Antarctica (15 page)

“Aren’t you cold?” Wade asked the woman, noting her relatively thin parka, tights and gloves.

“Why no. Can’t say I am.” She laughed: “A good fat layer I guess.”

“Uh huh,” Wade said doubtfully, glancing at the impassive X. A good fat layer indeed. “What about you?” Wade asked him.

“I’m always cold,” X said shortly.

Wade tried to draw him back out. “You were saying something about how everything in the town is visible?”

X nodded once. “Nothing’s buried. The whole town is right there where you can see it. There’s its power supply, see the fuel tanks up in the gap, and the main generators there under us. There’s the power lines, and the sewer lines, and the sewage treatment facility. Down there you see the raw materials for building, and then all the working shops, the warehouses, the vehicle parking lots. Then all the people stuff takes up just a small part of the space, around the galley and Crary.”

“The stomach and the brains,” Valerie said. “It’s like one of those transparent bodies with all the organs visible.”

X nodded but said nothing. He didn’t want to have a pleasant conversation with her, Wade saw; he was resisting her attempts to be pleasant. She continued to point out features to Wade: the helicopter pad as airport, the harbor and docks still iced over, the mall behind the docks as entertainment district, also in deep freeze until the tour ships arrived. Then the radio building as communications industry, and even a historical district, in the single dot of the Discovery Hut on the point opposite them.

“Can you guess what’s missing?” she asked.

“Police station?” Wade ventured. “Jail?”

“That’s true, very good. But that’s not it.”

“The Navy would come in and be police, if they needed them,” X said darkly. “And they don’t need a jail because they take you away.”

“Hmm,” Wade said. “So there’s no law enforcement here at all?”

“Sylvia is a U.S. Marshall,” X said. “She could deputize people if she needed help locking someone up.”

“There used to be a town gun,” Valerie said, smiling at the memory, “but they were afraid of some winterover going postal, so they had it disassembled and the pieces distributed around town in three or four offices. And now some of the offices have lost their piece.”

She and Wade laughed; X continued to brood. He would not be pleased by her, Wade saw.

“So what’s missing, then?”

“People,” X said.

Val nodded. “Nobody in sight, see?”

Wade saw. “Too cold.”

“That’s right. No one hangs out outdoors. McMurdo looks like that twenty-four hours a day. Occasionally you see people going from one building to the next, but other than that, it always looks like a ghost town from up here.”

“Interesting,” Wade said.

They sat and looked down at the empty-seeming town, which nevertheless hummed and clanked with a variety of mechanical noises. Some vehicles moved, up among the acres of lumber and container boxes.

“Where do you go next?” Wade asked Val.

“I’ve got a Footsteps of Amundsen to guide next week. But first I’m taking a DV out to the Dry Valleys.”

“Oh, that must be me.”

“Really! Well—nice to meet you. It should be a good trip. I’m glad to get the chance to see Barwick Valley, people don’t get to go there very much.”

“So I was told. I still don’t know exactly where it is.”

She pointed at the mountains across the flat sea of ice to the west. “Over there.”

Wade nodded doubtfully. X was now staring at him, and though it was hard to tell with the sunglasses and hood and scarf and all, it seemed he was glaring at him. Perhaps because of this trip with Val. Though of course that was not exactly Wade’s doing. “Where will you go next?” he asked, trying to defuse the look.

X snorted. “GFAs go where they’re told. Although I might be quitting, now that you mention it.” Looking now at Val: “I might be resigning from ASL, so I can take an offer to go out and work for the African oil people.”

“No!” Val exclaimed. “X, are you really?”

“Yes,” he said. “I really.”

“Oh X.” She pursed her lips, shook her head. Wade saw that she didn’t want to talk about it in front of him. X was looking glumly down at the town.

Finally she turned to Wade: “You’re still cold, aren’t you.”

“Yes.” He was shivering hard enough to give his voice a vibrato, almost a trill.

“Well, we should get down. I’ll show you where we’re going on the maps. Also, have you gotten your gear yet?”

“No.”

“I’ll see that you get the good stuff.”

