by Stuart Atkinson

Chapter 5: Ice & Fire 

As the helicopter flew low over the seemingly-endless ice plain, rising and falling like a  cruise missile as it hugged the contours of the  bleak landscape, its two backseat passengers closed their eyes and  tried not to throw up.  

The two hour flight from the scientific base at McMurdo had been such a terrifying rollercoaster ride that beneath their thick, fur-lined  hoods their faces were a pale shade of green. It had been an endless  round of ups and downs, a few minutes' calm, level flying, followed  by a gulp or  groan as the chopper's pilot - who seemed  to be under  the illusion he was flying an X-Wing  fighter down a trench on the  Death Star, and not a tiny, fragile helicopter above a frozen desert  at the bottom of the world - threw their aircraft upwards. Now, as they neared their target, the geologists clutched their seats in fear, dark sunshades concealing their saucer-wide eyes, desperate to hold onto the contents of their stomachs just a few minutes more.

 No-one had warned them about the sickening ride into the Antarctic exterior, especially not their boss, sitting up front beside the pilot, but they weren't too surprised about that.

The Ice Queen had made it clear from the start that they weren't welcome in her kingdom, and she had pointedly ignored them during the whole of the flight.  That she was immune to the nauseating motion of the helicopter just made her seem even less human in their eyes. If that was possible.

Suddenly the chopper dropped like a stone, descending to a lower part of the plain, and the two scientists baulked loudly, barely managing to keep their lunches down as their stomachs flew up into their  mouths. They ignored the cruel laughter of the pilot as he levelled off, only to hurl the tiny Bell Ranger skywards again. The geologists  gripped the sides of their seats so tightly their knuckles actually  cracked. He was an animal, they were convinced of it. 

The third passenger shook her head as the noise echoed in the tiny cockpit. Lightweights, she sniffed scornfully; people like them didn't belong in a place as dramatic - or as beautiful -

as  Antarctica. It was wasted on them. She couldn't think of anyone else in the world who might be capable of loving it as much as it deserved to be loved - as much as she did. 

Except her daughter, perhaps.  

Yes, she thought, looking down on the frozen landscape leaping up  towards her chopper, Fee would adore this as much as I do - 

"Ms Barrett, we should be coming up on the ground team in around five minutes," the pilot announced over the radio, shattering her  concentration. His voice was annoyingly tinny and distorted in her  headphones. "You might like to -  

"And you might like to keep your Top Gun aerobatics to yourself flyboy," she advised him sharply, "in case you hadn't noticed, our cargo is looking a little green back there..." She said it without turning round, but could sense the beakers sinking back into their seats, embarrassed. "And I know exactly what to do," she added pointedly, "I've been doing this long enough."  

Too long, she thought wearily, staring out the window. Blue sky. White land. Nothing else, absolutely nothing, the whole Universe split into two colours. Beautiful. 

The scolded pilot said nothing, avoiding eye contact with her, and behind him the two geologists exchanged uncomfortable glances; when  the infamous Angela Barrett was in this kind of mood you kept your  head down if you knew what was good for you. They'd both learned that the hard way. 

Angela gazed out the window, looking down at the icefields passing beneath them, and wondered what Fee was doing at that moment. If the poor girl's father had any say in it, she mused, Fee would probably be  tired, hungry and filthy, stranded somewhere in the middle of the  Nullarbor, covered in bug bites and brushing dust out of her lustrous  long hair. Yes, she would be hot, dirty and exhausted. 

And loving every minute of it, Angela smiled knowingly. 

She missed her. She missed her daughter so much it hurt. But she could never reveal that to the rest of her team, or to sheep like the two beakers cowering behind her. It was hard enough for a woman to gain and keep the respect of her male peers in as benign an environment as a university or commercial laboratory; in a testosterone-drenched, blizzard-blasted wasteland like Antarctica, where each sign of doubt  by a woman was leapt upon as a sign of incompetence, and mistakes - by members of either gender - cost lives, it was almost impossible. Down here it wasn't just survival of the fittest; the fittest had to be the  hardest, too.  

