Steve touched his cheeks and nose, but they were numb with cold. He found a small mirror and looked at himself. Carter was right: Steve’s face was dark red, and hard little blisters had already formed on his nose. Will was burned, too.
“We must be getting some diffracted ultraviolet,” Steve said. “Can you get Gerry on the radio?”
He asked Gerry to monitor ultraviolet intensity; a few minutes later Gerry called back to say he’d gotten a reading almost as high as those recorded in the summer weeks after the icequake. “We better be careful,” Gerry added. “How do your eyes feel?”
“They itch,” Steve replied.
“Yeah. You must’ve burned ’em a little.”
“Christ,” Steve murmured after Gerry signed off. “If the ultraviolet is this bad here, what’s it like where the sun is shining?”
“Worse,” said Will.
Later that day one of the DB’s sledges was abandoned, and the loads on the others were redistributed. So much fuel had been burned that Carter began to doubt whether the whole convoy would make it to Outer Willy. There was so little petrol left that he decided to save it for the pony engines, and the snowmobiles were left behind as well. Gordon and Roger were not sorry.
For some days temperatures had stayed between -60° and -40°; on the 19th the sky clouded over and the temperature rose in an hour from -45° to -15°. By 1500 hours a blizzard stalled the convoy near a pressure ridge, and there they stayed.
On the second day of the blizzard, Carter made a routine radio check with the other vehicles. There was no answer from Sno-Cat 2. After trying to raise them for five minutes, Carter gave up and called Sean in the Nodwell, which was parked next to the Sno-Cat.
“I hate to ask it of you,” he told Sean, “but could you just pop across and see what the problem is?”
“No problem,” Sean grunted. “I was just about to walk the dog anyway.”
The Nodwell, like all the other vehicles, was almost completely drifted over. Sean, with help from Herm and Ray, managed to force open the rear door and dig his way out of the drift. With a safety line tied to his waist, he groped his way to the dark mound of the Sno-Cat and then to the wanigan behind it. He dug away part of the drift over the door and pounded on the plywood. There was no response. He shouted, but the wind drowned him out.
Growing frightened, Sean began shovelling at the drift, throwing the powdery snow back into the wind. The cold clamped hard on his arms and legs and began working inward to his chest and belly. The only light came from the cab of the Nodwell, where part of one window was clear. It was just a few metres away, but made only a ghostly yellow blur in the screaming night.
At last he was able to yank the door open. A lamp was on, but nothing moved. By the time Sean wrestled his way in, snow filled the wanigan with billions of glittering-cold sparks. A primus stove burned against the rear wall; the four men lay unmoving in their sleeping bags. When he saw their flushed, almost purplish complexions, Sean heaved the door open again and wedged it in place. The wanigan was full of carbon monoxide.
After a minute Tim began to stir, and then Max and Colin. Terry Dolan took longest to come to. Sean turned off the primus, shut the door and got on the radio.
“Carter, this is Sean. They nearly caught it — monoxide. But I think they’ll be all right. Katerina, can you hear me?”
“Yes. I will be there as soon as I am dressed.”
The four men were very sick for the next couple of days, but by the time the blizzard finally blew itself out they were fully recovered. Carter ordered regular ventilation checks to be made thereafter, and there were no more incidents. Sean’s nose, however, was grotesquely swollen with frostbite, and he had bad dreams for the next few nights.
After a week’s hibernation everyone was impatient to get moving, but it took a full day to dig out the vehicles and warm their engines. At 1700 hours on July 27 they set out and made good progress until the next morning, when they had to bulldoze through another pressure ridge.
The sun was close below the horizon now; the sky reddened as early as 1000 hours and didn’t darken until past 1500. But Gerry’s ultraviolet readings grew more ominous. What little UV diffracted to their latitude was as much as three times normal daylight intensity. In the outside world, Gerry estimated, ultraviolet must be seven to eight times normal.
“That ain’t the worst of it,” he said to Carter over the radio. “When you lose the ozone layer, you start cooling right down to the surface. Not much — maybe half a degree Celsius, overall. But that gets you halfway to an ice age all by itself, without the surge.”
“So much for the greenhouse theory,” Steve put in. “They’ve been saying for years that we’re putting so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the earth would be warmer by the turn of the century than it’s been in eight thousand years. Even if that were true, the only way to overcome the present cooling would be to burn every drop of oil, and every stick of wood, as fast as possible.”
“I hate gloaters,” Carter snorted.
The D4 burned out a bearing on July 30, and was abandoned. Its wanigan was attached to the Nodwell, and the men in it — Tom Vernon, George Hills, Gordon Ellerslee and Roger Wykstra — became regular visitors in the tractor.
By August 1, when another quake hit, the strain was getting to all of them. No one had expected the traverse to take this long; the tonnes of fuel were almost all gone, and so was the food. Carter estimated the convoy to be no more than thirty kilometres from Outer Willy, but there was scarcely enough diesel fuel even for that distance.
Will, Tim and Steve made a scouting trip on skis after the quake, to see if any crevasses lay across the convoy’s path. While they were gone, everyone slept or talked or played games.
The wind was rising. It thumped the walls, moaned, threw snow hissing against the windows. In the cabin, with only a small battery lamp to illuminate it, the shadows were deep and cold. Penny tried to warm her hands between her thighs. How had she ever enjoyed being snowbound?
She dreamed, half-awake, that she was outside trying to find Steve in the darkness. She was naked; her bare feet sank deep in the snow, and she knew she would freeze in just a few more moments. She called him, but the wind muffled her, choked her; she was coughing blood the way she had on the walk back from the helicopter. Steve, Steve, I’m bleeding! She waited for the grip of his hands on her shoulders, but it never came.
Somewhere far away there were voices, then a blast of cold air and a slamming door. Penny woke to see three bulky shapes standing in the cabin, their faces muffled. One of them squatted awkwardly beside her bunk. He pulled off his ice-crusted wool mask and brushed frost from his beard.
“Hi, Pen,” Steve said quietly. “Could we have a cup of tea? We brought our own snow in.”
“I love you,” Penny said. He looked surprised. A little hesitantly, he took off one of his bear-paw mitts, the leather glove beneath it, and then the wool shell. He reached out and touched her cheek.
“Your face is warm,” he smiled.
“Your hand is freezing. I still love you.”
“I love you, too. How about some tea?”
While the kettle clanked and pinged on the primus, Steve got on the radio to Carter. “We just got in; we’re in the Nodwell.”
“How’s the surface up ahead?”
“Good. A few sastrugi fields, but nothing bad. No crevasses. But listen, Carter — we’re closer than we thought. There’s an ice island only about ten kilometres away. I’m pretty sure it’s Outer Willy.”
Chapter 14 – Iceway
Ten minutes after the convoy got underway that evening, Sno-Cat 1 lost its right rear track. Carter ordered it and its sledge abandoned, and moved into the wanigan behind Sno-Cat 2. The others scattered to various parts of the convoy; Steve and Will crowded into the Nodwell.