Antarctica (42 page)

“How far away?” Jorge asked.

“Well, it’s about a hundred kilometers,” Val said, looking at each of them in turn. “Maybe a bit more. A long way, for sure, but not too long. We can do it. We’ll just pace ourselves, take rests when we need to, and keep walking till we get there.”

“No problem,” Jack said. “I ran a fifty-miler once.”

Val nodded, suppressing all irritation. “That’s right. And we won’t be in any special hurry. Our suits are like little walking emergency huts. They’re warmer than we’ll need, and they’ve got emergency food sewn into them, and the arm flasks for melting snow to water.” She patted her upper arm. “It’s too bad we don’t have our skis, but we have our crampons and ski poles, and we’ll be fine. Walking is easier than skiing anyway.”

Which was only true in certain conditions. But they were likely to run into sastrugi and blue ice on the Mohn Basin, also the snow dunes called supersastrugi that were building on the ice as a result of the increase in precipitation; and in all those areas the skis wouldn’t have helped them. So it was partly true. Anyway they needed the encouragement, Val judged. Not that anyone looked particularly frightened; they were serious but resolute. Jack was nursing his hurt hand, and he had his lips pursed in a scowl of determination, but he certainly did not look worried.

In any case, there was no reason to delay. In fact the sooner they were off, the better. “Let’s get going,” Val said. “We’ll keep trying the wrist radios at every rest stop, and probably they’ll click back in soon, and we’ll have an SAR team out before we get very far. But even
if we don’t, we’ll still be fine.” She stood. “Hey, a real adventure this time.”

No great laughs at that. The situation was too much felt in the body to be made light of; it was very cold, sitting there in the wind falling off the cap down the glacier. So they stood up stiffly, and followed her as she led them around the shore of Hansen Shoulder. This was a hard part, actually; the ice was beginning its fall into the glacier, and as it deformed around the little nunatak there were many crevasse fields and shear zones to be avoided. But Val found flat ice all the way through, and soon enough they were on the broad plain of firn to the west of the nunatak—on the ice plateau of the great polar cap, and no two ways about it. Nothing before them but white snow and ice, and the dark blue sky.

Six people, alone in such an immensity; a strange sight; a strange sensation. White snow, blue sky; in the polar cap’s extreme simplicity, the black cliffs of the Transantarctics behind them and to the right were somehow comforting, bleak and jagged though they were. Compared to the ice plateau they were familiar, even homey. But there was no help to be had among them, only broken ice and empty glaciers falling to the sea. And they would be hiking out until the mountains passed under the horizon and there would be no land in sight, as if they were far out on a white ocean.

Val started walking over the ice.

Snowmobiling across the polar cap felt different now. Wade was aware that the change was psychological in origin, but that did not lessen the sensation, which was as distinct as the difference between a sunny day and a cloudy one. Speaking of which, a few cirrus clouds now scythed the pure blue overhead, located distinctly lower in the sky than cirrus clouds usually appeared, indicating the great altitude of the ice plateau, or the altered physics of Ice Planet itself; the effect somehow made the world seem huge. And he could not make it shrink back to its previous size.

A bigger world, and emptier. The surface of the plateau was rougher. The snowmobile was less stable, and louder, its racket that of a motor grinding away, filled with skips and irregularities, as if always on the edge of stalling. Tipping the thing could be a fatal mistake, and it was rocking violently from side to side. The sun stood
overhead at its usual angle, a blinding chip in a dark immensity. It seemed he was catching brief glimpses of space itself, up there behind the dark blue sky. And it was colder as well, the wind in his face a bitter numbing blast. The Skidoo tilted and he overcorrected every time, his pulse racing.

He had to admit it; he was afraid. Cold fear. There was nothing ahead, and nothing behind. A white plain of snow in all directions. No other kind of exposure could match it. As if they were alone in the world, under the blinding eye of a cold god. Alone on the blank white roof of the universe.

And nothing to do but follow Carlos, and try to ignore the fatigue in his thumb. He wondered about the two men he was with, men he scarcely knew. Everything out here depended on the support of one’s companions. Without them there was only the cold, and it could kill you in a matter of hours—he could feel that in his face, feel the stiff numbness that led to frostbite and then fatality. Hypothermia straining to get in and do its work. Any tilt of the snowmobile could start the sequence that ended in hypothermia; broken ski, broken knee, anything would do it. So haul left! No right! No left!

