Wade followed the astronomer into the next broken-walled white cave. Here tables were still covered with china plates and Styrofoam cups, and the walls had shelves of condiments and galley equipment—just like the old station he had already visited, in fact, except more iced-over. A pair of dirty bunny boots on a table. A big coffee pot. Heinz catsup. Over in the corner on the floor lay a spill of rib-eye steaks, badly freezer-burned, and topped by what looked like a human turd.
“This was the first permanent settlement,” Spiff said. “They lived here about twenty years. It was mostly Jamesways buried in the snow, and some bigger plywood boxes, and the connecting archways.”
“Incredible.”
“Yeah. But listen to this. There was a lot of stuff down here just a few years ago, that isn’t here anymore. Most significantly, a big generator. They even considered pulling it when they built the current station, and putting it back to work, because there was nothing wrong with it. But it wouldn’t meet the safety codes and so on. In the end they just left it here. But two seasons ago we came down here, and it was gone.”
“Gone from down here?”
“Exactly. So how did it get out of here, you ask?”
“I do.”
“So did we. We went to every corner of this station that hadn’t been crushed, to try and find out. And on the far side of the station, near where the generator was, we found a snow wall that had been repacked. We cut through it, and there was a tunnel like ours, going off in the other direction. There were wheel marks in the floor. And that tunnel went on for ten kilometers.”
“Not possible.”
“I agree, but there it was! And then it came up to the surface, where there was a little trapdoor covered by snow. And outside that, the polar cap. Nothing else. We were over the horizon from the station. We had gone under the snow the whole way. And no sign of where they went.”
“None?”
“No tracks of any kind!”
“How could that be?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe a helo had dropped people, but there are no helos on the polar cap. Ed thought a hovercraft might have come in, but I thought the sastrugi weren’t disturbed enough.”
“Are there any hovercraft on the polar cap?”
“Yes, there’s an old Hake at the oil camp on Roberts Massif.”
“So you think they took the generator?”
Spiff shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. They would have the same trouble with the old dog as the people here.”
“So who?”
Spiff shrugged. “Who knows? But we wanted you to have the full complement of mystery before you left here. I’m afraid the people who work here, the locals, the people you just saw at the dance, are going to get blamed for all this stuff. They need someone outside ASL to help. So I wanted you to know.”
“I appreciate it,” Wade said sincerely. A convulsive shiver vibrated through him, head to foot. “I’m cold.”
“I know. Let’s go take a slide down the rabbit hole, that’ll warm you up.”
“A slide?”
“Yeah. Have you ever been in a waterslide?”
“Yes,” Wade said, thinking of a park in Virginia, a hotel in Vancouver. “But—”
“I know. Come on, I’ll show you.”
This walk was shorter than the others. Up and out of the eerie crushed ghost town, then along a snow tunnel, into a snow-walled chamber, bigger than anything left in the buried station. There were a lot of parkas and clothes piled inside what looked like a giant dumbwaiter, next to a round opening nowhere near as big as the tunnels they had been walking through.
“You made this too?” Wade asked.
“A group of us. The new heating elements can cut through the ice very efficiently. Did they tell you about the Rodwell?”
“No.”
“Of course not. Did you ever wonder where the station gets its water? Well, it all comes from an underground lake, a chamber down in the ice that is heated until there is a big pod of liquid water. They just keep going deeper and deeper with it as the water is used. The sewage dump is the same; it’s just another underground pod of liquid, good old Lake Patterson, and when it fills they move the heating element to another spot, and the old stuff freezes and heads off in the ice cap, moving north ten meters a year.”
“Lake Patterson?”
Spiff pulled his head out of the hole. “Named after Patterson. Okay, it’s ready. Take off your clothes and down you go.” Spiff was already unzipping.
“You’re kidding.”
