Icequake: A Prophetic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  Steve got up from the table and pressed buttons on the seismograph. The screen lit up in a flicker of coloured lines and changing numbers. The others watched him in silence.

  “Right — this must have been when it started,” he said at last. “A strong shock at 0500 hours — then another twenty minutes later — and another — damn it, they keep getting stronger.” He turned to Al. “You couldn’t raise Shacktown?”

  “Not a whisper.”

  “We’ve got to get back right away. Even if Inner Willy is closed down, Outer Willy should be okay. They’ll be evacuating everyone as fast as they can, and we’ve got to let them know we need to get out as well.”

  “Okay. What about the shot Will and Jeanne are setting up?”

  “Call ’em back. We don’t have time for it.” He hastily changed tapes on the seismograph while the others finished their meal. In less than two minutes they were back in their anoraks and heading for the door. Steve switched off the light and heat, leaving the hut illuminated only by the glowing dials of the instrumentation. Al opened the door.

  The hut trembled, as if a violent gust of wind had struck it, and then lurched violently. Al lost his balance and fell through the doorway. The plywood walls began to creak; a chair slid across the floor and fell over.

  “Out! Right now!” Steve shouted. He grabbed Penny, lifted her and shoved her through the doorway; she nearly fell over Al, who was scrambling to his feet. Tim followed an instant later. Three hundred metres away, Will and Jeanne were struggling up the icy slope from the glacier, their gear abandoned. Except for the creaking and rumbling of the hut, everything seemed very silent; only after a few seconds did Penny become aware of a profound, almost inaudible vibration in the rock beneath her. From the glacier below came a sudden sharp bang, then another and another, until each blurred into the other’s echoes.

  “Get into the helicopter,” Al said. Penny and Tim started to obey when the mountain shuddered violently and they lost their footing. Clumsily Penny got to her hands and knees and looked around for Steve. He was still inside the hut, watching the seismograph. He was smiling.

  He’s crazy, Penny thought. Crazy. Bonkers.

  The word made her giggle. A hum filled the air, like wind in a forest. The rock shuddered again and the hut snapped off its foundations with a shriek of torn metal and splintering plywood. The windmill toppled over, clanging on the twisted aluminium roof. Then the walls parted and the roof collapsed.

  Al got up again and lunged towards the wreckage, but Steve came out by himself, feet first and unhurt. He was clutching a tape under his arm — the tape Tim had just put on the machine.

  Penny turned to look at the helicopter. It was skidding away from its landing site, moving erratically down the shallow gradient towards the glacier, and towards Will and Jeanne.

  Penny screamed: “The helicopter!” She couldn’t hear herself. The hum was turning into a deep, rolling roar, growing louder every second, like an endless peal of thunder. Once she had watched a rocket lift off from Cape Canaveral; this was worse, much worse. It went on in a mindless, meaningless blur of sound that drugged and stupefied.

  Another shock hit, rousing her enough to reach out to Al and make him look away from Steve, towards the helicopter. She saw his eyes widen. Then he was on his feet, lurching towards it. It had found a steeper slope and was now sliding steadily downhill, not just skidding about.

  Al reached the helicopter, yanked open the door and hauled himself inside. A few seconds later Penny could see him in the cockpit; the rotors quickened, but the engines were muted against that strange unending thunder. She shut her eyes against the downdraft from the rotors. The downdraft increased, throwing snow as fine and sharp as powdered glass against her face. The helicopter had lifted off, and was hovering just overhead.

  Penny could not get up. It was easier to lie face down on the rock, to wait for the rock to stop shaking and the thunder to die away. A long time seemed to pass. Then someone took her arm and pulled her to her feet.

  “I’m blind!” she screamed. Hands guided her deeper into the freezing wind, lifted her onto a floor that swayed and trembled more than the ground itself.

  Someone must have shut the helicopter’s door, because the wind stopped and the thunder lessened slightly. Penny let herself be lowered into a seat. She felt someone push back her hood and gently remove her sunglasses. Warm hands were cupped beneath her eyes; warm breath fell on her eyelids. They stung, then swam with tears. Steve’s face appeared above her and slowly came into focus.