And after three years of this, none came fitter, or harder, than her. 

That was why she never let them see her looking at the picture of Fee  she kept in her back pocket, or hear her laughing as she re-read for  the millionth time the letters from her daughter she'd brought with  her to Antarctica. She knew that if she did they'd lose respect for  her - or, more likely, lose their fear of her. And if that happened,  then everything she'd worked so hard for, and sacrificed so much for,  would be lost. She would rather die than let *that* happen. 

And so the Ice Lady flew over her desolate kingdom in silence,  scanning the shining white land below for the precious nuggets of black  which had lured her yet again to the bottom of the Earth. 

When she thought of how Fee was in the Nullarbor, searching for scraps  and leftovers from the Mundrabilla fall, Angela had to laugh at the  irony of it. Mother and daughter were separated by many thousands of miles, but in  remarkably similar places. Both Nullarbor and Antarctica were huge,  flat, and light in colour - the three main requirements for a  worthwhile meteorite collecting area - and both regularly crawled with  collectors, researchers and chancers, all seeking for their fortunes  at ground level.  

But that was where the similarity ended.  

For, unlike the the Nullarbor, which was as silent and as still as a  cemetery, Antarctica was a dynamic place, a *moving* desert. And it  was that movement which made it the world's number one meteorite  hunting ground. And Angela's spiritual home. 

Thanks to the photographic skills of shuttle and space station  astronauts, the public perception of Antarctica was of a huge,  irregular-shaped "ice cap" laid over the Earth's south pole.

Portraits of the ice continent taken from high orbit made Antarctica  look like a splash of white paint on the bottom of a blue ball - until one realised  though that that blue ball was actually the Earth, and Antarctica was a  vast slab of ice, then the sheer scale of the place was quite a shock.  Antarctica was big, bigger than the United States, an Ice World  wrapped around the very base of the Earth.  

But the photos only told half the story.  

As she flew over towards the mountains, Angela knew that the ice-cap  which everyone thought *was* Antarctica was merely a skin, a crust  concealing a true continent of solid rock and stone. Down there, she  knew, deep, deep below the rolling  plain, were mountains, plains,  ranges and valleys the equal of any to be found on Africa, the  Americas or Europe. It was a humbling thought. 

But, if some climatologists were correct, it hadn't always been so.  According to their controversial theories Antarctica had once been naked under the Sun, its bare rock exposed to the sky. It had blossomed  with plants, trees and flowers, seen rivers and lakes. How she wished  she could have seen that! 

... but that was ancient history. A dream of a dream. Today Antarctica  was a drowned continent, Nature's Atlantis. Perhaps even the *real* Atlantis, some "experts" thought that, too.  

But it didn't matter. Now, tens of thousands of years after it had last felt the warmth of the Sun,  Antarctica was hidden, concealed by and crushed beneath an  unbelievably thick blanket of ice. No, not a blanket, she mused,  staring down at the ground, pondering what lay beneath, an *ocean*.     

And, just like the great liquid oceans of the Earth, the frozen ocean  covering Antarctica was in constant motion. Slow motion, admittedly,  but motion nonetheless; Antarctica's icy skin was split up into many  glaciers, each one a river of ice which flowed out from the  continent's centre at a rate of a few inches a year, surging onwards  in an eternal ripple of ice. And, just as rivers carried twigs and  branches to the sea, the great glaciers carried meteorites outwards  from the continent's barren heart to its edge. Layers of them, one on top of another, so that the meteorites were like fossils within a cliff face - or, as Fee had once suggested, 'like cherries in a cake'. 

If Antarctica had been free of mountains, the meteorites would have been carried to the edge of the continent and then simply fallen off, tumbling into the icy sea like penguins, or  lemmings. Angela suspected many probably did just that anyway, and sometimes she  dreamed of dropping down to the ocean floor in a submarine, finding it  littered with countless thousands of priceless specimens... But that  was impossible, and it saddened her to know that they would never be  recovered and enjoyed. But then again, Maybe some were never meant to  be recovered. Maybe the Earth wanted - and was entitled - to keep some for herself. 

