***
Susan drove the second snowmobile, following Jake as he led the way through the storm. Lt. Richards sat behind her on the seat, looking over her shoulder. There had been an argument, though a small one, about who should drive, and the Lieutenant received a lesson in dealing with Susan when her mind was focused on something she wanted. The message was simply ‘stand down or stand clear’.
With the annual sea ice having broken up in recent days, the three had no choice but to follow the edge of the permanent ice shelf. They traveled through the storm without fear, only because the route was well marked and broken in by regular traffic by scientists working the area. The route from Cape Armitage to Cape Chocolate on Salmon Bay was flagged and safe. There they would turn due north and eventually intersect and follow the path of the dog teams until, hopefully, they caught them. Though the Alpines moved at a far faster rate than the dog teams, they had a much longer track to follow. And the group that included Sokolov, Frodo, and Geoff had a significant head start.
Susan felt reasonably sure that her ruse will have worked. Her reputation alone should have been enough, but experience should have taught the Captain to distrust anything she said and to expect that anything she did would be to lead him in the wrong direction. He would have to conclude that she was misleading him now, and determine that if she were acting as if she were taking the Russian to Terra Nova, he could be sure that Sokolov could be anywhere but there. Susan was, at the moment, quite pleased with herself.
It was cold driving into the windblown snow, but she didn’t want to stop. She had been aching for the opportunity to be going somewhere, and while this was not what she had intended for the conclusion of her field season, it would have to do. She could forget about the remaining three years on her grant anyway, she might as well go out big since there was zero chance of ever being welcomed back again anyway.
They made camp at Butter Point, which was on the edge of an area of sea ice called New Harbour. On the other side was Hogsback Hill, where the dog teams had come ashore. The ice appeared to be stable even with the main part of the sound having been blown out. Jake said that he thought the storm would abate in a few hours, and they were due for a break anyway.
Making camp in an Antarctic storm after sitting motionlessly on the back of a snowmobile for several hours is a challenge. Cold muscles are reluctant to move. Simple feats seem superhuman with a metabolism that has slowed, begging for sleep. They worked like drones, focusing on setting the tents, cutting blocks for the latrine. When the two tents were secure the three of them looked at each other uncomfortably.
“You can still change your mind,” Jake said to Susan, breaking the silence and nodding towards his tent. His banter sounded flat in the wind and on tired ears, to the effect that it did not sound like joking at all.
“I can still kick your butt,” she replied gamely, adding an element of levity that his comment seemed to lack.
“Ah,” Jake said, nodding gravely. “That’s true. I’d forgotten. Well, good night then.”
Jake disappeared into his tent and Susan and the Lieutenant into theirs.
“That was a little harsh,” Lt. Richards said to Susan when they were inside.
“What was?” she asked.
“What you said to Jake just now. For all the joshing, I still think he has some feelings for you, and that they may be hurt.”
“Feelings?” Susan said, scoffing. “What makes you think he has feelings? He’s an oaf; a funny one, but an oaf.”
Susan laughed as she said this, she was joking after all, but Lt. Richards sat stiffly and uncomfortably wrapped in his sleeping bag anyway.
“I’m not arguing his case,” he said as a disclaimer, “but you can be pretty casual about tramping on peoples sensitivities sometimes. That’s all I’m saying. Go easy on him.”
“So what, do you feel trampled on? Is that what this is about?”
“No, I don’t. I just think it must be hard on him, all of us in close quarters like this, and you being with me. It’s hard on a guy. I know what I would be feeling if it were me in the other tent.”
Susan let out her breath and sank down with a groan.
“So, what do you want from me? Am I supposed to go jump into his sleeping bag now, so he doesn’t feel left out? Is that what you want?”
“Of course not.”
“Well then, quit complaining.”`
At some point during the night the wind slackened, but it didn’t stop completely. Jake was the first to emerge from the shelters and he stretched as he looked out over the landscape they could not see when they stopped.
“Anybody else getting up today, or am I it?” he said to the other tent.
There was a rustling of nylon and the sound of zippers, before the other two came out and joined him in the stillness.
“Did you make coffee?” Susan asked Jake, who stood silently and watched her and the Lieutenant getting their things in order.
“Sweetheart,” he said in as dignified manner as he could assume, “as you can see I make a great many allowances for you, but that would be an excess of affection under the circumstances, don’t you think?”
Lt. Richards looked at Jake uncomfortably, and then busied himself with digging out the Alpines.
“Which circumstances are you talking about?” Susan couldn’t help but ask. She thought about the Lieutenants’ admonishment of the night before and wondered if Jake were in fact masking his thoughts with innuendo and if she were wounding him by responding in kind. It wasn’t that she was unaware that she had a propensity to be blunt, but it still seemed unlikely that Jake would be affected by it.
Jake sighed.
“Ok. Have it your own way then,” he said.
Nothing had changed in the way that Jake said the things he did, and Susan wouldn’t have noticed anything to be different except for the Lieutenants comments to her, but she recognized that there was something missing in the way he spoke to her. He almost did sound as if he was speaking truthfully. She preferred it the old way.
“That’s alright, Darling, I’ll do it,” she said, playing her part to see if she could get him to respond like he always would have. He merely nodded.
There was a discussion as to whether the conditions were acceptable to continue the journey, and it was decided that they would remain where they were for a few hours and see if the weather would improve. It wasn’t bad, but they would be traversing an area that required visibility and it would be less risky to wait for the storm to clear out. Susan took the opportunity to explore the geology of the escarpment against which their camp was abutted. She took Jake with her; Lieutenant Richards went back into the tent.
