Antarctica (60 page)

The clouds broke up and blew off to the north. Between the last low white stragglers the sun shone brightly, burnishing the gray interior of the hut. Wade followed the others outdoors into the sun, and blinked up at Erebus. Offshore the sea ice was gone, and waves lined the water. Hungrily Wade gazed at the open sea, at movement in the landscape, such a relief after all the days of snow and ice. The ocean here was black even though the sky overhead was blue; he had never seen anything like it.

A while later a fast fat-rimmed rubber motorboat came slushing out of the sun-blasted water to the south, and beached below them in a surge of floating ice chunks. The three-person crew of the boat did not appear surprised at Val’s group; their manner made it clear that in the last week they had picked up so many groups in trouble around the shores of the Ross Sea
that search and rescue was nothing to them anymore; they were worldly now, and jaded. No one had died, they said, as far as they knew. But there had been a lot of close calls.

So the nine said quick good-byes to Scott and his men, and locked up the Cape Evans hut, and piled into the boat with their nearly empty daypacks, and off they went purring over the black water. Through the steep riven Dellbridge Islands, past the broken stub of the Erebus Ice Tongue. To the left soared steaming Erebus. To the right, across the black water, the Western Mountains stood two or three times their usual height, raised by a fata morgana into a kind of fantasy range, the super-Himalaya of Ice Planet.

Wade sat in the bow of the Zodiac, looking around. He was tired, vibrated, spaced out. A bitter wind blew splinters of sunshine. Antarctica had never looked so surreal to him, so sublime; whether this was because he was on the last leg of his adventure or because of the intrinsic beauty of the scene was hard to say. He felt both detached and absorbed at the same time; happy in some Buddhist sense: desiring nothing. Clarified. The buzz of the craft’s engine was loud enough to allow him to hum at full volume without anyone else hearing him, and so without thought or choice he happily hummed his soundtrack to the scene, the music buzzing in him as if transmitted by the landscape, as if he were a mere radio receiver—the end of Beethoven’s 131 quartet, then the bass phrase from the Ghost Trio and the Ninth that Berlioz had termed the work of a madman, Wade humming it over and over and feeling more glorious the more glorious he felt, the muscular tunes bouncing along with the boat over the low waves, melodies so stuffed with meaning that they were landscapes in themselves, landscapes very like the one they hummed
through now, vast and clear and clean of line. Could they live up to the greatness of these tunes, to the greatness of this planet, so vast and beautiful?

As they skimmed in toward the hollow end of Hut Point, overrun with McMurdo’s clutter of buildings, Wade found himself uncertain. The court was still out, no doubt about it. But the tunes kept fountaining out of him. A sort of plan was beginning to take shape in his mind.

They passed a big chunk of broken sea ice, a flat iceberg almost awash in the waves. A crowd of Adelie penguins was standing on it watching the Zodiac pass, some waving their flippers. Wade waved back at them. He saw that other penguins were shooting up out of the water and landing on their stomachs on the ice, sliding over it like big hockey pucks and sometimes colliding with other penguins already up there. Sudden explosions of sundrenched water, and then a slick gleaming penguin suspended in the air over the ice; yet another Escher moment to add to the rest, fish-to-bird, metamorphosis. Wade laughed to see it.

McMurdo now looked like a big town to him, a metropolis, as big and tawdry as any freeway strip in the United States. No; hard to feel the glory there. Hard not to feel a sense of diminution, looking back at the fata morgana to the west, and then forward to Mac Town. He would have to figure out how to hold on to this moment of grace.

The pilot idled in to the dock, the crew tied the Zodiac to the claws. The members of the expedition stepped back into Little America.

Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last. After this trip away, which had lasted only—well—Wade
was too tired to calculate it, but it couldn’t have been more than a week or so—the sheer weirdness of McMurdo shot in his eyes like the overexposed sunlight, image after image knocking him back on his heels. Scott’s Discovery hut, looking much like the Cape Evans hut, dwarfed and empty out on its point beyond the docks and the mall. The buildings of the little town scattered over the volcanic rubble, all snow-plastered by the recent storm; but the snow was thawing at this very moment, and all the streets were filled with frozen runnels of ice-crusted mud.

