Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

  What could human beings hope to achieve in such a sterile place? And what type of person would willingly volunteer to spend one year of their lives in that quest?

  On first inspection, Capricorn seemed small, feeble even. Home to just five personnel, it promised little enough protection against the savage forces which played around it. In total it was just five buildings, three of them modular units, which were interconnected, and two others—shed-like structures—which sat some fifty metres to one side. From one of the sheds a rhythmic thud-thud-thud spoke of a large engine at work.

  A radio mast stood proud above the main block, the tubular steel of its structure covered with a thick coating of rime.

  Closer inspection would reveal that Capricorn was well—even beautifully—designed, the modules constructed of carbon fibre and wood, the shells triple-insulated against the all-embracing cold. Aerodynamic curves on each corner offered smooth passage to passing storms, a subtle ramp at the base of each wall denied loose snow the opportunity to drift. Each roof was lightly domed, each doorway scalloped to prevent jamming, each ventilation shaft ingeniously designed so that the precious flow of fresh air was never blocked by ice.

  Someone had put a great deal of thought—of love, even—into the creation of this place.

  Above the door was a plaque of polished wood: ‘No Free Newspapers’. Someone here had a sense of humour. Push open the door, savour the aroma of freshly percolated coffee, of frying bacon and newly baked rolls, the calming, homely smells of a new working day.

  A day in which everything was about to change.

  13

  Lauren Burgess was Capricorn base commander, at twenty-eight the youngest occupant of such a post in the history of the continent. This was not her first Antarctic posting; in fact, she had spent a total of seven years at other bases, working in her research speciality of glacial biology.

  But Capricorn was different—Capricorn was hers. This newly built drilling station was not merely Lauren’s brainchild, it was the beginning, middle and end of her universe. One of just two truly independent bases on the Antarctic continent—the Greenpeace base was the other—Capricorn was not an outpost of some far-away land, it owed no affiliation to any government or state. This was the manifestation of a lifelong dream and home to a scientific programme which—if it worked—would, in about five months’ time, pull off an astonishing coup.

  That morning—as every morning of the seven weeks in which the base had been operational—Lauren was in the place she loved best, the laboratory, analysing samples of the ice cores which drilling engineer Sean had delivered from the overnight bore session. The lab was small but well designed: a work bench fitted with electron and conventional microscopes, a suitcase-sized spectrophotometer mounted in the roof for measuring ozone content and an ion chromatograph for quantifying anion concentrations in the ice samples.

  Lauren put on her sterile gloves and took out core number 141 from where it was stacked in the lab freezer. Each of the perfectly cylindrical sections was about the size of a drink’s can, and Lauren’s first task was to carefully cut a transect ready for analysis on a pre-chilled surgical slide. This was secondary work to the main scientific objectives of Capricorn, but it was no less fascinating to Lauren, even though she had performed these tasks thousands of times before in other bases.

  Lauren slipped the ice sample beneath the microscope and adjusted the focus until the crystals were sharp. Every passing day brought cores from deeper in the ice sheet, and it was thrilling to Lauren to think that she was looking at crystals which had first fallen as snow many millions of years before. She recorded the crystallite structure and size, noting that these deeper cores were now producing bigger crystals under the increased pressure of the ice above.

  Next she ran a microparticle analysis, searching for anions such as sulphates and nitrates—the by-products of the volcano which was situated some seven hundred metres beneath the base. Lauren was absorbed in the work, the knowledge that a storm was raging outside not worrying her one bit, and by midday the tasks were done, the log books completed and the newly discovered data inputted into the computer.

  Lauren picked up her empty coffee mug and walked the carpeted corridor towards the mess room. To her right was the small gymnasium; she could hear the rhythmic mechanical swish as a weight machine was pressed into action.

  She put her head round the door, finding, as she had expected, the Capricorn medic Mel halfway through her morning fitness session. Mel was from Auckland—and, like many of her fellow New Zealanders, had a deep affinity for the frozen south. She’d acted as base medic at three previous bases, including Scott base, the main New Zealand station in Antarctica. Mel had a perennially cheerful personality and rarely got depressed … a perfect qualification for surviving the rigours of an Antarctic winter.

