Antarctica (2 page)

As the people who had warned him had said, there was nothing for him to do. The train of vehicles was on automatic pilot, navigating by GPS, and nothing was likely to malfunction. If something did, X was not to do anything about it; the other tractors would maneuver around any total breakdowns, and a crew of mechanics would be flown out later to take care of it. No—X was there, he had decided, because somebody up in the world had had the vague feeling that if there was a train of tractors rolling from McMurdo to the South Pole, then there ought to be a human being along. Nothing more rational than that. In effect he was a good-luck charm; he was the rabbit’s foot hanging from the rearview mirror. Which was silly. But in his two seasons on the ice X had performed a great number of silly tasks, and he had begun to understand that there was very little that was rational about anyone’s presence in Antarctica. The rational reasons were all just rationales for an underlying irrationality, which was the desire to
be down here
. And why that desire? This was the question, this was the mystery. X now supposed that it was a
different mix of motives for every person down there—explore, expand, escape, evaporate—and then under those, perhaps something else, something basic and very much the same for all—like Mallory’s explanation for trying to climb Everest: because it’s there. Because it’s there! That’s reason enough!

And so here he was. Alone on the Antarctic polar plateau, driving across a frozen cake of ice two miles thick and a continent wide, a cake that held ninety-five percent of the world’s fresh water, etc. Of course it had sounded exciting when it was first mentioned to him, no matter the warnings. Now that he was here, he saw what people had meant when they said it was boring, but it was interesting too—boring in an interesting way, so to speak. Like operating a freight elevator that no one ever used, or being stuck in a movie theater showing a dim print of
Scott of the Antarctic
on a continuous loop. There was not even any weather; X traveled under the alien southern constellations with never a cloud to be seen. The twilight hour, which grew several minutes longer every day, only occasionally revealed winds, winds unfelt and unheard inside the cab, perceptible to X only as moving waves of snow seen flowing over the white ground.

Once or twice he considered gearing up and going outside to cross-country ski beside the tractor; this was officially forbidden, but he had been told it was one of the main forms of entertainment for SPOT train conductors. X was a terrible athlete, however; his last adolescent sprout had taken him to six foot ten inches tall, and in that growth he had lost all coordination. He had tried to learn cross-country skiing on the prescribed routes around McMurdo, and had made a little progress; and sometimes it was a tempting idea to break the monotony; but then he considered that if he fell and
twisted an ankle, or stunned himself, the SPOT tractors would continue to grind mindlessly on, leaving him behind trying to catch up, and no doubt failing.

He decided to pass on going outside. Monotony was not such a bad thing. Besides there would be some crevasse fields to be negotiated, even up here on the plateau, where the ice was often smooth and solid for miles at a time. Although it was true that the Army Corps of Engineers had mitigated all crevasses they didn’t care to outflank, meaning they had blown them to smithereens, then bulldozed giant causeways across the resulting ice-cube fields. This process had created some dramatic passages on the Skelton Glacier, which rose from the Ross Sea to the polar plateau in less than thirty kilometers, and was therefore pretty severely crevassed in places, so much so that the Skelton had not been the preferred route for SPOT; the first trains had crossed the Ross Ice Shelf and ascended the Leverett Glacier, a gentler incline much farther to the south. But soon after SPOT had become operational, and quickly indispensable for the construction of the new Pole station, the Ross Ice Shelf had begun to break apart and float away, except for where it was anchored between Ross Island and the mainland. The Skelton route could make use of this remnant portion of the shelf, and so every year the Corps of Engineers re-established it, and off they went. X’s nighttime ascent of the Skelton, through the spectacular peaks of the Royal Society Range, had been the most exciting part of his trip by far, crunching up causeway after causeway of crushed ice concrete, with serac fields like dim shattered Manhattans passing to right and left.

But that had been many days ago, and since reaching the polar plateau there had not been much excitement of any sort. The fuel depots they passed were automated
and robotic; the vehicles stopped one by one next to squat green bladders, were filled up and then moved on. If any new crevasses had opened up across the road since the last passing of a train, the lead vehicle’s pulse radar would detect it, and the navigation system would take appropriate action, either veering around the problem area or stopping and waiting for instructions. Nothing of that sort actually happened.

