Karl Kofoed
Deep Ice
To Dorothy and Janet, without whose help Deep Ice wouldn’t have been written.
About the Author
Karl Kofoed is a graphic artist with over 30 years of commercial experience. Karl describes himself as wearing two professional “hats”. He is owner of Kofoed Design, specializing in graphic design, illustration, photo retouching and restoration. Deep Ice is Karl’s first venture into the world of traditional prose, and he has several other books waiting in the wings.
His other professional “hat” is that of a science fiction illustrator and writer. He is well known to the SF community and has done scores of book covers and interior book and magazine illustrations. Karl’s Galactic Geographic© feature (GalacticGeographic.com) appears in Heavy Metal magazine. Using his Macintosh computer he has single handedly designed, written, illustrated, and produced the Galactic Geographic Annual 3003, which he describes as “a coffee table book from the future”. Published by Chrysalis/Paper Tiger Books, it is now available at book stores everywhere.
Karl and his wife Janet, a popular jewelry designer, live in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, USA; a suburb of Philadelphia. They each have a daughter named Lisa, from previous marriages.
One
Henry’s watch alarm nagged at him for fifteen seconds. Then silence, except for the sound of windblown ice crystals testing the orange-and-blue nylon of the tent. But Henry Scott Gibbs had reset his internal clock. He knew there would be no aurora tonight, and probably not for a couple of nights.
September on the Ross Ice Shelf. This time of year the Antarctic winds herald the coming of summer with relentless squalls that rise from nowhere and linger or disappear seemingly with a will of their own.
Sometimes he’d try to be invisible from the wind after he’d set his automatic cameras to monitor the ice-fire rings of blue and green that hung overhead, painting the snow with eerie undulating light and shadow. He had to make sure the cameras were working. Couldn’t afford to waste film if they weren’t. So he had to wait and sleep in short shifts, waking every hour until the sun’s slow rise, and then moving on to a different location.
The wind had been nagging at him lately. It almost seemed nervous. He had the notion it might subside if it couldn’t find him; if it didn’t know he was there; if he hid from it like his dogs did, lying low and letting the snow drift over them as they slept. Once, as an experiment, he’d piled snow over himself; it had seemed to work, but then he’d remembered that snow is ideal insulation. The wind was unaffected.
He didn’t mind the cold. And he’d always been a loner. That’s why he was here, on his own with just a pack of dogs for company, smack in the middle of the largest, deepest and most massive block of ice in the world — the Ross Ice Shelf.
Somewhere in the back of Henry’s brain an automatic switch brought him halfway to consciousness. He did his best to suppress it. His left eye opened briefly and he surveyed the darkness around him. He could sleep. From the sound of the snow on the tent he knew the winds were hitting fifty miles per hour. He heard one of his dogs howl a soft complaint. Was it his favourite, Sadie?
“Spoiled brat,” he mumbled.
It would be nice, he thought, to have his two best friends, Sadie and Shep, curled up next to him, but he knew that to roust the dogs out of their slumber was pointless — it would just stir them up and make them all colder. Best to leave them alone.
Rolling over in his Arctic Blast sleeping bag, he started drifting off. In a few hours, he promised himself, he’d try the radio again. Maybe this time he’d get a weather report. He pulled an arm free of the heavy bag to cool off a little. He was getting hot. His friends used to laugh at him for walking around in the dead of winter in upstate New York wearing only a T-shirt. He would put on a vest when it got really cold.
When he opened his eyes again it wasn’t his watch but his dogs that were sounding the alarm.
The sun was barely up. He cocked his head to listen, and smiled devilishly. The wind had stopped tugging at his tent.
“Fooled ya… bitch,” he muttered to the wind.
“Thought I’d bought it. Thought I was dead, didn’t you?”
His dogs continued the incessant barking. He interrupted his own musings with a sudden burst of impatience. “What the hell are you crappin’ about?” he yelled. “Shep! Shut those bastards up!”
Sadie was whimpering outside the tent. She was the older of his two favourite malamutes, and he admitted openly to coddling her. But now she was at work and had to deal with the elements like the other dogs. Besides, if he let her into the tent when it got cold he’d have to let Shep in too; then the whole team would want in. Shep was Sadie’s son and had taken over her role as lead dog. He was fierce and independent but obeyed Henry’s every whim.
Henry had owned many dogs in his ten years on the Antarctic ice, but none of them outshone Shep. He’d almost lost Sadie a year earlier when they crossed a hidden fissure in the ice. Luckily she had been tied to the rest of the team. She had dangled helplessly, twisted in the nylon cords. He remembered her yelps echoing in that bottomless green chasm for the better part of a half hour before he was able to secure the sled and haul her up. A strap had broken her left front leg and rendered her slightly but permanently disabled. By that time Shep had been experienced enough to take over the role as leader of the team. What amazed Henry was Sadie’s willingness to step down as leader. As soon as he had made the switch, she had immediately assumed a different role. She would run ahead scouting for danger, always seeming to know exactly where Henry wanted to go.
Sadie, Shep and the other seven dogs were Henry’s only family. Every human who had ever been close to him had died, and now, at forty-five, he had one mission in life: his career. The yacht accident in the Bahamas that had taken the lives of his mom and dad, his wife and two kids had left a scar on his soul he knew would never heal. It had been five years since the news had come over the radio, the cold impersonal voice of a coastguardsman saying that the Felice was last reported floundering in a storm, radioing a mayday. He had been halfway around the world studying the deep ice when it happened, and somehow the distance had made it harder. By the time he got back, two weeks had passed and all he could do was identify bodies. Everyone he loved was gone. It was as though he was being punished by an angry god for ignoring his family.
He hadn’t lingered, even for the funeral.
Henry unzipped the tent and squinted into the daylight. Shep and Sadie were standing near the tent facing the west. All he could see were their backsides and their wagging tails. He had to force his way through the snow that had drifted around the tent during the night. He looked at his thermometer. Flat on the zero mark.
“Downright balmy,” said Henry as he stood up to scan the horizon. The vastness of the Ross Ice Shelf always astonished him. It was easy to imagine himself alone in the world, and the idea didn’t bother him at all. Maybe he deserved to be alone. He’d be the first to admit he didn’t really like people all that much. And now his dogs were telling him someone or something was out there on the ice.
He lifted his binoculars and examined a dark patch far off on the horizon.
Something was moving out there, but it didn’t seem to be moving towards him.
The dogs continued to bark.
“Shut up, you fuckin’ furbags! I can’t hear myself think!”