Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Such moments are transitory. Wade was already considering how much the roaring power of the Skidoo was implicated in his euphoria, how much it was the technological sublime he was feeling rather than the glory of Antarctica per se—when from ahead of Carlos came a flash, as from a mirror reflecting the sun. Immediately after that a black plume of smoke lofted into the air, narrow and dark, and suddenly choked off. A big puff, wafting off on the breeze.

  Carlos’s Skidoo took off. Apparently he had been holding back as a courtesy to Wade’s inexperience, and now he was hellbent on getting back to the station as fast as possible, leaving Wade and X quickly behind. Wade pressed his tired thumb even harder on the accelerator, and his Skidoo shot over the snow faster than before. Despite this acceleration X drew up beside him, barreling over the untracked sastrugi, seeming unaware of the bumps, his whole being focused on the smoke puff ahead. He passed Wade and slammed his Skidoo into the tracks ahead so that he could go even faster.

  Then both Carlos and X were stopped, and Wade let his cramping thumb relax, and his Skidoo quickly slid to a halt. He stood astride his snowmobile, looking at the station ahead of them. The main building was knocked flat and scattered all over the ice. One propane tank still burned, the fitful blue-orange flames pale in the sunlight. Otherwise there was no movement. The tents were flattened. The Jamesway and the machine shops were ripped to shreds. The drilling platform was on its side, its base shattered. There was no one to be seen.

  Hesitantly they walked toward the wreckage. Thankfully, there were no bodies in sight; strange but true; the main building and machine shops were smashed open to their inspection, and it appeared they must have been empty when they were blown apart, for there was no sign of anyone.

  Despite this good news Carlos hopped in a rage beside what remained of the main building, literally shaking his fist, cursing violently, “Hijo de puta” and so forth—the most sulfurous Spanish Wade had ever heard. X walked around saying, “Where is everybody? Where is everybody? There’s no one here. That’s very weird. How could there be no one here? Where did they all go? Oh God, I hope they’re not under the wall—” He went to his knees, looked under one of the larger fragments of the main building.

  He stood again. The three of them looked at each other. There was no one there. It seemed to Wade that the buildings must have been deserted at the moment of impact. Perhaps people had had time to run? But then where were they now?

  “It’s very weird there’s no one here,” X said to Wade. “It’s like when I was ripped off on the SPOT train. Some kind of, I dunno. Some kind of group out here.”

  “The ones who dug out Hillary’s Weasel?” Wade wondered. “Or the ones salvaging the old Pole station?”

  X stopped pacing. “There are people salvaging the old Pole station?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought they still used that for storage.”

  “Not the old Pole station. The old old Pole station.”

  X stared at him. “Wow,” he said.

  The three of them wandered together to the downed drilling rig, none of them willing to get very far from the other two. At the foot of the collapsed structure was a mass of blasted and melted metal, distorted shapes under the fallen superstructure. No sign of methane hydrate leakage, of course. No doubt the explosion had capped the hole down there somewhere. Carlos cursed some more. “This never would have happened, never never never, it was safe, we made it safe, everything was backed up, nothing could go wrong, they had to blow it up to make this happen, those hijos de putas,” hopping in place, weeping, shouting, roaring. “I live here, I born here, this is my country I know how to take care of it, I kill these people these terrorists, I kill them kill them kill them!”

  Wade and X nodded, neutral but sympathetic.

  “How are we going to get home?” X asked.

  “Home?” Wade said.

  “McMurdo. Or even Roberts.”

  “Call in a helo,” Wade said. “Or that hovercraft you mentioned.”

  X nodded. “But what if the same thing happened to Roberts?”

  Wade felt himself blinking in the frigid cold. He hadn’t thought of that.

  X shrugged. “Could have happened.”

  Wade tapped Chase’s phone number on his wrist. Might as well get help from the top.

  But there was no connection. Quickly he tapped through his other regular numbers, the operator, everything. All connections were down. He felt a little shiver that had nothing to do with the cold, that was not corporeal at all. A metaphysical shudder, an informational shudder. The shutdown of one of his senses.

