Antarctica

9 Big Trouble

Wade slept through the flight to Shackleton Glacier Camp, and sleepwalked his way through the transition from Herc to helo, then fell asleep again. The next time he woke he found himself suspended above the upper reaches of Shackleton Glacier, in the clear plastic bubble of a little Squirrel helicopter. The ice curved down to the sea in a broad sweep, with long lines of rubble marking very clearly the direction of the flow, and tributary glaciers pouring in and merging in just the way the water of rivers would, although here the eddies and cross-currents were indicated by rippled blue crevasse patches, or even in some places gnashed into fields of turquoise blades.

The Kiwi helo pilot pointed down at one such field. “Ever seen one of those close up?”

“No.”

They dropped like a shot bird, tilting forward and to the left as they spiralled tightly downward. Wade gritted his teeth. Kiwi pilots were scary, as he had begun to learn on his flight down from Christchurch. The young American pilots working for ASL moved their big beasts around the air like trucks, and like good truck drivers they were impressive; but the Kiwis, older and wiser, flew as if their helos were extensions of their bodies, like dragonflies. This man looked unconcerned as he brought the helo swooping down to hover, in dragonfly style, well down inside an avenue of serac skyscrapers; Wade was shocked at their size, as from a thousand feet up they had looked like waist-high ripples. “Wow.”

The pilot pulled back up and continued without comment. Back at cruising height, the crevasse patches again looked like ice cubes; but now, knowing how big they really were, Wade’s sense of scale popped like one’s ears did, and he realized that the glacier and the mountains flanking it were all huge, huge, huge. The helo buzzed along like a bee up a winter canyon. It was a big planet.

Ahead a rusty rock island grew. A spill of glacier poured over a low point in its outermost ridge, and fell down toward a bowl of rock that it never even reached, much less filled. As they passed the island Wade could now see the polar cap, extending to the south forever. On the southernmost point of the island clustered a tiny knot of green square roofs, like Monopoly houses. Vertigo of scale: it was as a gnat or a microbe that he watched the tiny structures recede behind them, and the nunatak get lower and smaller, until they were out over the ice of the polar cap, and it was ice as far as they could see, on a world grown as big as Jupiter, or the sun itself. Then the helo began to drop again. They were landing on the ice.

The complex of buildings they descended on was of course bigger than it had appeared from above. As Wade got out of the helicopter the complex looked entirely deserted, in the usual Antarctic way; everyone indoors. The empty continent indeed.

Then one of the doors opened, and out of it appeared the big man Wade had met back in McMurdo, on Ob Hill. It seemed a very long time ago; in actuality, less than two weeks.

“Hi!” Wade said.

X looked closer, then recognized him as well. “Hi. Welcome to the ice.”

Wade nodded, looking around at the brilliantly lit scene. Flat white to the horizon in all directions; much like the Pole in that regard. A gentle breeze cut deep into him. The main building of the complex was a small meat locker/mobile home, behind it a gleaming oil derrick or something like, resting on broad pontoons that were only slightly snowdrifted on their south sides. Metal grid stairs led up to the usual locker door, and after a brief look around they went inside.

The interior of the room was like the bridge of an invisible ship, the walls banked with the consoles of anonymous machinery. From this height expansive shallow basins and low hills were discernible on the ice plain.

“Nice,” Wade said.

“Yes,” said X, and called into the next room. A man entered. “This is Carlos, the leader of the group here.”

“Good to meet you,” Wade said to the bearded man. They shook hands.

“And you too,” Carlos said. “Nice to have you here. Here, let’s have some lunch, and then we’ll take you out and show you around.”

“That would be nice.”

Lunch was a spicy Chilean shrimp and scallop stew. There were other men in the room, Latinos and Africans, eating the stew and talking in Spanish or English. Then they left in a group for the machine shop, and Carlos and X and Wade sat at a lab table under one of the end windows, and talked looking out at the view. Wade described his mission to Antarctica, and told them some of what he had discovered at the South Pole and back at McMurdo. Carlos nodded, then expressed his admiration for Phil Chase. “He is very important now, very important.”

Wade said, “Do you mind if I try to transmit our conversation to him? He’d like to hear this, I’m sure.”

“Oh no problem, no problem.”

Wade tapped the Congressman’s button on his wrist phone, hoping it was not the middle of the night wherever Chase was now; or that he was feeling insomniac again. Voices in the night: that was how Phil spent many a sleepless hour.

“First,” Wade said, “can you tell me if your hovercraft has ever been out to the South Pole, either with you, or piloted by someone else?”

