Antarctica

10 Roberts Massif

It was Misha’s night to cook again, and the heavenly smells of corned-beef hash filled the yellow Scott tent. They wolfed down the food and then slowed down, moving easefully into the dishwashing and Drambers phase of the evening. Graham Forbes sat back taking wet dishes from Harry and drying them, while a recumbent Geoffrey Michelson tapped the McMurdo code on his wrist phone to make their nightly sked coms with Randi.

No Randi, however, on this night. No Mac Town at all. Static all up and down the dial, in fact.

“What’s this,” Michelson said, looking at his phone.

“Try the box,” Misha suggested, indicating the big old radio in the corner of the tent.

“A clever idea.” Michelson turned on the radio, clicked the dial to the McMurdo frequency, tried a call. Again, nothing but static. Graham put down his dishtowel and leaned over to inspect the radio.

“Something odd going on,” Michelson said.

“More than something,” Misha noted with a puzzled expression. “They’re different systems. For both of them to malfunction at once—” He shook his head, sipped his Drambers.

“You’re suggesting something more than accident?” Michelson asked.

“It doesn’t look like an accident to me.”

“But what?”

“Don’t know. Sabotage?”

The four of them thought it over, looking at each other.

“The satellite links are vulnerable,” Misha said. “You only have to train a tracking dish on a satellite, and send a stronger signal at it than the one it’s supposed to be getting, and you’ve captured it.”

“But there are so many satellites up there,” Michelson objected. “The system is massively redundant, I would have thought.”

Harry and Misha were both shaking their heads.

“There’s a lot of satellites because there’s a lot of traffic,” Misha said. “And they all are part of various overlapping networks, with a lot of carriers and hub satellites transferring messages before they’re sent back down to Earth. So if you had your dishes down here, and targeted the right hubs as they came over this area, you could knock down a lot of the system.”

“Especially down here,” Harry said. “There aren’t that many fully polar satellites.”

“But if one satellite failed wouldn’t they switch to another?”

“Sure,” Misha said. “But it might be possible to track that and redirect the disruption as well. Just find the new hub and point the dish that way. It could all be done by a single program, I bet.”

“The hard part isn’t making it break down,” Graham said, remembering pub talk with a friend in the corns business. “The hard part is making it work at all.”

Michelson looked at his three companions. “Well,” he said. “I’ll thank you gentlemen to stay out of Greenpeace, please. And I’m shocked to learn we live in such a vulnerable system.”

“The satellites are up there,” Misha said, waving up. “Easy to see, easy to disrupt. Anyone with a transmitter at fourteen gigahertz can do it.”

“But it doesn’t explain McMurdo,” Graham pointed out.

They considered it in silence. “Disable the radio building,” Misha suggested finally.

“But the town is full of radios like this one,” Harry said. “They should be back on the air pretty soon, no matter what.”

Michelson nodded. “And we should still be able to contact Burt right now. Let’s try that.”

He clicked the tuning dial over two stops, and pressed the transmit button on the handheld mouthpiece. “S-374, this is S-375, are you there Burt and crew, do you read me, over.”

A pause, the faint hiss of a radio connection: “We read you, Geoff! But we haven’t been able to contact Mac Town or make calls out, and our GPS isn’t working!”

“That’s our situation here too, Burt, although we didn’t know about the GPS.”

“That’s even more satellites,” Misha said.

“It’s not just that, Geoff, our helo pick-up didn’t show tonight either! We had to walk back to camp, it was pretty hairy!”

“They must have had to cross some ice,” Misha joked.

Michelson waved him quiet and pressed the transmit button: “Something’s gone wrong in Mac Town, I’m afraid. But they’re sure to be back on the air soon, so I suggest we sit tight out here until we find out more about what’s happened.”

“That’s fine by us, Geoff. No way do we want to walk all the way back home. Besides, we’re finding some great stuff over here. What about you, have you found anything?”

“We’re plugging away, Burt. Nothing extraordinary so far.” With a warning glance at Misha not to guffaw while he was transmitting. “Let’s keep in close contact while this situation continues, Burt. Talk again at nine tomorrow morning, all right? And let us know immediately if you hear from Randi or anyone else.”

“Sure thing, Geoff! I’ll bet you anything it’s Greenpeace again, gone after those oil camps!”

“Mac Town would seem to have little to do with that. But we’ll find out. Have a good night, you fellows, and over and out.”

“Same to you, over and out.”

Michelson put down the radio transmitter. They sat in the hiss of the Coleman stove, sipping their Drambuie.

Misha said, “So you didn’t want to tell your co-P.I. about your find, eh?”

“Misha.” Michelson sipped. “Not on the radio. Anyone could be listening.”

“All those people out here,” Graham said, needling Michelson like Misha always did. It was a bit catching.

“There are other field camps out here,” Michelson said. “Besides, even if it was just Burt, he might be tempted to crow about it to people in Mac Town, or in the north.”

Graham nodded. He liked Michelson’s caution in this respect, because he thought he understood what caused it. A premature announcement, indulged in before all the work was done and the results accepted for publication, could actively endanger the results themselves. Internet science and press-release science were both potentially dangerous in that respect. The beech litter mat they had found in the Apocalypse Sirius was a crucial find, Graham was sure; but only when properly fitted into their case, and supported. Then it would be a very solid brick in the wall, maybe even one of the things that tipped the balance to general acceptance of the dynamicist view of things. But they were very far from that at this point. Right now what they had was just some rusty-yellow organic matter, no more; it could be two hundred years old, it could be two hundred million years old. The stabilists would certainly challenge them on that basis, and on every other basis they could think of. They had to build a framework for these fragments, so to speak, and forestall all possible objections to their interpretation of what they meant; for objects remained objects until the objections were countered. One had to locate them in dense meshes of history to turn them into facts, facts that would then support a theory. This part of the process was crucial to doing any lasting, influential work. And so Michelson would be enlisting an array of paleobotanists, paleobiologists, geomorphologists, geophysicists, paleoclimatologists, and glaciologists like Graham himself, all bringing their specialty to bear on the subject at hand, all of whose own careers, if they took part in this effort, would then become at least somewhat connected to the success or failure of the dynamicist view.

As was certainly true for Graham, working on questions of glacial sedimentology. He was already fully committed, of course; and now his fate was somewhat intertwined with Michelson’s. So he was reassured by Geoff’s style, which he admired enough to try to emulate in his own work—that reticence, that sense of the history of the geosciences. The fairly consistent attempts to keep things low-keyed and playful; certainly things had happened in the course of this controversy that would have made Graham furious if he had been in Michelson’s position, and he could only presume that Geoff had indeed been angry back when those things had happened. Yet now he spoke of the stabilists not as enemies to be crushed, but with great, almost exaggerated politeness, expressing underneath that a basic respect for them as scientists, especially for the ones whose work he thought was the most well-done and therefore challenging. Perhaps this merely reflected his sense of the most certain, one might even say most scientific, method of crushing them as flat as a leaf mat; in any case it was a position he held to all the time, even here in his own camp. Possibly he was different in private, at home. But after a few weeks in the field in Antarctica one began to feel that one knew one’s companions pretty well. In the end it was very much like the privacy of home.

