Ice on Fire
Aug. 17th, 2011 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Keene wiped the frost off his goggles and entered the wheelhouse of _Serengeti_. It was about ten degrees warmer inside than the Arctic winter outside. He took off his heavy gloves and clapped his hands together vigorously to get a little circulation back before trying to operate the radio.
"DMX nine zero, DMX nine zero, over," said Keene into the receiver. There was a burst of static and then a reply.
"Papa Bear back, DMX nine zero," said the reply. "Long time no hear, Keene; what's it been, four hours?"
Keene was in no mood for kidding around. "Just gimme the news, Carl," he said.
"No word, buddy," replied Carl. "Your bro at the hospital says the old lady is yelling up a storm, but still no baby." Keene rested his head on the ice cutter's bulkhead. Of all the times to be called up for active duty, this was the one time, the only time, that his wife really needed him. He had promised he'd be there.
But this was an emergency. Keene swore, his breath visible, and got back on the horn.
"All right, keep your ears on," he said. "I'll try to wait at least six hours until the next call."
"You know I wouldn't hassle you, but admiral says keep the channels clear," said Carl apologetically. "Trying to coordinate every ship and plane above the Circle for this situation takes all the bandwidth we got. Hey, apparently there's some kind of… thing going on!"
Keene smiled beside himself. "Yeah, I know," he said. "_Serengeti_ out." He hung up and looked at the faint haze of blue to the north, hugging the edge of the ice on the horizon.
It wasn't every day the Northern icecap burst into flame.
Well, not flame exactly. It was a lot like flame, but it was also different. It wasn't anything natural, that much was sure. The speculation among the captains Keene ran with was that it had escaped from some kind of military laboratory. The chief question was whether that lab was one of theirs or ours.
It looked a bit like fire – it glowed, and tongues of flame leaped and danced the way hot flames do – but it was cold, so cold that it burned flesh that got close, and it was an icy and iridescent blue. It spread like fire too, leaping from place to place if there was enough air and fuel to support it. But it wasn't combustion. This fire fed on ice.
It was a strange process. The science guys were still scratching their heads over what exactly it was doing. It consumed ice, that was for sure, and it did it by extracting heat from the air around it. It left behind liquid water, just above freezing temperature, and a lot of water vapor, and some other trace chemicals that were still being studied. Nobody was sure where it had started, but it had chewed its way across much of the Canadian open water and the area close to the Russian islands. The resulting change in sea levels was still being studied, but coastal areas were already being swamped, and even the most conservative figures painted a catastrophic picture even if the fire were to be extinguished immediately.
The _Serengeti_ had been roped into duty, and Keene and his seven crewmen with it. They had been assigned a place in the cordon of hastily-assembled firefighters. Their duty station was the far Northern Atlantic; their charge, to cut a firebreak through to isolate pristine ice from the conflagration. It was winter, and conditions were deteriorating, but what could they do? It was kill the fire or watch the world drown.
Keene thought of his unborn baby. They hadn't checked on gender – her idea; she liked surprises – and they had two different nursery motifs ready to go as soon as the baby came. But Keene liked to think of the baby as a boy. He wanted his son to be able to go play in the ocean at a beach – while there was still such a thing. Grimly, he put his boat in gear and resumed plowing northwards.
They had already hit ice, but it was all scattered floes and broken chunks; _Serengeti_ plowed through the detritus easily, her hardened bow shoving the ice aside. To the east all looked normal, but to the north and west, that curious blue haze made a bridge between ice and sky, as if a landscape painter had blurred out the distinct line between the two. Keene was glad he wasn't there. There the air would be much, much colder – possibly hazardously so – and the ice might refreeze and lock in the boat. Then when the blue fire came, they might not be able to get away. According to the reports, all of Greenland was on fire, and there hadn't been many survivors.
A low drone penetrated the wheelhouse; Keene opened the door, braving the cold, to watch the planes flying in a loose delta overhead. There were six of them, all fire-planes borrowed from the forest service, and they were carrying the big water scoops towards the conflagration. Keene shook his fist at them. He didn't claim to be an expert in this strange situation, and was pretty sure that anybody who *did* make such a claim was probably a horse's ass, but he felt certain that dumping buckets of water wasn't going to do much to dampen this flavor of fire. It would refreeze and add fuel. Keene ranted impotently at the planes until they buzzed out of his sight to the northwest. It was something to do.