But thankfully, not all the continent's celestial treasures fell into the ocean;  Antarctica's many mountain ranges formed natural barriers against the March  of the ice, and when the two went head to head there was only ever one  winner: the glacier ground to a halt, folding over on itself like a  butter curl. Then, exposed to the roaring mountain winds, the glacier's  surface was gradually worn away, and as each frozen layer was planed away  the meteorites embedded within it were liberated from their icy imprisonment, left sitting  there on the ice, jet black against its wind-polished blue. Nature's unique gift to Antarctica: celestial fruit, ripe for the picking. 

Of course, the Universe didn't just give her treasures away to anyone;  to prove one was worthy enough to pluck meteorites off the ground like  fallen apples, one had to survive there long enough to find them. And with temperatures of -40 degrees, howling wind, snowstorms and blizzards,  not to mention crevasses which opened up beneath you without warning,  avalanches which scraped climbers off hillsides and even the occasional earthquake, Nature made sure that only the most determined  and dedicated went home with more than frostbite and frustration.

Angela had found fifty one meteorites in Antarctica. She hoped that  meant Nature had accepted her. But she didn't assume so.  

Antarctica was a bitter, brutal, unforgiving place, a lethal white wilderness which Angela loved it with a  passion, and staring out the chopper's window she knew why. Out on the Nullarbor no one place was better than any other; each scorched, dusty  square mile was as good a place to look as the next. Or the last. But  out here, in Antarctica, the Golden Rule of Meteorite Hunting - "There  are no cheats or shortcuts" - was stood on its head and laughed at.  Here the movement of the ice actually shepherded the meteorites together,  herding them towards collecting areas, ready for discovery and  recovery, and every year since 1967 - the year the first Antarctic  meteorites had been discovered, accidentally, by a team of bewildered  Japanese scientists - the continent had become the happy hunting ground of rock hounds like herself.  

And now, on a bright, Antarctican summer day, she was heading towards a rendezvous with her most experienced ground team, which had  radioed her a Code Red alert. Code Red: "Specimens located" - not  specimen, *specimens*. Alpha had found a Multiple, Maybe even a genuine  strewn field? No, that would be too much to ask for. A Multiple would be more than enough.  

"Faster," she ordered the pilot, sensing the seconds ticking way  uselessly. Faster! There were rocks down there! 

The pilot nodded silently - keeping his thoughts to himself - and  threw the chopper into a steep dive. Behind him the two beakers  groaned loudly and covered their mouths with their hands.  

Lightweights, Angela smiled to herself... 

Soon after, the helicopter rounded the snow-capped black peak of one of the tallest pinnacles of the Queen Alexandra Range,  and Angela leaned forwards excitedly as she caught her first glimpse  of her prime recovery squad. Six brightly-coloured dots down on the  ice, looking for all the world like tiny candies decorating the white  icing of a huge cake.  

Alpha Team.  

The ground team had always seemed to her like an Antarctican version  of a Wild West posse. Instead of horses they rode ski-bikes and  snow-scooters. And instead of gunslingers, escaped bandits or train  robbers, they rode across the wide open spaces in search of rocks  which had fallen from the sky. But they didn't just look like a posse,  they acted like one too, whooping and hollering as they dashed across  the glaciers, howling at the Sun as it turned the ice plains around  them to fields of white fire.  

Once, a lifetime ago, she'd ridden with them. She missed it, of  course; who wouldn't miss such freedom and lawlessness. But she'd moved  on. She'd had no choice.  

