208 32 Alice awoke feeling refreshed. She was going to Rasmussen at last. She thought of his lean cragginess, his leathery scent, his capable hands with a feeling of homecoming. Nothing truly disastrous had happened in McMurdo and now she could get on with the plan. A clean slate, her mother would say. “You’re late,” the helicopter flight coordinator told her when she arrived at the helo pad. “I am?” “Yep. You were supposed to fly out on the second.” “What’s this?” “The third.” She had slept through an entire day without realizing it. “No worries.” The flight coordinator weighed Alice and her gear, and then fitted her with a helmet, chatting the whole time. “We can run you over there. We have a pick-up in the Dry Valleys , anyway. In fact, there’s your ride now.” Alice heard the low whine of a helo, looked out and saw it zipping over the sea ice toward McMurdo. It hovered and then touched down. “Let’s go,” the helicopter coordinator shouted to be heard above the engine. “I’m loading you hot.” Alice followed her out to where the helo, the propeller a blur, and its pilot waited. They ran in a crouched position, their heads tucked low, and for a moment she flashed on the Dalai Lama, as if she were humbly approaching him. But as she stepped under the whirring propeller all her attention was focused on avoiding decapitation. She loaded her sleep kit and survival duffel in the cage, clamped it shut, and opened the passenger door. “First time on the Ice?” the pilot asked conversationally as the helo lifted off. She nodded, gripping the door handle so tightly her hand hurt. Then it occurred to her that she might accidentally unlatch the door, so she drew her hand into her lap. “We’re going to tip a little,” the pilot said, and suddenly her body was parallel to the frozen sea. Only her seatbelt held her in place. On the sea ice below, a quartet of black and white Adélie penguins speed-waddled toward some distant destination. Once they got going fast enough, they flopped to their bellies to toboggan for a bit, then popped back to their feet for more hustling. She also saw Weddell seals lounging around cracks in the sea ice. The sight of them chewed at the calm she was trying to maintain. Maybe Jamie had tagged some of those very seals. Alice closed her eyes and kept them closed until the pilot said, “We’ve just crossed McMurdo Sound. We’re leaving the sea ice now. This is the beginning of the Dry Valleys.” The Transantarctic Mountains were a 2,900-kilometer-long range of peaks that offered unaltered sedimentary deposits more than five hundred million years old. The exposed layers, multicolored stripes of red, tan, brown, tawny, and cream, swirled through the rocks, layers of earth laid down over the millennia. Maybe she could make sense of the men in her life if she thought of them as layers in a pit she had dug into a mountain. Even if they were hopelessly scrambled layers, having endured multiple upliftings, volcanic overlays, even human intervention, even then, with the tools of a geologist, she might be able to understand their relationship to one another. There would be the lab technician on the surface, overlaying Jamie, and Rasmussen, all laid down upon the bedrock of the first Frank, and that thin layer of the second Frank. Alice and the pilot flew up the valleys between peaks more perfectly striated than the Grand Canyon, passed over Lake Fryxell, and then over the Canada Glacier where the pilot pointed out two 209 [44.198.169.83] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:05 GMT) tiny human figures walking across the glacier surface. He said that they were biologists studying microorganisms in the ice and that he would be picking them up on his flight back to McMurdo. The beakers waved when the pilot hovered over their heads and gently wagged the helicopter from side to side. Next was Lake Hoare and Lake Chad, and then Mummy Pond where the pilot passed down close to the earth and pointed out the mummy seals, animals that had been dead more than three thousand years, perfectly preserved by the dry, cold climate. No one knew how they’d gotten so far inland in the first place, but there were their bodies, curved among the...