Jury Duty (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  “When it rises, which is like never in winter, it moves in an arc low along the horizon. The sun never reaches high noon. It never gets above you. At first, for barely an hour, it’ll peek over the mountains and then retreat back into the darkness. By the time you get to October, the sun is up and doing circles in the sky. It’s never directly overhead, but it never sets either. Not for four months.” She gestures with her finger, twirling it around her head as she adds, “It just loops and loops and loops and the day never ends.”

  “Loops?” Nick asks, confused.

  “Around and around the edge of the horizon,” Dmitri says.

  “It really is like being on another planet,” Jazz says. “You probably don’t realize it, but we instinctively rely on the sun for a sense of time. But in Antarctica, the sun lazes around the sky, distracting you. You lose all sense of direction. And this is important—if you get lost, you cannot rely on the sun. If you get separated from your surface team and can’t see any landmarks, it’s crucial you stay where you are. Wandering around under the maddening sun won’t help. You’ll think it will. You’ll be convinced you’re going in the right direction, but you’ll only make things worse for the rescue team.”

  “Four months,” Dmitri says, raising four fingers. “Four months of darkness in winter and four months of unrelenting daylight in summer. It’s crazy down there. In summer, there’s no way to tell if it’s noon or midnight.”

  “And in between?” Nick asks, genuinely curious about how radically different the seasons are in Antarctica.

  Jazz says, “The days grow shorter in autumn and longer in spring, changing at an astonishing rate until either the darkness or the light is banished for months on end.”

  There’s something about the way she speaks. For her, this is personal. She’s talking about Antarctica the way a boxer might speak about an opponent in an upcoming fight. There’s a sense of defiance tinged with respect.

  “Then there are the katabatic storms. That’s something you sure as hell don’t get on Mars. The wind howls across the frozen plateau at upwards of two hundred miles an hour for weeks on end. It’s like a hurricane without an eyewall, driving snow and ice at you like hail, making it almost impossible to walk outside.”

  Nick keeps chewing. He’s fascinated. He gets that the point of her diatribe is to scare the bejeezus out of him—and it’s working—but it’s also mesmerizing to hear about another world on Earth.

  “When the wind picks up, your body becomes a sail. It sounds crazy, but we’ll practice hurricane-walking on the ridge. You need to bend at the waist to almost ninety degrees. Keep your chest facing down at the ice or you won’t make any headway. Look up and you’ll be blown backwards like a bunch of ten-pins being struck by a bowling ball.”

  “The chill,” Dmitri says with a little too much delight. “Tell him about the chill.”

  It’s almost as though he’s recounting a checklist of points to drum into the new guy.

  Jazz obliges. “Then there’s the wind chill. It can turn negative forty into negative eighty in a heartbeat. With the wind chill, temperatures have been known to sink well below a hundred. You think breathable air is a problem on Mars? Hah. You ain’t been to Antarctica. Exposed skin will succumb to frostbite within minutes, at some points, in mere seconds, and as for your lungs? Anything below eighty is going to hurt like fuck. We even had one guy drown out there on the ice.”

  “Drown?” Nick asks with a mouth full. “On the ice? How is that possible?”

  “It was a hundred and twenty below with the wind chill. We were on the edge of the plateau, surrounded by granite-like ice cliffs and packed snow. He didn’t have enough fur covering his face.”

  “He wanted to see,” Dmitri says, clarifying her point. He’s trying to be helpful, but his demeanor is unsettling. He wasn’t there. Losses like this must have become almost lore among the team. They must talk about them at length, trying to figure out what could have been done to save a life.

  “See what?” Nick asks, reluctantly mopping up more butter with his stale bread.

  “There was nothing to see other than the whiteout,” Jazz says.

  “He should have said something to someone,” Dmitri says.

  Jazz shakes her head, recalling the incident. “Within minutes, he was coughing up blood. He never even realized he was drowning as fluid filled his damaged lungs.”

  “Damn fool,” Dmitri says.

  “He only lasted fifty-eight days,” Jazz says as though that’s notable.

  Nick wants to ask whether that’s fifty-eight days down there or fifty-eight days after that incident damaged his lungs, but either way, the point’s clear—he’s dead now. Dmitri shakes his head. It seems he knew the man.