Carlos looked surprised. “To the Pole? It’s more than two hundred kilometers away.”

“Couldn’t the hovercraft get there?”

“Not without refueling.”

“Couldn’t fuel caches be out there?”

“Well, yes, I suppose so. I mean there are, at our field stations. But they are all located over this basin under the ice that we are investigating, the Pothole as we call it. We don’t go toward the Pole much.”

“And no one else could have used the hovercraft?”

“No way.”

Wade nodded, thinking it over. “Tell me more about this place.”

Carlos described the nature of the work going on at the station, emphasizing its exploratory nature, the new fail-safe technologies being employed in the hunt, and the fact that the main quarry at this point was methane hydrates, which if burned as fuel rather than released into the atmosphere would actually help the overall picture concerning global warming. He listed the points of the suspended Antarctic Treaty, and described how they were in fact conforming to all of them: “especially at this point, when the drilling is being done for science only.”

Wade nodded throughout this description, then said, “It’s very interesting, but you must agree that there is a lot of criticism and opposition to your project.”

“This is political in nature.”

“Well, some from Antarctic scientists too. If the project is as harmless or as beneficial as you say it is, then why are they making these objections?”

Carlos rolled his eyes. “Unfortunately there are a fairly large number of scientists who are not completely scientific. Not good scientists when it comes to life outside their own field of study. It’s part of a more general crisis ongoing among scientists worldwide, concerning how to behave in the world outside their field. You have been down here long enough to notice, I hope, that this continent is run by scientists, and mostly for their own benefit. They are funded by governments to come down here, and they generate the only export of the continent so far, which is scientific papers. Knowledge, you can say, but say also papers, careers, livings.”

X was nodding deeply as Carlos said this, and Wade looked to him to invite him to explain why.

“That’s the way it looked in McMurdo,” X said. “Beaker utopia. And the rest of the people down here making things nice for them, freeing up their time, but just making wages for themselves. It’s a caste system.”

“Exactly,” Carlos said. “Most scientists have analyzed life scientifically, and realized that sufficiency is all that you really need, and that pursuing money beyond the point of sufficiency only degrades life. So that it is no coincidence that very rich people are often fools or crazed, while scientists are smart people who have carved their little utopia out of the world system, by extending their efforts after knowledge rather than money. They know that knowledge can become power, and with the power that science wields in this world, they control things. Control even the political realm, but without the hassle of politics per se. They just advise the decision makers what is possible and what is advisable, and ask for money, and go out and do what they want.”

Wade said, “So you’re saying scientists control not just Antarctica, but the whole rest of the world?”

Carlos got up and took their bowls to the stove for refills. “Exactly true! And this illustrates a very important principle of mine, which is that whatever is true in Antarctica is also true everywhere else in the world. But in Antarctica there are no, no,” he waved at the blank featureless white plain outside the window, “no distractions. No trees or billboards. You can see what really is true, naked out here. So if you come down here and see a continent ruled by scientists for their own convenience, it is true also then on all the other continents as well.”

Wade said, “Well, but, I don’t know … I’m not used to thinking of scientists actually being the ones in control. I don’t think most of them would agree that’s the case. I doubt they would even want it to be.”

“Oh no, not explicitly! Of course not! Who would want that, it is obviously such a hassle! Politicians—” he looked at Wade, raised a palm to say, What can you say? “No sane person would want that, apologies to Senator Chase. It violates the principle of sufficiency. But tell me, who do you think rules the world?”

“Governments,” Wade said.

“Okay, but not politicians per se. The whole government.”

“Yes.”

“Meaning you. I mean, in that the politicians get elected, and they have staff people who actually know how to work the system. And so when they want to get something done, they ask their staff how they can do it, and if the staff likes the project they tell the politician how, and if they don’t like it, they subvert it.”

“Yes, Minister,” X said. “Great show.”

Wade had to agree. “I certainly am in complete control of my politician,” he said distinctly toward his wrist phone. “Sir Humphrey has nothing on me.”

“So,” Carlos said, “but when you make your decisions, who do you consult? Do you call yourself a bureaucrat?”

“No, not really.”

“Because they are just functionaries, they do not set policy?”

“That’s right.”

“But what about technocrats? What about scientific staff, who tell the politicians what is physically possible and what isn’t? Are you a technocrat?”

“Perhaps,” Wade said. “But not usually. I have an expertise, I suppose, but I’m no scientist.”

