Antarctica Read online

“X, did you say hijacked? Tell me what you mean by hijacked, over.”

  “What I mean is that I’m in a storm up here and just now some, somebody landed on my roof and covered my windows on the outside with black plastic, and none of my doors will open, something has been done to them on the outside to keep them from opening! So I’m going to go back and try to cut through a bar holding the back doors together, but I thought I’d better call you first, in case, to tell you what’s happening! Also to ask if you can see anything unusual about my train in any satellite images you have of it! Over!”

  “We’ll have to check about the satellite images, X, I don’t know who is getting those, if anyone. Just stay put and we’ll see what we can do. Don’t do anything rash, over.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” X muttered, and pushed the transmit button: “Listen Randi, I’m going to go to the back doors and see if they’ll open, be right back to tell you about it, over!”

  He went to the back and shoved out on the doors again. Again they stopped, but this time he fit the hacksaw into the crack over the bar, and began to saw like a maniac. Some kind of hardened plastic, apparently, and the doors impeded the saw. By the time he cut through the bar he was sweating profusely, and when he flung the doors open the air crashed over him like a wave of liquid nitrogen. “Ow!” he said, his throat chilling with every inhalation. He pulled his parka hood up, and held onto the door and leaned out into the wind, his eyes tearing so he could barely see.

  But he had a door open. He was no longer trapped. He leaned out to look; the next vehicle in the line was following as if nothing had happened. It was like being in a train of mechanical elephants. No one in sight, nothing to be seen. Rumbling engines, squeaks of giant tractor wheels over the dry snow, the whistle and shriek of the wind; nothing else; but a gust of fear blew through him on the wind, and he shivered convulsively. He needed more clothes. Back up in the cab he could hear Randi’s voice, a clear Midwestern twang that cut through static like nothing else: “Mac Coms calling SPOT 103, answer me X, what’s happening out there? Weather says you’re in a Condition One out there, so be careful! They also said their satellite photos do not penetrate the cloud layer in any way useful to you. Answer me X, please, over!”

  Instead he dropped down the steps and onto the hard-packed snow beside the vehicle. It squeaked underfoot. “Shit.” He ran forward and leaped onto the ladder steps that were inset into the lower body of the cab. Black plastic on the windows, sure enough. “Shit!” He tore at it, and the freezing wind helped pull the sheet away from the metal and plastic; he held onto the sheet with a desperate clench, so he would have evidence that he had not hallucinated the whole incident. Then he hesitated, irrationally afraid of jumping down wrong somehow and screwing up, as in his ski fantasy. But surely in the state he was in, he could run a lot faster than the tractors were moving; and it was too cold to stay where he was, the wind was barreling right through his clothes and his flesh too, rattling his bones together like castanets. So he leaped down, and landed solidly, and as his tractor lumbered past he ran out of the line of the treadmarks, to be able to see back the length of the train. It looked short. He counted to be sure, pointing at each tractor in turn; while he did his vehicle got a bit ahead of him, and when he noticed that he ran like a lunatic back to the side of the thing, and leaped up and in, panting hard, frightened, frozen right to the core. There were only nine vehicles now.

  High rapid beeping came from her crevasse detector, and Valerie Kenning stopped skiing and leaned on her ski poles. She was well ahead of the rest of her group, and with a check over her shoulder to make sure they were coming on okay, she stabbed her poles deeper into the dry snow of the Windless Bight, causing a last little surge of heat in the pole handles, and took the pulse radar console out of its parka pocket and looked at the screen, thumbing the buttons to get a complete read on the terrain. A beepbeepbeep; there was a fairly big crevasse ahead. They were entering the pressure zone where the Ross Ice Shelf used to push around the point of Cape Crozier, and though the pressure was gone the buckling was still there, causing many crevasses.

