“Shouldn’t we keep going?” Wade asked.
Carlos shook his head. “We need food to stay warm. Roberts isn’t going anywhere.”
So he sawed blocks of snow, and Wade shoveled them up to X, who carried them over to a curving wall built around the south side of the Skidoos, protecting them from the breeze. The big blocks had the consistency and feel of Styrofoam, and were not much heavier.
Then they sat in the lee of the wall while Carlos set up the Primus stove, a skeletal little piece of equipment that obviously came from the dawn of the industrial age. Wade watched in appalled fascination as the physics of Ice Planet were again revealed: Carlos applied the flame of a lighter to a pool of stove fuel under the cooker, a move that should have caused a small explosion, and the fuel lay there under the flame, inert, until after a time it flickered bluely, like the burning brandy on a crêpe Suzette. “Incredible,” Wade said. “Not possible.”
Carlos glanced at him. “Yes. A cold day.” He had recovered from the first shock of his station’s destruction, and was now calm and unhurried, even somewhat cheerful; certainly he did not appear to be feeling the dread that chilled Wade’s gut. He jammed snow into a pot, and began melting it over the growing flames of the stove, and got packets of lemonade powder and soup ready. A pot of snow melted down to only a third of a pot of water, and when that was boiling Carlos made mugs of hot lemonade and soup. Several pots of snow were transformed over time into dehydrated stew, hot chocolate, and finally mud-thick coffee. The chunks in the stew did not fully rehydrate, so that they tasted like bits of chalk, but Wade did not complain; he had discovered with the first mouthful that he was ravenous, and the stew tasted fine. The chalky bits just gave it some needed texture.
After the meal they packed up. Wade felt considerably warmer, from the stomach outward. Carlos checked the radio and GPS again, and though the radios were still out, apparently some of the GPS satellites were coming back online, for he got a brief fix before the system crashed again. “About three hours more,” he declared. “Not long.” They started the Skidoos—a moment of great fear to Wade, followed by relief—and took off again. Wade followed Carlos as always, impressed by the man’s calmness at lunch. It was comforting to be out here with a local.
And there they were again in their row, Carlos, Wade, then X, chuntering across the hard-packed firn. Occasionally they passed some of the new snow dunes people talked about, areas with fields of crescent dunes marring the smoothness of the cap, the snow looking just like sand, and the dunes like a very pure part of White Sands in New Mexico. Up close these dunes were much more textured and sastrugilike than any sand would be, like Georgia O’Keeffe stylized dunes, Wade thought, or some kind of fractalized hyper-realist hallucination. But the hovercraft road avoided going directly through any of these.
All too soon the cold began to gnaw again at Wade’s knees and face and hands. He felt more clearly than he ever had the struggle between heat and cold in his body, a kind of war fought on many fronts, with differing success depending on exposure. His core heat was definitely there, Still radiating as a result of the hot food and drink, sending out reinforcements to fight the encroachment of cold on the distant fronts of the extremities. Out there the battles were being fought capillary by capillary.
And lost, at least on the farthest fronts. Not in his torso; but away from that furnace it was a matter of slow ache, loss of feeling, numbness. Carlos called a short stop to help them fight the fight, and with the engines still running they stomped around and danced and did jumping jacks and Pete Townshends, and kneaded their sore butts and excruciated right thumbs. New heat was sent out from stomachs to the distant fronts. Then they were off again.
The next time they stopped it was to refill their fuel tanks, a very cold operation in itself. Then off again, and another long interval of snowmobiling and thumb pain and getting cold. The cold penetrated everywhere, until Wade could not drive as well as he had at the start, awkward though he had been then, because of the stiffness of his cold arms.
He was considering speeding up to Carlos and waving him down for another session of warm-up exercises, and perhaps a hot drink, when stopping became a moot point. His engine sputtered, ran, sputtered, ran, sputtered, died. The Skidoo skidded to a halt. Carlos looked back, hearing or otherwise sensing that something had changed, and as he turned, his vehicle also slowed and stopped. X coasted up next to Wade, shaking his head. They were out of gas.