“A bureaucrat then! Or staff assistant, or political aide. Whatever you call it. Let’s just say government, like you said at first. But you make your decisions by consulting with a technical staff, the technocrats, and they make their decisions by consulting with the scientific bodies, the scientists. And so the scientists call the shots!”

Wade and X stared at each other in consternation.

“And now we have overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity,” Carlos went on as he gave them full bowls. “We have maybe two, maybe three billion more people than we can support. And this global warming, the bad weather. It’s an emergency situation. Governments have to guide us through this tight spot in history, if we are going to get through it without supercatastrophes. But how will they do that? Who will tell them how to do it?”

“Beakers,” X said.

Carlos nodded.

“But they’re not even trying!” X objected. “They’ve got their island utopia, like you said, and so they just come down here or wherever else and hang out in the field or the lab and do their thing, and they’re not doing anything to save the world, as far as I can tell. They’re just part of the capitalist machinery.”

“Yes and no,” Carlos said. “Capitalism is the dominant economic order, and it tends to subsume everything else, it wants to subsume everything else. But the great outsider, the system that capitalism cannot conquer, is science. The two are actually at odds with each other, the one trying to defeat the other. This is the great war of our time!”

“Capitalism versus science?” Wade said, skeptical.

“Sure. First it was capitalism versus socialism, and then capitalism versus democracy, and now science is the only thing left! And science itself is part of the battlefield, and can be corrupted. But in essence, in my heart as a scientist, I say to you that it is a utopian project. It tries to make a utopia within itself, in the rules of scientific conduct and organization, and it also tries to influence the world at large in a utopian direction. No, it is true!” he cried, noting the skeptical looks on both Wade’s and X’s faces. “Here, have you seen this book?” He leaned over the lab bench and pulled a book from under a stack of dirty dishes. “Do you know it? This is the Spanish version, it was written by Chileans. Los Elementos Eticos, Políticos y Utópicos Incorporados en la Estructura de la Ciencia Moderna. Recently it has been translated into English, of course, for that is the language of science. In English it is called something like The Ethical, Political, and Utopian Elements Embodied in the Structure of Modern Science. And this book is really having an impact, it is quite a revolution in scientific circles. Because what it demonstrates very clearly is that what we think of as neutral objective science is actually a utopian politics and worldview already. There is a big historical section describing the rise of science, showing that science is self-organizing and self-actualizing, and always trying to get better, to be more scientific, as one of its rules. And there is a big middle section showing how various features of normal scientific practice, the methodology and so on, are in fact ethical positions. Things like reproducibility, or Occam’s razor, or peer review—almost everything in science that makes it specifically scientific, the authors show, is utopian. Then the final section tells what the ramifications of this fact are, how scientists should behave now, once they realize this truth. And the book is a kind of underground bestseller! It goes from lab to lab, the graduate students are all reading it, the senior scientists who are still thinking—everyone! This is the cause of the recent explosion in appropriate technologies, if you ask me, the so-called materials revolution, the ecological-efficiency movement, permaculture, all these scientific movements and strands, all networked together of course, and all vibrating now with the philosophy of this book!”

“I’d like to read that,” X said, tapping madly at his paperback’s console to see if it was in there already.

“Me too,” Wade said.

Carlos nodded. “It should be in most of the e-books like X’s here, unless you have an old one that isn’t getting supplemented. The translation is about five years old now. Anyway, you know, what I have been saying to you is the utopian description of the situation. In reality, there are a great number of scientists who are not interested in the reasons they do what they do. This makes them bad scientists in that way, but there you are. Bad work is done in every field. So, you know, there are some scientists used to the old ways down here, when the technology being deployed was not safe for the environment. Consider the nuclear reactor that American scientists brought down to McMurdo, for instance.”

“Nuclear reactor?” Wade said.

“It’s gone now. Along with a big chunk of Observation Hill, which had been contaminated. A hundred thousand tons of dirt, shipped north to the nuclear dump in South Carolina. Nukey Poo, they called it.”

“You can still set a dosimeter ringing if you stick it in the dirt in the right places,” X confirmed. “Some people used to do that for fun.”

“For fun?” Wade said.

“McMurdo,” X explained.

“Anyway,” Carlos said, taking their emptied bowls over to a narrow shelf on the wall and stacking them, “when more people realize what we are doing out here—the high safety factor, the need to capture as much methane as we can before it is released as a greenhouse gas—the desperate need for energy in the countries of the consortium—then there will no longer be this ignorant outcry. Meanwhile”—he grinned at Wade, waving at the door—“let us show you something.”

