“And the third year,” he said, grinning, “you do it because you’re no longer fit for anything else.”
There was some uneasy laughter, except for one of the grunts, Franklin, the ragtime piano player, who swiveled toward them and said, “Five years, man, I’ve come down here for five years in a row. What the hell’s that make me?”
“Beyond repair,” Lawson said, and they all laughed, including Franklin. The put-down was the lingua franca of base life.
After powering through his own breakfast, though with a lot less coffee than usual—“You really don’t want to have to pee once you get into a dry suit,” Lawson had advised him—Michael went back to collect his camera gear. He sealed up his Olympus D-220L in its watertight Ikelite housing, made sure it had a brand-new battery, and said a silent prayer to the god of technical fuckups. Hundreds of feet under the polar ice cap was no place for even a minor glitch to crop up.
Like just about anything in the Antarctic, a dive was a complicated production. The day before, Murphy had sent a work crew out onto the ice with a huge auger, mounted on the back of a tracked vehicle, to bore two holes through the ice. The first hole, which would be covered by the rudimentary dive hut, was the hole the divers would use to get in and out of the water. The second hole, maybe fifty yards away, was the safety hole, just in case anything from shifting ice to aggressive Weddell seals made the first one temporarily inoperable. (Weddell seals could get very territorial about a nicely drilled breathing hole.)
Murphy also insisted, den mother that he was, that anyone diving get a once-over from Dr. Barnes first. Michael had to prop himself up on the edge of her examining table, let her examine his throat and nasal passages, clear out his ears, take his blood pressure. It was odd, having to let someone whom he’d come to regard as simply a friend treat him suddenly in a professional capacity. He just hoped she wouldn’t have to give him the hernia test, by holding his testicles and having him cough.
She didn’t. Nor did she seem the least bit uncomfortable in this different role. Charlotte, he discovered, could put on the dispassionate face of the physician and go about her duties in a purely clinical manner. Not that it stopped her, when the exam was done and she had declared him fit as a fiddle, from asking, “You sure you want to do this?”
“Absolutely.”
She was taking her stethoscope off and slipping it into a drawer. “Going under that ice, in a face mask and all that gear…you don’t have any claustrophobia?”
From something in her voice, he suddenly had the thought that she was talking about herself, not him.
“No. Do you?”
She tilted her head to one side, without looking him in the eye, and he thought back to the snow-school night, when they had had to sleep in the hand-carved domes.
“How’d you make it through the igloo training?” he asked.
“Darryl didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“That boy can keep a secret,” she said appreciatively. “I never did go inside.”
Michael was puzzled. “Tell me, please, that you did not go back to camp, by yourself.” He was appalled at the thought of such recklessness.
“Nope. I slept in eighteen layers, inside the sleeping bag, with just my feet inside the tunnel. I was afraid if I wedged any more of me in there, Darryl might suffocate inside.”
Once he knew about her phobia, and how she’d toughed it out without ever letting on, he admired her even more.
And Darryl, too, for being able to keep her secret.
“I’ll be on the walkie-talkie all day,” Charlotte said, “if you need anything out there.”
He expected no less.
“Now you and Darryl be careful, and watch what you’re doing. And don’t you let Darryl boss you around too much.”
“I’ll tell him you said so.” Then he started piling on all the outdoor gear again and left the infirmary for the dive site.
To get there, he had to board a Spryte—a humble cross between a tractor and a Hummer, which in turn dragged a Nansen sledge weighted down with some of the extra diving equipment. Darryl sat beside him, looking like a kid on his way to Disneyland. Their caravan made slow progress on the ice, and it was about ten minutes before Michael saw the prefab dive hut, built along the lines of a garden shed, sitting out in the middle of nowhere, with a black-and-white flag flying. The hut itself was an improbable pink, like a pale summer rose, and a couple of the base personnel were piling up fresh snow all around its foundation to keep out any wind; its floor actually rested on cinder blocks a foot or so above the ice.