Under the Ice

The light changed as they went beyond the mouth of the cave. Gradually there was a blue-green glow, utterly different from the Antarctica of grey sea and white ice that had surrounded them for weeks.

The small boat buzzed between the high buttresses of ice, transparent walls with a core of aquamarine.

“It’s warm,” said Keith. His glasses were fogging with the heat as he sat squeezed between the battery sled and the piles of supplies.

“It’s twenty degrees Celsius inside. You won’t know yourself,” smiled Calla, unhooking her parka and shaking out her curly red hair. This smile had drawn Keith thousands of miles into one of the most remote places on earth, including two months of seasickness getting to Antarctica.

“Can you feel the steam?” she continued, “It’s all the way from Mount Erebus. Just enough to eat its way through the ice and make these caves.”

“Not going to cook us, is it?” Keith asked nervously. He’d asked this before but been given equivocal answers.

“Nah. The ice does a good job of cooling it down. Mostly.” Calla was laughing at him. Antarctic scientists weren’t supposed to be nervous.

Turning another corner, ducking under a lip of ice, soon the rubber dinghy ground against shingle. Here was actual rock and earth, the first they’d seen for weeks.

Rob, keeper of the motor, tossed Calla the rope and she leapt with it over the side onto firm ground and hauled them up further. Keith staggered a little as he stood on the slippery pebbles. He touched the ground reverently.

“Terra firma at last”

Calla was looking up at the glowing, curving roof above them. Over the icy blue was a layer of life. The more their eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, the more they could see it.

“Here it is. Photosynthesis in Antarctica.” Wonder shone through her.

“Oy, give us a hand here.” Rob was impatient to unload the goods and get back for the next trip. It took half an hour to haul the heavy battery sled off the dinghy. The boxes of equipment and supplies were easier, encased in metal and plastic to protect them from the elements, although not from being dropped overboard.

Calla insisted on the tarp being laid under everything. “We have to try and keep it as pristine as possible. Just being here, we’re going to contaminate it, but we can minimize that.”

Rob took off, leaving the two scientists on the dark beach, surrounded by bright ice. “Back in two hours with the others” he said. “That’ll be ten hours on shore altogether.”

Calla was already pulling off her gloves and looking for her microscope as Keith set up the power supply and the radio. This was his field, plugging things in so other people could use them.

When the last sounds of the boat died away, the cave quietened. Small waves lapped at the shingle, the ice creaked and snapped distantly, echoing. Every movement they made was loud in the relative stillness.

“It’s a bit eerie, isn’t it?”

“Extraordinary,” Calla replied “Fantastic, amazing.” She was still looking around with a grin on her face. “Wonderful.”

Later, a burst of static from the radio stopped him thinking about how amazing and wonderful he thought Calla was.

“ASRV Everest here. Cave Base do you hear me? Over.”

Keith grabbed the handpiece. “Yep, what’s up? Over.”

“That storm we thought was going south has turned around. We need to get you out of there. Over.”

Calla was shaking her head. Keith thought he’d have to drag her away while she clung to the rocks like a limpet, now she was in the place she’d been trying to reach for so long.

“You’re sending the dinghy back for us? What about the others? Over.”

“They’re staying here. Things are going to get rough. Over.”

Keith thought about more days of riding steeply up and down plunging cliffs of grey water, spray streaming sideways in the wind, and wished he hadn’t. He felt seasick again already.

Calla grabbed the handpiece. “We’re here now. Come back when the storm’s done. Over.”

The little ripples had actually become small waves already, sucking up and down beneath the lip they’d ducked under to enter the inner cave. As they watched the waves grew and the muted song of the cave became a high whistle.

Keith took the handpiece back again. “We're okay. I don’t think we’ll get out now, actually. Over.”

There was a pause, obviously some consultation going on outside in the baying storm.

“Okay. Rob agrees, probably won’t be able to get back in to you. Stay safe. Over.”

“Got that. Over”

Calla was jumping up and down, pumping her fists in the air. “Yay, we stay.”

Keith was less excited. Now that he couldn’t leave, the strangeness of the glowing blue-green cave was more threatening than comforting.

But he was with Calla. That was the important thing.

Together they hauled the equipment above any possible slopping of the sea. The lip over the entrance was regularly disappearing now, but it muffled the rough movement enough of the pool in front of them; still quite smooth, just surging and falling more than previously.

Calla was immediately absorbed into her project. “Let’s get some samples!” she said excitedly. She was indefatigable, scraping at the walls at the corners of the cave and filling tiny tubes until the light faded and Keith needed to set up the lights. It was early enough in the summer season that daylight did actually fade away for a few hours.

“This is so cool. It’s definitely algae, but it’s not anything like a species I’ve seen before. And there’s that fungi, and there’s going to be so many new things. It’s like being here at the dawn of a civilization, when you see the first colony that came bring life to a whole continent…”

Keith was checking through their food supplies. Enough for four people for twelve hours should do two people for a few days well enough.

