The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “That’s it, then,” I said. “We can’t go on in this, can we?” Inwardly I was saying, Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you for the fog. Thank you for the fog. Though whether it was to Titus or God or the grinning fog ghosts, I have no idea.

  Poor Uncle Victor: He had taken a wild gamble and lost. It’s one thing to arrive back with photographs, with booty, with a hank of alien hair, with Proof. But to arrive back empty-handed; to have to explain petty things like vehicle theft and narcotic tea bags when he should have been explaining about worlds within worlds! Now he and Manfred Bruch would almost certainly have to share the glory of discovery with American geologists and South American tour guides. Or, if they kept the secret to themselves, they would have to leave Antarctica, flat broke, and start saving up for another trip. That’s if they escaped prison.

  Perhaps we could say we had taken the Hagglund to go in search of help after everyone in Camp Aurora mysteriously went to sleep.

  Victor and Manfred came into our compartment for a food break, and though the Viking was looking wretched, Uncle Victor got on and made tea. He guarded jealously the task of serving us the drinks he thought we deserved: hot chocolate, tea, black currant juice. “Drink! Drink!” he would say. “Dehydration, that’s the big danger down here! Driest place on earth! People don’t realize.” I went to give him a kiss on the cheek (because inside he was surely churning with disappointment), but he was too busy lining up vitamin tablets on the table, beside his fruit cordial, and he brushed me aside. “Drink up! What people forget,” he said, pausing between words to swallow another letter of the alphabet—vitamin C, E, B12, “this place is categorized ‘desert’ . . . water cycle here takes ten thousand year . . . ‘Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to’ . . . Drink up! Drink!”

  “It is regrettable, but it seems . . .” Manfred began, face sweating.

  “Good cover, this fog,” said Victor.

  “Half the fuel is gone now,” said Manfred, unzipping his jacket even though he was shivering. “Sadly we must turn around and go back.” I noticed that the belt inside was unbuckled, his trouser fastenings undone as if he had eaten too big a meal for comfort.

  “Uphill going, downhill coming back,” said Victor. “Traveling lighter now, too. Need less fuel.” And he slapped his knees and stood up, his round belly exaggerated by the many layers of clothing and the bulky snowsuit. The four of us so filled the space that the truck from outside must have looked like a tumble dryer crammed with Teletubbies.

  “But we can’t in the fog,” I said without thinking. It wasn’t mutinous. It was just a fact.

  “With GPS?” said Victor. “What’s to stop us!”

  “Well, the Shear!”

  “What’s the Shear?” asked Sigurd.

  Victor rattled his sinuses in an enormous, scoffing snort. “Hearken to the ignorance, eh, Sym? Asks what the Shear is!”

  “The provisions, also, they are half used up,” said Manfred, counting up the red boxes with the transparent lids. “More than half.”

  “More in the Nansen,” said Victor.

  “How would we see crevasses? Or pressure ice?” I said.

  Victor’s brightness was undimmed. “This crate’ll carry us through. Better than a Sherman tank, these items!”

  “Crevasses?” Sigurd said, and swallowed hard.

  “How do we find a glacier in the fog?” I said. “Let’s wait till the fog lifts, at least!”

  “A spot less negativity please, Sym,” said Victor curtly. “What do I teach you always? Positive thinking brings positive results. Now’s not the time for getting cold feet.”

  Inside my head, Titus burst out laughing. It chimed in with the rising hysteria.

  “Glacier?” said Sigurd. “What glacier?”

  “Tell him, Sym,” said Victor, closing his eyes with Buddha-like patience. “Tell the lad.”

  The Norwegians both looked at me. I felt like Skippy the Kangaroo asked to count by hopping up and down on the spot. Titus was laughing so hard now that he had to sit down on the floor. “To get up onto the plateau,” I muttered, “to get through the mountains—we need a glacier. It’s like—you know—taking the wheelchair ramp instead of the stairs.” Titus laughed even harder, breathlessly, groaning and sighing with mirth.

  Victor beamed. “Route’s all plotted! No time like the present! Time and tide, you know? ’Nough gossiping. Fall in, everyone! All hands on deck!” And he opened the door and climbed down again, shedding nautical bluster like snow.

