Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Carlos turned the steering wheel gently. In this case the control was less sensitive; it took nearly a full revolution of the wheel to get the craft to change direction even slightly.

  “A total idiot. Still, we can do it. See, we are going in a circle. Here, better slow down,” knocking the thruster level back down to idle.

  “What about brakes?” X asked.

  “No brakes. If you really want to brake, you turn the craft around and hit the thrusters, and that slows it down.”

  “Great.”

  “Well, how are you going to have brakes when you aren’t touching the ground? I suppose deploying both the outriggers would slow you down.”

  X shook his head.

  “It’s all right,” Carlos said. “We can turn around and go down the steepest sections backwards.”

  “Uh huh.”

  It was sounding pretty tenuous to X, but on the other hand Carlos was now driving them around the ice offshore from Roberts in big swooping glides, just as if he knew exactly what he was doing.

  Val came up behind them. “Looks like you have this thing in hand.”

  “No problem,” Carlos and X said in concert.

  “It looks like Jack is coming to a bit.”

  “Good, good! And it’s almost time for sked coms with McMurdo. We can tell them what we’re doing. And remind me to ask about German and Geraldo and the rest of them.”

  They brought the craft back in to the dock, X muscled down the lift fan lever, and the tub thumped hard down onto the ice.

  Carlos stood. “Let’s get ready quick, and get going while the engines are still warm.”

  They went to the back of the cabin. The injured trekker, Jack, had been awakened by the sounds of the hovercraft’s test run. Ta Shu and Jim were crouched at his sides, getting hot liquids into him; the others crowded in the doorway to see how he was, X at the back. Between sips Val and Carlos asked him questions. He was a bit groggy, and could not remember the accident in which he had been hurt; but he did remember much of the walk here, he said, with a brief glance at Val that X could not interpret. His shoulder hurt, he said, but otherwise he was fine. X got the impression that he was pissed off, but unwilling to talk about it. Something had happened out there on the ice. Val did not seem at all comfortable with him, which was in marked contrast to her behavior with her other clients.

  “Okay,” Carlos said when Jack was done drinking. “Time to try Randi again.”

  He went to the radio and turned it on, then wrapped a fist around the shrieking earpiece and started the call. “McMurdo, this is Roberts Station! Roberts Station at nineteen hundred scheduled coms, over!”

  Reception was if anything worse than last time. But then Randi’s voice was cutting through. “Kkkkkkkkkkkkk got you, Roberts! How’s it kkkkkkkkkkver?”

  Carlos managed to make most of a status report, and Randi told them a bit more about what had happened. As far as they could gather through the static, one or all of McMurdo’s big fuel tanks had been contaminated somehow. “The Navy’s flying in some fuel and there’s a tanker on the way, but meanwhile the guys are filtering the shit out of what’s left, and we’re burning it as fast as they clean it. Really too bad Ron isn’t still here to work on the filtering. So search and rescue activities are still being conducted on a need basis, over.”

  “Triage,” Wade commented.

  Carlos waved him quiet. “Randi, does that mean you will not be able to collect us by helo, over?”

  “No helo ops at Shackleton Camp at this time, T-023! Their fuel is wrecked. Do you still need a medevac?”

  “Well, he has a broken collarbone.”

  “Kkkkkkkkk down the list. You should get down to Shackleton Camp if you can. We plan to fly a Herc there tomorrow and evacuate everyone there. Apparently a lot of the Roberts crew ended up there, did you know that, Roberts? Roberts Station and the Mohn station too.”

  “Hey!” X and Carlos said, giving each other a brief hug.

  “—to Shackleton, or hang tight at Roberts, and wait for us to get to you.”

  “We don’t have the food to wait long,” Carlos said into the screeching, reaching over Jorge to shake hands with Wade as well.

  “Then get yourselves to Shackkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.”

  “Okay, okay,” Carlos said, “but who did all this, do you know, over?”

  “Did not read you, Roberts, can you repeat, over?”

  “Who did all this!”

  “Kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.”

  “Mac Coms, this is Roberts, do you read me?”

  “Roberts, are you there, repeat, Roberts, do you read me, over?”