  He put his lips next to her ear, and his voice came from far away: “Your eyelids froze.” She nodded. He touched her cheekbones. “Frostbite. Don’t worry.” She pulled off her mitts and held her hands to her face. Steve sat back beside her, and the helicopter lifted abruptly.

  Tears poured down her face and over her fingers; she found herself shuddering uncontrollably. She was dimly aware of Jeanne and Tim in the seat opposite her, and supposed Will must be up in the cockpit with Al. The endless roar diminished as they climbed, but was still too loud to permit speech.

  When her eyes stopped watering, Penny put her sunglasses back on and looked out the window. Far below, the Beardmore was covered with a dazzling white haze that glinted prismatically here and there. On the horizon the mountains had lost their sharp edges; mists and clouds were forming around them. Beyond them, over the polar plateau, a high overcast was growing. The helicopter turned and she glimpsed clear skies over the Shelf.

  The intercom system wasn’t working. Penny found a pencil and paper in her many-pocketed trousers, scribbled a note and gave it to Steve: Is this the surge?

  He nodded. Quake was bad, he wrote beneath her question. 7.5 at least.

  Why the noise?

  Glacier sole full of stones — scraping over bedrock.

  She looked out the window again, towards the unseen ice sheet that fed the Beardmore, the Shackleton and hundreds of other glaciers. — Up there the ice is over two kilometres thick, she thought. What could stop it once it began to move?

  Will came in from the cockpit. Something about him seemed odd even to Penny’s dulled perceptions. He leaned close to her, inspecting her frostbitten cheeks and nose. Smiling a little, he leaned forward and kissed her. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him back. — The crazy bastard’s delighted. He’s positively delighted!

  Will turned to Steve and gripped his shoulders in an awkward hug, then shook Tim’s hand and then kissed Jeanne. She had been sitting curled up, leaning against Tim with her eyes shut and her hands over her ears. When Will kissed her, she reached out as Penny had, embraced him and began to cry.

  He held her for a long minute; the sun, shining through the window behind him, made a halo of his curly red hair. — A ministering angel, Penny thought, but in the same moment Will detached himself, gave Jeanne a business-like pat on the shoulder, and left her to go rummaging in a chest at the rear of the passenger compartment. He got out some acoustic earmuffs and handed them to the others. Penny put hers on, and with the sudden drop in the noise level she realised her body was as clenched as a fist. She took a deep breath and made herself relax.

  Seeing the scrawls on Penny’s paper, Will took her pencil and wrote quickly: I want to get down near the ice.

  Steve mouthed: Why?

  Check the speed of the surge.

  What about noise? Steve wrote.

  Earmuffs should help. Won‘t be long. OK?

  Steve nodded reluctantly.

  Penny looked at the terse questions and answers they had written. Is that all we have to say about this?

  Will went back into the cockpit, and almost at once the helicopter began to descend. As they approached the glacier surface, the noise grew loud enough to make them nauseous. They were near the Grid West edge of the Beardmore, but the glacier was invisible under the ice haze. Then they were low enough for the downdraft of the rotors to blow much of the haze away in the area directly beneath them; it was only a couple of m
etres deep. The helicopter hovered, and they could see the chaotic surface of the ice moving steadily towards the Shelf.

  It was like nothing Penny had ever seen before. Perhaps a planetoid, rotating its shattered surface under an orbiting spacecraft, might present a similar image. Blue-grey blocks slid into view out of the haze, sank, rose and fell apart. Splinters of ice speared upward and toppled, to be replaced by crevasses that crashed open and shut and open again. For a moment the helicopter’s downdraft combined with the wind to wrap everything in swirling glitter; then the air cleared again as an ice thrust heaved up almost close enough to touch.

  Steve timed a particular ten-metre lump as it slid by beneath them; then, as the helicopter rose again, he scribbled a calculation or two. Will returned from the cockpit.

  About 3 k.p.h.? Will wrote.

  Steve nodded. Faster in the centre than here.

  5-8 k.p.h. in centre?

  Not yet. Soon — maybe faster when surge really gets going.

  Penny grabbed the pencil: Half ice sheet will go in 1 week at that speed. Hollin had calculated that in his paper on Wilson’s surge theory.

