Antarctica (34 page)

Wade heard Viktor’s booming laugh across the chamber. “A good idea!”

“A great idea,” Spiff said. “People here need to resist. It’s been hard here for a long time. I mean ASA wasn’t bad, and yet even then people snuck down and explored old old station, stuff like that. And now, no one likes ASL at all. They treat people like shit, and NSF lets them get away with it. So people resist. It’s a way of staying sane. You can only spend a few weeks here before you begin to go nuts.”

“It was only a few hours for me,” Wade confessed.

They laughed, and someone kissed his cheek; although it was someone with a beard. Viktor no doubt.
“Sounds like Viktor is having quite an impact on polar cap society,” Wade said.

Spiff laughed. “Yes, yes. But it’s mostly talk,” he said louder.

A volley of splashes struck them.

“It is! You say so yourself, Viktor. The great idea man. Is very possible! He comes up with a lot of ideas, but he’s undercapitalized. This water pipe to the Sahara—”

More splashes.

“It’s not happening?”

“Well, I’m sure it’s technically feasible, but that doesn’t mean it will ever get done. Hey, stop that! And if it does, it probably won’t be by Viktor.”

“I have grant in hand. Is very possible.”

Then one of the women called out, “Whirlpool, whirlpool!” People began to move by Wade around the perimeter of the pool, all in the same direction; and soon enough he was pulled along as well, in the whirlpool growing because of their movement. “At the North Pole we’d go the other direction, right?” No one replied.

Floating in blue-black darkness. Spinning down a maelstrom, blind. Wade struggled to keep his head above water, then deduced from the splashing, and from people’s breathing patterns, that the others were mostly submerged. He took a deep breath and went under himself, the water very hot on his face, and reached down to the floor and pushed along in the flow. Banging into the icy walls of the bench. Bumping into the bodies of other people, their limbs slick and muscular. Men or women, there was usually no way to tell. His dives got longer and longer. While submerged he turned and tumbled, upside down, rightside up; it got hard to tell, it did not matter, except when it was time
to breathe. He let the water tumble him however it wanted to. He was flotsam.

“Look for the Cherenkov light,” he heard Spiff gasp at one point. “Look down at the northern sky, see the muons coming up at us. This ice is as transparent as pure diamond, you can see the light from three hundred meters away, the PMTs see a neutrino every second, blue light,” and then Wade was swept under again, and looking down. Then he was seeing blue streaks from far, far below. The light of distant supernovas. The ice was clear. He did not want this rolling tumble ever to stop. Apparently no one else did either, for it went on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Eventually it achieved a sort of no-time, a limbic limbo, such that afterward Wade could not have said how long it went on; perhaps an hour, perhaps two. What in the world could possibly tempt them back from such amniotic bliss?

Finally Spiff hauled him up. “Come on, man, we don’t want to drown a senator.”

“Oh go ahead.”

They laughed and pulled him up again. “Come on, we’re going to miss breakfast.”

Food; that was what would bring them back. Bare necessity.

Now they were all getting out, climbing up a rubber mat and into a passageway Wade couldn’t see. Blind and freezing, though they assured him it was heated air. Flashlights were turned on, and towels and clothes lay piled in the same dumbwaiter, which was open on two sides; there were two changing rooms, it appeared, one for men one for women, it seemed. In any case there were only men in this room, which was walled by ice rather than the compacted snow in all the tunnels and chambers above: Spiff, and Ed, and Viktor, and the bass
player, who appeared utterly blissed-out, though he whimpered as he tried to dress, using fingers that were like Polish sausages. “Snackbar gave his hands so we might live.” They had to zip up his fly and his parka for him. Then they were dressed, thank God, and walking along a crystalline tunnel, the women and the men, all of them steaming like horses, and the steam falling to the floor as white dust.

“If we didn’t heat the air you couldn’t dry off fast enough. You can take a pot of boiling water and sling it up in the air and it hits the ground as dust and pebbles,” Spiff said to Wade. “Crackles like mad.” Wade’s snot was already refrozen, in fact; but his body core was warm, and he felt fine, just fine.

They came to a vertical shaft with a wooden ladder extending up one side. Above they could see nothing. Wade began to climb. It went on till his hands hurt. Then they were climbing snow stairs in a snow-walled passage on a slant, taking a turn on a snow landing, going up stairs again.