Hey you, do you read?

We read.

Everything ready?

Everything’s ready. The hardware’s in place, and we have made contact with the friends who are going to clear all personnel from active sites. They’re in position, so we can go on the prearranged schedule.

Great. They’ve got track of everyone?

Yes. Everyone’s in their site camps.

Cool. Okay, we go on schedule then, very good. Everyone have a nice trip home, and remember, no talk ever. Eco radical not ego radical. This is probably the last time most of us will communicate, so for all of us, let me say it’s been nice working with you.

You too.

You too.

Over and out.

Outside, the other two men prepped three snowmobiles. While Wade watched he called Phil Chase back again; “Did you hear any of that, Phil?”

“Yes I did. I was asleep when you called, and I may have slipped back under from time to time, but I kept the phone to my ear, and it was very interesting. Sir Humphrey indeed. And I want to read that book. It sounds good. It would be good if what this man said was true. But I don’t think he’s taking into account the true power of power. There’s guns under the table, Wade. There’s a cancer in the social body, and the tumor cells are the brains of these god-damned Götterdämmerung executives, guiding the traffic over the cliff and then flying off to their Caribbean isle. I’d like to figure out a new kind of chemotherapy … it’d look kind of like Eraserhead I guess….” Either the connection broke or Phil had gone back to sleep.

Then Carlos and X were ready, and Wade was given a one-minute tutorial in operating a Skidoo, which was a little snowmobile with a single broad ski for a front wheel. Then they were off, buzzing over the white surface in a line of three, with Wade in the middle. He had never ridden a snowmobile before, but with a thumb-squeeze accelerator, and no brakes at all, and handlebars for the front ski like a bicycle, it was no great problem to handle. It was like being astraddle a giant clumsy extra-wide Harley Davidson, he supposed, having never been on a motorcycle either. Certainly balancing the thing was no problem, except for occasional lurches into dips he did not see, for which he grossly overcompensated with anxious leans and turns in the other direction.

But by and large the ride was very close to effortless, especially after he relaxed the viselike grip he had taken on the handlebars, which were heated to keep his hands warm. Both his hands and wrists were inside giant borrowed mitts called bear claws, but without the heat from the handlebars they still would have been cold.

After several more minutes of roaring over the white firn, he felt free to unlock his gaze from Carlos’s back and look around a bit. Off to their left a black serrated rock ridge broke the horizon. Carlos was following a barely discernible line of green flags, waving limply on top of bamboo poles. At one of these he slowed down, turned to the left and sped on, toward a new manifestation of the black mountains on the horizon, this time straight ahead of them. As they closed on it Wade saw it in more detail, looming up over the white plain: a brown-black spur of rock, lined horizontally. A mountain buried to the neck in ice. Nearer to it he saw that the rock disrupted the ice around it into rings of frozen eddies, and even what looked like frozen breakers, forever almost about to break against the lower slopes of the rock cliff.

When they stopped, outside the turbulence, Wade pulled off one bear claw to check his wrist GPS. They were in the Mohn Basin, it seemed; the spur of rock appeared to be D’Angelo Bluff; beyond it the black spike of Mount Howe. The ice between these nunataks was lined and cracked with entire cities of blue shatter. Carlos started up again and headed straight for one of these broken zones, finally maneuvering in broad turns until he appeared to be riding right into the open end of a broad ice ravine. Blue gleaming seracs overhung one wall; above those black rock towered high in the sky.

blue sky

black rock

blue ice

Happily Carlos stopped at this point in the growing chasm, and turned off his snowmobile engine. X and Wade did the same. Suddenly they were out there, in a silence so complete it seemed noisy.

Except there; a breeze, soughing over the ice. It was Debussy who should have been the composer for this continent, Wade thought. Debussy or Satie, or Sibelius, mystic spirit of snowy Finland. Sibelius the composer and Dalí the artist. Or Escher. Or Rockwell Kent, or Canada’s Group of Seven, or Nisbet of the Antarctic. Only a few could have caught it. Empty blue sky. It was a strange place to be.

Carlos and X converged on Wade, and Carlos pointed at a big snow block. “See it?”

Wade stared at the white snow. “See what.”

They laughed at him. “Come on.”

Over firn they crunched. It did not give underfoot, and they left no tracks. Quite close to the ice wall, Carlos pointed again. “There, see it?”

