The goose that laid the golden egg had been killed, over and over and over again.
But the icy fastness of the South Pole had, ultimately, worn out all its would-be invaders and made itself impervious to all but the most tentative intrusions. There were scientific bases and research stations, like Point Adelie, scattered around the shores of the Southern Ocean, but they were like little black pebbles on a vast white beach. Tiny dark specks in a world of blue sea and crystalline peaks. And most of them, as Michael had learned at his dinners in the Officers’ Mess, were less about the quest for knowledge than they were about making a claim on the land-and the limitless mineral resources that might lie beneath it.
“The Antarctic is the only continent on earth with no nations on it,” the Ops had pointed out over dinner one night, “and to keep it that way, the Antarctic Treaty was drawn up in ‘59. The treaty declares the Antarctic-which means any ocean or land south of sixty degrees-to be an international zone. Nuclear-free. Forty-four nations have signed on.”
“But that hasn't stopped the squatters,” Darryl had said, piling the potatoes au gratin onto his plate. “Come one, come all.”
Lieutenant Healey had smiled ruefully at that. “You're right. Many nations, including some unlikely newcomers like China and Peru, have set up so-called research stations. It's their way of asserting their rights to participate in any discussions about the Antarctic-or any exploitation of its resources that might later occur.”
“In other words, they're just getting in line, like us,” Darryl said, “for whenever the free-for-all really gets under way.” He shoveled another mouthful of potatoes into his mouth, and before quite swallowing it, added, “And it will.”
Michael had no doubt he was right, although looking out the window at the frozen panorama below and the sun, squatting like a fat bronze ball on the horizon, it was hard to envision that coming cataclysm. The endless ice, and the rolling sea, looked as impervious as they did eternal.
To the west, he could see the first signs of the storm front the captain had hinted at. Wispy gray clouds were filling the sky and starting to fly in their direction, like strips of a shroud being torn by invisible fingers. The ocean, too, was starting to stir, the gentle swells growing higher, the waves frothing white. Flocks of seabirds were driven before the rising wind.
Darryl had come awake, and was sitting up straight; apparently, the seasickness was at long last behind him, and his skin, though pallid as any redhead's, was at least no longer green. He grinned at Michael and gave him a thumbs-up. Charlotte was studying a folded map in her lap.
In the cockpit, Michael could see Diaz and Jarvis conferring, surveying their scopes and monitors, and a few seconds later the helicopter gained altitude and, if he wasn't mistaken, speed. It was impossible to make out much but a vast undifferentiated tableau of ice below. And for the next twenty minutes or so, the chopper seemed bent on nothing but getting to its destination as quickly as possible. Michael wondered if the storm front wasn't advancing faster than they'd expected.
He put his head back and closed his eyes. He, too, was pretty tired; sleeping on board an icebreaker hadn't been easy. Between the constant rumbling of the engines and the grinding of the screws as they pulverized the passing growlers-chunks of ice as big as buses-not to mention the dank, dark quarters (he could still smell the odor of mildew on his clothes), it was doubtful he'd gone for more than a couple of hours without being jarred awake, or, more than once, heaved out of his bunk and onto the floor. No matter what his quarters were like at Point Adelie, he looked forward to sleeping in a bed that wasn't rocking, where the deadliest ocean in the world wasn't hammering away at him from just a few feet away, dying to get in.
He wondered if there had been any change in Kristin's condition. It was odd to be so out of touch, so far removed, in every sense, from all the concerns of his ordinary life. It was true that he'd been taking a sort of sabbatical from his friends, his family, his work; after the accident, he'd just kind of holed up with his misery, letting the answering machine field his calls and AOL keep track of his e-mails. But he knew that if anything dire occurred, he'd find out; the world-or at least Kristin's little sister-would breach his walls and get word to him, one way or the other. But where he was headed, regular communication of any sort was bound to be difficult, and his ability to respond in any meaningful way was nil. He could hardly race to a bedside, or worse, a cemetery, from the most inaccessible part of the planet, thousands of miles away.
The terrible thing about that, if he was being completely truthful with himself, was that it came as a relief. Ever since he'd embarked on this journey, he'd felt a lightening of his load, a reprieve from feeling he was forever on call. For months, he'd felt suspended, on a round-the-clock watch, unable to move forward without constantly looking back. There was something to be said, even if he couldn't say it, for the imposition of physical barriers. They had a nice way of taking things out of your hands.
The chopper was buffeted by the wind, and without moving his head, Michael cracked open one eye. The scene outside had changed entirely. The wispy clouds had become a ghostly army scudding across the sky. And even the ocean, far below, was almost completely cloaked by a swirling fog. The lines between sea and sky, ice and air, were becoming increasingly obscured, and Michael knew that this was one of the greatest hazards in the Antarctic-the whole universe, in a matter of minutes, could be reduced to a glaringly white photon soup. Ships foundered and explorers plummeted into unseen crevasses. Pilots, unable to orient themselves, crashed their planes into glacial peaks or straight down onto the pack ice.
