MICHAEL HAD SPOTTED the little red-haired guy getting off the plane at Santiago and knew he was a scientist right off the bat. There was something about scientists that gave them away, though he’d have been hard put to say exactly what. It wasn’t something easy, like the smell of formaldehyde or protractors sticking out of their pockets. No, it was more a matter of their mien; with scientists—and Michael had been around plenty of them while photographing and writing about the natural world—there was something both detached and highly observant. They could be part of a group, and not part of a group, at the same time. And hard as some of them might try to fit in, they never really did. It was like that massive school of sunfish that Michael had photographed underwater in the Bahamas; all of the fish, for safety’s sake alone, tried to move toward the center of the swarm, but some of them, for whatever reason, were kept to the margins and never made it.
And of course they were the easiest for predators to pick off.
During the layover before he could catch the prop plane to Puerto Williams, Michael dragged his duffel bag into the crowded café area of the airport. The red-haired guy was sitting alone at a table in the corner, his head lowered toward his laptop. Michael got close enough to see that he was studying a complex chart littered with numbers and arrows and intersecting lines. To Michael, it looked vaguely topographic. He stood for only a second or two before the guy in the chair whipped around; he had a small, narrow face, and pale red eyebrows, too. The guy sized Michael up, then said, “This can’t possibly be interesting to you.”
“You’d be surprised,” Michael said, approaching him. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’m just waiting for my connection to Puerto Williams.”
He was waiting to see if that worked, and it did. “Me, too,” the guy said.
“Mind if I sit down?” Michael said, taking the empty chair at the table—the last empty chair in the whole place.
Dumping the duffel on the floor, with one foot through the strap (a habit he’d gotten into on lots of late-night travels in foreign locales), Michael extended his hand and introduced himself. “Michael Wilde.”
“Darryl Hirsch.”
“Puerto Williams, huh? Is that your last stop?”
Hirsch clicked the keyboard a few times, then folded up the laptop. He looked at Michael as if unsure what to make of him yet.
“You’re not some kind of government intelligence agent or anything, are you? Because if you are, you’re doing a terrible job.”
Michael laughed. “Why would you think that?”
“Because I’m a scientist, and we live in an age of idiots. For all I know, you’re tracking me to make sure that I don’t prove the earth is getting warmer—even though it plainly is. The ice caps are melting, the polar bears are disappearing, and Intelligent Design is perfectly designed for dolts. So go ahead—you can arrest me now.”
“Relax. You’re sounding a little paranoid, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Just because you’re paranoid,” Darryl observed, “doesn’t mean you’re not being followed.”
“True enough,” Michael replied. “But I like to think I’m one of the good guys. I work for Eco-Travel Magazine, doing photos and text. I’m going down to the Antarctic to do a story on life at a research station there.”
“Which research station? A dozen countries have planted stations there, just to stake their claim.”
“Point Adélie. About as close to the Pole as you can get.”
“Oh,” Hirsch said, digesting the news. “Me, too. Huh.” He sounded like he still hadn’t given up on his conspiracy theory. “That’s really something.” His fingers tapped on the closed lid of his laptop. “So, you’re a journalist.”
Michael detected that first glimmer he had seen before, a million times. When people found out he was a writer, there was that first mild surprise, then acceptance, and then—a nanosecond later—the dawning realization that he could make them famous. Or at least write about them. It was like watching little lights go on in their heads.
“That’s great,” Hirsch said. “What a coincidence.” With studied nonchalance, he opened his laptop again and started tapping at the keyboard. “Let me just show you something.” He turned the screen so that Michael could see it. The same elaborate chart appeared. “This is the seafloor of the continental shelf, under the ice around Point Adélie. You can see here where the shelf extends, and here”—he put a nail-bitten finger to the screen—“where it drops off precipitously, into what we call the abyssal range. I’m planning to go down maybe a couple of hundred meters on this trip. I’m a marine biologist, by the way. Woods Hole Oceanographic. I’m particularly interested in the notothenioidei—Antarctic icefish—as well as sea snails, eel pouts, rat tails. You know what those are, right?”
Michael said yes, though, privately, he’d have to concede his knowledge was extremely sketchy.
“—and how their metabolisms function in this incredibly hostile environment. A lot of what I do, now that I think about it, would offer some great photo opportunities. These creatures are fantastically adapted to their ecological niches, and to me at least, they’re phenomenally beautiful, though some people, I gather, have trouble seeing it. But that, I think, is just because they seem so foreign at first…”
There was no stopping him. He didn’t even need to take a breath. Michael glanced at the espresso cup next to the computer and wondered just how many of those his new travel pal had imbibed.
“…and many of these animals, no matter how small or simple, carry a veritable world of parasites, in everything from their anal glands to their eye ducts.”