So before talking to anyone outside their group about their fine discovery, the lab work on the samples would have to be done, and the literature would have to be researched, and other scientists asked to make contributions, possibly; and the papers would have to be written, and revised, and submitted to the most prominent appropriate journals, where anonymous reviewers would no doubt suggest further revisions, which, as they often strengthened one’s case, were usually incorporated; and only then would the papers be published. By that time the inferences made from the physical objects taken out of the field would be tied down the way Misha tied down their sleeping tents, in a redundant-looking network of stakes and lines: bombproof. And in that state they would be read, and would add to the dialogue among the small groups of people who had the expertise to judge the arguments, to probe them for weaknesses; people who would indeed make judgments and criticisms; and later their own scientific assumptions about the field would take this new set of facts into account, and engage the theory, and they would design their own next projects accordingly; and see different things than they would have otherwise, out in the world; and the dialogue would go on, as it had ever since Lyell, or Newton or Aristotle or the first talking primates, depending on how broad a view of science one wanted to take. In the most fundamental sense, Graham decided, science had begun a very long time ago.

So it might be three or four years before these papers were published, and the effects felt only in the years after that. This was the pace of discourse which had kept the Sirius story going for more than thirty years now. Like the glaciers at the center of the story, it moved slowly but ground fine.

So now Michelson, keeping his cards close to the vest, quickly shifted the talk to what they could do there in the field in the next few days to help their situation later in the lab. Because back in the north it would do no good to wish for one more sample rock; one had to get it now.

After that part of things was all worked out, however, Harry flipped open his laptop and called up the Pliocene Antarctic map that he had been working on for some time now, entering all the data that had been collected in the decades of the dynamicist effort. Now he reworked the line describing the little inlet of the fjord they had been investigating. Michelson regarded it over the top of his glasses with a little smile. “Whatever happens in the end,” he remarked contentedly, “the Sirius question has certainly been good for Cenozoic geology in Antarctica.”

Harry finished redrawing the fjords and hills. The whole stretch of what was now the Transantarctic Mountains was much lower in his map, and deeply cut by fjords—like the current coastline of Labrador, or Norway, or for that matter southern Chile. Elsewhere on the map, western Antarctica was an archipelago somewhat resembling the Philippines. Michelson was always encouraging Harry to look for possible land bridges connecting the Peninsula to the Transantarctics, as Nothofagus did not migrate across water well, and it seemed to him that there had to be dispersal routes over land to make Pliocene beech forests as far south as eighty-five degrees comprehensible. Either the trees had had routes to come and go with the fluctuating climate, or else there had been places on the craton proper that had remained refugia for the biome during even the coldest parts of the last fourteen million years. “The peninsular refuge seems more likely, if the trees could get back south when it warmed.”

Behind the Transantarctics, where the great ice cap now covered all, the Pliocene map showed a continental mainland like a violently chewed Australia. The craton had begun to come apart like the basin and range territory of North America, leaving basins running all over east of the Transantarctics, from the Weddell Sea all the way across to the Indian Ocean, which intruded south in a bay bigger even than the Ross Sea. Those ancient inland seas contained many of the regions that the oil teams were interested in, for if they had been seas for long enough, they very possibly would have been floored by enough organic material to create oil.

The paleofjord they had been studying today ran through the Transantarctic Hills all the way to this Pliocene Wilkes Bay; or at least this was the way Harry had it drawn. It was not something that they could easily confirm, because the relevant region was deep under the ice cap. But the uplift rates they were establishing, and the depth of the subglacial basin on the other side of the range, made it very likely to be true. Or perhaps there had been a saddle peninsula there dividing the two seas, a saddle from which one could look down into the head of both fjords. Thus keeping one of Geoff’s precious land bridges.

After they had played with the map a while, talking things over, Harry switched to a photo of a krummholz beech forest, taken on the slopes above a bay in southern Chile. Ceaseless winds had swept the tops of the little trees back in a permanent curve. They had all grown together into a single mat, like a lichen mat seen in a microscope. Bright green and dark green mosses covered the understory of the miniature forest. Moss carpets still served as surrogate soils in the Antarctic Peninsula, and the microenvironments in these little biomes were several degrees warmer than the outer air. “This photo was taken just north of Tierra del Fuego,” Harry said. “The Magellanic moorland biome matches the species list we’ve found down here almost perfectly.”

“That’s probably very much what it looked like here in the Pliocene,” Michelson said, staring over his glasses again. “Odd to think that temperatures have risen now to the point where such a forest could survive here again. People would have to plant it, but after that …”

Harry was shaking his head. “The Treaty forbids bringing in exotic plants.”

“But this wouldn’t be an exotic, would it? Merely native vegetation, returned home after a period of exile. The Chileans and Argentinians already tried growing beeches up in the Peninsula. It didn’t work then, but it’s considerably warmer now than when they tried.”

The other three let this pass. It was not the kind of thing they would consider doing, and it was hard even to know if Michelson was serious or not.

After staring at the laptop photo for a time, lost in their own thoughts, they stirred themselves, and prepared to make the cold transfer to their sleeping tents. “I wonder what’s happening in McMurdo,” Harry said.

“We’ll find out soon,” Michelson said. “Randi will call us the moment she gets back on the air, we can be sure of that. Meanwhile, we’re self-sufficient here for longer than it will take to sort things out. So we can continue to work while we wait.”

Wade sat in the passenger compartment of the hovercraft, clutching the warmed ceramic of a mug of hot chocolate, gulping at it and scalding the roof of his mouth, and slowly, slowly coming back up out of the depths of hypothermia. Back from the deepest cold he had ever felt in his life; back to the point where he could shiver; then through violent shivering, to the point where he could stop all but a residual quiver.

Carlos was out on another exploration of the burned station. X sat across from Wade, hunched over the stove to catch as much of its warmth as possible, sucking down his own hot chocolate.

“This is turning into quite a trip for you,” X observed.

“Yeah.” Wade glanced at X. “I wish I still had Val assigned to me as a guide. I’d feel better.”

X grunted. “This’d be nothing to her.”

“Is that right?”

“You should hear some of the stories she tells.”

“So she’s an exceptional mountaineer.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. I think a lot of mountaineers are like her. It’s just that they all have lots of really scary stories to tell. They go out close to the edge, I’m telling you. It’s scary.”

“It seems decadent to me.”

“Decadent?”

“Well, you know. I hear a good version of La Mer and I’m thrilled, I mean really thrilled. So, you know, if you need to risk your life to get your thrills, I don’t know. It seems jaded to me.”

