Icequake: A Prophetic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  “Och, you’ve mad. Mad. The worst machos are always women.”

  Later, he drowsily asked: “And who’s the father?”

  “No one here. A fellow in Christchurch. Old school chum. We spent a couple of days together before Christmas.”

  The fire-watch patroller clumped down the corridor. Don Treadwell’s death-rattle snore changed pitch.

  “Damn silly of me, really. I missed my period, and felt ill, and all that kind of thing, but I figured I might just as well get on with my work and worry about everything else when I got back home. And then — everything happened, and I got scared. And I needed you. Does that sound awful?”

  “No. I think I’m complimented. But you’ll have to tell Katerina, you know. And no arguments — you’ll do what she tells you. You know — if we don’t evacuate — if we’re stuck here till spring — when is the baby due?”

  “September, I reckon.”

  “You could be the mother of the first native-born Antarctican.”

  *

  Hugh Adams lay staring in the darkness. Easy does it. Get upset and you’ll only take longer to get back on your feet. And you’re enough of a nuisance now.

  He went on staring at the dark until he fell asleep.

  *

  Ben Whitcumb sat up drinking beer and reading in the lounge. Gordon Ellerslee, half-drunk, swayed in from the mess hall.

  “Hey there, ol’ Benny Rabbit, whatcha readin’?”

  “Some mystery.”

  “You look kinda depressed. Something eatin’ you?”

  “No, no. Just tired. Too tired to sleep.”

  “Whatcha think of all this sex and lust and general wick-dipping we got going on around this here scientific research station?”

  “I’ve got enough to worry about without that.”

  “You sound kinda pissed off, Benny Rabbit. I’ll bet you’re jealous as hell.”

  “What are you talking about?” Ben snapped.

  “Big Red, who else? Man, just think what she must be doin’ to old Steve right about now. Mm-mm! Makes you wish you’d gone in for seismology, doesn’t it?” Gordon laughed. “Gotta admit Steve sure knows how to make the earth move, eh?”

  Ben closed his book and stood up. “Thanks, Gord. You’re making me sleepy already.”

  *

  A few hours later Colin Smith sat in the dome, watching the sun slide above the horizon. The sky was cloudless, but brilliantly tinted in shades of red, pink, orange and yellow. The ice and the mountains reflected the colours, which changed almost from second to second. The dust of Erebus was already widely scattered across the Ross Sea.

  The sun, rising through crimson haze, was a sharp-edged yellow disc. They were mottled regions all over it, of a darker yellow with a tinge of brown. Colin watched in silence, absently aware that his whole body was shaking. He had never before seen sunspots with his own unaided eyes.

  *

  All through the morning of February 10, tremors ran through the station. Nothing was damaged, but Howie had a bad moment in Tunnel D when all the newly stacked crates and drums began to sway, and a miniature snow flurry fell gently from the frosted steel ceiling. Howie stood still for two minutes, his breath steaming in the light of the swinging lamps overhead. Then he went on down the tunnel to the lounge.

  Al was sitting in an armchair, his slippered feet on a coffee table. He had had thirteen hours’ sleep, a hot shower and a big breakfast; now he was contentedly lighting his first cigar of the day.

  “Morning, Howie.”

  “Hi, Al. You’re lookin’ pretty goddamn comfortable.”

  “If you’re through in the hangar, I won’t be comfortable for long.”

  “Well, she’ll fly. But she looks like you tried to fly her through a mountain. Pretty bad up there, eh?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. We were lucky; could’ve sucked a big chunk of pumice into one of the engines. Well, you go find Carter and tell him we’ll be on our way in a few minutes.”

  “Steve goin’ with you this time?”

  “Yeah, Max says he’s bored with flying.”

  “Gonna take Penny, too?”

  “Don’t I wish!” Penny yelled from the mess hall. She appeared in the doorway; her face was peeling, there were blisters on her nose, and her thick red hair was tied back in a disintegrating bun. “I’ve been put on permanent KP.”

  Steve and Carter came into the lounge; Steve was carrying a stereo camera and a portable videotape recorder. He glanced at the monitor screen in the corner of the lounge. “Still looks good outside.”

  “Yup. Let’s get going.”

