Antarctica (30 page)

The South Pole was cold. At first when Wade climbed out of the Herc and saw the white glare and the dark blue sky, it was familiar enough to make him think it was going to be like McMurdo or the Dry Valleys. Then the cold shot up his nostrils into his head and his snot froze, with a tickling sensation that was only a little painful. After that there were icicles inside his nose. This seemed to stabilize the nasal situation, and after that his nose stayed relatively warm—warm, with icicles inside it!—and the sensation of cold shifted elsewhere, to the various joints in his clothing: between boots and pants, and at his wrists, neck and eyes. Cold!

By this time he had rounded the nose of the Herc, and was walking across the smashed snow of the runway. He passed a little glass-walled booth topped by a big sign: “South Pole Pax Terminal.”

Beyond it stood the new Pole Station, gleaming in
the sun like a blue spaceliner stranded on the snow. Actually like three spaceliners, all standing on thick blue pylons, and linked by blue passage tubes. At the end of the leftmost module a cylindrical blue control tower stood overlooking the scene. Farther across the glittering white plain, past heaped mounds of snow and a line of yellow bulldozers, he could see just the tops of a little sunken village of antique Jamesways. Farther still, a pale blue geodesic dome stuck out of snow that appeared to be in the process of burying it entirely; the old station, apparently.

A man approached Wade and introduced himself: Keri Hull, NSF rep for the Pole. He led Wade to the spaceliner and up metal grid stairs like those Wade had seen in ski resorts. From here the new station looked like a segmented flying wing, aerodynamic in the polar winds. They went through the usual meat-locker doors, inset into the curved blue wall.

Keri led Wade down a hall to a bright warm galley. They sat down at a long table with a few other people; one of them got him a mug of hot chocolate, and he held the mug in both hands gratefully. The inside of his nose began to defrost. The room was full of people eating and talking. It was steamy.

“First a few words about the station,” Keri said. “We’re supposed to do this for everyone. We’re at 9,300 feet here, and because of the Earth’s spin the atmosphere is thinner at the poles than at the equator, so our nine three is the equivalent of about 10,500 feet at the equator. It’s a hard ten thousand, too, because of the cold and the dryness. So stay hydrated and don’t run around too much in the first days of your stay. And if you have a persistent headache or loss of appetite, see the station doctor and she’ll fix you up. Officially we recommend avoiding caffeine and alcohol, but, you
know—moderation in all things.” He grinned and sipped from a giant coffee mug with his name painted on it. “Just pay attention to your body signals and behave accordingly. Okay? Good. Now—how can we help you down here at ninety degrees south, Mr. Norton?”

“I’d like to have a look at the whole station, with the idea of going through the various, um, incidents that have been reported, kind of step by step.”

Keri frowned. “You mean going into the old station?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. That’s against regulations, I’m afraid.”

“Of course. But it seems that it will be necessary, given that some of the, the removals, have been happening there.”

Keri raised his eyebrows. “Necessary?”

“I’m down here to investigate the incidents,” Wade said firmly.

The other man’s look made it clear he thought this was a waste of time. “It’s potentially dangerous,” he warned. “The snow accumulation is crushing down the dome.”

“But the archway next to the dome is still in use, as I understand it?”

“Yes.”

“So the approach is safe.”

“Yes, but—”

“So we could go down the archway, and just have a quick pop in to see under the old dome, and hope that it won’t collapse at that very moment.”

Keri didn’t appreciate that way of putting it. “You’ve talked to Sylvia about this?”

Wade nodded.

“All right. We’ll take you in tomorrow, okay? We’ll
have to get some gear and people together to do it safely.”

“Fine.”

So he had a day to kill. Keri appeared to be done with his orientation, and for some reason miffed at him. A young woman named Lydia took him down the hall and showed him what would be his room—like a nice hotel room, greatly miniaturized—and gave him his room key. He was free to do what he wanted.

