Although he was a fine arctic geologist specializing in the dynamics of ice formation and movement, the current expedition would be his last trip to either pole. Henceforth, his research would be done in laboratories and at computers, far from the severe conditions of the icecap.
Harry wondered if Jobert was bothered less by the bitter cold than by the knowledge that the work he loved had grown too demanding for him. Once day Harry would have to face the same truth, and he wasn’t sure that he would be able to exit with grace. The great chaste spaces of the Arctic and Antarctic enthralled him: the power of the extreme weather, the mystery that cloaked the white geometric landscapes and pooled in the purple shadows of every seemingly unplumbable crevasse, the spectacle on clear nights when the aurora borealis splashed the sky with shimmering streamers of light in jewel-like colors, and the vast fields of stars when the curtains of the aurora drew back to reveal them.
In some ways he was still the kid who had grown up on a quiet farm in Indiana, without brothers or sisters or playmates: the lonely boy who’d felt stifled by the life into which he’s been born, who’d daydreamed of traveling to far places and seeing all the exotic marvels of the world, who’d wanted never to be tied down to one plot of earth, and who’d yearned for adventure. He was a grown man now, and he knew that adventure was hard work. Yet, from time to time, the boy within him was abruptly overcome by wonder, stopped whatever he was doing, slowly turned in a circle to look at the dazzlingly white world around him, and thought: Holy jumping catfish, I’m really here, all the way from Indiana to the end of the earth, the top of the world!
Pete Johnson said, “It’s snowing.”
Even as Pete spoke, Harry saw the lazily spiraling flakes descending in a silent ballet. The day was windless, though the calm might not endure much longer.
Claude Jobert frowned. “We weren’t due for this storm until this evening.”
The trip out from Edgeway Station–which lay four air miles to the northeast of their temporary camp, six miles by snowmobile past ridges and deep chasms–had not been difficult. Nevertheless, a bad storm might make the return journey impossible. Visibility could quickly deteriorate to zero, and they could easily get lost because of compass distortion. And if their snowmobiles ran out of fuel, they would freeze to death, for even their thermal suits would be insufficient protection against prolonged exposure to the more murderous cold that would ride in on the back of a blizzard.
Deep snows were not as common on the Greenland cap as might have been expected, in part because of the extreme lows to which the air temperature could sink. At some point in virtually every blizzard, the snowflakes metamorphosed into spicules of ice, but even then visibility was poor.
Studying the sky, Harry said, “Maybe it’s a local squall.”
“Yes, that’s just what Online Weather said last week about that storm,” Claude reminded him. “We were to have only local squalls on the periphery of the main event. Then we had so much snow and ice it would’ve kept Père Noël home on Christmas Eve.”
“So we’d better finish this job quickly.”
“Yesterday would be good.”
As if to confirm the need for haste, a wind sprang up from the west, as crisp and odorless as a wind could be only if it was coming off hundreds of miles of barren ice. The snowflakes shrank and began to descend at an angle, no longer spiraling prettily like flakes in a crystal bibelot.
Pete freed the drill from the shank of the buried bit and lifted it out of its supportive frame, handling it as if it weighed a tenth of its actual eighty-five pounds.
A decade ago he had been a football star at Penn State, turning down offers from several NFL teams. He hadn’t wanted to play out the role that society dictated for every six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-pound black football hero. Instead, he had won scholarships, earned two degrees, and taken a well-paid position with a computer-industry think tank.