Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Yet they hauled their sledge over the polar cap until they were only one more week’s walk away from the South Pole. After two months of hauling, and two years of preparation, only a week more to go.

  But they had run too low on food. The amount they had been able to haul was not enough to sustain them at the pace they were keeping. They fell short by about five percent of what they needed. If they had started from the Bay of Whales; if they had learned to ski; who knows. But not on this trip.

  Shackleton recognized this, up there on the polar cap; he did the calculations, and saw clearly what they meant. And yet he was wild for the Pole, he did not want to turn back. He knew Scott would get the next chance, with the route found, and a large group of men to make the try. He knew this would be his only chance.

  But it became clear they could not reach the Pole and survive. As a consolation, in the last week Shackleton fixed on reaching to within a hundred miles of the Pole. The clever Marshall did what he had to as navigator to convince Shackleton that they had done this. But still, in the end it was Shackleton who decided to turn back, when he was ninety-seven miles away. His men’s lives were in his hands, as his life had been in Scott’s six years before. In the tent he wrote in his diary “I must look at the matter sensibly and consider the lives of those who are with me.”

  And so they turned back. They took a final day trip to get as far south as they could before the return, then turned back. What latitude did they reach? I don’t remember.

  But for sure the return journey was a close enough thing to prove that Shackleton had needed to turn back. A half-dozen times on that return they missed death by a hair, and in the end Wild and Shackleton had to make a dash for the Discovery Hut and a hasty return to save Marshall and Adams, an effort that lasted for Shackleton some hundred consecutive hours, this after suffering a complete collapse just two weeks before at the upper end of the Great Glacier. Marshall had saved them during that collapse, and Adams and Wild had carried on throughout, complaining vociferously in their coded diaries about all the others, but persisting, enduring all—growl and go, grin and bear it. And on one of their last desperate nights, as Huntford points out to us, the failing Wild wrote in his diary that Shackleton had that morning “privately forced upon me his one breakfast biscuit, and would have given me another tonight had I allowed him. I do not suppose that anyone else in the world can thoroughly realise how much generosity and sympathy was shown by this: I DO by GOD I shall never forget it. Thousands of pounds would not have bought that one biscuit.” And every word of the entry was underlined.

  And in the end they lived. But they could not have added two more weeks to their trip, no, not two more days, not two hours! It was cut very fine indeed.

  Shackleton returned to England a hero. Some people made note of the presence of mind and sense of values involved in turning back when so close to one’s goal, and they commended the shen-yun of such an act. Most applauded the achievement itself, of ascending the polar ice plateau and getting so far south. At that time it was the closest anyone had been to either of the Poles. As for Shackleton himself, when he got home he said to his wife, “Better a live donkey than a dead lion.” And she agreed.

  Later, in his own final tent, it is possible that Scott reversed this formulation, and decided that it was better to be a dead lion than a live donkey. Certainly the world at large often seems to think so. Of course it is impossible to say for sure if Scott ever thought anything like this. The British mind is an inscrutable thing.

  black white

  rock ice

  The Transantarctic Range is unique—not in its rock, which is the same sort of igneous array found in other mountains—but in its ice. In effect the entire range serves as a dam or a dike, holding back the polar cap. Flying over the range X could see this just as clearly as if looking down at a diorama designed to illustrate the situation. It was a Dutchman’s nightmare: against the south side of the range pressed a sea of white ice, submerging the range nearly to its full height; directly on the other side of the range lay the Ross Sea, ten thousand feet lower; and at every dip in the range the ice was pouring down to the sea, ripping away rock like water tearing open breaks in a levee, until some of the gaps in the range were huge floods of ice, rivers ten and twenty and thirty miles wide. The half-dozen biggest glaciers in the world were all down there one after the next, slicing through the shaved black rock walls and spires that remained above the flood. And as they flew farther south, X saw that sections of the range in the distance were entirely submerged, the ice pouring over and down in a smooth white drop that extended for scores of miles, the dike entirely overwhelmed. Ice Planet at its iciest.

