Antarctica (51 page)

“Maybe not,” she said somberly, thinking it over.

“Over in the Dry Valleys, it looked like he was going to be a …”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“So did it come to anything, I mean get difficult? Was he mad at you?”

“Maybe.”

“Well. So he might have been punishing you. But that’s his problem, really. Nothing you can do about that.”

“No, I know. But I don’t want him to die on me.”

Wade risked putting a hand to her arm, very gently. “Carlos seemed to think he was just shook up, and cold. We’ll get him down to Shackleton Camp and back to McMurdo, and he’ll be okay. Besides he’s too convinced of his own importance to let himself die, right?”

A small smile. She glanced at him. They went downstairs to the passenger compartment. “Keep trying to get your senator,” Val reminded him.

“Oh yeah,” Wade said, staring at his wrist phone. “I’ll set it on repeat call. It’ll try for me once a minute.”

They got the hovercraft off with only that same minor thump of the tub; X suspected a weak lift fan at the left rear, though Carlos gave him a dubious glance, as if he might be doing something wrong with the lifters. Whatever; they were up and moving over the ice, and there was no reason to look back.

At first the hovercraft was dreamlike in its smoothness, and X and Carlos grinned at each other. Then they left the flattened road out to Mohn camp and ventured onto the sastrugi-covered white firn of the virgin glacier. Out here the craft rocked a little, this way then that, as air blew out from under the skirt at different points depending on what kind of deformations they were floating over. Nevertheless it was a pretty smooth ride compared to say a snowmobile, and as Carlos cautiously notched up the prop throttle they found that the faster they went, the smoother it got. Soon they roared
smoothly over the ice, first outward from Fluted Peak, then around Roberts Massif on its east side.

As X had noted from the air on his journey in, the massif stuck in the head of the Shackleton Glacier and nearly plugged it; it was like a rock island in the midst of rapids falling out of a lake into a river. The narrow gap on the west side, between Misery Peak and Dismal Buttress, was shattered blue ice from wall to wall, entirely unpassable. So their only choice was to go around the eastern side of Roberts, where a wider ice stream called the Zaneveld Glacier made a smooth curving drop into a confluence with the western stream and the Shackleton proper. The Zaneveld was also crevassed pretty heavily in places, but there were smooth unbroken ramps that descended from one level section to the next, and Carlos said Geraldo and German had taken the hovercraft up and down the route they had worked out several times.

As they moved away from Roberts, out to a kind of ice causeway running smoothly between two crevassed sinks, they noted that the hovercraft moved somewhat like a plane in flight, in that it was frequently struck on the side by the wind, so that the bow of the craft yawed and was not always pointed exactly the same way that the craft w
as
moving, skidding along at a bit of an angle. And as usual the wind was strong out here, beginning its katabatic drop down the glacier to the sea. The leeway they were sustaining from the force of this wind was blowing them into a crevasse sink on their right, not to any great extent, but Carlos turned left a bit more to counteract it. This did little but increase their yaw to that side.

“Try the left outrigger,” he said, stroking his beard.

“Okay.”

X pushed down the toggle. When the little snowmobile
hit the ice and X squeezed its throttle, shredded ice shot out from its back end toward the hovercraft, and immediately they could see that they had some resistance to their leeway.

“That’s enough,” Carlos said, and X held the throttle at that point. After a bit: “Okay, we’re past that one. Wind should be directly behind us now. Pull the outrigger.”

“Left outrigger up,” X said, enjoying their imitation of copilot procedures.

Then the craft’s pulse radar began to ping, loud and fast. Carlos looked over at the radar screen: crevasses ahead, on the last section of their ramp between the sinks. “Damn.” He looked at Geraldo’s map again. “Ah yes. That’s why they made this turn, see here? We have to go down right against the shoreline of the massif. That’s blue ice without a break. At its side it curves down to the rock, so we can’t get too close and slide over that curve. We ride down on the flat stuff.”