“Great, thanks.”

They stood up. X remained seated, staring at Val with that impenetrable look. Val returned the gaze:

“See you around, X.”

He nodded. “See you around.”

“Nice meeting you,” Wade said awkwardly, aware that he was being used to get out of a confrontation of some sort.

“Nice meeting you too.”

And the big man sat watching them as they descended. Wade took one glance back and saw him there under the big wooden cross, hunched over and brooding.

X slouched down the ridge to Mac Town, his feet like two frozen turkeys attached to the end of his legs. His fingers were cold, his pulse sluggish, his heart numb. He went to the galley and caught mid rats. The night crowd was heavy, mostly the old iceheads done with the swing shift, plus some beakers done with their email. X took two Reuben sandwiches and a mug of coffee and sat at one of the empty round tables. First he downed the coffee, holding the cup in his fingers till they burned. Then while he was devouring the second sandwich Ron sat down beside him.

“So what do you say?” Ron said, leaning in toward X with an exaggerated conspiratorial leer.

X swallowed. “I’ll go for it.”

“Good man!” Ron nodded, first in surprise, then satisfaction: “I knew you would.”

“I didn’t.”

Ron grinned his pirate grin.

Abruptly X stood and grabbed his tray. “When do I go?”

“Day after tomorrow. They’ll drop by the Windless Bight station.” This was a private airstrip set beyond Scott Base, a kind of parasite on the two government bases, barely functioning these days. “Get yourself out there, and they’ll pick you up and take you out to their camp in the Mohn Basin.”

X nodded. “I’m gonna go resign.”

He left the galley and walked by Crary to the Chalet. Inside he told Paxman that he was resigning, and Paxman got him the forms to sign with no surprise or objection. It looked like he would not have to explain himself to Jan or Sylvia, as he had feared he would have to. Ever since Helen had resigned midseason and ASL had sued her for breach of contract and lost, it had become one of the options available to disaffected ASL employees. It was burning your bridges, because ASL would never hire you again, that was for sure. But they couldn’t stop you from doing it.

So he put his signature on the form, powerfully tempted to sign it “X.” But he signed his full name, to make sure everything was legal, and gave the form back to Paxman.

“What are you going to do?” Paxman asked.

“Work for the African oil people.”

“I’ve been thinking of doing that myself. Good luck out there.”

“Thanks.”

Then he turned, and there was Sylvia in the doorway, looking at him with a calm hard evaluative expression. She was NSF of course, and what an ASL employee did was in theory not her concern. But it was all connected down here. And the oil-exploration camps were the most visible sign that the Antarctic Treaty was in limbo, and in danger of falling apart forever. So X tried not to cringe under her sharp eye.

“Didn’t like general field assistance, I see,” she said.

“No.” He met her look and held it. “ASL doesn’t do right by its employees. We’re treated like it’s such a privilege to be in Antarctica that we can always be replaced. The hours are longer than is legal back in the world, there’s no security season to season, no retirement, no benefits beyond the bare minimum. Nothing that real jobs have, or used to have. And NSF sets the conditions, you let them do it. You could tell them what they can do and can’t do, and create better working conditions down here.” He kept his voice soft and calm; no fits here, just stating the facts.

Sylvia said, “There are legal limits to how much NSF can interfere with the contractors they hire.” She shook her head, turned toward her office. “Good luck, X.”

Back out into the wind, dismissed. He trudged up the torn snow and mud to the Berg Field Center warehouse. Ob Hill loomed behind the old building. There were things about Mac Town that he was going to miss. Joyce was in the BFC lounge, an area of the upper floor which had a few couches, a magazine rack, a table and a coffee machine.

“I came to say good-bye,” X said. “I’m off to one of the oil camps.”

“Oh X,” Joyce said, looking annoyed. “Not really.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

She didn’t believe him. He wasn’t sure he did either.

“Anyway I’m off,” he said.

“Does Val know?”

“Yeah. I ran into her up on Ob Hill.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh X. She misses you, you know.”

“Right.”

