At the far end of the shed, a corrugated door rolled up, the icy metal screeching. Bright sunlight outside.
"Looks like a beautiful day in the neighborhood," Bolden said. And with a sputter of diesel exhaust, he drove the first snowtrack out through the door.
It was a bouncing, bone-jolting ride. The ice field that had looked so flat and featureless from a distance was surprisingly rugged when experienced up close, with long troughs and steep hillocks. Evans felt like he was in a boat, crashing through choppy seas, except of course this sea was frozen, and they were moving slowly through it.
Sarah drove, her hands confident on the wheel. Evans sat in the passenger seat beside her, clutching the dashboard to keep his balance.
"How fast are we going?"
"Looks like fourteen miles an hour."
Evans grunted as they nosed down a short trench, then up again. "We've got two hours of this?"
"That's what he said. By the way, did you check Kenner's references?"
"Yes," Evans said, in a sulky voice.
"Were they made up?"
"No."
Their vehicle was third in the row. Ahead was Kenner's snowtrack, following behind Bolden's in the lead.
The radio hissed. "Okay," they heard Bolden say, over the speaker. "Now we're coming into the shear zone. Maintain your distance and stay within the flags."
Evans could see nothing different--it just looked like more ice field, glistening in the sun--but here there were red flags on both sides of the route. The flags were mounted on six-foot-high posts.
As they moved deeper into the field, he looked beyond the road to the openings of crevasses in the ice. They had a deep blue color, and seemed to glow.
"How deep are they?" Evans said.
"The deepest we've found is a kilometer," Bolden said, over the radio. "Some of them are a thousand feet. Most are a few hundred feet or less."
"They all have that color?"
"They do, yes. But you don't want a closer look."
Despite the dire warnings, they crossed the field in safety, leaving the flags behind. Now they saw to the left a sloping mountain, with white clouds.
"That's Erebus," Bolden said. "It's an active volcano. That's steam coming from the summit. Sometimes it lobs chunks of lava, but never this far out. Mount Terror is inactive. You see it ahead. That little slope."
Evans was disappointed. The name, Mount Terror, had suggested something fearsome to him--not this gentle hill with a rocky outcrop at the top. If the mountain hadn't been pointed out to him, he might not have noticed it at all.
"Why is it called Mount Terror?" he said. "It's not terrifying."
"Has nothing to do with that. The first Antarctic landmarks were named after the ships that discovered them," Bolden said. "Terror was apparently the name of a ship in the nineteenth century."
"Where's the Brewster camp?" Sarah said.
"Should be visible any minute now," Bolden said. "So, you people are some kind of inspectors?"
"We're from the IADG," Kenner said. "The international inspection agency. We're required to make sure that no US research project violates the international agreements on Antarctica."
"Uh-huh..."
"Dr. Brewster showed up so quickly," Kenner went on, "he never submitted his research grant proposal for IADG approval. So we'll check in the field. It's just routine."
They bounced and crunched onward for several minutes in silence. They still did not see a camp.
"Huh," Bolden said. "Maybe he moved it."
"What type of research is he doing?" Kenner said.
"I'm not sure," Bolden said, "but I heard he's studying the mechanics of ice calving. You know, how the ice flows to the edge, and then breaks off the shelf. Brewster's been planting GPS units in the ice to record how it moves toward the sea."
"Are we close to the sea?" Evans said.
"About ten or eleven miles away," Bolden said. "To the north."
Sarah said, "If he's studying iceberg formation, why is he working so far from the coast?"
"Actually, this isn't so far," Kenner said. "Two years ago an iceberg broke off the Ross Shelf that was four miles wide and forty miles long. It was as big as Rhode Island. One of the biggest ever seen."
"Not because of global warming, though," Evans said to Sarah, with a disgusted snort. "Global warming couldn't be responsible for that. Oh no."
"Actually, it wasn't responsible," Kenner said. "It was caused by local conditions."
Evans sighed. "Why am I not surprised?"
Kenner said, "There's nothing wrong with the idea of local conditions, Peter. This is acontinent. It would be surprising if it didn't have its own distinctive weather patterns, irrespective of global trends that may or may not exist."
"And that's very true," Bolden said. "There are definitely local patterns here. Like the katabatic winds."
"The what?"
"Katabatic winds. They're gravitational winds. You've probably noticed that it's a lot windier here than in the interior. The interior of the continent is relatively calm."