His wristphone beeped.
“Hi Wade! It’s Phil. Where are you now?”
“I’m in McMurdo Station, Antarctica.”
“Are you! Is it cold?”
“It’s cold.”
“What does it look like?”
“Well—” Wade looked around. “It’s what people mean when they say adhocitecture.”
“Hockey texture?”
“It’s a real mix. All kinds of buildings.”
“Just tell me what you see, Wade. You’re my eyes.”
“Well, I’m walking by the Crary Lab now. It’s quite small, composed of three small buildings on a slope, with a passageway connecting them. There’s a street sign saying that I’m on Beeker Street, but it’s not much of a street. There are a lot of pipelines right on the ground.”
“Much traffic?”
“Not much traffic. Now I’m passing a building like a giant yellow cube, with a bunch of antennas on the roof. Must be the radio building. Now I’m passing a little chapel.”
“A church?”
“Yes. Our Lady of the Snows. Now I’m on a road going out to the docks. Right now the docks are empty, because the bay is iced over. In fact there are trucks and snowmobiles out on the ice. There’s a kind of minimall behind the docks, one of the newer buildings. A restaurant on the second story, with windows. Looks like it would have a good view of town. Here’s a sign that tells me I’m on the way to the Discovery Hut, built by Robert Scott’s party in 1902.”
“It’s still there?”
“Yes. A small square building.”
“Amazing. So did you meet with the NSF rep? How did it go?”
“It was interesting. She’s a Brit, she’s very polite. She was pretty much in damage-control mode, I’m afraid. Playing it cautiously. But I wouldn’t expect anything else right now. I tried to lay the groundwork. The thing is, I don’t know how much she knows. If she’s just an annual appointment rotated in here, I can imagine she might be temporary enough, and formidable enough in person I might add, not to be told about some things.”
“Yeah sure.”
“So, I’m off to see a Professor Michelson, an old veteran down here. He’s big in the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, apparently one of the major players.”
“Okay, good. Get the view from the top and then proceed. Give me a call if you need any help, and I’ll call again to get the news myself soon.”
“Where are you again?”
“I’m in Turkestan right now, but I’m off to Kirghiz tomorrow. I’ll be in touch. Stay warm!”
“I’ll try.”
It would not be easy. Out on Discovery Point the breeze was really cutting, so cold by Wade’s standards that it was beyond cold really and down into some new kinetic sensation entirely. If it weren’t for the very warm clothing encasing him he would have been, he didn’t know—petrified perhaps. Instantaneously.
The historic hut proved to be locked. A bronze plaque declared it a World Heritage Site. Beyond it stood a memorial to a man named Vince, drowned nearby in 1902. Across the town stood a tall dark cinder cone, topped by another little cross. Wade found it hard to imagine what it had been like here in 1902. Walking back into the center of town took only ten minutes, and though his nose and ears were cold, the rest of him was warming up just from walking around in his many layers of clothing. Before he knew it, he was at the other side of town; it was only a few hundred yards wide. He started climbing the volcanic cone. Paxman had pointed up at it from Hotel California, and mentioned that it had a good view, and that the cross was a memorial to Scott. And he was in Antarctica, after all. Had to get out and around.
A rough trail led over pipelines running behind the last row of buildings, then up the brown volcanic rubble of the hillside, following the spine of a ridge directly to the peak. It was a braided trail with lots of alternatives, the rubble tromped to sand by hundreds of pairs of feet making their way up the cone, including the feet of Scott and Shackleton, Wade supposed. Though the air was still cold he heated up inside his parka, and soon had it entirely unzipped and pulled open. Hands in pockets, climbing up a hill in Antarctica. He was on the lee side of the cone, and it began to feel like he was in a skin-tight envelope of hot air, on which the cold air still pressed tangibly.
Near the top the rock became a single mass of cooled cracked lava, twisted and gnarly. The wind whistled over the peak and blew his envelope of hot air away. He zipped up the parka quickly, impressed at how quickly the cold bit.
He reached the top. He could see a long way in every direction. A knee-high bronze panorama plaque named the various features one could see. At the foot of the other side of the hill lay the Kiwis’ Scott Base, a dozen green buildings clustered on the shore of the smooth white plain of the Ross Ice Shelf. Ross Island broke steeply out of this smooth plain, and rose in the distance to the stupendous broad white volcano that was Mount Erebus, looking somewhat like the cone Wade stood on, only white and ten million times bigger.
In all directions the sea was frozen white, the ice either permanent or annual. Far out on the sea ice Wade could make out the faint lines that marked the airport where his Herc had landed. The airport’s trailer buildings were the merest black specks on the ice, which gave Wade a sudden sense of how vast everything was. Far beyond the airport lay what the panorama informed him were Black Island and White Island, appropriately named, and beyond them Mount Discovery, a black cone maypoled with white glaciers, and the Royal Society Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, jumping out of the white sea. Buttery shafts of yellow sunlight lanced down the valleys of these far mountains.
Struck by the views, Wade only in a final dizzy turn noticed that there was already someone else on the peak. A man, sitting on the rocks just under the wooden cross, protected from the wind. “Hi,” Wade exclaimed, startled.