As long as the storm didn’t keep the ARSV Everest away too long.

Later, when Calla was finally willing to rest, although she was still quivering with excitement, they lay on the tarp, using their heavy outdoor clothing for padding, looking up at the icy ceiling.

“Did you always want to be a scientist?” Keith asked.

“Even before I knew what that was,” she replied. “We lived in Canada, and we had a skating pool at the bottom of the garden. Lots of kids had shallow ones that just made a thin layer of ice, but ours was deeper and you could paddle around in the summer. Instead of skating I used to lie on it staring into the ice trying to see what had frozen into it. You could see bubbles, fish, anything that had ever fallen in…the other kids thought I was nuts.”

“You’re...weird,” he said, meaning breathtaking.

“I know. It’s so great to be here, in a place where people actually get what it’s all about, the stupendousness of life on earth, and that the most astounding thing is that we exist at all.”

Keith wanted to stroke her tumbling hair, her lips, watching the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed her excitement. But they were colleagues and stuck together for days. If she rejected him, what would happen then?

Surely there could be no better moment?

Calla broke the mood obliviously. “I know what this cave looks like.”

“What?”

“A big toilet bowl, with the sea flushing in and out.”

It did.

“Speaking of which…” Keith had already been told off for trying to pee up against the walls.

Calla thought for a while, then provided one of her two sampling buckets.

Three days later, Keith was getting worried about the ship. Calla was still busy making notes and doing initial analysis of her first samples.

There had been nothing from the radio. He divided the rest of the food into smaller portions, in case the storm kept the ship away for longer.

What if anything had happened to the ARSV Everest? Would anyone know they were here? How long could they survive?

A week later, and it seemed they had known one another forever. Calla would shout “Teeth!” every time Keith started tapping his pencil against them, a favourite thinking habit. She would also shout if he stepped off the tarp onto the ice “Don’t contaminate the cave!”

He had begun to hold a finger up whenever she muttered about the lack of comparison samples and the limitations of the small portable microscope. “Back in the ship…” she’d start, and then stop, looking guiltily at Keith.

They’d described family and friends and their favourite holidays, the things that brought them to this place. The more he knew about Calla, the more fascinated he became, and the more fearful of being rejected.

He tried to talk about what to do next, but she just shook her head and turned away. They would not survive forever, even with a steady supply of melt water and reasonable warmth. The two-way radio brought back nothing but static. The battery was running low, despite his care in managing it.

The next day, the distant roar of the storm disappeared, making the echoes in the cave sound much louder.

Still no response on the two-way.

He spent three days wiring up the second handset to make a mayday beacon. It wasn't likely to penetrate the ice to reach a satellite or research station and he had no way to float it out the cave mouth.

Calla was still detailing the structure of the algae, then moving on to the moss. With the beacon finished, he had too much time to think.

“We need limericks,” he announced on day twenty.

“Huh?”

“Like, there once was a man from Nantucket, who kept all his brains in a bucket…you know”

Over the next few days the ancient cave echoed to terrible poetry.

“Our ancestor was an amoeba, who grew and evolved in a fever, the further it grew, the more facts it knew, but no one could hear an amoeba,” Calla howled at the walls, laughing.

“I know how the amoeba feels” Keith said.

Still nothing from the two-way.

They sang songs, “Born Free, as free as the wind blows…” was a favourite. Calla tried to flick back her hair as if it was streaming in the wind, but it had become sticky and stiff with salt. Keith tried raking it with his fingers, but got them stuck and caused a fight.

“Lean on me, darling, darling, lean on me…” sang Keith, pulling at Calla, but she resisted and the attempt fell into a pushing game.

“Probably we’ve been here so long our DNA has been incorporated into something in this cave. It’ll be changed forever.” Calla said.

“At least there’ll be some trace of us. In a million years there’ll be a Keithalla, or a Callath, a squid thing that’s our descendant.”

“Perhaps there’s no-one out there.” On day twenty-five, Calla looked vulnerable.

Keith reached out. “Someone will come.”

She pulled her hand away and seemed to fold in on herself.

“How about krill for breakfast?” he asked.

“Great idea!” Calla managed a shadow of her usual enthusiasm. They sifted the water around the entry to the cave but caught only a teaspoon of edible things. Their idea of edible had expanded remarkably.

Keith decided to make his move. They were going to die anyway. No more hesitation.

A static hiss. “Kssh, Cave Team, are you there? Over."

Calla whooped, grabbed Keith and hugged him. “We're getting out of the toilet!”

He took that glowing face and kissed it. “I thought you liked it here?”

“I do.” She kissed him back.

Keith grabbed the two-way handset "Cave Team to Everest. We're busy here. Come back tomorrow. Over."