Keene gunned eighty thousand horsepower on twin shafts in a generally northward direction. Where _Serengeti_ encountered more solid ice, the backswept shape of the bow below the waterline forced the ship up on top of the pack. There the vessel's weight crunched it down through the ice, and heeling pumps pushed the water away on both sides of the ship to permit it to glide more freely. Keene made fifteen knots on average through most of the daylight hours and counted himself lucky.
There was no more daylight, meaning it was four o'clock, when Keene couldn’t stand it anymore. He picked up the radio and buzzed Carl again.
"DMX nine zero, there's news – not the best, but not the worst, so keep your panties on," said Carl.
"Out with it," Keene said.
"Baby's stuck, chief," Carl said. "Doesn't want to go forwards. Can't go backwards. Kind of in a holding pattern right now."
"Shit," said Keene, then toggled SEND again.
"How's Emily?" he asked.
"Jesus, Keene, that's a dumb one," scolded Carl. "How the hell you think she is, with a goddamn baby stuck up her ass? She's not really happy with you or with the rest of the world right now. You count yourself lucky you're out here and not there."
"Go screw yourself, Carl," growled Keene.
"You go screw," replied Carl, "and stay off my goddamn line." Keene had a few choice words to say, but he didn't press SEND while saying them.
Keene forced the vessel through the ice, trying to make up for lost time. It was dark and the wind was picking up, pushing in the exact wrong direction. _Serengeti_'s headway slowed to a crawl. Lloyd came in off the foredeck, ice crusted over every exposed surface of his body. He removed his ski-mask and shook it out. His face was as red as a beet.
"Shitty out there, skipper," he said. Keene nodded. He wasn't in the mood for small talk.
"There's a blue glow on the horizon off to port," continued Lloyd. "Must be getting nearer to the fire. The whole horizon is en frio."
"En what?" frowned Keene.
"Frio. Like, instead of on fire being 'en fuego', this is 'en frio'. Spanish word for 'cold', yeah?"
Keene nodded. Frio. It was good to have a new word for the stuff, something other than 'blue fire'. They were fighting frio.
The enemy had a name.
Keene put the pedal to the metal and bore down. The ice was actually growing weaker now; the consumption of the ice to the west was breaking the massed pack apart. The blue light was an arclight glow visible through every port window. Keene napped fitfully, letting Kolby have a turn at the helm, but he had terrible dreams. He dreamed that Emily was heaving and straining in the delivery bed, and he was there with her, but when he bent to catch the baby, all that came out was a misshapen blue chunk of ice. As he stared at the chilly thing in his hands, it burst into flame.
"Skipper!" Keene was being shaken awake. He bumped his head on the underside of the bunk above him and peered up at Lloyd and Virgil, fighting off the fog of sleep.
"Frio's close, skipper," said Lloyd. "We got something on the radar, too." Lloyd sounded scared. He was an old hand, and old hands are good in familiar situations, but they're just that much more skittish when they run into something unknown.
Keene came up and looked at the scope. There was a mass of weather coming down from the northwest, but it was too low to be rainclouds, and it was moving too fast. Keene took binoculars out on deck and peered in that direction, bracing against the biting wind. The blue glow looked swollen there; it had height as well as width, and Keene thought he could see a shifting in the shapes of the azure tendrils that reached upwards.
"We're hard upon the frio," Keene shouted, barging back into the wheelhouse. "Adjust north by northeast. What's on the scope isn't weather, it's the steam cloud, and we're going to hit it. Brace yourselves."
He hit the floodlights. The water was active enough to have significant chop in the broken ice; joints folded up and caved downwards across a white landscape perpetually in motion. Looking out over a mobile pack was enough to make a greenhorn seasick, looking at something that looked so much like solid ground but moved like the sea. And coming rolling across it was a solid mass of fog, its whiteness tinged blue.
Keene got on the loudspeaker. "Everybody get your asses inside," he said curtly. Barnes, who was on the forewatch, unclipped himself from the deck cleat and started carefully picking his way aft along the slippery deck. Keene heard the cabin hatch bang as the other crewmen hurriedly followed his orders.
"C'mon, Barnes, hurry up," called Keene as the fog rolled in. It was as dense a cloud as Keene had ever seen in many years at sea, billowing softly and swirling in upon itself. Once it closed over the foredeck, Keene couldn't even see the first rail ahead of him. The navigation lights were completely invisible. Keene cut the floods; they weren't doing anything.