  Their little Twin Otter flew into the gap torn by one of the great ice rivers, and flew up it. This one was the Shackleton Glacier—not as big as the Byrd or the Beardmore or the Nimrod, but very substantial nevertheless. One of the dozen largest glaciers on Earth, and no doubt it would have torn its channel even wider and rivalled the Byrd and the Beardmore for size, were it not for the presence of a rock island blocking the head of the glacier, like a cork sucked into place by the flow and nearly plugging it entirely.

  This rock island was Roberts Massif. As they flew over it X looked out his little side window, fascinated by the rusty bumpy wasteland, a pocked humpty-dumpty shatter of dolerite, dominated by a single transverse ridge that stood above the scraped red rock and smooth bluish ice surrounding it. The massif was about twenty kilometers wide and twenty kilometers long, and on its polar side the ice came rolling in like a high tide, creating several ice bays in the shoreline.

  As their plane descended the smooth curves of the ice ravished X’s eye, as did its bluish tint, which glowed as if the sky’s color had seeped into the white ice and stained it all through. And as the plane landed on a narrow snowplowed airstrip like a long strip of carpet, he suddenly felt happy, for the first time in a long time. Aesthetics as ethics; that was X’s new motto. Whatever was beautiful had to be good.

  From the airstrip the plane taxied bumpily toward an ice bay indenting the shore of the massif, under a fluted red-and-white peak named Fluted Peak. One side of the bay sported a small dock, standing on squat pylons. On the rock shore above this dock clustered a small settlement of solar habitats, like metallic-blue mobile homes—less than a dozen buildings all told. The settlement was no bigger than some of the beaker outposts X had helped to open during Winfly, which was a comfort to him. Surely such a small operation could not be doing any great harm.

  The little Twin Otter stopped next to an oblong fuel bladder, lying on the ice at the end of the dock. When the props had stopped spinning X followed the pilot out the little door and down the steps. Out from under the wing he straightened up, and was greeted by a bearded man in a plaid shirt and Carhartt overalls, approaching hand out, smiling.

  They shook hands. “I am Carlos,” the man said. “Welcome to Roberts Massif.”

  “Thanks,” X said. It was frigid out, and breezy, but the man’s bare hands were warm. He led X to one of the buildings, and in through the meat-locker door. “Pretty windy to be out in shirtsleeves,” X remarked.

  “Oh, yes, Roberts is a windy place. Even when it’s not windy it’s windy.”

  “That’s too bad,” X said with feeling. Wind was the hard part of the cold.

  “Yes, well, you know, the katabatic. Air is always falling off the polar cap just from its own weight, and we are right on the edge of the cap. So it can be perfectly still out on the ice, or down on Shackleton, but never here. We have entered it in the Windiest Town on Earth contest, but so far no reply.”

  “That’s an environmentalist contest though, isn’t it?”

  “Precisely. A great one to win when they finally admit we are the windiest.”

  Carlos, as he told X while heating soup for their lunch, was Chilean. His father had been an officer in the Chilean Air Force, and during one of the periods when Chile and Argentina had been actively trying to substantiate their overlap
ping claims to the Antarctic, he had been stationed on the Antarctic Peninsula. So Carlos had spent the first ten years of his life as a resident of the Chilean stations Arturo Prat and General Bernardo O’Higgins, up in the Banana Belt as he put it, which was somewhat warmer than most of the continent, but notorious for storms.

  “It was a wonderful childhood,” he told X cheerfully. “Wonderful! I can bicycle on ice, I can pilot a Zodiac through anything, I can talk to penguins and skuas. Not to mention the more usual skills. I’m a true Antarctican, one of the few. Most of them are Chileans like me, although there are some Argentinians as well, not as good at it of course. One of my first memories is of the time that their Almirante Brown station burned down, and the old Hero brought its people by on their way out. They were sad, and the commandante had fallen into a loco antartida. And of course now both countries have given up on the occupation program, so there are no Antarctic children growing up anymore, which is also sad, I think. Because it was a great, great childhood. The happiest time of my whole life.”

  “And now you’re out on Roberts Massif.”