  I went after him. The fog had laid a milky film of ice over the three metal steps, and I pitched down them. “But the Shear, Uncle! Please don’t go into the Shear! Not in the fog!” Recovering my feet, I turned around, and the Hagglund was a dark shape devoid of color, like a cellar door in a house full of smoke. I knew that if I lost sight of it, if I took one step farther into the fog, there would be no Hagglund, no gravity, no day of the week, no geometry, no news, no Sym.

  The engine started up. The sagging caterpillar tracks engaged with the drive wheels and flexed into life, shedding blocks of compacted snow. Bare hands, Sym, bare hands! In a panic, I slid one glove on the wrong way around—no thumb—felt my way along the side of the vehicle. It throbbed under my touch. The hydraulic link between the two vans gave an exasperated sigh as I passed it. I twisted my glove around and pulled myself up onto the slippery steps of the front van, just as the caterpillars started to move. As I clung to the open door, I heard the back one bang shut. I suppose the Nansen sled and the Ski-Doo were stirring into life at the ends of their ropes, falling into line between the caterpillar tracks. Falling into line. Not that I could see. There was nothing to be seen in the big side-view mirror but the white blindness of curdling fog. Uncle Victor reached out a hand and pulled me inside, into the passenger seat, but he did not lift his foot off the accelerator or stop whistling under his breath.

  Sigurd’s voice came over the intercom. “What is Shear?” it said. Sigurd had started to sound like an English language teaching tape.

  What is this? This is a Hagglund.

  What is that? That is a mistake.

  How is the glacier? The glacier is cold.

  Where are the crevasses? God alone knows.

  Victor did not trouble to answer him. I fastened my seat belt before slamming shut my door. The headlights lit two large cones of fog without showing anything of the way ahead. The fierce bright nothingness of the Ice Shelf had pained our eyes, but this fog? This was a cataract in the eyeball. Please make the fog lift! Please make it lift! Make the fog lift! I prayed now, and whether it was to God or Titus or the grinning fog ghosts I have no idea. The cones of light swarmed with mosquito flecks of ice. The windshield was full of fog. It came at us like dust-debris from an explosion—clouds and clouds and clouds of impenetrable smoke, or the steam from a steam train about to wipe us out. My eyes strained to see through it—strained and strained and could not be kept from trying to see. I could feel the optic nerves stretch like threads of bubble gum.

  So I turned on the closed-circuit TV just as Sigurd said, “Tell him!” I didn’t hear it, of course. But “Tell him” makes for a fairly distinct lip movement, and Sigurd said it several times over: “Tell him! Tell him! Tell him, please!” Manfred Bruch gave a violent shake of his head. Of course those lip movements might mean something else entirely in Norwegian, but thinking about it, I’d never once heard Sigurd and Manfred talk to each other in anything other than English.

  “Okay, what’s so funny?” I said to Titus, who was in the seat behind me now, using his hat to wipe the frozen fog out of his hair and the tears of laughter off his cheeks.

  “Sorry. Just my black sense of humor, hoo-hoo, sorry,” he hiccupped softly. “‘Now’s not the time for cold feet.’ Is that what he said? Quite worthy of Scott, that. ‘Now’s not the time for cold feet!’” He was in snow clothes now, I noticed, and his boots were sodden.

  Endlessly patient with our stupidity, the dot on the GPS navigation system winked and blink
ed on and on and on, tracing our progress toward the Transcontinental Mountains and the Polar Plateau. Toward Symmes’s Hole. You would have thought fright might have quickened its electronic heartbeat. But it’s British, so I suppose it hides its emotions.

  Its pulse stayed steady even when we hit the ridge.

  We hit at twenty miles an hour. It seemed to hit us, rather, looming up out of the fog like Moby-Dick attacking the Pequod, ramming us head-on. The impact was so great, I thought for sure the Hagglund would fall apart around us. The drive wheels screamed inside the rubber of the caterpillar tracks. The headlights blinked out. A crack appeared across the windshield, with a noise like a pistol shot. The engine overfueled itself and died.

