“You sounded so calm.”
“Did I?” Will laughed. “After the quake, and the crash, I was getting almost used to it all — weren’t you?” Then, looking around the disordered lab, he added: “This is worse, in a way. I don’t even want to think about the drilling rig.”
“Yes.”
Will turned sideways to face her. “All right, House-mouse. What’s on your mind?”
“You’ll think I’m pretty stupid.”
“Come on.”
“I’d — I want to move in with you, Will.”
He looked carefully at her. “I’ll be damned. You’re not joking.”
“No, I’m not joking.”
“Well.” Will looked both pleased and alarmed. “Well. It’s a lovely idea, isn’t it? But it’d just upset everyone to no purpose — including me. There’d be jealousy, envy, resentment—”
“That Canadian girl last year — she moved in with Bob McCullough, and no one minded.”
“Perhaps not. But it was nearly the end of the summer, and we were all about to go home.” He chewed his thumbnail. “I like you a lot, Jeanne. And you like me. But you’re not the sort to fall madly in love; you are certainly not madly in love with me.”
“No — not in some soppy girlish way. But I do like you. And I need you. Ever since the quake, I’ve been—” She covered her face with her hands and leaned against him, shuddering. “Oh, Will, I keep thinking this is all a dream, all a dream. But it doesn’t quit, and I’m so bloody frightened.”
“Yes, yes.” He stroked her curly yellow hair. Her fingers were peeling from the touch of frostbite she’d suffered. She smelled sweet and clean. “Yes, yes. I know.”
“God — I feel rotten doing this to you,” she murmured. “As if you didn’t have enough trouble, falling into crevasses and freezing your poor ears, you’ve got me blubbering all over you.”
Will laughed, and kissed her gently. “All right. Look. Go back to bed. In the morning if you haven’t changed your mind, and I haven’t either, I’ll talk to Carter about it. Maybe he can give us that empty room McCullough had.”
“I won’t change my mind, I promise you.”
“Ough, you’re choking me, you brute. Now up you get. I’ll walk you home, if I may.”
She had been up only an hour or two, but as she slid into her bunk Jeanne knew she would have no trouble getting back to sleep. Tomorrow, once they were settled, she could tell him what she was really frightened about. He’d understand. God, he’d better understand.
Katerina Varenkova lit a Rothman off the butt of the last one and poured herself some more brandy.
“Those things are lethal, you know,” Herm Northrop remarked. His dark eyes gleamed behind his rimless glasses. “I’m always astounded to see a doctor smoking.”
“Communists are brave people. And in-vul-ner-able.”
“Not to our capitalist carcinogens. Nor to their own alcohol.”
“You are saying I am drunk?”
“Why, I believe I am. Katya, you are drunk.”
“Good. I deserve to be drunk. Since yesterday morning I have two or three hours of sleep. I am not a young girl; I cannot stay up so long. But Terry and Hugh need attention. The emergency supplies for McMurdo, I must pack them. So I stay up. I have Big Eye anyway, unless I drink brandy. Then I get some sleep, or I am no good to anybody.”
“At least you’re not being under-used.”
“That is true. I am very busy. I will stay busy.”
“Good. So will I.” He raised his Styrofoam cup. “To us — the workers of the world.”
“To us.”
It was quiet in the infirmary. Terry, drugged against the agony of his burns, slept heavily a few metres away behind a partition. A single lamp, flickering with power surges induced by solar flares, glowed on the desk next to Katerina. Herm sat in an uncomfortable armchair, looking avuncular as always but a bit drunk as well. He regarded the lamp suspiciously.
“I don’t mind the flickering,” he said, “but I do worry about the reactor’s electronics. The silly thing might decide to shut itself down. Or go for a walk.”
She seemed not to have heard him. “Herman — what will happen to my husband?”
“I don’t know, Katya. But I’m pretty sure he and the others will pull through all right.”
“And why?”
“Vostok’s a long way from all this, isn’t it? A good thousand kilometres or more. And it sits on three kilometres of ice — goes down below sea level, if I’m not mistaken. That won’t move very easily. In any case, they can fly out to Mirny Station. Good lord, with those monstrous tractors of theirs, they could drive out if they liked.”
“Yes. That is so.” She obviously didn’t believe him, but she brightened a little. “Poor Vanya. He is probably worrying over me. And your wife — she will be worrying over you.”
“I suppose so.” He realised he hadn’t thought about his wife since the quake. Toronto seemed very far away, farther and stranger than Vostok.
Penny went to the greenhouse after the meeting. The plants seemed unchanged, but after a while she noticed that a few were missing — probably knocked off their shelves by the quake. The long fluorescent day went on for the rest, and the air held a faint scent of sweet peas despite the ventilation fans.
She got out her notepad and began to reconstruct the events of the last two days. Her hands still hurt a bit, and the right one was peeling badly with frostbite; it reminded her that what she was describing had really happened. So did the sunburn on her face, which was the worst she’d ever had.
She wrote steadily, ignoring her own doubts about the adequacy of her words to convey what they had gone through at Beardmore and on the Shelf. When she got a chance, she would develop and print the photos she’d taken, but even they would fail to show the true scale and power of the surge. Maybe nothing could.
An hour passed quickly. She heard footsteps, and Steve walked in.
“Hi, Penny.”
“Hi. Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“Too wound up. And Tim’s snoring and talking in his sleep.” He sat down on the bench next to her, his back against the table on which Penny was working. “I’m sorry — am I interrupting?”
“Nothing serious.” She patted his hand. “How are you?”
“…I’m not sure. Scared and happy.”
“Mm. I can understand scared, but—”
“Well, I was pretty accurate about the quake, and too conservative about the surge.”
“Uh-huh. Very expensive vindication for a crackpot theory.”
Steve nodded sombrely. “Yes, it is. And this is just the down payment.”
“I guess so. What next?”
“Mass extinctions. A new ice age. A temporary rise in sea level of ten or twenty metres. More earthquakes and volcanism.”
“Can I quote you?”
“Don’t be sarcastic. It suits you too well.”
“Sorry. But it isn’t going to be quite that bad, is it?”
“I think it’ll be very bad. Since the Roche Event, the whole planet has taken a huge dose of radiation. It’s been aggravated by the solar flares, which have damn near finished off the ozone layer.” He smiled faintly at the blisters on her cheeks and nose; he had them, too. “The ozone will recover eventually when the sun quiets down, but until then we’ll take far more ultraviolet than we’re used to. And until the magnetic field builds up again — which will probably take generations — we’ll also get a lot of ionising radiation.”