Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  This was the archway, essentially a long metal-covered tunnel, which when built had stood on the surface of the snow in front of the dome, which had been much taller then. As they walked inside, Keri explained that this station had been built in the early 1970s, and had been sinking under the accumulated snow ever since. The tall inner curve of the archway above them was completely covered by a fuzz of hoarfrost, the ice crystals large and flaky and arranged in big chrysanthemum shapes, all mashed together. To their right as they walked the tunnel was jammed with one big box after another, like meat lockers again, or containers from a container ship. The passageway was squeezed against the white wall to the left. They walked on hard-packed snow. It got darker fast. They passed a short pole with a knob on top, stuck in the floor; this was the current geographical south pole, the thing itself, such as it was.

  They came to a crossroads of tunnels. To the left a short tunnel led to two large doors that met imperfectly, revealing snow behind. “The old entrance to the station,” George said. To the right an ice-bearded low tunnel led in to the darkness under the old dome.

  They followed their flashlight beams down the tunnel into the center of this chamber. At the high point of the dome a round circle of open air let in some light. The underside of the dome was coated with a fur of ice crystals so thick that the hexagonal strut system of the old fullerdome was only suggested, as if it were a feature of the crystallization process. The effect for Wade was of some kind of immense igloo cathedral, the filtered light pouring down onto three or four large red-walled boxes, buildings that looked like two-story mobile homes, with exterior metal staircases like the new station’s, and metal landings outside their second-story entrances.

  Keri and George led Wade through each of these buildings in turn. They were all much the same; narrow halls connecting tiny rooms, all packed with boxes, or empty chairs, or filing cabinets. One upstairs room had a pool table in it. “Come on to the galley,” Keri said as Wade stared at this lugubrious sight. “That was the real place to hang out.”

  They went out onto a metal landing and downstairs, then across to another refrigerator door, and in through a coat room to the darkened galley. In the flashlight beams long shadows barred the walls. The narrow room looked much too small to feed a whole station. One side was open to the old kitchen; stoves and ovens and refrigerators were still there. Only a few holes in the cabinetry marked where scavenged items had been taken away, to the new station or elsewhere.

  “They just left all this?” Wade asked.

  “As you see. By the time they built the new station, this was all old stuff, breaking down. Or it wouldn’t fit, or wouldn’t match the energy requirements. It was too much trouble to integrate it. And too expensive to haul away. Actually they were going to dismantle this whole station and dome, but it was too expensive. So here it is. Someday we’ll break it all down and spot it to Mac Town and they can use it there, or put it in the dump ship and landfill it.”

  “Or put it in a museum,” George said.

  “But meanwhile,” Wade said, “someone else appears to be taking things.”

  The two men were silent.

  “Right?”

  “Well,” Keri said. “We don’t know what’s happening. Some items have disappeared from here, it’s true. But it may be a kind of, I don’t know, a kind of game being played.”

  “A prank, you mean?” Wade asked.

  “Something like that. We’re not sure. But it doesn’t make sense any other way. The stuff being taken is not that useful. Old refrigerators. Stoves. Boxes of files.”

  “Hmm,” Wade said.

  “It just doesn’t make sense. Unless it’s a game.”

  “Would people play games like that?”

  “Well …”

  “Most of this stuff happened during winterover,” George explained.

  Keri nodded. “During the winters there are only seventy people here. They’re all evaluated by ASL and NSF ahead of time, of course, and they spend two weeks together to see how they’ll do. But naturally there are some times when people get down here who are not exactly, ah, normal. Or maybe they start normal, but during the winters here they, uh …”

  Wade nodded. Next to a restroom door was a shelf of condiments, still filled with boxes and bottles of sugar, salt and pepper, creamer, hot chocolate powder, tea bags, mustard. Heinz ketchup. A strawberry syrup bottle with a round Haz-Mat sticker on it. All the contents frozen for sure, as it was bitterly cold.

