Antarctica Read online

  And as he sat on the heavy shop floor, picking up nuts and bolts on automatic pilot, he racked his brains again, and cursed himself for talking to her about political philosophy, of all things. He cursed himself for making fun of his athletic career, what had he been thinking? To an obvious jock? And yet she had laughed at all that, she seemed to have been enjoying it. And the hike up Bealey Spur, looking around at those magnificent peaks, and the braided silver of the river below; he had done fine, he had enjoyed the climb and they had had a lot of fun. Of course at one particularly steep point in the trail, huffing and puffing, he had made some joke about being driven by such a hard taskmaster of a pro mountaineer, and her response had made it instantly clear that she didn’t think that line of humor was funny at all; which made sense, and he had immediately apologized and backed off. So that couldn’t have been it, could it? Just one little bad joke? And if that had been it, and getting dumped was the penalty for one misbegotten remark, what then did that say about her? It didn’t make sense. She was a very easygoing person, she was always so cheerful, so casual. She never seemed worried about anything. Such fun, ah, God … he couldn’t think of it, it hurt too much. And yet he thought of it all the time. Like pushing a sore tooth with your tongue. Yes, it still hurts, you fool. You idiot. But what, what, what had he done?

  So his poor racked brain spun, and his fingers picked up screws, nails, nuts, bolts, washers, and cotter pins, and put them in their bins. And slowly, slowly, he gave up all hope of getting back with Val; and, returning to his other unhappy track of thought, he gave up all hope of revolution bringing down the heartless aristocracy of the world; and when he slunk into the galley, starving and cold, Val’s gang laughed at their table, and the beaker girls smiled and passed him by, on the other side of an invisible spacetime discontinuity which was class.

  After which, back to the heavy shop. The Sisyphean pile was of course as high as ever. This is work, X thought; this is what work is.

  Ron appeared in the door. “Shit, X, are you still doing this?”

  X glared at him.

  “Tell you what, X. I got a proposal for you. Something completely different. It’ll still be work, hard work. But compared to this good-for-anything stuff you’re doing, it’ll be pure shits and giggles.”

  Dulles to LAX, LAX to Auckland on the overnight, half watching two half movies, half eating two half meals; watching the face of a sleeping English nurse who worked in Australia, who had been very cheery until Wade had asked her about her job; three patients had died recently of melanoma; she slept dreaming of them, looking troubled. Wade wanted her for his nurse.

  Later he woke to the insistent beep of his wrist phone. “Wade Norton,” he said blurrily into it.

  “Wade it’s Phil. Where are you now?”

  “Somewhere over the Pacific,” Wade said, trying not to wake up fully.

  “What, you’re not there yet?”

  “You just told me about this what, I don’t know.” Wade checked his watch, but could not remember what time zone it was keeping.

  “Have you made it past the international date line? Or am I still calling you from tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know. I was asleep.”

  “So was I, Wade. But then I woke up and turned on CNN, and saw Winston being interviewed, and I was so pissed off that I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

  “So you called me.”

  “As always.”

  Wade pulled his phone headset from his briefcase and put it on, then plugged it into his wrist.

  “—he did today? It’s not enough to block your Antarctic Treaty, and my debt-for-population reduction package—now he’s making noises about the CO2 joint implementation deal, knowing that any noise and the Chinese will throw a tantrum and run. Invasion of national sovereignty, he called it. We can’t be paying for their trouble! As if global warming was their trouble! Didn’t he notice Hurricane Velma? His own damn state about a hundred miles skinnier than it used to be, and him on CNN saying it’s a Chinese problem? Where do they find these guys? They must be breaking the cloning laws down there, they keep electing the same guy over and over.”

  “He’s popular,” Wade said, leaning his head against the cool smooth jet window.

  “Yes but why, Wade, why? How do these people win elections? I have never understood why so many decent hardworking Americans will loyally and you have to say even pigheadedly continue to vote for people whose explicit declared project is to rip them off.”

  “People don’t see it that way,” Wade said, beginning to doze again.

  “But it’s so obvious! Cutting jobs, reducing wages, increasing hours, shaving benefits and retirements—all this downsizing is the downsizing of labor costs, meaning less of what companies make is given to the employees and more to the owners and shareholders. And this is the Republican program! They advocate this transfer of profits! They write and pass the laws that allow it, and oppose the laws that try to stop it! So why do people vote for them, why? Nobody making less than about seventy grand a year should ever even think of voting for them! And even the people who make more should reconsider their priorities.”

  “You’re a true Democrat, Phil.” Though he had been a Green in his first term, and an independent in his second.

  “That’s true, but still, how do they do it?”

  “They tell people it’s Democrats ripping them off, with taxes. People see business paying them and government taking it away.”