“Maybe. I’m not sure it’s the same kind of thrill you’re talking about. I’m not sure it’s the risk itself these people are hooked on. It’s something else, I don’t know. I never understood it. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, trying to understand it. One time Val told me about getting avalanched on the side of Mount Cook and carried down the mountainside toward the bergschrund at the bottom of the slope, you know the crack at the bottom? Certain death. But the avalanche carried them right over it. They were left waist-deep in the snow on the flats, unharmed, except Val had busted a rib. And she said it hurt like hell, but they had to walk ten miles to get to a roadhead, and somewhere on the way they started laughing so hard that she almost died of the pain, but she couldn’t stop laughing. It was so great, she said. She says it with this little Aussie accent sometimes—it was grayte. Like an Aussie gal. Totally scary.”

“So you two were some kind of a …?”

“Yeah yeah. We had an affair, an ice romance you know, end of last season.”

“Wow.”

“I know.” Brooding. “But this season when we got back to Mac Town she wasn’t interested.”

“What?”

“Yeah. It was over.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh man. I hate that kind of thing.”

“Yeah well.” X sipped his hot chocolate. “Better for your chances with her anyway, right?”

“What!”

“Come on.”

“Come on yourself!” Wade shook his head. “Why would she even consider me. A Washington bureaucrat, a functionary.”

“She liked you.”

“I can’t even ski.”

“That’s true.”

“Hey now. Neither can you, and I notice she went with you.”

“See?”

“Oh, so maybe there’s hope. Maybe I can be so lucky as to get the same treatment you got.”

They cackled briefly.

“We can dream,” X said.

Carlos slammed in and made for the stove. “Not good,” he told them. Apparently the blast had knocked apart all the buildings and set the fuel bladders on fire, and almost everything had burned after that. The force of the explosion appeared to have broken the hover-craft’s mooring ropes and skidded it across the ice a few feet, saving it from further harm. Carlos rooted in his bag of finds, cursing again in Spanish, but almost absentmindedly now.

“But where did everyone go?” X asked again, as he had out at the station on the ice cap. It seemed to Wade that they had made the crossing of the polar plateau only to find themselves in the same situation they had been in before, except now much more tired, sore, cold and hungry. His legs lay there before him like Jell-O held in long balloons, and his tailbone was aching, though he did not think his spectacular fall had broken it again.

Carlos poured himself some hot water from the pot on the stove into a mug of powdered chocolate. For a moment Wade smelled the sweet dark smell. He felt intense relief at being indoors. They were still on their own, in the interior of Antarctica, in the midst of what appeared to be a general terrorist attack; but at least they were indoors.

“First another meal,” Carlos said, as he put more ice in the pot to melt. “And warm up some more. Then we’ll try the radio again and see if we can make coms with Shackleton or McMurdo. Or anybody.”

The other two nodded, staring hard at the pots on the stove. They were all now sitting encased in thick sleeping bags Carlos had pulled out of the hovercraft’s cabinets, the red nylon bunching around them to the chest. With their ski masks rolled up into thick-rimmed caps, they looked almost human.

“Is there much food?” Wade asked. “If we have to wait to be rescued?”

Carlos frowned. “The galley burned. There’s some scattered around in other buildings, in emergency bags. And some here on board. Enough to feed us for a week or two, certainly.”

“Surely it won’t take that long to get to us.”

“One would think so. Hopefully we can find out by radio.”

“Could we drive this thing down the glacier to Shackleton Camp?”

Carlos and X looked at each other.

“I was thinking about it,” Carlos said. “I’ve driven it a few times, I know how to do it, but it takes two….” He looked at X.

“I’ve watched,” X said, hand up. “I could do the copilot, I guess. We could try if we had to.”

“Maybe we could figure it out,” Wade said. “How hard could it be?”

The other two shared another look.

“Maybe,” Carlos said. “We’ll see what Mac Town says first. If we can get them.”

Then they heard shouts outside.

Ice like white paper before the first brush stroke. The original emptiness from which all begins. A fifth element beyond space and time, emptiness in its supreme degree.

Ice and rock. Consciousness of white, capacity of black.

Perpetual winter. The planet Winter. One day, one night. The yin and yang of dark and light. Camera, please save these images and voice-over for later transmission.

A white ocean. In the far distance a dragon’s back, buried in ice. We walk in a straight line, yet it is a movement that simultaneously turns on itself and opens to the infinite. Spiral development. We have come into a strange situation, as you will learn when this transmission reaches you. In many ways it is a clarification of our purpose. We have to reach a refuge and food, or we will die. All other tasks are set aside, as this one of survival takes precedence.

It is a situation strangely like that reached by Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, begun in 1914 after Amundsen and Scott had finished their fateful race to the Pole. The Pole having been reached, subsequent expeditions had to find different rationales for going, and at that time this was not so easy. Shackleton called his voyage the British Imperial Transantarctic Expedition, but this grand title only partly concealed the fact that the trip had no real point. Crossing the continent was merely a goal invented to replace reaching the Pole; no one had thought of it before. It was the excuse of someone who wanted to be down there just for the sake of being there. Exploration, science, neither really mattered to Shackleton; what mattered was living in Antarctica. There he had first experienced that being-in-the-world which is our fundamental reality, our one true home; and rather than try to find that experience also in the wilderness that is England, he kept returning south.

So he and his men embarked on a new kind of enterprise, similar in many ways to the wilderness adventure trips we see today. Like the trip we are sharing at this, moment.

Each expedition has a different character, you see, fulfilling different karmic fates. In fact many expeditions encompass entire karmic lifetimes all in themselves. For karmic lives are shorter than human lives, and each of us passes through many different karmic existences during the course of a single biological span. This is a fact that is not well known in the West, I have found, even though the demonstration of it is there for all to see in the history of their own lives.

In any case, Shackleton and his men sailed the Endurance into the Weddell Sea, on the side of Antarctica opposite the Ross Sea. The Weddell Sea is covered with pack ice far more than the Ross Sea, and Shackleton’s ship was caught in this ice, and they were forced to live on the ship for ten months while the ship was carried in the ice’s slow dance around the great bay; and then the ice crushed their ship and sank it, and they lived in camps on the ice for five more months, still drifting north and west.

The trip Shackleton had planned to make was gone for good. They could only camp on the ice as it drifted out to sea, waiting for the ice to break up, when they could try to sail in three very small lifeboats to some solid land. At that point they would be cast into one of the greatest voyages in history. But the waiting, for month after month; this was a very difficult thing. Other expeditions were driven to madness by such enforced inactivity.

Yet all Shackleton’s men attest to the fact that he was calm in waiting, even jovial, and that his unfailing good spirits, and the close regard he had for his men, helped them to endure the wait. He created a community of trust. In spiritual terms it may be that these months of waiting were the greatest achievement of that group—an extraordinary experience of being-in-the-world, which changed them fundamentally and forever: living on ice, using the collective unconscious of their paleolithic minds. “We realized that our present existence was only a phase,” as Worsley put it. And as this is always true, everywhere, they had realized a very valuable thing. And it was Shackleton who made it possible. He never faltered.

