Antarctica (48 page)

Nice if you could do it. And in some ways cleaner than sticking a knife into a man’s sense of himself. But
not a choice Val had had. They needed Jack moving; and now he was moving. But she had a foul taste in her dry mouth—the sick, salty taste of South Georgia Island—and she did not want to look back at those particular clients anymore.

On they walked. She kept to the stragglers’ pace. They came to a long low hogback hill in the ice, an extension of the ridge running south from Last Cache Nunatak, and she hurried to the front of the group. It was good that they had gotten this far, but crevasses here were a real possibility, and the snow was deep on the side of the slope, and cut by the winds into high sastrugi. Val stomped out as deep a trail as she could, and reminded everyone to stay in single file and in her steps. The ice was flowing over a buried rock ridge, so she kept the pulse radar sweeping the ice ahead, and watched the ice itself closely for telltale dips or changes in snow texture. None appeared, and they were able to walk over the ridge without incident. But even that slight uphill made it clear to Val that her legs were getting tired. Which meant the clients must be wasted. She checked her watch, calculated back; they had been walking for twenty-six hours. She figured they had about twenty kilometers left to go.

Then she heard a faint shout, and looked back quickly. Jack was collapsed on the snow, the others standing or crouched in a knot over him. Val ran back down the slope to them. Jack was semiconscious at best; he was trying to get up, and the others were holding him down.

“Keep down!” Val said to him sharply, almost pleading. She took his pulse, checked him out as best she could. It looked like hypothermia to her, along with
whatever else had slowed him down; shock was her best guess, shock from the loss of blood and the fall generally.

She stood and thought it over. Then she took Ta Shu’s ski poles and her own, and with their rope lashed the poles to Jack’s back in a double-X pattern. It was a lousy stretcher, but with the rope tied to her harness she could pull him along on his bottom and boot heels, his neck and head supported. It was harder than pulling the sledge had been, but only Jack’s butt and heels were in occasional contact with the snow, and his head was supported by ski poles and a net of rope. Now that he wasn’t walking he would chill down fast, of course, but there was nothing she could do about that, except dial his suit’s photovoltaic system to max and hurry to Roberts as fast as she could. “Keep up with me if you can,” she ordered the others when the arrangement was finished. “And stay in my tracks for sure.” She took off.

And then she really began to work. It was particularly hard without her ski poles, for those helped walking in snow a great deal. But there was nothing for it. As long as they did not encounter bare ice, she intended to go as fast as she could without stopping, all the way to the Roberts camp. The others would have her bootprints to show the way if they fell too far behind, and Jack’s heels would knock down the largest of the sastrugi, leaving even more of a trail. With luck the others would, like her, feel a new surge of energy at this emergency, and keep her in sight. And once she got to Roberts she could drop Jack off and go back for them.

So off she went, pushing it as hard as she could given the distance left. She had a lot in reserve, and it felt good finally to quit holding herself to the clients’ pace and just
take off
. This, she thought blackly, was the only part of guiding she was good at.

A few hours later the closest client was on the horizon behind her, perhaps six to eight kilometers back. She stopped and watched them as she drank her meltwater and caught a breather; she thought it was Ta Shu and Jim leading the way. Jack was still semiconscious, but he seemed aware enough of his predicament to stay still in his traces. On reflection it seemed to Val that he might have suffered a concussion when they fell. Although he had been gung ho for a while after that. Or else he had gone into shock from loss of blood—mild shock at first, followed by serious shock. Hard to say. Now cold would be the major factor; serious hypothermia could not be far away. Only the photovoltaic elements in his suit were protecting him from it, and with the sun obscured by clouds they were much less powerful.

But Roberts Massif was now revealed right to its base; so they were less than ten k out. The oil camp was right around the southernmost point of the massif. So they had done most of it. When the others got closer she pointed at Roberts, hoping to give them the little surge of adrenaline they were sure to get when they saw the goal. Then she was off again, faster than ever. No truly long haul is ever done with much of a kick kept in reserve for the end, but she had gone out extremely slow in the first half, so a good negative split was a distinct possibility. Anyway she was going to give it her best shot; the others could follow at whatever pace they could manage. Although they had looked shattered, they also seemed as though they could carry on to the end. Ta Shu had even spun around once to do his filming
or his geomancy, or both. Val liked his imperturbability.