  She approached this one slowly and got a visual sighting: a slight slump lining the snow. She would have noticed it, but there were many others that were invisible. Thus her love for the crevasse detector, like a baseball catcher’s love for his mask. Now she used it to check the crevasse for a usable snowbridge. The music of the beeps played up and down—higher and faster over thin snow, lower and slower over the thicker bits. In one broad region to her left, snow filled the crevasse with a thickness and density that would have held a Hagglunds. So Val unclipped from her sledge harness, plucked her poles out of the snow and skied slowly across, shoving one ski pole down ahead of her in the old-fashioned test, more for luck than anything else; by now she trusted the radar as much as any other machine she used.

  She recrossed the bridge, snapped back into her sledge, pulled it across the crevasse, and stood waiting for the others, chilling down as she did. While she waited she checked her GPS to scout their route through the crevasses ahead. A bit of a maze. The three members of the 1911 journey to Cape Crozier, the so-called “Worst Journey in the World,” had taken a week of desperate hauling to pass through this region; but with GPS and the latest ice maps, Val’s group of twenty-five would thread a course in only a day, or two if Arnold slowed them too much.

  There were only two days to go before the springtime return of the sun to Cape Crozier, and at this hour of the morning Mount Erebus’s upper slopes were bathed in a vibrant pink alpenglow, which reflected down onto the blue snow of the shadowed slopes beneath it, creating all kinds of lavender and mauve tints. Meanwhile the twilit sky was pinwheeling slowly through its bright but sunless array of pastels: broad swathes of blues, purples, pinks, even moments of green; as Val slowly cooled down she had a good look around, enjoying the moment of peace that would soon be shattered by the arrival of the pack. A guide’s chances to enjoy the landscapes she traveled through came a lot less frequently than Val would have liked.

  Then the pack was on her and she was back at work, making sure they all got across the snow bridge without accident, chatting with the perpetual cheerfulness that was her professional demeanor, pointing out the alpenglow on Erebus, which was turning the steam cloud at its summit into a mass of pink cotton candy thirteen thousand feet above them. This diverted them while they waited for Arnold. It was too cold to wait comfortably for long, however, and many of them obviously had been sweating, despite Val’s repeated warnings against doing so. But even with the latest smartfabrics in their outfits, these folks were not skillful enough at thermostatting to avoid it. They had overheated as they skied, and their sweat had wicked outward through several layers whose polymer microstructures were more or less permeable depending on how hot they got, the moisture passing through highly heated fabric freely until it was shoved right out the surface of their parkas, where it immediately froze. Her twenty-four waiting clients looked like a grove of flocked Christmas trees, shedding snow with every move.

  Eventually a pure white Arnold reached them and crossed the snowbridge, and without giving him much of a chance for rest they were off again through the crevasse maze. Although they were crossing the Windless Bight, a strong breeze struck them in the face. Val waited for Arnold, who was puffing like a horse, his steamy breath freezing and falling in front of him as white dust. He shook his head at her; though she could see nothing of his face under his goggles and ski mask (which he ought to have pulled up, sweating as he was), she could tell he was grinning. “Those guys,” he said, with the intonation the group used to mean Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard, the three members of the original Crozier journey. “They were crazy.”

  “And what does that make us?”

  Arnold laughed wildly. “That makes us stupid.”

  black sky

  white sea

  Ice everywhere, under a starry sky. Dark white ground, flowing underfoot. A white mountain puncturing the black sky, m
antled by ice, dim in the light. An ice planet, too far from its sun to support life; its sun one of the brighter stars overhead, perhaps. Snow ticking by like sand, too cold to adhere to anything. Titan, perhaps, or Triton, or Pluto. No chance of life.

  But there, at the foot of black cliffs falling into white ice, a faint electric crackle. Look closer: there—the source of the sound. A clump of black things, bunched in a mass. Moving awkwardly. Black pears in white tie. The ones on the windward side of the mass slip around to the back; they’ve taken their turn in the wind, and can now cycle through the mass and warm back up. They huddle for warmth, sharing in turn the burden of taking the brunt of the icy wind. Aliens.

