Last Gasp

Yesterday the temperature had fallen to 52.3 degrees below zero F. Once it dropped past minus 60 degrees there would be no more scuba diving till next summer. But he hoped there was time for at least one more dive. There were specimens of planktonic algae he wanted to collect, in particular a subspecies known as silicoflagellates, which abounded beneath the pack ice of the Weddel Sea, here on the western rim of the Antarctic Plateau. Amazing really--that there should be such an abundance of microscopic life teeming below when up here it was as bleak and sterile as the moon.

With slow, calculated movements he gripped the metal ladder and hauled his six-foot frame twenty feet up to the first platform. Young and fit as he was, honed to a lean 160 pounds after nearly six months at Halley Bay Station, Chase knew that every calorie of energy had to be budgeted for with a miser's caution. Inactive, the body used up about one hundred watts of power, which went up tenfold with physical activity. The trick was to keep on the go without overtaxing yourself. That way you kept warm, generating your own heat--but there was another trap if you weren't careful. At these extreme latitudes the oxygen content was low, the equivalent of living at ten thousand feet on the side of a mountain. With less oxygenated blood reaching the body's tissues any exertion required double the effort and energy expenditure. Too much exertion and you could black out--without warning, as quickly as a light going out--and that would be that.

Chase knelt down and brushed away the thick coating of furry frost from the gauges with his cumbersome hands.

Windspeed was up to 18 knots, he noted with a frown. Then relaxed slightly and grinned when he saw that the red needle of the temperature gauge was still a few degrees short of sixty. Good. That meant one more day, possibly two, for diving. Nick wouldn't like it, but he'd have to persuade him; he couldn't dive without a backup. Serve the bastard right, he thought with a flash of mordant humor.

With only two weeks left to serve at the station, Chase was keen to gather as many marine samples as possible before boarding the C-130 for the 1,850-mile flight across the Pole to the American base at McMurdo Sound, then the 2,400-mile haul to Christchurch, New Zealand. And a week after that he would be home! Wallowing in all the comforts and pleasures of civilization. After all these months of enforced celibacy the young scientist knew quite definitely which pleasure came first.

He straightened up and gazed out over the featureless wasteland toward the heart of the polar interior. His breath plumed the air like smoke. On the barely discernible line of the horizon a very faint smudge of the most delicate crimson indicated the advent of the sun. They would see it for a couple of hours today--a flattened reddish ball resting on the rim of their world--and then once more it would be night. Soon it would be night until September.

That's how much we depend on you, Chase communed with the rising sun. Without your warmth and light the planet would be sheathed in ice twenty feet thick. Or was it fifty? Not that it mattered, he thought wryly. Ten feet of ice over the surface of the earth would be enough to make the human race as extinct as the dinosaur.

Directly below him elongated slivers of deep purple shadow edged out from the weather gantry and radio mast--the "bird's nest" as it was called by everyone on the station. The shadows crept slowly across the smooth humps that were the only visible sign of the warren of living quarters and labs and the thirty-six men beneath.

The arc of red tipped the rim of the world.

Chase held his breath. It was awesome, no matter how many times you witnessed the miracle.

From dingy gray to misty pearl and then to blinding white the landscape was illuminated like a film set. Chase shielded his eyes against the reflected glare. Even though the horizontal rays were weak, the albedo effect of the white blanket of snow and ice threw back every photon of light in a fierce hazy dazzle that seared the eyeballs. Under certain conditions this caused a whiteout: land and sky melting together, with no horizon to align the senses to, all contours and topographical features lost in a blank white dream.

Chase watched, marveled, and became alert.

Something was moving. Out there on the ice. Hell, no, he was surely mistaken. He was gazing toward the Pole. Nothing could be coming from that direction, from the barren heart of all that emptiness. Impossible!

In the next instant he was scrambling down the ladder, rubber boots slithering on the ice-coated rungs. In his haste he forgot about the thinness of the atmosphere, about energy budgets. He hadn't gone more than a dozen yards before his chest was heaving. Sweat ran from his armpits; always a danger signal, because damp clothing lost its insulation properties and you froze in your own perspiration.