A big man, massive in a dirty dark green parka, broad face brooding behind sunglasses and the fur fringe around his parka’s hood. Tan overalls, knees dark with accumulated oil and grease. One of the ASL employees, evidently.
He grunted something at Wade and continued to survey the scene. Wade maneuvered past him to the big wooden cross he had seen from the town below. It was about ten feet tall, a thick squared-off beam. The letters they had carved into it in 1913 had been painted white, and the paint had withstood the flensing of the wind so much better than the bare wood that though the letters had been carved in to begin with, they now stood out a little from the surface. The grain of the wood also stood out. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. And then five names, with military ranks included. Wade stared at it for a while, at a loss. Tennyson was not a poet that postpostmodernism had managed to convert to its own purposes. And the Scott expedition had been a bit of a mess, as far as Wade recalled. He had never studied the matter.
The man sitting on the peak stirred, and Wade glanced down at him, again at a loss. Finally he said, “Do you come here often?”
The man stared at him, impassive behind mirrored sunglasses. “Often?”
“You’ve been up here before?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice view.”
“Great view.”
“Yes. A great view.”
They looked down on McMurdo together. The buildings’ roofs were all metal of one sort or another: ancient corrugated tin, the latest photovoltaic blue gloss, everything in between. Except for a row of six brown dormitories, no two buildings were alike: gleaming blue spaceships, ramshackle wooden shacks, black Quonset huts, open fields of lumber, the Holiday Inn, the docks, the tourist mall, the row of brown dorms, the little Crary Lab, the even littler Chalet next to it, down by the helicopter pad and the shore …
“Have you lived here long?” Wade asked.
“No.”
“What do you do?”
“GFA.”
“GFA?”
The man turned to look at him; Wade saw that the question branded him a newcomer. “General Field Assistant.”
“I see.”
“And you?”
“I work in Washington, for a member of the Senate.”
“Which one?”
“Chase.”
“The one that’s never there?”
“That’s right.”
The man nodded. “You must be here to look into the ice pirates.”
“Yes,” Wade said, surprised. “I am.”
“I’m the one who was in the SPOT train that lost a vehicle.”
“I see…. There seems to be a lot of stuff like that happening.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any idea what might be going on?”
“Me?” The man was amused.
They sat there looking down at McMurdo. “Not a particularly attractive town,” Wade ventured.
“It grows on you.”
“Really?”
The man shrugged. “It’s ugly, but … you can see everything about it. Right there before your eyes.”
As he finished this statement a figure appeared below them: a woman, coming around a rocky knob as she climbed the same trail Wade had. Thick gloss of dark blond hair, long thighs in sky-blue ski tights, rising rhythmically under a black parka, covering broad shoulders. The two men watched her climb. Wade’s companion had hunched forward. She was taking big steps up, in iridescent blue mountaineer’s boots. She looked up and they caught a brief glimpse of blue mirrored sunglasses, broad cheekbones, fine nose, broad mouth. Wade’s eyebrows shot up; a beauty, it seemed, with the shoulders of a rower or weightlifter. Wordlessly the two men stared. And then she was there, stepping easily, breathing easily; “Hi,” she said easily. She had the breezy insouciance that Wade thought of as a cheerleader’s cheeriness; the confidence of an attractive woman, brought up in the American West somewhere. An outdoorswoman.
“Hi,” the two men replied.
Startled, the woman looked again at Wade’s companion. “Oh hi, X. I didn’t see you.”
“Uh huh.”
Uh oh, Wade thought, looking at the two of them. The man was hunched into a kind of boulder.
“Valerie Kenning,” the woman said to Wade, and extended a hand.
“Wade Norton.”
“Nice to meet you. What brings you down here?”
“Looking around,” he said, explaining again about Chase as he rubbed his mittens together.
“Are you cold?” she asked. “Let’s move down just a bit and get out of the wind.”
They all moved down into the lee of the gnarly brown peak. When the man she had called X stood, Wade realized that he was really tall, almost seven feet it seemed. Taller than the woman, but not by a great deal; and the woman was a good bit taller than Wade. X sat down again heavily.
“Aren’t you cold?” Wade asked the woman, noting her relatively thin parka, tights and gloves.
“Why no. Can’t say I am.” She laughed: “A good fat layer I guess.”
“Uh huh,” Wade said doubtfully, glancing at the impassive X. A good fat layer indeed. “What about you?” Wade asked him.
“I’m always cold,” X said shortly.
Wade tried to draw him back out. “You were saying something about how everything in the town is visible?”
X nodded once. “Nothing’s buried. The whole town is right there where you can see it. There’s its power supply, see the fuel tanks up in the gap, and the main generators there under us. There’s the power lines, and the sewer lines, and the sewage treatment facility. Down there you see the raw materials for building, and then all the working shops, the warehouses, the vehicle parking lots. Then all the people stuff takes up just a small part of the space, around the galley and Crary.”
“The stomach and the brains,” Valerie said. “It’s like one of those transparent bodies with all the organs visible.”