  ‘Morning, Mel.’

  Mel didn’t break her bench presses.

  ‘Hi,’ she puffed. ‘Four hundred and ten … four hundred and fifteen…’

  Lauren continued to the mess room, pausing long enough to take a quick glance at the noticeboard which hung on the wall outside.

  ‘Murdo’s joke of the day,’ read the Post-it Note. ‘How do you stop your girlfriend giving you blow jobs?’

  Lauren lifted the flap which concealed the answer:

  ‘Marry her.’

  Lauren smiled in spite of herself. Next to the punchline a weather fax was pinned. Lauren removed it carefully and entered the mess room, where she joined radio operator Frank at the breakfast table. Someone had put a Van Morrison CD on the stereo system, the lyrical progressions of Hymns to the Silence adding to the mellow mood of the room.

  ‘Have you noticed how Murdo’s jokes of the day are getting more and more obscene as the weeks go by?’ Lauren asked Frank.

  Frank turned away from his copy of New Scientist. ‘It keeps him amused,’ he told her. ‘If you fried eggs for a living, you’d probably be the same.’

  ‘You think that’s obscene?’ Murdo poked his head out of the galley, his rich Scottish vowels accentuated in mock indignation. ‘You should work in a rig kitchen. What are you having, boss?’

  ‘My conscience says muesli…’ Lauren hesitated.

  ‘But your belly says Murdo’s bacon and egg special?’

  ‘Add a sausage to that and I’ll love you for ever.’

  ‘Actresses and bishops…’ Frank murmured.

  ‘At this rate we’re going to ship half a fucking ton of rabbit food back home,’ Murdo observed. ‘Unless we can find some penguins to feed it to.’

  Lauren smiled as she turned to the weather fax; she loved the morning banter of the mess room—the cosy epicentre of their world. It wasn’t a particularly big room, but it was a welcoming one, with bright rugs on the floor and two huge sofas on which the team could relax. In one corner was a small library, packed with paperbacks, in another was a television and video. Evening films were one of their few entertainments.

  This was a happy team, she reflected with some satisfaction, a small but cohesive unit of five committed individuals who so far had been getting along just fine. But winter was almost upon them, the days already diminished to the point where all they had to distinguish day from night was a few gloomy hours of half-light. Winter, Lauren knew, was when the team dynamics would be put to the real test; for seven months they would be locked into the darkest and most intimidatingly cold place on earth.

  ‘That front is quite something, don’t you think?’ Frank observed, nodding to the weather fax.

  ‘Ninety-six millibars,’ Lauren noted as she looked out of the window into the storm. ‘Doesn’t get much worse. Not the type of conditions to be out on a field trip.’

  Lauren finished her breakfast.

  ‘Where’s the grease monkey?’ she asked.

  ‘Where do you think?’

  ‘That boy works too hard. I’ll take him out some coffee.’

  Frank was whistling the theme from Love Story as Lauren filled up Sean
’s thermal mug. Lauren pretended not to notice—the team teased her mercilessly about the imagined chemistry between her and the roustabout who was in charge of the Capricorn drilling rig.

  Her featherdown windsuit was hanging on the hook by the door. Lauren zipped the quilted wind protector over the top, donned a woollen hat and pulled on her ‘bunnyboots’—the plastic boots which had been invented by oil line workers in Alaska and were still the warmest footwear in the world. Lastly, the gloves; Lauren was ready to commit herself to the frigid exterior, into a wind which was going to try its hardest to whip her off her feet.

  It took her breath away every time, the crisp bite of super-chilled air sending a shock into the centre of her head as she breathed in deeply; like a whiff of smelling salts, one inhalation of Antarctic air was enough to wake the dead.

  Others might have found it intimidating, detected something malevolent, life-threatening even, in the intensity of the invading cold, in the driven snow which felt hard against her face. For Lauren the air was like nectar, she breathed it in deeply, savouring it as if it was the breath of a lover.

