“I want it in there,” Darryl said, stepping to the large aquarium tank. Earlier, he had removed the subdividers, emptied out the old water, scrubbed the tank from top to bottom, and refilled it with fresh seawater. It was now one large tub. He’d taken the resident cod out to a hole in the ice and slipped them through. If they were still part of someone else’s experiment, then they should have been so labeled. Through the ice cover, he could dimly make them out as they slithered away—along with a darker form, swiftly approaching. No doubt a leopard seal who had suddenly spotted his lunch buffet. Life in the Antarctic was a precarious business.
Franklin moved the dolly to the lip of the tank, and Lawson stepped into the water; wearing his trademark kerchief on his head, he looked a bit like a buccaneer about to wade out to his prize.
“You know the water displacement’s gonna wet your floor, right?” Franklin said, and Darryl replied, “That’s why we’ve got the floor drains. Go ahead.”
With Lawson bracing it from inside the pool, and Darryl helping Franklin to tilt it forward gently, the ice block slowly made its way over the rim of the pool, then, as Lawson jumped back, it completed its descent, splashing into the water and sending, as Franklin had predicted, a wave of temperate salt water sloshing onto the floor and over the tops of their boots. As the tarp drifted free, the ice seemed to float and settle for a few minutes, with the two figures lying back to back, before the ripples in the tank subsided and the block became still.
His prize, at last.
Franklin took a long look at it, then said, “I wouldn’t want to work in here alone with that.”
Lawson, stepping out of the tank drenched, looked like he felt the same way.
But Darryl wasn’t bothered in the slightest. His eyes were riveted on the slab of ice, which now rested, horizontally, in the pool; the seawater rose enough to cover nearly all of it. If his calculations, based on the thickness of the ice and the temperature gradient in the aquarium, were correct—and his calculations generally were—the bodies would float entirely free in just a few days. Cool, but still intact and well composed.
Once Franklin and Lawson had gone, he closed up shop. There wasn’t much he could do in there immediately; the most important thing was to go out and check some of his underwater nets and traps, and see what fresh examples of the antifreeze fish—as the marine biology crowd referred to them—they might yield. You never knew when, or how, the additional specimens might come in handy.
Before leaving, he turned off the overhead fluorescents, but the lab still glowed in the lights from the tank and the aquarium, radiating a pale purple that pervaded the steel-and-concrete space, and only failed to reach into the farthest and darkest corners. He pulled on his coat and gloves and hat—God, it got to be a nuisance after a while, all this dressing and undressing—and opened the door to a blast of freezing wind. Closing it firmly behind him, he tromped down the icy ramp and off toward the shore.
Inside the lab, the various denizens of the tanks, ranged all along the walls and shelves, went on about their quiet, confined, and ultimately doomed lives. The sea spiders stood up on their spindly hind legs and used several others to probe the glass. The worms moved through the water, spooling and unspooling like ivory ribbons. The starfish spread themselves flat, suctioning themselves to the walls of their prison. The big-mouthed, nacreous ice fish swam in endless tight circles. The hoses burbled, the space heaters hummed, the wind howled around the outside of the module.
And the slab of ice in the aquarium slowly, imperceptibly, melted. Little by little, the cool water circulating in the tank eroded the thickness of the ancient ice. Occasionally, there was a crackling sound, as the seawater found a minuscule fissure and rushed to fill it. Tiny, almost invisible striations appeared here and there, like scratches on a mirror. Air bubbles surfaced and popped. The black PVC pipes that brought the freshwater into the tank and removed the same amount of water that had now been cooled by the melting ice kept the temperature at a steady thirty-nine degrees. In a day or two, the ice would become thin enough to see through clearly, thin enough to let in the faint purple glow of the lab…so thin the block might begin to split and crumble.
And then the ice would have to relinquish, however grudgingly, everything it still held captive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
December 13, 12:10 p.m.
RIDING IN A DOGSLED was actually much more comfortable than Michael would have imagined. The cargo shell of the sled was a hard, molded polymer plastic, much like a kayak, but you rode a few inches above its bottom, cradled in a sort of hammock. Even when the dogs ran over a rough patch in the ice, or hit a bump, you were cushioned by all the cold-weather gear you had on. The snow and ice whizzed past on either side, as Danzig, standing straight on the runners behind Michael’s head, shouted encouragement to the dogs—the last dogs, as Michael had learned from Murphy back at the base, in the entire Antarctic.