Icequake

by Crawford Kilian

  Will reported that the drilling hut was now back in full operation, thanks to Gordon and Simon, and the hole was within twenty metres of the bottom of the ice.

  “This is important,” he said. “We need to know the exact thickness of the ice under us, and what its condition is.

  “Something dicey is coming up,” he continued. He explained the problem he foresaw as Laputa approached the Ridge. The others listened in silence; then Howie raised a hand.

  “If this is gonna happen, how come we haven’t stopped already? There’s a lot of ice up ahead of us, and it must be hitting the Ridge, too.”

  “Good point. First, don’t forget the Shelf thickens as you go from the sea towards the land. A lot of the ice ahead of us is too thin to hit the Ridge. But over the last couple of weeks, you see an odd pattern in our rate of drift. We go a couple of kilometres one day, a kilometre the next and the third day we scarcely budge. A day or two later we move four or five kilometres, and then slow down again over the next few days. It looks to me as if each island is hitting the Ridge and grounding itself; then the ice behind it breaks it up into bite-size bits, and we all move three squares forward. Then the next island grounds itself, and so on.”

  “Beautiful!” Sean McNally said excitedly. “All these bloody thick ice islands get chopped up, so the debris covers a greater area and moves faster — and the super-shelf forms inside a year or two. You’d think someone planned it.”

  “I’m delighted that you appreciate the aesthetic elegance of my hypothesis,” Will grinned. “The Scots and the Irish usually understand each other in these matters. But it means we get chopped up, too, and probably in the next six weeks.”

  Half a dozen people started talking at once. Katerina hushed them; Carter then pointed to Gordon, who had leapt to his feet and was determined to be heard.

  “That settles it,” he snapped. “We gotta get out of this place, right now. Hell, another three-four days and we won’t even have sunlight. Al ought to leave at once for New Byrd; that’s what I think.”

  “Wait a minute, Gord,” said Will. “Remember, I said your drilling operation is important.”

  “Not now it isn’t.”

  “It is. You see, we may be better off than we look. The bottom of the Shelf is as crevassed as the top — maybe even more so, now we’ve had such a pounding. Just maybe, the bottom of our little island may be, uh, rotten enough to break away without destroying the island. If — ”

  “If, if, if,” Gordon jeered. “What if it’s not?”

  “We move to the mainland,” Hugh said quietly. “Perhaps to one of the Dry Valleys. And we winter there.” There was more uproar. Herm Northrop stood up. No one paid him any attention until he banged a beer can on the table.

  “I don’t care where we go,” he said, “as long as we take the reactor core with us.” He looked wryly pleased with the startled expressions on his listeners’ faces. “It can’t be left behind if our island is going to be broken up. The core is radioactive enough to poison the whole Southern Ocean.”

  “But you c-could s-seal it, Herm,” Colin said. “And it could b-b-be picked up n-n-next year.”

  “Next year it might be at the bottom of the sea. Eventually the container would rupture. We simply mustn’t let that happen.”

  Al Neal cleared his throat. “Herm, the core container is too big and heavy for the Otter. You’d need a Hercules.”

  Gordon was on his feet again, jittering with impatience. “Goddamn it, that’s just another reason for sending Al out for help! I’m no ecology freak, but I sure don’t want to see those rods down on the bottom, warming up the Ross Sea. Hugh — Carter — you gotta send him.”

  Hugh closed his eyes. “We’ll consider it, Gordon. Meanwhile, get that hole drilled.”

  Jeanne had tentatively raised her hand a couple of times; now Carter nodded to her. She stood up, looking nervous.

  “I don’t exactly know if this is the time or place to mention it. But there’s something else you might as well consider. I’m pregnant.”

  There was a moment’s silence, followed by cheers, whistles and table pounding. Simon bellowed, “Good for Will!” and Will blushed violently. Jeanne blushed, too. Hugh and Carter glanced at each other.

  “Does Katerina know about this?” Carter shouted above the noise.

  “Yes, I know,” Katerina called from the door to the infirmary. “Please, more quiet.”

