by Douglas Falk
The Voyage
www.mascotbooks.com
The Voyage
©2019 Douglas Falk. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, or photocopying, recording or otherwise without the permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-1-64543-038-4
Prologue
Antarctica, January 27th, 1956
Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd stood firm in the blizzard. He wore his practical winter trench coat today instead of the medal-adorned uniform he usually sported at formal occasions—leading his men through the snows deep in Antarctica was anything but a posh dinner party nor was it remotely like a military briefing back home in America. If there was anything at all he had learned after serving thirty years in the U.S. Navy, it was the appreciation of pragmatic leadership.
It’s not about how gallantly the mission is accomplished, but that it is accomplished—without fail.
He waded through the ankle-deep snows with his thick military boots and found himself striding up a small hill, hoping to glance at the wide, desolate landscape. He squinted towards it and looked closely.
Blast…I can’t see a thing.
The snows whirled around him and his men. Despite the observable fact that the sun was in zenith, any prospects of seeing far ahead were abysmal. The blizzard was simply too thick today. He turned around and addressed his men.
“Corporal Needham! Binoculars, if you may!”
A scrawny young man, barely eighteen years of age from what Byrd could estimate, emerged from the ranks and handed his pair of binoculars over to the admiral. Byrd grabbed the black Bausch & Lomb army binoculars and proceeded to look into them.
I’ll be damned. Still not a thing in sight, other than a thick haze of white mist.
He handed the scopes back to the young corporal, knelt to the snow…and reflected.
We have to go further, with or without a clear line of sight.
He gazed upon his platoon, and despaired.
Green boys. I bet most of them have never seen this much snow or ice in their lives combined. Not that I had first-hand experience of polar weather conditions when I was in their age, though…the climate in Virginia is about as mild as they come.
Twenty-eight years had come and gone since his first Antarctic expedition, but he could recall the voyage to the southernmost outpost of the Earth as if it was yesterday. The same ponderings that haunted him back then came crawling back today.
We are not meant to live here. Human life is not suited for this place.
After five polar expeditions during a span over three decades, Byrd’s boyish facial features had started to wax and wane, and his hair had turned to a rather dour shade of grey—but his old sentiments still stood the test of time.
We are not meant to dwell here.
He rose to his feet and tried to push the nostalgic memories away, which surged like shockwaves through his body and soul.
It is not time for me to retire just yet. I have a job to do…one final assignment. The rocking chair can wait.
He ordered the platoon onwards, and they marched through the snowy inferno. They had arrived with the USS Wyandot one month prior. They reached the outskirts of the Ross Ice Shelf and had stayed the night at McMurdo Base. Swiftly thereafter, a hellish long and tiresome walk followed towards the South Pole, which they had reached two days ago.
We ought to build a base here. A base here at the South Pole so that people can come and go safely and stay the night with a roof over their heads and proper floor under their feet, here as far south as south goes. It would be reasonable to name it after Roald Amundsen…as long as we don’t name the encampment in the honour of Robert Falcon Scott, all is well. If you finish second place, you deserve neither award nor glory. You win, or you lose. There is no middle ground.
The orders assigned to him by his superiors were clear and sound, as always. They were to reach the South Pole and thereafter head forward on foot and emerge on the other side of the continent in the area around Queen Maud Land. They were to settle down at the Norwegian military base at the site and await transport back home to the States. Judging by the briefing in Washington where Byrd had been assigned the task, this was to be the very first attempt at traversing Antarctica in human history.
I better not slip up at the finish line.
The platoon marched onwards with all the strength they could muster, and Byrd decided to set up camp after having led his men forward for two miles. Two corporals and a private were in the process of assembling Byrd’s large admiral tent when the snowstorm suddenly appeared to fizzle out. The blowing wind abated, and the few snowflakes that fell from the sky were minuscule. Byrd stood with his arms crossed and watched over the sad attempts by his men trying to assemble his tent, then he turned around and looked out over the plains—the line of sight had improved remarkably just over the course of a few minutes. To his disappointment, what he saw was the same as always.
Same old tundra. Same old flat lands and the ever-extending ice, glaciers, and snow…snow in spades.
Suddenly, he heard a cry from somewhere ahead of him.
“Sir!”
It was young corporal Needham, who stood and gazed with binoculars at his position as sentry about fifty meters ahead of the camp. Byrd waded through the thick snow and cut through it like Moses at the Red Sea with his aging albeit still fit body. He approached Needham.
“What have you seen?”
Needham held the binoculars in his right hand. He was trembling.
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t know.”
“Give me those,” commanded Byrd. Needham handed the binoculars over to him, and he looked in to the optics. “Where should I look?”
Needham, still trembling, pointed at the horizon with shaky fingers. “There. Over there, two o’ clock.”