But we need not wonder at Shackleton’s ability to keep his spirits high during this time. Marooned though they were, he was just where he wanted to be. He was living in Antarctica, having a difficult adventure—it was just what he wanted! So he was able to keep his men cheered up because the joy of life was in him. He was in his place. This is a big part of the greatness of Shackleton: he found his place, he went there, he enjoyed it. He shared that joy in a way others could feel.

This is particularly important for us to remember now. We started in the footsteps of Amundsen, but we must end in the mind of Shackleton. So far our leader Valerie has exhibited that Shackletonian optimism which will be so important to the success of our endeavor, and I trust completely that she will stay that way and see us through. How I admire her calm happy spirit, her strength in leading us. And we are lucky; walking across the ice is not as hard as living on it and waiting. We have a goal to travel toward, just beyond the horizon.

We live an hour and it is always the same. No distractions to the spirit. A white plain to infinity. Not sensory deprivation exactly, but rather a kind of sensory overload, within just a very few massive elements: sun, sky, ice, light, cold; all intense to the point of overwhelming the mind. But then time passes and here we are still. On we walk. The microforms of snow under my feet are a true infinity of worlds. The sky is several different tints of blue. The sun is a star.

Everything is so clear in this moment. No past, no future. Messner’s mantra: We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.

Only this moment, always. We never get to change the past. We never get to know the future. No reason to wish for one place rather than another; no reason to say I wish I were home, or I wish I were in an exotic new place that is not my home. They will all be the same as this place. Here the experience of existing comes clear. This world is our body.

Now we must walk over it a certain distance. We, like Shackleton’s men, have had our supplies crushed in the ice. And though our hour’s wait was nothing like their fifteen months, in the long run we end up in the same boat. We have to cross this white immensity now. We have to make our way to food and refuge. We make our brush stroke on the empty paper. We are like they were once the ice under them broke up, and the truly dangerous part of their adventure began.

blue sky

white ice

At first they walked over firn, which took their weight like a sidewalk. There were sastrugi of course, but they could easily step over them, and the different angles of hardpack that their boots landed on actually gave their feet and ankles and legs some variety in their work, so that no one set of muscles and ligaments got tired, as when pounding the pavement in cities or in the endless corridors of a museum. So in these sections it was good walking.

They spread out in little clumps: Jack and Jim up with Val, Jack going very strong, even pushing the pace a bit; Jorge and Elspeth behind them; Ta Shu back farther still, rubbernecking just as he had before their accident. Val set the pace and did not allow Jack to rush them. “Save it,” she said to him once a little sharply, when she felt him right in her tracks. “Pace yourself for the long haul.”

“I am.”

But he dropped back a little, and on they walked. They were doing fine. As she always did on long hikes, Val stopped the group to rest for about fifteen minutes after every ninety of walking, in a system somewhat similar to Shackleton’s. In ninety minutes their arm flasks had melted the snow and ice chips stuffed into them, and so everybody had two big cups of water to drink. They could also eat a few inches of their belts, as Elspeth put it; their suits’ emergency food supplies were sewed into an inner pocket wrapped all the way around the waist. The food was something like a triathlete’s power bar, flattened and stretched into something very like a wide belt, in fact. It was good food for their situation. At some stops they chewed ravenously; during others their appetites seemed to Val suppressed, by altitude or exertion no doubt. She made sure they didn’t force it. In truth it was water that was crucial to this walk; they were breathing away gallons of it in the frigid hyperarid air, and they were sweating off a little bit as well. Two flasks every ninety minutes was by no means enough, but it certainly staved off the worst of the dehydration effects, which could devastate a person faster even than the cold, and made one more susceptible to the cold as well.

So between the walks and the breaks they made steady progress. But after several of these had passed, they came upon swales of softer snow, which had been pushed by the winds into sastrugi like crosshatched dunefields. These snowdrifts were new, the result of unusually heavy snowfalls on the edges of the polar cap in recent years, generally assumed to be an effect of the global warming generally, and of the shorter sea ice season in particular. Climatologists were still arguing what caused all the different kinds of superstorms, aside from the overall increase in the atmosphere’s thermal energy. In any case the snow was here, one more manifestation of the changes in weather.

Val stopped for a meeting. “Follow me and step right in my footsteps, folks, and it will be a lot easier.”

“We should trade the lead, so everyone saves the same amount of energy,” Jack said.

“No no, I’ll lead.”

“Come on. I know we’ve got a long walk, but there’s no reason to get macho on us.”

Val looked at him a while, counting on her ski mask and shades to keep her expression hidden. When her teeth had unclenched she said, “I’ve got the crevasse detector.”

“We could all carry that when it was our turn.”

“I want to be the one using it, thanks. I know all its little quirks. It wouldn’t do to have any falls now.”

“You having the radar didn’t keep it from happening last time.”

They stood there under the low dark sky.

“Go second, and make her steps better for us,” Ta Shu suggested to Jack.

“We shouldn’t have anyone lose more energy than anyone else.”

“I have more energy than anyone else to start with,” Val said. “Everyone except maybe you, but you’re hurt. You cut your hand. You hit the wall of the crevasse. Let’s not waste any more energy arguing about it. It’ll work out.”

It was very hard to be civil to him. She couldn’t think of anything else to say, and so took off before she said something unpleasant.

He stayed right on her heels, like some kind of stalker. She could hear his breathing, and the dry squeak of his boots on the snow. Untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, discourteous, unkind …

They followed her through the soft snow dunes in single file. She kept the pace easy, resisting the pressure from Jack. Never was the snow as soft as Rockies’ powder, of course, but it was extremely dry, and already had been tumbled by the winds until it was on its way to firn. It was more like loose sand than any snow back in the world, loose sand that gave underfoot, thus much more work than the firn. Then in the areas where it adhered, she had to pull her boots out of their holes after every step, and lift higher for the next one, which was also hard work. But she had put in her trail time—a lifetime’s worth—and it would take many many hours of such walking to tire her. No, she would be fine; she could walk forever. It was the clients she was worried about. She was responsible for them, and she had gotten them into trouble, as Jack had pointed out; but she couldn’t carry them, they had to walk on their own. So it had to be made as easy for them as possible.

So she did what she could. But as they walked on, and hour after hour passed, under the sun that wheeled around them in a perpetual midafternoon slant, they began to lose speed and trail behind. Jack no longer trod in her bootprints the second she left them unoccupied, nor during the breaks did he again mention leading the way. In fact he spent the rest periods in silence now, a mute figure under his parka hood, behind his ski mask and shades. He wasn’t eating much of his belt, either. That worried Val, and she tried to inquire about it by asking the group generally how they were feeling, and getting a status report from everyone; Elspeth was developing blisters on her heels, she thought; Jorge’s bad knee was tweaking; Jim and Ta Shu reported no problems in particular, but like everyone said they were tired, their quads in particular getting a little rubbery with all the loose soft snow. Jack, however, only said, “Doing fine. ‘Pacing myself for the long haul.’”

