Antarctica (14 page)

“Yes, it’s worked very well. We have to offer the same kind of small groups and adventurous itineraries, of course, or else the industry niche wouldn’t be filled, so to speak. But ASL has done pretty well that way, and I’d say we have ninety percent of the business now. It’s kept the environment cleaner, and it adds a bit to the operating budget down here as well, so it’s a winner both ways. Of course there are those who object to bringing so many people down here at all, but the truth is it’s no more people than would have come anyway, and this way we have a chance to control the conditions of their visit.”

“Interesting.”

“It is, isn’t it.”

Of course it was government muscling out private business in a way that the current Congress would probably hate. But Senator Chase was now part of the opposition, so probably would not mind. Hard to say. It occurred to Sylvia that she could use a political officer, like any other governor of a large province. But no such luck.

Perhaps this man could temporarily fill the role. In
any case he did not appear offended by the trekking arrangement; on the contrary, he seemed to approve. He was a civil servant himself, after all.

Now he said, “What about these disappearances—the South Pole overland vehicle, I mean, and the other irregularities we’ve been hearing about?”

Sylvia sighed, and pulled from her desk’s In tray a sheet of paper detailing all the incidents from the previous two years. “As you see by the chronology, there has been a fairly sharp increase in incidents of theft.”

“Indeed,” Norton said, glancing through the list.

“We have ASL looking into it, of course, and the National Transportation and Safety Board has been called in for this last case, as well as the FBI.”

“What do you think is happening?” He looked at her closely.

She shrugged. “There are a lot of people down here. Civilians of various sorts. ASL itself has subcontractors. And despite our efforts with adventure travel, there are still private groups down here as well. So …”

“You’re saying it could be just ordinary theft.”

“Yes.”

“It seems weird to steal things down here, though. Impractical.”

“Yes.”

A long silence. There was more to be said, but it seemed to Sylvia that some of it had better wait until he had seen some of the DV tour.

“Well,” he said, apparently reaching similar conclusions himself. “What do I need to do to get ready for the Dry Valleys?”

After the meeting Wade was led by a young man who introduced himself as Paxman to a building nearby, a grubby old two-story box sporting a painted sign declaring it “Hotel California.” Paxman showed Wade into one of the rooms on the ground floor, and Wade threw his two orange bags on a single bed. The room reminded him strongly of his college freshman dorm—small, institutional, a sink and mirror in one corner, the bathroom shared with the room on the other side of it. Drapes permanently pulled, it appeared, no doubt to provide darkness to sleep in.

Paxman said, “Sorry, there are some great rooms up in the Holiday Inn, but they’re all full on such short notice.”

“No problem.”

Not a place to hang out, however. So after Paxman left, Wade went down the stairs in the big freezing stairwell on the end of the building, and walked out into a frigid breeze. The sun was hanging in the west over white-and-black mountains that were as vertical as
cardboard cutouts. Wade wandered the unpaved lava rubble streets of the settlement—not so much streets, actually, as mere open spaces between clusters of buildings. The buildings were a mix: new flying-wing shapes, covered entirely in metallic-blue photovoltaic film; worn functional wooden or cinder-block warehouses and dorms; military barracks or Quonset huts from the Navy years, or perhaps even from the town’s founding during the International Geophysical Year of 1956-57.

His wristphone beeped.

“Hi Wade! It’s Phil. Where are you now?”

“I’m in McMurdo Station, Antarctica.”

“Are you! Is it cold?”

“It’s cold.”

“What does it look like?”

“Well—” Wade looked around. “It’s what people mean when they say adhocitecture.”

“Hockey texture?”

“It’s a real mix. All kinds of buildings.”

“Just tell me what you see, Wade. You’re my eyes.”

“Well, I’m walking by the Crary Lab now. It’s quite small, composed of three small buildings on a slope, with a passageway connecting them. There’s a street sign saying that I’m on Beeker Street, but it’s not much of a street. There are a lot of pipelines right on the ground.”

“Much traffic?”

“Not much traffic. Now I’m passing a building like a giant yellow cube, with a bunch of antennas on the roof. Must be the radio building. Now I’m passing a little chapel.”

“A church?”