  “Have fun, you two,” Suzy called from the mess hall. “Don’t be late. No stopping off for a quick drink on your way home.”

  Al shook his head sadly. “You know, the Antarctic used to be so nice before they let women in.” He blocked Penny’s punch and said to Steve: “I’ll be dressed in ten minutes. See you in the hangar.”

  Penny wanted to kiss Steve goodbye, but knew better; it wasn’t done in front of others, least of all in front of men without women.

  He waved at her. “See you, Pen.”

  “See you.” But she felt irritated at his casual attitude; if he couldn’t kiss her, he could at least look as if he wanted to.

  *

  The day was almost cloudless, but there was an autumnal quality to the sunlight as the Otter lifted from the Shelf. Even now, at noon, the sun was not far above the horizon, and the dust of Erebus dulled the sky like a faint overcast. Al set a course for Axel Heiberg Glacier, about fifty kilometres Grid West. It was one of the shortest and steepest glaciers in the range, and would get them up to the polar plateau in the least time.

  Though both men kept earmuffs nearby, the deafening noise of the surge seemed to have abated. The Shelf below was broken in long, surprisingly straight lines, and the gaps between the islands seemed to Al to be larger than they had been yesterday. The most dramatic change, though, was along the coast: the landward edges of the islands were already six or seven kilometres offshore. The steep sides of the islands were up to fifty metres above the chaos of broken surge ice that filled the gap between Shelf and land.

  “Looks like the worst pressure ice anyone ever dreamed of,” Al shouted over the growing roar from below. Steve nodded and put the videotape camera to his eye.

  The glaciers were moving fast, carrying immense blocks of ice into the sea faster than the Shelf could move. This ice piled up in the gap until in some places it actually rose higher than the surface of the Shelf. Steve watched one raft of ice, a hundred metres wide and five hundred long, nose under another berg and lift its landward end right into the air. For a few seconds it loomed over the jumbled surface like a monstrous cannon aimed at the mountains; then it snapped of its own weight and fell in a glittering cloud. The surge ice absorbed it and moved onward; from the air it reminded Steve of the ‘chaotic terrains’ in photographs of the surface of Mars. He smiled without amusement: precise and elegant physical laws were the cause of this chaos, as spectacular a proof of entropy as one could hope for — or fear.

  They reached the mouth of Axel Heiberg and began to gain altitude. Here the noise was still bad, and they were grateful for the earmuffs. The glacier — the one which Amundsen had ascended on his way to the Pole in 1912 — looked like a rapids filmed in slow motion. The surface at its centre was moving at a stately ten to twelve kilometres per hour, and almost as fast along its edge. The mountains on either side were slashed and scarred, and most of the snow on them had already avalanched to merge with the glacier. The crevasses seemed narrow but deep, contorted into elongated U’s by the speed of the surge. Occasionally the moving ice struck some obstacle below the surface, and bulged upward for a few seconds before riding over it. The air was almost windless, and very little of the glacier was obscured by the kind of ice haze they had seen on the Beardmore just after the quake.

  Neither man spoke for some time. The Otter climbed hundreds of metres in a few minutes, following the rising
terrain. As they approached the ice falls near the top of the glacier, Steve swore in surprise: where the ice had once hung still as it imperceptibly crept down the cliffs, it now shot out, sending great blue-white chunks, some the size of apartment buildings, toppling free to drop a hundred metres.

  Then they were over the plateau, and the mountains slipped behind them. Ahead was a white emptiness, little different from the Shelf but far vaster. Both men were familiar with the plateau, and at first it seemed unchanged. Then Al pointed straight ahead.

  “It’s moving.”

  Steve had been taping a crevasse field; when he took his eye from the camera, he saw that the field had no end. The plastic ice far below the surface was too compressed to break, but the upper layers were shattered into thousands upon thousands of narrow parallel crevasses. Here and there they crushed themselves out of existence as the ice struck some buried mountain. The noise was like constant distant thunder; the sun seemed slightly dimmed.

  “It can’t be like this all the way to the Pole,” Steve yelled. Al looked at him and shrugged.

  Steve slumped in his seat and shook his head. Al checked his bearings and altered course a few degrees; a shaft of sunlight fell through the side window and gleamed on the instruments. Steve watched dust particles sparkle in the sunlight and then vanish. We get a few moments in the light, and we see some marvels, and we go into the dark again.