  Jazz chews on a piece of jerky. “Hell, Mars is easy by comparison. All those flash fancy spacesuits and shit. We get none of that.”

  “I get it,” Nick says, trying to eat the last of his butter with a bit of bread crust. “You’re trying to scare me.”

  “I’m trying to build respect,” Jazz says. “Antarctica is vicious. Unforgiving. Worse than Everest. Antarctica’s a bitch. She’ll kill you in under a minute given the chance.”

  “Have you?” Nick asks, curious about the comparison she’s drawing. “Have you climbed Everest?” He knocks back a lukewarm mug of coffee. Jazz doesn’t bother saying yes. She seems offended he would even ask.

  “Everest is a walk in the park. Do you want to know what I remember most about Everest? Do you really want to know what sticks in my mind about conquering the world’s highest mountain?”

  “Sure,” he replies. “The cold? The view? The thrill of standing on top of the world?”

  “The bodies.”

  Jazz shakes her head. Up until this point, Nick assumed Jazz was giving him the usual hazing, wanting to scare the new guy. Now, he’s not so sure. Her eyes are ten thousand miles away, somewhere on the upper slopes of the North Face, gazing at a corpse buried in the ice. “Every one of them. Every goddamn one was a highly motivated, well-trained, fully-equipped, experienced climber. And every one of them was dead.”

  Her eyes focus on him.

  “Do you want to know what motivates me out there on the ice? It’s simple. I’m sick of leaving bodies on the trail.”

  Nick swallows the lump in his throat.

  Hike

  After lunch, Dmitri and Jazz lead Nick through the rabbit warren of corridors within the base.

  “This is the mud room,” Jazz says, leading him into the external staging area within the network of huts. There’s no mud, but there’s plenty of ice scattered around the rubber mats lining the floor, particularly over by the external door. If anything, it looks like they’re about to walk into a commercial freezer.

  As much as he doesn’t want to admit it, Jazz is right. This is nothing like the snow-capped mountains of the Carolinas. Life on South Georgia is akin to being on another planet. Antarctica will be worse. There might not be any pressure doors or spacesuits hanging on the walls, but the staging area operates like an airlock, separating two entirely different worlds. Boot prints have become embedded in the crushed ice.

  A double-glazed window provides a glimpse outside. With the sun sitting low above the mountains, the temperature is plunging across the island. The mud room acts as a buffer against the bitter cold. As they walk along the narrow room, the temperature plummets, dropping below zero before they reach the far door. The outer door opens. Nick is momentarily blinded by the light reflecting off the brilliant white snow.

  Once outside, they don ski goggles. Jazz shows Nick how to adjust the hood on his jacket so it narrows around his head, warming the incoming air. His hood, though, also narrows his field of view. Nick can only see the world through the small furry opening. His peripheral vision is gone. He’s either looking down at his boots or along the path. To either side, there’s nothing but a blur of fur.

  The temperature falls along with the sun. Out over the bay, a warship sits anchored amo
ng icebergs. Its straight lines and gunmetal grey hull are distinctly out of place among the sea ice and the distant, rocky peninsula. That frigate is an alien intruder in a primitive, hostile land. Nick wonders if the view before him isn’t that dissimilar to the one that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago in Antarctica when the alien spacecraft crashed.

  Rocks crunch beneath their boots as they trudge along the shoreline. Granite boulders the size of houses dot the landscape, each capped with snow, frozen in the ice.

  Occasionally, penguins waddle down over the loose pebbles toward the waves lapping at the beach. They disappear beneath the dark water with barely a splash.

  “You have to respect the cold,” Jazz says as they trek inland, following a rocky trail leading up to an antenna mounted on the ridge. “Most places on Earth, you can survive for roughly three days without water and a month or so without food. As soon as you factor heat into the equation, everything changes, regardless of whether that’s Siberia or the Sahara.

  “Without a constant 98 degrees, your internal organs are in deep trouble. Out here, all it takes is a drop of a few degrees—just four degrees—no more. If your core body temperature hits 95 you’re succumbing to hypothermia and on the verge of death. Down there in Antarctica, the cold can kill you in under four minutes, so the survival equation goes—breathable air, then warmth, then water, then food.

