Michelson and Forbes got on their knees and began dismantling some of the precious layered deposit, putting chunks of it into sample bags, discussing more invisible features in their highly technical language. “Here,” Michelson said to Wade. “If you care to help, you can count the number of vertical layers this deposit has.”
Wade got on his knees and went at it, getting colder by the minute. The other two continued inspecting the sandstone inch by inch, apparently oblivious to the biting chill air, even though they were wearing less than Wade was.
Michelson looked back at Wade. “Try counting how many fit against your fingernail, then measuring how many fingernails high the stack is, and multiply,” he suggested.
Wade, shocked at the idea of that sort of approximation entering the pure realm of science, continued to count the layers one by one.
Eventually they all stood up. Wade was cold, and very stiff from the previous day’s hike, and his hands were numb inside their mittens. “Six hundred and six,” he reported. “So there was liquid water down here for six hundred years!”
“Or six hundred tidal cycles,” Forbes said. “Which would be about one year.”
Wade saw the little smile reappear under Michelson’s moustache. “Liquid water, in any case,” Michelson said. “And very possibly this disconformity in the succession represents the transition from a marine environment to a subaerial one. What we called D-7 over on the Cloudmaker.” At the end of his black noseguard an icicle curved down almost to his chin, turning his face from a Breughel into something out of Bosch. “Let’s get back to camp,” he said, glancing up at the sun as if consulting a clock. “I’m famished, and we mustn’t be late for dinner. It’s Misha’s turn to cook, and he’s planning something special, I can tell.”
Indeed he was. After a long walk back weighted down by many sample bags filled with rocks, they crawled into the Scott tent and the sharp smell of cooking garlic butter raked down their nostrils directly to their empty stomachs. They oohed and aahed and knocked around against the sloping canvas of the tent until they were properly arranged, Wade back in his corner, which was very hard on his back—harder work physically than the whole rest of the day. But on this night Val was seated next to him, in fact jammed against him leg to leg, so that the entire evening he had the more-than-just-somatic warmth of that contact pouring into him. “Just in time,” Misha told them, handing out hors d’oeuvres: mugs of cold Scotch and melted brie on camp crackers, followed quickly by the main course: lobster tails sautéed in the garlic butter, with a side of corned-beef hash, followed eventually by a dessert of chocolate bars and Drambuie.
It was heavenly. Wade sawed away at the flesh of his lobster tails with a big Swiss Army knife, marveling that food could taste so good. “Four star,” someone muttered, and there were various hums and purrs and clattering as they all gulped down their meals. Near the end of the main course Michelson leaned on one elbow next to the radio and stretched out like a Roman emperor, the little V of a smile lifting his moustache. “Remember,” he said to Wade, “you must tell them what hell it was down here.”
“Ninth circle,” Wade agreed, wiping melted butter off his chin and licking it from his fingers.
“You liked the lobster?” Misha asked him.
“Kind of salty,” Wade said, which caused Val to choke.
“Don’t worry,” she said to the frowning Misha when she had recovered, “things are going to taste salty to Wade here for the rest of his life.” She explained what he had done at Don Juan Pond and the scientists laughed at him.
Then as they slowly downed dessert, and Misha heated water on the Coleman stove to wash dishes, the talk turned to the day’s work. Wade asked them to tell him more about the Sirius group controversy, and Val seconded the request, and the scientists were happy to oblige. All four of them contributed to the telling, even Misha, who to Wade’s surprise took the lead; he had had training in geology, that was clear. “The old view,” he explained, “was that the East Antarctic ice cap is an old and stable feature. The west sheet comes and goes, but the east sheet was established after Antarctica detached from South America, forty or fifty million years ago. Then it was here in place, and growing ever after, except for some warming periods, maybe, but those all long ago; most recently fourteen million years, at the latest.
“Then in the 1980s Webb and Harwood and their group found diatoms in the Sirius sandstone, and dated the diatoms at three million years old. When they published that data and their conclusion, that the eastern ice sheet hadn’t been there three million years ago, the battle was on.”
“Battle,” Wade said around a final salty mouthful of lobster.
“Well, you know. Scientific controversy.”
“Battle,” Harry Stanton confirmed.
“The two sides wouldn’t shoot each other on sight,” Michelson objected.
“No no,” Misha said, “it’s not like people after a divorce or something, you know, totally personal and vindictive. But still, they were both convinced that the other side weren’t being …”
“Scientific,” Michelson supplied with his little smile.
“They both thought the other side was being a blockhead,” Harry said. “Scientifically speaking of course.”
“Yes,” Misha said. “They didn’t like each other, after a while.”
“Suggesting lab contamination didn’t help,” Michelson said.
“Lab contamination?” Wade asked Misha.
“Well, when Harwood and Webb first said they had found these diatoms in the Sirius sandstone, some of the stabilists suggested the diatoms had come from other studies in the same lab. That went over very poorly in Ohio, as you can imagine.”
“Indeed. Stabilists?”
“The old ice group. This is the battle of the stabilists and the dynamicists.”
“So we won the name battle at least,” Michelson murmured.
“Then next, when it was established that the diatoms were actually inside Sirius rocks, the stabilists suggested there were so few diatoms that they had probably just blown in on the wind from the coast.”
“That infamous coast-to-plateau wind,” Harry noted.
“Which blows so hard that it shoves the diatoms right under the ice cap that the stabilists claim has always been there,” Michelson said.
“Yes, of course,” Misha said. “Blown over from Australia, perhaps. But they did find some diatoms in the ice at the South Pole, so the stabilists had some support for this idea.”
“And how did the Ohio group deal with that?”
Misha grinned. “With quantity. Sometimes you have quality results, and sometimes you need quantity results. They blew up tons and tons of the Transantarctic Mountains. They went to every Sirius site they could find with a great big dynamite license from NSF, and they blew up great masses of Sirius and took them back home and dumped them on the stabilists’ desks, metaphorically speaking of course. Diatoms by the ton.”
“Not tons,” Michelson objected. “Nothing in excess.”
“Tons. Whole nunataks you see on the map, now entirely gone and removed to labs at Ohio State.”
“No no—”
“Yes yes,” laughing, “I was the mountaineer for one of those expeditions, I set the charges myself! It was awesome. There should be an Ohio State Glacier named up there, we tore a brand new pass in the Transantarctics.”
Much laughter in the tent at Michelson’s expense, who clearly had been involved with this project. Wade saw that the younger scientists were fond of him. “And they found good evidence?” Wade said.