The Zodiac crew led the nine travelers into a big building at the back of the docks, next to the minimall. Inside a group of U.S. Navy officers greeted them with paper cups of hot chocolate and coffee, asked them to sit down on folding chairs, and with tape recorders and clipboards ran through their story, asking question after question. They answered everything as clearly as they could, told them the whole story, though it was clear from the inconsistencies, repetitions and confusions that they were tired. But the Navy men were businesslike and friendly, and soon they were hustling Jack into a pickup truck for a ride up to the medical clinic for a check-up on his shoulder and general condition. The others they asked apologetically to check in at the Chalet, where Sylvia and her team would ask them many of the same questions before they could go to their rooms and get some rest. Those who had given up their room on leaving for their trip were given keys to new rooms, and off they went.

Beeker Street, Crary Lab, the Chalet. The eight remaining travelers slowed, then bunched in the muddy open area above the Chalet.

Wade turned to Val, who was looking around at the town as spaced as any of them, or more so. “Why don’t
I go check in at the Chalet for us, and tell them the rest of you will come down after you’ve had a chance to clean up.”

“Sure,” Val said.

Ta Shu was circling slowly, baffled. “This place,” he said. Jorge and Elspeth headed toward Hotel California. X led Carlos off to the BFC. Jim took off for the Holiday Inn. Wade drifted over to the Chalet, climbed laboriously the steps onto the porch. He looked back; without further ado the group that had traveled together so far, the group that had huddled on Shackleton Glacier bare to the storm, had dissipated in all directions.

Wade pulled back the heavy door of the Chalet. Inside things looked just as they had when he had last seen them, and he realized ruefully that he had expected everything everywhere to be changed.

But of course not. Paxman led him across the main room to Sylvia’s office. She was standing behind her desk, listening to a short man speak to her in a low voice. She saw Wade and waved him into the office without ever taking her attention from this man, who talked on in a low monotone, not acknowledging Wade’s appearance with even a glance. Something in Sylvia’s look told Wade that she had been listening to him for quite some time.

“My clients are not associated with Earth First! or the Sea Shepherds or the Arctic Peoples’ Defense League, or the Antarctic World Park Emergency Rescue Action, or the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or any of the mainstream environmental groups, or any of the underground groups.”

“Okay,” Sylvia said. “Who are they then?”

“They don’t tell me,” the man replied levelly. “They’ve given me to know that they are private individuals, of no affiliation, who have decided to practice civil disobedience and direct action in the form of targetted nonlethal ecotage, to resist and hopefully bring to an end all transgressions of the Antarctic Treaty, which was until its expiration the only law this continent had. They feel that the other environmentalist groups allied with their cause can provide the arguments, the legalities, the publicity, and all the rest of the apparatus of resistance, all important, and their function is to take direct action, and then to stay out of sight and remain undiscovered. In this particular case only, they’ve gone so far as to hire me to speak for them here to you, because none of the other groups they contacted would agree to do that.”

Sylvia looked at him closely; Wade would not have wanted to be on the receiving end of that flinty gaze. She could not have been at all happy that the Navy was back in town, Wade thought. And this man was representing the people who had gotten them there.

The man did not seem to notice her gaze. Sylvia said, “Mr. Smith, this is Wade Norton, an assistant to Senator Chase from California.”

“Hello,” Mr. Smith said, shaking Wade’s hand. “I admire many of the things Senator Chase has done.”

Sylvia nodded, as if to say Of course. “Wade, this is Mr. Smith. He has shown up here in McMurdo by sea, unannounced.”

“I came privately,” Mr. Smith explained. “I’m from Smith, Jones and Robinson, environmental law.”

“I see,” Wade said.

“Wade has been out in the field, and I believe he has witnessed the impact of your clients’ actions. Is that right, Wade?”

Wade nodded. “We survived,” he said.

Mr. Smith was dressed in standard trekker’s garb, which meant he was too warm in the Chalet. In spite of the prisming blue photovoltaic suit he looked innocuous, like a small-town lawyer; he had so well practiced the semiotics of the nonconfrontational that he had become nearly invisible. A puppet only, his appearance said; a spokesman for his clients and that was all; no views of his own, no thinking, nothing but a medium of transmission, like a walking telephone, or a microwave signal repeater.

