“Ice!” Karen shouts. Our radios level amplitude, magnifying whispers and buffering shouts—that shout was well buffered.
Eloni freezes.
“Go,” Randi snaps, and clips Eloni’s helmet with the side of her boot. “Get going!”
Galvanized, Eloni half scrambles and half falls the remaining fifty meters, landing on her seat where the bridge butts against the wall. She starts fumbling with the ’biner holding her line to the wall belay line. Ed, clipped to a line, moves to help her—I think he has a knife in his hand. Heedless, I follow him using crampons and ax. Ed reaches Eloni.
I look up and see the sky falling.
Randi releases and leaps from almost twenty meters up on the wall, un-belayed, right at me. “Catch,” she shouts.
I have time to set my crampon spikes and open my arms. She hits hard, and various pieces of her gear dig into my chest. I grab her as the boots tear free and we skitter together down the side of the bridge. My line stops us after a three-meter slide.
Ten meters from us, with a roar clearly conducted through the ice we lie against, an avalanche of clathrate pours down. There is no sign of Ed and Eloni.
Randi clips a line to my belt, rolls off, and starts to scramble back to the top of the bridge, ice dust streaming around her.
“Ed!” she shouts. “Eloni!”
The fall increases, becoming a white wall. Randi scrambles into it. I follow and am enveloped in a stream of pulverized clathrate, and I can see nothing. It flows over me, not like sand or water, but something in between—not dense, but still exerting pressure.
I wait. My helmet is filled with the sound of my breathing.
“Ed!” Randi shouts again.
“We’re alive.” Ed’s voice is hoarse and strained. “Trapped next to the wall. The fall created a bit of a pocket. No injuries, but it’s getting somewhat cold.”
In spacesuits with rebreathers and plenty of energy, we are in no danger of suffocating. But under our coveralls we wear skintight vacuum suits that depend on a surrounding vacuum for much of their thermal control and the fabric of the vacuum suits, while smart and extremely tough, is necessarily thin. Conduction of heat could quickly freeze Ed and Eloni. But, clinging to the side of the bridge with the landslide still in progress, there is nothing I can do to reach them.
“Got you on locator. Can move.” That is Randi Lotati, for me. Move? How?
I roll over prone to the face of the bridge, reach forward into the flow with my hands, and find purchase. With both arms and legs, I find I can edge forward, too.
“Solid piece—here.” Randi says. “Ice boulder. Think you’re on other side.”
“S-sounds that w-way,” Ed replies.
“Line charge. My side. Push like hell when I say.”
“No, Randi,” Ed pleads, “too dangerous—”
“Push, damn it! Now!”
I hear the crack of the detonation.
“Randi?” I call, and claw my way toward the signals, white sand and occasional rocks still streaming by me. Somehow, though, it seems a bit easier. “Randi, Ed?”
“Wojciech, Ed. We—we’re free. At—at least the rock’s split. Need help with Eloni.”
“I’m trying.” I pant. “Where’s Randi?” I am exhausted struggling against the continuing stream of material from above. I reach forward with my hand and hit flesh. Someone there. The world is gray in my helmet lamp; I can see nothing. “Ed, is that you?”
“Not me, mate. It’s slackening a little. I’ve got some space.”
The someone moans. The groan is female.
“Eloni?” I push the person in front of me again, harder.
“She’s with me, Wojciech.” Ed says.
“Randi?”
She grunts. “Wojciech. I’m OK. I’m just… stuck. Legs won’t move.” I feel a hand brush mine, then lock with mine. “Drag me back.”
“I’ll try.” Trusting the precarious hand link, I sit up into the flow of clathrate mud. It tries to take me away with tremendous force, but my line holds me. Slowly I get my legs around in front of me and pull as hard as I dare. She doesn’t move.
“It’s no good. I’ll hurt you if I pull any harder.”
“Freezing’s worse. Hurt me. Pull.”
God knows how much force I put on her arm, but something seems to unstick, and she comes toward me, slowly at first; then something breaks free and we scoot back about four meters. I can see through whirls of snow here. I can see my clip still on the bridge line, see Randi strung out at the end of my arm.
“Dr. Lotati, she’s out. Over here.”
“What? Wojciech? Where?.. There, I have you! I’ll be right over.”
He is there in a moment. “Had you on the other side of the Bridge for a moment—propagation freak, I think. Randi, will you be all right for a few minutes?”
“Hurts like hell, Dad, but yes. Thanks, Wojciech.”
Dr. Lotati gives her a pat and plunges into the remains of the ice fall. Minutes later, he and Ed emerge, carrying Eloni between them. “Mike, Karen, this is Emilio,” he says. “We’re all out of the avalanche. I don’t know in what shape yet, but we’re all out.”
“Roger. We suggest all of you rest a bit until this plays itself out.”
“Mike…” He pauses, catching his breath. “We’ll consider that.”
There are several rueful chuckles, and we spend the next five minutes or so, watching the river of white dust slowly come to a halt.
Finally the ice fall abates entirely and we take stock. Randi reports a severe sprain in her right shoulder. Ed is recovering from hypothermia and is severely bruised as well. Eloni is better, physically, but appears to be in some kind of psychological shock. The rest of us have minor bruises.
The side of the crevasse looks like a giant took a huge, semicircular bite out of it. Karen and Mark wave at us from an edge that is now at least fifty meters back from where it was. We lost two long lines, buried in the debris. The avalanche has buried half the bridge and I worry that it could start again at any time and bury us along with the other half. I try to do some mental calculations on how long it would take a suborbital hopper to get here and pull us out.
“I think we are here for a while,” Dr. Lotati says, “at least until we’re all up to climbing out again. We might overnight on the bridge.” If he’s worried about the avalanche restarting, he isn’t saying so.
“We’ll need to revise the schedule a bit,” Ed adds. “Another five kilometers per day would do it, I should think. Now, how do we get the gear down here?”
“Toboggan the big tent down to us,” Randi says. “Meantime, collect data.”
I stare at Randi, stupefied.
“Are you OK, Eloni?” I ask, mainly out of concern but perhaps with a secondary agenda of reminding people of something.
Eloni raises her head and looks around in wonder. If she expects a chewing out, it seems she is in the wrong group. I lay a hand very gently on her shoulder, and, as if I touched some kind of hidden button, she leans into me and lets out a very long sigh, which I hear clearly where my helmet touches her. Randi is looking right at us, but in the glare of our headlights, her face is unreadable. Warning bells ring in my head.
“My mistake, Eloni,” Ed says, “pressuring you like that for something that’s not automatic. You needed to think it through, and with me talking at you like that, you couldn’t. My mistake.”
“Eloni,” Dr. Lotati asks, “Can you help Juanita get her samples tomorrow?”
Eloni takes a breath and slips away from me. “I—I can do that.” A smile of relief creases the young woman’s features.
“That a way!”
“Randi?” I ask, dumbfounded. “Your arm?”
“I’ll live. Still go for the bottom, Juanita?”
“There may be a pond of liquid nitrogen trifluoride down there—it’s unprecedented.”