“Yes. Our Lady of the Snows. Now I’m on a road going out to the docks. Right now the docks are empty, because the bay is iced over. In fact there are trucks and
snowmobiles out on the ice. There’s a kind of minimall behind the docks, one of the newer buildings. A restaurant on the second story, with windows. Looks like it would have a good view of town. Here’s a sign that tells me I’m on the way to the Discovery Hut, built by Robert Scott’s party in 1902.”

“It’s still there?”

“Yes. A small square building.”

“Amazing. So did you meet with the NSF rep? How did it go?”

“It was interesting. She’s a Brit, she’s very polite. She was pretty much in damage-control mode, I’m afraid. Playing it cautiously. But I wouldn’t expect anything else right now. I tried to lay the groundwork. The thing is, I don’t know how much she knows. If she’s just an annual appointment rotated in here, I can imagine she might be temporary enough, and formidable enough in person I might add, not to be told about some things.”

“Yeah sure.”

“So, I’m off to see a Professor Michelson, an old veteran down here. He’s big in the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, apparently one of the major players.”

“Okay, good. Get the view from the top and then proceed. Give me a call if you need any help, and I’ll call again to get the news myself soon.”

“Where are you again?”

“I’m in Turkestan right now, but I’m off to Kirghiz tomorrow. I’ll be in touch. Stay warm!”

“I’ll try.”

It would not be easy. Out on Discovery Point the breeze was really cutting, so cold by Wade’s standards that it was beyond cold really and down into some new kinetic sensation entirely. If it weren’t for the very
warm clothing encasing him he would have been, he didn’t know—petrified perhaps. Instantaneously.

The historic hut proved to be locked. A bronze plaque declared it a World Heritage Site. Beyond it stood a memorial to a man named Vince, drowned nearby in 1902. Across the town stood a tall dark cinder cone, topped by another little cross. Wade found it hard to imagine what it had been like here in 1902. Walking back into the center of town took only ten minutes, and though his nose and ears were cold, the rest of him was warming up just from walking around in his many layers of clothing. Before he knew it, he was at the other side of town; it was only a few hundred yards wide. He started climbing the volcanic cone. Paxman had pointed up at it from Hotel California, and mentioned that it had a good view, and that the cross was a memorial to Scott. And he was in Antarctica, after all. Had to get out and around.

A rough trail led over pipelines running behind the last row of buildings, then up the brown volcanic rubble of the hillside, following the spine of a ridge directly to the peak. It was a braided trail with lots of alternatives, the rubble tromped to sand by hundreds of pairs of feet making their way up the cone, including the feet of Scott and Shackleton, Wade supposed. Though the air was still cold he heated up inside his parka, and soon had it entirely unzipped and pulled open. Hands in pockets, climbing up a hill in Antarctica. He was on the lee side of the cone, and it began to feel like he was in a skin-tight envelope of hot air, on which the cold air still pressed tangibly.

Near the top the rock became a single mass of cooled cracked lava, twisted and gnarly. The wind whistled over the peak and blew his envelope of hot air away.
He zipped up the parka quickly, impressed at how quickly the cold bit.

He reached the top. He could see a long way in every direction. A knee-high bronze panorama plaque named the various features one could see. At the foot of the other side of the hill lay the Kiwis’ Scott Base, a dozen green buildings clustered on the shore of the smooth white plain of the Ross Ice Shelf. Ross Island broke steeply out of this smooth plain, and rose in the distance to the stupendous broad white volcano that was Mount Erebus, looking somewhat like the cone Wade stood on, only white and ten million times bigger.

In all directions the sea was frozen white, the ice either permanent or annual. Far out on the sea ice Wade could make out the faint lines that marked the airport where his Herc had landed. The airport’s trailer buildings were the merest black specks on the ice, which gave Wade a sudden sense of how vast everything was. Far beyond the airport lay what the panorama informed him were Black Island and White Island, appropriately named, and beyond them Mount Discovery, a black cone maypoled with white glaciers, and the Royal Society Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, jumping out of the white sea. Buttery shafts of yellow sunlight lanced down the valleys of these far mountains.

Struck by the views, Wade only in a final dizzy turn noticed that there was already someone else on the peak. A man, sitting on the rocks just under the wooden cross, protected from the wind. “Hi,” Wade exclaimed, startled.