  “Yes, Mac Coms, roger, roger, we read you!”

  “We read you too, Roberts, over!”

  “Repeat—who did all this!”

  “No information on that, Roberts. We assume saboteurs of some sort, but kkkkkkkkkkkkkk.”

  “How illuminating,” Carlos said, shaking his head and staring at the handset. “Randi, listen! We are planning to take the hovercraft to Shackleton! Can you give us weather forecasting please, over!”

  “Kkkkkkkkk would you like weather forecasting, Roberts?”

  “Yes, Randi, yes! Affirmative, roger, over!”

  “Roberts, repeat message, I say, would you like weather forecasting here, over!”

  “Yes, Mac Coms! Yes! Yes! Roger! Affirmative! Roger ro-ger ro-ger!”

  “I can’t read you guys anymore, but I’m gonna switch you over to weather forecasting, Roberts. Listen are you aware that there is something wrong with your radio, over?”

  Carlos waved the handset in the air over his head, eyes bugging out. Then he shouted into it, “Roger, Mac Corns, we are aware of that! Over!”

  “Listen Roberts, can you call back in half an hour? Weather is out to lunch right now, and I’m getting a kkkkkkkkkkkk.”

  “Roger, Mac Coms! We will try to call back in half an hour, but we are going to leave for Shackleton now! Over!”

  “Excuse me, Roberts, what did you say, over?”

  “We will STAND BY and call back in HALF AN HOUR. Over.”

  “Roberts, I’m not reading you anymore. Please stand by, over.”

  “Okay, God damn it! Roger! We will stand by!” Carlos began to laugh maniacally.

  “Kkkkkkkkkkkkk what?”

  “No, what’s on second!” Carlos shouted. “Who’s on first!”

  “What?”

  “No! What’s on second! Who’s on first!”

  “What? Oh! Oh, ha ha ha! Very funny, Roberts! Tell you what, you keep on doing your Abbott and Costello by yourself, I gotta go attend to the Three Stooges now! Call back in half an hour, God damn it, over and out!”

  Carlos slammed the radio off and shook the handpiece like he wanted to smash it to pieces, still laughing. “Ah, ha ha ha! We used to laugh ourselves sick at that when we were kids. It was the best English lesson we ever had. I don’t know’s on third!” he shouted at the handset.

  He looked around at the others. “Come on, let’s go. Shackleton Camp here we come.”

  Wade was helping Carlos and X and the others to secure everything in the hovercraft for the trip down to Shackleton Camp when his wrist phone beeped. He jumped as if shot, and ran up the short set of stairs to the aft cabin to get some quiet and reduce interference, then clicked the receive button.

  “Hello!”

  “Wade, Wade, is that you?”

  “It’s me, Phil! Where are you?”

  “Never mind where I am Wade, where are you! What’s going on down there?”

  “Well, let’s see, there’s been an attack on the oil camp I was visiting, and we’re now at the oil group’s base camp on Roberts Massif, top of the Shackleton Glacier, and that base has also been destroyed, so we’re about to take a hovercraft down to NSF’s Shackleton Glacier Camp, to be flown back to McMurdo.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No Phil, listen, what have you heard, what’s happening?”

  “Well I don’t have the full story yet, I got a
call from John and he told me that satellite communications to Antarctica had been interrupted and there were no reports coming out, but clearly something was wrong, and at that point I started calling you and got no reply! I got no reply!”

  “I know.”

  “But now I’m calling you using a Pentagon code I got, they must have some satellites of their own up there that are a little bit more reliable, but they don’t like to share them. I had to get John to contact Andy right in the Pentagon to get the codes, but it seems like they’re working pretty well.”

  “Better than our radio contact with McMurdo, that’s for sure. Could you patch me in to McMurdo, do you think?”

  “Sure, I can try. Just a second.”

  The line went dead.

  “Hey!” Wade said, punching Phil’s button on his phone. No answer. The same blank he had gotten since the moment they saw the smoke rise over Mohn Station. “God damn it.”

  “What’s wrong?” It was Val, up to see what had happened.