The helicopter settled onto the snow-carpeted ice with a gentle thud,  and even before the pilot had started to power-down the rotors she had  flung open the door and jumped out. Allowing herself the luxury of a  brief smile as she felt, and heard, the snow crump beneath her thick  boots, she ducked down out of the rotors' way and started to run  towards the parked skidoos, ignoring the mist of stinging ice crystals  blowing all around her as the wicked, ever-present Antarctican wind  whipped across the plain. Behind her the beakers slumped back in their  seats, happy to still be alive and down on solid ground. 

As she ran Angela drank in the landscape around her, catching glimpses  of it through gaps in the wind-carried ice haze. The blue ice of the frozen plain was hidden beneath a covering of snow whiter than toothpaste, a shining, brilliant white, but in places the wind had whipped it away revealing metallic blue ice scoured and  polished by the winds scratching and shrieking down off the nearby  mountains. Above her the sky was a huge blue canvas, such a deep, almost  purple blue that it burned like a gas flame, and as she ran she could easily imagine she was on the  top of Everest, or K2. And the Sun..! The Sun was a hissing, spitting ball of white  fire; she could almost see lances of silvery brilliance shooting way  from it, it was that bright. Beneath her feet the snow sparkled and  danced with a million silvery flames, as if stars were shining up from underneath.  

No, not stars, she mused, fallen stars... 

Up ahead of her now, standing a short distance away from the parked  snow-bikes, Angela recognised the familiar figure of Gaye Lewis, her  prime team leader. No-one else would have been able to - her face and  trademark blonde hair were hidden beneath her quilted hood, and her  electric blue eyes were concealed behind the darkest set of sunshades  Angela had ever seen - but Angela could recognise her Number 1 by body  language and pose alone.  

The two women came together in a bear-like greeting hug, then Gaye led  her boss by the elbow towards the skidoos, parked nearby. 

"I thought you'd want to see this in person," Gaye shouted, struggling to  be heard above the howling wind, "I haven't seen a scatter this good  since '98... remember?" 

Angela nodded, her nostalgic smile hidden beneath her own hood. Oh  yes, she remembered. Down at Allan Hills they'd found five meteorites  scattered over an area just a few hundred metres across. She'd been  like a kid on Christmas morning. It was hard to see how they could better that... 

"Anyway," her team leader continued, leading her through the line of  half a dozen parked-up skidoos, four of which were being kept company  by members of the recovery team, male and female. All of them had tied garishly-coloured flags and pendants to their high whip aerials, like medieval knights flying banners from their noble steeds. "We  should get these little guys collected quickly; I reckon we'll be in a white-out within the hour.... "   

Angela said nothing, crumping impatiently across the thick snow in silence,  leaning into the gusting wind. If anyone else had told her that, she would have called them a fool; the sky above them was a brittle blue, a blue that seemed to go on forever, without a cloud to be seen! But if Gaye said snow was coming then snow was coming. She was never wrong. Never. The woman had a sixth  sense when it came to storms.  No wonder other teams called her "The Weather Witch". 

"Okay, it's your call," Angela shouted back at her number 1, "just  show me what you've found, then we'll *all* head home." 

Satisfied with that answer, Gaye smiled a broad, beaming smile, which  shone even through the folded fabric of her hood. Without another word  she led Angela away from the skidoos out into the open.  

It was just a hundred feet or so from the helicopter to the recovery  site, but fighting against the cruel wind Angela felt like it was a  million miles. Eventually it appeared in the distance - a fire-engine  red flag, flapping insanely in the wind, clashing painfully with the azure sky behind it. Beside it, crouched low  against the gale, the other two team members looked like they had had  been frozen in place, or turned to stone by a passing Gorgon's  terrifying stare. But Angela knew what they were doing: protecting the  find. They'd be cold, and in pain, but tough. That was what they were paid for.  

The two team members shuffled aside to let her see what they were  sheltering - a yellow plastic sheet, thrown over the ice, covering the Find. Angela knelt down next to it and reached out to pull  away one corner. Her back  was to the wind now, and she gritted her teeth as the gale howled around  her. It was like being in a wind tunnel. Frightening. But  exhilarating, too.  