So, okay. End of that break. On they walked.

Her GPS was still out of commission, but occasionally when she turned it on it flickered and gave a reading, then blinked out again. The last one that had come through indicated that they were averaging about three kilometers an hour, which was normal on the plateau; a bit slower in the soft snow no doubt, hopefully a bit faster on the hardpack.

Then they came to a patch of blue ice, and Val groaned to herself. They had to stop and put on crampons, then scritch cautiously across the ice, which here was pocked and dimpled by big polished suncups. The nobbly surface gave their ankles a hard workout indeed, as their crampon points forced them to step flush on the terrain underfoot no matter its angle. It was best to step right on the cusps and ridges between the little hollows, crampons sticking into the slopes on both sides and keeping the foot level; but that took a lot of attention and precise footwork. So scritch, scritch, scritch, they stepped along, making perhaps two kilometers an hour at best. Val headed directly for the nearest stretch of snow in the distance, so that as soon as possible they reached the far side of the blue ice, groaning with relief, and could sit down and take the crampons back off, and drink what water had melted at the bottom of their flasks, then restuff the flasks with hacked chips of the blue ice, which would yield more water when melted than snow. Then they were up and off again, on what felt like land, after a precarious crossing over water.

Jorge and Elspeth were clearly tiring now, though they did not complain. Jim too was getting tired, and Jack stuck with him, arms crossed over his chest. Jack still wasn’t eating very much compared to the others, but he still wasn’t responding to her questions about it, either.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“I’m fine.”

“We’re probably burning three or four hundred calories an hour doing this.”

“I’m fine.” Don’t bother me.

So she shrugged and took off again. They were back on good firn again, and could make decent time with minimum effort. Just walking, a great relief after what had preceded it.

But now when she looked back, she saw that Jim and Jack were behind Ta Shu, bringing up the rear, and losing a couple hundred yards per hour on all the rest of them. It didn’t seem like much, but it added up. And it worried her. But there was nothing to do but carry on, and ratchet down the pace a bit so that no one pushed too hard, especially those bringing up the rear.

They had been hiking for ten hours when Val got another GPS fix. They had come some thirty kilometers, a good pace; but she had aimed them out to the south to avoid the crevasses at the top of the Hump Passage, at the head of the Liv Glacier. So they still had at least seventy kilometers to go, she figured, depending on how far south they would have to detour to get around the ice ridge extending southward from Last Cache Nunatak. Beyond that ice ridge lay the head of the Zaneveld Glacier, which was heavily crevassed; they would have to stay south of that; and then on the far side of the Zaneveld was Roberts Massif. All those features lay below the horizon, of course; they could see only about ten kilometers in all directions, which meant that they could see nothing but the ice plain, except for occasional glimpses of the peaks of the Queen Maud Range, poking over the horizon to their right.

Into her rhythm, taking it slow. So far of all the clients Ta Shu seemed the least affected by their long march. He spent all his rest time contemplating the distant peaks of the Queen Maud Range, deciphering their feng shui message no doubt. While walking he stumped along steadily, and at times caught up with her and walked by her side. “We are doing well!”

“Yes.”

He pointed at the mountains, the only thing marring a perfect white/blue circle of a horizon. “This is a good place,” he said. He was pointing at what Val hoped was Barnum Peak, standing over the west side of the Hump Passage. “Open to the south. Protected on the north by mountains. This is good.”

“Doesn’t all that reverse in the southern hemisphere?”

“No. Constant everywhere. A dragon-spine range, that. Fire over water. Sometimes bad health. I would have to do more study.”

“No time for that,” Val said politely. “Anyway, it looks like your health is fine. You’re really going strong.”

“Thank you,” he said. He was hiking with his face uncovered, and now as he smiled some of the icicles in his gray moustache broke off and fell away. “No problem so far. I can walk; one of the few things I can do. I spent my childhood harvesting rice. Walking to town. Walking to school, when I went. A peasant life. Then given a spot at university, very lucky. Then, just after I got there—re-education!” He laughed. “So back to the fields for some more years.”

“Good way to get in shape.”

“Oh, there are better ways, I assure you.” Laughing at her. “Better ways indeed. Not enough to eat, you see. But it made me strong. Now I am old, but that kind of strength, ha—you must sit many years before it is all gone:”

Val nodded. She knew what he meant; she had often seen that kind of strength in Nepal, where people had an endurance that no Westerner could touch. A couple of Sherpas she knew had walked from Everest Base Camp to Kathmandu in three days, just to see how fast they could do it—a trek that even the best Western mountaineers took two weeks to do, back when they had walked it at all. No, Val had walked many miles with the Sherpa and Rawang porters, and she had seen that although they had mostly been very cheerful people, they were pack animals, really, like draft horses or donkeys—that was how they made their living, as beasts of burden, working hard, tired in the afternoons, eating like starved dogs every evening. Val had admired a lot of those guys for the way they worked, loved them dearly even though she had towered over them and hadn’t spoken their language. It hadn’t been the kind of love that had any real connection in it. But sometimes watching them she had wanted a big Western man to have that kind of spirit, that cheery toughness, something like Ta Shu’s. These were the kind of people she wanted to walk with.

Instead this little group of clients, with only one Ta Shu in it, and the rest slowly losing steam. In fact Jack and Jim were falling behind faster than ever. Puzzled, Val stopped and watched them closely for a while. It was not Jim who was slowing them down: Jack had hit the wall, it looked like. “Fuck,” she said. He had gone out too fast, perhaps, and burnt out. Or was feeling the loss of blood from the cut in his hand. Or both. Anyway he was slowing down markedly.

Val called an early break, and waited for the two men to catch up, cursing to herself. They joined the group twenty minutes after Jorge and Elspeth came in, and during that time the others had eaten and drunk their flasks and refilled them, and were beginning to freeze. This was a serious problem, and she couldn’t help thinking that it was Jack’s fault. So often it happened that men like him took off too fast, on an adrenaline rush, thinking their emergency energy would be inexhaustible, and then they were the first to hit the wall. Pacing took a lot of self-discipline. And big muscular men were generally not so good in ultra-longdistance events: they had too many muscles to feed, and when they ran out of the day’s carbo load, they had too little body fat to throw on the fire.

So when Jim and Jack clumped into the group, Val suggested that they have a bite of their belts to give themselves more energy. Jim nodded, and pulled out some of his belt and tore it off and stuffed it under his ski mask into his mouth before it froze.

Jack just shook his head irritably. “I’m just pacing myself,” he snapped. “Like you said to do. Don’t get neurotic about it, that’s the last thing we need. Let people go what pace they want.”

“Sure sure. Try eating some food, though. We need the group to stay more or less together, or the people in front will freeze waiting for the ones behind.”