“Guess you can tell,” Ensign Diaz said over the intercom headsets, “we've got some headwinds coming at us.”
Michael sat up in his seat and glanced over at his traveling companions. Charlotte was folding up her map and putting it away, and Darryl was craning his neck to see out her window.
“But we're almost at Point Adelie. We're tracking the coastline, and coming in from the northwest. If the fog breaks, you should be able to see the old Norwegian whaling station, or maybe even the Adelie rookeries.” He clicked off, but then, a few seconds later, came back on again. “Ensign Jarvis has asked me to advise you that our ground time will be minimal, so please be prepared to depart the craft as soon as you are advised that it is safe to do so. Don't wait for your bags and gear-they'll be transferred for you.” Then he clicked off again and stayed off.
Michael tightened the laces on his boots, and gathered up his coat and hat and gloves, even though he couldn't put them on again until he was out of the shoulder harness. The chopper was slowly losing altitude-he could feel it even if he couldn't see it-and cutting through the fog. Occasionally, a patch of rocky shoreline would become visible, and once or twice he saw great black swarms of penguins, massed on a snowy plain. Then he caught a glimpse of a patchwork of abandoned wooden buildings, the colors of soot and rust; what looked like a steeple poked up from the fog. But it was hard to say for sure, as the chopper was skimming along so quickly, rising and falling on the powerful air currents, bucketing from side to side. A few minutes later, it came up over a low ridge, slowing down and turning, the rotors whirring louder than ever. Michael leaned close to the window to look down; the chopper's blades were shredding the mist below, and through it he could see a man in a hooded orange parka wildly waving and sliding around on the ice. Splotches of gray and brown surrounded him, some of them moving, skittering across the snow and ice, others disappearing as if they'd spontaneously evaporated. The helicopter hovered, but a gust of wind hit it hard and set it rocking in the air. In the cockpit, Diaz and Jarvis were hunched over their controls; Diaz was speaking rapidly into his microphone.
The man below vanished from Michael's field of vision, then ran back across it, his arms still waving. The chopper rocked again, an air horn blasted twice, then, slowly, the aircraft descended. When its blades touched the ice, there was a grinding noise that reminded Michael of cracking open one of those
old-fashioned ice-cube trays, and under it came the sound of the man in the orange parka shouting. He skidded past the window-Michael caught a glimpse of a bearded, weather-beaten face under dark goggles-and then he heard the gradual sigh of the rotors winding down. The pilots were flicking off switches and shucking their own seat belts.
Michael did the same.
Diaz turned around, and called out, “Last stop!”
Jarvis had already climbed out, and was yanking on the latch to the passenger compartment. The door jerked open, and a blast of Antarctic air blew like a gale into the cabin. Charlotte was still wrestling herself out of her seat harness, and Darryl was doing his best to help her.
“All ashore that's going ashore!” Jarvis shouted, extending a hand to Charlotte, who finally freed herself and stepped out gingerly onto the ice. Darryl tumbled out after her, and Michael followed.
The orange parka guy was shouting at the pilots, something about seals, Weddell seals, and pups. Michael was still a little deaf from the roar of the chopper, and much of what the guy was saying was snatched up and blown away before he could quite make it out.
Michael moved away from the helicopter, as several other men in parkas and goggles ran toward the tail of the helicopter, where Jarvis had already thrown open a cargo bay. Michael saw pallets of supplies sliding out, but then he almost lost his footing and had to focus again on where he was going. Where was he going? There was no sign of the research station, and the ice, he suddenly discovered, had holes in it, roughly a few feet wide. He stopped, and he could see that there was something on the ice, something red and pulpy and wet, and the orange parka man was shouting again, though now Michael could actually hear some of it.
“The Weddell seals, they're whelping here! Right now! Watch where you're going!”
Charlotte and Darryl, arm in arm, were frozen in place.
“Holes in the ice!” he cried, pointing at several spots around them. “They've chewed breathing holes in the ice!”
A few yards off, almost indistinguishable against the ice, Michael saw a pup. Then two. White, but smeared with blood, their black eyes open. A mother lay beyond them, like a gray barrel.
And then, as he watched, another seal-bigger, darker, fully grown-put its head down into a hole, and somehow managed to slither through.
“Keep going!” the guy in the orange coat shouted. “Get off the ice!”
Someone from the station, a guy with a frozen handlebar moustache, was guiding Charlotte and Darryl forward. Michael inched in the same direction, but sometimes the fog made it hard to see as far as your own feet. And the ice, slick under the best of circumstances, was even harder to navigate on, wet with blood and littered with afterbirth. When, finally, he felt the grit of rock and lichen under his boots, Michael breathed a sigh of relief. A burst of wind dispelled a patch of fog, and he saw, on a low rise not more than fifty yards away, a handful of muddy gray, prefab structures, raised a few feet above the permafrost, and huddled together like the ugliest college quad in the world. An ice-rimed flagpole stood in the center, with Old Glory snapping in the freezing wind.