“We’re close,” Carlos said to Wade. The green flags marking the hovercraft route were numbered, apparently, and the last one had been Number 10, so they were only ten kilometers out. The rusty mountains marking the horizon ahead were Roberts Massif. Very soon the station would appear over the horizon. They could ski, or, if Wade did not want to ski, walk on crampons.
“I’ll try skiing,” he said. Ten k was not too bad; just over six miles. Before his arrival in Antarctica he would have laughed at such a distance, perhaps five minutes on the highway; how bad could it be? But now he had the memory of his walk with Val up Barwick Valley to tell him just how long ten k would feel. In fact the knowledge still tweaked a little in his left knee. It was a significant distance. But he could do it.
And they were beyond choices now. So he changed his bunny boots for heavy cross-country ski shoes, chilling his feet and hands thoroughly in the process. “Damn.” It was difficult if not impossible to hurry any of these operations, no matter how much he tried. In fact it took an effort to manage them at any speed.
He had tried cross-country skiing a few times before, and had fallen a lot. He would have to get better fast. X’s skis looked like popsicle sticks at the bottom of his massive tree-trunk legs. It was hard to believe they would support him. X did not look convinced either; he shook his head at the sight. Curious how with their faces behind ski masks and sunglasses, so much was yet communicated. Body language indeed.
When they were all set they stood on their skis, Wade and X propped on their poles. Like a trio of bank robbers on ice, anonymous and insect-eyed. The sunlight prismed on their photovoltaic gloves and overalls and parkas, and Wade was grateful for their warmth, but still his fingertips, nose, ears and feet were cold, and getting colder.
But as Carlos pointed out, the work of skiing would cure that. He took off, wearing a backpack that contained much of what was detachable from the snowmobiles. Wade followed.
X hit a bump and fell like a tree. As if struck by his bow wave, Wade fell too. The snow was hard and his elbow hurt. Uneasily he got up again, faster than X, who was very awkward on his too-short skis. Carlos was skiing ahead effortlessly. When he looked back and saw his fallen comrades, he made a swooping turn and came back to them. “Follow me, I’ll find the flattest part of the track and it will be easier.”
So they followed him and it was easier, although sometimes Wade’s skis got caught on two sides of a little sastrugi ridge and drifted apart no matter what he tried. He fell often, and so did X. The sheer work of getting back to his feet tired him. He began to sweat, overheated everywhere except at his frozen tips, which stubbornly continued to freeze. He remembered encountering the phrase “penile frostbite” in an article on runners’ problems in wintertime. Hopefully the hot blood in his body core would warm that and all other chilled extremities, while the cold blood in the extremities would cool the hot core of him, like water from a radiator. But it didn’t seem to be working; he was too hot and too cold at one and the same time. He struggled on.
It was some comfort to see X falling as often or more often than he did. The two of them went down like bowling pins. After one fall, as they were both getting up and pushing off again, X said, “Too bad we don’t have those spacesuits the trekker groups wear.”
“What do you mean?” Wade said. “There’s better gear than this?”
“Yes.”
“There’s better gear than this and I’m not wearing it?”
“Ha.”
“Are there super DVs that get better stuff?”
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“You tell me. Probably so. But what we’ve got is normal government issue, and you can buy gear that’s better. This stuff can’t convert piezoelectric energy from your walking into heat, it can’t melt you water, it can’t feed you—”
Wade fell again. “Can’t ski for you.”
“Can’t ski, that’s right. Nothing.”
“Why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why don’t we have the best stuff?”
“Expensive! And what we have is adequate for what we’re supposed to be doing out here. We’re not supposed to be out here skiing around. This is trekker stuff.”
“So if Val were here we’d be okay.”
“Probably so.”
They skied on side by side. The snow got smoother, and they glided along without mishap for a while. Carlos was a black mark on the horizon ahead of them; Roberts Massif was bigger, and they could see right to the ice shoreline at the foot of the rock, where the station would soon be visible to them, though they hadn’t spotted it yet. Then X said to Wade, “If that’s blue ice then we’re fucked.”
