Antarctica (39 page)

Val moved farther into the room, enchanted. A shattered cathedral, made of titanic columns of driftglass; a room of a thousand shapes; and all of it a blue that could not be described and could scarcely be apprehended, as it seemed to flood and then to overflood the eye. Val stared at it, rapt, trying to take it all in, realizing that it was likely to be one of the loveliest sights she would ever see in her life—unearthly, surreal—her breath caught, her cheeks burned, her spine tingled, and all just from seeing such a sight.

But no sledge. And back at the entrance to the blue chamber, there was a narrow crack running the other way, not much wider than the sledge itself; and looking down it, into an ever-darkening blue, Val saw a smear of pale snow and ice shards, and below that, what appeared to be the sledge, wedged between the ice walls a hundred feet or more below; it was hard to judge, because the crevasse continued far down into the midnight-blue depths below. There was no way she could get down there and get back up again; and even if she could have, the sledge was corked, as they said. Stuck and irretrievable. In this case crushed between the walls, it looked like, and broken open so that its contents were spilled even farther down. A very thorough corking. No—the sledge was gone.

Wade slept through the flight to Shackleton Glacier Camp, and sleepwalked his way through the transition from Herc to helo, then fell asleep again. The next time he woke he found himself suspended above the upper reaches of Shackleton Glacier, in the clear plastic bubble of a little Squirrel helicopter. The ice curved down to the sea in a broad sweep, with long lines of rubble marking very clearly the direction of the flow, and tributary glaciers pouring in and merging in just the way the water of rivers would, although here the eddies and cross-currents were indicated by rippled blue crevasse patches, or even in some places gnashed into fields of turquoise blades.

The Kiwi helo pilot pointed down at one such field. “Ever seen one of those close up?”

“No.”

They dropped like a shot bird, tilting forward and to the left as they spiralled tightly downward. Wade gritted his teeth. Kiwi pilots were scary, as he had begun to learn on his flight down from Christchurch. The young
American pilots working for ASL moved their big beasts around the air like trucks, and like good truck drivers they were impressive; but the Kiwis, older and wiser, flew as if their helos were extensions of their bodies, like dragonflies. This man looked unconcerned as he brought the helo swooping down to hover, in dragonfly style, well down inside an avenue of serac skyscrapers; Wade was shocked at their size, as from a thousand feet up they had looked like waist-high ripples. “Wow.”

The pilot pulled back up and continued without comment. Back at cruising height, the crevasse patches again looked like ice cubes; but now, knowing how big they really were, Wade’s sense of scale popped like one’s ears did, and he realized that the glacier and the mountains flanking it were all huge, huge, huge. The helo buzzed along like a bee up a winter canyon. It was a big planet.

Ahead a rusty rock island grew. A spill of glacier poured over a low point in its outermost ridge, and fell down toward a bowl of rock that it never even reached, much less filled. As they passed the island Wade could now see the polar cap, extending to the south forever. On the southernmost point of the island clustered a tiny knot of green square roofs, like Monopoly houses. Vertigo of scale: it was as a gnat or a microbe that he watched the tiny structures recede behind them, and the nunatak get lower and smaller, until they were out over the ice of the polar cap, and it was ice as far as they could see, on a world grown as big as Jupiter, or the sun itself. Then the helo began to drop again. They were landing on the ice.

The complex of buildings they descended on was of course bigger than it had appeared from above. As Wade got out of the helicopter the complex looked entirely deserted, in the usual Antarctic way; everyone indoors. The empty continent indeed.

Then one of the doors opened, and out of it appeared the big man Wade had met back in McMurdo, on Ob Hill. It seemed a very long time ago; in actuality, less than two weeks.

“Hi!” Wade said.

X looked closer, then recognized him as well. “Hi. Welcome to the ice.”

Wade nodded, looking around at the brilliantly lit scene. Flat white to the horizon in all directions; much like the Pole in that regard. A gentle breeze cut deep into him. The main building of the complex was a small meat locker/mobile home, behind it a gleaming oil derrick or something like, resting on broad pontoons that were only slightly snowdrifted on their south sides. Metal grid stairs led up to the usual locker door, and after a brief look around they went inside.

The interior of the room was like the bridge of an invisible ship, the walls banked with the consoles of anonymous machinery. From this height expansive shallow basins and low hills were discernible on the ice plain.

“Nice,” Wade said.

“Yes,” said X, and called into the next room. A man entered. “This is Carlos, the leader of the group here.”

“Good to meet you,” Wade said to the bearded man. They shook hands.

“And you too,” Carlos said. “Nice to have you here. Here, let’s have some lunch, and then we’ll take you out and show you around.”

“That would be nice.”

Lunch was a spicy Chilean shrimp and scallop stew. There were other men in the room, Latinos and Africans, eating the stew and talking in Spanish or English. Then they left in a group for the machine shop, and Carlos and X and Wade sat at a lab table under one of the end windows, and talked looking out at the view. Wade described his mission to Antarctica, and told them some of what he had discovered at the South Pole and back at McMurdo. Carlos nodded, then expressed his admiration for Phil Chase. “He is very important now, very important.”