So he slowed the craft, and brought it back in toward Roberts. X saw what he meant; there against the shore was a broad band of turquoise ice, very smooth and unbroken, as if these were calm shallows where the glacier did not move as quickly as it did out in the middle of the stream. The only complication was that the mass of the glacier was considerably higher than the rock of the shoreline, bulking over it in a way that added to the surreal quality of the view: the drop from the glacier to the shore was a smooth blue curve, like a wave bulging up ready to crest. Wind ablation of the grounded ice, Carlos said. If they got onto that slope they would slip sideways and crash down onto the rock.

But as Carlos had said, the level creamy blue ice above the curve was wide enough to travel on. And so
they proceeded down the glacier, looking left and down at the shoreline of Roberts, the red of the shattered dolerite very pronounced against the blue of the ice. On their right a nasty shear zone broke the ice into a million glittering blue shards. So they could not shade far either right or left; but they had their road down.

They hummed along. On their left appeared a little side stream of ice separating Roberts Massif proper from an outlying island of rock called Everett Nunatak. After that they came to an overlook and could see down the broad expanse of the Zaneveld. From above their route was clear; they could glide down between two of the many parallel rubble lines marking the surface of the glacier, the rubble composed of boulders and pebbles that had fallen off or been ripped away from Roberts, and conveyed out gradually to the center of the ice, revealing the slow-motion currents by the way they were lined along the surface.

Val came up to the bridge. “This manual I found says the hovercraft should not be taken onto slopes more than three degrees off horizontal.”

Carlos shook his head. “The manual was not written for Antarctica.”

“This hovercraft wasn’t made for Antarctica.”

“True. But it does fine. We go down backwards, we have the outriggers. We take a line and cleave to it.”

“Uh huh,” Val said dubiously.

Yet it seemed to X that Carlos was right to be sanguine. Majestically they floated down the Zaneveld, over flat ice next to one of the main rubble lines, shooting over small cracks and rocks that would have eaten a snowmobile; floating down a slight incline, effortless and smooth. Carlos and X were sitting back, feeling quite pleased with themselves as Val peered suspiciously over their shoulders.

Then the ice tilted downward just slightly more than it had been before, and suddenly the hovercraft was like a ball in a gravity well demonstration, speeding up distinctly, and what was worse, sliding off to the right. With a brief clatter the craft ran directly over the nearest rubble line, and then it was flying downslope—the true downslope—right toward a gnarly shear zone underlying Wiest Bluff, on the other shore of the Zaneveld.

Carlos sat forward and turned the craft to the left, and it responded, swivelling on its axis; but they merely continued sideways in the same direction they had been going before. “Left outrigger,” he said tersely.

X brought it down onto the ice, and squeezed the snowmobile accelerator to full throttle. “How about going down backwards, like you said?” he suggested.

“Yes yes,” Carlos snapped, spinning the steering wheel.

“What about brakes?” Val asked.

“No brakes.”

“No brakes!”

“It’s like a boat. You cut the engines and it slows.”

“Except on a slope like this!”

“We have to turn around. Bring the outrigger up.”

Carlos spun the steering wheel harder left, and the craft came around so they were going backward, more or less, but still sliding down toward Wiest Bluff, never changing the overall direction of the craft’s movement at all. “Right outrigger now.”

X dropped the right outrigger. Then for a moment the craft was facing true uphill, and they were sliding down backward, and Carlos shoved up the prop fan’s speed; but X’s outrigger tracks caught the ice at that same moment, and the craft swung around and began sliding sideways again. Carlos cursed and turned the
steering wheel the other way, but it took a while to stop their spin momentum, and when he got it going the other way it spun right past the backward position again.

“I’m going to try bringing the tub down into contact,” X said nervously, thinking it would act as a brake. He put his weight on the stiff lifters.

“Don’t,” Carlos said. “The ice is too rough.” As he spoke the craft began to chatter and jounce horribly underneath them.

X hastily yanked the lifters back up.

“What about in a smooth patch?” he asked.

“That was a smooth patch.”

“Oh. Well, what about when we’re over snow.”

“Sure.”

But the glacier was gleaming blue ice for as far as they could see in all directions: like a giant racing spill-way, with all its waves and turbulence frozen in place for them to observe as they slid farther down into it.