The red dolerite of Roberts reared before her. Then she was stomping down the bare ice dropping to the massif, and she had to pull Jack around and let him down ahead of her. She leaned forward to look at his face; he appeared to be asleep. “We’re almost there,” she said. “We’ll get you some help.”

Then she turned the last corner and saw that the little station had burned down. Completely destroyed. A new kind of fear spiked into her. Her shouts brought no one out of the ruins. Then a figure appeared on the hovercraft still lying next to the dock.

X opened the door and shouted back at the approaching stranger. A tall woman hauling an injured man on a kind of travois, lashed together from ski poles and climbing rope. Feeling amazed without knowing why, X looked closer. It was Val. His heart leaped: “Hey!” he cried. She looked over at him, saw he was on the hovercraft, and pulled wearily over to the dock. X crossed the broad section of paneling he had made into a gangplank, and helped her to get the stricken man on board. Trouble on her trek, and without helo support from Mac. The tenuous nature of their presence on the ice, something he had thought about a lot during the snowmobile ride to Roberts, came home to him again. They had thought they were out there surviving on their own, when really they had been totally dependent on outside support.

“X, is that you?” she said, staring at him from behind ski mask and sunglasses.

“Yeah.”

He helped her get the man over the side of the hovercraft and inside. They got the man on his back on the floor. She croaked “Water,” and pulled off her mask; she looked grimmer than he had ever seen her, by many magnitudes. “Any doctors with you?”

“No.” He went back to the stove and poured her a mug of warm water, then brought it to her. “We’re barely here ourselves.”

“Uh.” She took a sip of water, looked out a window at the station. “What happened?”

“We’re not sure. We’re the only ones here. We just got here ourselves a little while ago, and found the place like this.”

“It was blown up,” Wade said from stoveside, somewhat unnecessarily in X’s opinion, as there were not any competing explanations.

Val looked in at Wade, again surprised. “Wade! Jeez, what is this? I thought you were at the Pole.”

“I was.”

“Uh huh,” she said. She held the mug to the stricken man’s lips. Distracted by him, on conversational automatic pilot, she said, “And how was that?”

“It was interesting.”

Val didn’t hear him. She couldn’t get water into the man; he was out. She looked up at X. “But then you both ended up here?”

“The drilling camp we were at was also blown up,” X explained. “And when we got here we found this one as you see it. We presume there’s been a terrorist attack on the oil camps.”

“You presume?” Val said.

“We haven’t been able to establish radio contact with anyone.”

“Oh really! We haven’t either.”

“What happened to you?” Wade asked.

“We lost our sledge. An ice block fell on it. So we came here. I would have waited for search and rescue if I could have made coms, but I couldn’t. It was weird.”

“Where were you again?” Wade asked.

“Top of the Axel Heiberg.”

“How far away is that?”

“Hundred k or so.”

The men stared at her.

“I’ve got four more clients out there following me,” she said.

“I’ll go help them in,” X said.

“Thanks.”

As X put on his boots and outdoor gear, Wade explained in his deadpan style what had happened to the three of them since their trip out to see the Hillary Weasel; that felt to X like it had happened a few weeks ago, though in reality it had been the previous day. “We assume the people in these two camps got warned somehow, and managed to get out. Or were taken out. Or whatever, because there was no one at either place—you know, no bodies, no one wandering around.”

“What about the radios here?” Val asked, her face serious as she digested the implications of Wade’s story.

“There’s only the one on board here, I think. We haven’t tried it yet.”

“What about emergency bags?”

“I’ve found a couple,” Carlos said as he came in the room, dragging one across the floor behind him. “And there’s a radio on board. But I don’t think it’s the radios.”

“I know. But we only had our phones, and I wanted to try something stronger.”

“Me too.”

He and Val started discussing the base and its resources. With the main complex destroyed, these were limited indeed; so far, two emergency bags, for nine people. That would feed them for a few days, and Carlos said there was some food in the hovercraft. In the ordinary course of things that would be enough to hold them until they were rescued by Mac Town; but obviously they were not in the ordinary course of things.