She pulled back the sheeting. And laughed. 

"Thought you'd be pleased..!" Gaye shouted above the gathering storm,  as her boss stared at the blackened object cowering beneath the  protective sheet. Angela nodded slowly, not hearing the woman's words.  She was too busy wondering if she was hallucinating. 

The meteorite was roughly the same size as an apple, but that was  where the similarity ended. Its skin was black, a shiny, glassy black,  and even from an arm's length away Angela could see a tracery of flow  lines upon it, standing up from thesurface like varicose veins. It  looked almost as if it had fallen that morning.  

Which, Angela guessed, as she shielded her face from another blast of  ice and snow crystals, probably wasn't that far from the truth. 

"It's not been here long," she concluded, her voice breaking with the  effort of talking above the shrieking gale, "look: little weathering... minimal discolouration... what do you think," she asked, looking up at her number 1, "been here a decade? Less?" 

Gaye nodded in agreement. "No longer than 3 years, I'd say," she  suggested. "Look at those flow lines; if it had been here any longer  than that they'd have been smoothed clean away by this damned wind..."   

Angela nodded. Gaye was right, as usual. Gaye knew the consequences  and effects of Antarctica's weather inside out, back to front. If she said 3 years, it had been 3 years. No argument.  

So, Angela thought, rocking back on her heels, this was a young  meteorite, a recent visitor to Earth. That alone made it rare; most  meteorites found in Antarctica were thousands of years old-  

Angela felt a tap on her shoulder then, and heard Gaye speaking into her ear. "This is just the warm-up act," her friend said cryptically, pointing off towards the open plain, "look..."

Angela peered out into the whiteness - and  her jaw literally dropped open.  

At first, she thought she was hallucinating, because what she was seeing was plainly impossible. Out there in the near distance, flapping and cracking in the wind,  more  flags were sticking out of the ground, each one as red as  Rudolph's nose.

A *lot* more flags. 

Taking deep breaths to calm herself down, flooding her mouth with icy air, Angela closed her eyes and gathered her thoughts. This, she told herself, was what it all came down to, what it was all about. Each flag represented a meteorite, a stone that had, impossibly, fallen from the sky.  

Okay. No more delaying. She started counting. 

"Seven," she Gaye confirmed, holding up seven fat fingers in front of her boss's face. "Our best ever..." Angela knew that, but she was too busy thinking ahead to look back. Seven stones, grouped together... chances were all the stones were as young  and fresh as the one laying at her feet..? 

She took another deep breath,  trying to stay calm, trying not to jump to conclusions. But those conclusions were sooooo tempting: Maybe,  just Maybe, they'd found one of meteoritics' Holy Grails: a new strewn  field.  

She knew she should have felt elated, but there was something...  missing. And she knew what it was: the fire, the fire of being The  First. Her Team had done well, brilliantly well, but all she could do  now she was here was follow - literally - in their footsteps. It was  all there already, laid out for her on a plate. The meteorites were  wonderful, as always, but as always she was seeing them second hand;  checking on the discoveries of others by looking over their shoulders  at sights which had left them wide-eyed.  

It wasn't enough, not anymore. Never had been, if she was honest with herself. She had to go and see one on her own.  Find one of her own. Like she used to. Like in the old days. 

She stared out across the ice. Seven flags, seven meteorites. If  it  was like any of the other strewn fields there would be more, there just *had* to be... 

"I'll be right back," she said, clambering to her feet and pulling  her jacket tighter around her. Gaye looked stunned. 

"What?" 

"I want to find one," Angela said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.  

"You - you're joking, right?" Gaye laughed nervously, shuffling around  to subtly block her boss's path, "there isn't time! The snow - " 

"I won't be long..." Angela insisted, struggling to be heard above the  roar of the wind, "I just want to - "  

"Just want to what?" Gaye couldn't believe what she was hearing. "No!  It's out of the question!" 