“How so?”
“It’s as hard as rock, and slick. Bumpy but slick.”
“Oh.” Wade’s heart sank. His only attempt at ice skating had broken his tailbone. He had had to sit on an inflated donut for three months.
“Shit. That’s blue ice all right.”
They came up to Carlos, who was on the last peninsula of white snow, sticking into a sea of blue ice.
“I can’t ski ice,” X said.
“Few people can,” Carlos replied. “We’ll have to put on crampons and walk.”
So they sat down and took off their skis, got their boots and crampons out of their daypacks, changed shoes for boots, strapped on crampons, repacked the daypacks, stood up, and walked on with skis and one ski pole over one shoulder—one hand for them, the other hand poling the ice with a ski pole. All parts of this operation were bitterly, numbingly cold.
But walking with crampons was absurdly secure after skiing, like walking on flypaper. The crunch of the ice underfoot reminded Wade of twisting ice trays back home, and for an instant he was desperately homesick for a world where ice came in one-inch cubes. The change of footgear had chilled him so deeply that his legs were shaking. His thighs felt like jelly. And the crampons quickly tired his feet and ankles, for they made him too secure on the ice. From too little traction to too much; nothing comfortable.
“We’re almost there,” Carlos called back to them.
“He starts saying that at around the halfway point of any trip,” X warned Wade. “He’s just like Val that way.”
“Ah.”
X was narrating his journey to himself; from the snatches Wade heard it sounded as if an unseen sports commentator of great cynicism was peering out from inside X’s ski mask. Past a gentle rise, snow returned to cover the bare blue ice. After a short conference they sat down and changed back into skis, which was welcome in one sense, as the weight of the skis over his shoulder was becoming oppressive to Wade; but the gear change chilled him even further. His hands would barely work. Carlos had them eat chocolate bars. Feeling famished, Wade bit into a frozen bar and what felt like a rock in the chocolate jolted a tooth filling with excruciating pain: “Ow ow shit ow!”
“Watch out for the frozen raisins!” X and Carlos warned together.
“Oh thank you very much!”
“Sorry. They’re like pebbles when they freeze.”
“Now you tell me.”
“I hate this kind of chocolate, for that very reason.”
Gloves back on, hands numb and clumsy. Frigid air, cutting right to the bone. Up and on. It seemed to Wade that he could feel parts of his mind begin to numb like his fingers; the outer layers of the cortex, the delicate lobes behind the nose, all chilling and shutting down. A pure white plain in a clear blue sky. Ups and downs, thankfully mild. Skiing as badly as ever, or worse. Over them the lowering sky. Looking toward the sun, off to his left, made it like noon, and the snow blazed in a mirrorflake fan. Looking straight ahead across the sunlight made it dawn, the sastrugi thrown in high relief by countless small shadows. Looking away from the sun made it midnight, the layered grainy bedding of the snow darkly lustrous. The angle of light the only landscape. Or rather the landscapes were all boot-high, so that they Brobdingnagged over them, left, right, left, right, in the cold one could never adapt to, the frozen air spiking up the nose like a dangerous drug directly into the brain, a drug needed but feared, the inescapable addiction to oxygen now something like a fatal necessity. Colder and colder, no matter the skiing. More parts of the brain regressing, losing the ability to talk or even to think, all the words fading out like stars at dawn. Ahead the rock seemed closer, and he saw gleams of color at the shoreline; the station, presumably. The sight made Wade feel dully better. They were going to make it.