On he drove.

Three very long hours later—it felt to Wade more like eight—Carlos waved an arm, and his Skidoo quickly halted. All along he had been following the road in the snow blasted by the hovercraft—the sastrugi that so impressed Wade were actually much flattened—and now the three of them stomped around on the road’s crust, trying to get the circulation going in their extremities. Carlos and X taught Wade to windmill his arms rapidly to speed the return of blood and warmth to his hands. For a while they stood around
spinning their arms like a bunch of Pete Townshends. Then Carlos took a shovel and an ordinary carpenter’s saw from his Skidoo’s back box. He stuck the saw in the snow and began cutting.

“Shouldn’t we keep going?” Wade asked.

Carlos shook his head. “We need food to stay warm. Roberts isn’t going anywhere.”

So he sawed blocks of snow, and Wade shoveled them up to X, who carried them over to a curving wall built around the south side of the Skidoos, protecting them from the breeze. The big blocks had the consistency and feel of Styrofoam, and were not much heavier.

Then they sat in the lee of the wall while Carlos set up the Primus stove, a skeletal little piece of equipment that obviously came from the dawn of the industrial age. Wade watched in appalled fascination as the physics of Ice Planet were again revealed: Carlos applied the flame of a lighter to a pool of stove fuel under the cooker, a move that should have caused a small explosion, and the fuel lay there under the flame, inert, until after a time it flickered bluely, like the burning brandy on a crêpe Suzette. “Incredible,” Wade said. “Not possible.”

Carlos glanced at him. “Yes. A cold day.” He had recovered from the first shock of his station’s destruction, and was now calm and unhurried, even somewhat cheerful; certainly he did not appear to be feeling the dread that chilled Wade’s gut. He jammed snow into a pot, and began melting it over the growing flames of the stove, and got packets of lemonade powder and soup ready. A pot of snow melted down to only a third of a pot of water, and when that was boiling Carlos made mugs of hot lemonade and soup. Several pots of snow were transformed over time into dehydrated stew, hot
chocolate, and finally mud-thick coffee. The chunks in the stew did not fully rehydrate, so that they tasted like bits of chalk, but Wade did not complain; he had discovered with the first mouthful that he was ravenous, and the stew tasted fine. The chalky bits just gave it some needed texture.

After the meal they packed up. Wade felt considerably warmer, from the stomach outward. Carlos checked the radio and GPS again, and though the radios were still out, apparently some of the GPS satellites were coming back online, for he got a brief fix before the system crashed again. “About three hours more,” he declared. “Not long.” They started the Skidoos—a moment of great fear to Wade, followed by relief—and took off again. Wade followed Carlos as always, impressed by the man’s calmness at lunch. It was comforting to be out here with a local.

And there they were again in their row, Carlos, Wade, then X, chuntering across the hard-packed firn. Occasionally they passed some of the new snow dunes people talked about, areas with fields of crescent dunes marring the smoothness of the cap, the snow looking just like sand, and the dunes like a very pure part of White Sands in New Mexico. Up close these dunes were much more textured and sastrugilike than any sand would be, like Georgia O’Keeffe stylized dunes, Wade thought, or some kind of fractalized hyper-realist hallucination. But the hovercraft road avoided going directly through any of these.

All too soon the cold began to gnaw again at Wade’s knees and face and hands. He felt more clearly than he ever had the struggle between heat and cold in his body, a kind of war fought on many fronts, with differing success depending on exposure. His core heat was definitely there, Still radiating as a result of the hot food
and drink, sending out reinforcements to fight the encroachment of cold on the distant fronts of the extremities. Out there the battles were being fought capillary by capillary.

And lost, at least on the farthest fronts. Not in his torso; but away from that furnace it was a matter of slow ache, loss of feeling, numbness. Carlos called a short stop to help them fight the fight, and with the engines still running they stomped around and danced and did jumping jacks and Pete Townshends, and kneaded their sore butts and excruciated right thumbs. New heat was sent out from stomachs to the distant fronts. Then they were off again.