"No, it isn't!" Angela barked, pressing her face so close to Gaye's  they were almost touching, "I'm in charge of this expedition and if I  want to go and take a look out there then I'm going to go and take a  look!" 

Gaye's head actually jerked back at that, as if she had been physically struck. She looked, and felt, wounded. Angela had never pulled rank on  her that publicly - or that angrily - before. 

"Look, I'm sorry..." Angela said, pulling away, feeling guilty. A  little. "This is just something I want to do - something I *have* to  do... okay?" She searched her team leader's furious, hurt eyes for  understanding and sympathy. "Okay?" 

Gaye wanted to argue, but couldn't. Strictly speaking, Angela was  right, she was the boss, her word was law out there on the ice. But  even if Angela hadn't been in charge, Gaye knew that there was a fire  burning inside her now which only she could douse. She had a need.  

Gaye made a show out of checking her watch, then let out a long, weary sigh. "Five minutes," she told her boss, an edge still to her voice, "five minutes then I'm  coming for you, and believe me I'll drag you back by the hair if I  have to!" The two women stared hard at each other, like two tigers eye  to eye, then Gaye smiled sympathetically. "Oh...  go on then, go and find  one of your beloved rocks...!" 

Angela reached out, grabbed her friend's head in both hands and planted a huge kiss on the top of her hood. "Thank you!" Promising her she  wouldn't be long, she turned her back on her Number 1 and headed  towards the nearest red flag out on the ice. And when she reached it  she walked right past it, past it and all the others, until there was  only open, virgin ice ahead of her. 

With each snow-flattening step she took, Angela felt more of her cares  evaporating away. Everything - and everyone - else was behind her,  over her shoulder. It was as if a decade, more, had fallen away from her shoulders like a  heavy cloak. She felt lighter, freer, liberated! No-one to supervise or monitor, no equipment to check, no targets to meet; now it was just her, the sky, and the ice. Like the old days. 

Her eyes scanned and  scoured the glowing blue-white ice stretching away on all sides, tuning out everything else until her entire Universe had shrunk down to the ground at her feet. It was as if she was  shining a spotlight on the ice through her eyes, panning it over the  glacier, ignoring everything that lay outside its circular field of  brightness - 

And then suddenly, just as she had known it would be, there it was: a  tiny black nugget,  laying on the ice in front of her, positioned so perfectly ahead of her it was as if it had been  placed there deliberately by the Universe. 

"Well, hello there little fella," she smiled, kneeling down beside it,  sheltering it from the hungry howls of the wind with her own body,  "thanks for waiting for me..." 

Reaching into her pocket she took out her Kit, and within a couple of   minutes - being careful not to contaminate the strawberry-sized starstone by touching  or even breathing on it - she had logged the meteorite's position with  her GPS, measured its size with her electronic ruler and photographed  it with her insulated digital camera, too. All that was left to do was  bag it and tag it.  

But, even though she knew time was running away from her, she paused,  taking a moment to enjoy her find. 

She imagined she was the rock, out there in space before it landed in  Antarctica. Time would have passed slowly for her, so slowly...  Silently sliding towards Earth, caught in its gravity she would have  watched distant supernovae flare and  fade away once more,  like  distant lanterns glimpsed through a storm. Perhaps, a short time  later, she'd have felt the gentle touch of their  light waves as they  pulsed past her... 

Maybe that wouldn't have been all she'd felt. Maybe she'd have have felt  vibrations run through her as alien radio transmissions washed  through  the Solar System, like ripples on a pond, before they bounced  back off  her shining metallic body, reflected towards some other civilisation  which would decode them a million millennia in the  future... Maybe she'd even have have felt the backwash from the  mammoth engines of some  alien spacecraft, a gargantuan Culture-type  ship ploughing  through the Solar System en-route to somewhere more interesting..? 

