“See? It’s all in how you look at things.”
In this world of permanent wind and ice, arguably the birthplace for weather patterns all over the globe, the Lansing provided a work platform for three dozen people for up to seven weeks. Stowed in virtually every available space was the equipment and personnel for no fewer than six distinct research studies, each with its own need for access to the ship’s fulltime crew. The pecking order for sampling time on station was only occasionally a democratic process. Often, several wholly unrelated experiments were tossed together on the same manifest, selected as much for their ability to fit with the other pieces on board as for their scientific merit, political clout, or supposed urgency. The complement of principal investigators on this cruise included an ozone specialist, two ocean physicists, a polar geologist, a chemist, and Garner, the only biologist. Early on, the Lansing’s fulltime crew had known that this would be a cruise for sick bags and, so far, their temporary charges the researchers and science crew had borne out that expectation. All except Garner, the last to get his sampling gear out of the water and the first to get it wet again the next day.
Everything about the way he tackled his sampling protocol suggested that he’d seen far worse conditions than this.
Despite outward appearances. Garner himself felt as though he hadn’t slept in days. His sharp gray eyes remained clear and focused above a week’s growth of beard, but he had been dressed in his cold weather suit for so long that it had come to feel like an extension of his skin. The muscles throughout his lean, six-foot-two-inch frame ached and more than once he had felt his knees begin to tremble from sheer exhaustion. Nonetheless, he drove his data collection forward as if it were some kind of vendetta, which in a way it was.
Zubov’s assignment was to assist that vendetta. A husky Ukrainian who exceeded Garner’s own height by two inches and outweighed him by a hundred pounds, Zubov had a thick beard and a head of curly black hair that, taken with his massive frame, made him look more like a lumberjack or professional wrestler than an electronics technician.
The radio in his hand crackled.
“Fifty meters and rising. One minute,” said Donny Clark, the winch operator and the only other crewman obligated to be on deck in these conditions.
Zubov relayed the tow status to Garner, who took the radio and spoke into it.
“I need my baby brought in fast, Donny,” he said.
“Fast as you can as soon as she hits the surface. I’ll give you the word.”
Zubov took the radio back.
“He means as fast as we can, not as fast as you can,” he said to Clark.
Their intent was to retrieve their sampling instruments from the water and get them onto the deck before they could be damaged by the waves, bounced off the hull, or lost to the sea below. But Zubov knew from experience that if the cable were taken in faster than he and Garner could accommodate the slack, one of them could suddenly and violently end up on the wrong side of the railing.
The object of Garner’s professional passion — currently being hauled back to the ship from a depth of one hundred meters — was a five-foot-diameter sphere crafted from titanium, glass, and PVC packed with electronics, cameras, sensors, and various bottle sampling devices. The water-intake ports on the front of the device distinctly resembled eyes, nostrils, and a mouth, and in conjunction with the ungainly array of electronics sprouting from the top of the sphere, the device was given an obvious nickname: the Medusa sphere. It was the latest in an unattractive but innovative series of machines designed by Garner himself to sample and record communities of plankton — microscopic plant and animal life — as they subsisted below the surface of the storm-tossed Southern Ocean.
As Garner and Zubov peered into the wake-washed sea behind the Lansing, Medusa emerged from the murky depths and came into view just beneath the surface.
Medusa’s depth here was immaterial; as each wave heaved the Lansing up, then down, the “depth” of the fifty thousand-dollar sampler could vary by as much as a five-story building.
The deck was suddenly alive with motion and the sound of mechanical adjustment.
The winches holding Medusa’s cables whined to life, acting in concert with the large A-frame that angled back over the Lansing’s stern.
Garner made eye contact with the winch operator: Get ready.
The Lansing’s bow tilted sharply down into another wave trough and the wire connected to Medusa pulled in sharply, along the hull.
“Now!” Garner shouted, spun his arm in the air to signal Clark, then lunged across the deck to join Zubov as Medusa broke the surface. The timing was perfect: as the wire angled back down, away from the hull, the gleaming sphere shot from the water. It dangled in midair and away from any obstacles, suspended from the Lansing’s A-frame boom.
The bow crashed down again and Medusa angled inboard as Clark paid out enough line to lower the device toward Zubov’s outstretched arms. Garner swung around his friend and slammed the stern rail closed to prevent Medusa from sliding back overboard. Momentarily distracted, Garner didn’t see Zubov lose his tenuous grasp on the sampler as it wheeled dangerously away from him. The mundane operational ballet they had practiced countless times suddenly went dangerously awry.
“I’m losing her!” Zubov shouted, drawing Garner’s attention. By the time Garner whirled around. Medusa was already out over the railing and Zubov was straining after it. A length of the sampler’s thick communications cable had snagged around Zubov’s waist and threatened to snap his spine if the device were to suddenly drop from its present position.
“Hang on!” Garner shouted, trying to wrestle the cable away from his friend.
Zubov still leaned perilously out over the rail, one hand gripping one of Medusa’s wings to prevent the device from swinging any further.
Now the increased tension in the cable wrenched Garner to the deck as he lost his footing. Zubov let out a gasp as Medusa’s full weight pulled him out over the water. Clark was frozen at the winch controls, unable to assist the men without allowing Medusa to swing freely. Zubov grimaced again as the cable pinned him tighter, threatening to rip him through the bars of the railing or topple him over it.
“Let go of it!” Garner shouted again. “I’ll cut it loose.”
“Not a chance!” Zubov yelled back.
Though the five-hundred-meter cable was sheathed in Kevlar, Garner had engineered a breakaway chink every few feet on the cable to allow for maintenance and repair and potential emergencies like this. In seconds he had the cable’s armor stripped away and drew a knife to slice through the electronics inside.
Before the knife went to work, the Lansing finally pitched forward again and Medusa came back over the deck. Clark let out more slack and Medusa came quickly to the deck. Still prone. Garner pulled himself across the pitching deck and clipped Medusa to the deck with a pair of safety lines.
As suddenly as it had started, the peril abated.
“That’s why we don’t deploy instruments in thirty-foot seas.” Zubov glared at Garner.
“We being those of us with less-ambitious sampling requirements. Us being everyone but you.” His complaint was only semi-serious. At twenty thousand dollars a day, the researchers aboard the Lansing couldn’t afford to wait for more agreeable weather. As winter set in, four days of stormy weather would begin to look relatively attractive when weighed against the next four months.
Very soon the waters through Drake Passage would be whipped into conditions fully deserving of their reputation as the most dangerous in the world. Bounded on three sides by land, the Weddell Sea is a convenient repository for wind, waves, and ice. These elements roll and recirculate in a permanent maelstrom, a meteorological testament to the bitterness of the Antarctic. More than in any other body of water, sanctuary in the Southern Ocean is far away and sparsely distributed.