  14

  Lauren’s fascination with Antarctica—like Carl’s—had begun when she was a child, fired by the slides and stories of her father.

  Her father was a geologist, ‘a deep-rock man’ as he called himself. He’d spent most of his life in the oil industry, scooting from the Gulf of Mexico to Nigeria, from the South China Sea to Texas. In 1956, when he was in his mid-twenties, he had spent a year in Antarctica, part of the massive scientific research project called the International Geophysical Year.

  He had five yellow boxes of Kodachrome slides from that expedition, still retaining their fresh colours thirty years on.

  Lauren loved the paraphernalia which went with a viewing; the projecting equipment was exotic and thrilling to a child. There was the screen, the luminous sheet which rolled miraculously from a cigar-shaped metal tube which then—magically—sprouted legs. Then there was the projector itself, with its whirring fan, its brilliant bulb filling the living room with heady aromas as it cooked old dust and baked long-suffering resistors into a frenzy of hot ceramic smells.

  The curtains would be drawn, the lights extinguished. Lauren and her brothers would sit, blinking with excitement, as the images snapped through the projector one by one.

  There were whales, their glistening black backs breaking through water which was green like bottle glass. There were icebergs, huge fangs of powder-blue ice which dwarfed the tiny red ship sitting alongside. Then there was their father, astoundingly young and bearded, perched uneasily on a pair of skis, a pipe clamped between his teeth as he laughed into the camera.

  Lauren hung onto his words; ‘You can see for hundreds of miles in Antarctica,’ he had said. Hundreds of miles? Lauren’s young mind tried to imagine how far that would be—like seeing to Scotland, maybe?

  Lauren had seen pictures of mythical lands in books of fairy tales, but Antarctica seemed so much more beautiful—a place filled with more pristine wonders than any human imagination could ever conjure. When the equipment was put away, Lauren would curl up in her bed, her mind racing with images: orange-breasted penguins guarding their fluffball chicks—‘You have to watch those beaks,’ her father had said, ‘give you a nasty snap’—a leopard seal, sleek and mean, barking Rottweiler teeth at a shaky lens which had moved in too close.

  And one more: her father standing with a raised flag and two fellow scientists next to a tent filled with strange machines. He held a roll of paper in his hand, a jubilant expression on his overtanned face. ‘That was the day,’ he told them proudly, always lingering over the shot for longer than he needed, ‘the day we found the underground lake.’

  His words confused Lauren. What lake? How could it be under the ice? Wouldn’t it be frozen? Lauren struggled and failed to imagine how such a bizarre thing could happen.

  Still, her father had discovered it, and that made her proud.

  Lauren ached to see Antarctica for herself, but she knew she would have to be patient. In the meantime, she did the next-best thing—seeking with that perfect logic of childhood the biggest expanse of ice she could find. That place was the ice rink at the local mall, Ambassador Ice and Bowl to be precise, located, unpromisingly, in a subterranean complex beneath a car park, approached through concrete tunnels littered with torn sweet wrappers and crushed drink cans.

  Inside was another world, a world so thrillingly cool, so refrigerated, it literally took Lauren’s breath away every time she queued to hire her skates. Then she would take to the ice, daring a touch with her hand from time to time, loving the way her skates carved elegant grooves into the surface. When she fell, she would let her cheek rest for an instant, enjoying the numb sensation it gave her flesh.

  By the time she was eleven she was at the ice rink every weekend. To onlookers she was just another kid, her dark hair a mass of ringlets, pushing herself around the rink, never trying any fancy moves or routines.

  For Lauren it wasn’t about the skating, it was about the ice. The rink was a place to let her imagination fly. In her mind the ice became the surface of some great glacier—she saw herself skating for hundreds of miles across the frozen wonderland of Antarctica.

