Fischer eleven years ago, shortly after she earned her doctorate and took her first research position with a division of International Telephone and Telegraph. Franz, who had also worked for ITT, was attractive and not without charm, when he chose to reveal it, and they'd been together for nearly two years. It hadn't been an altogether calm, relaxe, and loving relationship. But at least she had never been bored by it. They'd separated nine years ago, as the publication of her first book approached, when it became clear that Franz would never be entirely comfortable with a woman who was his professional and intellectual equal. He expected to dominate, and she would not be dominated. She had walked out on him, met Harry, gotten married a year later, and never looked back.
Because he had come into Rita's life after Franz, Harry felt, in his unfailingly sweet and reasonable way, that their history was none of his concern. He was secure in his marriage and sure of himself. Even knowing of that relationship, therefore, he had recruited Franz to be the chief meteorologist at Edgeway Station, because the German was the best man for the job.
In this one instance, unreasonable, jealousy would have served Harry — and all of them — better than rationality. Second best would have been preferable.
Nine years after their separation, Franz still insisted on playing the lover scorned, complete with stiff upper lip and soulful eyes. He was neither cold nor rude; to the contrary, he strove to create the impression that at night he nursed a badly broken heart in the lonely privacy of his sleeping bag. He never mentioned the past, showed any improper interest in Rita, or conducted himself in less than a gentlemanly fashion. In the confines of a polar outpost, however, the care with which he displayed his wounded pride was as disruptive, in its way, as shouted insults would have been.
The wind groaned, the snow churned around her, and the ice stretched out of sight as it had since time immemorial — but gradually her racing heartbeat subsided to a normal rate. She stopped shaking. The terror passed.
She'd won again.
When at last Rita entered the igloo, Franz was on his knees, packing instruments into a carton. He had taken off his outer boots, coat, and gloves. He dared not work up a sweat, because it would chill his skin, even inside his thermal suit, and leach precious heat from him when he went outdoors. He glanced up at her, nodded, and continued packing.
He possessed a certain animal magnetism, and Rita could see why she had been drawn to him when she was younger. Thick blond hair, deep-set dark eyes, Nordic features. He was only five nine, just an inch taller than she, but at forty-five he was as muscular and as trim as a boy.
“Wind is up to twenty-four miles,” she said, pushing back her hood and removing her goggles. “Air temp's down to ten degrees Fahrenheit and falling.”
“With the wind-chill factor, it'll be minus twenty or worse by the time we break camp.” He didn't look up. He seemed to be talking to himself.
“We'll make it back all right.”
“In zero visibility?”
“It won't get that bad so fast.”
“You don't know polar weather like I do, no matter how much of it you've seen. Take another look outside, Rita. This front's pushing in a lot faster than predicted. We could find ourselves in a total whiteout.”
“Honestly, Franz, your gloomy Teutonic nature?”
A thunderlike sound rolled beneath them, and a tremor passed through the icecap. The rumble was augmented by a high-pitched, nearly inaudible squeal as dozens of ice strata moved against one another.
Rita stumbled but kept her balance, as though lurching down the aisle of a moving train.
The rumble quickly faded away.
Blessed stillness returned.
Franz finally met her eyes. He cleared his throat. “Larsson's much-heralded big quake?”
“No. Too small. Major movement on this fault chain would be much larger than that, much bigger all down the line. That little shake would hardly have registered on the Richter scale.”
“A preliminary tremor?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“When can we expect the main event?”
She shrugged. “Maybe never. Maybe tonight. Maybe a minute from now.”
Grimacing, he continued packing instruments into the waterproof carton. “And you were talking about
12:45
Pinned by cones of light from two snowmobiles, Roger Breskin and George Lin finished anchoring the radio transmitter to the ice with four two-foot-long belaying pins, and then ran a systems check on the equipment. Their long shadows were as strange and distorted as those of savages hunched over an idol, and the eerie song of the wind might have been the voice of the violent god to whom they prayed.
Even the murky glow of the winter twilight had now been frozen out of the sky. Without the snowmobile headlamps, visibility would drop to ten yards.
The wind had been brisk and refreshing that morning, but as it gathered speed, it had become an increasingly deadly enemy. A strong gale in those latitudes could press a chill through layer upon layer of thermal clothing. Already the fine snow was being driven so hard that it appeared to be sheeting past them on a course parallel to the icecap, as if falling horizontally out of the west rather than out of the sky, destined never to touch ground. Every few minutes they were forced to scrape their goggles and break the crust of snow off the knitted masks that covered the lower half of their faces.
Standing behind the amber headlights, Brian Dougherty averted his face from the wind. Flexing his fingers and toes to ward off the cold, he wondered why he had come to this godforsaken terminus. He didn't belong here.