  “Sorry, Kate. All right, all right, settle down, everyone.” Carter got them quiet and went on: “My own reaction to your news is, ah, modified rapture. We don’t need all the details — ”

  “Yes, we do.” someone croaked.

  “Belt up, there!” Carter roared. “Anyway, we’ll do everything we can to keep you safe and well, House-mouse. It’s a — a factor to consider.” He looked very unhappy. “Does anyone else have any exciting revelations for us? I sincerely hope not.”

  “I want to talk about this rationing,” Gordon said. “Hugh’s being cagey about sending Al out, but it looks to me like you’ll have to send him, Hugh And if he goes, we’ll be evacuated within a week or two. So there’s no need for rationing, and we can start eating enough to do our goddamned jobs.”

  “Gordie deserves to get stuffed if anyone does,” Suzy Dolan muttered.

  “I’m sorry, Gord,” Hugh said. “Inside people get two thousand calories a day; outsiders get three. If we’re evacuated, you can make it up in New Zealand.”

  Gordon was about to say something more, but everyone else applauded Hugh so loudly that he thought better of it. Katerina popped in again, looking furious.

  “We must have quiet!”

  “Meeting adjourned,” Carter said. “Everybody out of the lounge.”

  *

  The weather was, unexpectedly, very good: temperatures stayed below -35°C, the sky was clear, and there was very little wind. People found excuses to go outside, if only for a walk around the station. The moon, half-full, was bright; haloes often formed around it, and Penny once saw three moon dogs arrayed across the sky. The Grid South horizon would begin to glow around 1000 hours. By noon the sky was pink or orange, and the sun made a brief appearance; twilight lasted until past 1500. It was never wholly silent outside. Distant rumbles and creaks came from all sides, and even the snow underfoot often vibrated. In the drilling shed the whine and clank of machinery went on around the clock.

  Al, Will and Sean made a short flight around Laputa to survey its progress towards the Ridge. As Will had predicted, Blefuscu — the island Grid South of them — was breaking up: short-lived peaks were forced as much as a hundred metres above the Shelf before collapsing of their own weight. Deep crevasses opened up and crashed shut all around the pressure ridges, but they were encouraged to see that beyond the Ridge the Shelf still showed many extensive flat surfaces. Apparently the big ice islands were breaking into relatively small ones, linked by wide belts of pressure ice like scar tissue.

  To the Grid North, Lilliput continued to grind against Laputa; beyond Lilliput was the growing area of chaotic surge ice, an uneven mass that rose up to two hundred metres above the Shelf. The Otter ventured as far Grid North as the Dufek Coast, which was almost unrecognisable under the glacial overflow. The remote station near the old mouth of Shackleton Glacier was gone, overwhelmed by ice, and many coastal hills were now nunataks.

  “I’d love to see what it looks like up on the plateau,” Steve said to Penny on the evening after the flight. “There must be whole mountain ranges exposed. Like Atlantis risen from the sea. Well, maybe we’ll get a look at it in the spring.”

  “Christ, not again,” Penny groaned, pulling away from him. The bunk seemed narrow and uncomfortable. “We’ve got to be out of here by then.”

  He grunted. “Well, maybe. But I’ll be back.”

  “And what am I supposed to do while you’re falling into crevasses and freezing your balls off? Knit baby booties by the fireside?”

  “ — Good lord, don’t tell me you’re — ”r />
  “No, no! I just — oh, forget it. Forget it.”

  “Come on, Pen, what is it?” His bafflement was obvious, and infuriating.

  “I had some idiotic sentimental idea that we’d stay together when we got home,” she said wearily.

  “Ah. Well. I hadn’t really thought that far ahead.”

  “Not about us, no. Just about coming back to this — this place.”

  “This place is important to me, Penny. It’s the most important place in the world.”

  “And I’m not important, of course.”

  “Not in the same way, no. In another way you’re far more important, and you know it. Shush! But this is my work. My work. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand me at all.”

  “I understand you, all right. I used to be married to someone exactly like you.”

  He turned over. “This is ridiculous. Good night.”

