Icequake: A Prophetic Survival Thriller

by Crawford Kilian

  Around 1000 hours on May 1 the snake-eye went back down the hole with the first length of cable attached to it; the cable, in turn, carried chunks of Styrofoam attached by wire every ten metres. Given the length of the snake-eye’s own control cable, it had been decided to deploy several relatively short loops, like the petals of a flower. After the first one, Jeanne had relatively little difficulty.

  “Our only real problem is the bloody current,” she remarked late that afternoon in the drilling shed. “It’s almost impossible to put anything Grid North of us and keep it there. You’ve got to find a crevasse and wedge the cable in without losing the snake-eye at the same time.”

  Nevertheless, she managed. Current went on at 2030 hours that evening. The snake-eye showed no dramatic change, though the water temperature did begin to show a very slight rise right at the bottom of the hole; the warmed water was rising into the crevasse. As soon as this was announced at the seminar, Katerina ordered Jeanne to stay out of the drilling shed and to take at least a solid day’s rest. She was glad to obey.

  The tremors continued to strike the station every few hours, but no one seemed alarmed. The only problem was the fact that the CANDU now required more snow than ever to keep its boilers going at full capacity to produce enough electricity for the cables. Snow mining now went on around the clock, and the conveyor that fed snow to the melter added its clatter to the noise of the generator.

  On May 3 Penny went along with Steve, Tim and Sean McNally on a traverse to the Grid North end of Laputa. The blizzard had finally exhausted itself, and the moon was bright through broken clouds. The Sno-Cat was cold, but it was worth it to be outside breathing clean air.

  Penny sat on the floor of the cab next to Steve while Sean and Tim steered through sastrugi and drift. “Isn’t this fun?” she said. “Like going on a hayride.”

  “I remember the last time you and I went for a ride in a Sno-Cat,” Steve said shyly. “You went to sleep on my shoulder.”

  She felt comfortable and happy with him for the first time in weeks.

  It took them six hours to cover fifteen kilometres. The Sno-Cat floundered through deep, soft snow most of the way, and finally came to a halt at the crest of a rise. Here they made camp; beyond they could see crevasse fields running in dark lines to a distant mass of pressure that gleamed blue in the moonlight. Snug in a warm tent, they made supper, drank beer and talked desultorily for a while before falling asleep. Penny found it odd to sleep in a bag by herself, with Steve on one side and Tim on the other.

  During the noon twilight next day they took telephoto pictures of the pressure ridges between Laputa and Lilliput. To Penny they looked very much like the Queen Maud mountains: sharp peaks, mantled in drift, stretched from west to east. After she had watched the pressure for a while, though, she saw that the peaks kept changing. Directly ahead of them a spire of ice rose and snapped off; to the right a row of jagged-edged hummocks sagged almost flat. A constant snapping and creaking came from the pressure, and Penny could feel the ice shaking beneath her feet.

  The moon was fairly high by noon, and by its light they could just make out a misty blueness beyond the pressure: the surge ice, rearing high above Lilliput. Penny got a brief glimpse of it through binoculars before the lenses iced over, and shivered.

  “This place scares me,” she told the men.

  “Me, too,” said Tim. “I think we’ve seen as much as we’re going to, Steve.”

  “Right. Let’s get going. If we’re lucky we’ll be home for supper.”

  They weren’t. About halfway back the Sno-Cat shuddered violently and slewed sideways down a slope into a drift-choked depression. When they got out to start digging snow away from the treads, they could feel the surface shaking.

  “Another earthquake?” Sean asked.

  “No,” said Steve. “I think this end of the island is breaking up.” He began digging, his breath glinting in the Sno-Cat’s headlights.

  In the two hours it took them to get underway again, they felt several more shocks. Many small crevasses now intersected their track, but Sean drove straight across them without difficulty. They got back to Shacktown around midnight and stumbled into the mess hall for some coffee.

  “Welcome back!” George Hills greeted them. He was hunched over a table with the Vostochni, teaching them Monopoly. Nearby were Ray Crandall and Herm Northrop, playing cribbage.

  “How are things in Lilliput?” said Herm.

