Murphy paused, to let things cool down.
“No.” Then, “Maybe. You probably weren’t keeping track of your time, or your oxygen levels. I’m sure you’ve heard of rapture of the deep—maybe you had a touch of it down there. I had a guy who swore he saw a submarine, and it turned out to be a nice big pressure ridge. You were just lucky you came to your senses and got out while you could. And as for you,” he said, speaking to Darryl, “you should have been keeping better tabs on him. You were dive buddies—that means keeping an eye on each other and staying close.”
“Point taken,” Darryl said, looking sheepish. “But the fact remains, he brought up the wine bottle. It’s in my lab now, thawing. You can’t deny that the bottle exists.”
“It’s a big leap,” Murphy said, falling into his high-backed swivel chair, “from a frozen wine bottle to a woman—wrapped in chains yet—stuck inside a glacier.”
Michael hated to add this, but he felt that he had to. “And she might not be alone.”
“What?” Murphy exploded.
“There might be someone else frozen with her.”
Even Darryl, who hadn’t heard that part, hesitated.
“Is that all of them then?” Murphy replied. “Or maybe they were all getting off a bus, and the bus is frozen inside the glacier, too.”
There was a temporary standoff while Murphy unrolled an antacid and popped it into his mouth.
“You got pictures of the seal?”
“Yes,” Michael said, knowing where he was going.
“And the sea spider? And the scale worms? And the trunk the bottle came from?”
“Yes.”
“So why no pictures of the ice princess?”
“I was too scared.” The words were like ashes in his mouth, and even as he’d been hauled up into the dive hut, he had wondered how—at the most crucial moment in his career—he could have failed to get a photo. The shock, coupled with the urgent necessity to surface, had just been too great. And though he knew it was a pretty good excuse, he still felt an unrelenting disappointment in himself—a disappointment that could only be cured by going back down again.
“Why don’t we just settle this the easiest way possible?” Michael said. “Let me go back to the scene of the crime.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Why not?” Michael asked, as Darryl chimed in with, “I’ll go, too.”
Murphy looked from one of them to the other. “You may think that we’re off in the middle of nowhere, with nobody looking over our shoulders, but you’re wrong. Every single thing we do here, I have to write up and report to the NSF, or the U.S. Navy, or the Coast Guard, or, believe it or not, NASA. See that?” he said, pointing to an unwieldy tower of papers and forms stacked in wire bins on his desk. “That’s just one week’s worth of crap I’ve got to fill out and file. And every dollar of what we do has to be accounted for. You know what it cost to send that auger out onto the ice, and prep the dive hut, and prime all the gear?”
“I’m sure it’s plenty,” Michael said, “but that’s why we need to do this quickly. Everything’s still in place. I can go down tomorrow—and with a little help from Calloway, and the right equipment, we can even get the body out of the glacier somehow. Jesus,” Michael said in exasperation, “this could be a monumental find.”
“Don’t you mean a monumental story for your magazine?” Murphy retorted.
There was nothing more to say for the moment. Murphy chewed on his antacid, and Michael and Darryl exchanged a long frustrated look.
Murphy blew out a weary breath. “Where’s Calloway?”
“I saw him in the rec hall,” Darryl said.
“Tell him to get over here,” Murphy said, busying himself with some papers on the desk blotter. “Now.”
Michael knew enough not to say another word. And so did Darryl.
The wine bottle rested in a small tank of tepid seawater, on the counter in Darryl’s marine lab. With its icy coating gone, the label was revealed, but the ink had been so smudged that it was nothing but a blur. Darryl peered into the tank, as if watching a live specimen that might surprise him at any moment, and Michael paced up and down, wondering what else he might need to do to persuade Murphy.
“Give it a rest,” Darryl advised him. “He’s a bureaucrat, but he’s not stupid. He’ll come around if he hasn’t already.”
“And what if he doesn’t?”
“He will, trust me.” Darryl sat back on the stool and looked at Michael. “I’ll tell him I need to go down again to collect more samples—he can’t refuse a beaker—and at that point, what’s the difference if he lets you go down, too?”
Michael considered it, but he was afraid it wasn’t fast enough. “What if she’s gone?”
“Gone?” Darryl said, incredulously.
“I mean, what if I can’t find her again?”