Wade peered. Against the white was a white shape. Then it jumped out at him, like one of those three-D mashes suddenly revealing its pattern: a white metal box on tracks, somewhat like the old Hagglunds he had seen at McMurdo, but smaller; only seven or eight feet tall. One would have to crouch to get in its door.

“Wow,” Wade said.

They approached it. The sides were covered by hoarfrost or wind-plastered snow, but under that appeared to be painted white as well. The metal tracks ran over small sprocketed metal wheels. All painted as white as the cab. The three men stood before it. X could look right into one of the wind-drifted windows.

“What is it?”

Carlos and X looked at him.

“It took a long time to answer that question,” Carlos said. “We found it here by accident, while putting out a geophone grid last year. This is nowhere near where anyone has been, you see. And the Americans didn’t have any vehicles missing, not then anyway. In any case, it’s a Weasel, made in England in the 1950s. There was a Weasel used by Edmund Hillary’s group when they drove tractors to the Pole in 1958. Most of their tractors were Fergusons, but they had one Weasel that they ran until it fell apart, and then they left it out on the polar cap.”

“But …”

“It must have been completely buried. Perhaps as much as ten meters down in the ice, and out there on the cap, with nothing for hundreds of kilometers in any direction.”

“Wow. Who could have found it?”

An expressive shrug from Carlos.

“Someone with a metal detector,” X said.

“And a bulldozer,” Carlos added.

“And the new ice borers.”

“And familiarity with Hillary’s route,” Wade suggested.

“That would be easy enough,” Carlos said. “Hillary wrote a book about his trip.”

“I never heard of this expedition,” Wade confessed.

“Who has? Driving tractors to the South Pole?”

“That would be hard,” X noted.

“Yes, but what is the point? You sit in the driver’s seat, you try to stay warm, you look for crevasses.”

“That would be hard.”

“I suppose. But it is not the right kind of method to make people notice. We could drive these snowmobiles to the Pole, eh? But so what?”

Wade said, “Can we look inside?”

“Sure, sure.” Carlos went to the door of the cab, and turned a handle—no lock—and pulled open a thin metal door. Clearly the Weasel had not been a warm experience. A box of thin metal, primitive controls for the driver, benches against the side. The heat of the engine would be all that made it possible.

“Whoever dug it out doesn’t seem to have refurbished,” Wade remarked, running his hand over a wooden bench.

“No. Except for the white paint, I think. But there’s no clue to their identity. As if they used it for something and then abandoned it.”

“Or stored it,” X said.

“Maybe so. Anyway, here it is.”

“Does it run?”

“Yes. Half a tank of gas.”

“It evaporates through the cap,” X said. “It could have been full not too long ago.”

They walked out of the shade of the chasm, back into the blazing light. Wade’s sunglasses shifted back to full strength. He looked around; still the empty icescape, the pure blue sky. The Hillary Weasel sat against its ice wall—a white oddity, incongruous, something like the prehistoric man found in the ice in Austria. Thrown up by the ice. Or excavated. Someone was out here doing things, Wade thought. Someone who liked rescuing bits of the past. Salvaging useful tools, giving them a try. Perhaps giving up on them if they didn’t work out, and leaving them around as exhibits in a kind of open-air museum, or art gallery. Or whatever. He shook his head, climbed back on his Skidoo.

They were running the snowmobiles back over their outgoing tracks, and at a certain point Wade’s Skidoo tilted and veered and he pulled it back on track with accidental ease, and realized that the vehicle was not going to tip over no matter what he did. All of a sudden he forgot all his cares and all the mysteries, and was just riding a big motorcycle-thing, a wonderful bit of Antarctic technology, fit for a museum or an art gallery itself, over the snow at the bottom of the world. He hummed some Wagner and christened this “The Ride of the Valeries,” because he was thinking of her again. This is what she liked, and perhaps this was how she felt when she was out here. This was what she lived for. Exuberance is beauty! And those distant low black mountains on the white horizon, that sky! An exaltation came over him: Wade on ice, humming Wagner through the mesh of his ski mask.

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. Tipping 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.

“Shouldn’t we keep going?” Wade asked.

Carlos shook his head. “We need food to stay warm. Roberts isn’t going anywhere.”

So he sawed blocks of snow, and Wade shoveled them up to X, who carried them over to a curving wall built around the south side of the Skidoos, protecting them from the breeze. The big blocks had the consistency and feel of Styrofoam, and were not much heavier.