  “I just had a talk on the phone with Phil Chase. He was using a military satellite link, and said he would patch me to McMurdo.”

  “Must not have worked. We’re almost ready to go here.” She leaned against the seat back next to him, let out a deep breath.

  “You must be tired,” Wade said.

  “No, not tired exactly.”

  “Worried about your group. That guy who’s sick.” She nodded, then shook her head. “I knew there was something wrong with him, but he wouldn’t tell me. He had a broken collarbone and he didn’t tell me.”

  “Some people are like that. He may not have known exactly what was wrong, anyway. If he was stunned.”

  “Maybe not,” she said somberly, thinking it over.

  “Over in the Dry Valleys, it looked like he was going to be a …”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “So did it come to anything, I mean get difficult? Was he mad at you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well. So he might have been punishing you. But that’s his problem, really. Nothing you can do about that.”

  “No, I know. But I don’t want him to die on me.”

  Wade risked putting a hand to her arm, very gently. “Carlos seemed to think he was just shook up, and cold. We’ll get him down to Shackleton Camp and back to McMurdo, and he’ll be okay. Besides he’s too convinced of his own importance to let himself die, right?”

  A small smile. She glanced at him. They went downstairs to the passenger compartment. “Keep trying to get your senator,” Val reminded him.

  “Oh yeah,” Wade said, staring at his wrist phone. “I’ll set it on repeat call. It’ll try for me once a minute.”

  white sky

  blue ice

  They got the hovercraft off with only that same minor thump of the tub; X suspected a weak lift fan at the left rear, though Carlos gave him a dubious glance, as if he might be doing something wrong with the lifters. Whatever; they were up and moving over the ice, and there was no reason to look back.

  At first the hovercraft was dreamlike in its smoothness, and X and Carlos grinned at each other. Then they left the flattened road out to Mohn camp and ventured onto the sastrugi-covered white firn of the virgin glacier. Out here the craft rocked a little, this way then that, as air blew out from under the skirt at different points depending on what kind of deformations they were floating over. Nevertheless it was a pretty smooth ride compared to say a snowmobile, and as Carlos cautiously notched up the prop throttle they found that the faster they went, the smoother it got. Soon they roared smoothly over the ice, first outward from Fluted Peak, then around Roberts Massif on its east side.

  As X had noted from the air on his journey in, the massif stuck in the head of the Shackleton Glacier and nearly plugged it; it was like a rock island in the midst of rapids falling out of a lake into a river. The narrow gap on the west side, between Misery Peak and Dismal Buttress, was shattered blue ice from wall to wall, entirely unpassable. So their only choice was to go around the eastern side of Roberts, where a wider ice stream called the Zaneveld Glacier made a smooth curving drop into a confluence with the western stream and the Shackleton proper. The Zaneveld was also crevassed pretty heavily in places, but there were smooth unbroken ramps that descended from one level section to the next, and Carlos said Geraldo and German had taken the hovercraft up and down the route they had worked out several times.

  As they moved away from Roberts, out to a kind of ice causeway running smoothly between two crevassed sinks, they noted that the hovercraft moved somewhat like a plane in flight, in that it was frequently struck on the side by the wind, so that the bow of the craft yawed and was not always pointed exactly the same way that the craft was moving, skidding along at a bit of an angle. And as usual the wind was strong out here, beginning its katabatic drop down the glacier to the sea. The leeway they were sustaining from the force of this wind was blowing them into a crevasse sink on their right, not to any great extent, but Carlos turned left a bit more to counteract it. This did little but increase their yaw to that side.

  “Try the left outrigger,” he said, stroking his beard.

  “Okay.”

  X pushed down the toggle. When the little snowmobile hit the ice and X squeezed its throttle, shredded ice shot out from its back end toward the hovercraft, and immediately they could see that they had some resistance to their leeway.

  “That’s enough,” Carlos said, and X held the throttle at that point. After a bit: “Okay, we’re past that one. Wind should be directly behind us now. Pull the outrigger.”

  “Left outrigger up,” X said, enjoying their imitation of copilot procedures.