Byrd squinted and looked directly at two o’clock. He saw nothing but the endless, desolate snowy landmass they had wandered through for a whole month.
“I see nothing,” said Byrd.
He looked through the optics once more, just for safety. And that was when he saw it. He dropped the binoculars, which fell to the ground with a thud. Byrd rubbed his eyes, hoping that what he saw was a mirage…he picked the binoculars up from the snow and looked again.
Dear God. It’s not a mirage. It looks like…looks like…could it be? Sweet Mary, mother of God.
1
Molly Malones, a modest-looking pub situated at Odengatan, might be the archetypical Stockholm bar. The sort of pub that is scarcely attended on working days—but on holidays, the crowds flock. A place where worn-out regular customers in their sixties commingle with youngsters in the mood for a pint of Guinness or Kilkenny, forming an unholy alliance in the quest for intoxication in a comfortable locale. The walls were adorned with picturesque images of the Irish countryside and the emblems of the four provinces of Ireland: Ulster, Connacht, Munster, and above all Leinster with its iconic symbol of the harp—which also happens to be the logotype of the brewing company Guinness.
John took a sip of his glass Leffe Blonde and loo
ked outside the window from the table they were perched. Still, the snow was intense, and degrees below zero Celsius was to be regarded as the new normal.
Every year, still the same damned Swedish winter. And more to come. January just rolled in, after all.
“Damn,” William said in delight as he pushed his finished plate of fish and chips away from him on the table. “Solid food here in this joint. Nourishing.”
“It’s all right, I suppose,” John said calmly. “All right. Tell me now…why it is you’ve brought me here. You do realise that you scared Alma off today with your rantings and ravings? I don’t even know why I’m here, to tell you the truth…but we are friends still, when all is said and done. And I won’t turn a pint of Leffe down…so let’s hear it.”
The atmosphere inside the pub was tense, and the murmur amongst the neighbouring table almost drowned out the words spoken by John—but only nearly. William had gotten the gist of it.
“All right,” said William with a serious look on his face and leant forward over the table towards John. “I will tell you. And you will be convinced. Not tonight, not after just one conversation—but eventually…once you’ve done your own research and unlearned old information and when the passage of time has let the new information sink in. In time you will be convinced, indeed—and not just you, everyone. Everyone in this room, everyone in this country, everyone in Europe…every single person in the world.”
John stared at him with a confused look on his face. What’s with this apocalyptic tone of his? What the hell is he talking about?
William leant even closer to John as the middle-aged couple next to them roared with laughter over a joke they couldn’t hear.
“Have you seen The Matrix, John? You will feel like Neo once he was given the choice by Morpheus to either take the red pill and thus be told about the ugly truth of mankind, and you will have to process it in your own pace. But that comes later—once you’ve taken the red pill and accepted the obvious truth.”
John rolled his eyes.
Another one of William’s grand ideas? Sigh. I wonder what it is this time.
“Was it really necessary to start droning on about this mystical, mind-blowing discovery you’ve made at lunch today? We were supposed to be spending that time by going through the presentation on Huckleberry Finn. Alma didn’t get a word out today with her analysis on how Jim is the essential core in Twain’s story. You cut her off every time with your cryptic gossip-talk about wanting to announce something tonight.”
“I was so excited, John.”
“Okay. Are you surprised that she didn’t turn up to this little shindig?”
“Not really, John. Some people just want their lives to go on as they always have. They want to live their lives like a hamster in a wheel—constantly racing forward in the same direction, destined to eternal confinement in their prisons of their own minds. Alma is as bright as they come and an excellent writer and a gold-star student for sure—but she is one of those people. She isn’t ready for the big leap…she is a blue-pill person. But no matter…it was just you I wanted to see tonight.”
The Matrix references?
John had watched The Matrix recently enough to know what it meant to be labelled a blue-pill person. The blue pill is the polar opposite of the red pill—had Neo chosen the blue pill, instead of learning the truth that artificial intelligence had taken over and governed mankind for decades and that his entire life he thought he had lived was but a simulation in a computer…he would have woken up in his bed, and any memory of meeting the mysterious Morpheus erased, and his faux life would carry on in blissful ignorance just as before.
“Alma is a star, and one of the smartest individuals I’ve ever known. She will save our presentation…whether she is a blue pill, red pill, or purple-pill inclined person. She is the brightest person I’ve ever met in the Frescati campus-circles.”
John drifted away from the present and was thrust back into the past—his mind began to wander back to the day when he first laid eyes upon Alma Kronwall, standing there outside entrance C at Stockholm University, smoking a cigarette. That long, black, flowing hair…she appeared to John as the reincarnation of a classic Hollywood star.
She looks like Audrey Hepburn would have looked like if her hair was longer.