“No. The tube is ice, but we’re running some hot water down it now, hear that? And the air is warmed too, it’s almost up to freezing. So it’s like any other water slide, only darker. The ride only lasts a couple of minutes. It goes down about say five stories, in about three hundred meters, and then you land in a warm bath. Be ready for that, it’s a shock when you hit if you’re not forewarned.” He pulled off his pants, stood before Wade naked. “Hurry up, you go first and I’ll shut down here and follow. Hurry, I’m getting cold.”
“I’m already cold,” Wade protested. In fact he had never been colder in his life. But he did as he was told. By the time he had all his clothes off he was shivering violently.
“Okay, jump in and go for it. You can go head first or feet first, but you shouldn’t try changing from one to the other midway, or knee-riding. Not the first time anyway.”
“I won’t. Will it be dark all the way?” Wade said, peering down the hole.
“Black as the pit. Have a good ride.”
Wade took a step up and sat his bare bottom on the ice. “Jesus.”
“Have fun!” Spiff shouted, and gave him a push and he was off, sliding on his bottom. Then the tube dropped away in the blackness and he was on his back, like a luge rider. In fact it had all the qualities of luge—insane speed, rapid turns left and right, up and down, but mostly down, down down down in gut-floating no-g drops, sliding in a stream of warm water over cold slick ice, and all in pitch blackness so there was no way of telling where he would go next. He yowled. The cold of the ice seemed less severe as he sped up, but the air rushing over him was freezing. He shouted again at a heartstopping drop and right turn, you could crack your skull! Except he didn’t.
Three or four more dramatic turns and he began to enjoy himself. Then he was flying through free space, and he shrieked just as he plunged into boiling water. His skin went nova, especially along his bottom and back.
He shot up spluttering and took several gasping breaths, shouting once or twice between them, treading water desperately. It was pitch black, he could see nothing.
“Must be the senator.”
“Just stand up, man.”
“Jesus!” he said, finding his feet. “Hi!” He found he could stand, on an ice floor. The pool of hot water was chest deep. The air was steam. In the blackness he could hear several people talking, including Viktor. His skin was still blazing, but less painfully. “You guys are nuts.”
They laughed happily. No one contradicted him.
With a shout Spiff fired into the pool and rammed Wade, sending him under again. He was pulled to the surface and set on his feet. The person who had pulled him up was a woman. One of the big women from the dance. There were several of them in the pool, in the blackness and clatter of watery noise and voices, everyone moving about. “Ice is such a great insulator.” As his eyes adjusted Wade saw that the chamber was not pitch black, but black with just a touch of blue in it. He still could see nothing whatsoever, not even the basic shapes of the people around him. Under the general clatter he did hear lower voices, and right next to him a quick urgent low exchange: “Ah come on.” “Don’t or I’ll break it off.” “All right! Okay.” Wild laughter.
Wade sloshed around gingerly, wishing Val were in the pool with the rest of these unseen amazons. If you had a thing for jock women, he thought, the South Pole was definitely the place to be. The ice on the bottom of the pool was covered in some places with what felt l
ike big rubber shower mats. Against the unseen walls there was a narrow bench, similarly matted. After a while Wade was thoroughly warmed up and his skin stopped burning. He began to see black shapes in the indigo blackness of the cave. He ran into Spiff, who told him more about the waterslide, with Andrea or someone else her size limpeted to his side, or so it seemed to Wade; it was too dark really to tell. Several years ago, Spiff told him over the noise, Viktor had come by and described a waterslide complex cut under Vostok Station. The local PICO crew, meaning the Polar Ice Coring Office, had included some folks very prominent in the Why Be Normal Club, and they were just beginning to use the new ice-cutting technology, which used hot laser melting elements and steam removal, “real Star Wars stuff, I mean it was developed by the space-beam people at Livermore and Los Alamos, and turned out to be good for nothing at all in the world except it turns ice to steam no problem, which is very useful down here of course—the old ice-coring tech used three thousand gallons of diesel fuel for every kilometer cut through the ice, at ten dollars a gallon, and slow. Basically like melting it with your shower head. But with these lasers you could cut a whole city into the ice, man, and so these PICO freakos helped some winterovers cut this slide here, just to pass the time and keep up with those Vostok Russkies. Although later Viktor confessed that he had made that whole thing up, and Vostok had no such thing. He just thought it would be a good idea.”