But he had been warned it would be this way, and was ready for it. Besides, it was not that much different from all the rest of the mindless work that Ron liked to inflict on his GFAs; and here X was free of Ron. And he wasn’t going to run into anyone he didn’t want to, either. So he was content. He slept a lot. He made big breakfasts, and lunches, and dinners. He watched movies. He read books; he was a voracious reader, and now he could sit before the screen and read book after book, or portions of them, tracking cross-references through the ether like any other obsessive young gypsy scholar. He made sure to stop reading and look out the windows at the great ice plain during the twilights bracketing noon, twilights that grew longer and brighter every day. Though he did not experience again anything quite as overwhelming as the indigo twilight of the crescent moon, he did see many beautiful predawn skies. The quality of light during these hours was impossible to get used to, vibrant and velvet beyond description, rich and transparent, a perpetual reminder that he was on the polar cap of a big planet.

Then one night he got some weather. The stars were obscured to the south, the rising moon did not rise on schedule, though clearly it had to be up there, no doubt shining on the top of the clouds and, yes, making them
glow just a little, so that now he could see them rushing north and over him, like a blanket pulled over the world; no stars, now, but a dim cloudy rushing overhead; and then through the thick insulation of the cab he could for once hear the wind, whistling over and under and around his tractor. He could even feel the tractor rock just a tiny bit on its massive shock absorbers. A storm! Perhaps even a superstorm!

Then the moon appeared briefly through a gap, nearly a half moon now, full of mystery and foreboding, flying fast over the clouds, then gone again. Black shapes flicked through the clouds like bats. X blinked and rubbed his eyes, sure that he was seeing things.

A light tap tapped on the roof of his vehicle. “What the hell?” X croaked. He had almost forgotten how to talk.

Then his windshield was being covered by a sheet of what looked like black plastic. Side windows and back window also. X could see gloved fingers working at the edges of the plastic, reaching down from above to tape the sheets in place. Then he could see nothing but the inside of the cab.

“What the hell!” he shouted, and ran to the door, which resembled a meat-locker door in both appearance and function. He turned the big handle and pushed out. It didn’t move. It wouldn’t move. There were no locks on these tractor doors, but now this one wouldn’t open.

“What-the-
hell
,” X said again, his heart pounding. “HEY!” he shouted at the roof of the vehicle. “Let me out!” But with the vehicle’s insulation there was no way he would be heard. Besides, even if he were …

He ran down the narrow low stairs leading from the cab into the vehicle’s freight room. On one side of the big compartment were two big loading doors that
opened outward, but when he twisted the latch locks down, and turned the handles and pushed out, these doors too remained stubbornly in place. They were not as insulated as the cab doors, and when he pushed out on them hard, a long crack of windy darkness appeared between them. He put an eye to the thin gap, and felt the chill immediately: fifty degrees below zero out there, and a hard wind. There was a plastic bar crossing the gap just below eye level; no doubt it was melted or bonded to the doors, and holding them shut. “Hey!” he bellowed out the crack. “Let me out! What are you doing!”

No answer. His face was freezing. He pulled back and blinked, staring at the crack. The bar was welded or glued or otherwise bonded across the doors, locking them in place. No doubt it was the same up there on the outside of the cab door.

He recalled the emergency hatch in the roof of the cab, there in case the vehicle fell through sea ice or got corked in a crevasse, so that the occupants had to make their escape upward. X had thought it a pretty silly precaution, but now he ran back and pulled that handle around to the open position, a very stiff handle indeed, and shoved up. It wouldn’t go. Stuck. He was trapped inside, and the windshield and cab windows were covered. All in about two minutes. Ludicrous but true.

He thought over the situation while putting on the layers of his outdoor clothing: thick smartfabric pants and coat, insulated Carhartt overalls, heavy parka, gloves and mittens. He would need it all outside, if he could get outside, but now he began to overheat terribly. Sweating, he turned on the radio and clicked it to the McMurdo coms band. “Hello McMurdo, McMurdo, this is SPOT number 103, SPOT calling Mac Town do you read me over over.” While he waited
for a reply he went to one of the closets of the cab, and pulled a brand new hacksaw from a tool chest.