There was a thump aft and shouts. Lloyd's sweating face appeared in the wheelhouse hatch. "Barnes didn't make it inside!" he yelled. "He's collapsed!"
"Do not open that deck hatch," ordered Keene. "Kolby! Get that SCUBA gear on! Go out the aft hatch and drag Barnes inside!"
"Shit," said Kolby. He was scared, but he did as he was told. Inside the wheelhouse, the temperature was rapidly dropping – that cloud was COLD. The air reeked of salt, and ozone, and something else – something strange and chemical-smelling, something that reminded Keene a great deal of industrial plants and medical laboratories, and nothing at all of the clean air of the open sea.
There were more shouts from astern, and Keene left Virgil at the helm to go see what was going on. Kolby had fetched Barnes inside. Barnes was on a table, and Lloyd was working over him with the oxygen bag. Kolby was shivering all over, and when he removed his ski mask, Keene saw that the skin on his face was blue.
"Piece of cake, Skipper," said Kolby, gasping with relief. "I think we're just a little oxygen-depleted out there, that's all."
Lloyd nodded. "Barnsey'll pull through, chief," he said. "Just get us out of this freakin' cloud."
Keene returned to the wheelhouse and adjusted his course a point more to the east. To his great satisfaction, he saw that the fog was already thinning; he could see the faint nimbus of the navigation lights through the miasma on the foredeck. Keene could think of nothing he wanted more than to check on his wife.
He picked up the radio and called "DMX nine zero, over," several times. Only static returned. Keene adjusted the frequency tuning several times but got nothing on any signal. He threw the receiver across the cabin; its spiral wire kept it from smashing to pieces against the bulkhead.
Lloyd stuck his head in. "What's up, Skipper?" he asked. Keene waved a hand vaguely in the air.
"It's the damned frio cloud, I bet," he said. "Something about it screws up the radio. We're out of touch for now, that's all." Keene turned wearily to his mate.
"Don't sweat it, Lloyd," he said. "We're almost there. Let's do the job and go home."
The ice began to solidify again, and the engine horsepower climbed as _Serengeti_ was obliged to force her way through the pack with more vigor. The blue was entirely to the west now, and none of it to the north, but Keene was unsettled to see a different, more conventional glow in that direction. He changed course, angling for the yellow flicker seen dimly through the sleet.
One of the fire-planes had crashed. Only one of its wings and its tail were visible; the rest had probably punched down through the ice, but the wound had already closed over again. Keene saw no flares and no signs of survivors, but he sent Lloyd and Virgil out onto the ice with a sled anyway to look. They came back empty-handed.
"Nothing?" asked Keene.
Lloyd shook his head. "Saw a bear," said Virgil.
"Yeah?" asked Keene.
"Yeah," replied Virgil. "It was just sitting there, like it didn't know what to do." Keene thought he knew how the bear felt. What had dropped the plane? Oxygen loss or something else?
They pushed on for four more hours and reached the coordinates assigned to them by the fleet. They began constructing the firebreak. _Serengeti_ punched into the dense pack, forcing the ice apart with the heeling pumps. On the stern, teams of crewmen began deploying the hastily-assembled meltwater booms. They were buoys with a very simple reactor powered by a self-regulating Uranium pebble chamber. All they did was take in sea water into a set of heat exchangers, heat it up, and pump it out through floating booms. The crew chained the booms together with the reactors strung along it like beads. These they deployed in _Serengeti_'s wake to keep the gap open. Hopefully they could keep the frio from spreading. If it could be isolated, segregated, perhaps there was some other way to kill it. With CO2 drops, perhaps, or liquid nitrogen.
They were halfway through their run when the radio crackled to life. "Papa Bear calling for DMX nine zero, over," came Carl's static-distorted voice. Keene fumbled for the radio.
"Yeah?" he said.
"Good morning, Dad," said Carl.
"Yeah?!" repeated Keene, overjoyed.
"Hells yeah," replied Carl. "A girl, Florence, six pounds fourteen, twenty one inches. Mama is uncomfortable but happy. She requests you pay your respects ASAP."
"All right," said Keene, tearing up a little. "A girl. Yeah. Hey, uh, tell Mama I'm almost done and I'll be home so fast it'll make her head spin. And also I love her, and her."
"That's beautiful, baby," said Carl.
"Shut up, Papa Bear," said Keene. "_Serengeti_ out."
Lloyd clapped Keene on the back. "Hey, man; congratulations," he said. Keene suddenly had a thought and convulsed with silent laughter.
