In the cockpit, Michael could see Diaz and Jarvis conferring, surveying their scopes and monitors, and a few seconds later the helicopter gained altitude and, if he wasn’t mistaken, speed. It was impossible to make out much but a vast undifferentiated tableau of ice below. And for the next twenty minutes or so, the chopper seemed bent on nothing but getting to its destination as quickly as possible. Michael wondered if the storm front wasn’t advancing faster than they’d expected.
He put his head back and closed his eyes. He, too, was pretty tired; sleeping on board an icebreaker hadn’t been easy. Between the constant rumbling of the engines and the grinding of the screws as they pulverized the passing growlers—chunks of ice as big as buses—not to mention the dank, dark quarters (he could still smell the odor of mildew on his clothes), it was doubtful he’d gone for more than a couple of hours without being jarred awake, or, more than once, heaved out of his bunk and onto the floor. No matter what his quarters were like at Point Adélie, he looked forward to sleeping in a bed that wasn’t rocking, where the deadliest ocean in the world wasn’t hammering away at him from just a few feet away, dying to get in.
He wondered if there had been any change in Kristin’s condition. It was odd to be so out of touch, so far removed, in every sense, from all the concerns of his ordinary life. It was true that he’d been taking a sort of sabbatical from his friends, his family, his work; after the accident, he’d just kind of holed up with his misery, letting the answering machine field his calls and AOL keep track of his e-mails. But he knew that if anything dire occurred, he’d find out; the world—or at least Kristin’s little sister—would breach his walls and get word to him, one way or the other. But where he was headed, regular communication of any sort was bound to be difficult, and his ability to respond in any meaningful way was nil. He could hardly race to a bedside, or worse, a cemetery, from the most inaccessible part of the planet, thousands of miles away.
The terrible thing about that, if he was being completely truthful with himself, was that it came as a relief. Ever since he’d embarked on this journey, he’d felt a lightening of his load, a reprieve from feeling he was forever on call. For months, he’d felt suspended, on a round-the-clock watch, unable to move forward without constantly looking back. There was something to be said, even if he couldn’t say it, for the imposition of physical barriers. They had a nice way of taking things out of your hands.
The chopper was buffeted by the wind, and without moving his head, Michael cracked open one eye. The scene outside had changed entirely. The wispy clouds had become a ghostly army, scudding across the sky. And even the ocean, far below, was almost completely cloaked by a swirling fog. The lines between sea and sky, ice and air, were becoming increasingly obscured, and Michael knew that this was one of the greatest hazards in the Antarctic—the whole universe, in a matter of minutes, could be reduced to a glaringly white photon soup. Ships foundered and explorers plummeted into unseen crevasses. Pilots, unable to orient themselves, crashed their planes into glacial peaks or straight down onto the pack ice.
“Guess you can tell,” Ensign Diaz said over the intercom headsets, “we’ve got some headwinds coming at us.”
Michael sat up in his seat and glanced over at his traveling companions. Charlotte was folding up her map and putting it away, and Darryl was craning his neck to see out her window.