  They almost missed Amundsen-Scott Station. The surface at the Pole was heavily crevassed, and there were few visible vehicle tracks. Al spotted a dark blur and flew lower. Near the top of a wide crevasse was a twisted mass of metal that still kept a vestige of geometry: the remains of the geodesic dome that had covered most of the station.

  “They must have gone into the crevasse and then burned,” Steve said. “Go around again.”

  The Otter orbited the Pole six times, just a few metres above the broken surface. There were no signs of life, and no place that looked safe enough to land on. Apart from the dome a few tractors and a collapsed rawin tower were all that was left of the station. Steve taped their last orbit and said: “Let’s go home.” He stared down at the ice, watching its shadows lengthen as the sun dropped lower.

  Al looked at the altimeter. It should have read 3,500 metres; instead, it indicated they were only 3,100 metres above sea level. The ice sheet had already dropped here by four hundred metres.

  “Going to be a long winter,” he said quietly.

  Chapter 7 – Laputa

  The day after the Otter’s flight to the Pole, the weather went bad again for three straight days. When it cleared, Al and Max made a quick sortie back to Ross Island. The explosion of the satellite cone, they found, had created a steep-walled new bay on the Grid North-East shore of the island; Scott and McMurdo bases were gone. Hut Point Peninsula was now linked to the rest of the island only by a blackened isthmus of steaming rock. The Shelf went on forcing its way into the new bay, where it melted and froze again in a self-sustaining blizzard. The floes — ice islands, really — of the broken Shelf were deeply drifted with ash and pumice, especially downwind of Ross Island.

  Part of the Shelf was bypassing Ross Island and moving down McMurdo Sound into the open sea. Al thought he saw Outer Willy, far to the Grid South, but since Erebus’s main crater was erupting again he didn’t dare fly close enough to make certain that he’d seen the abandoned airstrip. But he and Max both saw Scott’s old hut near the shore of the Sound, intact despite its nearness to the volcano. There was no sign of life anywhere — on the island, the ice or the mainland.

  On their return Al and Max made two low-level circuits of Shacktown’s own island. It was relatively small, a rough rectangle slightly over a hundred kilometres along its north-south axis, and about fifty kilometres from east to west. To the Grid South the island drove against a somewhat larger one; to the Grid East and West, ice-choked leads separated it from other islands. To the Grid North a squarish island about fifty kilometres on a side was welded to Shacktown’s island by a seam of pressure ice; beyond was the surge ice, still pouring off the continent.

  That was the last of the reconnaissance flights. Gerry Roche and Howie O’Rourke took one of the Sno-Cats out on February 12 and traversed the island from one end to the other. They found surprisingly few crevasse fields: pressure from the surge seemed to have crushed most of them, creating treacherous sinkholes and sastrugi-like surfaces. Wherever one island touched another, pressure ridges were growing; at the Grid South end the ridges were up to thirty metres high and three hundred wide. The noise of the grinding, splintering ice kept the men from venturing too close to the island’s edges, especially since here, at least, there were many new crevasses. They set off some seismic shots that indicated the island was still in one piece, and collected ash-filled snow samples.

  By the time they returned, on February 15, Shacktown was beginning to resume its routine. Steve fussed over his instruments in the seismographic tunnel; Carter and Gerry watched the slow, slow growth of the earth’s new magnetic field, and the odd behaviour of solar protons striking the atmosphere in almost straight lines. Colin Smith watched the weather and stuttered through twice-daily forecasts that were usually bad and usually accurate.

  Penny was working in the mess hall the night after the Sno-Cat returned. Around 2030 hours, just as the seminar was getting organised next door, Steve and Max wandered in, talking animatedly. She envied them their energy.

  “Hi, Pen. Are we too late for supper?”

  “I saved some for you. What took you so long?”

  “We’ve been looking at Gerry and Howie’s snow samples,” Steve said.