An uncertain smile played on Lloyd's face. "What?" he asked. "What's funny?"
"Emily named my daughter 'Florence'," said Keene, shaking his head. "Floe."
"DMX nine zero, DMX nine zero, over," said Keene into the receiver. There was a burst of static and then a reply.
"Papa Bear back, DMX nine zero," said the reply. "Long time no hear, Keene; what's it been, four hours?"
Keene was in no mood for kidding around. "Just gimme the news, Carl," he said.
"No word, buddy," replied Carl. "Your bro at the hospital says the old lady is yelling up a storm, but still no baby." Keene rested his head on the ice cutter's bulkhead. Of all the times to be called up for active duty, this was the one time, the only time, that his wife really needed him. He had promised he'd be there.
But this was an emergency. Keene swore, his breath visible, and got back on the horn.
"All right, keep your ears on," he said. "I'll try to wait at least six hours until the next call."
"You know I wouldn't hassle you, but admiral says keep the channels clear," said Carl apologetically. "Trying to coordinate every ship and plane above the Circle for this situation takes all the bandwidth we got. Hey, apparently there's some kind of… thing going on!"
Keene smiled beside himself. "Yeah, I know," he said. "_Serengeti_ out." He hung up and looked at the faint haze of blue to the north, hugging the edge of the ice on the horizon.
It wasn't every day the Northern icecap burst into flame.
Well, not flame exactly. It was a lot like flame, but it was also different. It wasn't anything natural, that much was sure. The speculation among the captains Keene ran with was that it had escaped from some kind of military laboratory. The chief question was whether that lab was one of theirs or ours.
It looked a bit like fire – it glowed, and tongues of flame leaped and danced the way hot flames do – but it was cold, so cold that it burned flesh that got close, and it was an icy and iridescent blue. It spread like fire too, leaping from place to place if there was enough air and fuel to support it. But it wasn't combustion. This fire fed on ice.
It was a strange process. The science guys were still scratching their heads over what exactly it was doing. It consumed ice, that was for sure, and it did it by extracting heat from the air around it. It left behind liquid water, just above freezing temperature, and a lot of water vapor, and some other trace chemicals that were still being studied. Nobody was sure where it had started, but it had chewed its way across much of the Canadian open water and the area close to the Russian islands. The resulting change in sea levels was still being studied, but coastal areas were already being swamped, and even the most conservative figures painted a catastrophic picture even if the fire were to be extinguished immediately.
The _Serengeti_ had been roped into duty, and Keene and his seven crewmen with it. They had been assigned a place in the cordon of hastily-assembled firefighters. Their duty station was the far Northern Atlantic; their charge, to cut a firebreak through to isolate pristine ice from the conflagration. It was winter, and conditions were deteriorating, but what could they do? It was kill the fire or watch the world drown.
Keene thought of his unborn baby. They hadn't checked on gender – her idea; she liked surprises – and they had two different nursery motifs ready to go as soon as the baby came. But Keene liked to think of the baby as a boy. He wanted his son to be able to go play in the ocean at a beach – while there was still such a thing. Grimly, he put his boat in gear and resumed plowing northwards.
They had already hit ice, but it was all scattered floes and broken chunks; _Serengeti_ plowed through the detritus easily, her hardened bow shoving the ice aside. To the east all looked normal, but to the north and west, that curious blue haze made a bridge between ice and sky, as if a landscape painter had blurred out the distinct line between the two. Keene was glad he wasn't there. There the air would be much, much colder – possibly hazardously so – and the ice might refreeze and lock in the boat. Then when the blue fire came, they might not be able to get away. According to the reports, all of Greenland was on fire, and there hadn't been many survivors.
A low drone penetrated the wheelhouse; Keene opened the door, braving the cold, to watch the planes flying in a loose delta overhead. There were six of them, all fire-planes borrowed from the forest service, and they were carrying the big water scoops towards the conflagration. Keene shook his fist at them. He didn't claim to be an expert in this strange situation, and was pretty sure that anybody who *did* make such a claim was probably a horse's ass, but he felt certain that dumping buckets of water wasn't going to do much to dampen this flavor of fire. It would refreeze and add fuel. Keene ranted impotently at the planes until they buzzed out of his sight to the northwest. It was something to do.
Keene gunned eighty thousand horsepower on twin shafts in a generally northward direction. Where _Serengeti_ encountered more solid ice, the backswept shape of the bow below the waterline forced the ship up on top of the pack. There the vessel's weight crunched it down through the ice, and heeling pumps pushed the water away on both sides of the ship to permit it to glide more freely. Keene made fifteen knots on average through most of the daylight hours and counted himself lucky.