  *

  The hole through Laputa was exactly 511.5 metres long. On April 20, after several attempts, Will and Jeanne managed to drop a gadget called a snake-eye all the way to the sea. It was technically known as a Mobile Remote Fiberoptic Underwater Observation Module, and was a considerable advance over the television cameras that had first probed the underside of the Shelf in the late ’70s. The snake-eye looked like a miniature torpedo, just over a metre long and about as thick as a man’s arm. Its nose contained a powerful lamp and three lenses, as well as instruments to measure temperature, salinity and turbidity. Attached to a cable running up the drill hole, it could be steered — clumsily — by jets of compressed air from a tank in its midsection. The operator of the snake-eye sat at a console in the drilling shed, using three controls to steer it and six others to run its cameras and instruments.

  Jeanne had a knack with the snake-eye, and Will automatically assigned her to the console. He, Gordon and Simon stood behind her as the snake-eye finally got all the way down without mishap. The console video lit up and the VTR went on.

  “My God,” Jeanne said. “Looks like chocolate syrup down there.” The screen was a muddy grey-brown. “Awfully turbid.” She lowered the snake-eye about ten metres and aimed its nose up at the ice. A swirl of bubbles glittered in the beam of the lamp, rising past the orange line of the cable. The bottom of the ice was a mottled grey surface; the bubbles crawled around on it like droplets of mercury, with a few finding their way back into the black circle of the drill hole. Jeanne lowered the snake-eye to the horizontal and turned it slowly through 360°. The same mottled grey of old ice showed through the murk; the drill had come through into a crevasse.

  Jeanne had to lower the snake-eye more than fifty metres before it reached the true bottom of the island. She sent it cruising Grid South, pausing every few metres to turn its lenses upward. After it had travelled almost four hundred metres and the cable was near its fullest extent, Jeanne sent it on a roughly circular clockwise course. Angled upward, it scanned a surface as bleak and scarred as some Neptunian moon’s. Crevasses slashed deep into the ice, with sometimes only a metre or two between them. Mud had drifted into cracks and been trapped there, giving much of the ice a resemblance to clay. Countless ice fragments, broken loose, had refrozen to the island like stalactites.

  “Not bad,” Will said cheerfully when the circuit was completed. “I counted twelve major crevasses in eight hundred metres, and lots of little ones. We might just slide over the Ridge with a few thumps.”

  “Wishful thinking,” Jeanne retorted. She began drawing the cable in, watching it wind around a rotating drum. “Our bottom’s no different from the ice under Blefuscu. Those crevasses are wide, but they’re not all that deep. And they’ll start closing up when we hit the Ridge, instead of breaking off.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment, and then at Gordon and Simon. Will sighed and shook his head. “She’s right, I’m afraid.”

  “What’s it mean if the crevasses close up?” Gordon asked.

  “They’ll absorb some of the impact,” Jeanne told him. “But only a little. Then we’ll start breaking up, vertically and horizontally. Everything will be all jumbled up; we could end up with another chunk of ice on top of us, or we could turn turtle.”

  Gordon paced across the shed and back. “Christ. If this doesn’t get ’em off their ass, nothing will.”

  Will looked at Jeanne. He touched her shoulder. “Gordie, I think you may be right.”

  *

  Gordon’s arguments, for all the weight they gained from the snake-eye, were blown away by a blizzard that swept over the Shelf that night and lasted for days. The Otter was readied; Al was prepared; the wind never dropped below a hundred k.p.h., and often gusted to three hundred.

  On the third day of the blizzard Herm Northrop walked down Tunnel E from the reactor. Usually he was grateful for the CANDU’s compactness and automated systems, which enabled it to run with only minimal supervision; but today he almost wished it would malfunction and give him something to do. He thought about the Ridge, and about what would happen to the core rods when the island broke up. He would have plenty of time to shut down and pull the core, anyway. The container might, with great luck, be buried in sediment before it could rupture. (Jeanne, however, had given him no comfort on that point: there was very little sediment anywhere under the Shelf, and the Ridge, being steadily scoured by the ice, was likely to have none at all.) If it did rupture it would, as Gordon had said the other night, warm the Ross Sea.