Then they sat in the lee of the wall while Carlos set up the Primus stove, a skeletal little piece of equipment that obviously came from the dawn of the industrial age. Wade watched in appalled fascination as the physics of Ice Planet were again revealed: Carlos applied the flame of a lighter to a pool of stove fuel under the cooker, a move that should have caused a small explosion, and the fuel lay there under the flame, inert, until after a time it flickered bluely, like the burning brandy on a crêpe Suzette. “Incredible,” Wade said. “Not possible.”

Carlos glanced at him. “Yes. A cold day.” He had recovered from the first shock of his station’s destruction, and was now calm and unhurried, even somewhat cheerful; certainly he did not appear to be feeling the dread that chilled Wade’s gut. He jammed snow into a pot, and began melting it over the growing flames of the stove, and got packets of lemonade powder and soup ready. A pot of snow melted down to only a third of a pot of water, and when that was boiling Carlos made mugs of hot lemonade and soup. Several pots of snow were transformed over time into dehydrated stew, hot chocolate, and finally mud-thick coffee. The chunks in the stew did not fully rehydrate, so that they tasted like bits of chalk, but Wade did not complain; he had discovered with the first mouthful that he was ravenous, and the stew tasted fine. The chalky bits just gave it some needed texture.

After the meal they packed up. Wade felt considerably warmer, from the stomach outward. Carlos checked the radio and GPS again, and though the radios were still out, apparently some of the GPS satellites were coming back online, for he got a brief fix before the system crashed again. “About three hours more,” he declared. “Not long.” They started the Skidoos—a moment of great fear to Wade, followed by relief—and took off again. Wade followed Carlos as always, impressed by the man’s calmness at lunch. It was comforting to be out here with a local.

And there they were again in their row, Carlos, Wade, then X, chuntering across the hard-packed firn. Occasionally they passed some of the new snow dunes people talked about, areas with fields of crescent dunes marring the smoothness of the cap, the snow looking just like sand, and the dunes like a very pure part of White Sands in New Mexico. Up close these dunes were much more textured and sastrugilike than any sand would be, like Georgia O’Keeffe stylized dunes, Wade thought, or some kind of fractalized hyper-realist hallucination. But the hovercraft road avoided going directly through any of these.

All too soon the cold began to gnaw again at Wade’s knees and face and hands. He felt more clearly than he ever had the struggle between heat and cold in his body, a kind of war fought on many fronts, with differing success depending on exposure. His core heat was definitely there, Still radiating as a result of the hot food and drink, sending out reinforcements to fight the encroachment of cold on the distant fronts of the extremities. Out there the battles were being fought capillary by capillary.

And lost, at least on the farthest fronts. Not in his torso; but away from that furnace it was a matter of slow ache, loss of feeling, numbness. Carlos called a short stop to help them fight the fight, and with the engines still running they stomped around and danced and did jumping jacks and Pete Townshends, and kneaded their sore butts and excruciated right thumbs. New heat was sent out from stomachs to the distant fronts. Then they were off again.

The next time they stopped it was to refill their fuel tanks, a very cold operation in itself. Then off again, and another long interval of snowmobiling and thumb pain and getting cold. The cold penetrated everywhere, until Wade could not drive as well as he had at the start, awkward though he had been then, because of the stiffness of his cold arms.

He was considering speeding up to Carlos and waving him down for another session of warm-up exercises, and perhaps a hot drink, when stopping became a moot point. His engine sputtered, ran, sputtered, ran, sputtered, died. The Skidoo skidded to a halt. Carlos looked back, hearing or otherwise sensing that something had changed, and as he turned, his vehicle also slowed and stopped. X coasted up next to Wade, shaking his head. They were out of gas.

“We’re close,” Carlos said to Wade. The green flags marking the hovercraft route were numbered, apparently, and the last one had been Number 10, so they were only ten kilometers out. The rusty mountains marking the horizon ahead were Roberts Massif. Very soon the station would appear over the horizon. They could ski, or, if Wade did not want to ski, walk on crampons.

“I’ll try skiing,” he said. Ten k was not too bad; just over six miles. Before his arrival in Antarctica he would have laughed at such a distance, perhaps five minutes on the highway; how bad could it be? But now he had the memory of his walk with Val up Barwick Valley to tell him just how long ten k would feel. In fact the knowledge still tweaked a little in his left knee. It was a significant distance. But he could do it.

And they were beyond choices now. So he changed his bunny boots for heavy cross-country ski shoes, chilling his feet and hands thoroughly in the process. “Damn.” It was difficult if not impossible to hurry any of these operations, no matter how much he tried. In fact it took an effort to manage them at any speed.

