Antarctica (43 page)

Wade fell again. “Can’t ski for you.”

“Can’t ski, that’s right. Nothing.”

“Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why don’t we have the best stuff?”

“Expensive! And what we have is adequate for what we’re supposed to be doing out here. We’re not supposed to be out here skiing around. This is trekker stuff.”

“So if Val were here we’d be okay.”

“Probably so.”

They skied on side by side. The snow got smoother, and they glided along without mishap for a while. Carlos was a black mark on the horizon ahead of them; Roberts Massif was bigger, and they could see right to the ice shoreline at the foot of the rock, where the station would soon be visible to them, though they hadn’t spotted it yet. Then X said to Wade, “If that’s blue ice then we’re fucked.”

“How so?”

“It’s as hard as rock, and slick. Bumpy but slick.”

“Oh.” Wade’s heart sank. His only attempt at ice skating had broken his tailbone. He had had to sit on an inflated donut for three months.

“Shit. That’s blue ice all right.”

They came up to Carlos, who was on the last peninsula of white snow, sticking into a sea of blue ice.

“I can’t ski ice,” X said.

“Few people can,” Carlos replied. “We’ll have to put on crampons and walk.”

So they sat down and took off their skis, got their boots and crampons out of their daypacks, changed shoes for boots, strapped on crampons, repacked the daypacks, stood up, and walked on with skis and one ski pole over one shoulder—one hand for them, the other hand poling the ice with a ski pole. All parts of this operation were bitterly, numbingly cold.

But walking with crampons was absurdly secure after skiing, like walking on flypaper. The crunch of the ice underfoot reminded Wade of twisting ice trays back home, and for an instant he was desperately homesick for a world where ice came in one-inch cubes. The change of footgear had chilled him so deeply that his legs were shaking. His thighs felt like jelly. And the crampons quickly tired his feet and ankles, for they made him
too
secure on the ice. From too little traction to too much; nothing comfortable.

“We’re almost there,” Carlos called back to them.

“He starts saying that at around the halfway point of any trip,” X warned Wade. “He’s just like Val that way.”

“Ah.”

X was narrating his journey to himself; from the snatches Wade heard it sounded as if an unseen sports commentator of great cynicism was peering out from inside X’s ski mask. Past a gentle rise, snow returned to cover the bare blue ice. After a short conference they sat down and changed back into skis, which was welcome in one sense, as the weight of the skis over his shoulder was becoming oppressive to Wade; but the gear change chilled him even further. His hands would barely work. Carlos had them eat chocolate bars. Feeling famished, Wade bit into a frozen bar and what felt like a rock in
the chocolate jolted a tooth filling with excruciating pain: “Ow ow shit ow!”

“Watch out for the frozen raisins!” X and Carlos warned together.

“Oh thank you very much!”

“Sorry. They’re like pebbles when they freeze.”

“Now you tell me.”

“I hate this kind of chocolate, for that very reason.”

Gloves back on, hands numb and clumsy. Frigid air, cutting right to the bone. Up and on. It seemed to Wade that he could feel parts of his mind begin to numb like his fingers; the outer layers of the cortex, the delicate lobes behind the nose, all chilling and shutting down. A pure white plain in a clear blue sky. Ups and downs, thankfully mild. Skiing as badly as ever, or worse. Over them the lowering sky. Looking toward the sun, off to his left, made it like noon, and the snow blazed in a mirrorflake fan. Looking straight ahead across the sunlight made it dawn, the sastrugi thrown in high relief by countless small shadows. Looking away from the sun made it midnight, the layered grainy bedding of the snow darkly lustrous. The angle of light the only landscape. Or rather the landscapes were all boot-high, so that they Brobdingnagged over them, left, right, left, right, in the cold one could never adapt to, the frozen air spiking up the nose like a dangerous drug directly into the brain, a drug needed but feared, the inescapable addiction to oxygen now something like a fatal necessity. Colder and colder, no matter the skiing. More parts of the brain regressing, losing the ability to talk or even to think, all the words fading out like stars at dawn. Ahead the rock seemed closer, and he saw gleams of color at the shoreline; the station, presumably. The sight made Wade feel dully better. They were going to make it.