  “Noisy,” Penny said. “And cold.”

  “Lilliput is breaking up Laputa,” Steve said. He yawned. “If we’re still here tomorrow, I’ll go see how the seismographs are behaving. How’s the melting going?”

  “Very well, I gather,” Herm nodded. “Jeanne says the tops of the crevasses are getting wider.”

  “When are we scheduled to go over the Ridge?” Penny asked.

  “A day or two. Will says we’ll know when it happens.”

  George looked up from the game. “Damn stupid, if you ask me, Herm. Here we finally got some clear weather, and nobody’s even talkin’ about sending Al out. Even if we do get over the Ridge, we’ll be in the same fix.”

  “Yes, George,” Herm said neutrally. He looked at his watch. “Well, it’s just past twelve; time to head down to the snow mine.”

  Ivan and the others came over to talk to Steve. “We are worrying about arguments. You have problems here.”

  “Some,” Steve agreed.

  “Why is this arguments permitted? This is not good time.”

  “We do things a little differently here, Ivan.”

  He shook his head. “Very dangerous. Very dangerous. I am sorry; the guest shall not be critic. But we are worrying.”

  “So are we,” Penny said.

  *

  On the morning of May 8 a tremor almost as violent as the icequake hit the station. No one was hurt this time, but boxes were once again strewn all over the tunnels. The shock was followed by lesser tremors for several hours.

  Steve spent most of that day in his seismograph tunnels. At the seminar that night he said that Laputa’s Grid South end had probably broken up on the Ridge. Colin Smith agreed: he had determined that Laputa had moved some five kilometres since the tremor that morning.

  “That’s a hell of a rate of speed,” Carter said. “Does it mean we’re over the worst of this?”

  “I doubt it,” Will replied. “The broken-up parts of the island are passing over the Ridge now, and the rest of Laputa is shooting forward as a result. We’ll have more tremors. But at least we won’t have Lilliput treading on our heels for a while, I hope.”

  “You’re probably right,” Steve said. “All the tremors have been coming from the Grid South today.”

  “How’s the immersion heater doing?” Hugh wanted to know.

  “Very well,” Jeanne said. “But I’ve given up trying to keep the cables evenly spaced around the station. The current from Grid North is too strong. So now they’re all fanned out in front of us, which is probably just as well. I had a little trouble with the snake-eye today — couldn’t see what’s going on too well because the water is just opaque. I think that’s because the melting is releasing a lot of mud from the ice. At least I like to think it is.”

  Books suddenly catapulted from their shelves, and there was the sound of breaking crockery in the kitchen, followed by Terry’s violent swearing. The lights flickered for an instant, and Tom Vernon bolted from his chair to attend to the generator.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Gordon burst out. “Hugh, when are you gonna wake up? When are you gonna send Al out?”

  “When I bloody well think we need to!” Hugh roared. It had been so long since anyone had heard him speak above a murmur that his bellow startled them more than the tremor had. Hugh stood up and walked deliberately up to Gordon. The Canadian was almost a head taller, but he seemed to shrink under Hugh’s glare. “Gordon, you have been a pain in the collective ass. If I hear any more of your nagging and complaining, I will have you confined to you
r room. I would rather do without your services than pay for them with divisiveness and low morale.”

  “Well, gee, Hugh — I didn’t — you — ” Gordon sat down. Hugh turned and went back to his chair.

  “Let’s get on with the seminar,” he said calmly.

  Within twenty-four hours Lilliput caught up again with Laputa and began pushing it across the Ridge. On May 11, after two days of almost constant minor tremors, there was another major shock that made the science huts temporarily uninhabitable; all the ventilation ducts above Tunnel C were disconnected. The seismographs indicated that the Grid North end of the island had crumpled under Lilliput’s pressure. Steve and Tim went out in a Sno-Cat and fired some seismic shots which Will monitored; they showed several stress belts running the length of Laputa.

  That same day Al got drunk. During a quick check of possible damage after the shock, Roger Wykstra and Max Wilhelm found him in his cubicle, lying face down on his bunk. An empty bottle of Mortlach whisky lay on the floor beside him. Only half-conscious, Al was singing ‘Happy Birthday’ over and over again.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Roger asked softly.