  “But business takes it away too! They take it first and they take more and then they run off with it! People are just squeaking by while their employers are zillionaires! At least if the government rips you off then they use the money to build roads and schools and airports and jails and all, they build the whole damn infrastructure! No, taxing and spending is good, that’s what I say—tax big and spend big, I say that right on the floor of the Senate.”

  “We know, Phil. We watch in the office and we weep.”

  “Yes you do, because government is the people! The owners just take the money and build castles in Barbados. How can they justify that, how can they sell that program?”

  “Ideology is powerful.”

  “I guess so. You must be right. Although I’ve never understood why you can’t just look the situation in the face and see what’s going on.”

  “An imaginary relationship to a real situation.”

  “Very imaginary. But we’ve got to be even more imaginative than they are, Phil. Our imaginations are stronger than theirs!”

  “Maybe. They seem to have the upper hand right now.”

  “Do you think so? Don’t you think we’re gaining on them?”

  “Do you?”

  “Sure I do! I know it looks slow. But there are lots of people out there sick of being downsized. Give them half a chance and they’ll go for it. They don’t want revolution, but if they see a reform process leading to a desirable goal then they’ll walk away from these Götterdämmerung cowboys and they’ll all start up their own co-ops.”

  “Capitalization trouble.”

  “Yeah, but it’s legal, that’s the thing. It’s like a kind of progressive’s loophole in the law. And there’s so much of it happening already, under the radar. It’s like there are two sides battling for which fork of the path history is gonna take.”

  “Your teeter-totter teleology.”

  “What’s that? Sure, ecology’s on our side. It’s a good angel bad angel kind of thing. Co-opification versus the Götterdämmerung. But you know, everything’s going down in flames—ordinary people with kids can’t possibly like that, can they Wade? They’ll have to choose co-opification.”

  “You would think so.”

  “We have to make sure. Oh, man. I’m getting tired. I think the nightcap has finally done its thing, Wade. I’m gonna crash I think. I’m in Kashmir, try not to call me in the middle of the night, okay? But give me another report when you get there.”

  “I will. Good night, Phil.”

  “Nigh
t night.”

  Then he was waking up again under the light touch of a stewardess, and an hour later off the plane and through the airport and onto a smaller plane, and flying south to Christchurch, over the green hills of New Zealand’s two islands. Then down onto a small-town airport, and out waiting for luggage, in the late afternoon. His wrist phone told him it was three days after Phil’s call about Antarctica; but he had lost a day crossing the international date line. His internal clock appeared to be at about 4 A.M.

  He pushed his luggage on a cart through the parking lot, out to the roundabout at the airport entrance, where his hotel was located. Just around the corner, he was told, was the U.S. Antarctic Centre. So after checking in and taking his luggage to his room, he walked around to the Centre in a dreamlike state, to make his appointment for clothing issue.

  Inside a big low building he sat on a long wooden bench with some other men checking in, and tried on an entire L.L. Bean catalog of winter clothing, pouring cornucopiastically out of two big orange canvas bags packed specifically for him. The array of solar and piezoelectric gloves and mittens was particularly impressive, and he commented on it to one of the Kiwi helpers in the room. The man looked at his manifest and shrugged: “You’re going a lot of places.”

  “Am I?”

  “That’s what it says.”

  So Wade hefted his bags and shambled back to the hotel, then had dinner in the hotel restaurant. Every face there came straight out of Masterpiece Theatre, New Zealand now being considerably more British than the British. Back in his room he slept deeply, barely woke to his alarm; stared at his face in the bathroom mirror; good-bye to that world. He lugged his bags back to the Centre. It was dawn, and he and several other men changed into their extreme weather clothing. “We’ll cook in the plane,” an American commented, “and if we go down this stuff won’t keep us alive a single second longer.”

  “Propitiating the gods,” a Kiwi official suggested.

  The official herded them into a larger room, like an ultrafunctional airport lounge, where they and their orange bags were sniffed eagerly by a big black dog on a leash. Then they were led out to an old bus, and driven across the airport tarmac to the side of a big green four-engined prop plane with the number “04” painted in white behind its nose. Wade followed the other passengers up tall steps and through a small oval door, into a dim interior.

  He shuffled back into a big poorly lit cylindrical space, which was almost filled by the bladeless fuselage of a khaki helicopter. The walls were covered with things; on the floor against the walls, aluminum tubing supported red nylon webbing seats. The other passengers sat here and there, and Wade realized there were only going to be a dozen of them—half in black overalls and big red parkas, half in khaki pants and leather flyers’ jackets. These latter were the Kiwi crew of the helicopter. Wade sat down next to them.

  Overhead the space was filled by scores of pipes, lines, struts and cannisters, many of them encased in gray canvas-covered insulation tubing, laced into place with what looked like very long shoelaces, and marked everywhere by stencilled numbers, acronyms, cryptic instructions and so forth; and all covered with a layer of dust. If it had been a movie set the art director would have been accused of shamelessly camping it up: a flying machine of the previous century, how quaint! Except this one had to fly them for eight hours across an islandless stormy sea.

