He ruminated on Hayes’s latest briefing. The news was now public, and the world was already planning for a worst-case scenario. Nowhere was there greater panic than in the twin financial metropolises of New York and Tokyo, where a fifteen-foot rise in sea-level would mean flooded subways and ruined infrastructure, not to mention billions of dollars in terms of useless real estate. Hayes hadn’t gone into any great detail, but it was clear the big financial structures were establishing duplicate setups as quickly as possible in cities on higher ground. Printers in the Midwest had stopped working on newspapers and junk mail in order to have the capacity to handle all the hard-copy downloads of bank records, insurance data, credit vouchers and thousands of other supposedly priceless sets of data. Meanwhile the world’s population was talking about nothing else but Deep Ice — the nickname given to the crisis. The phrase had leaked from somewhere on Capitol Hill and quickly spread to the US tabloids, then to the back pages of the mainstream press, and finally into conversations on talk radio and television. Oprah Winfrey’s show — the day after the “Nightline: Fire in the Ice” special about the eruption of Mount Erebus — had broken the daytime Neilson records and made the Ross Ice Shelf a topic of discussion on every street corner and in every coffee shop around the world.
Henry wondered what it would be like if the public got the whole story, if the military admitted that a nuclear bomb had melted a huge hole in the ice. He thought of Grimes’s madness on deck. It only added to the surreal quality of his life; like the Mad Hatter in Wonderland, Grimes was the centre of the tea party. And here on the Enterprise they were just as isolated from the real world as Alice had been from hers.
Henry let his gaze roam over the details of his quarters. Bulkheads, tasteful y painted a practical warm white. Like a prison, or a safe, or a laboratory. He looked over at Shep, already asleep beside his bunk. A wave of jealousy swept over him. Why couldn’t he just forget the world and sleep like the dog? What sense did it make to lie here and worry?
There was a soft tap at his door. He guessed it was Sarah, and it was. When he saw her face he knew she was staying with the team.
“I’m in for the duration.” Her dimples were showing.
“General Hayes called me over and…”
“Yeah, he said he’d talk to you. I guess all he had to do was call the Pentagon.”
Sarah smiled even more broadly. “He said that, if there was a chance my being on the team might help with the situation, they wanted me here.”
Henry pushed the door closed behind her as she continued her story. He sat near her on his bunk and took out a Lucky Strike, which he put in his mouth but made no attempt to light.
She stopped mid-sentence and gave him a quizzical look. “You don’t smoke.”
“I’m not smoking,” he said. “So, don’t they need you at the FBI?”
“No. See, according to Hayes the reason they were planning to send me back was for my benefit. They didn’t think I wanted to be here on the Enterprise.”
“Well, do you?” asked Henry, looking around for a match.
Sarah seemed surprised at the question. “Sure,” she said.
He shook his head and threw the cigarette at the wall. Shep lifted his head and looked at it.
“What?” said Sarah with alarm.
“I don’t like being cooped up in this floating box. I guess that’s what’s eating me.”
Sarah considered the dog. “If he can handle it, I should think it’d be a piece of cake for you. Besides, is the company so bad?”
“I just want to be out on the ice.” He took another cigarette and put it in his mouth.
She seemed relieved. “Oh, that’s it. You want your day job back.”
“I guess you could say that. I just need to be doing something, I guess. I feel useless.”
Having found nothing with which to light his cigarette, he put it back in the pack.
“Have you ever seen the aurora?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Not since I was a little girl. I’d like to.”
Suddenly Sarah remembered Henry had attended the most recent briefing. She hadn’t been invited.
“It’s that briefing, isn’t it? That’s what’s bothering you. They told you something. What?”
Henry thought for a moment.
“Maybe you’re right,” he began. “The briefing covered a lot of ground, but most of it was about the world.”
“ ‘The world’?”
He told her General Hayes had received so many questions from the crew that he’d decided to share what he knew. The story had leaked to the press, and now everyone was worried about the Ross Ice Shelf. “The thing is, everyone apparently thinks the volcano caused the problem. Apparently only the military knows about the bombs.”
Sarah’s eyes filled with tears. “No one really knows the truth. Not even us.”
“Well, we know more than most, if that’s worth anything.” He took her hand. “I’m sorry to upset you, Sarah. Now you know why I didn’t want to talk about it.”
Sarah smiled. A spent tear dripped onto the back of Henry’s hand. She noticed and lifted his hand to her lips, giving him a playful look, licking the tear away.
Her eyes met his again. “At least we’re in this together.”
A moment later they were on his bunk. This time they didn’t make love, simply held one another for a long while, as though letting go would send them falling into an abyss of despair.
Tears flowed from Sarah.
“I’m sorry. This is completely insane,” she whispered. “It’s not real.”
“You mean, us?”
“Everything,” she said. “I have a life, too. Now all of it might be gone.”
Henry didn’t argue. He just held her close, trying to enfold and protect her.
Soon they were asleep.
Four hours later the USS Enterprise, flagship carrier of the US Navy, sailed within sight of Valparaiso, the main port of Chile. The admiral made no secret of it. All the bul horns were blaring with the news.
Henry’s eyes opened to the announcement. Amazed and delighted to find Sarah asleep in his arms, he looked across her plain green sweater to see a disembodied hand moving beside her. Before he could become alarmed he realized it was his own, numb from lack of circulation. When he pulled on it to try to get it out from under her, Sarah began to awake. Why is it, he asked himself, that women look so beautiful when they’re lying down?
He gazed into her sleepy green eyes. No way to stop the smile she brought to his face. He knew this wasn’t just a sex thing. Not this time. After all, they were full y clothed. Sarah didn’t seem to want to leave either. She made no effort to stir, just lay there absorbing whatever it was that Henry was sending.
“Ever seen Chile?” he asked.
“Only in a bottle,” she answered with a wry smile.
He grinned. “I did some climbing there about five years ago. Very high country — twenty thousand feet or more. The height of the Rockies is low ground by Andes standards.” He studied the green-blue striations of Sarah’s irises; they reminded him of a rare gem, sparkling and priceless, seen but never possessed.
“The Basques, from Northern Spain, settled most of it, mixed with the descendants of the Incas.”
“Incas?” She raised an eyebrow.
“You know, one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. They were mummifying everybody long before the Egyptians thought of it. Somehow I grew up thinking they were latecomers to the American Indian world. But they had a civilization that was highly organized. Tijuanaco. Amazing. Agriculture, irrigation for twenty miles or more, very civilized…”