Wade heard Viktor’s booming laugh across the chamber. “A good idea!”
“A great idea,” Spiff said. “People here need to resist. It’s been hard here for a long time. I mean ASA wasn’t bad, and yet even then people snuck down and explored old old station, stuff like that. And now, no one likes ASL at all. They treat people like shit, and NSF lets them get away with it. So people resist. It’s a way of staying sane. You can only spend a few weeks here before you begin to go nuts.”
“It was only a few hours for me,” Wade confessed.
They laughed, and someone kissed his cheek; although it was someone with a beard. Viktor no doubt. “Sounds like Viktor is having quite an impact on polar cap society,” Wade said.
Spiff laughed. “Yes, yes. But it’s mostly talk,” he said louder.
A volley of splashes struck them.
“It is! You say so yourself, Viktor. The great idea man. Is very possible! He comes up with a lot of ideas, but he’s undercapitalized. This water pipe to the Sahara—”
More splashes.
“It’s not happening?”
“Well, I’m sure it’s technically feasible, but that doesn’t mean it will ever get done. Hey, stop that! And if it does, it probably won’t be by Viktor.”
“I have grant in hand. Is very possible.”
Then one of the women called out, “Whirlpool, whirlpool!” People began to move by Wade around the perimeter of the pool, all in the same direction; and soon enough he was pulled along as well, in the whirlpool growing because of their movement. “At the North Pole we’d go the other direction, right?” No one replied.
Floating in blue-black darkness. Spinning down a maelstrom, blind. Wade struggled to keep his head above water, then deduced from the splashing, and from people’s breathing patterns, that the others were mostly submerged. He took a deep breath and went under himself, the water very hot on his face, and reached down to the floor and pushed along in the flow. Banging into the icy walls of the bench. Bumping into the bodies of other people, their limbs slick and muscular. Men or women, there was usually no way to tell. His dives got longer and longer. While submerged he turned and tumbled, upside down, rightside up; it got hard to tell, it did not matter, except when it was time to breathe. He let the water tumble him however it wanted to. He was flotsam.
“Look for the Cherenkov light,” he heard Spiff gasp at one point. “Look down at the northern sky, see the muons coming up at us. This ice is as transparent as pure diamond, you can see the light from three hundred meters away, the PMTs see a neutrino every second, blue light,” and then Wade was swept under again, and looking down. Then he was seeing blue streaks from far, far below. The light of distant supernovas. The ice was clear. He did not want this rolling tumble ever to stop. Apparently no one else did either, for it went on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Eventually it achieved a sort of no-time, a limbic limbo, such that afterward Wade could not have said how long it went on; perhaps an hour, perhaps two. What in the world could possibly tempt them back from such amniotic bliss?
Finally Spiff hauled him up. “Come on, man, we don’t want to drown a senator.”
“Oh go ahead.”
They laughed and pulled him up again. “Come on, we’re going to miss breakfast.”
Food; that was what would bring them back. Bare necessity.
Now they were all getting out, climbing up a rubber mat and into a passageway Wade couldn’t see. Blind and freezing, though they assured him it was heated air. Flashlights were turned on, and towels and clothes lay piled in the same dumbwaiter, which was open on two sides; there were two changing rooms, it appeared, one for men one for women, it seemed. In any case there were only men in this room, which was walled by ice rather than the compacted snow in all the tunnels and chambers above: Spiff, and Ed, and Viktor, and the bass player, who appeared utterly blissed-out, though he whimpered as he tried to dress, using fingers that were like Polish sausages. “Snackbar gave his hands so we might live.” They had to zip up his fly and his parka for him. Then they were dressed, thank God, and walking along a crystalline tunnel, the women and the men, all of them steaming like horses, and the steam falling to the floor as white dust.
