Antarctica (44 page)

As was certainly true for Graham, working on questions of glacial sedimentology. He was already fully committed, of course; and now his fate was somewhat intertwined with Michelson’s. So he was reassured by
Geoff’s style, which he admired enough to try to emulate in his own work—that reticence, that sense of the history of the geosciences. The fairly consistent attempts to keep things low-keyed and playful; certainly things had happened in the course of this controversy that would have made Graham furious if he had been in Michelson’s position, and he could only presume that Geoff had indeed been angry back when those things had happened. Yet now he spoke of the stabilists not as enemies to be crushed, but with great, almost exaggerated politeness, expressing underneath that a basic respect for them as scientists, especially for the ones whose work he thought was the most well-done and therefore challenging. Perhaps this merely reflected his sense of the most certain, one might even say most scientific, method of crushing them as flat as a leaf mat; in any case it was a position he held to all the time, even here in his own camp. Possibly he was different in private, at home. But after a few weeks in the field in Antarctica one began to feel that one knew one’s companions pretty well. In the end it was very much like the privacy of home.

So before talking to anyone outside their group about their fine discovery, the lab work on the samples would have to be done, and the literature would have to be researched, and other scientists asked to make contributions, possibly; and the papers would have to be written, and revised, and submitted to the most prominent appropriate journals, where anonymous reviewers would no doubt suggest further revisions, which, as they often strengthened one’s case, were usually incorporated; and only then would the papers be published. By that time the inferences made from the physical objects taken out of the field would be tied down the way Misha tied down their sleeping tents, in a
redundant-looking network of stakes and lines: bombproof. And in that state they would be read, and would add to the dialogue among the small groups of people who had the expertise to judge the arguments, to probe them for weaknesses; people who would indeed make judgments and criticisms; and later their own scientific assumptions about the field would take this new set of facts into account, and engage the theory, and they would design their own next projects accordingly; and see different things than they would have otherwise, out in the world; and the dialogue would go on, as it had ever since Lyell, or Newton or Aristotle or the first talking primates, depending on how broad a view of science one wanted to take. In the most fundamental sense, Graham decided, science had begun a very long time ago.

So it might be three or four years before these papers were published, and the effects felt only in the years after that. This was the pace of discourse which had kept the Sirius story going for more than thirty years now. Like the glaciers at the center of the story, it moved slowly but ground fine.

So now Michelson, keeping his cards close to the vest, quickly shifted the talk to what they could do there in the field in the next few days to help their situation later in the lab. Because back in the north it would do no good to wish for one more sample rock; one had to get it now.

After that part of things was all worked out, however, Harry flipped open his laptop and called up the Pliocene Antarctic map that he had been working on for some time now, entering all the data that had been collected in the decades of the dynamicist effort. Now he reworked the line describing the little inlet of the fjord they had been investigating. Michelson regarded it
over the top of his glasses with a little smile. “Whatever happens in the end,” he remarked contentedly, “the Sirius question has certainly been good for Cenozoic geology in Antarctica.”

Harry finished redrawing the fjords and hills. The whole stretch of what was now the Transantarctic Mountains was much lower in his map, and deeply cut by fjords—like the current coastline of Labrador, or Norway, or for that matter southern Chile. Elsewhere on the map, western Antarctica was an archipelago somewhat resembling the Philippines. Michelson was always encouraging Harry to look for possible land bridges connecting the Peninsula to the Transantarctics, as
Nothofagus
did not migrate across water well, and it seemed to him that there had to be dispersal routes over land to make Pliocene beech forests as far south as eighty-five degrees comprehensible. Either the trees had had routes to come and go with the fluctuating climate, or else there had been places on the craton proper that had remained refugia for the biome during even the coldest parts of the last fourteen million years. “The peninsular refuge seems more likely, if the trees could get back south when it warmed.”

