The Silent Sea

ANTARCTIC PENINSULA

THE WINDS HAD PICKED UP, SO THE SKY SCREAMED OVER the domes, carrying with it curtains of blowing snow. Such was the oddity that was the planet's most isolated continent that much of it, though snow-covered, is considered a desert, with only trace amounts of precipitation. The peninsula saw far more snowfall than the interior, but it was possible the flakes raking the facility had fallen hundreds of years ago.

This wasn't yet the storm they were anticipating, just a subtle reminder that, no matter what, humanity is an interloper here.

Andy Gangle woke with a screaming headache. It wasn't the dull pain of too much time staring at a computer screen. Rather, it was the sharp stab of drinking something too cold too quickly, and no matter what he did like pressing chemical hand warmers to his temples, as if to defrost his brain nothing helped.

Not the darkened room, not the pain tablets he'd dry-swallowed moments after being struck with the crippling agony. Despite his vehement need for privacy, a low moan escaped his white lips, a plaintive, albeit unintended, call for help. He lay curled in a fetal position on the sweat-soaked tangle of sheets and woolen blankets. Opposite Gangle's bed, and staring down since his arrival, was the iconic image of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at the camera.

He'd won that picture in an eighth-grade science contest, and it had stayed on his wall through high school and had a place of honor in a succession of dorm rooms. It was a little tattered, but whenever he was troubled he would look at the photograph and find the absurdity in whatever was bothering him. If Einstein, with the burden of knowing his equations had helped decimate two Japanese cities, could laugh at the world, then there was nothing going to stop Andy Gangle.

He looked at it now and felt nothing but rage. A blinding rage fueled by the unmitigated agony searing his brain. What did Einstein know of burden? Andy thought. He'd made his mark in physics as a young man and spent the rest of his life doddering around. To hell with him. To hell with them all. Moving faster than he thought possible, Gangle uncoiled his gawky limbs, leapt from the bed, and clawed the poster from the wall. Clear tape adhered four little triangles of paper to the wall, but the rest came off in a sheet. Savagely, Andy tore at the poster, ripping at it with his fingers and teeth, damp confetti falling to the linoleum-tiled decking.

Gina Alexander was passing by Andy's door on the way to her place in the kitchen, thinking that in five days, if the weather held, a big beautiful C-130 Hercules airplane would land on the ice runway a quarter mile inland from the station and that she'd be out there waiting for it. Next stop Chile, then Miami, then . . . what?

She didn't know. Coming to Antarctica had been cathartic, and her time here had put the pain of her husband's betrayal and their divorce into a locked corner of her heart, but she didn't know what would come next. She hadn't thought that far ahead. She considered the possibility of moving closer to her parents, but the very idea of living in a place called Plant City, Florida, grayed her hair and made her fingers curl with imaginary arthritis.

A sound coming from Andy's room as she passed by had a reptilian quality, a dry, rasping hiss, like a monstrous snake or some giant lizard. She paused in midstride and listened. It did not come again. The thought of knocking on Andy's door and asking if he was okay came and went as fast as her mind could process it. If Andy Bug-eyes was having a problem, that was just too bad. He'd alienated the entire team with his odd behavior, and Gina was a firm believer in you reap what you sow.

A minute later, she was greeting a few of the science types, as she warmed the griddle and dropped the first batches of bread into the restaurant-grade toasters.

It would have behooved Gina to check on Andy or tell Greg Lamont, the station commander, what she'd heard.

Andy had discovered a way to dull the pain in his head. It had happened in the frenzied seconds when he was shredding the poster. In his enraged fit to see it utterly destroyed, his coordination was off just enough so when his teeth clamped down on a section of paper, his incisors nipped the flesh to the side of his index fingernail. The blood was a warm combination of copper and salt, not unpleasant, but unexpected in that as soon as it touched his lips the pain spiking behind his eyes dimmed, like an industrial light-bulb goes from glaring white to just an amber glow and then fades to nothing.

The morsel of flesh, as he chewed it, was rubbery, like a pencil eraser that had hardened over time. He contemplated what he was doing, as his finger dripped blood. He brought his hand up to his face, staring in fascination at the patterns the blood made as it dribbled across his skin. He waved his hand to make lines of blood across his palm. He giggled, dipping his finger into the blood and writing on the wall, red smears on clean white plastic. He wrote letters, formed them into words, into a concept he should have seen all along. It was so simple, so perfect. He admitted the line he'd written was crudely formed, blood not being as easy to work with as paint, but the meaning was perfectly clear.

Mime Goering for crow Nicole.

Some instinct, some sense of self-preservation buried deep in his brain, told him to clean himself before he went to find what he needed to carry out his plan. With his finger wrapped in masking tape from his desk and the worst of the blood wiped from his lips, Andy Gangle checked that the hallway was clear and stepped from his room.