He had tried cross-country skiing a few times before, and had fallen a lot. He would have to get better fast. X’s skis looked like popsicle sticks at the bottom of his massive tree-trunk legs. It was hard to believe they would support him. X did not look convinced either; he shook his head at the sight. Curious how with their faces behind ski masks and sunglasses, so much was yet communicated. Body language indeed.

When they were all set they stood on their skis, Wade and X propped on their poles. Like a trio of bank robbers on ice, anonymous and insect-eyed. The sunlight prismed on their photovoltaic gloves and overalls and parkas, and Wade was grateful for their warmth, but still his fingertips, nose, ears and feet were cold, and getting colder.

But as Carlos pointed out, the work of skiing would cure that. He took off, wearing a backpack that contained much of what was detachable from the snowmobiles. Wade followed.

X hit a bump and fell like a tree. As if struck by his bow wave, Wade fell too. The snow was hard and his elbow hurt. Uneasily he got up again, faster than X, who was very awkward on his too-short skis. Carlos was skiing ahead effortlessly. When he looked back and saw his fallen comrades, he made a swooping turn and came back to them. “Follow me, I’ll find the flattest part of the track and it will be easier.”

So they followed him and it was easier, although sometimes Wade’s skis got caught on two sides of a little sastrugi ridge and drifted apart no matter what he tried. He fell often, and so did X. The sheer work of getting back to his feet tired him. He began to sweat, overheated everywhere except at his frozen tips, which stubbornly continued to freeze. He remembered encountering the phrase “penile frostbite” in an article on runners’ problems in wintertime. Hopefully the hot blood in his body core would warm that and all other chilled extremities, while the cold blood in the extremities would cool the hot core of him, like water from a radiator. But it didn’t seem to be working; he was too hot and too cold at one and the same time. He struggled on.

It was some comfort to see X falling as often or more often than he did. The two of them went down like bowling pins. After one fall, as they were both getting up and pushing off again, X said, “Too bad we don’t have those spacesuits the trekker groups wear.”

“What do you mean?” Wade said. “There’s better gear than this?”

“Yes.”

“There’s better gear than this and I’m not wearing it?”

“Ha.”

“Are there super DVs that get better stuff?”

“You tell me. Probably so. But what we’ve got is normal government issue, and you can buy gear that’s better. This stuff can’t convert piezoelectric energy from your walking into heat, it can’t melt you water, it can’t feed you—”

Wade fell again. “Can’t ski for you.”

“Can’t ski, that’s right. Nothing.”

“Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why don’t we have the best stuff?”

“Expensive! And what we have is adequate for what we’re supposed to be doing out here. We’re not supposed to be out here skiing around. This is trekker stuff.”

“So if Val were here we’d be okay.”

“Probably so.”

They skied on side by side. The snow got smoother, and they glided along without mishap for a while. Carlos was a black mark on the horizon ahead of them; Roberts Massif was bigger, and they could see right to the ice shoreline at the foot of the rock, where the station would soon be visible to them, though they hadn’t spotted it yet. Then X said to Wade, “If that’s blue ice then we’re fucked.”

“How so?”

“It’s as hard as rock, and slick. Bumpy but slick.”

“Oh.” Wade’s heart sank. His only attempt at ice skating had broken his tailbone. He had had to sit on an inflated donut for three months.

“Shit. That’s blue ice all right.”

They came up to Carlos, who was on the last peninsula of white snow, sticking into a sea of blue ice.

“I can’t ski ice,” X said.

“Few people can,” Carlos replied. “We’ll have to put on crampons and walk.”

So they sat down and took off their skis, got their boots and crampons out of their daypacks, changed shoes for boots, strapped on crampons, repacked the daypacks, stood up, and walked on with skis and one ski pole over one shoulder—one hand for them, the other hand poling the ice with a ski pole. All parts of this operation were bitterly, numbingly cold.

But walking with crampons was absurdly secure after skiing, like walking on flypaper. The crunch of the ice underfoot reminded Wade of twisting ice trays back home, and for an instant he was desperately homesick for a world where ice came in one-inch cubes. The change of footgear had chilled him so deeply that his legs were shaking. His thighs felt like jelly. And the crampons quickly tired his feet and ankles, for they made him too secure on the ice. From too little traction to too much; nothing comfortable.

“We’re almost there,” Carlos called back to them.

“He starts saying that at around the halfway point of any trip,” X warned Wade. “He’s just like Val that way.”

“Ah.”

