Free Until the Night by Giles Blunt

radiometers, and she spent many hours a day staring at readouts and computer screens in an effort to define the vertical structure of cloud water contents. She measured the size of droplets and crystals, properties that determine how energy is exchanged between the Arctic surface and the atmosphere.
    She was embarked on a long-term project to measure how clouds interact with aerosols, and how they change with the seasons and from one year to another. At some point in the future her findings would be correlated with mine and Wyndham’s on seasonal meltage. Already by this time, which was 1992, much research had been done on global warming, and the models were predicting an especially high rate of warming in the Arctic. But so far (surprisingly, given the dolorous certainties to come) we had found no hard evidence of it.
    And I hoped desperately we wouldn’t find any. I had nightmarish visions of oil platforms and tourists overrunning the only place on the planet I felt at home. Of all of us, Wyndham was the most pessimistic. When depressed, he would spin scenarios of catastrophes—of floods and cyclones and mass migrations. I wasn’t willing to call him paranoid, as some of the others did. Instead, I chose not to think about it, the way one chooses not to imagine the death of a spouse.
    What happens in your ideal world? I asked Rebecca one day.
    My interest was entirely selfish, of course, and there may even have been a touch of irritation in it. It should not be possible for a woman to be such a dedicated scientist, such a humble and reliable trader in hard fact, and yet have such a beautiful neck and throat. I was not usually one to notice these things. When it came to the appreciation of female beauty, I had always been strictly an impressionist. But Rebecca taught me to be a detail man. I thought about the elegant and shifting columns of tendon and cartilage. I thought about her way of blinking exactly once whenever I spoketo her, as if capturing my remark like a lattice of crystals for later analysis. I thought about her fingers, slender and tapered, the nails perfectly formed, neatly shaped. Her skin was darker than mine, not quite tawny, and I had to suppress the desire to touch her hands as she typed, despite the wedding band.
    My ideal world?
    I had spoken to her from the doorway of her office. Only three of the scientists had private offices: Dahlberg, Vanderbyl and Rebecca. In Rebecca’s case, it was a matter of getting her instruments as far from the power shack as possible, because the generator tended to interfere with her readouts. The space was not much bigger than a graduate student’s carrel, but it had a porthole window over which she had hung a towel to keep the glare off her screens.
    My ideal world?
    She didn’t turn to face me but spoke to my reflection in her radar screen.
    In my ideal world, we don’t have a sea station here, a drift station there, we have an international network of cloud observatories: Tiksi, Hammerfest, Alert and Barrow—at least those four. And every day I get to chat with Russians and Danes and Americans about Arctic clouds. And you?
    It must be wonderful to be so easily amused.
    Now she did turn to face me. Why ask, if you’re only going to make fun? A coordinated network of stations is what we need. It’s going to take a lot more than a drifting dysfunctional family to figure out what’s going on up here.
    I didn’t respond, only stood for a few moments reading the Ice Island Regulations that were taped to every door in the facility.
Please appreciate that this camp is in a very remote location. In the event of an accident, every effort is made to evacuate the injured party(s). However, we cannot control bad weather or radio blackouts, which can last up to 10 days. Exercise extreme caution and good judgment in your daily work and activities during your stay on the Ice Island. Thank you for your co-operation and have a pleasant stay.
    A few days later, I stopped at