She goes up to the surface and for once is pleased to see low cloud. They are still so desperately tired she doubts they could endure the task of getting ready to leave.
Underground, ice tunnels lead to outlying huts and igloos. They find the machine shop, the ski room, the radio shack. In the blubber room, a pile of eviscerated seal carcasses await chopping up. Crates of food and cans of kerosene line the tunnels. In the dog tunnel, when her lantern first passes over them, Marian takes the frozen turds for enormous, glossy brown toads.
From an abundance of perfectly preserved, deep-frozen ingredients they cook a meal of ham and corn on the cob （grown in 1938, the package says）。 Eddie keeps venturing off down the tunnels, returning with unexpected treasures. He finds a cigar, then a Victrola, plays Benny Goodman and Bing Crosby. The music echoes off the beams, the bare walls, reverberates out into the ice, is heard by seals swimming underneath.
* * *
—
The sky stays shut. Whenever she climbs up to check the weather, there is always cloud, sometimes blowing snow. It would be a lie to say she feels only disappointment. It is easy to forget, below, that this can’t last, that they must leap again. The ice creaks to remind her.
They have found gasoline barrels and fueled the plane. Every day they dig away whatever snow has drifted against it. They have checked every hose and valve and gasket, should have eliminated any possible leaks, but doubt nags at Marian. And Eddie is behaving oddly again. He spends more time above than she does, wandering in contemplation, but when he comes below, he bustles with great purpose, tidying the huts and checking the supplies.
Antarctica has a trickster’s spirit. In certain lights, a mountain a mile distant turns out to be a shoulder-high heap of snow fifty feet away. Dozens of tall, black figures marching toward them out of the fog turn out to be only five knee-high Adélie penguins, magnified and multiplied by some atmospheric illusion, stretched along an invisible horizon like an army.
* * *
—
They are inside the Peregrine when Eddie tells her he will not go with her. The weather has cleared, and they have just finished, again, shoveling out the snow that has blown in through the cracks. She isn’t really listening, is thinking through everything that must be done, must be checked.
“The thing is,” he says almost casually, “even if I did go, I don’t think we’d make it, and I don’t want to drown. The only thing I’ve ever been grateful for in the war was that I didn’t drown.”
Distracted, she thinks he is making a strange joke. “What?”
“I’m staying here,” he says again.
Disbelieving, puzzled, she tells him, no, of course he isn’t. She needs him. They will make it. There is no reason for them not to. They’ve patched the leak. They’ve come so far.
“No,” he says, calmly, “I don’t think we will. For me, it’s not worth the risk.”
“Are you talking about a premonition?”
“You could call it that.”
Still looking for the prank, the joke, she asks him why he’d bothered shoveling out the plane if he wasn’t going, and he says, still serene, that he thought she would still want to try, alone.
“But you don’t think I’ll make it. You think I’ll drown.”
“You could stay here.”
“I can’t. What are you talking about? Do you mean stay here and try to get a ship to rescue us? It’s too late in the season. We’d have to wait a year, and there’s no reason anyway.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I know you’ll go. But I don’t want to. If I stay here, I know what will happen to me.”
She is stunned, outraged, panicked. “You’ll freeze or starve, or you’ll fall in a crevasse and then freeze or starve.”
“Maybe,” he says. “Or I’ll wait until winter and then go out in the night, on a clear night, and lie down under the aurora.”
She shouts at him that he’s being irrational, crazy, that he’s breaking a promise, condemning her to death, and he lets her finish before he explains he doesn’t like the mess of the rest of the world, wants no part of it anymore.
“Is this revenge?” she says. “For what happened to Ruth?”
“Please don’t insult me,” he says quietly.
She calms herself, speaks carefully. “There’s a life for you after we finish,” she tells him. “You’ll find it. Antarctica isn’t going to make you less lonely.”
“But I’m not lonely here. That’s the whole point. And there’s not a life for me back there.” He gestures at the water, the northern bulk of the planet. “Not one I want. I’ve tried. Really, I have. I can’t find my way anymore.”