“Holes in the ice!” he cried, pointing at several spots around them. “They've chewed breathing holes in the ice!”
A few yards off, almost indistinguishable against the ice, Michael saw a pup. Then two. White, but smeared with blood, their black eyes open. A mother lay beyond them, like a gray barrel.
And then, as he watched, another seal-bigger, darker, fully grown-put its head down into a hole, and somehow managed to slither through.
“Keep going!” the guy in the orange coat shouted. “Get off the ice!”
Someone from the station, a guy with a frozen handlebar moustache, was guiding Charlotte and Darryl forward. Michael inched in the same direction, but sometimes the fog made it hard to see as far as your own feet. And the ice, slick under the best of circumstances, was even harder to navigate on, wet with blood and littered with afterbirth. When, finally, he felt the grit of rock and lichen under his boots, Michael breathed a sigh of relief. A burst of wind dispelled a patch of fog, and he saw, on a low rise not more than fifty yards away, a handful of muddy gray, prefab structures, raised a few feet above the permafrost, and huddled together like the ugliest college quad in the world. An ice-rimed flagpole stood in the center, with Old Glory snapping in the freezing wind.
The guy in the orange parka came up behind him and said, “We call it the garden spot of Antarctica.”
Michael stamped his cold, and bloodstained, boots.
“But I've got to warn you,” he went on, in a thick Boston accent, “it's not always this pretty.”
PART II
“And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariners’ hollo!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.”
“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-
Why lookst thou so? — With my crossbow
I shot the ALBATROSS!”
CHAPTER TEN
December 2 to December 5
The first few days at Point Adelie were difficult to sort out. Not only because so much was going on, but because there was no sense of the time passing. With the sun perpetually shining, its rays beaming through the cracks in the blinds at night, the only way to tell what time it was at all was to look at your watch, or perhaps ask someone, if you were still confused, if that was 11:30 in the morning or 11:30 at night. Followed by, what day of the week? It wasn't as if you could check the morning newspaper, or the TV listings for that night. All the ordinary markers by which you measured and regulated your life-when you went to bed or when you got up, what time you exercised at the gym or attended the yoga class, when you left for work or came home-were all useless. It didn't even matter whether it was a weekend or a weekday, since you weren't very likely to find a date, or go to the movies, or sleep over, unexpectedly, at someone else's place, or have to take the kids to a soccer practice. All of it was moot. You were in a time and a place where none of that quotidian stuff mattered. In the Antarctic, everything existed in a free-floating state, and you either learned to impose your own kind of order on it-any kind of order-or you slowly went bonkers.
“The Big Eye is what we call it,” Michael was informed over his first meal in the commons. (That college quad notion had even extended to some of the nomenclature at the camp.) The guy in the orange parka and goggles, who'd turned out to be the research station's Chief of Operations-Murphy O'Connor, by name-had eaten with the new arrivals, and taken that opportunity to run down some of the camp's rules and regulations, among other things.
“If you work too hard, for too long, you lose all track of time, and before you know it you're walking around with the Big Eye.” He made his eyes bulge out in his face, while sucking in his cheeks, making himself look gaunt and demented.
Charlotte smiled, and Darryl laughed, as he ladled another pile of baked beans onto his plate.
“Won't be so funny when you get it.”
Darryl stuck the serving spoon back in the beans.
“For a little guy, you sure can shovel it in,” Murphy observed.
Michael wondered if Hirsch would take offense at that, but Murphy's manner was at once so plainspoken and open-handed that Darryl didn't seem to mind at all.
“So,” Murphy resumed, “try to stick to some kind of schedule while you're down here. Make it up yourself, but try to keep on it. The kitchen's always open-you can always rustle up a sandwich- but if you flip out, we don't have a psych ward on the premises.” He glanced over at Charlotte. “Unless Dr. Barnes is planning to open one.”
“Not if I can help it,” she said.
Then he proceeded to offer them a long list of other Point Adelie pointers, including the most important of all.
“You never leave the base alone,” he said, staring at each one of them to emphasize the point. His eyes were big and brown, behind aviator-style glasses that barely cleared the black stubble covering his chin and cheeks. “A year ago, we had a guy-a geologist from Kansas-who just wanted to go out and grab a few quick specimens. Went out alone, didn't leave word where he was going,” and at this, Murphy raised a cautionary finger, “and we didn't find him for three days.”
“What happened?” Michael asked.
“Went down a crevasse and froze to death.” He shook his head sadly and sipped his coffee from a mug with a picture of a penguin on it. “Sometimes you can't see the crevasses for shit.” He pointed back in the direction of his office. “That's why we've got a blackboard in the hall; if you are leaving the base, you write down who's going, where you're going, and when you're planning to return.”
Michael had already seen the board-the last entry said something about a ground terrain exploration in Dry Valley One.
“And when you get back-safely-check it off on the board. I do not appreciate having to do a bed check to make sure everybody's tucked in for the night.” He paused, then smiled at the thought of something. “You'd be surprised what I find.”
Michael couldn't imagine anything too salacious. Looking around the commons, which was sparsely populated just now, there were a couple of tables where the service personnel were sitting- all youngish men in blue uniforms-and a couple of others where the scientists were concentrated. It wasn't any harder to spot them there than it had been to pick out Darryl at the Santiago airport. They were a small eccentric crew, one with a long gray ponytail and wire-rimmed specs halfway down his nose, and a couple of stout blond women with broad shoulders