John was over the moon by the fact that Professor Lundström had placed the two of them in the same group along with William in the Literature Studies and Analysis course. It had felt like a gift from above…a golden opportunity granted from the skies, a chance of getting to know her on a personal level.
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever,” said William loudly and effectively yanked John back from his dreams of Alma back to the present.
“Are you going to get to the point yet?” John was starting to feel weary about this drawn-out, theatrical prologue his friend was constructing.
William stared at him with an intense, primal glare as he adjusted his round glasses. “Yes. One last thing, though, to calm the nerves. Be a good lad and order me a shot of whiskey, will you? Speyside Deluxe, if they have it…good old Famous Grouse if not.”
John obeyed and rose to his feet. As he walked to the counter to greet the bartender, he contemplated. What is it he has discovered? What is he so excited about?
William Milton had puzzled him on a regular basis over the span of the six months they had known one another. John had often wondered why the son of a Lockheed Martin chairman would want to become an English teacher. His father was by all accounts wealthy beyond words, and William was set to one day inherit an empire that would essentially turn him into one of the most influential people in the world, should his father’s legacy stay intact once that day came. Becoming an aspiring, underpaid high school teacher did not seem like the most natural next step for someone like that.
But I suppose that some people, like God, work in mysterious ways. He sure is a peculiar one, with a style and cadence of his own…I’ve got to give him that. He’s not a follower, and he does not care what other people think of him. He is a genuine free thinker in a sea of followers. Sheep, as he would call them.
William always used to wax and wane about one visionary idea after the other. He claimed to have circumnavigated the world five years ago with his father on a yacht, and one would think that his lust for adventure had been satiated after such a momentous undertaking. But John noticed no such signs.
He’s always hungry for more, it would seem. Always on a quest for knowledge.
The bartender poured two small glasses of Famous Grouse Smoky Black and placed them on the counter. John grabbed them with both hands, elbowed his way forward in the crowded pub, and put the whiskey shots on the table as he took his seat next to William.
“Okay,” John said calmly. “Tell it to me now. Tell it all and tell it true. No more foreplay.”
William raised the glass of whiskey in the air and downed it all in one fell swoop. “Ahh. That felt good.”
“Tell me now!”
“Okay, I will tell you. Are you ready?”
“I was born ready.”
William leant forward again with a wistful gleam in his eyes.
“Have I mentioned that my father works for Lockheed Martin?”
John didn’t have to think about what to reply. “Yes, of course. Many times, how could I not know? He’s one of the most influential people in the world. They make advanced space and aeroplane mechanics, among other things.”
“In a nutshell, yes.”
“Why did you wonder if I knew?”
William slowly stroked the empty glass of whiskey on the table with his pinkie finger before he spoke.
“About a month ago, my father was approached by a certain…individual. An anonymous man who presented himself as a curious philanthropist, if I remember my father’s words correctly. This individual wanted to invest in a potential project down in Antarctica—you know, the South Pole. He had a plan for a business venture down there and wanted Lockheed Martin to supply him with
material, technology, vehicles, and manpower for the project…in exchange for a substantial sum of money. My father never did tell me the exact figures, but we are probably talking eight or even nine digits here. He also neglected to tell me the exact motives for what the anonymous investor had for setting up shop in Antarctica…but I have my ideas.”
“All right. What happened next?” John’s interest was only mildly piqued. Thus far, the whole affair sounded lukewarm at best.
“Lockheed Martin accepted the offer, and the deal was poised to go ahead…when something unexpected happened. The deal was halted—by the UN.”
John was confused. “The UN? The United Nations?”
“The very same. Do you know of the Antarctic Treaty?”
“Never heard of it. What is it?”
William leaned even closer as the bar patrons around him were roaring with laughter amongst themselves. “A treaty signed in 1959, penned by the United States, the Soviet Union, and pretty much all other major, influential countries on Earth—fifty-three in total, if my memory serves me right. Don’t you think it’s a curious thing? These countries, many of which have been in perpetual conflict and even fought wars against one another…somehow, during all these six decades, they have all gotten along just fine when it came down to this treaty…for sixty years, which is essentially a lifetime. I guess you want to know what they have agreed upon, John?”
John nodded slowly.
“They decided to cut off the continent of Antarctica ever since the day the treaty was signed, and for all the days to come. It’s essentially an untouched landmass under world government quarantine—the actual treaty is a dreadfully boring thing to read…I did power through with it, and I read it all—but amongst all the red tape and the bureaucracy, the purpose of the treaty is clear: Antarctica is to be protected at all costs to prevent independent exploration of the continent, and trespassers will be dealt with in the harshest manner imaginable.”
For the first time during the whole night at Molly Malones, John had begun clamouring to William’s every word. William couldn’t be more pleased that his friend was now paying attention. He smiled wryly and continued.