1537 words (6 minute read)

Chapter 3

Maitri Antarctic Station, Schirmacher Oasis, Antarctica - 

Srini lowered the binoculars and exhaled. He’d been holding his breath to prevent the lenses from fogging up. The vapor formed a thick cloud in front of his face, some no doubt collecting on the tiny icicles that hung from his nose, eyelashes, and cheeks. 

I’ll never get used to this place, he thought to himself as he stowed the binoculars in their case and took the cap off his permanent marker. Normal ball-point pens were useless in Antarctica: the ink froze too easily. That, and about a million other small absurdities conspired to remind him just how far from home he was. 

He quickly jotted the data from his visual inspection of the glacier in his small, black field notebook. Relative height, apparent mass, signs of recent calving. Normally, he brought a digital camera to supplement his notes with photos, but the last functioning camera battery had been fried when one of the grad students reached for it without grounding himself first. The air here was so dry that a spark of static electricity could generate enough voltage to fry delicate electronics. The resupply mission carrying the replacement batteries hadn’t arrived yet. 

The wind picked up, and a blast of cold air hit him hard in the face. Srini gasped in spite of himself. He was much better acclimated to the climate now than he had been when he arrived for his first season, eight years ago as a callow grad student. Although he’d been obsessed with the continent and its frigid, terrifying expanse since he was a child, his first expedition to the station had also been the first time he had ever travelled more than twenty miles outside of New Delhi in his life. Nothing about his adolescence in the sweltering city could have prepared him for just how cold it would be here. 

The transition had been a difficult one, but he had persevered. He loved Antarctica for its strangeness, its inhuman beauty. Working at Maitri was like being on an alien planet. Just surviving here was an adventure. He grinned in spite of the harsh wind. Of all the billions of people on the planet, how many could claim to see what he had seen? How many in the history of the human race could claim to have stood at the foothills of the Transantarctic Mountains, walked across the Beardmore Glacier, or watched the migration of the great emperor penguins?

One day during his second season, Sanjay, the geologist, had brought a bottle of Laphroaig scotch with him as the two had been taking ice core measurements. When they had finished, he produced both the bottle and a small collapsible travel cup, which he handed to Srini with a conspiratorial grin. With his multitool he chipped off a small piece of one of the discarded cores, dropped it into the cup, and slowly poured the scotch out over it. 

“Eighteen year old scotch,” he said with a sly glance at Srini. “Five hundred thousand year old ice.”

The wind finally died down, and Srini pulled himself out of his reverie. The sun was sinking low in the sky, and there were too few daylight hours in the winter season for him to waste them by daydreaming. He glanced down at his notes, blinked a few times, and frowned. The figures swam before his eyes for a moment as he shook his head vigorously. 

Those numbers can’t be right, he thought, frowning. He closed his notebook and took the binoculars out again. This time he didn’t think to hold his breath, and he cursed as he tried to sight the glacier’s peak through the elevation figures printed on the lenses. But the figures matched what he saw. 

Srini put the binoculars away a second time and turned his back on the glaciers as he began the long walk back to the station. With each step, he redid the calculations in his head. There was something he wasn’t seeing. Some bit of mental math he’d clearly gotten wrong. 

The sun had almost set by the time he could see the outlines of the small, efficiently-built structures that made up Maitri Station. For a moment he thought he saw a swarm of mosquitoes hovering above  the motor pool where they kept the tracked vehicles, but the little dots in his vision disappeared when he tried to focus on them. 

Hallucinations, he thought to himself with relief. That’s all. Yet another aspect of Antarctica life he didn’t think he would ever get used to. The oxygen content in the atmosphere was low enough to affect even the hardiest explorer once they’d been here a few months. It was an unnerving part of the job, but something they had all been trained for, and come to accept as just another part of the strange world they had chosen to inhabit for so much of their lives. Hallucinations, at least, were explicable. The mistake he’d made in the observations were probably a similar effect. 

Opening the door to the station felt like sliding into a warm bath. It was probably no warmer than 19 degrees centigrade inside, but he might as well have been in a jacuzzi. The frost on his face began melting, and he reached for a tissue as his nose began to run. 

Gayatri was sitting on the couch in the computer lab, her eyes dancing over graphs on her laptop as she chewed absentmindedly on the end of a pencil. Her legs were tucked up under her as she half lay, half sat in a strange contorted posture that she swore helped her do her best thinking. She gave him a bare nod of acknowledgement, born from the easy familiarity between people who had worked and lived together in close quarters for eighteen months. 

“How was the walk?” she asked absently, her eyes returning to her screen. 

Srini stripped off his coat and gloves. “I’m starting to hallucinate.”

“The mosquitoes?” 

“Yes.” Gayatri nodded, her focus still on her work. “I think it was playing tricks with my eyesight. Can you take a look at these for me?” He pulled the notebook out of his coat pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it in mid-air, frowned at him, but slipped the elastic band off the cover. Her eyes narrowed as she quietly read through his notes. 

Finally, she snorted. “Yeah, that’s crazy. Want to compare with satellite?”

“Do we have something recent?”

She nodded, unfolding herself from her unusual sitting position. “Yeah, it just came in eight hours ago. Let’s have a look.” She padded over to one of the old desktops, a five year old machine running an even older operating system with a keyboard that stuck from too many exhausted grad assistants spilling too many cups of coffee. Gayatri sat on the battered office chair and clicked through a series of directories. 

“So you finally cracked, huh?” she teased as she navigated through the satellite images. “I guess that must be a side effect of being so old.”

Srini rolled his eyes and leaned over her shoulder. “I’m a year and a half older than you, Gayatri.”

“Yeah, but it’s the mileage. Here it is.” She leaned closer, squinting at the black-and-white image on the screen. It showed a birds-eye view of the familiar contours of the ice-shelf the station sat on, the mountains, the coastline, and the glacier Srini had been sent to observe. 

Neither one spoke for awhile. Gayatri glanced back down at Srini’s notebook and eyed the figures again. “That’s not…” she started to say, before trailing off nervously. 

“No,” he answered, not needing to hear the rest of the question. “Can you bring up the previous image?” 

She nodded silently, and clicked open a second file. She layered the two images on top of each other until they were perfectly aligned, then switched between the one and the other. The file dates were only two weeks apart, and the pictures were almost identical. Almost. 

“Let’s go back another two weeks. Can you bring back the image from a month ago?” 

This time, knowing what they were looking for, the difference was obvious the moment she opened the file. Srini heard her gasp audibly. 

It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. Nonetheless, the numbers were there in his notebook. He’d seen if with his own eyes. Even if he hadn’t, the jpeg on the screen in front of them was irrefutable. 

“What do we do?” Srini had known Gayatri since they were undergraduates. He had heard her voice be condescending, kind, sarcastic, flirtatious, and irritated. But he had never heard fear in her voice before. Not like that. The thought chilled him worse than the Antarctic wind. 

He forced himself to swallow before answering, not trusting himself to keep the emotion out of his voice. “Send these back to Delhi. And make hard copies. And alert the Russian team at Vladisov Station that we’re preparing for immediate evacuation.”