Michael laughed. “Yeah, sure you do.” He lifted his chin at the fish tanks and specimen jars. “This is your idea of paradise. I’ll never get you out of here.”
Darryl raised his shoulders, as if to concede the point, before adding, “Not completely true. Weather permitting”—which is something that preceded virtually every statement in the Antarctic—“I’ll be stepping outside tomorrow morning.”
Michael sat back on a lab stool and brushed some snow off his sleeve. “Really? Where to?”
“Davy Jones’s locker,” Darryl said with a dramatic flourish.
“You’re diving?”
“I assume so,” Darryl said. “I didn’t see any submersibles lying around, did you?”
“In search of what?”
That was a big question, and Darryl didn’t have an easy answer. It was what he had come all that way to investigate. “There are about fifteen kinds of Antarctic fish,” he said, deliberately skipping the Latinate names, “that can survive in conditions that no other species can. They can live in freezing waters, in total darkness for four months at a time. They have no scales, and they have no hemoglobin.”
“So in other words their blood is—?”
“Colorless. Exactly. And even their gills are a pale translucent white. What’s more, they carry a kind of natural antifreeze, a glycoprotein, that keeps ice crystals from forming in their circulatory systems.”
“And you’re going to catch some of these fish?” It was plain from his tone that Michael found everything he was hearing bizarre, to say the least.
But Darryl was fairly used to that. “Catching them isn’t really very hard. When they swim, it’s very slowly, and most of the time they just sit on the bottom, waiting for some hapless krill or smaller fish to wander by.”
“How would they feel about my wandering by?”
“You want to come with me?” He could see from the smile on Michael’s face that he meant it. “Do you know how to dive?”
“Certified on three continents,” Michael said.
“I’ll have to check with Murphy and make sure that it’s okay.”
“Don’t bother,” Michael said, springing off the stool. “I’ll do it.” He was out the door before he’d even finished zipping up his coat, and Darryl wondered if he’d just made a smart call or an utterly insane one. Did Michael have any idea what he was getting into?
But Michael did know. Whenever a new challenge presented itself, and he felt even that slightest flicker of hesitation—sometimes confused with the instinct for self-preservation—he immediately overruled it. The adrenaline rush was what he lived for—and these days, he knew no better counteractive than that to the depression that was always, subtly, tugging at his sleeve. If he let his mind wander, it would invariably, by Byzantine routes he could never have traced, find its way back to the Cascades…and Kristin. And it was only by losing himself in some extreme challenge, or tortuously wrestling his thoughts in another direction, that he could find any real peace.
The night before, when he’d found himself descending into that bottomless pit, he’d mustered up his courage and called her younger sister’s cell phone. Though he was a world away, the base had a powerful satellite hookup, courtesy of the U.S. military, and apart from brief bursts of static and a telltale delay, the connection was pretty good. Karen sounded amazed.
“So you’re calling from the South Pole?” she’d said.
“Not exactly, but damn close.”
“And are you freezing to death?”
“Only when the wind blows…which is always.”
There was a silence on the line, while the words made their way to her—and they both wondered what to say next.
Michael finally broke the impasse by asking, “Where are you right now?” and Karen laughed. Damn, it was so much like Kristin’s laugh.
“You won’t believe this,” she said, “but I’m at the skating rink.”
Michael could instantly picture it. “Are you in the Skate and Bake?” That was the coffee shop attached to the rink.
The connection faltered, then came back as Karen was saying “…hot chocolate and a bear claw.”
He could see her in his mind’s eye, in a bulky cable-knit sweater, in one of the tiny booths.
“Alone, or are you on a hot date?”
“I wish. I’ve brought along a book on William Rehnquist. That’s my hot date.”