“Of course it is. You act as if you never saw it before.”
Jerry nodded, wide-eyed. “I never did.”
Sandy and the two men broke out laughing. “Well, this is an occasion,” Dr. Steele said. “I promise you you will have your fill of it before we’re through with this trip.”
Jerry was flabbergasted. “I’ve seen pictures of it, but I just never realized there could be so much of it in one place. Man! That one drift must be twenty feet high. Can you imagine waking up some morning in Valley View and finding that in your front yard, Sandy?”
“Well, I haven’t seen too much of it,” Sandy admitted. “But I’ve been up to the Northwest with Dad a few times.”
At that moment a jeep screeched to a stop nearby, its exhaust spewing out smoke like a chimney. The corporal at the wheel leaned out and yelled to them. “Dr. Steele here?” After the geologist identified himself, the corporal told them to pile into the jeep. “There’s a gent waiting for you at headquarters. A detail will be right out to unload your baggage.”
“How do you keep these runways free of ice?” Dr. Steele shouted to the driver above the loud, rowdy roar of the little jeep motor.
“Sweep ’em with giant vacuum cleaners regularly,” the corporal replied. “When it gets really rough we melt the ice with flame throwers.”
Professor Berkley Crowell was waiting for them close by the glowing steel-drum coal stove that reinforced the electric heaters in the big quonset-hut headquarters. “You can’t beat the old-fashioned way,” he said with a smile, toasting his fingers in the shimmering heat waves that radiated from the top of the steel drum.
The professor was a slight, stooped, very British-looking man in his middle fifties. He had a thin weatherbeaten face, a sharp nose and a close-cropped mustache. His deep-set blue eyes were warm and full of good humor.