“No, really. I think she’s done her trolling, you know, and found out that she made a mistake. That guy Mike was a jerk. She likes you better than the rest of the guys down here.”

X shrugged. “Too late now,” he said, trying to squash a tiny little hummingbird of hope that was now zooming around in his chest. Irritated, he held a poker face. Joyce stood up awkwardly, and came around her desk to give him a hug, her head just higher than his belly button. He accepted the hug gratefully, feeling like a beggar.

“What a mess,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She pulled back to look up at him. “You shouldn’t go, X. Not just because of Val. We’re working on trying to improve things here.”

“Uh huh.”

“No, really. Listen X, the service contract comes up for renewal at the end of this season, and ASL very well might lose it.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“No, really!”

But Joyce had educated X on the history of the companies hired by NSF to run its Antarctic bases, so she was in large part responsible for X’s skepticism. The first company, Holmes and Narver, had won its bid during the height of the Cold War, and was rumored to have been a CIA front company. The second server, ITT, had just finished helping the CIA overthrow the Allende government in Chile, so there was no question about its CIA connection; and it had close ties with oil companies too.

The third company, Antarctic Support Associates, had been a great improvement over the previous two,
Joyce had said. An ordinary and even good company—certainly the good people in it had made it as much of a home as they could, and they had been in the majority. Joyce and many other office heads still in McMurdo had started with ASA and still remembered it fondly. Its contract had been the usual ten-year deal, however, and NSF had required it to give potential competitors some subcontracts so that the competitors could learn enough to make truly competitive bids at contract time. ASA had dutifully done this, and in its third ten-year stint given a subcontract to a subsidiary of a multinational conglomerate, one of the most hardball in the new global economy. There were rumors that this subcontractor had conducted some cuckoo-in-the-nest type activities, subtly messing up ASA where it could; but in truth its aggressive downsizing had resulted in such low labor costs that it was able to make a very low bid simply by sweatshopping its McMurdo labor force, and counting on the attractions of the place and the tough times up north to keep positions filled. And as NSF was constrained by Congress to accept the lowest bid without judging labor practices for anything more than legal compliance, the new company had won easily, and ASA was gone. As they took over McMurdo the owners of the new company had rechristened it Antarctic Supply and Logistics, either because they had not looked closely at the resulting acronym or because they had and wanted to make it clear right away just what kind of tough lean no-nonsense 21st-century corporation they really were.

This of course had been a disaster for all the old ASA hands who wanted to stay on, who had had to reapply for the same jobs at a fraction of the old salary and benefits package, with all their seniority lost. And it had been a déjà vu disaster for Joyce, who had seen it all
before in her first profession, nursing; there she had been downsized to “census-dependent full-time employment” early on, meaning that she was full time unless not enough beds in the hospital were filled, when she would be called and told to stay home without pay. She had gotten pissed off and decided that if taking care of sick people was going to be sweatshopped like everything else then she was going to quit and light out for the territory, in her case the white south.

So X’s skepticism concerning her hope for change only reflected what she had taught him. But now she held off all that bad history with an outstretched hand: “No, listen,” she said seriously. “We’ve got some plans, we’re really working on it. And you’d fit right in.”

“I’ve already resigned.”

“Shit.” She shook her head, disgusted. “Damn it, X, you should have talked to me first!”

“I want to go.”

She gave him a very hard look. He was taking things too far, the look said; he was being oversensitive, romanticizing the whole Val thing. Miserably he stared back at her, refusing to concede the point.

She shrugged, dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Okay. But you remember what I said. It’s the truth you know! We’re going to change things!”

He nodded and clumped down the stairs. There at the turn in the stairwell was the big photo of Thomas Berg in the middle of a polar dip, grinning and wet, chest-deep in the subzero water of McMurdo Sound, in a hole hacked in the sea ice like a seal hole, the man like a big seal. It had always struck X as a poignant memorial, as Berg had soon after that died in a helicopter crash in the Dry Valleys. Now it struck him harder than ever, as some sort of general comment on what one’s happy moments really meant, on how long they lasted.
He walked out into the slap of the wind feeling worse than ever.