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"If Polar Queen struck any one of these thousands of bergs, she could have gone to the bottom in less time than it takes to tell about it."
"A thought I don't care to dwell on."
"Anything on your side?" asked Giordino.
"Nothing but gray, undistinguished rock poking through a blanket of white snow. I can only describe it as sterile monotony."
Giordino made another notation on his chart and checked the airspeed against his watch. "Twenty kilometers from the whaling station, and no sign of passengers from the cruise ship."
Pitt nodded in agreement. "Certainly nothing I can see that resembles a human."
"Maeve Fletcher said they were supposed to put the second party ashore at a seal colony."
"The seals are there all right," Pitt said, gesturing below. "Must be over eight hundred of them, all dead."
Giordino raised in his seat and peered out the port window as Pitt banked the
helicopter in a gentle descending turn to give him a better view. The yellow-brown bodies of big elephant seals packed the shoreline for nearly a kilometer. From fifty meters in the air, they looked to be sleeping, but a sharp look soon revealed that not one moved.
"It doesn't look like the second excursion group left the ship," said Giordino.
There was nothing more to see, so Pitt swung the aircraft back on a course over the surf line. "Next stop, the Argentinean research station."
"It should be coming into view at any time."
"I'm not looking forward to what we might find," said Pitt uneasily.
"Look on the bright side." Giordino smiled tightly. "Maybe everybody said to hell with it, packed up and went home."
"Wishful thinking on your part," Pitt replied. "The station is highly important for its work in atmospheric sciences. It's one of five permanently occupied survey stations that measure the behavior and fluctuations of the Antarctic ozone hole."
"What's the latest news on the ozone layer?"
"Weakening badly in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres," Pitt answered seriously. "Since the large cavity over the Arctic pole has opened, the amoeba shaped hole in the south, rotating in clockwise direction from polar winds, has traveled over Chile and Argentina as high as the forty-fifth parallel. It also passed across New Zealand's South Island as far as Christchurch. The plant and animal life in those regions received the most harmful dose of ultraviolet radiation ever recorded."
"Which means we'll have to pile on the suntan lotion;" Giordino said sardonically.
"The least of the problem," said Pitt. "Small overdoses of ultraviolet radiation badly damage every agricultural product from potatoes to peaches. If the ozone values drop a few more percentage points, there will be a disastrous loss of food crops around the world."
"You paint a grim picture."
"That's only the background," Pitt continued. "Couple that with global warming and increasing volcanic activity, and the human race could see a rise in sea level of thirty to ninety meters in the next two hundred years. The bottom line is that we've altered the earth in a terrifying way we don't yet understand--"
"There!" Giordino abruptly cut in and pointed. They were coming over a shoulder of rock that sloped toward the sea. "Looks more like a frontier town than a scientific base."
The Argentinean research and survey station was a complex of ten buildings, constructed with solid steel portal frames that supported dome roofs. The hollow walls had been thickly filled with insulation against the wind and frigid cold. The antenna array for gathering scientific data on the atmosphere festooned the domed roofs like the leafless branches of trees in winter. Giordino tried one last time to raise somebody on the radio while Pitt circled the buildings.
"Still quiet as a hermit's doorbell," Giordino said uneasily as he removed the earphones.
"No outstretched hand from a welcome committee," Pitt observed.
Without a further word he settled the helicopter neatly beside the largest of the six buildings, the rotor blades whipping the snow into a shower of ice crystals. A pair of snowmobiles and an all-terrain tractor sat deserted, half buried in snow. There were no footprints to be seen, no smoke curled from the vents.
No smoke or at least white vapor meant no, inhabitants, none that were alive at any rate. The place looked eerily deserted. The blanket of white gave it a ghostly look indeed, thought Pitt.
"We'd better take along the shovels stored in the cargo bay," he said. "It looks like we're going to have to dig our way in."
It required no imagination at all to fear the worst. They exited the aircraft and trudged through snow up to their thighs until they reached the entrance to the central building. About two meters of snow had drifted against the door. Twenty minutes later they had removed enough to pull the door half ajar.