Earth would have grown from just a mysterious blue "star", eventually  becoming a brilliantly-lit droplet of bluer-than-blue water, lit by  starlight.  Mesmerising, hypnotising, an island of colour in an ocean of freezing  darkness... and on that painted bauble civilisations  would have been  born and died as she approached; Empires would have  risen and fell as she tumbled,  end over end, her bright metal  surfaces reflecting distorted mirror  images of the lush, living world  ahead of her...  

Then the first gentle kiss of the atmosphere... warmth pulsing through  her ancient body... then heat, so much heat; her skin burning away as  she plunged through the air, screaming, smoking, before the stunning,  shattering impact against the rock hard surface of the glacier... 

"Come on then," she said to the little rock, picking it up with her  tweezers and dropping it carefully into the sample bag, "let's get you  home..." 

After taping it up carefully, making sure no air or moisture could  leak in, she dropped the  bag into her pocket and started back for the  flags, feeling as light as a feather again. "Thank you," she smiled up at the sky as she crumped across the snow, feeling the gusting wind  punching against her back.  

Only one thing was missing. 

Fee. She wished her daughter could have been there to share the find  with her; she wanted that more than anything. But it just wasn't  possible at the moment. She needed money, much more of it, before she  could finally give her daughter the life she deserved. And the only  way she could make that happen was to keep hunting for meteorites on  behalf of others, people who didn't have a clue just how special and  precious they were.  

It made her want to scream, to drop to her knees  there and then and pound the ice in rage and frustration - but she had no choice. If  the only way she could provide for her daughter all the things she'd missed out on herself was by selling her soul, then so be it. Whatever  it took, she would do it.  

Of course, Fee, thousands of miles away, knew none of that. All she knew was what her father  told her - that her mother now hunted meteorites for profit, she  didn't *care* about them anymore. To her, meteorites were big, fancy  coins, nothing more, nothing less. Well, there was nothing she could  do about that, not yet anyway. But one day... aaah, one day... 

She plunged her hands deep into her pockets, tucking the meteorite safely away, and ploughed on towards  the skidoos.

Mission accomplished. Everything, and everyone else,  could go to hell. 

"One more for your collection..." Angela smiled triumphantly, holding  out her prize-in-a-bag as Gaye appeared ahead of her; true to her word she'd come looking for her, but, Angela noted with a grin, she'd  waited ten minutes, not five.  

Gaye took the rock from her and gave it a quick look-over, weighing it in her  hand, smiling approvingly. Angela knew she had already estimated its weight to within a gram or so. That was another of her strange powers. And, as predicted, the western horizon was now starting to disappear beneath a blanket of white cloud. Snow was approaching. A White Witch, indeed...  

"Listen... thanks, Gaye," Angela smiled, and gave her number 1's shoulder a grateful squeeze, "I needed that." The blonde team leader nodded in silent  understanding; there was no need for any more words. Both had done  what they had to do.  

It was time to go home.  

"The others are all tagged, gee-peed and stowed," Gaye reported,  suddenly sounding quite weary. 

"Good," Angela nodded approvingly, "then pack up and head back to  McMurdo, I'll meet you there - " 

"Aaah, I see.." Gaye gave her boss a sly, sideways look, "bailing on  us, huh? Too cold for you out here?" she asked, adding, accusingly: "I  knew it - you're going soft, riding around in your whirlybirds - "  

"That little guy proves otherwise," Angela suggested, purring with  contentment. "Now go on, get out of here... I'll have the coffee on, I  promise..." 

"Yes, Sir!" her friend replied with a mock salute. Turning away she  told one of the two team members to accompany Angela back to the  chopper. The man nodded and steered Angela away from the recovery  site, again by her elbow. They made good time back to the helicopter,  and she was airborne again within minutes, climbing up into the cobalt-coloured sky like a leaf on a breeze, and as they swung around to  the east, heading for McMurdo, Angela closed her eyes, ignoring the  renewed groans of their beaker passengers, and sank back into the  seat. 

Seven new meteorites - no, eight, she reminded herself, picturing Hers. Probably all from the same Fall. A new strewn field... 

*That* would show him... 

© Stuart Atkinson 2002