Antarctica (33 page)

Brilliant sunlight exploded in his head. The cold slammed into him like a great side of frozen beef, nearly knocking him down. He was wet under his parka, and the cold hurt right to the bone. It was a relief when the others started running and he could run too, blinded by a flood of cold-induced tears. Running brought freezing sweat in contact with various parts of him as he moved.

He followed Spiff and Andrea and some others down the ramp into the archway of the old station. In the tunnel it was black as the pit, and by the time his sight returned he was past the geographical pole’s pole and being led into the center of the domed area. Next to the box that had held the old galley there was a round railing and a round trapdoor, like the cover of a giant
sewer hole. “This is the old utilidor,” Spiff said up to Wade. “Follow me.”

Wade climbed down a metal ladder so cold he had to yank on his hands to get them to detach from the rungs. At the bottom of the ladder a flashlight beam revealed that ice-crystal flowers had covered everything to the point that it was impossible to tell what was under them. It was like spelunking in a white cave. Spiff brushed off a handful of crystals, and jammed it in his mouth after a swallow from his flask. “Scotch snow-cone,” he mumbled. “Real good. This is the utilidor.”

“Which is?” Wade said, watching their breath freeze and fall to the floor.

“It was the passageway they used to work on the guts of the old station. Cold down here.”

“Yes it is.”

“Sixty-six below, all the time.”

“Sixty-six below?”

“Fahrenheit. That’s right. You can imagine the guys working down here on some busted plumbing or broken wiring or the like. And this was before heated gloves.” Now they were moving along at a good speed, crouched under a ceiling of ice chrysanthemums, and when Wade slowed down Andrea pinched him in the butt. “Now here’s the start of the tunnel to the rest of the underground complex.”

“Complex?”

“That’s right. Did they tell you about old old station?”

“No.”

“Not possible! Those guys. The old station above us here is not the oldest station. The old old station is the one they built back in the IGY, in 1956. It’s about thirty meters under the surface now. The buildings are
all getting squished, but there’s a fair amount of space down there still, and a lot of stuff.”

They ducked through a hole at the end of the utilidor, and stepped into a tunnel walled by crystal-coated plywood, which was bowed in at the sides, and down from the ceiling, and up from the floor, and in places even shattered. “It’s okay,” Spiff said. “It’s a slow-motion process. Now we don’t even mess with plywood, because we can remelt the holes so easily with the new laser melters.”

“So you cut this tunnel?”

“Parts of it were cut by a number of different people. Here, look here.” He gestured in a side door at what looked like a closet, with a mattress on the floor and some boxes next to it. “This is really old. There was a winterover when one guy started only showing up for dinners, and no one knew where he was the rest of the time. Then several seasons later the seismograph crew came through and found this place. He must have brought in a lamp, and maybe a space heater. But when they found it there was only a single page from a
Playboy
, and this stuff here.”

“Wow,” Wade said, peering into this memorial to mental illness.

“They keep it on the route to remind people to be more active in their resistance. See, NSF and ASL think they own this station, they think it’s here for beakers like me, but the people who work here, they know better. They know a lot that NSF doesn’t know about this place.”

They moved on in the frigid tunnel, past a side tunnel that ran, Spiff said, to a crashed Herc buried at the end of the landing strip; then down a branch tunnel that led into the quiet zone, where Spiff shouted out “Hey Ed, come on, we’re going to go sliding!”

No response, so they went down and pounded on the door. It opened, and a pony-tailed head stuck out. “Six of you, three in bunny boots, three in tennis shoes.”

“Right again. This is Wade. Ed can identify the number and footwear of his visitors by reading his seismographs.”

“As well as Chinese nuclear tests, oil exploration blasts anywhere in the southern hemisphere, rocket launches from Canaveral, arguments my ex gets into with her new victims, and dropped bowling balls in Iowa.”

“Sensitive instrumentation,” Wade ventured.

“You bet.”

Ed scribbled an explanation for the sudden explosion of squiggles on the paper rolls slowly emerging from his machines, and followed them down the tunnel.

Another half hour’s freezing walk, and then they climbed down a ladder set in a crack, into another station. Wade looked around, amazed.