  Max shook his head. But he remembered the conversation he had had with Al on the flight to McMurdo. “Let’s go,” he said. “He’ll be all right when he sleeps it off.”

  For the next five days Laputa moved slowly and violently over the Ridge. Hugh instituted daily evacuation drills, regardless of the weather, and the Otter was kept fuelled and warmed for a possible trip to Taylor Dry Valley. The cables went on pouring heat into the water below them until 1335 hours on the afternoon of May 17, when they were snapped. The ice below Laputa was now in contact with the Ridge.

  In a few minutes before she lost the snake-eye, Jeanne saw on the console that Herm had been right. The crevassed ice, weakened by days of heat, crumbled away as the island scraped over the immovable stone. Hugh told the people waiting in the chilly hangar to go back to bed.

  The next day, just before noon, a crash like thunder pealed across the island. Howie and Simon went out on skis to investigate and found that Laputa had broken apart less than three kilometres Grid North of the station. The huge fragment left behind was breaking up in slabs that were rapidly filling the gap.

  Laputa still moved Grid South, towards the distant Pacific Ocean, but more slowly than before. During the brief noon twilights those who wanted to could ski from the station to the new edge of the island. There they could look down on a grey-green plain of floes and bergs that extended to the dim horizon in all directions. The chaotic ice beyond the Ridge was lower and thinner than Laputa; in the grip of a deep-running current, the island drifted through the growing super-shelf.

  “Now we start to winter over,” Steve said.

  Chapter 10 – Winter

  Will Farquhar stood near the edge of Laputa and looked Grid East. The night was still; the moon was full, and bright enough to smother the stars. Clear to the horizon, the Shelf glowed silver-blue, a gently rolling plain broken in many places by ice islands rising like desert mesas, with steep sides and flat tops. It was very quiet.

  He looked down. Elsewhere, Laputa’s cliffs were as much as fifty metres above the new Shelf, but here they had collapsed into a kind of scree slope over which the blizzards of the past few weeks had formed a thick, hard wind-crust. The boxes which he and Tim Underwood had pushed down the slope had scarcely scratched it.

  Tim came out of the Sno-Cat, his frosted beard glittering in the moonlight. He was lugging a crate of gelignite. “This is the last of it,” he said. Will nodded. The two of them dragged the crate to the top of the slope and shoved it over. It slid down with a faint hiss and came to stop near the rest of the gear in the shadows of a pressure ridge.

  “All set, then?” Will asked.

  “Yup.” Tim clipped himself to a rope secured to the Sno-Cat, and gingerly let himself down the slope. His newly-healed wrist took the strain without a twinge. The gradient was not very steep, but the wind-crust gave little purchase even to crampons; without the rope, he would have slid helplessly down into the pressure ridge.

  Will followed a few moments later. Without talking much, the men dragged their gear through the pressure ice and out on to the snow. For an hour they hand-drilled holes in the ice beneath and then set off seismic shots. Each charge went off with a thump that echoed from the cliffs of Laputa and sent a silver-blue geyser of ice crystals and smoke into the still air.

  When they were finished, they returned to the foot of the slope and Tim began to climb back. Will turned to look across the moonlit Shelf. He thought he had never seen anything as strange or as beautiful in his life.

  *

  Seminars were held less often now, and this one attracted only about a dozen people. Even so, Tim looked nervous as he stood up with a couple of sheets of paper in his hand, and Will’s encouraging smile seemed to fluster him all the more.

  “Uh, we got some good data from the shots yesterday,” Tim began. “First, from the ones we did on Laputa, it looks like the island is pretty well intact, with no major stress areas or fractures. Our average thickness is about four hundred and fifty metres, so the Ridge must have taken off a bit more than we thought.

  “The Shelf ice seems to be consolidating very fast. It’s about eighty metres thick, at least around Laputa. In a few places it’s as thin as — ” he glanced nervously at his notes — “as, uh, forty metres, and as thick as a hundred and five. There’s a lot of new snow on it. We had to drill through damn close to ten metres before we hit proper ice.”