Then the snow tilted down toward the massif, and he could pole along without moving his legs, a blessed relief. But then the snow turned to white ice, and he was sliding down without pushing at all—downhill skiing, in other words, and faster and faster, as if on a bike without brakes. His skis chattered, and he bent his knees and crouched, poles tucked under his arms and head down in a grim parody of real skiers, until an unseen bump up-ended him and he landed on his butt again, and slid down the slope almost as fast as before, spinning on his back like a cartwheel. His skis had detached and disappeared, but his ski poles were still flailing around him, so he grabbed the end of the left one with his right mitten as it bounced over him, and twisted on his side and jammed the point against the ice. It barely cut a line but it did slow him down a little, scraping like chalk on a blackboard, and by and by he was sliding slowly enough to jam his boot edges onto the ice without immediately breaking his legs. Eventually he bobbled to a halt, perhaps a hundred meters out from the hovercraft and a little wharf sticking out from the rock onto the ice. After that little shoves of his mittens slid him down a gentle incline, ten meters at a shove. Behind him Carlos and X were tromping down the slope upright, having stopped to take off their skis for the final descent. Wade waved at them weakly, and they cheered his survival.
Their pleasure was short-lived, however, because Roberts Station was destroyed—knocked apart and burned. They stepped onto rock and climbed up to the edge of the wreck, Carlos shouting curses in Spanish again but almost absently now, as he began to probe the ruins in search of the equipment it would take to keep them from freezing. A hard wind keened over the rock and they tottered like wooden men, finding nothing, the ruins revealing how small the buildings had been, like trailers in a trailer park, and now all black sticks and lumps. “Where is everyone?” X croaked over and over. Wade stumbled with every step, his boots would not rise high enough.
“They’re gone,” Carlos said. “Come on, let’s get in the hovercraft.”
The hovercraft was out on the ice some six or eight feet from the wharf, pushed out there apparently by the blast that had leveled the station. X found a piece of singed paneling and carried it over and dropped it on the gap as a gangplank, and they staggered across it onto the deck of the craft, and fell through the door into the cabin. It was as cold inside as out. Wade could barely move. Carlos banged open a cabinet and lifted out a green Coleman stove, and dropped it on the shelf under the windows and slapped it open. Painstakingly he screwed a gas cannister onto the coupling at the side of the stove, then fumbled in his parka for his lighter and applied it to a burner, turning a dial on the stove and flicking the lighter repeatedly; the scraping flint was a primeval sound. Then with a whoosh they had fire.
10
Roberts Massif
It was Misha’s night to cook again, and the heavenly smells of corned-beef hash filled the yellow Scott tent. They wolfed down the food and then slowed down, moving easefully into the dishwashing and Drambers phase of the evening. Graham Forbes sat back taking wet dishes from Harry and drying them, while a recumbent Geoffrey Michelson tapped the McM
urdo code on his wrist phone to make their nightly sked coms with Randi.
No Randi, however, on this night. No Mac Town at all. Static all up and down the dial, in fact.
“What’s this,” Michelson said, looking at his phone.
“Try the box,” Misha suggested, indicating the big old radio in the corner of the tent.
“A clever idea.” Michelson turned on the radio, clicked the dial to the McMurdo frequency, tried a call. Again, nothing but static. Graham put down his dishtowel and leaned over to inspect the radio.
“Something odd going on,” Michelson said.
“More than something,” Misha noted with a puzzled expression. “They’re different systems. For both of them to malfunction at once—” He shook his head, sipped his Drambers.
“You’re suggesting something more than accident?” Michelson asked.
“It doesn’t look like an accident to me.”
“But what?”
“Don’t know. Sabotage?”
The four of them thought it over, looking at each other.
“The satellite links are vulnerable,” Misha said. “You only have to train a tracking dish on a satellite, and send a stronger signal at it than the one it’s supposed to be getting, and you’ve captured it.”
“But there are so many satellites up there,” Michelson objected. “The system is massively redundant, I would have thought.”
Harry and Misha were both shaking their heads.
“There’s a lot of satellites because there’s a lot of traffic,” Misha said. “And they all are part of various overlapping networks, with a lot of carriers and hub satellites transferring messages before they’re sent back down to Earth. So if you had your dishes down here, and targeted the right hubs as they came over this area, you could knock down a lot of the system.”
“Especially down here,” Harry said. “There aren’t that many fully polar satellites.”
Antarctica Page 33