A big man, massive in a dirty dark green parka, broad face brooding behind sunglasses and the fur fringe around his parka’s hood. Tan overalls, knees dark with accumulated oil and grease. One of the ASL employees, evidently.

He grunted something at Wade and continued to survey the scene. Wade maneuvered past him to the big wooden cross he had seen from the town below. It was about ten feet tall, a thick squared-off beam. The letters they had carved into it in 1913 had been painted white, and the paint had withstood the flensing of the wind so much better than the bare wood that though the letters had been carved in to begin with, they now stood out a little from the surface. The grain of the wood also stood out. To
strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield
. And then five names, with military ranks included. Wade stared at it for a while, at a loss. Tennyson was not a poet that postpostmodernism had managed to convert to its own purposes. And the Scott expedition had been a bit of a mess, as far as Wade recalled. He had never studied the matter.

The man sitting on the peak stirred, and Wade glanced down at him, again at a loss. Finally he said, “Do you come here often?”

The man stared at him, impassive behind mirrored sunglasses. “Often?”

“You’ve been up here before?”

“Yeah.”

“Nice view.”

“Great view.”

“Yes. A great view.”

They looked down on McMurdo together. The buildings’ roofs were all metal of one sort or another: ancient corrugated tin, the latest photovoltaic blue gloss, everything in between. Except for a row of six brown dormitories, no two buildings were alike: gleaming blue spaceships, ramshackle wooden shacks, black Quonset huts, open fields of lumber, the Holiday Inn, the docks, the tourist mall, the row of brown dorms,
the little Crary Lab, the even littler Chalet next to it, down by the helicopter pad and the shore …

“Have you lived here long?” Wade asked.

“No.”

“What do you do?”

“GFA.”

“GFA?”

The man turned to look at him; Wade saw that the question branded him a newcomer. “General Field Assistant.”

“I see.”

“And you?”

“I work in Washington, for a member of the Senate.”

“Which one?”

“Chase.”

“The one that’s never there?”

“That’s right.”

The man nodded. “You must be here to look into the ice pirates.”

“Yes,” Wade said, surprised. “I am.”

“I’m the one who was in the SPOT train that lost a vehicle.”

“I see…. There seems to be a lot of stuff like that happening.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea what might be going on?”

“Me?” The man was amused.

They sat there looking down at McMurdo. “Not a particularly attractive town,” Wade ventured.

“It grows on you.”

“Really?”

The man shrugged. “It’s ugly, but … you can see everything about it. Right there before your eyes.”

As he finished this statement a figure appeared below them: a woman, coming around a rocky knob as she
climbed the same trail Wade had. Thick gloss of dark blond hair, long thighs in sky-blue ski tights, rising rhythmically under a black parka, covering broad shoulders. The two men watched her climb. Wade’s companion had hunched forward. She was taking big steps up, in iridescent blue mountaineer’s boots. She looked up and they caught a brief glimpse of blue mirrored sunglasses, broad cheekbones, fine nose, broad mouth. Wade’s eyebrows shot up; a beauty, it seemed, with the shoulders of a rower or weightlifter. Wordlessly the two men stared. And then she was there, stepping easily, breathing easily; “Hi,” she said easily. She had the breezy insouciance that Wade thought of as a cheerleader’s cheeriness; the confidence of an attractive woman, brought up in the American West somewhere. An outdoorswoman.

“Hi,” the two men replied.

Startled, the woman looked again at Wade’s companion. “Oh hi, X. I didn’t see you.”

“Uh huh.”

Uh oh, Wade thought, looking at the two of them. The man was hunched into a kind of boulder.

“Valerie Kenning,” the woman said to Wade, and extended a hand.

“Wade Norton.”

“Nice to meet you. What brings you down here?”

“Looking around,” he said, explaining again about Chase as he rubbed his mittens together.

“Are you cold?” she asked. “Let’s move down just a bit and get out of the wind.”

They all moved down into the lee of the gnarly brown peak. When the man she had called X stood, Wade realized that he was really tall, almost seven feet it seemed. Taller than the woman, but not by a great
deal; and the woman was a good bit taller than Wade. X sat down again heavily.