Of course that had to be a front, and a front Wade was quite familiar with; in fact it was a popular style in Washington these days, usually practiced by very sharp lawyers indeed. He said, “How do you communicate with your clients?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. I can say I have never met any of them in person.”

“So some of them might be down here among us, and you wouldn’t know.”

“That’s correct.”

“I might be one of them, and you wouldn’t know.”

“That’s correct.”

The bland little man looked closely at Wade for the first time, as if trying to ascertain whether this were the case.

Wade thought it over. He said to Sylvia, “Senator Chase has suggested to me that since we have all the players involved in the recent events here at hand, you might consider meeting to discuss the issues involved openly, with the idea of making a report to the investigators who no doubt are on their way to join us, or are already here.”

“Most of them will get here tomorrow, weather permitting,”
Sylvia said. “The storms have held them up in Christchurch.”

“The senator wonders if we could even make some recommendations for future policy which would help to avoid any repetitions of incidents like this one. And I think Mr. Smith’s presence here means this meeting could have even wider representation than Senator Chase imagined. I could also invite some friends into town to participate as well—the people who helped us get back here.”

“Ferals?” Sylvia asked sharply.

“Why yes,” Wade said. “So you do know about them.”

She met his gaze calmly. “I’ve heard rumors. I’d be interested to hear what they had to say. I’ve tried to make contact with them before. But never any reply.”

“No. But now they may be willing to come in. Given what has happened.”

Sylvia nodded, thinking it over.

“If anything positive is to come out of all this,” Wade said, “it will have to happen here, I think. Up north it will sink into the mass of everything else.”

“Possibly,” Sylvia said. “Although SCAR, and the Treaty negotiating committee, and now it looks like a UN committee, will all be considering the matter, along with our Congress and other governments.”

“No doubt. But the fuller our report, the more they’ll have to work with.”

“My clients would welcome such a meeting,” Mr. Smith said.

“How do you know?” Wade and Sylvia said together.

Mr. Smith returned their stares blandly. The role of the spokesperson was an ambiguous one, as Wade very
well knew, having just put words into Phil Chase’s mouth. Walking telephone or mastermind? There was no way to tell.

“Have you gotten all stranded parties back to safety?” Wade asked Sylvia. “I mean, is it appropriate to start holding such a meeting?”

Sylvia nodded. “S-375 have been heloed back from the Dry Valleys, and I’ve just heard from Palmer and Pioneer Hills that all the affected oil personnel have been recovered. Everyone’s in.”

“Nobody was hurt by my clients’ actions,” Mr. Smith noted.

“That was luck,” Wade said. “That was sheer luck, I can tell you that personally. If it weren’t for the help of people your clients don’t even know about, a good number of us would have died. Destroying life support systems on the polar cap is very, very dangerous. Reckless endangerment at the very least.”

“Nevertheless,” Mr. Smith said. “The fact remains.”

“Let’s not get into that now,” Sylvia said. “The fact is that Mr. Smith’s clients committed serious criminal acts, very dangerous to people down here, and that will be taken into account I’m sure.” She looked at the man. “I hope you’re prepared to answer for what these clients of yours have done, Mr. Smith. It could come to contempt of court and more, I imagine, if you choose to shield them from the law.”

“I’ve never been cited for contempt, and don’t plan to be now,” Mr. Smith said. “Of course I’m prepared for anything. I brought my toothbrush.”

Sylvia and Wade looked at each other.

“I have to get cleaned up,” Wade said. “Get some food, and see if I can contact the ferals. And talk to the senator.” Or not. He too was a spokesperson. You’re
the senator, as they kept saying at the Pole. Or wherever it had been.

Sylvia said, “I’ll talk to some of the others. Let’s meet again after dinner with whomever is available, for starters. As you say, there’s no time to lose.”

Val kicked the muddy snow off her boots and stomped up the stairs of dorm 308, then dragged down the hall to her room on the top floor. She opened the door and went inside, and sat down heavily on the bed. Everything in its place, same as always. A functional little space, like a ship’s cabin. It appeared that Georgia, her roommate for the season, was out on a trip of her own; her bags were gone, her closet doors shut. They had barely even met.