Finally they banged up through a trapdoor. They were in the little glassed South Pole Pax Terminal, out by the runway, crowding into it and spilling out.

Wade stumbled back in the stupendous light. He couldn’t stop blinking, and the cold-shocked flood of tears froze on his cheeks. He had been struck blind for sure this time, going from pure black to pure white. Out the door of the shelter and the wind hit like another smack from the invisible side of beef. Wade felt his body ringing like a bell from the blow. It still looked to be the very same time of day it had been when Viktor had arrived, so many eons ago. In an earlier incarnation.

Wade staggered up the metal stairs of the new station, into the stuffy warmth of the blue flying wing. He
was reeling, he could barely stand. He could barely pull off his mittens.

He was headed for his room, one pruned hand propping him against the wall, when he ran into Keri.

“So how did you like old station?”

Wade jumped, composed himself. “Very interesting,” he said. “Kind of like a, a cave.”

“Indeed. Now look, there’s a Herc coming in tonight, do you want to take it back to McMurdo?”

“Um, ah.” Wade tried to think. He gaped, and Keri stared at him curiously. “You know, I’d like to visit Roberts Massif, actually.”

“Roberts? The oil folks?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Well, there’s no direct transport there, of course. You’ll have to go back to McMurdo, and then fly out to Shackleton Glacier camp, and then helo up to Roberts.”

“Fine,” Wade said. “Whatever it takes.” He floated past the man into his room.

Sylvia stood before her wall map of Antarctica, marked now with a variety of red, orange, and yellow numbered dots. There were only a few reds and oranges, though each one was individually troubling, of course. But there were a lot of yellows, especially along the coast of Victoria Land, and down the long spine of the Transantarctics. Some of these could be explained by the recent influx of oil exploration groups, and the few remaining private adventure firms. Others couldn’t.

She took the orange marker from her desk and carefully entered a “14” next to the Amundsen cairn on Mount Betty. Another USO, an unidentified sitting object; some kind of radio with satellite dish, apparently, placed much too close to the historic site; owner unknown; discovered by T-023, Val Kenning’s Amundsen trek. She wrote all this down on a sheet of paper numbered “14” in orange, and put it in a file. Helo pilots had seen two other such objects when flying S-046 around the Beardmore Glacier, and another had been stumbled upon near Ice Stream C, by one of the ASL
team working out of Byrd Station. That one had been brought back in by the worker, and proved to be a satellite dish and radio transmitter of unknown provenance. She had had it mailed out to Cheech and then Washington for analysis, but no word had come back yet. Geoff often spoke of black boxes in science; here were the ultimate black boxes.

She was still staring at the map, trying to see a pattern in the dots, feeling balked and apprehensive, when she heard Paxman’s light tap-tap-tap at her door. “Come in.”

He stuck his head in. “Wade Norton’s back from the Pole, and he wants to talk with you.”

“Certainly, send him in.”

She moved behind her desk, and Wade entered the room. He presented quite a different appearance than he had on arrival, all very predictable of course: sunburned except around the eyes, which had an unfocused, somewhat stunned expression; hair slicked down into the characteristic Antarctic bad hair mat.

“How did you like the Pole?”

“It was very interesting.”

A long pause, as he appeared to be lost in reminiscence. “In what way?” Sylvia prompted at last.

“Ah, well. Lots of ways. Tell me—are you aware of any other, ah, incidents at the Pole like the ones we discussed when I arrived?”

She stared at him. “None except the ones I told you about.”

“Ah.” Another pause. “And the NSF rep at the Pole, and the ASL station manager; they’re in your full confidence?”

“Why yes. Did they seem not to be?”

“I don’t know.”

Now his gaze was focused, and he was staring at her. Their gazes met for a matter of seconds.

“They weren’t particularly helpful,” he said. “The NSF rep in particular appeared to think I might represent a threat to the Pole station, somehow.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He waved a hand. “It’s not really important. But …” He thought for a moment, appeared to change tack. “I’m thinking of trying to visit the oil exploration camp on Roberts Massif, at the head of Shackleton Glacier.”

“I see,” Sylvia said, taken aback. “And why that one, in particular?”