“SPOT 103, through the miracle of radio technology you have once again manipulated invisible vibrations in the ether to reach Mac Coms, hey X, how are you out there, over.”

“Not good Randi, I think I’m being hijacked!”

“Say again X, I did not copy your last message, over.”

“I
said
I am being
hijacked
. Over!”

“Hey X, lot of static here, sounded like you said say Hi to Jack, but Jack’s out in the field, tell me what you mean, if that’s what you said, over.”

“
Hi
-JACKED. Someone’s locked me in the cab here and taped over the windows! Over!”

“X, did you say hijacked? Tell me what you mean by hijacked, over.”

“What I mean is that I’m in a storm up here and just now some, somebody landed on my roof and covered my windows on the outside with black plastic, and none of my doors will open, something has been done to them on the outside to keep them from opening! So I’m going to go back and try to cut through a bar holding the back doors together, but I thought I’d better call you first, in case, to tell you what’s happening! Also to ask if you can see anything unusual about my train in any satellite images you have of it! Over!”

“We’ll have to check about the satellite images, X, I don’t know who is getting those, if anyone. Just stay put and we’ll see what we can do. Don’t do anything rash, over.”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” X muttered, and pushed the transmit button: “Listen Randi, I’m going to go to the back doors and see if they’ll open, be right back to tell you about it, over!”

He went to the back and shoved out on the doors again. Again they stopped, but this time he fit the hacksaw into the crack over the bar, and began to saw like a maniac. Some kind of hardened plastic, apparently, and the doors impeded the saw. By the time he cut through the bar he was sweating profusely, and when he flung the doors open the air crashed over him like a wave of liquid nitrogen. “Ow!” he said, his throat chilling with every inhalation. He pulled his parka hood up, and held onto the door and leaned out into the wind, his eyes tearing so he could barely see.

But he had a door open. He was no longer trapped. He leaned out to look; the next vehicle in the line was following as if nothing had happened. It was like being in a train of mechanical elephants. No one in sight, nothing to be seen. Rumbling engines, squeaks of giant tractor wheels over the dry snow, the whistle and shriek of the wind; nothing else; but a gust of fear blew through him on the wind, and he shivered convulsively. He needed more clothes. Back up in the cab he could hear Randi’s voice, a clear Midwestern twang that cut through static like nothing else: “Mac Coms calling SPOT 103, answer me X, what’s happening out there? Weather says you’re in a Condition One out there, so be careful! They also said their satellite photos do not penetrate the cloud layer in any way useful to you. Answer me X, please, over!”

Instead he dropped down the steps and onto the hard-packed snow beside the vehicle. It squeaked underfoot. “Shit.” He ran forward and leaped onto the ladder steps that were inset into the lower body of the cab. Black plastic on the windows, sure enough. “Shit!” He tore at it, and the freezing wind helped pull the sheet away from the metal and plastic; he held onto the sheet with a desperate clench, so he would have evidence that
he had not hallucinated the whole incident. Then he hesitated, irrationally afraid of jumping down wrong somehow and screwing up, as in his ski fantasy. But surely in the state he was in, he could run a lot faster than the tractors were moving; and it was too cold to stay where he was, the wind was barreling right through his clothes and his flesh too, rattling his bones together like castanets. So he leaped down, and landed solidly, and as his tractor lumbered past he ran out of the line of the treadmarks, to be able to see back the length of the train. It looked short. He counted to be sure, pointing at each tractor in turn; while he did his vehicle got a bit ahead of him, and when he noticed that he ran like a lunatic back to the side of the thing, and leaped up and in, panting hard, frightened, frozen right to the core. There were only nine vehicles now.

High rapid beeping came from her crevasse detector, and Valerie Kenning stopped skiing and leaned on her ski poles. She was well ahead of the rest of her group, and with a check over her shoulder to make sure they were coming on okay, she stabbed her poles deeper into the dry snow of the Windless Bight, causing a last little surge of heat in the pole handles, and took the pulse radar console out of its parka pocket and looked at the screen, thumbing the buttons to get a complete read on the terrain. A
beepbeepbeep;
there was a fairly big crevasse ahead. They were entering the pressure zone where the Ross Ice Shelf used to push around the point of Cape Crozier, and though the pressure was gone the buckling was still there, causing many crevasses.