  Despite our seat belts, Victor hit his chin on the steering wheel and my hands were flung forward like stones from a slingshot. On the CCTV screen I could see Manfred and Sigurd gasping for breath where the impact of their seat belts had jarred the wind out of them. I would have breathed on their behalf, but my own lungs were just as flat.

  In the fog, the ridge we had hit could have been any height—the same as the van’s or twenty times taller—a wave-shaped petrifaction of snow aslant our path, solid as concrete. The Hagglund could no more tackle it than a baby could crawl up a brick wall. For a long time, the engine would not restart, and then Victor could not find how to shift the gears into reverse. (Reverse had never been part of his plan.) Finally he maneuvered us around and drove alongside the ridge—tried to drive parallel to it, though it was impossible to tell ridge from fog, and the big side-view mirror kept gouging and scraping against the wall of ice until its glass broke and its bracket buckled out of shape. Manfred was all the time leaning on the button of the intercom, swearing, yelling for Victor to stop, demanding to know what was happening, what was going to happen.

  “No harm done. Built like a tank, these items! No call for language,” Victor murmured into his microphone, jovial as a tour guide on an open-topped bus, still hoping for a tip at the end of the ride.

  For ten miles we followed the ice ridge, while the surface under us roughened into a jumble of angular blocks and the fog boiled around the windows. Then the front of the van reared up, dragging itself over a clutter of boulder ice like rubble left by the collapse of a wall. A stretch of the ridge had decayed, and we blindly reeled and pecked our way through the gap and onto flat ice again. The twin cones of yellow electric light no longer lit the fog, but it was a small loss. What good is a torch to a blind man?

  Within a mile we crashed again, this time into a great monolith of frozen snow like the stump of a giant redwood. Swerving to avoid it, Victor collided with another, even bigger, and stove in a corner of the engine housing. When we got out to inspect the damage, I groped my way along the trailing tow rope, only to find the end frayed and the Ski-Doo gone. The Nansen sled had turned over and had been dragging along on its side. We got it back onto its runners—“Gloves, Uncle!”—but the fuel cans lashed to it had been pierced, and although the diesel inside was frozen solid, it would all leak out as soon as we thawed it for use.

  “We go back. We go back now,” said Manfred Bruch over and over again. “I’m sorry, but . . .”

  Uncle Victor neither argued nor agreed but simply went on singing between his teeth—“I love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles”—trying to kick the bent metal back into shape and keep it from catching on the caterpillar tracks. Sigurd said nothing at all. He was pasty pale, and he had bitten into his lip when we crashed.

  “Right, Sympatica!” said Victor, slapping me on the back. “Let’s get this tank back on track!”

  “Can we get home now?” I asked—as if the evening had turned chilly and it was time to turn back to a nice warm fire after a ramble in the countryside. What I meant was: “Is there enough fuel?” but Victor had done his calculations, had allowed for snags and holdups, had been planning this for years. He put me in charge of watching the gyrocompass on the dashboard—“Just keep us heading south”—while he rectified our course.

  Three more pressure ridges and contortions of ice loomed out of the fog. We had become one of those toy cars, bouncing off the walls and table legs of Antarctica, changing direction at every impact. We were trapped in a maze of dead ends. The fog itself seemed to be turning into concrete, and the concrete was setting around us into prison walls. In the fog we could not make sense of their geology, what pattern they were following, which way to steer to break free of the maze.

  Then Manfred, the toe of his boot on the intercom button even as he strove to see out the windows, gave a scream of pure terror as he saw the ground give way. It simply unzipped beneath the tank, opening on the left of us, passing under the tracks, and out to our right, dropping compacted snow into the nothingness below it. It can’t have taken more than three seconds for the ground to fall from under us.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “What Each Man Feels in His Heart, I Can Only Guess.” —Scott

  We were left straddling a crevasse, the rear of the front cab overhanging it, all but a yard of the back van supported by thin air. Manfred Bruch continued screaming: I could hear him through the intercom, through Uncle Victor’s headset, even, I’m sure, through the walls of the vehicle.