  Will and Steve looked at each other and then showed the paper to Tim. Tim wrote: Maybe. Depends how many glaciers involved.

  The helicopter swept over the flank of Mount Kyffin; its mantle of snow-and ice had slid away, leaving bare brown rock at its peak and avalanche scars down its sides. When Penny turned to look at Mount Kaplan, it too seemed barer than it had been. They flew out across the mountains, over a small glacier that was moving in a jumble of broken ice. The dull roar of the surge was broken every few seconds by a distant screaming sound as ice and rock shattered each other. When she could remember to, Penny took a few photos, but the view from the window had an almost hypnotic quality that kept her staring open-mouthed.

  Then they were over the Shelf, and the Shelf had cracked.

  These were no mere crevasses. For some kilometres out from the coast, the Shelf was grounded on the floor of the Ross Sea, but even the enormous weight and anchoring of seven hundred metres of ice could not withstand the surge. Some of the fissures were already over a hundred metres wide, and glowed blue in their depths. A long network of cracks ran roughly parallel to the coast; others ran Grid South until they vanished in the glare of the sun. The thunder of the surge lessened. From the Shelf came occasional creaking and detonations, like a great wooden ship caught in a storm.

  The helicopter circled one of the north-south fissures. Blowing snow obscured the gap until the wind abruptly changed, and they looked down into a blue-black abyss. Penny saw glints of light far down in the darkness, a suggestion of something moving, and realised after a moment what it was: the waters of the Ross Sea, open to the sky for the first time in a hundred thousand years. The glimpse was brief: great slabs of ice, fifty metres thick and a hundred long, calved off the sides of the fissure and crashed down into the darkness.

  Penny turned to see Steve using her Nikon to take pictures; his face reflected nothing. The helicopter flew on. Will came back again, more elated than ever, and scribbled a frantic exchange with Steve:

  Fracture’s very clean — shelf more homogen than I thought.

  Think fissures will stay open? Steve wrote.

  No. Surge will push shelf out to open sea, all packed together.

  How fast?

  Will shrugged.

  Has Al raised Shacktown?

  Will shrugged again, then left to check with Al. He came back, shaking his head.

  Penny had a sudden hideous vision of a fissure opening up right under the station: the sudden flash of daylight in the tunnels as the roof caved in, the boom of the breaking ice, the huts falling far down into the blue darkness — Quit it! Stupid neurotic chicken-shit moron fantasies. They’ll be all right. They’ll be all right. Worried sick about us. What a time we’ll have, sitting in the mess hall comparing notes.

  Notes. This had been going on for almost an hour and she hadn’t even made any notes. She found some more paper and tried to organise her thoughts; after five minutes she gave up and slumped wearily back into her seat. Steve gently took the paper from her lap and began scrawling figures. But after every calculation he drew a line through what he had just written.

  He’s in the same predicament. Trying to make sense out of this with black marks on a piece of paper.

  She leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder. Her face was beginning to hurt badly. Steve absently patted her hand.

  A crosswind gusted off the mountains and made the helicopter sway. More gusts followed. The helicopter rose and fell; the overcast had spread clear across the sky. Dry snow began to hiss against the window, driven from the glaciers and avalanches by katabatic winds blowing down from the plateau. Penny saw long snakes of snow crawl across the Shelf; they thickened rapidly until the surface vanished and they were flying through a roaring sunlit fog, a whiteout.

  Al lifted the helicopter above the blizzard, back into pale sunlight. The blizzard swept under them, its upper layer almost as sharply defined as the Shelf had been until a few minutes ago. Like a layer of cloud, it stretched in all directions, from the mountains to the Grid South horizon.

  The world had vanished. There seemed nothing to do, nothing to say or write that was not grotesquely absurd and futile. They would not get back to Shacktown. They would not be rescued by the Americans at McMurdo. This place of empty blue and formless white was going to kill them in a little while, and they would leave no trace. Penny thought of Scott, Wilson and Bowers, dying on the Shelf side by side, with love and sorrow for one another and the hope that friends would someday find their bodies, that their letters and diaries would link them at last with the living and make some sense of their deaths. We won’t have even that much. Just scrawls on a couple of scraps of paper, and some reels of magnetic tape lost in the snow. And no one will ever find us. Ever.