There was no more daylight, meaning it was four o'clock, when Keene couldn’t stand it anymore. He picked up the radio and buzzed Carl again.
"DMX nine zero, there's news – not the best, but not the worst, so keep your panties on," said Carl.
"Out with it," Keene said.
"Baby's stuck, chief," Carl said. "Doesn't want to go forwards. Can't go backwards. Kind of in a holding pattern right now."
"Shit," said Keene, then toggled SEND again.
"How's Emily?" he asked.
"Jesus, Keene, that's a dumb one," scolded Carl. "How the hell you think she is, with a goddamn baby stuck up her ass? She's not really happy with you or with the rest of the world right now. You count yourself lucky you're out here and not there."
"Go screw yourself, Carl," growled Keene.
"You go screw," replied Carl, "and stay off my goddamn line." Keene had a few choice words to say, but he didn't press SEND while saying them.
Keene forced the vessel through the ice, trying to make up for lost time. It was dark and the wind was picking up, pushing in the exact wrong direction. _Serengeti_'s headway slowed to a crawl. Lloyd came in off the foredeck, ice crusted over every exposed surface of his body. He removed his ski-mask and shook it out. His face was as red as a beet.
"Shitty out there, skipper," he said. Keene nodded. He wasn't in the mood for small talk.
"There's a blue glow on the horizon off to port," continued Lloyd. "Must be getting nearer to the fire. The whole horizon is en frio."
"En what?" frowned Keene.
"Frio. Like, instead of on fire being 'en fuego', this is 'en frio'. Spanish word for 'cold', yeah?"
Keene nodded. Frio. It was good to have a new word for the stuff, something other than 'blue fire'. They were fighting frio.
The enemy had a name.
Keene put the pedal to the metal and bore down. The ice was actually growing weaker now; the consumption of the ice to the west was breaking the massed pack apart. The blue light was an arclight glow visible through every port window. Keene napped fitfully, letting Kolby have a turn at the helm, but he had terrible dreams. He dreamed that Emily was heaving and straining in the delivery bed, and he was there with her, but when he bent to catch the baby, all that came out was a misshapen blue chunk of ice. As he stared at the chilly thing in his hands, it burst into flame.
"Skipper!" Keene was being shaken awake. He bumped his head on the underside of the bunk above him and peered up at Lloyd and Virgil, fighting off the fog of sleep.
"Frio's close, skipper," said Lloyd. "We got something on the radar, too." Lloyd sounded scared. He was an old hand, and old hands are good in familiar situations, but they're just that much more skittish when they run into something unknown.
Keene came up and looked at the scope. There was a mass of weather coming down from the northwest, but it was too low to be rainclouds, and it was moving too fast. Keene took binoculars out on deck and peered in that direction, bracing against the biting wind. The blue glow looked swollen there; it had height as well as width, and Keene thought he could see a shifting in the shapes of the azure tendrils that reached upwards.
"We're hard upon the frio," Keene shouted, barging back into the wheelhouse. "Adjust north by northeast. What's on the scope isn't weather, it's the steam cloud, and we're going to hit it. Brace yourselves."
He hit the floodlights. The water was active enough to have significant chop in the broken ice; joints folded up and caved downwards across a white landscape perpetually in motion. Looking out over a mobile pack was enough to make a greenhorn seasick, looking at something that looked so much like solid ground but moved like the sea. And coming rolling across it was a solid mass of fog, its whiteness tinged blue.
Keene got on the loudspeaker. "Everybody get your asses inside," he said curtly. Barnes, who was on the forewatch, unclipped himself from the deck cleat and started carefully picking his way aft along the slippery deck. Keene heard the cabin hatch bang as the other crewmen hurriedly followed his orders.
"C'mon, Barnes, hurry up," called Keene as the fog rolled in. It was as dense a cloud as Keene had ever seen in many years at sea, billowing softly and swirling in upon itself. Once it closed over the foredeck, Keene couldn't even see the first rail ahead of him. The navigation lights were completely invisible. Keene cut the floods; they weren't doing anything.
There was a thump aft and shouts. Lloyd's sweating face appeared in the wheelhouse hatch. "Barnes didn't make it inside!" he yelled. "He's collapsed!"