The guy in the orange parka came up behind him and said, “We call it the garden spot of Antarctica.”
Michael stamped his cold, and bloodstained, boots.
“But I've got to warn you,” he went on, in a thick Boston accent, “it's not always this pretty.”
PART II
POINT ADELIE
“And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariners’ hollo!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.”
“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-
Why lookst thou so? — With my crossbow
I shot the ALBATROSS!”
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
CHAPTER TEN
December 2 to December 5
The first few days at Point Adelie were difficult to sort out. Not only because so much was going on, but because there was no sense of the time passing. With the sun perpetually shining, its rays beaming through the cracks in the blinds at night, the only way to tell what time it was at all was to look at your watch, or perhaps ask someone, if you were still confused, if that was 11:30 in the morning or 11:30 at night. Followed by, what day of the week? It wasn't as if you could check the morning newspaper, or the TV listings for that night. All the ordinary markers by which you measured and regulated your life-when you went to bed or when you got up, what time you exercised at the gym or attended the yoga class, when you left for work or came home-were all useless. It didn't even matter whether it was a weekend or a weekday, since you weren't very likely to find a date, or go to the movies, or sleep over, unexpectedly, at someone else's place, or have to take the kids to a soccer practice. All of it was moot. You were in a time and a place where none of that quotidian stuff mattered. In the Antarctic, everything existed in a free-floating state, and you either learned to impose your own kind of order on it-any kind of order-or you slowly went bonkers.
“The Big Eye is what we call it,” Michael was informed over his first meal in the commons. (That college quad notion had even extended to some of the nomenclature at the camp.) The guy in the orange parka and goggles, who'd turned out to be the research station's Chief of Operations-Murphy O'Connor, by name-had eaten with the new arrivals, and taken that opportunity to run down some of the camp's rules and regulations, among other things.
“If you work too hard, for too long, you lose all track of time, and before you know it you're walking around with the Big Eye.” He made his eyes bulge out in his face, while sucking in his cheeks, making himself look gaunt and demented.
Charlotte smiled, and Darryl laughed, as he ladled another pile of baked beans onto his plate.
“Won't be so funny when you get it.”
Darryl stuck the serving spoon back in the beans.
“For a little guy, you sure can shovel it in,” Murphy observed.
Michael wondered if Hirsch would take offense at that, but Murphy's manner was at once so plainspoken and open-handed that Darryl didn't seem to mind at all.
“So,” Murphy resumed, “try to stick to some kind of schedule while you're down here. Make it up yourself, but try to keep on it. The kitchen's always open-you can always rustle up a sandwich- but if you flip out, we don't have a psych ward on the premises.” He glanced over at Charlotte. “Unless Dr. Barnes is planning to open one.”
“Not if I can help it,” she said.
Then he proceeded to offer them a long list of other Point Adelie pointers, including the most important of all.
“You never leave the base alone,” he said, staring at each one of them to emphasize the point. His eyes were big and brown, behind aviator-style glasses that barely cleared the black stubble covering his chin and cheeks. “A year ago, we had a guy-a geologist from Kansas-who just wanted to go out and grab a few quick specimens. Went out alone, didn't leave word where he was going,” and at this, Murphy raised a cautionary finger, “and we didn't find him for three days.”
“What happened?” Michael asked.
“Went down a crevasse and froze to death.” He shook his head sadly and sipped his coffee from a mug with a picture of a penguin on it. “Sometimes you can't see the crevasses for shit.” He pointed back in the direction of his office. “That's why we've got a blackboard in the hall; if you are leaving the base, you write down who's going, where you're going, and when you're planning to return.”
Michael had already seen the board-the last entry said something about a ground terrain exploration in Dry Valley One.
“And when you get back-safely-check it off on the board. I do not appreciate having to do a bed check
to make sure everybody's tucked in for the night.” He paused, then smiled at the thought of something. “You'd be surprised what I find.”
Michael couldn't imagine anything too salacious. Looking around the commons, which was sparsely populated just now, there were a couple of tables where the service personnel were sitting- all youngish men in blue uniforms-and a couple of others where the scientists were concentrated. It wasn't any harder to spot them there than it had been to pick out Darryl at the Santiago airport. They were a small eccentric crew, one with a long gray ponytail and wire-rimmed specs halfway down his nose, and a couple of stout blond women with broad shoulders who looked like bit players in some Norse legend. Murphy must have been following his gaze, because he said, “We call the scientists beakers.”
Michael got it. Beakers, as in lab equipment.
“But they don't mind. They call us grunts.”
“And you don't mind?” Charlotte said.
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