  Then the craft’s pulse radar began to ping, loud and fast. Carlos looked over at the radar screen: crevasses ahead, on the last section of their ramp between the sinks. “Damn.” He looked at Geraldo’s map again. “Ah yes. That’s why they made this turn, see here? We have to go down right against the shoreline of the massif. That’s blue ice without a break. At its side it curves down to the rock, so we can’t get too close and slide over that curve. We ride down on the flat stuff.”

  So he slowed the craft, and brought it back in toward Roberts. X saw what he meant; there against the shore was a broad band of turquoise ice, very smooth and unbroken, as if these were calm shallows where the glacier did not move as quickly as it did out in the middle of the stream. The only complication was that the mass of the glacier was considerably higher than the rock of the shoreline, bulking over it in a way that added to the surreal quality of the view: the drop from the glacier to the shore was a smooth blue curve, like a wave bulging up ready to crest. Wind ablation of the grounded ice, Carlos said. If they got onto that slope they would slip sideways and crash down onto the rock.

  But as Carlos had said, the level creamy blue ice above the curve was wide enough to travel on. And so they proceeded down the glacier, looking left and down at the shoreline of Roberts, the red of the shattered dolerite very pronounced against the blue of the ice. On their right a nasty shear zone broke the ice into a million glittering blue shards. So they could not shade far either right or left; but they had their road down.

  They hummed along. On their left appeared a little side stream of ice separating Roberts Massif proper from an outlying island of rock called Everett Nunatak. After that they came to an overlook and could see down the broad expanse of the Zaneveld. From above their route was clear; they could glide down between two of the many parallel rubble lines marking the surface of the glacier, the rubble composed of boulders and pebbles that had fallen off or been ripped away from Roberts, and conveyed out gradually to the center of the ice, revealing the slow-motion currents by the way they were lined along the surface.

  Val came up to the bridge. “This manual I found says the hovercraft should not be taken onto slopes more than three degrees off horizontal.”

  Carlos shook his head. “The manual was not written for Antarctica.”

  “This hovercraft was
n’t made for Antarctica.”

  “True. But it does fine. We go down backwards, we have the outriggers. We take a line and cleave to it.”

  “Uh huh,” Val said dubiously.

  Yet it seemed to X that Carlos was right to be sanguine. Majestically they floated down the Zaneveld, over flat ice next to one of the main rubble lines, shooting over small cracks and rocks that would have eaten a snowmobile; floating down a slight incline, effortless and smooth. Carlos and X were sitting back, feeling quite pleased with themselves as Val peered suspiciously over their shoulders.

  Then the ice tilted downward just slightly more than it had been before, and suddenly the hovercraft was like a ball in a gravity well demonstration, speeding up distinctly, and what was worse, sliding off to the right. With a brief clatter the craft ran directly over the nearest rubble line, and then it was flying downslope—the true downslope—right toward a gnarly shear zone underlying Wiest Bluff, on the other shore of the Zaneveld.

  Carlos sat forward and turned the craft to the left, and it responded, swivelling on its axis; but they merely continued sideways in the same direction they had been going before. “Left outrigger,” he said tersely.

  X brought it down onto the ice, and squeezed the snowmobile accelerator to full throttle. “How about going down backwards, like you said?” he suggested.

  “Yes yes,” Carlos snapped, spinning the steering wheel.

  “What about brakes?” Val asked.

  “No brakes.”

  “No brakes!”

  “It’s like a boat. You cut the engines and it slows.”

  “Except on a slope like this!”

  “We have to turn around. Bring the outrigger up.”

  Carlos spun the steering wheel harder left, and the craft came around so they were going backward, more or less, but still sliding down toward Wiest Bluff, never changing the overall direction of the craft’s movement at all. “Right outrigger now.”

  X dropped the right outrigger. Then for a moment the craft was facing true uphill, and they were sliding down backward, and Carlos shoved up the prop fan’s speed; but X’s outrigger tracks caught the ice at that same moment, and the craft swung around and began sliding sideways again. Carlos cursed and turned the steering wheel the other way, but it took a while to stop their spin momentum, and when he got it going the other way it spun right past the backward position again.