This station was crystallized entirely. The walls were buckled, the ceiling in some places only waist high. In the flashlight gleams it looked like a museum exhibit of artifacts from the 1950s, shattered and crystallized. Thick wires looped down like strings of jewels, or the long-sunken rigging of a shipwreck. “Don’t worry, there’s no power here anymore.”

“So you say.”

“No electricity, then. Here, let’s go to the galley. See, look in here.”

Wade noticed that no one was behind them anymore. “Where are the others?”

“Oh, they’re setting up the slide. Here, take a look.”

Wade followed the astronomer into the next broken-walled white cave. Here tables were still covered with
china plates and Styrofoam cups, and the walls had shelves of condiments and galley equipment—just like the old station he had already visited, in fact, except more iced-over. A pair of dirty bunny boots on a table. A big coffee pot. Heinz catsup. Over in the corner on the floor lay a spill of rib-eye steaks, badly freezer-burned, and topped by what looked like a human turd.

“This was the first permanent settlement,” Spiff said. “They lived here about twenty years. It was mostly Jamesways buried in the snow, and some bigger plywood boxes, and the connecting archways.”

“Incredible.”

“Yeah. But listen to this. There was a lot of stuff down here just a few years ago, that isn’t here anymore. Most significantly, a big generator. They even considered pulling it when they built the current station, and putting it back to work, because there was nothing wrong with it. But it wouldn’t meet the safety codes and so on. In the end they just left it here. But two seasons ago we came down here, and it was gone.”

“Gone from down here?”

“Exactly. So how did it get out of here, you ask?”

“I do.”

“So did we. We went to every corner of this station that hadn’t been crushed, to try and find out. And on the far side of the station, near where the generator was, we found a snow wall that had been repacked. We cut through it, and there was a tunnel like ours, going off in the other direction. There were wheel marks in the floor. And that tunnel went on for
ten kilometers.”

“Not possible.”

“I agree, but there it was! And then it came up to the surface, where there was a little trapdoor covered by snow. And outside that, the polar cap. Nothing else. We were over the horizon from the station. We had gone
under the snow the whole way. And no sign of where they went.”

“None?”

“No tracks of any kind!”

“How could that be?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe a helo had dropped people, but there are no helos on the polar cap. Ed thought a hovercraft might have come in, but I thought the sastrugi weren’t disturbed enough.”

“Are there any hovercraft on the polar cap?”

“Yes, there’s an old Hake at the oil camp on Roberts Massif.”

“So you think
they
took the generator?”

Spiff shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. They would have the same trouble with the old dog as the people here.”

“So who?”

Spiff shrugged. “Who knows? But we wanted you to have the full complement of mystery before you left here. I’m afraid the people who work here, the locals, the people you just saw at the dance, are going to get blamed for all this stuff. They need someone outside ASL to help. So I wanted you to know.”

“I appreciate it,” Wade said sincerely. A convulsive shiver vibrated through him, head to foot. “I’m cold.”

“I know. Let’s go take a slide down the rabbit hole, that’ll warm you up.”

“A slide?”

“Yeah. Have you ever been in a waterslide?”

“Yes,” Wade said, thinking of a park in Virginia, a hotel in Vancouver. “But—”

“I know. Come on, I’ll show you.”

This walk was shorter than the others. Up and out of the eerie crushed ghost town, then along a snow tunnel, into a snow-walled chamber, bigger than anything left
in the buried station. There were a lot of parkas and clothes piled inside what looked like a giant dumbwaiter, next to a round opening nowhere near as big as the tunnels they had been walking through.

“You made this too?” Wade asked.

“A group of us. The new heating elements can cut through the ice very efficiently. Did they tell you about the Rodwell?”

“No.”

“Of course not. Did you ever wonder where the station gets its water? Well, it all comes from an underground lake, a chamber down in the ice that is heated until there is a big pod of liquid water. They just keep going deeper and deeper with it as the water is used. The sewage dump is the same; it’s just another underground pod of liquid, good old Lake Patterson, and when it fills they move the heating element to another spot, and the old stuff freezes and heads off in the ice cap, moving north ten meters a year.”

“Lake Patterson?”