  Uneasily Wade jammed the foam earplugs he had been given into his ears, and got his webbing seatbelt fastened. Then the engines started, and even with the earplugs the roar was deafening. The dozen passengers were cast into a speechless world, a world of sign language, smiles, nods, thumbs-up, and so on. A crew member wearing a jacket that proclaimed him part of the New York Air Guard checked them over, then climbed up a hatchway to the cockpit. They were moving; perhaps they were taking off. The other red-parkaed passengers drifted into books, or reverie; the Kiwi helicopter crew members got up and wandered about, finding flat places to lie down and go to sleep. This left the webbing seats around Wade empty, and he lay down as well. Hot air alternated with frigid blasts.

  He managed to sleep for a while. When he woke up he stood and made his way forward, and established by hand signals with one of the crew that it was okay to go up the steps and into the cockpit. Up there it was a scene out of a World War II movie; two pilots up front, under a bank of small windows, in bright light; two officers behind them; a flight engineer to one side. Here it was just quiet enough to talk, and they chatted over the dull wash of the engines as they ate lunches out of brown paper bags, like school kids. They didn’t look much older than school kids either.

  “When was this plane built?” Wade asked the engineer.

  “1960.”

  “Metal fatigue?”

  “All the moving parts get replaced. The fuselage itself is thick as a sewer main. These Hercs are tough. This one here spent fifteen years under the snow after it lost an engine and crashed. Then they dug it out and put on a new engine, and here it is.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Yeah. Although the Herc bringing in the new engine crashed and was totalled, so it was no net gain.”

  “Oh.”

  Wade returned to his seat. So these planes really were antiques. Technology from the previous century. Which sometimes crashed. He forced himself to go back to sleep.

  When he woke again the interior of the plane was distinctly brighter. He pulled himself up and looked out the porthole. White light blasted his eyes and he fell back, eyes running, and fumbled on sunglasses before looking out again.

  Mountains; white mountains. Here and there the sheer face of a black cliff, but everything else covered in what looked like a coat of whipped cream, overspilling all the landscape. The creamy pure white of the snow was unlike anything he had ever seen—as if while he had slept the old Herc had skipped through hyperspace, and was now flying over another planet entirely. Ice World. A white waste of creamy snow, stretching out to fisheye horizons, with a blue-black sky above. Wade knelt on the webbing and pressed his nose to the cold glass, staring as the white mountains flowed under them, the speed of their passage not as great as the usual jet’s passover, so that there was a kind of fluid slow-motion quality to the changing angles of the black cliffs, all sliding by in the white noise of the Herc. Wow, Wade thought. Maybe it really will be different.

  When he turned and sat down again, he noticed that one of the young New York Air Guardsmen was wandering around the plane with a flashlight in hand, pointing it up into the dim network of pipes and wires overhead, then going to the porthole in the rear door to look out intently at the left wing. He did this for a while, back and forth, back and forth. He wiped his brow; he was sweating. In fact he looked terrified. He was like a mime doing Deep Fear.

  Wade looked around and saw that the New Zealander helicopter crew had also noticed the Air Guardsman. He leaned over to shout in the nearest Kiwi’s ear.

  “What’s up?”

  “—flaps aren’t working,” in a very strong Kiwi accent. Fleps ahnt wuh-keen.

  “A flap isn’t working?”

  “None of the flaps are working!”

  Wade pulled back to stare, feeling his stomach shrink. The Kiwi pilot was grinning, and he nodded to show that Wade had heard right. Then he leaned toward Wade to add more.

  “Wash them in Cheech—water freezes in there—won’t move after that.”

  “And so?” Wade shouted.

  “—don’t need flaps to land.”

  “You don’t?”

  The man shook his head, then grinned at the Guardsman and shouted to Wade, “I don’t think he knows that!”

  “No!”

  Obviously he didn’t. But Wade did. Or so a Kiwi helicopter pilot had told him. Not need flaps to land a plane? Wasn’t that exactly what they were for? Certainly the Kiwis did not look worried. In fact they were watching the Air Guardsman sweat it out, and glancing at each other and grinning, then trying to look dead serious when the Guardsman walked by
, then laughing hilariously—all this in pantomime, in the white noise of the howling engines. The Air Guardsman was oblivious of them, however, and he pinballed around the plane, tracing the big hydraulic lines that ran along the ceiling from the cockpit to the wings. Wade saw with a sinking heart that this was a machine run by the force of liquids pushed around in tubes. And the Air Guardsman was sweating bullets, he was literally wiping his brow, though it was freezing in their compartment. The Kiwis could barely contain their mirth when he turned their way. Wade watched it all with his mouth hanging open, wondering who to believe. He preferred to believe the helicopter crew, of course, but they were Kiwis, and who knew what they would do? Not need flaps to land?