X nodded but said nothing. He didn’t want to have a pleasant conversation with her, Wade saw; he was resisting her attempts to be pleasant. She continued to point out features to Wade: the helicopter pad as airport, the harbor and docks still iced over, the mall behind the docks as entertainment district, also in deep freeze until the tour ships arrived. Then the radio building as communications industry, and even a historical district, in the single dot of the Discovery Hut on the point opposite them.
“Can you guess what’s missing?” she asked.
“Police station?” Wade ventured. “Jail?”
“That’s true, very good. But that’s not it.”
“The Navy would come in and be police, if they needed them,” X said darkly. “And they don’t need a jail because they take you away.”
“Hmm,” Wade said. “So there’s no law enforcement here at all?”
“Sylvia is a U.S. Marshall,” X said. “She could deputize people if she needed help locking someone up.”
“There used to be a town gun,” Valerie said, smiling at the memory, “but they were afraid of some winterover going postal, so they had it disassembled and the pieces distributed around town in three or four offices. And now some of the offices have lost their piece.”
She and Wade laughed; X continued to brood. He would not be pleased by her, Wade saw.
“So what’s missing, then?”
“People,” X said.
Val nodded. “Nobody in sight, see?”
Wade saw. “Too cold.”
“That’s right. No one hangs out outdoors. McMurdo looks like that twenty-four hours a day. Occasionally you see people going from one building to the next, but other than that, it always looks like a ghost town from up here.”
“Interesting,” Wade said.
They sat and looked down at the empty-seeming town, which nevertheless hummed and clanked with a variety of mechanical noises. Some vehicles moved, up among the acres of lumber and container boxes.
“Where do you go next?” Wade asked Val.
“I’ve got a Footsteps of Amundsen to guide next week. But first I’m taking a DV out to the Dry Valleys.”
“Oh, that must be me.”
“Really! Well—nice to meet you. It should be a good trip. I’m glad to get the chance to see Barwick Valley, people don’t get to go there very much.”
“So I was told. I still don’t know exactly where it is.”
She pointed at the mountains across the flat sea of ice to the west. “Over there.”
Wade nodded doubtfully. X was now staring at him, and though it was hard to tell with the sunglasses and hood and scarf and all, it seemed he was glaring at him. Perhaps because of this trip with Val. Though of course that was not exactly Wade’s doing. “Where will you go next?” he asked, trying to defuse the look.
X snorted. “GFAs go where they’re told. Although I might be quitting, now that you mention it.” Looking now at Val: “I might be resigning from ASL, so I can take an offer to go out and work for the African oil people.”
“No!” Val exclaimed. “X, are you really?”
“Yes,” he said. “I really.”
“Oh X.” She pursed her lips, shook her head. Wade saw that she didn’t want to talk about it in front of him. X was looking glumly down at the town.
Finally she turned to Wade: “You’re still cold, aren’t you.”
“Yes.” He was shivering hard enough to give his voice a vibrato, almost a trill.
“Well, we should get down. I’ll show you where we’re going on the maps. Also, have you gotten your gear yet?”
“No.”
“I’ll see that you get the good stuff.”
“Great, thanks.”
They stood up. X remained seated, staring at Val with that impenetrable look. Val returned the gaze:
“See you around, X.”
He nodded. “See you around.”
“Nice meeting you,” Wade said awkwardly, aware that he was being used to get out of a confrontation of some sort.
“Nice meeting you too.”
And the big man sat watching them as they descended. Wade took one glance back and saw him there under th
e big wooden cross, hunched over and brooding.
X slouched down the ridge to Mac Town, his feet like two frozen turkeys attached to the end of his legs. His fingers were cold, his pulse sluggish, his heart numb. He went to the galley and caught mid rats. The night crowd was heavy, mostly the old iceheads done with the swing shift, plus some beakers done with their email. X took two Reuben sandwiches and a mug of coffee and sat at one of the empty round tables. First he downed the coffee, holding the cup in his fingers till they burned. Then while he was devouring the second sandwich Ron sat down beside him.
“So what do you say?” Ron said, leaning in toward X with an exaggerated conspiratorial leer.
X swallowed. “I’ll go for it.”
“Good man!” Ron nodded, first in surprise, then satisfaction: “I knew you would.”
“I didn’t.”
Ron grinned his pirate grin.
Abruptly X stood and grabbed his tray. “When do I go?”
“Day after tomorrow. They’ll drop by the Windless Bight station.” This was a private airstrip set beyond Scott Base, a kind of parasite on the two government bases, barely functioning these days. “Get yourself out there, and they’ll pick you up and take you out to their camp in the Mohn Basin.”
X nodded. “I’m gonna go resign.”
He left the galley and walked by Crary to the Chalet. Inside he told Paxman that he was resigning, and Paxman got him the forms to sign with no surprise or objection. It looked like he would not have to explain himself to Jan or Sylvia, as he had feared he would have to. Ever since Helen had resigned midseason and ASL had sued her for breach of contract and lost, it had become one of the options available to disaffected ASL employees. It was burning your bridges, because ASL would never hire you again, that was for sure. But they couldn’t stop you from doing it.
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