Behind the Transantarctics, where the great ice cap now covered all, the Pliocene map showed a continental mainland like a violently chewed Australia. The craton had begun to come apart like the basin and range territory of North America, leaving basins running all over east of the Transantarctics, from the Weddell Sea all the way across to the Indian Ocean, which intruded south in a bay bigger even than the Ross Sea. Those ancient inland seas contained many of the regions that the oil teams were interested in, for if they had been seas for long enough, they very possibly would have been floored by enough organic material to create oil.

The paleofjord they had been studying today ran through the Transantarctic Hills all the way to this Pliocene Wilkes Bay; or at least this was the way Harry had it drawn. It was not something that they could easily confirm, because the relevant region was deep under the ice cap. But the uplift rates they were establishing, and the depth of the subglacial basin on the other side of the range, made it very likely to be true. Or perhaps there had been a saddle peninsula there dividing the two seas, a saddle from which one could look down into the head of both fjords. Thus keeping one of Geoff’s precious land bridges.

After they had played with the map a while, talking things over, Harry switched to a photo of a krummholz beech forest, taken on the slopes above a bay in southern Chile. Ceaseless winds had swept the tops of the little trees back in a permanent curve. They had all grown together into a single mat, like a lichen mat seen in a microscope. Bright green and dark green mosses covered the understory of the miniature forest. Moss carpets still served as surrogate soils in the Antarctic Peninsula, and the microenvironments in these little biomes were several degrees warmer than the outer air. “This photo was taken just north of Tierra del Fuego,” Harry said. “The Magellanic moorland biome matches the species list we’ve found down here almost perfectly.”

“That’s probably very much what it looked like here in the Pliocene,” Michelson said, staring over his glasses again. “Odd to think that temperatures have risen now to the point where such a forest could survive here again. People would have to plant it, but after that …”

Harry was shaking his head. “The Treaty forbids bringing in exotic plants.”

“But this wouldn’t be an exotic, would it? Merely native vegetation, returned home after a period of exile. The Chileans and Argentinians already tried growing beeches up in the Peninsula. It didn’t work then, but it’s considerably warmer now than when they tried.”

The other three let this pass. It was not the kind of thing they would consider doing, and it was hard even to know if Michelson was serious or not.

After staring at the laptop photo for a time, lost in their own thoughts, they stirred themselves, and prepared to make the cold transfer to their sleeping tents. “I wonder what’s happening in McMurdo,” Harry said.

“We’ll find out soon,” Michelson said. “Randi will call us the moment she gets back on the air, we can be sure of that. Meanwhile, we’re self-sufficient here for longer than it will take to sort things out. So we can continue to work while we wait.”

Wade sat in the passenger compartment of the hovercraft, clutching the warmed ceramic of a mug of hot chocolate, gulping at it and scalding the roof of his mouth, and slowly, slowly coming back up out of the depths of hypothermia. Back from the deepest cold he had ever felt in his life; back to the point where he could shiver; then through violent shivering, to the point where he could stop all but a residual quiver.

Carlos was out on another exploration of the burned station. X sat across from Wade, hunched over the stove to catch as much of its warmth as possible, sucking down his own hot chocolate.

“This is turning into quite a trip for you,” X observed.

“Yeah.” Wade glanced at X. “I wish I still had Val assigned to me as a guide. I’d feel better.”

X grunted. “This’d be nothing to her.”

“Is that right?”

“You should hear some of the stories she tells.”

“So she’s an exceptional mountaineer.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. I think a lot of mountaineers are like her. It’s just that they all have lots of really scary stories to tell. They go out close to the edge, I’m telling you. It’s scary.”

“It seems decadent to me.”

“Decadent?”

“Well, you know. I hear a good version of
La Mer
and I’m thrilled, I mean really thrilled. So, you know, if you need to risk your life to get your thrills, I don’t know. It seems jaded to me.”