  “The phones aren’t working,” he said to the others.

  Carlos ended his muttering abruptly. “Really?”

  He hurried to his Skidoo and took a briefcase-sized radio from the box behind the seat. He set it on the seat and strung out the antenna lines in a broad V, then plugged together several of the miniature colored plugs that appeared every couple of feet in the antenna wire. He turned on the control console and began calling out.

  First Roberts; static only. Then McMurdo directly.

  Again, nothing but static.

  “Madre.” Carlos looked at X and Wade. “They seem to have put out Mac Town radio. And the satellites.”

  He moved the antenna lines so that the broad V they made faced a different direction, changed some plugs, tried again on a different channel. “Ah. At least that sounds like the usual static. But the peninsula is too far for this thing. I can almost hear them, but they will not hear us.” Nevertheless he tried transmitting again, in Spanish then English. No response.

  The three men looked at each other, their ski masks and sunglasses hiding their expressions. To Wade the snowmobiles now looked like fat motorbikes, their spare gas cannisters like gallon milk containers from the grocery store. Really inadequate to the task. Carlos was doing calculations on his wrist. “If we load the Skidoos to their maximum, we will have enough fuel to get to Roberts. Or if we run out we’ll be just a few kilometers away, and we can walk on in.”

  He looked at the other two.

  X shrugged. “Let’s get going.”

  He and Carlos took short shovels from their Skidoo boxes and went to a spot in the snow at some distance from the camp. Here Carlos had a cache of emergency gear, buried for use in case of a station fire. “I was in a Jamesway once that caught fire and burned to the ice in seven minutes. Seven minutes! If we hadn’t had kitchen knives under our beds to cut through the wall, we wouldn’t have made it. But once you get out, you need something else to replace the shelter, or you die of cold rather than hot. I guess that’s an improvement, fucking bastards.”

  In the wreckage X found one of the little hand pumps they used to transfer fuel from fifty-five-gallon steel drums into the vehicles and Skidoos. He brought it over and stuck one hose in a fuel cannister Carlos had pulled from the buried cache, the other into the gas tanks of the snowmobiles, and cranked the pump handle until the cannister was empty. Meanwhile Carlos strapped onto the Skidoos tent, stove, food bags, skis, crampons and so on.

  “Nice to have this stuff,” Wade observed.

  Carlos nodded. “This is the fourth time I’ve had to use an emergency bag. Every time it reminds you never to forget.”

  Before they left Carlos tried the radio one last time. Again no answers, on any band. Lots of static. “What is going on?” he exclaimed.

  The other two took this as a rhetorical question and pulled on their bear claws, Wade checking his watch one last time before he did. It was three hours since they had seen the explosion; Wade would have guessed forty-five minutes. They pull-started the Skidoos, and took one last look back at the camp; but behind masks and sunglasses Wade could see nothing of the others’ expressions.

  Off they went on the snowmobiles.

  cobalt sky

  turquoise ice

  Back in the sunlight Val had everyone follow her up the rest of the ramp, which—of course—widened and levelled off and became as
easy as anyone could have asked, until they were up on the white mass of firn-covered ice just to the south of the Hansen Shoulder; on the polar cap, in other words. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected.

  She had the others sit down on rocks that had fallen off the Shoulder onto the ice, and walked a few meters away and got on the wrist to call Mac Town and get an SAR started. It was embarrassing, but there was no way out of it.

  She punched the channel codes and waited, angry, worried, and ashamed. She ought not to have let it come to this. Accidents happened, of course. But it was her job to make sure no accident could hurt them very much. She ought not to have let Jack coerce her into taking the Amundsen route, given the changed nature of the glacier’s head. She ought not to have ventured under that ice block. Both had been stupid; now it, along with the South Georgia disaster, would be what got her into the thin history of Antarctica, which like the history of climbing was just a list of expeditions, with special attention given to firsts and fiascos. Stupid!