X left them discussing it and went out into the cold. He cramponed up the ice slope to the plateau proper, then waved at the four stragglers coming in. The first of them, a small Oriental man not wearing a ski mask, smiled, and then frowned as he saw the station. “Oh my! More trouble I see!”

“Yes. We’re in the hovercraft there, it’s still okay.”

“Hovercraft, okay. Hot chocolate?”

“Sure, go on in. I’ll wait for the others.”

“I also. They will soon join us. Doing very well.”

Actually they looked wasted to X, but they were happy to have made it, and though shocked at the sight of the burned station, they got down the slope to the hovercraft without difficulties. Over the gangplank, into the hovercraft’s interior, which felt nice and cozy after the outside, though it was probably only ten or twenty degrees warmer, at the most. But it was shelter.

Inside it was loud for a while as introductions and explanations filled the air. Only slowly did the new arrivals grasp that their troubles were not yet over; and even then their main feeling was pleasure at having successfully crossed seventy miles of the polar cap in a single push. X went back to the stove, and mixed mug after mug of hot cocoa for the new arrivals, observing
as he did that this session alone would use up nearly half the hot chocolate they had. Val said thanks as he handed her the last mug, but other than that she was focused on the hurt man. Carlos was checking the man out with a perhaps illusory paramedic competence; it wasn’t something X knew anything about. He resolved to take a first-aid course the next chance he got. He wanted to comfort Val somehow (impress her somehow), but could not think what he might do; there was nothing he could do for the stricken man, who, he suddenly realized, was probably Val’s latest romantic interest. Oh well.

He went down the passageway behind the passenger compartment, and started rummaging through the cabinets in the wall, which were packed with boxes, mostly containing machine parts and the like. “I think this guy is just cold now,” he heard Carlos say to Val. “Even a bad concussion shouldn’t leave him comatose like this, and you say it wasn’t a bad concussion anyway.”

“I didn’t think so,” Val said.

“Well, hypothermia will do this to you. How long were you pulling him?”

“Four hours or so, I guess. I had his suit on full heat.”

“But it’s been cloudy. That’s a long time to be doing nothing out here. Let’s get a core temperature and start warming him up.”

“How?”

“The hovercraft should have a body bag in it.”

X had just found this item in one of the passageway cabinets, and now brought it into the passenger compartment. He had only seen one deployed once, in an ASL demonstration in Christchurch, but Carlos said “Yeah, here we go,” and took the package from X and pulled it apart quickly, unfolding what looked like a
sleeping bag made of bubblewrap. It worked, as X recalled, in a manner similar to the antiquated handwarmers that some old iceheads still carried around in their Carhartts in Mac Town; the act of getting a person inside the bag twisted it enough to break all the internal pockets in the bubble-wrap fabric, and that mixed some chemicals contained in separate pockets, starting chemical reactions that generated heat. After that the person was inside a sleeping bag that emanated heat like a lukewarm bath, which was all that a hypothermic person could handle. “Here, cut his clothes off first,” Carlos ordered, working with a massive pair of scissors he found in one of the e-bags. As he worked he said, “It’s very dangerous to reheat a hypothermic person too fast, they get what is called rewarming shock. All their closed capillaries reopen at once, and the sudden drop in blood pressure causes the heart to fail.” With what X regarded as questionable gusto he went on to tell them a story about being on a ship in his youth which had rescued six Argentinian sailors out of the sea off Tierra del Fuego; the crew had dried them off, fed them hot food and drinks in the cabin, and watched all six keel over dead. But he trailed off as he stared at the little computerdoc console embedded in the bag. “Eighty-six degrees? What is this, Fahrenheit?” He pushed buttons. “Ah yes. Thirty degrees. Well, that is hypothermia all right. But I have seen worse.” The man in the bag looked like a sleeping movie star. Playing Lazarus, hopefully. Carlos was pointing out the sophisticated thermostatting that the bag was capable of, with its array of thermometers, rheostats, dampers and supplementary heaters, when he interrupted himself and said, “Oh, my. Look at this. He was injured, eh?”