The Curiosity by Stephen Kiernan Read Free Book Online Page B

the squad to yell over the wind. “Okay, crew, let’s cut this big thing with a nice margin so we don’t lose anything important. Squad Two should prep for seventy minutes from now, to mine for small samples.”
    Diving masks nod up and down the row. Billings makes a dignified bow; he leads Squad Two. I pull the mask over my face, climb on the platform. The team follows in the awkward walk of flippers, like so many penguins about to plunge off their floe.
    As everyone grips the chain-link railing for balance, I turn back for a look. I remember that moment now, with all that has happened, as a traveler a century ago might have recalled her steamship pulling away from the pier: here comes an unfamiliar culture, a different language, a new world. Gerber stands at the tech room window, his hair a crazy halo, flashing us a peace sign. On the bridge above, the captain speaks from one side of his mouth. A winch groans and the deck crane hoists our platform off the deck, dangles it in the windy air between ship and iceberg, then eases us into the water.
    The ocean presses on my calves, then my hips, upward. This close to the berg, there are no waves to topple me. Only the water, taking my shape. Can there be anything more intimate? The shock of the cold doesn’t hit till we’re up to our necks. I start my watch’s chrono function—time, after oxygen, being the most valuable commodity here.
    â€œMark,” I call to Gerber, which he repeats in my earpiece so I know he’ll have snapped a photo of the team being lowered into the sea.
    Then the water is over my mask, I’m immersed completely. So I do what I always do in that first moment: tilt my head back and let out a long exhale. It leaves the regulator in one fat bubble, which hurries upward like a helium balloon released by a child on a summer’s day. Beauty.

CHAPTER 5
    Baseball Mitt
    (Daniel Dixon)

    M ark,” Dr. Kate calls over the radio, and Gerber presses a button beside his monitor. The image on an upper screen freezes for half a minute—a hand ax striking at the ice—while the video feed continues on the TV below. It’s fascinating, if I linger on the still shot, how easy it is to spot hard-ice: when the ax hits, regular ice falls away and leaves something like white concrete. How had scientists before Carthage failed to discover this stuff? It’s like peeling off wax drippings without noticing the main candle.
    I jot that simile in my notebook for later, because there’s nothing else for me to write at the moment. I’m just watching while they work. But I can tell this iceberg is different, if only by everyone’s seriousness. Gerber has not made a joke in hours. He even turned down the Grateful Dead bootleg of the day; it’s barely white noise from his speakers. The way his chair is positioned, he can’t see the “mark” images overhead. He’s bent toward the live feed playing before him. The tech crew concentrates on screens in front of them, too: sonar scans, temperature gauges, water content monitors.
    The first team works their full shift, then the second squad digs into a side vein. They call it harvesting, Billings removing cores the size and shape of fence posts. They must be sweet with specimens, because by the end of that shift, Billings is singing in his headset. And damn my ears, can that guy not sing. I’ve heard beagles with better voices.
    Look, I don’t buy this whole project. But they must be freezing out there, in bone-aching cold that takes days to recover from. Every so often a piece breaks loose, and everybody scurries. They can’t help approaching an iceberg with fear. It’s like handling snakes, there are too many stories of something going wrong. Plus, both crews have been underwater nearly three hours. During breaks they skip breakfast and napping, despite having pulled an all-nighter. When Billings’s team made its second dive, Dr.