  “I was at the last Thanksgiving dinner they had in this galley,” George said, “and it was about a twelve-course meal, the complete Thanksgiving feast, with all the trimmings. We smoked the turkey in an old fifty-five-gallon steel drum, right outside that door. Best Thanksgiving I ever had.”

  On this nostalgic note they left the dark freezer of a building, and tromped over ice flowers back out to the archway, and the blaze of light at its end. As they walked toward this light at the end of the tunnel it grew brighter and brighter.

  After all the black little rooms, the infinite white plain of the polar cap was too bright to see properly—shockingly sunny, windy, vast, all under a low blue sky. Like a geometrical plane. Like the frozen bottom of a world. It was hard to reconcile the two places, in and out. “They built themselves a cave,” Wade said. To comfort themselves on Ice Planet.

  “More an igloo,” George said. “It was brighter then.”

  Still—something to hunker down into, to make the place habitable. Now replaced by the long blue metallic flying wing of the current station, like any postmodern hotel anywhere. We are here!

  And that was that. The old station, the empty spaces in it where some unremarkable things had disappeared. Nothing more to see. Obviously Keri and George and the others here did not think there was any purpose to his visit. Professional investigators from the NSF and the National Transportation Safety Board and the FBI had already been down to investigate the hijacked SPOT vehicle. It stood to reason a Senate aide couldn’t do anything they hadn’t already. So Keri’s looks said, and George’s too, to an extent; and Wade did not know exactly how he would argue the point, if he had cared to. Phil Chase had sent him, and that was reason enough; and more power, perhaps, than these men suspected. But he had to do more than be Phil’s roving eyes if he wanted to exert the power.

  But what? This damned place was balking him; it was a kind of no-place, a blank on the map. No reason to be here except for the abstract fact of the spin axis of the planet, which was a pretty strange reason once one thought about it. Ridiculous in fact. He glanced out a window at the ubiquitous view. It was like a minimum security prison for affluent white-collar criminals, or a spaceship for real. But even if it had been on a trip to a paradise planet Wade would have had to refuse the trip, to avoid dying of boredom en route. There was no interest to it at all, except perhaps for the human factor.

  But the scientists rushed by, obviously very busy, and, from what Keri had said, involved in subjects too esoteric to explain to mere mortals. And the support crew were working, or sitting in the galley in small groups, talking among themselves. Insular.

  Wade went to the coms room. Two young women were looking at screens; one looked up at him. “Keri said I could get an email line?” Wade asked.

  “You sure can,” one said, standing up. Strong southern accent, short, quick in her movements. “I’m Andrea,” she said. “How long are you gonna be here?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re on a DV tour?”

  “Kind of,” Wade said. “I’m down from Washington.”

  “That makes it a DV tour.”

  Wade nodded, and as she led him down the hall to a terminal in the personal coms room, he told her a bit about his visit.

  “Oh, the old dome, yeah. Good idea.” Meaning not a good idea; meaning there were better ideas. “Did they show you the utilidor?”

  “No.”

  She shook her head. She looked at him curiously; she wanted to help him, he thought
. Either just to show him their place, or something more, he couldn’t tell. She had been noticeably blank-faced about Keri. “We’ll have to show you the utilidor, at least.”

  Then the door to the coms room burst open and the other woman said “Viktor’s here, Viktor’s here,” pronouncing the name in a way that somehow made the k spelling clear.

  “Who’s Viktor?” Wade asked.

  “Oh, he’s our Russian friend,” Andrea said. “He lives out here and comes by occasionally, he’s great.”

  “He lives out here?”

  “Yeah, come on,” and as she headed down to the rec room Wade followed. She explained over her shoulder: “He skis around the polar cap between Vostok and Dome C and the Point of Inaccessibility, and here and the oil stations. Wherever. He’s got his sled filled with everything he needs and just skis around, or puts up his sail and sails.”

  “Where does he resupply?” Wade asked, thinking of the disappearances.