  “Don’t tell us about new snow,” George Hills said. “We been whisking it off the roofs for weeks.”

  “And we’ll be doing it some more,” Colin Smith added. “Looks like another storm coming in tomorrow.”

  There was an outburst of groans and swearing. To the fascination of Colin and Sean, and the dismay of everyone else, more snow had fallen in the past month than this latitude of the Antarctic normally got in five years. The reason, Colin believed, was that warm, moist air was being drawn towards the Pole too rapidly to permit it to drop its precipitation out over the ocean. The Antarctic desert was turning into the equivalent of a rain-coast.

  Steve raised his hand. “Tim, how solid is the new Shelf? Any big gaps or soft spots?”

  “Not that I could find.” He turned to the map of Antarctica on the wall of the lounge and pointed to the Ross Sea. “Uh, we’re right about here, just where the old Shelf ended. The new Shelf must run way beyond, maybe all the way to 55° — the Antarctic Convergence. Will says the temperature gradient rises so fast north of there that you couldn’t keep the ice welded together. At least not until you had a few years to cool the ocean down. I don’t know if I’ll go along with him, but he says New Zealand could start seeing winter pack ice around South Island by 1995.”

  “Serve the bloody Kiwis right,” Gordon Ellerslee laughed, but no one joined him.

  Carter cleared his throat. “Well, we’ll see. Anything else to add, Tim? No? All right, thanks very much. Anything else, anybody?”

  “One small thing,” Max Wilhelm said. “We’re almost due Grid West of Ross Island now, and whenever the wind blows from there we still get a great deal of volcanic ash. It looks as if Erebus is still at it.”

  “Mm-hm. And on that cheery note, I think we’ll adjourn.”

  “Monopoly? Monopoly?” Kyril asked; Yevgeni nodded eagerly.

  “Okay,” said Gordon. “I’ll take you Communist bastards on and teach you how it’s really played.”

  “You’ll be sorree,” Howie warned. The Russians had taken to the game at once; they consistently beat everyone else before turning on each other with a merry ruthlessness that vindicated Marx and Lenin. Tonight, as Cordon soon learned, was no exception.

  *

  Al Neal went down Tunnel D to the hangar next morning. The blizzard had arrived during the night and was gusting up to two hundred and twenty k.p.h.; wind moaned in the ventilators, and the air was full of f
ine snow that got in somehow and hung in the huts and tunnels like grain dust.

  Gordon and Howie were playing cribbage in the machine shop while Tom Vernon methodically took apart one of the Sno-Cats’ engines. They greeted Al with casual nods.

  “What’s new, Papa Al?” Howie asked.

  “Nothing much, just wandered up to look over the plane.”

  “Goin’ somewhere?” Gordon grunted.

  “Nope. See you guys.” Al went into the hangar and made his way to the Otter. Laputa had drifted almost 90° counter-clockwise since passing over the Ridge, and the hangar doors now faced Grid East; they were solidly drifted over, but each gust still struck them like a battering ram. Al wrinkled his nose at the stink of diesel fuel and JP4. The ice floor of the hangar was soaked with it, the result of dozens of minor spills over the months, and it worried him.

  He stepped up the ladder into the cabin and went forward to the flight compartment. Settling into his seat, he turned on the instrument panels. Everything read normal. All the fuel tanks were full, and the engines were being kept warm on current drawn from the reactor. The Otter could fly on a moment’s notice.

  “But there’s nowhere to go,” Al said out loud.

  *

  Laputa continued to move Grid South at about two kilometres per day; as the surge ice moved across the Ridge, it pushed the newly coalescing Shelf ahead of it. Temperatures rose and fell and rose again as storms swept in from the distant Pacific and collided with katabatic winds bearing dry, bitterly cold air from the polar plateau. Snow fell and consolidated into a hard crust; whisking parties used axes as much as shovels. The dome was repeatedly drifted over, frustrating Carter’s efforts to film the very faint auroras that sometimes appeared in clear weather. Gerry Roche’s instruments began to detect the fragile beginnings of a new ionosphere, one which vanished again and again under the onslaught of solar flares, but which persistently renewed itself.