“Maybe. I’m not sure it’s the same kind of thrill you’re talking about. I’m not sure it’s the risk itself these people are hooked on. It’s something else, I don’t know. I never understood it. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, trying to understand it. One time Val told me about getting avalanched on the side of Mount Cook and carried down the mountainside toward the bergschrund at the bottom of the slope, you know the crack at the bottom? Certain death. But the avalanche carried them right over it. They were left waist-deep in the snow on the flats, unharmed, except Val had busted a rib. And she said it hurt like hell, but they had to walk ten miles to get to a roadhead, and somewhere on the way they started laughing so hard that she almost died of the pain, but she couldn’t stop laughing. It was so great, she said. She says it with this little Aussie accent sometimes—it was
grayte
. Like an Aussie gal. Totally scary.”

“So you two were some kind of a …?”

“Yeah yeah. We had an affair, an ice romance you know, end of last season.”

“Wow.”

“I know.” Brooding. “But this season when we got back to Mac Town she wasn’t interested.”

“What?”

“Yeah. It was over.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh man. I hate that kind of thing.”

“Yeah well.” X sipped his hot chocolate. “Better for your chances with her anyway, right?”

“What!”

“Come on.”

“Come on yourself!” Wade shook his head. “Why would she even consider me. A Washington bureaucrat, a functionary.”

“She liked you.”

“I can’t even ski.”

“That’s true.”

“Hey now. Neither can you, and I notice she went with you.”

“See?”

“Oh, so maybe there’s hope. Maybe I can be so lucky as to get the same treatment you got.”

They cackled briefly.

“We can dream,” X said.

Carlos slammed in and made for the stove. “Not good,” he told them. Apparently the blast had knocked apart all the buildings and set the fuel bladders on fire, and almost everything had burned after that. The force of the explosion appeared to have broken the hover-craft’s mooring ropes and skidded it across the ice a few feet, saving it from further harm. Carlos rooted in his bag of finds, cursing again in Spanish, but almost absentmindedly now.

“But where did everyone go?” X asked again, as he had out at the station on the ice cap. It seemed to Wade that they had made the crossing of the polar plateau only to find themselves in the same situation they had been in before, except now much more tired, sore, cold
and hungry. His legs lay there before him like Jell-O held in long balloons, and his tailbone was aching, though he did not think his spectacular fall had broken it again.

Carlos poured himself some hot water from the pot on the stove into a mug of powdered chocolate. For a moment Wade smelled the sweet dark smell. He felt intense relief at being indoors. They were still on their own, in the interior of Antarctica, in the midst of what appeared to be a general terrorist attack; but at least they were indoors.

“First another meal,” Carlos said, as he put more ice in the pot to melt. “And warm up some more. Then we’ll try the radio again and see if we can make coms with Shackleton or McMurdo. Or anybody.”

The other two nodded, staring hard at the pots on the stove. They were all now sitting encased in thick sleeping bags Carlos had pulled out of the hovercraft’s cabinets, the red nylon bunching around them to the chest. With their ski masks rolled up into thick-rimmed caps, they looked almost human.

“Is there much food?” Wade asked. “If we have to wait to be rescued?”

Carlos frowned. “The galley burned. There’s some scattered around in other buildings, in emergency bags. And some here on board. Enough to feed us for a week or two, certainly.”

“Surely it won’t take that long to get to us.”

“One would think so. Hopefully we can find out by radio.”

“Could we drive this thing down the glacier to Shackleton Camp?”

Carlos and X looked at each other.

“I was thinking about it,” Carlos said. “I’ve driven it
a few times, I know how to do it, but it takes two….” He looked at X.

“I’ve watched,” X said, hand up. “I could do the copilot, I guess. We could try if we had to.”

“Maybe we could figure it out,” Wade said. “How hard could it be?”

The other two shared another look.

“Maybe,” Carlos said. “We’ll see what Mac Town says first. If we can get them.”

Then they heard shouts outside.

Ice like white paper before the first brush stroke. The original emptiness from which all begins. A fifth element beyond space and time, emptiness in its supreme degree.

Ice and rock. Consciousness of white, capacity of black.

Perpetual winter. The planet Winter. One day, one night. The yin and yang of dark and light. Camera, please save these images and voice-over for later transmission.