“If we didn’t heat the air you couldn’t dry off fast enough. You can take a pot of boiling water and sling it up in the air and it hits the ground as dust and pebbles,” Spiff said to Wade. “Crackles like mad.” Wade’s snot was already refrozen, in fact; but his body core was warm, and he felt fine, just fine.
They came to a vertical shaft with a wooden ladder extending up one side. Above they could see nothing. Wade began to climb. It went on till his hands hurt. Then they were climbing snow stairs in a snow-walled passage on a slant, taking a turn on a snow landing, going up stairs again.
Finally they banged up through a trapdoor. They were in the little glassed South Pole Pax Terminal, out by the runway, crowding into it and spilling out.
Wade stumbled back in the stupendous light. He couldn’t stop blinking, and the cold-shocked flood of tears froze on his cheeks. He had been struck blind for sure this time, going from pure black to pure white. Out the door of the shelter and the wind hit like another smack from the invisible side of beef. Wade felt his body ringing like a bell from the blow. It still looked to be the very same time of day it had been when Viktor had arrived, so many eons ago. In an earlier incarnation.
Wade staggered up the metal stairs of the new station, into the stuffy warmth of the blue flying wing. He was reeling, he could barely stand. He could barely pull off his mittens.
He was headed for his room, one pruned hand propping him against the wall, when he ran into Keri.
“So how did you like old station?”
Wade jumped, composed himself. “Very interesting,” he said. “Kind of like a, a cave.”
“Indeed. Now look, there’s a Herc coming in tonight, do you want to take it back to McMurdo?”
“Um, ah.” Wade tried to think. He gaped, and Keri stared at him curiously. “You know, I’d like to visit Roberts Massif, actually.”
“Roberts? The oil folks?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Well, there’s no direct transport there, of course. You’ll have to go back to McMurdo, and then fly out to Shackleton Glacier camp, and then helo up to Roberts.”
“Fine,” Wade said. “Whatever it takes.” He floated past the man into his room.
Sylvia stood before her wall map of Antarctica, marked now with a variety of red, orange, and yellow numbered dots. There were only a few reds and oranges, though each one was individually
troubling, of course. But there were a lot of yellows, especially along the coast of Victoria Land, and down the long spine of the Transantarctics. Some of these could be explained by the recent influx of oil exploration groups, and the few remaining private adventure firms. Others couldn’t.
She took the orange marker from her desk and carefully entered a “14” next to the Amundsen cairn on Mount Betty. Another USO, an unidentified sitting object; some kind of radio with satellite dish, apparently, placed much too close to the historic site; owner unknown; discovered by T-023, Val Kenning’s Amundsen trek. She wrote all this down on a sheet of paper numbered “14” in orange, and put it in a file. Helo pilots had seen two other such objects when flying S-046 around the Beardmore Glacier, and another had been stumbled upon near Ice Stream C, by one of the ASL team working out of Byrd Station. That one had been brought back in by the worker, and proved to be a satellite dish and radio transmitter of unknown provenance. She had had it mailed out to Cheech and then Washington for analysis, but no word had come back yet. Geoff often spoke of black boxes in science; here were the ultimate black boxes.
She was still staring at the map, trying to see a pattern in the dots, feeling balked and apprehensive, when she heard Paxman’s light tap-tap-tap at her door. “Come in.”
He stuck his head in. “Wade Norton’s back from the Pole, and he wants to talk with you.”
“Certainly, send him in.”
She moved behind her desk, and Wade entered the room. He presented quite a different appearance than he had on arrival, all very predictable of course: sunburned except around the eyes, which had an unfocused, somewhat stunned expression; hair slicked down into the characteristic Antarctic bad hair mat.
“How did you like the Pole?”
“It was very interesting.”
A long pause, as he appeared to be lost in reminiscence. “In what way?” Sylvia prompted at last.
“Ah, well. Lots of ways. Tell me—are you aware of any other, ah, incidents at the Pole like the ones we discussed when I arrived?”
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