“Don’t wait then!”

She stared at him. “You should eat,” she said finally. “And drink your arm flasks and refill them, for God’s sake.”

And after a little while more she had taken off again, and was soon leading the way. No beeps, thank God; they were out on the big ice cube itself now, a solid mass with very little cracking, and thank God for that. Just a matter of walking. Pacing oneself, yes, and walking. Hour after hour. She shifted them to a ten-minute break every hour, which was exactly Shackleton’s pattern. Frequently she glanced back over her shoulder. Jack was still falling behind, perhaps even more rapidly than before; and Jim was sticking with him.

At some time when she was not looking the sun was touched by a thin film of cloud, which had appeared out of nowhere. A white film, but heavily polarized by her sunglasses, so that it was banded prismatically.

As usual, it only took the slightest cloud cover for the day to go from blinding and hot to ominous and chill. Already they were pulling their ski masks down over their faces, and zipping up their parkas; and as they did the cloud thickened further, into a thin rippled patch thrown right over the sun, as if someone had tried to place it there. So often it happened that way; the cloud could have appeared anywhere in the sky, but ended up right between Val and the sun. It happened so frequently that she figured it must be some trick of perspective rather than a real phenomenon. In any case, there it was again.

Which was bad, bad news. The immediate effects were that their suits wouldn’t be as warm, and worse, their arm flasks would be much less efficient at melting snow and ice. It would take twice as long to melt snow now, maybe three times. So they were going to get thirsty.

The mental effect of the cloud was also bad. What had been a blazing plain was now shadowed and malign. Underfoot the beautifully elaborate crosshatching in the snow was revealed better than ever, a granulated fractal infinity of sharply cut microterracing. This complex world underfoot was as prismatic as any cloud whenever it flattened enough, and now when she looked in the direction of the sun Val saw diaphanous icebows, curving both in the cloud and across the snow itself. They walked forward into a geometry of rainbows. Val looked back at Ta Shu, and he raised a ski pole briefly, to let her know he had noticed the phenomena, and appreciated her thinking to bring them to his attention.

A beautiful sight; and yet still the world seemed dim and malignant. Clouds of any kind on the polar cap often presaged even worse weather, of course, which perhaps was part of the mood it cast. Hopefully her clients did not know that and so wouldn’t be affected as much. They were still many hours’ walk out from Roberts, and a lot could happen to Antarctic weather in that amount of time.

Nothing to do but forge on, of course, into a landscape turned alien; the awesome become awful, and all in the few minutes it had taken for a thin cloud to form. After which they were mere specks on a high plateau on Ice Planet, a place where humans could not live except in spacesuits. And they could feel that palpably, in the penetrating cold.

At the next rest stop they drank and ate in silence. There was no point, Val judged, in trying to cheer them on. She could have pointed out to them again that they were having an adventure at last, after trying so many times and paying so much money. But she doubted that would go over very well now. One of the distinguishing marks of true adventures, she had found, is that they were often not fun at all while they were actually happening. And in one of their camp conversations Jim had quoted Amundsen to the effect that adventure was just bad planning. So that if she called it that, they might blame her for it. Jack was certainly ready.

And she blamed herself. It had been a mistake to take the righthand route, as it turned out. Although still—as she walked on thinking about it, trying to cheer herself up—it seemed that what had happened showed that Amundsen was wrong, and that adventures could also be a matter of bad luck as well as bad planning. You could plan everything adequately, and still get struck down by sheer bad luck. It happened all the time. Chance could strike you down; that was what made these kinds of activities dangerous. That was what made all life dangerous. You couldn’t plan your way out of some things. You had to walk your way out, if you could.

In any case, while there was no obvious way to cheer them up during the rests, there was also no great need to urge or cajole them along. The situation was plain; they either walked on or died. The intense cold they were living in reminded them of that at every moment.

She tried her GPS and it gave her a reading, showing them on the 172nd longitude. About the halfway mark of their hike. Not bad at all, except that they were getting very tired. They had hiked around thirty miles, after all, and were beginning to run out of gas; she could see it in the way they moved. Jorge was limping slightly. Elspeth was letting her ski poles drag from time to time, no doubt to give her arms a rest. Jack was doing the same, and moving like a pallbearer. Jim was trying to keep to his friend’s slow pace, though often he pulled ahead and then stopped and waited, not a good technique. Only Ta Shu still had the contained efficiency of someone with some strength left in his legs, placing each step precisely into her bootprints, using his ski poles in easy short strokes. He looked like he could stump along for a long time.

Val herself was feeling the work, but was well into her long-distance rhythm, a feeling of perpetual motion that was not exactly effortless but a kind of contained low-level effort, one that she could sustain forever; or so it felt. Obviously there would come a time when that feeling would wear away. But she had seldom reached it, especially when guiding clients, and right now it was still a long way off.

Her endurance, however, was not the point. They could only go at the speed of the weakest members of the team, and there was nothing she could do for them. Well; she could give them her meltwater. And so at the next break she did that, giving one cup to Jack and another to Elspeth, over their objections. “Drink it,” she ordered, her tone peremptory in a way she had not let it be until now. “I’m not thirsty.”

But of course after that she was. The parching in her mouth and throat reminded her of multiday wall climbs back in the world, when they had only carried a quart or two a day for days on end, and spent the last couple days hanging on sunny granite faces sick with thirst, hauling themselves up despite that, their sweat white. Dry mouth, dry throat, the tongue thickening until it became a foreign object lodged in the mouth, obstructing the breathing; the physical reality of being a water creature drying out, therefore losing substance; getting thin. One could dry up and die, parch to death. It was a feeling more painful than cold by far, though down here it often combined with the cold, allowing it to penetrate more quickly, so that one ended up freeze-dried, like the mummified seals in the Dry Valleys.

Well, fine. But just as she had done on the big walls, she gritted her teeth, bit the inside of her cheek lightly, and powered on. She would drink one arm of her next melt, and then alternate after that. She was fine. She could walk forever. But the clients couldn’t.

The little cloud was thickening, a white blanket thrown right over the sun, holding its position with maddening fixity. You could laugh at the Victorians for talking about a battle with Nature, but when you saw a cloud hold its position like that, in the freshening wind now striking them, it was hard not to feel there was some malignant perversity at work there, a Puckish delight in tormenting humans. It might be the pathetic fallacy, but when you were as thirsty as Val was it felt tragic.

She slowed down to hike with each of the others in turn, inquiring after them. Except for Ta Shu, and perhaps Jim, they were hurting; nearly on their last legs, it appeared, with more than thirty kilometers to go. Well, she would shepherd them there. Bring them on home. Give them her water, give them her mental energy. There was something about taking care of clients in such a way that felt so good. Others before self. The Sherpas’ business Buddhism, their ethic of service. Being a shepherd, or a sheepdog. Husbanding them along.

