For the first few moments there was nothing but sea foam visible at the bottom of the crevasse. Then the first of two whales glided past the break in their former prison, the enormous animals weakened and scarred by the ice but freed to the ocean once more. As if in salute to its well-intentioned captors, the flukes of the second animal broke the surface of the water, then glided along for a moment before disappearing into the swash. The parted halves of the floe, each relieved of its obligation to the other, bobbed and twisted on the sea as their new mass found equilibrium.
Stunned and mildly shaken, the trio of researchers gazed over the lip of the new canyon in time to see their morning’s work sink beneath the waves. Some of the lighter gear still floated on the surface, and they pawed at it using the long poles they had for probing the ice. As each piece was gingerly retrieved, it was set aside on a large, disposable tarpaulin. Like all gear that touched the water, it would have to be safely contained until the incoming radiation detection equipment could confirm its degree of contamination.
From their position overlooking the ice, those aboard the Phoenix couldn’t help but see — and hear — the massive break.
“Wichita? Wichita, come in…” The team’s surviving walkie-talkie crackled to life with Byrnes’s voice from the bridge of the ship.
“Wichita” was the expedition’s code name for this particular site on the floe. Rather than remembering coordinates or absolute positions, each site was named after a U.S. city in relative direction and distance from where the Phoenix was moored.
“What the hell just happened?” Byrnes asked.
“Stress fracture,” the lead technician reported back. “It was bound to happen eventually.” The new canyon had split the floe in almost a direct line connecting four holes recently drilled in the ice. The weight of the floe was divided across this manmade fault line, and the struggling of the whales below had been enough to finally split the formation in two. As the two halves of the ice continued to drift, the contrived grouping of cities was separated in a line extending from San Francisco to Detroit, with a slight dogleg directly through Wichita. To relieve some of the gravity of the situation, someone offered a well known geological saw: “The earth has moved, but it’s not San Andreas’s fault.”
“How are the whales?” This time it was Carol’s voice on the radio, unmoved by the attempt at levity.
“We lost the two trapped between here and Denver,” the technician replied. “Mom and calf seemed very happy to say goodbye, but we also lost two sample cases and a Snocat. Dammit, Carol, I’m sorry.”
Carol’s hesitation in answering was enough to tell them she wasn’t pleased with the team’s carelessness, but she didn’t for a second doubt the sincerity of the apology.
“Shift happens,” she said. “Pack up whatever you have left and head over to Miami. The male over there looks like he’ll be the next to break loose. See if you can double-up the sampling regime there to make up for the lost material.”
The team confirmed this arrangement.
“Um, could you send us another Snocat too?” the technician asked tentatively.
“Roger that.” It was Byrnes’s voice again. “Though I should make you walk. Snocats aren’t disposable. Technicians are. Phoenix out.”
On the Phoenix, Byrnes signed off and caught Carol’s sharp look.
“Oh Christ, Carol, I didn’t mean anything by that.” It had been exactly a week since Ramsey and Dexter were taken off the ship.
“That’s right, you didn’t,” she said coolly. She noted the breakup of the floe in her log while Garner checked the updated weather conditions with the meteorologists. As the days warmed further, more fractures could be anticipated.
The ice would soon relinquish its grip on the two remaining whales, which would be good for the whales but bad for those on the Phoenix trying to determine the source of the animals’ illness.
“I don’t like this,” Carol admitted to Garner. “With the melting, the drift, and the stress on the floe, it’s only going to get more dangerous out there. We’ve been chopping away at that formation out there for a week now.”
After discussing the available options, they agreed to halt all drilling and digging until the conditions stabilized or there was another good freeze.
“From the ice cores you showed me, it was old ice to begin with,” Garner said. “It survived last summer, maybe the one before that. It’s been frozen and refrozen over the winters, compacted in warmer weather, then cemented together again. It isn’t going to break up in the usual way, assuming there is such a thing as ‘usual.”
“I can’t risk losing anyone else or any more gear,” Carol said. She turned back to Byrnes. “Is it practical to pull everyone except Miami back to the ship by tomorrow noon?”
“The geologists never like breaking camp,” Byrnes said. “But I’m sure we can convince them to finish their coring.”
“Right finish up, but no new holes,” Carol agreed. “Not until the last of the whales is gone. If they want to keep coring, they can take boats out to the smaller, broken pieces.”
“Gotcha, boss. Safety first.”
Again Carol’s thoughts strayed to Dex and Ramsey, lingering for only a moment before she pushed them away for the sake of the matters at hand.
She retrieved the radio fax she had received that morning from Dr. Junko Kokura, the nuclear researcher visiting western Greenland. The authorities there had told Kokura of the Phoenix’s request for help and she had agreed to interrupt her work with the Inuit populations there to come and take a look.
Carol reviewed Kokura’s resume a third time. She was a rare hyphenate in the field of nuclear research, possessing experience both as a nuclear engineer and a field physician studying the effects of radiation on human biology. First at the University of Tokyo, then Georgia Tech, and finally at Johns Hopkins University, Kokura’s research had focused on the effects of industrial radioactive fallout on remote populations.
Along the way she had helped to upgrade the Environmental Measurement Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy and conducted extensive field research on environmental radiation surveillance. Her extensive list of publications included studies of radiation induced cancer, biological effects of radiation, risk assessment and protection standards, health physics, radiation emergency response, and environmental exposure.
“This is unbelievable,” Carol said, handing the fax to Garner. “Not only is our only respondent an unquestionable expert on these kinds of things, but she happens to be in the neighborhood.”
The next twenty-four hours were filled with near-constant activity. The first of two scheduled equipment airdrops brought to the Phoenix a small complement of silvered radiation suits, dosimeters, and gamma spectrometry devices; containment boxes; and other basic field equipment for working in irradiated areas. Carol, Byrnes, and Zubov took an inventory of the new arrivals and began dispensing them to the Phoenix’s crew. The next order of business was to determine whether the ship itself was becoming too contaminated, then to perform an extensive remeasurement of radiation levels all over the site, including levels of specific isotopes whenever possible. Finally, the two remaining Balaenoptera were freed from their attachment to the ice near Miami station only minutes after the Phoenix’s technicians implanted the long-range tracking devices into both whales.