  “They have a lot of debris from Erebus,” Max added eagerly. “We should get even more as we move north.” He took a little plastic bag from his shirt pocket and drew from it a damp paper disc, speckled with fine grey-brown dust. “This is volcanic dust. Very characteristic of Erebus. And if there is this much in the snow around us, then there must be — God — tonnes and tonnes, millions of tonnes, in the atmosphere downwind of Ross Island. Maybe even more than Agung put into the atmosphere in — when, ’62? ’63?”

  Penny poured three cups of coffee and followed them to their table. Max went on:

  “If the dust in the stratosphere is on that order, it will be a bad winter in the southern hemisphere.”

  “Because the dust will block the sunlight?” she asked. He nodded.

  “It’d be bad even without the dust,” Steve said. “The surge is still going on. According to Gerry, we’re moving four or five kilometres a day — at that rate, we’ll be past Ross Island in six months. And the ice islands north of us will be cluttering up the Southern Ocean almost as far as New Zealand.”

  “Six months from now will be the end of August,” Max said, shaking his head. “By then the surge will be all over, and we’ll slow down as sea ice forms, yes?”

  “Maybe. But not for long. The surge ice will take months to reach equilibrium.” He rubbed at the peeling skin on his nose. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens.”

  Max laughed. “You know, in German we have a word, Schadenfreude. It means, mm, taking pleasure, joy, in disaster.”

  “That’s our boy,” Penny agreed. “Jolly Jeremiah. I don’t know which is more disgusting — your pessimism or your scientific detachment.”

  Steve didn’t rise to the bait; his eyes were fixed on the photomural of a New Zealand sheep station. Penny waved a hand in front of his face, and he blinked.

  “Sorry — I wasn’t listening.”

  “God, you’re hopeless. You know, you remind me of those scientists in Gulliver. The ones on the flying island, remember? They had to be hit with bladders to bring them back to reality.”

  “The Laputans.” Steve smiled. “Yes, I guess I am a bit like that. A lot of us are. They drove their wives crazy, didn’t they? The women used to sneak off the island to have affairs with ordinary men.”

  “Some girls have all the luck,” Penny said.

  Later that
evening Max suggested at the seminar that their ice island be officially named Laputa. Hugh then offered Lilliput for the island Grid North of them, and Blefuscu for the one Grid South. The islands to the Grid East and West were called Lagado and Balnibarbi. “But I won’t hear of anyplace being named Brobdingnag or Glubbdubbdrib,” Hugh warned.

  *

  Jeanne and Will wasted no time before examining the ruins of the drilling hut with Gordon Ellerslee.

  “Pretty bad, eh?” Gordon observed.

  “But not impossible,” Jeanne said. “The roof needs reinforcing, but the rig doesn’t seem out of alignment. Gord, how long would it take to get us back in business?”

  He gaped at her. “Jeez, I dunno. Ten days, two weeks, maybe. But why bother, House-mouse?”

  “We need that hole open again. We can’t just sit and do nothing, and the hole will tell us a lot about what’s going on — won’t it, Will?”

  “It will.”

  “Shit,” Gordon mumbled. “By the time it’s ready, we’ll be pulling outa here. Why should Reg and Simon and me bust our asses for nothin’?”

  “Och, it’ll not be for nothing,” Will assured him. “We may be here longer than you think. And if we are evacuated, it’ll be that much less work next year. Leave that roof like that and the shed’ll be full of snow in three months.”

  “It ain’t worth it, Will. I got better things to do.”

  “If you can’t do it, Gordon, just say so. We’ll understand.” Jeanne looked levelly at him; he rubbed his scarred, broken nose.

  “Aw, I can do it, all right. But it’ll be a waste of time.”

  “Good old Gordie!” Jeanne chuckled, hugging him. “What would we do without you?” Looking past Gordon’s arm, she sent Will an exasperated glance; this kind of manipulation disgusted her.

  The look turned to faint alarm when Gordon showed reluctance to let her go, and she avoided his eyes when he freed her at last.

  *

  The radio shack was repaired, though it remained chillingly draughty. Bruce and Roger spent days rebuilding the main transmitter with cannibalised parts. The antennae, however, were a major problem, and only a clumsy jury-rig could be set up during the impossible weather of mid-February. The radio operators tried to transmit to the outside, despite Gerry’s warning that it would be easier to bounce a brick off custard than a signal off what was left of the ionosphere.