Wade said, “Do you mind if I try to transmit our conversation to him? He’d like to hear this, I’m sure.”

“Oh no problem, no problem.”

Wade tapped the Congressman’s button on his wrist phone, hoping it was not the middle of the night wherever Chase was now; or that he was feeling insomniac again. Voices in the night: that was how Phil spent many a sleepless hour.

“First,” Wade said, “can you tell me if your hovercraft has ever been out to the South Pole, either with you, or piloted by someone else?”

Carlos looked surprised. “To the Pole? It’s more than two hundred kilometers away.”

“Couldn’t the hovercraft get there?”

“Not without refueling.”

“Couldn’t fuel caches be out there?”

“Well, yes, I suppose so. I mean there are, at our field stations. But they are all located over this basin under the ice that we are investigating, the Pothole as we call it. We don’t go toward the Pole much.”

“And no one else could have used the hovercraft?”

“No way.”

Wade nodded, thinking it over. “Tell me more about this place.”

Carlos described the nature of the work going on at the station, emphasizing its exploratory nature, the new fail-safe technologies being employed in the hunt, and the fact that the main quarry at this point was methane hydrates, which if burned as fuel rather than released into the atmosphere would actually help the overall picture concerning global warming. He listed the points of the suspended Antarctic Treaty, and described how they were in fact conforming to all of them: “especially at this point, when the drilling is being done for science only.”

Wade nodded throughout this description, then said, “It’s very interesting, but you must agree that there is a lot of criticism and opposition to your project.”

“This is political in nature.”

“Well, some from Antarctic scientists too. If the project is as harmless or as beneficial as you say it is, then why are they making these objections?”

Carlos rolled his eyes. “Unfortunately there are a fairly large number of scientists who are not completely scientific. Not good scientists when it comes to life outside their own field of study. It’s part of a more general crisis ongoing among scientists worldwide, concerning how to behave in the world outside their field. You have been down here long enough to notice, I hope, that this continent is run by scientists, and mostly for their own benefit. They are funded by governments to come down here, and they generate the only export of the continent so far, which is scientific papers. Knowledge, you can say, but say also papers, careers, livings.”

X was nodding deeply as Carlos said this, and Wade looked to him to invite him to explain why.

“That’s the way it looked in McMurdo,” X said.
“Beaker utopia. And the rest of the people down here making things nice for them, freeing up their time, but just making wages for themselves. It’s a caste system.”

“Exactly,” Carlos said. “Most scientists have analyzed life scientifically, and realized that sufficiency is all that you really need, and that pursuing money beyond the point of sufficiency only degrades life. So that it is no coincidence that very rich people are often fools or crazed, while scientists are smart people who have carved their little utopia out of the world system, by extending their efforts after knowledge rather than money. They know that knowledge can become power, and with the power that science wields in this world, they control things. Control even the political realm, but without the hassle of politics per se. They just advise the decision makers what is possible and what is advisable, and ask for money, and go out and do what they want.”

Wade said, “So you’re saying scientists control not just Antarctica, but the whole rest of the world?”

Carlos got up and took their bowls to the stove for refills. “Exactly true! And this illustrates a very important principle of mine, which is that whatever is true in Antarctica is also true everywhere else in the world. But in Antarctica there are no, no,” he waved at the blank featureless white plain outside the window, “no distractions. No trees or billboards. You can see what really is true, naked out here. So if you come down here and see a continent ruled by scientists for their own convenience, it is true also then on all the other continents as well.”

Wade said, “Well, but, I don’t know … I’m not used to thinking of scientists actually being the ones in control. I don’t think most of them would agree that’s the case. I doubt they would even want it to be.”

“Oh no, not explicitly! Of course not! Who would want that, it is obviously such a hassle! Politicians—” he looked at Wade, raised a palm to say, What can you say? “No sane person would want that, apologies to Senator Chase. It violates the principle of sufficiency. But tell me, who do you think rules the world?”

“Governments,” Wade said.

“Okay, but not politicians per se. The whole government.”

“Yes.”

“Meaning you. I mean, in that the politicians get elected, and they have staff people who actually know how to work the system. And so when they want to get something done, they ask their staff how they can do it, and if the staff likes the project they tell the politician how, and if they don’t like it, they subvert it.”

“Yes, Minister,”
X said. “Great show.”

Wade had to agree. “I certainly am in complete control of my politician,” he said distinctly toward his wrist phone. “Sir Humphrey has nothing on me.”

“So,” Carlos said, “but when you make your decisions, who do you consult? Do you call yourself a bureaucrat?”

“No, not really.”

“Because they are just functionaries, they do not set policy?”

“That’s right.”

“But what about technocrats? What about scientific staff, who tell the politicians what is physically possible and what isn’t? Are you a technocrat?”

“Perhaps,” Wade said. “But not usually. I have an expertise, I suppose, but I’m no scientist.”

“A bureaucrat then! Or staff assistant, or political aide. Whatever you call it. Let’s just say government, like you said at first. But you make your decisions by
consulting with a technical staff, the technocrats, and they make their decisions by consulting with the scientific bodies, the scientists. And so the scientists call the shots!”