  Herm’s eyes widened behind their rimless glasses. He stopped, turned and went back down the tunnel a little way. Along one wall, several big reels of heavy-duty power cable were stacked amid boxes and crates. The cable had been there, useless surplus, since the station had been built. There must be six or seven thousand metres of it, a sop to environmentalists’ anxieties about having a reactor too close to the station. Herm ran his gloved hand over the cable while he did some sums in his head. Then he trotted down the tunnel and went looking for Gordon Ellerslee.

  *

  That night’s seminar was the first attended by the Vostochni, who sat in a corner with Katerina translating for Yevgeni and Kyril. They had recovered with astounding speed, and if they were depressed by their amputations they gave no sign of it.

  The Shacktowners, however, looked grim as they heard from Colin that the blizzard showed no signs of ending, and from Will that Laputa had moved almost five kilometres in the past twenty-four hours — an indication that Blefuscu’s destruction was complete and that Laputa’s turn was next. A depressed silence fell over the lounge. Gordon stood up.

  “I’ve got a suggestion. Actually, it was Herm’s idea, but he checked it out with me and it sounded pretty good.

  “We got about three million miles of old HV-12 cable piled up in Tunnel E. If we stripped the insulation off of it and shoved it down the drill hole in a big loop, or maybe even two or three loops, and ran a hell of a lot of juice through it, we might be able to loosen up some of the ice under the island.”

  “Sort of like an immersion coil?” Terry Dolan asked.

  “Yeah,” laughed Gordon. “The world’s biggest goddamn immersion coil. If we switched station power over to the diesel generator, the CANDU could give everything it’s got to melting the ice.”

  “And that’s a great deal indeed,” Herm put in. “As you all know, the whole station — with everything running — only draws about a tenth of the reactor’s maximum output.”

  Somebody whistled. Will said, “It’s an interesting idea, but you can’t just shove the cable down there; you’d have to deploy it right up against the ice. But it’ll just sink.”

  “I think the snake-eye could probably deploy the cable,” Herm said, “and if we rig floats along the cable — perhaps Styrofoam, or even wood — it’ll stay pretty close to the ice. I don’t think we’d need to melt very much ice, just enough to weaken the ice between the crevasses so that they’ll break off as we hit the Ridge.”

  Jeanne said, “It might work over a very limited area, Herm.
At the most, a couple of square kilometres around the hole. But there’s no guarantee that Laputa won’t crack to bits anyway. We could split from stem to stern long before this part of the island reached the Ridge.”

  “Maybe. But I think it’s worth trying.”

  “So do I,” said Steve. “And I suggest we put everybody on it, right away. Just stripping the insulation off the cable is going to be a huge job.”

  “All in favour?” Hugh asked.

  Everyone’s hands went up. After Katerina and Ivan explained the matter to Yevgeni and Kyril, they cheerfully raised their bandaged hands as well.

  *

  The seminar was held on the evening of April 27. That same night Carter, Herm and the technicians met to plan the details of the project. The next morning almost everyone but the Dolans, the Vostochni, and one or two others started stripping cable. It was cold work in the tunnel, but no one complained; there was a lot of good-natured kidding and even some singing. Some stripped, others gathered up the insulation for disposal and others rewound the cable in hundred-metre lengths. The blizzard went on.

  After two solid days of work over two kilometres of cable had been prepared. Rather than run it through the tunnels and hangar and then out to the drilling rig, the technicians decided to lay insulated cable directly from the reactor building to the hole. This would save several hundred metres, but it meant teams had to work outside in hundred-kilometre winds and near-zero visibility. Ray Crandall and George Hills were frostbitten; after that, no one could work outside for more than twenty minutes every two hours.

  At 0235 hours on the morning of April 30 the Grid South end of Laputa struck the Ridge. The shock was not great enough to wake anyone, but those who were awake could feel it. A geranium in the greenhouse was knocked off a table, and Shackleton’s portrait fell off the wall in the mess hall. In the tunnels frost fell beautifully from the ceilings.

  Later that day the diesel generator went on, filling the whole station with a monotonous hammering roar that gave everyone headaches. Tremors continued. Will theorised that the end of the island was disintegrating a little at a time.