“Well …” He drifted over to her wall map, found the Shackleton and put his fingertip on Roberts. “See, it’s not so far from the Pole. And it’s not so far from the place where the SPOT train was hijacked or whatever.”

“Here’s the actual site of their current cost well,” Sylvia said, pointing to another red dot, out on the polar cap and even closer to the Pole. “That’s even closer to the Pole and the SPOT incident site.”

“Ah ha. And they use a hovercraft to get around on the cap?”

“Why yes, I’ve heard they do.”

“Do you know anything about this hovercraft?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at him closely. “It’s an old Antarctic veteran, actually. Or part of one. It was based here at McMurdo long ago, then shipped out to Christchurch when it was found not to be very useful.” Actually the rumor Sylvia had heard was that the pilots had been a pair of wild women who had hotdogged around in the thing until the ASA brass in charge at that time had gotten annoyed and taken it away from them. But that was the kind of rumor one heard when out in the field. Transmission error in gossip was a phenomenal
thing, and there was no way to know now what had really happened. “Anyway, when these people put together their program they tracked the Hake down in a warehouse in New Zealand and bought it, and had it modified and flew it back down. But why are you interested?”

He shrugged. “There were indications at the Pole that a hovercraft might be involved in some of the thefts from old station.”

“Really? What were the indications?”

“It was something some people said. Just a matter of seeing tracks, you know. Or not seeing tracks. They didn’t want me to break confidentiality, so I shouldn’t say more. I guess because they didn’t tell the NTSB investigators about it. Something about seeing the tracks only because they were out where they weren’t supposed to be, in one of the proscribed zones.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, I thought I’d visit Roberts and see what I could find out there. Keri at the Pole said I had to come back here and fly out to Shackleton field camp, and then get heloed up to Roberts.”

“Yes, that’s right. And we can certainly do that for you. There’s a flight to Shackleton leaving in, let’s see …” She consulted the schedule: “Oh my. In three hours. Think you can make it?”

He blew out a breath. “Ah why not. I can sleep in the Herc.”

“That’s right. First law of Antarctic travel; go when you can.”

“Yes.”

“But what about the people at Roberts, and out at this drill site? What makes you think they will talk to you, or even take you in? They haven’t acknowledged a single one of our messages.”

“I’ve got Senator Chase talking to them directly, and to the home offices in the consortium. It sounds like they’re willing to have me visit.”

“Really! Well, that’s good. That’s progress. I’ll be very interested to hear what you learn there.”

He nodded, looking at her oddly. Another pause. He was not laying all his cards on the table, she saw; and he suspected that she wasn’t either. Well, that was life: NSF and Congress did not have identical interests. Of course NSF reported to Congress, and so in theory she should be telling him everything she knew, or else she would be getting in trouble. “Let’s meet again when you get back,” she said, “and go over everything we don’t have time for now. You’d better get out to the skiway, or else you’ll miss your flight. I’ll have Paxman call out and tell them you’re coming.”

“Thanks.” Wearily he rose and went to the door. Two Herc flights in a single day; and already he looked wasted. He stopped in the doorway and allowed a flash of irritation to show, then shifted it into a wry smile. “If we were to put together the pieces of the puzzle we each have, we might be able to make enough of the picture to recognize it.”

“Yes,” she said.

He stared at her, then continued out the door.

When he was out of the Chalet, Sylvia checked her watch; nine
P.M
. She sighed; she’d have to wait until mid rats to eat, and she was starving already. She pulled a box of camp crackers out of her desk and got on the phone and had Randi patch her on a radio link out to S-375.

“Geoffrey, it’s Sylvia here, do you read me, over?”

Radio static, harsher than usual; then Geoff’s voice: “Yes, Sylvia, we read you, how are you? What’s up, over?”

“I’ve just had the assistant to Senator Chase here, Geoff. He’s just back from Pole, and he’s off to visit the oil exploration camp in the Mohn Basin.”

“Ah yes. He visited us here, as you know.”

“What did you think of him?”

“Well, he seemed to have a good head on his shoulders. Interested in us, or so it seemed. He asked good questions. We enjoyed his visit, anyway.” Voices and laughter in the background. “Although that may have been because of his mountaineer, or so my young libidinally starved colleagues seem to be implying, yes.” More laughter. “I myself am far above such things, as you know.”