Now, as she approached the igloo on the west end of camp, with the wind hammering her back, she suddenly suffered a phobic reaction so intense that it nearly brought her to her knees. Cryophobia: the fear of ice and frost. Frigophobia: the fear of cold. Chionophobia: the fear of snow. Rita knew those terms because she 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.