Spiff pulled his head out of the hole. “Named after Patterson. Okay, it’s ready. Take off your clothes and down you go.” Spiff was already unzipping.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. The tube is ice, but we’re running some hot water down it now, hear that? And the air is warmed too, it’s almost up to freezing. So it’s like any other water slide, only darker. The ride only lasts a couple of minutes. It goes down about say five stories, in about three hundred meters, and then you land in a warm bath. Be ready for that, it’s a shock when you hit if you’re not forewarned.” He pulled off his pants, stood before Wade naked. “Hurry up, you go first and I’ll shut down here and follow. Hurry, I’m getting cold.”

“I’m already cold,” Wade protested. In fact he had
never been colder in his life. But he did as he was told. By the time he had all his clothes off he was shivering violently.

“Okay, jump in and go for it. You can go head first or feet first, but you shouldn’t try changing from one to the other midway, or knee-riding. Not the first time anyway.”

“I won’t. Will it be dark all the way?” Wade said, peering down the hole.

“Black as the pit. Have a good ride.”

Wade took a step up and sat his bare bottom on the ice. “Jesus.”

“Have fun!” Spiff shouted, and gave him a push and he was off, sliding on his bottom. Then the tube dropped away in the blackness and he was on his back, like a luge rider. In fact it had all the qualities of luge—insane speed, rapid turns left and right, up and down, but mostly down, down down down in gut-floating no-g drops, sliding in a stream of warm water over cold slick ice, and all in pitch blackness so there was no way of telling where he would go next. He yowled. The cold of the ice seemed less severe as he sped up, but the air rushing over him was freezing. He shouted again at a heartstopping drop and right turn, you could crack your skull! Except he didn’t.

Three or four more dramatic turns and he began to enjoy himself. Then he was flying through free space, and he shrieked just as he plunged into boiling water. His skin went nova, especially along his bottom and back.

He shot up spluttering and took several gasping breaths, shouting once or twice between them, treading water desperately. It was pitch black, he could see nothing.

“Must be the senator.”

“Just stand up, man.”

“Jesus!” he said, finding his feet. “Hi!” He found he could stand, on an ice floor. The pool of hot water was chest deep. The air was steam. In the blackness he could hear several people talking, including Viktor. His skin was still blazing, but less painfully. “You guys are nuts.”

They laughed happily. No one contradicted him.

With a shout Spiff fired into the pool and rammed Wade, sending him under again. He was pulled to the surface and set on his feet. The person who had pulled him up was a woman. One of the big women from the dance. There were several of them in the pool, in the blackness and clatter of watery noise and voices, everyone moving about. “Ice is such a great insulator.” As his eyes adjusted Wade saw that the chamber was not pitch black, but black with just a touch of blue in it. He still could see nothing whatsoever, not even the basic shapes of the people around him. Under the general clatter he did hear lower voices, and right next to him a quick urgent low exchange: “Ah come on.” “Don’t or I’ll break it off.” “All right! Okay.” Wild laughter.

Wade sloshed around gingerly, wishing Val were in the pool with the rest of these unseen amazons. If you had a thing for jock women, he thought, the South Pole was definitely the place to be. The ice on the bottom of the pool was covered in some places with what felt like big rubber shower mats. Against the unseen walls there was a narrow bench, similarly matted. After a while Wade was thoroughly warmed up and his skin stopped burning. He began to see black shapes in the indigo blackness of the cave. He ran into Spiff, who told him more about the waterslide, with Andrea or someone else her size limpeted to his side, or so it seemed to Wade; it was too dark really to tell. Several years ago,
Spiff told him over the noise, Viktor had come by and described a waterslide complex cut under Vostok Station. The local PICO crew, meaning the Polar Ice Coring Office, had included some folks very prominent in the Why Be Normal Club, and they were just beginning to use the new ice-cutting technology, which used hot laser melting elements and steam removal, “real Star Wars stuff, I mean it was developed by the space-beam people at Livermore and Los Alamos, and turned out to be good for nothing at all in the world except it turns ice to steam no problem, which is very useful down here of course—the old ice-coring tech used three thousand gallons of diesel fuel for every kilometer cut through the ice, at ten dollars a gallon, and slow. Basically like melting it with your shower head. But with these lasers you could cut a whole city into the ice, man, and so these PICO freakos helped some winterovers cut this slide here, just to pass the time and keep up with those Vostok Russkies. Although later Viktor confessed that he had made that whole thing up, and Vostok had no such thing. He just thought it would be a good idea.”