  In this blaze of self-recrimination it took her a while to notice that Mac Town was not answering. Sometimes Randi was slow, but not this slow. Val pushed the button again and repeated her message. “Hello, McMurdo, this is T-023, do you read me, over?”

  Hiss of radio space; white noise. No McMurdo! She checked the wrist radio for status. It appeared to still be working, but there were no connections at all, all across the usual band. This was unprecedented, and she switched quickly to the emergency band, and then back around the dial. No answers anywhere. No radio.

  “Shit,” she said, staring at the little display screen. She pushed the function button and checked around. GPS was down too.

  “Hey folks,” she said. “Will you all try your wrist phones, and Ta Shu your radio glasses? I’m not getting through, and I want to see if it’s my phone that’s the problem.”

  One by one they tried calling out, with no success. Ta Shu whipped off his heavy video glasses and squinted at them.

  “Someone’s messed with the satellites,” Val concluded, staring at her wrist screen. Of course she knew their present location all too well, but still. All satellite connections appeared to be severed, which was amazing, because there were a lot of satellites up there. The GPS system alone relied on making contact with up to eight satellites per fix. She tried the radio again. No more luck than before. Sunspots, perhaps? But the satellites were supposed to have alleviated the problems that sunspots gave Antarctic radio communication.

  It was possible the big radio in the sledge would have done better; their little wrist radios didn’t have the power to reach geosynchronous satellites, and sometimes there was trouble with the system of lower satellites. But there was no way to test that now. The sledge was corked and no two ways about it.

  “Hmm.” She thought it over. Single-sledge travel was based on the idea that if you lost your sledge down a crevasse (it had happened before, at least three times that Val knew of), you had personal radios and helicopter rescue to back you up. Without coms to alert the rescue system, however, they were on their own.

  It was an ugly situation. Essentially they needed to get to the nearest shelter as fast as they could. In that regard at least they were much better off than the old guys would have been; there were a fair number of camps and stations in the Transantarctics. The closest one to them, Val decided after looking at the paper map she kept in her parka pocket for just such an eventuality as this, was the SCAG oil base camp on Roberts Massif, just across the Mohn Basin to the west. But that was about a hundred kilometers away.

  She sat down on a rock in the middle of the others, and got them all to quit trying their phones. “Come on, we’ve proved it. All satellite coms are down as far as we’re concerned, and we’re not getting GPS either. It means we have to get ourselves to the nearest station. But that’s okay, I know where that is, and we only have to cross a bit of the ice cap. We’re going to be all right.”

  “Where’s the nearest station?” Elspeth asked calmly.

  “It’s to the west, there across the Mohn Basin.” She pointed. “It’s one of those African oil camps, on the south side of Roberts Massif. It’s on the side we’ll be approaching, so all we have to do is cross the ice plateau. Level easy walking all the way.”

  “How far away?” Jorge asked.

  “Well, it’s about a hundred kilometers,” Val said, looking at each of them in turn. “Maybe a bit more. A long way, for sure, but not too long. We can do it. We’ll just pace ourselves, take rests when we need to, and keep walking till we get there.”

  “No problem,” Jack said. “I ran a fifty-miler once.”

  Val nodded, suppressing all irritation. “That’s right. And we won’t be in any special hurry. Our suits are like little walking emergency huts. They’re warmer than we’ll need, and they’ve got emergency food sewn into them, and the arm flasks for melting snow to water.” She patted her upper arm. “It’s too bad we don’t have our skis, but we have our crampons and ski poles, and we’ll be fine. Walking is easier than skiing anyway.”

  Which was only true in certain conditions. But they were likely to run into sastrugi and blue ice on the Mohn Basin, also the snow dunes called supersastrugi that were building on the ice as a result of the increase in precipitation; and in all those areas the skis wouldn’t have helped them. So it was partly true. Anyway they needed the encouragement, Val judged. Not that anyone looked particularly frightened; they were serious but resolute. Jack was nursing his hurt hand, and he had his lips pursed in a scowl of determination, but he certainly did not look worried.