  “Yes.” A quick glance from the stove, to see what X meant. “There is opposition to this project, admittedly. But from people ignorant of what we are doing and how we are doing it. This is a clean project, a very clean project, the latest in everything, you will see. Everything has been engineered with massive redundancies at the criticalities. Because of the latest advances in extraction technology, that means it is very safe indeed. A sure thing. Here, there is some of our new stuff out the window now, look.”

  He pointed out the little building’s one window, and X saw a vehicle like a ferry glide down from the high horizon and float across the slope of blue ice into the bay, then slowly up to the dock.

  “A hovercraft. The latest thing, a Hake 1500a.” Something in his grin made it clear he was joking, but X didn’t get it.

  “Wow.”

  Carlos stroked his black beard, which was as dense and fine as seal fur. “Okay, let’s eat quick and go load it, and then we can go out to the drilling site itself. Your work will take you back and forth, but mostly you will be out there, on the ice.”

  The hovercraft was not quite as smooth to ride as it was to watch, but once the pilot and copilot got it up and running, it was at least as smooth as flying a plane; and faster than a boat; and not quite so loud as a helicopter. One set of fans blew air down into the space under the skirts of the craft, lifting the body of it, which they called the tub, off the ice and onto the air cushion; then a big fan set in a tall housing at the back of the craft propelled it forward, kind of like an Everglades boat. Little stripped-down snowmobiles had been attached to outrigger booms on each side of the craft, and usually these machines hung in the air from the booms, but they could be let down and the snowmobile treads run, in order to give the floating hovercraft some traction against a side wind, or a steeper undulation than usual on the ice. These outrigger booms, as they called them, were late additions to the craft, and the pilots were proud of them. It was an older vehicle than X had expected, functional on the inside, well-worn, even battered, which was perhaps the explanation for the joke Carlos had made back at Roberts. X inquired over the roar, and Carlos nodded. “A product of Corrosion Corner,” he replied loudly. “Miami Beach, Florida. Three Hakes cannibalized and rebuilt as one. With improvements.” He grinned.

  The ice flowing past them on either side was a rolling white sea, broken by ferocious-looking shear zones, where for some reason the ice was broken to shards; perhaps a submerged rock reef, or a clash of two ice currents; Carlos shrugged when X asked him. Red flags flying on poles set at kilometer intervals marked their way, and at the base of the poles were round radio transponders, guiding the hovercraft’s automatic pilot; at this point the human pilot and copilot, Geraldo and German, were up and about, refilling their coffee mugs. Previous passes of the hovercraft had blown down the sastrugi en route, so that the craft traveled over a distinct road, dull white through bright white and vice versa, running from flag to flag. As the hovercraft floated along it tilted gently up and down, and sometimes side to side, as they hummed over the big shallow waves of the polar cap, its extremely slight hills and valleys, basins and mounds.

  “There is our camp, straight ahead.”

  A black dot on the sunburnt white horizon.

  “Another ten kilometers, but we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “We’re going that fast?”

  “Yes, look—a hundred kilometers an hour! It is the fastest vehicle on the ice, by a long way. Not quite so fast as helicopters, but it hauls a lot more. And helicopters, you know …”

  “Yes,” X said. He had seen the wrecks on Erebus and in Wright Valley: burnt skeletons.

  “The flying refrigerator, as they say. You talk about criticalities! But this thing, even if it fails you can get out and walk. No crash and burn. Now you can see the main building, just showing. It’s a very little camp, you see.”

  Geraldo and German took over the controls and brought the hovercraft slower and slower into its parking lot, next to a fuel bladder and a warehouse. Carlos saw the look on X’s face, and laughed. “Ah good, I see you’re going to like this place, eh? Good man.”

  The drilling station was even smaller than the supply depot on Roberts Massif. It was manned for the moment by Carlos, Geraldo and German, two Malaysians, a Namibian and a Zimbabwean. All of them greeted X in a friendly way, looking up at him from their seats in the station’s common room and grinning as one of the Malays said, “We can get you to do the work on the top of the derrick!”

  After a ceremonial hot chocolate, Carlos took X around the facility to show him what they had. Carlos now wore a thick parka over his Carhartts, X noticed; it was really cold out here, even though the wind was not as stiff as at Roberts. As soon as they got back outside X asked, “Where’s Ron?”