The next time they stopped it was to refill their fuel tanks, a very cold operation in itself. Then off again, and another long interval of snowmobiling and thumb pain and getting cold. The cold penetrated everywhere, until Wade could not drive as well as he had at the start, awkward though he had been then, because of the stiffness of his cold arms.

He was considering speeding up to Carlos and waving him down for another session of warm-up exercises, and perhaps a hot drink, when stopping became a moot point. His engine sputtered, ran, sputtered, ran, sputtered, died. The Skidoo skidded to a halt. Carlos looked back, hearing or otherwise sensing that something had changed, and as he turned, his vehicle also slowed and stopped. X coasted up next to Wade, shaking his head. They were out of gas.

“We’re close,” Carlos said to Wade. The green flags marking the hovercraft route were numbered, apparently, and the last one had been Number 10, so they were only ten kilometers out. The rusty mountains
marking the horizon ahead were Roberts Massif. Very soon the station would appear over the horizon. They could ski, or, if Wade did not want to ski, walk on crampons.

“I’ll try skiing,” he said. Ten k was not too bad; just over six miles. Before his arrival in Antarctica he would have laughed at such a distance, perhaps five minutes on the highway; how bad could it be? But now he had the memory of his walk with Val up Barwick Valley to tell him just how long ten k would feel. In fact the knowledge still tweaked a little in his left knee. It was a significant distance. But he could do it.

And they were beyond choices now. So he changed his bunny boots for heavy cross-country ski shoes, chilling his feet and hands thoroughly in the process. “Damn.” It was difficult if not impossible to hurry any of these operations, no matter how much he tried. In fact it took an effort to manage them at any speed.

He had tried cross-country skiing a few times before, and had fallen a lot. He would have to get better fast. X’s skis looked like popsicle sticks at the bottom of his massive tree-trunk legs. It was hard to believe they would support him. X did not look convinced either; he shook his head at the sight. Curious how with their faces behind ski masks and sunglasses, so much was yet communicated. Body language indeed.

When they were all set they stood on their skis, Wade and X propped on their poles. Like a trio of bank robbers on ice, anonymous and insect-eyed. The sunlight prismed on their photovoltaic gloves and overalls and parkas, and Wade was grateful for their warmth, but still his fingertips, nose, ears and feet were cold, and getting colder.

But as Carlos pointed out, the work of skiing would cure that. He took off, wearing a backpack that contained
much of what was detachable from the snowmobiles. Wade followed.

X hit a bump and fell like a tree. As if struck by his bow wave, Wade fell too. The snow was hard and his elbow hurt. Uneasily he got up again, faster than X, who was very awkward on his too-short skis. Carlos was skiing ahead effortlessly. When he looked back and saw his fallen comrades, he made a swooping turn and came back to them. “Follow me, I’ll find the flattest part of the track and it will be easier.”

So they followed him and it was easier, although sometimes Wade’s skis got caught on two sides of a little sastrugi ridge and drifted apart no matter what he tried. He fell often, and so did X. The sheer work of getting back to his feet tired him. He began to sweat, overheated everywhere except at his frozen tips, which stubbornly continued to freeze. He remembered encountering the phrase “penile frostbite” in an article on runners’ problems in wintertime. Hopefully the hot blood in his body core would warm that and all other chilled extremities, while the cold blood in the extremities would cool the hot core of him, like water from a radiator. But it didn’t seem to be working; he was too hot and too cold at one and the same time. He struggled on.

It was some comfort to see X falling as often or more often than he did. The two of them went down like bowling pins. After one fall, as they were both getting up and pushing off again, X said, “Too bad we don’t have those spacesuits the trekker groups wear.”

“What do you mean?” Wade said. “There’s better gear than this?”

“Yes.”

“There’s better gear than this and I’m not wearing it?”

“Ha.”

“Are there super DVs that get better stuff?”

“You tell me. Probably so. But what we’ve got is normal government issue, and you can buy gear that’s better. This stuff can’t convert piezoelectric energy from your walking into heat, it can’t melt you water, it can’t feed you—”