  In any case, there was no reason to delay. In fact the sooner they were off, the better. “Let’s get going,” Val said. “We’ll keep trying the wrist radios at every rest stop, and probably they’ll click back in soon, and we’ll have an SAR team out before we get very far. But even if we don’t, we’ll still be fine.” She stood. “Hey, a real adventure this time.”

  No great laughs at that. The situation was too much felt in the body to be made light of; it was very cold, sitting there in the wind falling off the cap down the glacier. So they stood up stiffly, and followed her as she led them around the shore of Hansen Shoulder. This was a hard part, actually; the ice was beginning its fall into the glacier, and as it deformed around the little nunatak there were many crevasse fields and shear zones to be avoided. But Val found flat ice all the way through, and soon enough they were on the broad plain of firn to the west of the nunatak—on the ice plateau of the great polar cap, and no two ways about it. Nothing before them but white snow and ice, and the dark blue sky.

  Six people, alone in such an immensity; a strange sight; a strange sensation. White snow, blue sky; in the polar cap’s extreme simplicity, the black cliffs of the Transantarctics behind them and to the right were somehow comforting, bleak and jagged though they were. Compared to the ice plateau they were familiar, even homey. But there was no help to be had among them, only broken ice and empty glaciers falling to the sea. And they would be hiking out until the mountains passed under the horizon and there would be no land in sight, as if they were far out on a white ocean.

  Val started walking over the ice.

  blue dome

  white plane

  Snowmobiling across the polar cap felt different now. Wade was aware that the change was psychological in origin, but that did not lessen the sensation, which was as distinct as the difference between a sunny day and a cloudy one. Speaking of which, a few cirrus clouds now scythed the pure blue overhead, located distinctly lower in the sky than cirrus clouds usually appeared, indicating the great altitude of the ice plateau, or the altered physics of Ice Planet itself; the effect somehow made the world seem huge. And he could not make it shrink back to its previous size.

  A bigger world, and emptier. The surface of the plateau was rougher. The snowmobile was less stable, and louder, its racket that of a motor grinding away, filled with skips and irregularities, as if always on the edge of stalling. Ti
pping the thing could be a fatal mistake, and it was rocking violently from side to side. The sun stood overhead at its usual angle, a blinding chip in a dark immensity. It seemed he was catching brief glimpses of space itself, up there behind the dark blue sky. And it was colder as well, the wind in his face a bitter numbing blast. The Skidoo tilted and he overcorrected every time, his pulse racing.

  He had to admit it; he was afraid. Cold fear. There was nothing ahead, and nothing behind. A white plain of snow in all directions. No other kind of exposure could match it. As if they were alone in the world, under the blinding eye of a cold god. Alone on the blank white roof of the universe.

  And nothing to do but follow Carlos, and try to ignore the fatigue in his thumb. He wondered about the two men he was with, men he scarcely knew. Everything out here depended on the support of one’s companions. Without them there was only the cold, and it could kill you in a matter of hours—he could feel that in his face, feel the stiff numbness that led to frostbite and then fatality. Hypothermia straining to get in and do its work. Any tilt of the snowmobile could start the sequence that ended in hypothermia; broken ski, broken knee, anything would do it. So haul left! No right! No left!

  On he drove.

  Three very long hours later—it felt to Wade more like eight—Carlos waved an arm, and his Skidoo quickly halted. All along he had been following the road in the snow blasted by the hovercraft—the sastrugi that so impressed Wade were actually much flattened—and now the three of them stomped around on the road’s crust, trying to get the circulation going in their extremities. Carlos and X taught Wade to windmill his arms rapidly to speed the return of blood and warmth to his hands. For a while they stood around spinning their arms like a bunch of Pete Townshends. Then Carlos took a shovel and an ordinary carpenter’s saw from his Skidoo’s back box. He stuck the saw in the snow and began cutting.