But it quickly became clear that the South Pole was not a place where there was much to do. He went back outside to snap some photos of the station. There were not many places he was allowed to walk, as the snowy plain surrounding the station to all horizons was forbidden ground in three of four quadrants: the dark sector for astronomy, the quiet sector for seismography, and the clean sector for incoming air from the prevailing wind, which almost always came from that particular north. He was left with the area between the station and the runway, where a short barber pole with a mirror ball on its top stood inside a curve of flags. This was the ceremonial South Pole, there for photo purposes. He walked over to the mirror ball and looked at the bulbous reflection of his hooded face. In the tiny reflected image of his mirrored sunglasses he could make out two little mirror ball-topped poles, marked by even tinier reflections of himself. An infinite regress of person and place. He tried to take a photo, but nothing happened; it seemed his camera battery had frozen.

Well. This was not the actual geographical pole anyway, which was located somewhere inside the forbidden old station, Keri had said; it would be moving through the station for another couple of years, until the station had been carried over it by the ice cap as it made its slow flow north to the sea.

There seemed little else to do outdoors but freeze. Wade gave Phil Chase a call on the wrist, and was a bit surprised when he answered. “Phil, it’s Wade! I’m at the South Pole!”

“That’s good, Wade. Is it cold? Is it bright?”

“It’s cold. It’s bright.”

“That’s good. Here it’s warm, and dark. I’m asleep, Wade. Call me back when it’s daytime here. I want to hear more about it.”

So much for outdoors. Wade retreated inside, grateful for the spaceliner’s sudden warmth. He looked out a tinted window at the view: a snowy plain in all directions, to a horizon which was about six miles away, Keri had said; Wade found it hard to tell. The surface snow was marked by sastrugi; these hundreds of small waves, and the chiselled sandlike snow that lay between them, must make skiing hard work indeed. He tried to imagine what it would be like to ski across such a plain plane of a plain, day after day for hundreds of miles, a whole continent, like walking from New York to LA, all the while pulling a heavy sledge, and often against the grain of the sastrugi, no doubt. And yet there were people out there doing it at that very minute, the Herc pilot had said, crossing the continent for fun, some of them following the SPOT route from the Pole to McMurdo. It must have been a disheartening sight to see a train of giant yellow tractors clumping past them on autopilot. But presumably their motivations had nothing to do with practicality.

It was not for him. And as he walked down the hall to his cubicle, to rest from his half-hour trip outside, he thought, What if there was no indoors? What if one had to stay out in this cold all the time, day and night, fresh in the morning or sweat-soaked (if one could
sweat) in the afternoon? He didn’t think he’d last more than a few hours.

Although indoors required a different sort of fortitude. How long could one stand to stay locked up in a motel? Wade did not think of himself as an outdoor person, but he did like to be able to go places. Here there was no there there, and scarcely a here here. He went to the galley and had a leisurely lunch, and watched the inhabitants of the station come in and go through the food line, and sit down and eat in small groups, talking busily, not paying too much attention to the other people in the room. When he was done himself he cleared his plate and went down the main hall of the southernmost module to the library; then the games room; then the gym; then the coms rooms, first the official use room, filled with big radios and other machinery, then the personal use room, filled with computers and video screens. Most of the terminals in the room were occupied, by off-duty personnel making contact with the world.

The second module of the station was mostly private quarters and bathrooms, with some lounges, mostly empty. Every hall window had the same view, of course. And the third module was locked. Wade retreated to the first module to ask about that, and Keri looked up from his computer screen (distracted) and said “Oh, it’s empty, didn’t you know?” In the fluctuating vagaries of Congressional funding, he went on, keeping his face carefully blank, the money to complete all of the station had been cut, and NSF had decided to use what they had to build the outer shell of the third module, leaving the completion of the inside to some flusher or more southerly-thinking Congress. The Japanese
were willing to contribute the money to complete it if part of it were turned into a small hotel, but so far NSF was resisting the temptation.

“Interesting,” Wade said. “I’d like to see that too.”