"Do not open that deck hatch," ordered Keene. "Kolby! Get that SCUBA gear on! Go out the aft hatch and drag Barnes inside!"
"Shit," said Kolby. He was scared, but he did as he was told. Inside the wheelhouse, the temperature was rapidly dropping – that cloud was COLD. The air reeked of salt, and ozone, and something else – something strange and chemical-smelling, something that reminded Keene a great deal of industrial plants and medical laboratories, and nothing at all of the clean air of the open sea.
There were more shouts from astern, and Keene left Virgil at the helm to go see what was going on. Kolby had fetched Barnes inside. Barnes was on a table, and Lloyd was working over him with the oxygen bag. Kolby was shivering all over, and when he removed his ski mask, Keene saw that the skin on his face was blue.
"Piece of cake, Skipper," said Kolby, gasping with relief. "I think we're just a little oxygen-depleted out there, that's all."
Lloyd nodded. "Barnsey'll pull through, chief," he said. "Just get us out of this freakin' cloud."
Keene returned to the wheelhouse and adjusted his course a point more to the east. To his great satisfaction, he saw that the fog was already thinning; he could see the faint nimbus of the navigation lights through the miasma on the foredeck. Keene could think of nothing he wanted more than to check on his wife.
He picked up the radio and called "DMX nine zero, over," several times. Only static returned. Keene adjusted the frequency tuning several times but got nothing on any signal. He threw the receiver across the cabin; its spiral wire kept it from smashing to pieces against the bulkhead.
Lloyd stuck his head in. "What's up, Skipper?" he asked. Keene waved a hand vaguely in the air.
"It's the damned frio cloud, I bet," he said. "Something about it screws up the radio. We're out of touch for now, that's all." Keene turned wearily to his mate.
"Don't sweat it, Lloyd," he said. "We're almost there. Let's do the job and go home."
The ice began to solidify again, and the engine horsepower climbed as _Serengeti_ was obliged to force her way through the pack with more vigor. The blue was entirely to the west now, and none of it to the north, but Keene was unsettled to see a different, more conventional glow in that direction. He changed course, angling for the yellow flicker seen dimly through the sleet.
One of the fire-planes had crashed. Only one of its wings and its tail were visible; the rest had probably punched down through the ice, but the wound had already closed over again. Keene saw no flares and no signs of survivors, but he sent Lloyd and Virgil out onto the ice with a sled anyway to look. They came back empty-handed.
"Nothing?" asked Keene.
Lloyd shook his head. "Saw a bear," said Virgil.
"Yeah?" asked Keene.
"Yeah," replied Virgil. "It was just sitting there, like it didn't know what to do." Keene thought he knew how the bear felt. What had dropped the plane? Oxygen loss or something else?
They pushed on for four more hours and reached the coordinates assigned to them by the fleet. They began constructing the firebreak. _Serengeti_ punched into the dense pack, forcing the ice apart with the heeling pumps. On the stern, teams of crewmen began deploying the hastily-assembled meltwater booms. They were buoys with a very simple reactor powered by a self-regulating Uranium pebble chamber. All they did was take in sea water into a set of heat exchangers, heat it up, and pump it out through floating booms. The crew chained the booms together with the reactors strung along it like beads. These they deployed in _Serengeti_'s wake to keep the gap open. Hopefully they could keep the frio from spreading. If it could be isolated, segregated, perhaps there was some other way to kill it. With CO2 drops, perhaps, or liquid nitrogen.
They were halfway through their run when the radio crackled to life. "Papa Bear calling for DMX nine zero, over," came Carl's static-distorted voice. Keene fumbled for the radio.
"Yeah?" he said.
"Good morning, Dad," said Carl.
"Yeah?!" repeated Keene, overjoyed.
"Hells yeah," replied Carl. "A girl, Florence, six pounds fourteen, twenty one inches. Mama is uncomfortable but happy. She requests you pay your respects ASAP."
"All right," said Keene, tearing up a little. "A girl. Yeah. Hey, uh, tell Mama I'm almost done and I'll be home so fast it'll make her head spin. And also I love her, and her."
"That's beautiful, baby," said Carl.
"Shut up, Papa Bear," said Keene. "_Serengeti_ out."
Lloyd clapped Keene on the back. "Hey, man; congratulations," he said. Keene suddenly had a thought and convulsed with silent laughter.
An uncertain smile played on Lloyd's face. "What?" he asked. "What's funny?"
"Emily named my daughter 'Florence'," said Keene, shaking his head. "Floe."