Searching for Answers
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Searching for Answers
Hannibal adjusted the controls of the heating stove and came closer to it, the intense cold chilled his bones, felt it slip through the heating blanket and penetrate his spine. It had been forty-five hours since his sled had broken down, leaving him stranded in the middle of the ice sheet, more than two hundred kilometers from the coast and from the ship Samuel Hilbert.
His expedition had come to Antarctica with the purpose of taking samples from the deepest ice sheets, to find out the concentration of phentomachines in them and thus determine exactly when their proliferation had started and how many years later the catastrophe had occurred.
While the rest of his companions had continued on their way, towards the vicinity of the pole, he had been delayed in taking some samples from the surface ice, but when he tried to resume his journey, his sliding sled had refused to light up, so instead of starting to grope around like a headless chicken, it would be best to set up a temporary shelter and wait for his expedition to retrace its steps back to the coast.
But it had been more than forty hours since he had been stranded, and even his companions had not returned for him, he thought that perhaps they had taken another route, or that they had strayed from the initial route and not found him, and assumed that he had returned to the coast.
His radio did not detect any signal, and after sending messages for help until he had had enough, without receiving any response, he had become tired and only left the transponder on, emitting a continuous signal, waiting for someone to detect it and come to his aid.
His supplies were running out, as were the batteries in his heater and the thought of setting fire to this place was crazy, indeed what would he burn, his own clothes or the sled. Her situation was beginning to get desperate.
With his fingers numb, occasionally moving them away from the metal and plastic ice cream, in order to bring them closer to the heater and try to recover their sensitivity, he continued to dig into the vehicle's engine, trying to find the cause of the damage. But without a firm knowledge of mechanics, searching for loose wires or parts that appeared at first glance to be broken or damaged, had not yielded any results. Even so, I didn't give up hope of finding the cause of the damage, especially when I had nothing better to do.
About twenty kilometers from Hannibal's position, in the depths of a great crack, suddenly open, and about three hundred meters from the surface, the steam of the sublimated ice, by the heat of the motor of a sliding sledge, even when it was on, would rise in the dark, until appearing on a thin column that could be seen at a short distance.
The peculiar cloud marked the place where, some forty-three hours before, the remaining four members of the expedition had been swallowed by the ice and snow of Antarctica, as they passed over a gigantic crack, hidden by a thin layer of frozen slush. The bodies of the explorers lay with all their equipment and sleds at the bottom of the deep sinkhole.
While on the ship Samuel Hilbert, in the midst of a storm that had already been raging for some fifty-three hours, with almost no visibility and making it impossible to receive radio signals, the crew waited for improved conditions to try to communicate with the expedition or send a rescue party if necessary, while the forecasts said that the storm would last at least another forty hours.
Huddled up on the insulating thermal blanket, Hannibal extended his hands to try to warm them, while the heat from the electric radiator slowly began to die down.
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