  Time passed. Jeanne went into the cockpit and returned almost at once. She mimed a radio conversation.

  Shacktown? Steve wrote. Jeanne grinned and nodded.

  20 km, she wrote.

  A little later they began their descent. The wind and snow enveloped them again. If Al lost Shacktown’s TACAN signal, they would be in trouble at once. The light dimmed from a blinding white to a deep, featureless grey. Penny removed her earmuffs and found she could stand the noise; the helicopter’s engines sounded almost normal, but there was still a low background rumble interrupted by sharp cracks that must be caused by the Shell’s continuing breakup.

  A few more minutes. Then we’ll be home, safe and sound after all, piling out into the hangar, groaning and laughing, hugging people, running down through the tunnels to the mess hall, finding out what happened to them, oh shit —

  The helicopter had been living at an altitude of only five metres; Al had thought it was much more. Below them a fissure had opened and then closed again, creating a pressure ridge about five metres high and invisible in the whiteout. The Huey raked its belly on the ridge, shearing away its landing gear and snapping its fuel line and some of its control cables. It lost power instantly, plunged to the surface beyond the ridge and slid over a hundred metres before coming to rest.

  Snow rattled against the helicopter’s crumpled sides, and the wind was suddenly very loud. Somewhere far away the Shelf broke again with a long, reverberating boom.

  Chapter 3 – The Shelf

  By 1000 hours the Otter was fuelled, warmed up and ready to fly as soon as Al got back. Howie O’Rourke took out the big D8 bulldozer to clear the ski-way; the Otter wouldn’t need it, but it would help a Hercules. Ploughing was a slow, noisy, cold and boring job, and when he turned the D8 around at the end of the ski-way, Howie swore furiously. The dome and Shacktown’s other surface structures were almost invisible in a thickening ice fog. Looking up, he saw the sky growing overcast. It would be a piss-off if they got another blow — not just because the evacuation would have to be postponed, but because he would have frozen his butt for nothi
ng and would have to freeze it again when the weather cleared up.

  In the reactor control room Herm Northrop was going methodically through shutdown. It was a slow, cautious process, and the station would not have to switch over to its emergency generator for at least four more hours. By then Al should be at McMurdo. Assume at least three more hours for a Hercules to be readied and flown in. By 1800 hours the core would have to be stored in its transport module, a lead-and-steel cylinder over two metres long. The module would then have to be wheeled through the tunnels and out to the plane.

  Herm was not afraid of flying. But he hated the thought of a plane going down with a core aboard.

  “By God, I’m not sorry,” Terry Dolan announced to his wife. “This time next week, we’ll be lyin’ on the beach in Sydney, thinkin’ how to spend our money.” He was making soup in two huge pots, whilst his last batch of bread baked in the oven. It would be enough to keep people fed until they pulled out.

  “It’s all going in the savings,” Suzy said firmly. “Every penny. And you might loaf on the beach, but I’ll be looking for a job soon as we get home.”

  “Suit yourself, love. Just pray the unemployment’s all gone.”

  “People got to eat, don’t they? Always work for cooks.”

  Katerina Varenkova had been too efficient. With all her belongings packed by 0900 she had had nothing to do since then but smoke, and the air in the infirmary was now almost opaque. If the West was so convinced that cigarettes caused lung cancer, why did it produce such good ones? She would miss them.

  Strange to think that she might be seeing Ivan soon — at Vostok, or Mirny, or perhaps back in Leningrad. They might well have evacuated Vostok already, it was the most remote of the Soviet bases, and the coldest place on earth — not a good spot to be in during the worst Antarctic summer on record. Compared to Vostok, this place was a vacation spot. Here there was no need to gasp for air on an ice sheet three kilometres above sea level, doing research with ancient equipment, fighting the cold with unreliable diesel generators and bearskins — bearskins! — hanging in the doorways to fight drafts. Here these pampered babies lived snug and relaxed, complaining because there was no mail and the TV projection screen was scratched. And all for propaganda.