  Actually Emperor penguins, of course. Some of them waddled away from the newcomers on the scene, looking exactly like the animated penguins in Mary Poppins. They slipped through black cracks in the ice, diving into the comparative warmth of the −2°C. water, metamorphosing from fish-birds to bird-fish, as in an Escher drawing.

  The penguins were the reason Val’s group was there. Not that her clients were interested in the penguins, but Edward Wilson had been. In 1911 he had wondered if their embryos would reveal a missing link in evolution, believing as he did that penguins were primitive birds in evolutionary terms. This idea was wrong, but there was no way to find that out except to examine some Emperor penguin eggs, which were laid in the middle of the Antarctic winter. Robert Scott’s second expedition to Antarctica was wintering at Cape Evans on the other side of Ross Island, waiting for the spring, when they would begin their attempt to reach the South Pole. Wilson had convinced his friend Scott to allow him to take Birdie Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard on a trip around the south side of the island, to collect some Emperor penguin eggs for the sake of science.

  Val thought it strange that Scott had allowed the three men to go, given that they might very well have perished, and thus jeopardized Scott’s chances of reaching the Pole. But that was Scott for you. He had made a lot of strange decisions. And so Wilson and Bowers and Cherry-Garrard had manhauled two heavy sledges around the island, in their usual style: without skis or snowshoes, wearing wool and canvas clothing, sleeping in reindeer-skin sleeping bags, in canvas tents; hauling their way through the thick drifts of the Windless Bight in continuous darkness, in temperatures between −40 and −75 degrees Fahrenheit: the coldest temperatures that had ever been experienced by humans for that length of time. And thirty-six days later they had staggered back into the Cape Evans hut, with three intact Emperor penguin eggs in hand; and the misery and wonder they had experienced en route, recounted so beautifully in Cherry-Garrard’s book, had made them part of history forever, as the men who had made the Worst Journey in the World.

  Now Val’s group was in a photo frenzy around the penguins, and the professional film crew they had along unpacked their equipment and took a lot of film. The penguins eyed them warily, and increased the volume of their collective squawking. The newest generation of Emperors were still little furballs, in great danger of being snatched by skuas wheeling overhead, the skuas trying some test dives and then skating back on the hard wind to the Adelie penguin rookery at the north end of the cape. As always, Cape Crozier was windy.

  Val’s clients finished their photography, and then were not inclined to stay and observe the Emperors any longer; the wind was too biting. Even dressed in what Arnold called spacesuits, a wind like this one cut into you. So they quickly regathered around Val. George told her they were hoping that they would still have time in the brief twilight to climb Igloo Spur and look for the circle of rocks that Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard had left behind.

  “Sure,” Val said, and led them to the usual campsite at the foot of Igloo Spur, and told them to go on up and have a look while there was still some twilight left. She would set a security tent and then follow. George Tremont, the leader of the expedition, which was not just another Footsteps re-enactment but a special affair, went into conference with Arnold, his producer, and the cinematographer and camera crew. They had to decide if they should film this moment as the true live hunt for the rock circle, or else find it today and then film a hunt tomorrow, in a little re-enactment of their own.

  Val had very little patience for this kind of thing. Her GPS had the coordinates for the “Wilson Rock Hut,” as the Kiwi maps called it, and so they could have hiked up the spur and found the thing immediately. But no; this was not to be done. George and the rest wanted to film a finding of the rock igloo without mechanical aid. They seemed to assume that their telecast’s audience would be so ignorant that they would not immediately wonder why GPS was not being used. Val doubted this notion, but kept her thoughts to herself, and concentrated on setting up one of the big team tents, looking up once or twice at the gang tramping up the ridge, with their cameras but without GPS. It was pure theater.

  After she had the tent up, and the sledges securely anchored, she hiked up the spine of the lava ridge. About five hundred feet over the sea ice the ridge leveled off, and fell and rose a few times before joining the massive flank of Mount Terror, Erebus’s little brother. As she had expected, she found her group still hunting for the rock hut, scattered everywhere over the ridge. In the dim tail end of the twilight this kind of wandering around could be dangerous; Cape Crozier was big and complicated, its multiple lava ridges separating lots of tilted and crevassed ice slopes running down onto the sea ice. When Mear and Swan had re-enacted the Worst Journey for the first time, in 1986, they had lost their own tent in the darkness for a matter of some hours, and if they hadn’t stumbled across it again they would have died.