Then the snow tilted down toward the massif, and he could pole along without moving his legs, a blessed relief. But then the snow turned to white ice, and he was sliding down without pushing at all—downhill skiing, in other words, and faster and faster, as if on a bike without brakes. His skis chattered, and he bent his knees and crouched, poles tucked under his arms and head down in a grim parody of real skiers, until an unseen bump up-ended him and he landed on his butt again, and slid down the slope almost as fast as before, spinning on his back like a cartwheel. His skis had detached and disappeared, but his ski poles were still flailing around him, so he grabbed the end of the left one with his right mitten as it bounced over him, and twisted on his side and jammed the point against the ice. It barely cut a line but it did slow him down a little, scraping like chalk on a blackboard, and by and by he was sliding slowly enough to jam his boot edges onto the ice without immediately breaking his legs. Eventually he bobbled to a halt, perhaps a hundred meters out from the hovercraft and a little wharf sticking out from the rock onto the ice. After that little shoves of his mittens slid him down a gentle incline, ten meters at a shove. Behind him Carlos and X were tromping down the slope upright, having stopped to take off their skis for the final descent. Wade waved at them weakly, and they cheered his survival.

Their pleasure was short-lived, however, because Roberts Station was destroyed—knocked apart and burned. They stepped onto rock and climbed up to the edge of the wreck, Carlos shouting curses in Spanish again but almost absently now, as he began to probe the ruins in search of the equipment it would take to keep them from freezing. A hard wind keened over the rock and they tottered like wooden men, finding nothing,
the ruins revealing how small the buildings had been, like trailers in a trailer park, and now all black sticks and lumps. “Where is everyone?” X croaked over and over. Wade stumbled with every step, his boots would not rise high enough.

“They’re gone,” Carlos said. “Come on, let’s get in the hovercraft.”

The hovercraft was out on the ice some six or eight feet from the wharf, pushed out there apparently by the blast that had leveled the station. X found a piece of singed paneling and carried it over and dropped it on the gap as a gangplank, and they staggered across it onto the deck of the craft, and fell through the door into the cabin. It was as cold inside as out. Wade could barely move. Carlos banged open a cabinet and lifted out a green Coleman stove, and dropped it on the shelf under the windows and slapped it open. Painstakingly he screwed a gas cannister onto the coupling at the side of the stove, then fumbled in his parka for his lighter and applied it to a burner, turning a dial on the stove and flicking the lighter repeatedly; the scraping flint was a primeval sound. Then with a whoosh they had fire.

It was Misha’s night to cook again, and the heavenly smells of corned-beef hash filled the yellow Scott tent. They wolfed down the food and then slowed down, moving easefully into the dishwashing and Drambers phase of the evening. Graham Forbes sat back taking wet dishes from Harry and drying them, while a recumbent Geoffrey Michelson tapped the McMurdo code on his wrist phone to make their nightly sked coms with Randi.

No Randi, however, on this night. No Mac Town at all. Static all up and down the dial, in fact.

“What’s this,” Michelson said, looking at his phone.

“Try the box,” Misha suggested, indicating the big old radio in the corner of the tent.

“A clever idea.” Michelson turned on the radio, clicked the dial to the McMurdo frequency, tried a call. Again, nothing but static. Graham put down his dishtowel and leaned over to inspect the radio.

“Something odd going on,” Michelson said.

“More than something,” Misha noted with a puzzled
expression. “They’re different systems. For both of them to malfunction at once—” He shook his head, sipped his Drambers.

“You’re suggesting something more than accident?” Michelson asked.

“It doesn’t look like an accident to me.”

“But what?”

“Don’t know. Sabotage?”

The four of them thought it over, looking at each other.

“The satellite links are vulnerable,” Misha said. “You only have to train a tracking dish on a satellite, and send a stronger signal at it than the one it’s supposed to be getting, and you’ve captured it.”

“But there are so many satellites up there,” Michelson objected. “The system is massively redundant, I would have thought.”

Harry and Misha were both shaking their heads.

“There’s a lot of satellites because there’s a lot of traffic,” Misha said. “And they all are part of various overlapping networks, with a lot of carriers and hub satellites transferring messages before they’re sent back down to Earth. So if you had your dishes down here, and targeted the right hubs as they came over this area, you could knock down a lot of the system.”

“Especially down here,” Harry said. “There aren’t that many fully polar satellites.”

“But if one satellite failed wouldn’t they switch to another?”

