Inside the unisex rest room’s single stall, Nimec had found tugging himself out from under his boxers, long johns, flannel-lined blue jeans, and various overlapped shirts an uncomfortable exercise in patience and control. But he managed to get his business done without embarrassment.
Now he filled the sink, soaped his hands under the automatic dispenser, and washed them in the plugged basin, complying with a sign above the sink that said its taps weren’t to be left running while you cleaned up. Nimec was about to splash his face with some fresh, cold water when he read the second item on the extensive list of dos and don’ts, and discovered the limit was one basinful per person. So much for that.
He dried his hands with a paper towel, tossed it in the trash receptacle, went to the door. A coin-operated condom machine was on the wall beside it. He paused and checked the sign. Unsurprisingly, the machine’s contents weren’t rationed.
Nimec emerged from the rest room. A small group of men and women looked askance at him as they walked past. Puzzled, he turned to where Megan was waiting for him down the hall.
He asked her about the plainly disagreeable glances once the two of them were seated in her office.
“I followed the rules,” he said, making the Scout’s-honor sign with his right hand. “Not that I can see how they’d know if I didn’t.”
She regarded him with amusement from across her desk.
“That bunch was mostly OAEs,” she said.
He pulled a face. “Mostly what?”
“Old Antarctic Explorers… longtimers on the ice,” she said. “Sorry. The lingo here gets contagious after a while.”
“And exactly how’s that supposed to have something to do with their attitude?”
“Isolation breeds a clannish mentality. The crew can be prickly toward outsiders. Or perceived outsiders. Their consumption of water is one of the things that raises spines.”
“Gracious,” Nimec said. “I hope they’re better hosts to those politicos who’re due for a visit.”
Megan Breen smiled her smile. It was always real. And always measured. Over the years Nimec had found that people either got the combination or they didn’t. The ones who did were usually charmed to helplessness. The ones who didn’t thought her calculating and manipulative. In the predominantly male world in which she functioned as Roger Gordian’s next-in-line, the split was close to even.
He got the smile completely.
“Our desalinization plant turns out fifteen thousand gallons of usable water on a good day,” she said. “That’s for cooking, cleaning, machine and vehicle use, hydroponics… the whole show. I know that may sound like a considerable amount, Pete. But it takes two gallons to wash your hands under a running tap, as opposed to one gallon washing in a filled basin. I could rattle off the comparative stats for high-versus-low-efficiency showers—”
“And toilets, I’m sure,” he said.
“One and a half gallons for ultra-low flush. Three to five for standard models.”
“You had that notice posted, didn’t you?”
“Worded it myself.”
“Then I won’t beat the issue of my lousy reception to death.”
They were both smiling now.
“Just wait till we get you a name patch,” she said. “When those malcontents find out who they offended, they’ll want to go scampering under a rug.”
Nimec sat a moment, glancing around the office. It was a small, well-ordered cubicle with bluish soundproof paneling and recessed overhead fluorescents. No windows. No decorative touches to enliven it. Two big maps covered nearly the entire wall to Megan’s right. One was a satellite image of the Antarctic continent. Shaped like a giant manta ray. The other showed the rugged topography of the Dry Valleys. There were three colored pins — red, yellow, blue — marking different points in the latter.
Nimec turned back to Megan. The last time he’d seen her, she had been the embodiment of corporate chic, letting the world know she was playing to win with a pricey designer suit and a smart wedge-cut hairstyle that just brushed the tops of her shoulders. Now her hair went tumbling loosely down over bib overalls and a maroon twill shirt, framing her face with thick auburn waves, highlighting her large emerald eyes like the deepest of sunsets over a wood of Irish pines. Nimec supposed she could dress herself in sackcloth and still be as lovely as ever.
He sat there a while, looking at her. He could think of a dozen matters they had to discuss, every one of them pressing, every one relating to the incidents that had brought him so far from home. But he was uncertain how to approach the subject he really wanted to talk about first.
“So,” he said. “How’ve you been?”
She shrugged, her hands on the desk.
“Cold,” she said. “And generally busy.”
“How about when you aren’t busy?”
“Cold and lonely.”
Nimec gave her a little nod. There had been photographs in her San Jose office. Vases with fresh flowers from the shop down the street. And abundant sunlight.
“I hear people come to Antarctica to find themselves,” he said. “Or reinvent themselves. It’s being away from everything they know. And the emptiness. I suppose they must feel like they’re filling it in. Writing their lives over on a blank page.”
Megan shrugged again.
“That may be true for some,” she said.
“And you?”
She paused a beat, but otherwise did a good job of seeming unaffected by the question.
“There’s no place else like this on earth. It’s magnificent. Beautiful in its way. It gives you the room and time to contemplate. But I’m doing this because Gord needed me here to get our operations off the ground.”
“So if not for his asking you to stay…”
“I’d scoot back to California like a kitten jumping onto a warm lap,” she replied, looking directly at him. No hesitation this time.
Nimec considered asking her what was actually on his mind. Instead he decided to change the topic. He cocked his head toward the map of the Dry Valleys.
“I figure those pins have got something to do with the missing search team,” he said.
“You figure right, Pete.” Meg swiveled in her chair, faced the map, and pointed. “The yellow one shows where they struck camp. It’s where McKelvey Valley crosses the northern mouth of Bull Pass. See?”
He nodded.
“The red pin would be about four miles from the camp-site, straight down into the pass,” she said. “That’s where they were last sighted.”
“By whom?”
“A chopper pilot named Russ Granger. He’s been at McMurdo forever, makes regular air runs to its research bases in the valley system.”
“He have any contact with the team?”
“No,” she said, and then thought a moment. “Well, let me revise that. They did exchange hellos. But it was just a fluke that Russ passed over Scarborough and the others at all.” She paused. “He says they seemed perfectly fine to him.”
“When would that have been? The time of day, I mean.”
“Ordinarily we’d be entering vague territory. But I think I know where you’re heading, so let me put my answer in context,” she said. “Time measurement becomes almost arbitrary when the whole year’s roughly divided into six months of daylight, and six months of darkness. Most stations set their clocks to match up with a time zone in their home countries for ease of communications… though that can lead to chaos when they have to make arrangements with other bases. Here at Cold Corners we’ve opted for Greenwich time simply because that’s what they use at MacTown, and there’s considerable interaction between us.”