  Years later, for her fourteenth birthday, her father fixed her up with a treat—a journey to Switzerland, where, in the Alps, she saw her first real glacier. It was the Eigergletscher, sinuous, fissured, filled with unexpected power.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Lauren said with wonder as they stood looking down on the glacier. ‘Look at the colour of the ice.’ A new light filled her eyes: glaciers would be the new love affair; they were dynamic, exciting, somehow alive.

  She began to devour Antarctic literature, consuming Cherry-Garrard’s Worst Journey in the World in one weekend session. She soaked up the privations of Scott, shivered at Shackleton’s narrow escape from the pack, stacking the precious tomes side by side until she had so many South Polar editions you could almost feel the blast of chill air seeping from the bookcase.

  Some of the things she had learned about Antarctica were truly amazing: that a boiling cup of water thrown into the air will instantly freeze into a shimmering cloud of ice crystals, that winter temperatures of seventy degrees below freezing are regularly recorded.

  Antarctica, Lauren now knew, was the coldest and highest continent on the planet—an environment so obstinately hostile to human life that it might have been created in the mind of some sadistic science fiction author. In total it was covered by fourteen million square kilometres of solid ice, constituting almost ten per cent of the total land surface of the earth.

  Lauren was hooked, and now she interrogated her father on every minuscule detail of his Antarctic expedition—particularly about the lake which she had first learned about all those years before. Now her curiosity had a scientific edge: was there a way to measure the size of the lake? What type of life could be down there?

  ‘We’ll go there together one day,’ he told her, ‘but first get your A levels out of the way.’

  But as Lauren revised for her exams a tragedy befell the family. Her father, who had been troubled by stomach pains for some months, finally went to have himself checked out; he was wheeled into a CT scanner on a bleak Monday morning and learned, twenty-four hours later, that he had cancer of the pancreas—the fastest and most deadly of all the intestinal cancers. It was inoperable, and five weeks later he was dead.

  His last words to Lauren were: ‘Sorry we won’t be going south together.’

  ‘I’ll go for you,’ Lauren told him, ‘and I’ll find out more about your lake.’

  Her mother begged her to postpone her exams, certain that grief would destroy Lauren’s chances of doing well. In fact the opposite happened; she found herself fired by a fierce determination to do her father proud. She got four straight A’s and won a place at Cambridge to study Glacial Biology. Why Cambridge? Simple: the Scott Polar Research Institute was there.

  Lauren kn
ew that the Scott Polar would, one day, be her ticket to the south, and she was right. After completing her degree, she joined the Scott Polar and was posted to Rothera, then Halley base, then seconded to the US Department of Science facility at the South Pole. She completed her postgraduate studies and moved on to her doctorate, but the lure of her father’s lake stayed with her throughout.

  One day, Lauren knew, she would raise the money to build her own base, right above the subterranean lake he had discovered.

  15

  Lauren leaned into the wind, trying not to spill a drop of the coffee as she made her way to the drilling shed. Inside, drill extension number 58 was being attached to the head of the gantry. Sean was swarming all over it, tending to the massive Perkins diesel and the rig which stood in a tripod above it.

  Sean Lowery had proved to be a brilliant addition to the team, coming to Lauren’s attention after a series of sparkling recommendations by several of her colleagues. The young American engineer had spent three seasons up in Greenland working with a Scott Polar Institute team drawing cores from the ice cap, and his references were first rate.

  ‘Sean’s your man,’ a fellow scientist had told Lauren. ‘He’s a brilliant mechanic, and he understands ice. He loves being out there in the wild too, any spare time we gave him he was out there climbing in the mountains all on his own.’

  ‘Can he get along with a team?’

  ‘No worries. He’s really laid-back. A little weird sometimes—like he talks to his machines—but he’s basically sound.’

  Lauren had flown Sean across from his Colorado home for an interview at her London laboratory. He was younger than she’d expected, still weatherbeaten from his most recent Greenland contract, his blond hair tied back in a ponytail that made him look more like a climber than an engineer. Lauren liked him instantly: there was something in his nomadic existence that echoed her own restless progression from one base to another.