“When I get it straight backwards put both outriggers down,” Carlos said. “Then if we turn left accelerate the left one, right if we drift right. I’ll do the same with the steering.”

“Okay.”

“Then if we slow down enough, bring the tub down fast.”

“Okay.”

“God damn, you guys,” Val said, looking downslope. “You’re headed for a crevasse field.”

“We know that.”

Carlos began to spin the steering wheel again. He was getting the hang of it, and after a bit he held the craft going directly backward down the slope, long enough for X to engage both outriggers on the ice and set them running, which gave them a bit more stability.
Unfortunately the slope of the ice grew even steeper at this point, and they crunched over a set of rubble lines and the right outrigger snowmobile snapped off and went spinning out of sight, boom and all. The hovercraft too was spinning again, dropping from time to time as they flew over crevasses at terrifying angles, hitting the tub then billowing up again on the skirts; if they hit one of those lengthwise they would shoot right down into it and be swallowed. Carlos struggled to get them oriented backward again. Out the front window they could see back up the glittering blue flood they had so far descended, all completely still and yet receding away from them at great speed. It was a steep slope. “We’re still headed for that crevasse field,” Val said. Behind them the whoops and hollers from the passenger cabin had been replaced by dead silence.

Carlos looked over his shoulder and then spun the steering wheel to the right. “Full left outrigger,” he said to X. “We need to go hard left.” He shoved the prop fan throttle to full power and took the steering wheel in both hands, standing before it with his head swiveling around in an attempt to see all directions at once. And then they were jetting sideways across the slope of the ice, sliding downhill still but making tremendous progress across the slope as well. If they went into a spin now they would be doomed to slip down into the crevasse field and crash. X ran the left outrigger motor faster or slower depending on the craft’s yaw, and Carlos did the same with the steering wheel, and suddenly it seemed as if they were two parts of a mind that actually knew what it was doing, shooting a traverse across the Zaneveld Glacier like an Everglades fan boat going full speed, jiggling their controls minutely, absolutely locked onto the scene rushing at them, the glacier surface here a smoothly curving drop, with some small
crevasses straight ahead; they flew right over them; to their right and below, a veritable Manhattan of blue seracs was flashing by. They were rounding Wiest Bluff at about ninety miles an hour.

But then as they rounded the great turn, another chaos of blue ice reared up directly before them, across all the glacier they could see. Without a word Carlos brought the hovercraft around so that it was facing uphill again, and X stabilized as much as he could with just a single outrigger; they were still working together with perfect coordination, and the craft held its rear to their destination and with the fan at full power slowed, slowed, slowed; but the shear zone was coming up at them so fast that Val hissed. X leaped onto the lift fan throttles and muscled them down with all his strength, and the skirts puffed out and collapsed and the tub slammed down onto the ice, and they were all thrown about as in a giant earthquake, Carlos and X holding on hard to try to keep the craft pointed uphill. They slowed, slowed, slowed. Then with a huge metallic crash the craft fell backward into the first crevasse of the shear zone and smashed to a halt, tilted up at about forty-five degrees.

X pushed himself off the floor. Carlos had already leaped back to the controls to kill the engines. The craft remained tilted up at the sky. The rear of the hovercraft was stuck down in a crevasse, which fortunately for them was both narrow and shallow. Not that they would ever get the craft out; but at least they had not fallen all the way into an abyss. Carlos and X and Val looked at each other, white-faced and round-eyed.

“Everyone all right back there?” Val called to the others.

Moans, curses. “What the
fuck
was that!” Jack said.

“Glad to hear you’re feeling better,” Val said.

“We are fine!” Ta Shu called up. “This is a good place!”

More curses.

“Let’s get off this thing before it falls all the way in,” Val said. “It’s back to walking for us.”

No one could object. The hovercraft was obviously out of commission. And it had, as Val pointed out when they staggered back to the cabin door, gotten them down the steepest section of the glacier. “We’re only about twenty miles from Shackleton Camp, and it’s only a few hundred meters lower than we are here. Easy sailing all the way! It’s going to be fine! We’re almost there.”