  “That’s the critical path. Never reverse any of the components. It doesn’t matter how thirsty you think you are, don’t drink ice water. If you’re holed-up in a snow cave waiting for rescue, don’t drink anything cold.”

  As the slope of the hill increases, Nick breathes in deeper. Cold air rushes into his lungs. Jazz seems to anticipate a question he’s thinking about but hasn’t asked.

  “If the cold hurts your lungs, it’s okay. Close your hood a little more to heat the incoming air, and keep going. If it stops hurting, you’re in trouble. At that point, your body is passing through a physiological milestone leading to frostbite, hypothermia, organ failure, and death. And all in under four or five minutes if you don’t have shelter. If you can’t feel the cold, you’re in a bad way. If you’re cold and you suddenly feel unusually warm, you’re seconds away from dying. Remember that.”

  Oh, how could he forget?

  Jazz picks up the pace, taking long strides, stepping up over large rocks and propelling herself on. She pushes up with her thighs, hitting a fast pace. Dmitri is behind Nick. The big Russian is in his element, following so close he’s almost stepping on the back of Nick’s boots.

  Nick is already struggling, sucking in the frigid air. Jazz seems to bounce along the track. Dmitri is relaxed, moving with ease.

  Jazz looks back over her shoulder, saying, “Your body will shut down in stages.” Her comments are unsettling. It’s almost as though she’s predicting his death. “Your core will want to maintain its temperature, so it will sacrifice the extremities. Toes, then feet, then legs. Fingers, then hands, then arms. Anything to keep the vital organs in your torso alive.

  “If you can breathe, nothing else matters beyond staying warm. Nothing. Don’t drink ice cold water. Don’t eat frozen food. It’s just not worth it, no matter how hungry or thirsty you are.”

  “But we’re going to be inside a base, right?” Nick manages between breaths.

  “Right,” Dmitri says from behind him, only his tone of voice is not convincing. Jazz doesn’t respond. She steps onto the next rock, springing up the side of the slope, using her ski poles to guide her on.

  After a few yards, she says, “Sometimes, the warmest place is in a snow cave.”

  “How do I find a snow cave?” Nick asks.

  “Find a snowdrift and dig. Stick a walking pole outside. Tie something colorful to it as a flag. That’ll let people know where you are.”

  Nick nods.

  “It sounds strange,” Jazz says. “As you’ll end up lying on the snow and ice, but you’ll be warm in a snow cave. Everything’s relative in Antarctica. If it’s eighty below with the wind chill, burrowing into a snowdrift can raise the temperature in the air around you to a balmy thirty above. Even though it’s still below freezing, that’s a difference of over a hundred degrees. Anything around freezing is like the inside of a fridge. It’s cold but bearable. You can survive that for a few days.”

  “But there is going to be a base, isn’t there?” Nick asks. “I’ll be inside it, won’t I?”

  “Right,” Dmitri says again. His dry repetition isn’t reassuring.

  “Then there’s the white-out,” Jazz says, reaching up and grabbing the side of a large boulder half-buried in the ice and working her way around the edge. Nick watches where she places her hands and boots, determined to replicate her motion.

  She says, “Whenever you go outside down there, hook up to a support line. Never go anywhere without clipping on, even if it looks fine out. If you’re moving between huts in the dark, always connect to a safety line. The wind can come out of nowhere, and when it does, it’ll bring snow. As Antarctica is locked in perpetual darkness during winter, it’s difficult to anticipate snow flurries or an oncoming blizzard.

  “As soon as a storm hits, you’ll find yourself in a white-out. Snow and ice will come at you so hard and fast you’ll barely be able to see your own legs. You’ll have a light on your helmet, but it’ll only make it worse. If you’re not hooked up, you’ll go tumbling. Once you lose that line, you have no bearings, no way of knowing which direction you should be moving in.

  “Remember, there are far more wrong directions than right ones, so if you get blown to one side, don’t rush. Look around for lights, buildings, vehicles, fences, anything that will give you shelter or a sense of direction. If you have to move, go no more than twenty feet. If you haven’t found the safety line, retreat back the way you came. Backtrack. Follow your own footsteps to where you fell, then venture out on another angle. Try to move in a star-like pattern, always returning to the point you first got lost rather than wandering off.

