The Rock From Mars Read Online Free Page B

for quick-thawing some food items before cooking them.
    All water had to be harvested from the polar ice—a time-consuming and laborious process that involved hefting masses of the heavy ice around, fueling up the stove, and so forth. As one Antarctic veteran observed, you never appreciated how little energy there was in a gallon of gas until you tried to use it to convert cold, cold ice to drinkable water. It was amazing how much energy that took. The daily chore of melting just enough ice for drinking, cooking, and other basic needs probably consumed more time in the field than any other daily activity—typically an hour a day per two-person tent. One consequence was that, instead of a good old civilized thirty-gallon shower every day, people in the field tended to take five-minute sponge baths—once a week, whether they needed them or not.
    This season, there had been occasional storms with winds over forty-five miles per hour, which kept the team pinned down in their tents, telling each other about their lives. In the worst years, workdays lost to high winds could add up to maybe 80 percent. On this expedition, a tolerable day or less per week had been the norm. Score passed the time by writing in her journal, reading books, playing cards, and catching up on her sleep. She never felt bored.
    Score shared her tent with a woman who had recently come through surgery. When the helicopters had dropped them off in the wilderness in a howling gale that first day, the roommate had started lamenting her decision to make the trip; she’d wanted to fly back with the choppers. Aside from the woman’s own plight, Schutt worried that this would throw Score off her stride just as she was getting started. But Score turned out to be resilient and relentlessly upbeat. She acclimated quickly and savored every moment. Like Schutt, she had fallen hard for the place.
    Over the years, the notion of adventure on the ice had attracted applicants as diverse as Japanese flower arrangers and an occasional composer of symphonies. Some had never even been camping before. Those who made the cut, whether they tended toward the extreme-sport type or seemingly fragile geekdom, typically had a great desire to explore new places and to prove themselves at some level. When the winds rose, though, the capacity for confinement with a good book proved a more valuable attribute than the compulsion to skydive off a mountain. As the six-week tour on the ice neared its end, sometimes even the most stable among them would feel the stresses of survival and the forced intimacy with fellow hunters starting to wear them down mentally. And older hunters would find that, with faltering blood circulation to the extremities, their hands and feet would chill more easily, and the skin of their faces tended to develop the waxy-looking patches known as frostnip—the precursor to frostbite—without their realizing it. Still, generally speaking, the team members were happy to be there; they were intensely motivated; and they made it work.
    Cassidy would sit in his tent in the mornings, as a first-year novice, “listening to the wind flapping the canvas and the sibilant whisper of ice crystals saltating along the surface” and cringe at the prospect of going out into it.
    For Score and company, the typical workday would begin around seven-thirty A . M ., with breakfast (usually a quick-and-dirty bowl of oatmeal), cleanup, and the daily radio check-in with McMurdo. The group met at nine A . M . to map out the day’s strategy. If their search stayed close to camp, the team might return at lunchtime to heat up some soup. Otherwise, they would eat a cold lunch “out there” and work through until about six P . M .—sweeping back and forth across their search grid, keeping their eyes and brains focused through the long hours and the chill. When the weather turned nasty, the search would be abandoned. It would be counterproductive to go on, because the hunters would wear