  “Well, there are ways. You know Vostok is closed now, but they left everything behind, and so he drops in occasionally and takes things.”

  “Ah ha! I’d like to meet this Viktor.”

  “Yes you would.” She leaned her head into the rec room and shouted, “Viktor is here!” and there was a cheer from inside. “Come on, he’ll be down at Spiff’s place.”

  She led him to the outer door of the first module, and Wade followed her outside with his parka barely zippered and his hood still on his back; the cold’s snap to his head almost knocked him down the stairs. Andrea was running ahead of him toward the quiet zone, and Wade saw she wasn’t wearing a parka at all, but was in the same light clothes she wore in the office. “Aren’t you cold?” he cried out as he followed her.

  “Why?”

  She led him to a pickup truck and unplugged it from its battery warmer and drove him across the runway to the Dark Sector, where a little rectangular building stood on stilts in the midst of a network of poles and lines. They went up stairs and into one of these buildings, Andrea shouting, “Is he here yet?”

  “I am here!” boomed a voice from inside the room.

  “Viktor!”

  In the room, walled everywhere with big machines, a group of people stood around a tall bulky man, dressed in blue photovoltaic clothing the same color as the new station’s exterior. Several conversations were going on at once, but most were listening to Viktor give his news:

  “Yes, I have big new project going! Hello, Andrea! Hello! And here is the senator we have visiting, I see! Hello, Wade! Yes, a new project with the Sahara mitigation people. You know they have a very great problem with spread of the Sahara, and I have designed a plan to help, and have just gotten a grant to start. You know,” he said to Wade, “how there is Lake Vostok underneath Vostok Station—a freshwater lake at the bottom of the ice, with as much water in it as your Lake Ontario.”

  Wade said, “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes, it is one of the biggest bodies of fresh water in the world. And under four kilometers of ice, so the water down there is under most enormous pressure. Drilling through the ice cap is of course no problem these days, and now the materials scientists at Chevron are making flexible pipelines, a Kevlar and soy plastic mesh, very strong, very light, and very cheap! And so we are going to drill down to Lake Vostok, and pipe the water in a direct pipeline to sub-Sahara desert border!”

  “No!” several exclaimed. “You’re kidding!”

  “Impossible!” one of them declared, with a grin that said he was only egging Viktor on.

  “No, Spiff! Is possible! Is quite possible! The height of the ice cap and its pressure on the water will be such to drive it all the way to the equator. Just a few pumps near the end to keep the flow going. The pipe will sink to a few hundred feet under the sea, and come up in Gabon. After that, fresh water for free! The Saharan mitigation group is very excited.”

  “Then when the lake is drained the weight of the ice will melt more water,” Spiff suggested, again egging him on.

  “No, no. Is not possible, I’m afraid. Not possible. But it will take years to spread Lake Vostok over the Sahara, years.”

  Spiff extricated little tumblers from a cabinet of scientific equipment. Viktor pulled a large glass bottle of vodka from his backpack and poured shots all around. Everyone gulped down a toast, except for Wade, who sipped his. Viktor explained the details of his new project to Spiff, who was saying things that would force Viktor to say either “Is possible” or “Is not possible.” Wade had heard other people around the station using these two phrases earlier, and now he heard someone else insisting to a man sitting on the desk, “Is possible, is very possible.”

  Viktor came over to Wade. “So you work for Senator Chase. That is good, I admire him very much. The nomads will inherit the Earth, this is what I say.”

  Wade nodded. “Sometimes it seems so.”

  “What is it like to work for him? Do you ever see him?”

  “I very rarely see him,” Wade admitted. “Perhaps twice a year.”

  “Twice a year! Very good! This is like an equinox.”

  “More like the solstices,” Wade said, which caused Viktor to grin and nod very rapidly. No doubt he was more aware of the difference between solstice and equinox than anybody on the planet.

  Spiff came over and joined them, and Viktor gave him a hug with one arm. “My crazy astronomer friend. You are jealous because finally there is a project on the ice crazier than yours!”