X was narrating his journey to himself; from the snatches Wade heard it sounded as if an unseen sports commentator of great cynicism was peering out from inside X’s ski mask. Past a gentle rise, snow returned to cover the bare blue ice. After a short conference they sat down and changed back into skis, which was welcome in one sense, as the weight of the skis over his shoulder was becoming oppressive to Wade; but the gear change chilled him even further. His hands would barely work. Carlos had them eat chocolate bars. Feeling famished, Wade bit into a frozen bar and what felt like a rock in the chocolate jolted a tooth filling with excruciating pain: “Ow ow shit ow!”

“Watch out for the frozen raisins!” X and Carlos warned together.

“Oh thank you very much!”

“Sorry. They’re like pebbles when they freeze.”

“Now you tell me.”

“I hate this kind of chocolate, for that very reason.”

Gloves back on, hands numb and clumsy. Frigid air, cutting right to the bone. Up and on. It seemed to Wade that he could feel parts of his mind begin to numb like his fingers; the outer layers of the cortex, the delicate lobes behind the nose, all chilling and shutting down. A pure white plain in a clear blue sky. Ups and downs, thankfully mild. Skiing as badly as ever, or worse. Over them the lowering sky. Looking toward the sun, off to his left, made it like noon, and the snow blazed in a mirrorflake fan. Looking straight ahead across the sunlight made it dawn, the sastrugi thrown in high relief by countless small shadows. Looking away from the sun made it midnight, the layered grainy bedding of the snow darkly lustrous. The angle of light the only landscape. Or rather the landscapes were all boot-high, so that they Brobdingnagged over them, left, right, left, right, in the cold one could never adapt to, the frozen air spiking up the nose like a dangerous drug directly into the brain, a drug needed but feared, the inescapable addiction to oxygen now something like a fatal necessity. Colder and colder, no matter the skiing. More parts of the brain regressing, losing the ability to talk or even to think, all the words fading out like stars at dawn. Ahead the rock seemed closer, and he saw gleams of color at the shoreline; the station, presumably. The sight made Wade feel dully better. They were going to make it.

Then the snow tilted down toward the massif, and he could pole along without moving his legs, a blessed relief. But then the snow turned to white ice, and he was sliding down without pushing at all—downhill skiing, in other words, and faster and faster, as if on a bike without brakes. His skis chattered, and he bent his knees and crouched, poles tucked under his arms and head down in a grim parody of real skiers, until an unseen bump up-ended him and he landed on his butt again, and slid down the slope almost as fast as before, spinning on his back like a cartwheel. His skis had detached and disappeared, but his ski poles were still flailing around him, so he grabbed the end of the left one with his right mitten as it bounced over him, and twisted on his side and jammed the point against the ice. It barely cut a line but it did slow him down a little, scraping like chalk on a blackboard, and by and by he was sliding slowly enough to jam his boot edges onto the ice without immediately breaking his legs. Eventually he bobbled to a halt, perhaps a hundred meters out from the hovercraft and a little wharf sticking out from the rock onto the ice. After that little shoves of his mittens slid him down a gentle incline, ten meters at a shove. Behind him Carlos and X were tromping down the slope upright, having stopped to take off their skis for the final descent. Wade waved at them weakly, and they cheered his survival.

Their pleasure was short-lived, however, because Roberts Station was destroyed—knocked apart and burned. They stepped onto rock and climbed up to the edge of the wreck, Carlos shouting curses in Spanish again but almost absently now, as he began to probe the ruins in search of the equipment it would take to keep them from freezing. A hard wind keened over the rock and they tottered like wooden men, finding nothing, the ruins revealing how small the buildings had been, like trailers in a trailer park, and now all black sticks and lumps. “Where is everyone?” X croaked over and over. Wade stumbled with every step, his boots would not rise high enough.

“They’re gone,” Carlos said. “Come on, let’s get in the hovercraft.”

The hovercraft was out on the ice some six or eight feet from the wharf, pushed out there apparently by the blast that had leveled the station. X found a piece of singed paneling and carried it over and dropped it on the gap as a gangplank, and they staggered across it onto the deck of the craft, and fell through the door into the cabin. It was as cold inside as out. Wade could barely move. Carlos banged open a cabinet and lifted out a green Coleman stove, and dropped it on the shelf under the windows and slapped it open. Painstakingly he screwed a gas cannister onto the coupling at the side of the stove, then fumbled in his parka for his lighter and applied it to a burner, turning a dial on the stove and flicking the lighter repeatedly; the scraping flint was a primeval sound. Then with a whoosh they had fire.