At the next stop, however, she tried again to give Jack her water, and suggested that he eat, and he refused the water and yanked the power bar out of his belt and tore off a piece savagely, muttering “Lay off, for Christ’s sake. We’re doing the best we can.”

Jim and Elspeth and Jorge all nodded. “This is hard for us,” Elspeth said to Val wearily.

“Of course,” Val said. “I know. Hard for anyone. You’re doing great. We’re making a very long walk, in excellent time. No problem. Let’s just keep taking it easy, we’ll get there.”

And as soon as possible she had them moving again, despite Elspeth’s suggestion that they take a longer break. That would only allow muscles to stiffen up; besides, the sheer impact of the cold made it impossible. They had to move to stay warm.

So she took off, trying to tread the fine line between going too fast and tiring them or going too slow and freezing them. She lost the glow she had felt during the previous march about the ethic of service and all that; in fact another part of her was taking over, and getting angry at these people for getting so tired so fast. Sure, she should have kept anything like this from happening. But they had no business coming down here to trek if they were not in shape. Even these so-called outdoor-speople were still very little more than brains in bottles—weekend warriors at best, exercising nothing but their fingertips in their work hours, the rest of their bodies turning as soft as couch cushions. Watching computer screens, sitting in cars, watching TV, it was all the same thing—watching. Big-eyed brains in bottles. These clients of hers were actually among the fittest of the lot, they were the best the world had to offer! The best of the affluent Western world, anyway. And even they were falling apart after walking a mere seventy kilometers. And thinking they were doing something really hard.

But in their spacesuit gear the level of raw suffering was not that great, if they could just learn to thermostat properly. Indeed the whole idea of Antarctic travel as terrible suffering which required tremendous courage to attempt struck Val as bullshit, now more than ever. It was all wrapped up with this Footsteps phenomenon—people going out ill-prepared to repeat the earlier expeditions of people who had gone out ill-prepared, and thinking therefore that you were doing something difficult and courageous, when it was simply stupid, that was all. Dangerous, yes; courageous, no. Because there was no correlation between doing something dangerous and being courageous, just as there was no correlation between suffering and virtue. Of course if you went at it with Boy Scout equipment like Scott had, then you suffered. But that wasn’t virtue, nor was it courage.

In fact, Val decided as she stomped along, most of the people who came to Antarctica to seek adventure and do something hard, came precisely because it was so much easier than staying at home and facing whatever they had to face there. Compared to life in the world it took no courage at all to walk across the polar cap; it was simple, it was safe, it was exhilarating. No, what took courage was staying at home and facing things, things like talking your grandma out of a tree, or reading the want ads when you know nothing is there, or running around the corner of the house when you hear the crash. Or waiting for test results to come back from the hospital. Or taking a dog to the vet to have it put down. Or taking a bunch of leukemic kids to a ball game. Or waiting to see if your partner will come home drunk that night or not. Or helping a fallen parent off the bathroom floor at four in the morning. Or telling a couple that their kid has been killed. Or just sitting on the floor and playing a board game through the whole of a long afternoon. No, on the list could go, endlessly: the world was stuffed with things harder than walking in Antarctica. And compared to those kinds of things, walking for your life’s sake across the polar ice cap was nothing. It was fun. It could kill you and it would still be fun, it would be a fun death. There were scores of ways to die that were immeasurably worse than getting killed by exposure to cold; in fact freezing was one of the easiest ways to go. No, the whole game of adventure travel was essentially an escape from the hard things. Not necessarily bad because of that; a coping mechanism that Val herself had used heavily all her life; but not something that should ever be mistaken for being hard or heroic. It was daily life that was hard, and sticking it out that was heroic.

Val shuddered at this dark train of thought, stopped in her tracks. She looked back; she had been going too fast, and the people she was caring for had fallen far behind. “Come on, God damn it!” she said at them. “You are so fucking slow. This is fun! This is your adventure! Are we having fun yet?” Almost shouting at them. But they were so far back there was no chance they would hear her.

They had too little energy and she had too much. And one thing about walking for hours and hours like this; it gave one an awful lot of time to think. Sometimes that was good, sometimes bad. When it was bad, it took a bit of an effort to remain the cheerful optimistic person that one was.

She checked her watch, and found that half an hour had passed; her arm flask was almost melted. She walked back to the others, pulling herself together to do the cheerleader thing, very hard now. My God, was she toast! No one could have been less in guide mode than she was at that moment, feeling parched but strong, well into her long-haul groove, and immensely irritated that these people had no long-haul groove to fall into. The back of her throat was so dry that it hurt to talk; but if she was that thirsty, then it was certain the clients were in worse shape; in need of her help; and in this situation that meant her words, as there was little else she could do. So she pulled up her ski mask so they could see her smile, and said, “Roberts Massif, coming over the horizon any minute now! We’re almost there!” Which, as they were still at least twenty-five kilometers from the oil camp, no doubt took the long-distance record for saying We’re almost there even in her own notorious career of misuse of the phrase. But it needed to be said, she judged; and so she said it. And it helped them to keep moving.

Except it wasn’t working for Jack. When he dragged up to the rest he only stared at Val and her good news, and after they started off he quickly fell behind again.

Then Val looked back and saw him squatting on his haunches, a terrible position for rest, as it trapped so much blood below the knees. It looked as if he had gone faint. Jim was hurrying forward, trying to get her attention.

She met Jim on the way back to Jack, and gave him the crevasse detector and told him to keep walking with the others. It might very well have come time to do the fascist guide number on Jack, she judged, and drive him on by snapping him with the whip of his own machismo, for his own sake and the sake of the whole group; and serve him right. But she didn’t want any witnesses.

She reached Jack and stood over him. He glanced up, looked back down.

“Well,” she said, “how’s it going?”

He waved a hand: go away. Leave me alone.

“Come on,” she said sharply. “We can’t go away. We can’t leave you behind. We’re with you, and you’re with us, so let’s get together. Otherwise everyone’s in trouble. Tell me what you need to feel better. Are you hurt?”

He looked down and away. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay in a while. I just need to rest.”

“Did you hit very hard when we fell in the crevasse? Do you think you’re concussed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you remember the fall?”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel nauseous?”

No reply.

“Do you think you’re concussed, or in shock?”

“I don’t know! Just let me rest, will you? You’re always pushing us. I just need some rest.”

“Okay, we’ll rest.” She sat down.

“No, no! Get going. You’ve got the radar, you should be out there, what are you doing?”

“I’m waiting for you. I gave the radar to Jim. We can’t go on any farther without you, or else we’ll get separated.”

“I’ll follow your tracks,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

Val stared at him, irritated but also worried. He sounded pretty irrational to her. But something was needed to get him going. “Oh come on,” she said again, standing. “We can’t go on without you! You’re endangering everyone right now, do you understand? God damn it—why is it always the macho guys that wimp out first.”

“You’re the macho guy here!” he cried. “Always pushing it! Always making us look bad!”