  But now the wandering had to be allowed; this was the good stuff, the treasure hunt. The camera operators were hopping around trying to stay out of each other’s views, getting every moment of it on their supersensitive film; it would be more visible on screen than it was to the naked eye. And everyone had a personal GPS beeper in their parka anyway, so if someone did disappear, Val could pull out the finder unit and track them down. So it was safe enough.

  The searchers, however, were beginning to look like a troop of mimes doing impressions of Cold Discouragement. The truth was that the rock igloo that the three explorers had left behind was only knee high at its highest point, and both it and the plaque put there by the Kiwis had been buried in the last decade’s heavy snowfalls; though most of the snow here had been swept to sea by the winds, enough had adhered in the black rubble to make the whole ridge a dense stippling of black and white, hard to read in the growing darkness. Every large white patch on the broad ridge looked more or less like a knee-high rock circle, and so did the black patches too.

  So hither and yon Val’s clients wandered, calling out to each other at every pile of stone or snow. Several were trying to read their copies of The Worst Journey in the World by flashlight, to see if the text could direct them. Val heard some complaining about the vagueness of Cherry-Garrard’s descriptions, which was not very generous given that young Cherry had been terribly near-sighted and had not been able to wear his thick glasses because they kept frosting up, so that among the other remarkable aspects of the Worst Journey was the fact that one of the three travelers, and the one who ended up telling their tale, had been functionally blind. A kind of Homer and Ishmael both.

  Val sat on a waist-high rock next to a couple of the film crew, who had given up filming for the moment and were plugging their gloves into a battery heater and then clasping chocolate bars in the hope of thawing them a bit before eating. They were laughing at George, who was now consulting a copy of Sir Edmund Hillary’s book No Latitude for Error, which recounted the first discovery of the rock hut, forty-six years after it had been built. Hillary and his companions had been out testing the modified farm tractors they would later drive up Skelton Glacier to the South Pole, and once at Cape Crozier they had wandered around like Val’s companions were now, with their own copy of Cherry-Garrard’s book and nothing more; essentially theirs had been the experience Val’s companions were now trying to
reproduce, for at that time Cherry-Garrard’s description of the site was the only guide anyone could have, with no GPS or anything else to help. So Hillary and his companions had argued over Cherry’s book line by line, just like Val’s group was doing now, only in genuine rather than faked frustration, until Hillary himself had located the hut.

  His book’s account of the discovery, however, also proved to have a certain vagueness to it, as if the canny mountaineer had not wanted to reveal an exact route. Although he had said, as George was proclaiming now, that the hut was right on the line of the ridge, and in a saddle. “‘As windy and inhospitable a location as could be imagined!’” George read in an angry shout.

  “We should be filming this,” Geena noted.

  “Elka’s getting it,” Elliot said calmly.

  Sir Edmund was proving as little help as Cherry-Garrard. It occurred to Val that someone could also look up the relevant passages in Mear and Swan’s In the Footsteps of Scott, for those first re-enacters, the unknowing instigators of an entire genre of adventure travel, had also relocated the hut in the pre-GPS era, and had published a good photo of it in their book. But it was a coffee-table book, Val recalled, and probably no one had wanted to carry the weight. Anyway no book was going to help them on this dark wild ridge.

  Elliot echoed her thought: “A classic case of the map not being the territory.”

  “Although a map would help. I don’t think they’re gonna find it without GPS.”

  “Has to be here somewhere. They’ll trip over it eventually.”

  “It’s too dark now.”

  And the wind was beginning to hurt. People were beginning to crab around with their backs to the wind no matter which way they were going. It was loud, too, the wind moaning and keening dramatically over the broken rock.

  “I’ll give you even odds they find it.”