Only a few days more and then homeward bound, he dreamed, slipping 'into his favorite reverie. Angie's blond hair, like pale seaweed. Angie's lithe body and small upstanding breasts. Angie's smooth skin, firm buttocks, and long legs. He'd always had a fatal weakness for leggy blondes with cut-glass accents. Coming from the back streets of Bolton in Lancashire, he wondered whether it wasn't some murky atavistic impulse, the caveman instinct to possess, control, have power over something fragile, inviolate. It reminded him of the childhood thrill of planting his feet across a field of virgin snow, despoiling the serene white canopy.
And why him? Perhaps she fancied a bit of rough. The ragged-arsed kid who'd elevated himself above his proper station to that of professional research scientist via a B.A. in oceanography and marine sciences at Churchill College, Cambridge, a master's in the advanced course in ecology at Durham University, and a Ph.D. on the feeding ecology and energetics of intertidal invertebrates at the Stazione Zoologica, Naples.
If he hadn't known the curriculum vitae was his own, it would have impressed him.
Thinking about Angie wasn't such a good idea. It inevitably started him off on a fantasy seduction that tantalized his libido without satisfying it; better to postpone that line of thought until reality was made flesh.
"How's the Creature from the Black Lagoon?" he called out.
Nick wafted his hand through the steam. "I've just come to the conclusion that you're a nutcase. The original mad scientist."
"How's that?" Chase inquired pleasantly, leaning back, eyes closed. The delicious warmth had penetrated right through him.
"Why make it hard on yourself and difficult for the rest of us? If Banting doesn't give a damn--and he doesn't, we know that--why should you?"
"What do you mean, difficult?"
"By setting a bad example," Nick clarified in a pained voice. "The tour's nearly over. You're off home soon and I've only got a month to do. Haven't you done enough work?"
"There were some specimens I needed, and it was my last opportunity. All right for you--you can get samples any time you want."
Nick Power's work as a glaciologist involved extracting ice cores from a mile and a third beneath the polar cap to investigate their fifty-thousand-year-old history. Nick and Chase were the same age, twenty-seven. The two men had met for the first time at the station and become friends. In their off-duty hours they had alleviated the boredom by listening to Chase's collection of early blues records and smoking Nick's prime Lebanese Red, which a friendly American pilot brought in on the monthly supply run. This was Nick's number-one priority; on the same chart glaciology came a poor second.
"I've got a year to eighteen months lab work when I get back to Newcastle. I'll need all the specimens I can get hold of."
"Hey, about that, Gav. Why go back to Newcastle? Why not try for a post in London? With your qualifications, and this experience at Halley Bay, it should be a piece of cake."
"Newcastle sponsored me. I owe them something."
"Yeah, I was forgetting, you're from the north, aren't you?" Nick said, as if that explained everything. Having been born in Lewes in Sussex and lived most of his life in London, he visualized the north as one vast smoking slag heap populated by burly men in cloth caps and scrawny women in clogs and shawls. No civilized, educated, intelligent person ever stayed there unless compelled to. It was purgatory, exile, a blighted land.
Chase heaved himself out of the water and reached for a towel. His jet-black hair, usually brushed sideways, hung in lank strands across his forehead. He was clean-shaven, mainly because condensation froze a beard into a spiky fringe of icicles.
"You may find this hard to believe, Nick, but I actually like living in Newcastle. It's a lively town, and there's some gorgeous countryside within twenty minutes drive."
"Moors, you mean?"
"The North Yorkshire moors, yes, but real countryside as well." Chase smiled to himself. Nick obviously pictured it as Wuthering Heights country. "You know--trees. Grass. Tinkling streams. Even the occasional cow with bronchitis."
"The occasional cow," Nick mused. "Are they similar to occasional tables?"
"Near enough," Chase agreed. "A leg at each corner."
He toweled himself briskly, body tingling and aglow. As they were getting dressed, standing on the slatted wooden boards beneath the puny sixty-watt bulb, Nick asked him if he'd heard anything more about the mysterious Russian.
Chase glanced up, frowning. "How do you know he's Russian?"
"Well, whatever it is he's babbling it sure ain't English, according to Grigson. Could be Serbo-Croatian for all the sense it makes." . "Have you seen him yourself?"
