“That’s not what your body temp indicates,” she said. “You’re still suffering some hypothermia from yesterday’s dive, and I’m not letting you go down today, no matter what you say.”
As Darryl had predicted to Michael, the chief had indeed authorized another dive, to retrieve the sunken chest if nothing else. And as for the ice princess, he’d said they should bring her up, too, if she wanted to come.
“But you’re letting Michael go,” Darryl now complained to Charlotte in a last-ditch appeal.
“Michael is fine,” she said, “and besides, if Michael leapt off a bridge, would you do that, too?” She laughed, scrawled something else on his chart, and Darryl knew that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with her.
He buttoned his shirt up and hopped off the examination table. In his heart, he knew that Charlotte was right—he was still feeling the effects of the dive. No matter how much hot tea he drank, and how many pancakes smothered in syrup and butter he ate, there was still some spot at his core that remained chilly. Last night, he’d slept under every blanket in the room, and at around 3 a.m. he’d awakened, nonetheless, with his teeth chattering.
“Killjoy,” Darryl said, as he left the infirmary. In the hall outside, he bumped into Michael, just coming back from delivering his own medical clearance papers to Murphy’s office.
“You coming?” Michael asked, and Darryl had to give him the bad news.
Michael looked surprised. “You want me to talk to her for you?” he said, nodding at Charlotte’s office.
“Wouldn’t do any good. The woman is made of stone. You just go out and make the discovery of a lifetime without me—I’ll be in the lab guzzling your bottle of wine. It ought to be safely thawed by now.”
Michael clapped him on the shoulder and loped off down the hall. Darryl pulled on his parka and his hat—even the shortest excursions, from one module to another, required protection from the elements—and, after a quick stop in the kitchen, headed back to the marine biology lab.
Although he had a lot of more important things to do, the bottle of wine was waiting for him, right in front of his lab stool, and he did find the damn thing strangely intriguing. True, it wasn’t going to make his name or his reputation in the scientific community, but how many times did you get the chance to study some historic artifact? He felt like the guys who scraped the encrustations from the Titanic’s dishes just to see the doomed ship’s name appear again. And this bottle had a good chance of being far older than anything from the White Star line.
He reached into the tank, filled with room-temperature seawater, and lifted out the bottle. Illegible shreds of the label hung down into the water. When he held it up to the light and tilted it, he could see the liquid sloshing around inside. Plenty of wine left—and possibly aged to perfection—for a victory toast that night. All he would need for his routine tests were a few drops. And it would be nice to know—if he ever did submit a small piece on the find to a scholarly journal—what kind of wine it had been.
The cork had held, reinforced as it had been by a quick and durable coating of polar ice. He took out the corkscrew that he’d just borrowed from the commons kitchen, but he was afraid to just insert it into the bottleneck and start drilling away. He wanted to go slow, and make sure the wine remained as uncontaminated as possible. First, he secured the bottle in the vise attached to the counter; the clamp was normally used on reluctant bivalve shells. After a quick survey of the lab and its instruments, he selected a scalpel freshly sterilized in the autoclave and used it to cut away the remnants of the red sealing wax around the tip of the bottle. When had the wax been applied, and by whom? A French peasant in the time of Louis XVI? An Italian winemaker during the Risorgimento? A Spaniard, perhaps, and contemporary of Goya?
He placed the waxy bits in a pile to one side, then inserted the tip of the scalpel between the cork and the bottleneck and began gently to cut around the edge. He wanted the cork to be as loose as he could make it before employing the corkscrew. When the circle had been completed, he put the scalpel aside and stopped just long enough to put the triumphal march from Aida on the Bose audio system; then, to its opening flourishes, he placed the mechanical corkscrew to the cork and began to turn the handle. There was a moment of resistance, followed by a smooth entry—so smooth that Darryl was afraid the cork was going to disintegrate, after all. But the corkscrew eventually made it all the way through, and its lateral wings began to rise as the cork came up and out in one sustained motion. There was even an audible pop as the cork broke entirely free.