  “What you think of as a straight line will be akin to a drunken walk in those conditions. If you walk off confidently in one direction, you’ll almost certainly get lost in the dark.”

  South Georgia is rugged. Were it not for the gravel trail they’re following, Nick’s sure this hillock would be untouched by humanity. The slope is steep, but it’s consistent. Loose gravel shifts beneath his boots. He digs in with his ski poles, pulling himself up onto a thin strip of frozen dirt as the track narrows.

  “Be careful,” Dmitri says from behind him. “Don’t put weight on your ski poles. They’re a guide, not a support. You don’t want to get in the habit of leaning on them. Use them to probe the ground around you. They’re an assist. Something to help you keep your balance. Don’t treat them like climbing gear.”

  “Got it,” Nick says between breaths. He’s trying. He wants to lean on the poles, but Dmitri is right. Put too much weight on them, and if they slip, he’ll go tumbling down the slope.

  “Come on,” Jazz says, calling out into the wind, seeing him falling behind.

  Nick pushes himself on, wanting to keep up with her. He tries to match her pace. To his surprise, she’s able to continue talking without losing focus.

  “I was down at Vincennes last winter when we lost our first researcher.”

  “Dr. Maxim Vasnetsov, from the Russian Academy of Sciences,” Dmitri says.

  Jazz says, “He’d been gone for no more than fifteen minutes when the station chief dispatched six of us to go out after him in a blizzard. We moved in pairs, linked together by rope.

  "We searched out to a quarter-mile with spotlights. When the storm finally lifted, we found him huddled on the ice. Poor bastard was barely twenty feet from one of the huts when he died. I must have walked right past him as he was in my zone, but the storm was so bad I never saw him. We were convinced he’d gone further. If only I’d tripped over him, he’d still be alive. Shit happens, I guess.”

  Up until now, Nick assumed Jazz
was simply a hard-ass, but there’s sorrow in her voice. She blames herself for the loss. She’s never forgiven herself. That strikes him as profound. She took it personally. But that guy wasn’t some other Nick Ferrin. He wasn’t a chump they dragged out of his living room during some stupid football game. He was a researcher. If anything, that’s worse as he would have been properly trained and prepared for life on the ice.

  Jazz falls silent, trudging on up the hill. Nick’s sure she has far more to say but that’s enough for now.

  It’s almost an hour before they approach the ridge. Jazz continues talking him through survival techniques, coming up with some new anecdote every ten minutes or so, but it’s all Nick can do to focus on placing one thick, heavy boot in front of the other. For what seems like an eternity, the rocky rim of the hill is little more than a distant illusion, and then suddenly, they’re there, with their goal barely twenty feet above them.

  A massive radio antenna rises above the barren ground. Taut guide wires keep the structure in place. The wind howls like a lion roaring into the gloom of twilight. A small wooden maintenance hut sits nestled into the side of the hill below the antenna. As the hut is beneath the ridge, rocks have collapsed around it, half-burying the metal roof and piling up against the walls. Ice binds the rocks together like mortar.

  Jazz turns to Nick. “Have you ever summited?”

  “Ah, no,” he replies. To the best of his knowledge, summit is not a verb.

  She gestures, waving politely with her hand and beckoning him on up the track. “Please. Be my guest.”

  Jazz and Dmitri remain on the narrow stone path beside the hut. Nick picks his way along the rocks, avoiding the ice. He clambers up toward the ridge. Snowflakes drift around him, being lifted by the swirling breeze. Working hand over hand, grabbing at large rocks, he scrambles up the mountainside.

  Nick clears the rim, stepping up onto the ridge, and is hit with a blast of wind unlike anything he’s ever felt.

  The hood on his jacket balloons. It’s ripped off his head by the sheer force of the wind. The loose material catches like a sail in a squall, causing him to stagger backward. The ferocity of the wind is overwhelming, striking him in the chest. It wraps around his arms and legs, chilling his face. The noise is overwhelming. It’s like a freight train roaring past inches from his ears. Whereas moments before, he was warm, now the cold seeps through his clothing, slithering beneath his jacket and wrapping around his legs like the clammy tentacles of some invisible monster. The chill creeps into his bones.