“Sure,” Misha said. “But it might be possible to track that and redirect the disruption as well. Just find the new hub and point the dish that way. It could all be done by a single program, I bet.”

“The hard part isn’t making it break down,” Graham said, remembering pub talk with a friend in the
corns business. “The hard part is making it work at all.”

Michelson looked at his three companions. “Well,” he said. “I’ll thank you gentlemen to stay out of Greenpeace, please. And I’m shocked to learn we live in such a vulnerable system.”

“The satellites are up there,” Misha said, waving up. “Easy to see, easy to disrupt. Anyone with a transmitter at fourteen gigahertz can do it.”

“But it doesn’t explain McMurdo,” Graham pointed out.

They considered it in silence. “Disable the radio building,” Misha suggested finally.

“But the town is full of radios like this one,” Harry said. “They should be back on the air pretty soon, no matter what.”

Michelson nodded. “And we should still be able to contact Burt right now. Let’s try that.”

He clicked the tuning dial over two stops, and pressed the transmit button on the handheld mouthpiece. “S-374, this is S-375, are you there Burt and crew, do you read me, over.”

A pause, the faint hiss of a radio connection: “We read you, Geoff! But we haven’t been able to contact Mac Town or make calls out, and our GPS isn’t working!”

“That’s our situation here too, Burt, although we didn’t know about the GPS.”

“That’s even more satellites,” Misha said.

“It’s not just that, Geoff, our helo pick-up didn’t show tonight either! We had to walk back to camp, it was pretty hairy!”

“They must have had to cross some ice,” Misha joked.

Michelson waved him quiet and pressed the transmit
button: “Something’s gone wrong in Mac Town, I’m afraid. But they’re sure to be back on the air soon, so I suggest we sit tight out here until we find out more about what’s happened.”

“That’s fine by us, Geoff. No way do we want to walk all the way back home. Besides, we’re finding some great stuff over here. What about you, have you found anything?”

“We’re plugging away, Burt. Nothing extraordinary so far.” With a warning glance at Misha not to guffaw while he was transmitting. “Let’s keep in close contact while this situation continues, Burt. Talk again at nine tomorrow morning, all right? And let us know immediately if you hear from Randi or anyone else.”

“Sure thing, Geoff! I’ll bet you anything it’s Greenpeace again, gone after those oil camps!”

“Mac Town would seem to have little to do with that. But we’ll find out. Have a good night, you fellows, and over and out.”

“Same to you, over and out.”

Michelson put down the radio transmitter. They sat in the hiss of the Coleman stove, sipping their Drambuie.

Misha said, “So you didn’t want to tell your co-P.I. about your find, eh?”

“Misha.” Michelson sipped. “Not on the radio. Anyone could be listening.”

“All those people out here,” Graham said, needling Michelson like Misha always did. It was a bit catching.

“There
are
other field camps out here,” Michelson said. “Besides, even if it was just Burt, he might be tempted to crow about it to people in Mac Town, or in the north.”

Graham nodded. He liked Michelson’s caution in this respect, because he thought he understood what
caused it. A premature announcement, indulged in before all the work was done and the results accepted for publication, could actively endanger the results themselves. Internet science and press-release science were both potentially dangerous in that respect. The beech litter mat they had found in the Apocalypse Sirius was a crucial find, Graham was sure; but only when properly fitted into their case, and supported. Then it would be a very solid brick in the wall, maybe even one of the things that tipped the balance to general acceptance of the dynamicist view of things. But they were very far from that at this point. Right now what they had was just some rusty-yellow organic matter, no more; it could be two hundred years old, it could be two hundred million years old. The stabilists would certainly challenge them on that basis, and on every other basis they could think of. They had to build a framework for these fragments, so to speak, and forestall all possible objections to their interpretation of what they meant; for objects remained objects until the objections were countered. One had to locate them in dense meshes of history to turn them into facts, facts that would then support a theory. This part of the process was crucial to doing any lasting, influential work. And so Michelson would be enlisting an array of paleobotanists, paleobiologists, geomorphologists, geophysicists, paleoclimatologists, and glaciologists like Graham himself, all bringing their specialty to bear on the subject at hand, all of whose own careers, if they took part in this effort, would then become at least somewhat connected to the success or failure of the dynamicist view.