Keri held his eyebrows in position, and merely rooted in a drawer and handed Wade a large key. “Be sure to lock it when you leave,” he said, and went back to his screen.

Wade looked at him curiously, then shrugged and went back down the halls to the closed door of the third module. The door was heavy. Inside, he saw the empty shell of a building; vertical struts were all that broke the expanse of a room which looked both larger and smaller than he would have expected. The view out the windows was the same as everywhere else.

He went back to the first module and returned the key, then sat down in the library, which had two walls covered with books, most looking very well-read indeed. A captive audience. It was all very interesting; but not. Only the idea that all these rooms were at the South Pole made them other than a weird cross of military base, airport lounge, lab lounge, and motel. It was, to his surprise, extremely boring; boring in a way that contrasted very strongly to his experience in Antarctica so far.

So the next morning, when Wade put on his heavy clothing and clumped down the hall after Keri and another man named George, he was greatly relieved, so anxious was he to do something. He followed the other men watchfully.

Outside on the landing the cold gave him its pop on the nose. They descended to the snow and walked past the little sunken village of Jamesways, and a small blue dorm on stilts that looked like a model for the big station, and then down a long slope in the snow, like one
half of a funnel placed on its side. Tracks in the dry snow made it clear that the depression had been cut by bulldozers. At the thin end of the funnel was a dark corrugated metal arch, the opening of a tunnel that was about ten meters below the surface of the plain.

This was the archway, essentially a long metal-covered tunnel, which when built had stood on the surface of the snow in front of the dome, which had been much taller then. As they walked inside, Keri explained that this station had been built in the early 1970s, and had been sinking under the accumulated snow ever since. The tall inner curve of the archway above them was completely covered by a fuzz of hoarfrost, the ice crystals large and flaky and arranged in big chrysanthemum shapes, all mashed together. To their right as they walked the tunnel was jammed with one big box after another, like meat lockers again, or containers from a container ship. The passageway was squeezed against the white wall to the left. They walked on hard-packed snow. It got darker fast. They passed a short pole with a knob on top, stuck in the floor; this was the current geographical south pole, the thing itself, such as it was.

They came to a crossroads of tunnels. To the left a short tunnel led to two large doors that met imperfectly, revealing snow behind. “The old entrance to the station,” George said. To the right an ice-bearded low tunnel led in to the darkness under the old dome.

They followed their flashlight beams down the tunnel into the center of this chamber. At the high point of the dome a round circle of open air let in some light. The underside of the dome was coated with a fur of ice crystals so thick that the hexagonal strut system of the old fullerdome was only suggested, as if it were a feature of the crystallization process. The effect for Wade was of some kind of immense igloo cathedral, the
filtered light pouring down onto three or four large red-walled boxes, buildings that looked like two-story mobile homes, with exterior metal staircases like the new station’s, and metal landings outside their second-story entrances.

Keri and George led Wade through each of these buildings in turn. They were all much the same; narrow halls connecting tiny rooms, all packed with boxes, or empty chairs, or filing cabinets. One upstairs room had a pool table in it. “Come on to the galley,” Keri said as Wade stared at this lugubrious sight. “That was the real place to hang out.”

They went out onto a metal landing and downstairs, then across to another refrigerator door, and in through a coat room to the darkened galley. In the flashlight beams long shadows barred the walls. The narrow room looked much too small to feed a whole station. One side was open to the old kitchen; stoves and ovens and refrigerators were still there. Only a few holes in the cabinetry marked where scavenged items had been taken away, to the new station or elsewhere.

“They just left all this?” Wade asked.

“As you see. By the time they built the new station, this was all old stuff, breaking down. Or it wouldn’t fit, or wouldn’t match the energy requirements. It was too much trouble to integrate it. And too expensive to haul away. Actually they were going to dismantle this whole station and dome, but it was too expensive. So here it is. Someday we’ll break it all down and spot it to Mac Town and they can use it there, or put it in the dump ship and landfill it.”