  The windows were all sweating with condensation from our breath. The fog was a kindness. If I could have seen out—seen down into the dark—I don’t think I could ever have moved my head or hands again, ever have looked away. As it was, I managed to turn and look at Victor. He would know what to do. He would get us out of it—infallible, resourceful Uncle Victor, who had aligned the atoms in his brain to increase his IQ.

  His hands were white on the steering wheel. His lips were between his teeth. His glasses were slightly bent from the first crash. “What we’re about now,” he said, “is an orderly evacuation. Bruch. Listen up, Bruch. Move toward the back door. If we lighten the vehicle, we can maybe ease her—”

  “No!” I said, tugging the headphones wide from his head, shouting into the microphone. “Don’t get out! Manfred! Sigurd! Don’t get out. The footprint of the vehicle’s lighter than a man’s. Don’t get out.” What a stupid expression: “the footprint of the vehicle.” But I’d just now been reading the manufacturer’s manual, hadn’t I? And those were the words! I don’t do words of my own. I only do . . . “the footprint of the vehicle.” What does it mean? How can a four-ton amphibious tank weigh less than a man? Even I don’t believe it, but that’s what it said in the book. That’s what the words said. They’re not my words. They’re trustworthy, believable, grown-up words. Nonfiction. “Don’t get out of the truck! If it’s less than four meters wide, we can get over it!”

  Four meters. Four meters. Four meters. How wide do you think it is, Titus?

  “Open the door and take a look, dearie.”

  I couldn’t get hold of the door latch in my overlarge mittens, tore one off, opened the door a crack, just a crack. The fog came in like an Arabian genie, insinuating its way around my legs and face. I could see all three of the icy metal steps, so the fog must have thinned; maybe it had been sucked into the crevasse by the falling snow. Maybe it had served its purpose, in losing us. For half their width, the steps overhung the crevasse; for half they were over snow. If I opened the door wide enough, I could probably lower myself down on to the brink of the crevasse before the Hagglund jackknifed backward into the abyss. How could a little pair of feet weigh more per square whatever than this big, red, ungainly, solid metal tank? How absurd. What rubbish. How implausible. Except that I don’t have little feet. This is Sym the clumsy, Sym the crass—elegant as a swan out of water. The manufacturer’s manual says that the footprint of the vehicle is less than that of a . . . Nothing about swans in the manual. And if the edges of the crevasse are still overhung with snow, I could be stepping onto a bit of brittle snow-crust jutting out over fathomless nothingness. Maybe ten yards deep, maybe one thousand.

  “I’d take a look for you, Sym, but I don’t do metric. Strictly an Imperial man, me
. How wide is the crevasse, Sym?”

  “I can’t tell! The fog! I can’t see!”

  Uncle Victor jabbed at the button of his seat belt. He was about to get out.

  “Just keep driving, Uncle! You know what Jon said? It can get over anything, this! Ten yards! Anything!” Positive thinking brings positive results. I didn’t want to say what I was really thinking: If we get out and the truck goes down the crevasse, we’re dead anyway.

  Victor looked at me. He was holding his lips between his teeth, and his skin was red and flaky because he doesn’t like to wear sunblock. He looked like an exotic breed of fish in a broken fish tank: ill-treated, bewildered.

  So I reached over and slid the gear stick from N to D. It’s an automatic. You can do that. The caterpillar tracks went taut. In the rear van, Manfred Bruch gave a roar of horror and made for the door. Sigurd tussled with him in a clumsy little brawl, which ended when his father took a punch in the stomach and dropped to his hands and knees to be sick.

  A pat of snow fell from each segment of the rubber track, into the dark beneath. Fog swilled over and around the Hagglund. The transmission whined. Every needle on the dashboard leaped around its dial—except for the gyrocompass, which pointed unswervingly south, unmoving; one of the collisions must have toppled it. The tank moved forward, defying gravity, defying physics, finding grip in thin air. Through my open door I could see how the vast noise of the engine was loosening compacted snow into granules, sending them trickling over the brink into the ravine below us. But we moved forward, which meant some few notches at least of caterpillar track were gripping terra firma at either end of the vehicle.

  Uncle Victor put his hands back on the steering wheel. He leaned forward, standing up, seat belt undone, to peer ahead into the fog. “What did I say, lass? What did I say? This crate can get over anything!”