  “I think I still win,” Spiff said, smiling.

  Viktor laughed: “Indeed so.” He looked at Wade: “Do you know Spiff’s work?”

  “No.”

  “He is the greatest astronomer in the world.”

  Spiff rolled his eyes.

  “Is not possible,” someone else around them said.

  “Exactly,” Spiff said.

  “From here Spiff studies the northern sky,” Viktor told Wade. “He is part of famous AMANDA project. They use the whole body of Earth to catch neutrinos. The neutrinos that fly through Earth from the north mostly miss everything completely and fly right through without obstruction, am I right, Spiff? Weakly interacting particles, like me. But sometimes they hit atoms from Earth and knock off muons, and muons fly into this ice cap from underneath and cause a particular blue light, Cherenkov light, yes? So they use the planet for their filter, and the ice cap for their lens, and they record the blue lights with strings of photomultiplier tubes extending one, two kilometers down. These tubes are like lightbulbs in reverse—they take in light and put out electricity—but what lightbulbs! They amplify incoming signals by a hundred million times, isn’t that what you said, Spiff? And from that they determine how many neutrinos, and even where in the sky they came from.”

  “You’re-kidding,” Wade said. “Impossible.”

  “No, no! Is possible, is quite possible!”

  Spiff was laughing at Wade. “Andrea,” he said across the heads in the room, “isn’t the dance starting soon?”

  “Yeah!”

  “You know me,” Viktor said to Spiff, “I always arrive in time to take a shower.”

  “Oh yeah, of course. Here, here’s my key. I’ll see you at the dance.”

  Viktor took the key and left. The party in Spiff’s office went on without him; people were getting ready for the dance, Spiff explained to Wade.

  “The dance?” Wade asked.

  “Hadn’t you heard?” He shook his head. “Keri probably didn’t think to tell you. It’s October 12th, you know.”

  “A Columbus Day dance?”

  “No, no, this is the day Lake Bonney camp was first established.” He cracked up at the look on Wade’s face. “Not really. The Polecats, the band here, just want to try to convince NSF to make ASL send them to Ice-stock, and so they’re putting on a dance every Saturday night for a while. This one’s a special one because Viktor’s here.”

  He asked what Wade was doing at the Pole, and Wade tried to explain. Spiff nodded and took him to his
desk for a vodka refill. “They took you into the old pole station, did they?”

  “That’s right. Very interesting place.”

  “Uh huh. Did they take you into the utilidor?”

  “No, what’s that?”

  Spiff nodded. “Did they tell you about how the Rodwell works?”

  “No.”

  “Lake Patterson?”

  “No.”

  “The buried Here?”

  “Buried Here?”

  “They didn’t take you anyplace else, did they?”

  “No.”

  “Is not possible.” Spiff shook his head, thinking it over. “They’re afraid of fingies like you. They’re paranoid after all these years.”

  “Fingies?”

  “Fucking new guys. Tell you what, talk to Andrea after the dance, and we’ll see what we can do. The truth is, the people down here are going to need some help pretty soon. Someone who isn’t in NSF or ASL who might take their side. Talk to Andrea.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  “We’ll go over in a second, let me close down here.”

  While he was working at a boxy unidentifiable machine that filled half the room, Wade read a small flowchart diagram that had been taped to the wall.

  “It’s like a map of Washington D.C.,” Wade observed.

  “What—oh, that? It’s a map of the world, man. Here I’m done, come on, the band is supposed to start now, and even with the Antarctic factor thrown in they might be starting soon.”

  “The Antarctic factor?”

  “Murphy’s law to the power of ten. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Nor the spin axis. Come on.

  Out they went, down the stairs in the blaze of day. The pickup truck was gone, however, and Spiff led Wade back over chewed snow toward the station; it looked close, but ten minutes later it was as far away as it had been when they had started, and they were walking fast. “How far is it?” Wade puffed.