Pinned by cones of light from two snowmobiles, Roger Breskin and George Lin finished anchoring the radio transmitter to the ice with four two-foot-long belaying pins, and then ran a systems check on the equipment.  Their long shadows were as strange and distorted as those of savages hunched over an idol, and the eerie song of the wind might have been the voice of the violent god to whom they prayed.

Even the murky glow of the winter twilight had now been frozen out of the sky.  Without the snowmobile headlamps, visibility would drop to ten yards.

The wind had been brisk and refreshing that morning, but as it gathered speed, it had become an increasingly deadly enemy.  A strong gale in those latitudes could press a chill through layer upon layer of thermal clothing.  Already the fine snow was being driven so hard that it appeared to be sheeting past them on a course parallel to the icecap, as if falling horizontally out of the west rather than out of the sky, destined never to touch ground.  Every few minutes they were forced to scrape their goggles and break the crust of snow off the knitted masks that covered the lower half of their faces.

Standing behind the amber headlights, Brian Dougherty averted his face from the wind.  Flexing his fingers and toes to ward off the cold, he wondered why he had come to this godforsaken terminus.  He didn't belong here.  No one belonged here.  He had never before seen a place so barren; even great deserts were not as lifeless as the icecap.  Every aspect of the landscape was a blunt reminder that all of life was nothing but a prelude to inevitable and eternal death, and sometimes the Arctic so sensitized him that in the faces of the other members of the expedition he could see the skulls beneath the skin.

Of course that was precisely why he had come to the icecap: adventure, danger, the possibility of death.  He knew at least that much about himself, though he had never dwelt on it and though he had only a shadowy notion of why he was obsessed with taking extreme risks.