  “Oh,” Carlos said, looking at him. As always with people outdoors in Antarctica, sunglasses kept him basically expressionless. “You have not heard? Ron was let go.”

  “Let go?”

  “Yes. We had to fire him. I don’t know how well you knew Ron, but, well …” He shrugged. “He had ideas about how things would work out here that were not right.”

  “Hmph. Well … I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  Ron, the emperor of Antarctica. He had been so pleased to be quitting ASL and coming out here, and no doubt he had thought he would be secret boss of the system here as in Mac Town. X had no doubt he had done things that justified firing him. Still, to actually do it … It was hard to believe that anyone had had the guts. ASL had been trying to ignore Ron’s abuses for years, simply to avoid the confrontation that these folks had taken on within weeks of hiring him. Which must have made Ron even angrier. He’d burnt his bridges behind him to make this move, and now he was fired and presumably back home in Florida somewhere, stewing with rum and resentment. It was a creepy thought.

  X turned his attention to Carlos again, who was leading him to the derrick and the drilling rig underneath it. Everything in the camp constellated around this derrick, a tall spindly structure much like the classic configuration of oil derricks from the very beginning, although this one had a substantial gantry standing next to it, a tall heated chamber, Carlos said, where the coupling of drills and pipeline units was accomplished. The technology incorporated powerful new ice borers with oil extraction techniques learned in the North Sea. Much of the work was automated, of course. X would be learning a variety of the jobs that remained for humans to do; not because he was to be a general field assistant, Carlos was quick to add, but because everyone on station was a generalist, by necessity. “It’s the best way—there are a lot of jobs to be done, and not very many people to do them.” This looked right to X; the station was very small, the galley a single stove and a sink without running water, in an old blue beaker box that also served as meeting room and coms center. A Jamesway next door was the dorm, and for those who disliked the dry he
at and noise of its Preway heater there were some tents staked out on the hard snow. Those, and a few heated and unheated warehouses, and a yellow bulldozer and a crane, and some forklifts in a shed, and a machine and carpentry shop, and a dozen big solar and piezoelectric panels in an array to the north—and that was it.

  “This is just an exploratory station, you understand,” Carlos said. He took X into one of the heated sheds while they were talking, and opened a small freezer and took out a chunk of ice. He flicked on a cigarette lighter taken from one of his inner pockets, and applied the flame to the chunk of ice; after a moment blue flames flickered off the top of it.

  “Whoa,” X said.

  “This is methane hydrate. There is a lot of it under us, at the bottom of the ice cap. If we find there is enough of it, then they may decide to expand, and drill for extraction. We are also evaluating the possibility of oil, of course, but that is secondary. The methane hydrates are the thing.”

  “And what are they, again?”

  “They are single molecules of methane—natural gas, you know—trapped in crystalline ice cages. They only form under high pressure, but when they do form there is a lot of gas there, as much as thirty liters of gas per liter of sediment. Of course there is a great deal of natural gas in the world, but for the southern countries that have no oil, and are crippled by debts to the North, if they could find even gas supplies of their own it would be very helpful.”

  “But can gas be transported by tankers?”

  “It isn’t how they do it. But there are new pipelines now, flexible and unbreakably strong, designed to lie under the surface of the ocean. It’s possible to run pipelines directly from here to South America and southern Africa. The materials are fantastic, they’re made of meshes like Kevlar, and include plastics grown in soy plants. The pipes have laser pigs, insulation, everything. Fantastic pipe. And so deep underwater nothing will disturb them. So these new technologies make methane a more useful fuel. And burning these methane hydrates could actually help the global climate situation. You see, if the polar caps melt, like we see them starting to, then this methane below us will be released into the atmosphere, and kick off a greenhouse warming that makes the one we have now look like nothing. We think now that some of the great rapid climate warmings of the past were caused by the release of methane hydrate deposits. So it’s possible we can capture this gas, and burn it for our own power, and reduce greenhouse gases at the same time. It’s very elegant in that way.”