Lieutenant Richards pulled his sleeping bag up to his hips, overlapping his parka, and leaned against a duffle bag of equipment. He went about examining his notes to pass the time, he still considered himself employed in the project with which he had been tasked, and began to draw conclusions from the data he had recovered. There was something that seemed to be not quite in line with what his other observations were and he was puzzled. Next to him was Susan’s pack with her field notes lying open and he looked for her pages that aligned with his to see if he could clear things up. The differences were subtle, but different enough to precipitate vastly opposing perspectives on what the net findings implied. He set the papers down and stared at the tent walls, his expression showing contrasting emotions, the eyes wide with disbelief, the cheeks and mouth hanging with a sadness that understood all too well.
Susan entered the tent when she and Jake were back from taking stock of the local geology. She saw his expression and asked him what was wrong. He held up the offending paper.
“Oh,” she said. “Going through my things? I might have expected that from Jake, but you?”
She spoke in a joking manner, as if to make light of her new predicament, but her eyes showed something akin to fear, the fear that something she didn’t want to change was suddenly being torn apart.
br /> “I wasn’t snooping. I was going through my notes and something seemed wrong. Yours were right there and I wanted to see if I could figure it out. I did,” he said, looking away from her.
“That was before,” she started to say, her voice pleading for understanding. “That was before, before everything. You know how it was before.”
“I know you never approved of my job here,” he said, “but I never thought you capable of lying to me, and continuing to lie after, well, after everything.”
“I wanted to tell you, and I didn’t do it anymore after I knew how you felt about what it means to find the deposits here. You didn’t want to find anything either. Do you blame me for trying to make sure that you didn’t?”
He shook his head in the negative, in a sign that could have been determined to mean that he did not find fault, but that image was soon dispelled.
“Blame?” he said. “How can I blame you? You were only doing what you thought was right and being who you are. The fact that I would never do the same thing towards you only makes us different. I guess we are different, in ways that are more difficult to bridge than I thought.”
“And you don’t call that blame?” she said, her voice rising from the angst of being condemned for doing the only sane thing someone in her position could. “You were sent here to destroy this place. I wasn’t going to allow it. Even you agreed that it couldn’t be allowed to happen. Ok, I didn’t tell you what I was doing. I’m sorry. But don’t treat me like I’m some kind of ogre and you’re some kind of saint. I’m the one who has been on the right side of this all along.”
“You are not an ogre, and I am not a saint. But you are always just so right all the time. So right in fact, that doing what you think needs to be done absolves you from any responsibility to act decently, even toward me. I’m sorry too. I’ve never wanted to be so right that I could act that way; especially not towards you.”
Susan declined to see the justice in his argument, and began to bundle her things together.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Somewhere else!” she yelled at him.
“There aren’t many places you can go,” he pointed out reasonably.
“I’ll find one.”
She left the door of the Lieutenants’ tent flapping in the wind and tore open Jake’s, throwing the bedding in on top of him.
“At long last,” Jake said without turning over to look at her, “you return. If only you knew with what anticipation I’ve dreamed of your coming back to me. I may even forgive you, in time.”
“Don’t start with me,” she said. “I’m not in the mood.”
“Doesn’t it matter if I am? Besides I’m serious.”
“Oh good God, that’s all I need.”
“Interesting you should point that out,” Jake said, twisting in his sleeping bag to face her. “I have been pondering that very question. It’s just what you need, for me to make an honest woman of you. Not that I haven’t tried, you know, but the soil I’ve tilled has so far not proven to be fertile. But I think it can be.”
“Do we really need to do this right now?” Susan said, tears welling up in her eyes, and a sob escaping despite her attempt to hold it back. “Can’t you see I’m dying here?”
It was plain enough to see that what she said was true and Jake, abandoning the demeanor he wore only for her, sat up and put an arm across her shoulder.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s got to be hard, even though the outcome was inevitable from the start. But you bucked the odds and went with your heart, or something sort of like one anyway, and that’s admirable.”
“What do you know about it?” she asked, though she was sorry for the harsh tone immediately.
“Darling,” he said, “how thick do you think these tent walls are? I know exactly how many times you roll over in your sleep at night. I know that you murmur something after you do before making a single snore and falling back asleep. I’d have to be deaf not to hear you yell.”
“Well then, if you know so much, was I wrong to do what I did? You were there the whole time. Hell, you encouraged it.”
He thought for a moment before answering.
“That’s true, I did. But that was before I got to know him as a person, and just thought of him as an ‘it’.”
“So, how do you think I feel?” she asked him, implying that if Jake saw it that way, she must do so infinitely more.
“Doesn’t that answer your question for you?” Jake said, quietly.
“I know,” she agreed. “I feel like crap.”
He nodded agreement without verbalizing the sentiment.
“You can get over that,” he said. “But that doesn’t solve the problem of what he told you a few minutes ago. You are different. Not just in opinions about things, but you’re different types of people. You may be drawn together by a kind of magnetism, but that’s the problems with magnets. You align them in ever so slightly a different way and they repel just as strongly as they attracted before. Your alignment was bound to shift at some point.”
Susan leaned back and looked at Jake for some sign that he was toying with her, then turned back the way she was before, the two of them sitting side-by-side.
“I know. I guess I’ve always known,” she said. “Thank you for not making light of this, at least not right now. You know, you’re a pretty good friend after all.”
He made much of sighing deeply and frowned.
“I know. I can’t help it.”
“Well, it won’t kill you,” Susan said, again regretting the tone she took with him, which had become a habit. If it turned out that his attitude towards her was an act, what did it make hers towards him? It worried her that her ability to play the harpy came so easily.
“That, my Dear,” Jake said, “remains to be seen.”