“Right,” she said. “Like insisting on taking Amundsen’s route even though the ice had changed. Come on! And for God’s sake either stand up or sit down, Jesus, you’re only trapping a bunch of blood below your knees by squatting like that. You don’t have to be stupid along with everything else.”

He sat heavily. “Just go on. I’ll catch up.”

“We can’t go on. What is wrong with you! You lost blood, you took a hit, okay! You sound kind of in shock to me, and you certainly have hit the wall somehow or other. But we need for you to walk. Just stand up and put one foot in front of the other. Give it a try at least! We can’t carry you, and we can’t go on without you. So you just have to do it. Reach down and show some guts for once.”

And she turned and walked off a few meters, mouth pursed into a tight line of disgust. High-school-coach bullshit, no doubt about it; but she could remember going into a berserker state as the result of her high-school volleyball coach’s ballistic exhortations, and Jack was certainly the type if anyone was to still fall for that routine.

She turned around and looked back. He was struggling to his feet. Something was definitely wrong; concussed, perhaps? He was like Seaman Evans, she thought uneasily, the first member of Scott’s team to die on their march back from the Pole—a big man who took a fall and afterward just fell apart. Big men didn’t do well down here. Macho men often did, she had to admit; but machismo itself was a weakness and could be stripped away in such a situation as this, where you had to pace yourself for the long haul. Maybe that was all it was; he preferred the blaze of the adrenaline rush and had burnt out fast, and then looked for someone or something else to blame.

She caught up to Jim, who was waiting for the two of them. The others were strung out ahead, struggling along, well in front of the crevasse detector, which was not good even if they were on the Big Ice Cube. It was cloudier than ever, and bitterly, bitterly cold.

“You’re supposed to be out front.”

“Hey look, he’s hurt,” Jim said angrily. “He’s lost blood.”

“I know. He still has to walk. We can’t carry him.”

Jim stared at her, clearly angry, balked, frustrated. Mask to mask in the whistling wind.

Val looked back. Jack was coming on now, slowly but steadily, using his ski poles to push forward. He was favoring his cut hand. “Here he comes. Do what you can to help him keep going. Give me the radar.”

She took back the crevasse detector and walked ahead of them, trying to keep herself down to their pace, though she needed to be out front with the radar, safe ice or not. As she plodded on she felt worse and worse. There had been a certain amount of pleasure in tongue-lashing Jack into action, of course, after biting back so many remarks in the previous week. Perhaps too much pleasure. In any case it left a bad taste in her mouth. Shackleton would have done it better. Although once after the Endurance had sunk, McNeish had refused to haul the boats over the ice any farther, and Shackleton had taken him aside and given him a choice; go on hauling or Shackleton would shoot him dead. McNeish had gone on.

Nice if you could do it. And in some ways cleaner than sticking a knife into a man’s sense of himself. But not a choice Val had had. They needed Jack moving; and now he was moving. But she had a foul taste in her dry mouth—the sick, salty taste of South Georgia Island—and she did not want to look back at those particular clients anymore.

On they walked. She kept to the stragglers’ pace. They came to a long low hogback hill in the ice, an extension of the ridge running south from Last Cache Nunatak, and she hurried to the front of the group. It was good that they had gotten this far, but crevasses here were a real possibility, and the snow was deep on the side of the slope, and cut by the winds into high sastrugi. Val stomped out as deep a trail as she could, and reminded everyone to stay in single file and in her steps. The ice was flowing over a buried rock ridge, so she kept the pulse radar sweeping the ice ahead, and watched the ice itself closely for telltale dips or changes in snow texture. None appeared, and they were able to walk over the ridge without incident. But even that slight uphill made it clear to Val that her legs were getting tired. Which meant the clients must be wasted. She checked her watch, calculated back; they had been walking for twenty-six hours. She figured they had about twenty kilometers left to go.

Then she heard a faint shout, and looked back quickly. Jack was collapsed on the snow, the others standing or crouched in a knot over him. Val ran back down the slope to them. Jack was semiconscious at best; he was trying to get up, and the others were holding him down.

“Keep down!” Val said to him sharply, almost pleading. She took his pulse, checked him out as best she could. It looked like hypothermia to her, along with whatever else had slowed him down; shock was her best guess, shock from the loss of blood and the fall generally.

She stood and thought it over. Then she took Ta Shu’s ski poles and her own, and with their rope lashed the poles to Jack’s back in a double-X pattern. It was a lousy stretcher, but with the rope tied to her harness she could pull him along on his bottom and boot heels, his neck and head supported. It was harder than pulling the sledge had been, but only Jack’s butt and heels were in occasional contact with the snow, and his head was supported by ski poles and a net of rope. Now that he wasn’t walking he would chill down fast, of course, but there was nothing she could do about that, except dial his suit’s photovoltaic system to max and hurry to Roberts as fast as she could. “Keep up with me if you can,” she ordered the others when the arrangement was finished. “And stay in my tracks for sure.” She took off.

And then she really began to work. It was particularly hard without her ski poles, for those helped walking in snow a great deal. But there was nothing for it. As long as they did not encounter bare ice, she intended to go as fast as she could without stopping, all the way to the Roberts camp. The others would have her bootprints to show the way if they fell too far behind, and Jack’s heels would knock down the largest of the sastrugi, leaving even more of a trail. With luck the others would, like her, feel a new surge of energy at this emergency, and keep her in sight. And once she got to Roberts she could drop Jack off and go back for them.

So off she went, pushing it as hard as she could given the distance left. She had a lot in reserve, and it felt good finally to quit holding herself to the clients’ pace and just take off. This, she thought blackly, was the only part of guiding she was good at.

white sky

rust rock

white ice

A few hours later the closest client was on the horizon behind her, perhaps six to eight kilometers back. She stopped and watched them as she drank her meltwater and caught a breather; she thought it was Ta Shu and Jim leading the way. Jack was still semiconscious, but he seemed aware enough of his predicament to stay still in his traces. On reflection it seemed to Val that he might have suffered a concussion when they fell. Although he had been gung ho for a while after that. Or else he had gone into shock from loss of blood—mild shock at first, followed by serious shock. Hard to say. Now cold would be the major factor; serious hypothermia could not be far away. Only the photovoltaic elements in his suit were protecting him from it, and with the sun obscured by clouds they were much less powerful.

But Roberts Massif was now revealed right to its base; so they were less than ten k out. The oil camp was right around the southernmost point of the massif. So they had done most of it. When the others got closer she pointed at Roberts, hoping to give them the little surge of adrenaline they were sure to get when they saw the goal. Then she was off again, faster than ever. No truly long haul is ever done with much of a kick kept in reserve for the end, but she had gone out extremely slow in the first half, so a good negative split was a distinct possibility. Anyway she was going to give it her best shot; the others could follow at whatever pace they could manage. Although they had looked shattered, they also seemed as though they could carry on to the end. Ta Shu had even spun around once to do his filming or his geomancy, or both. Val liked his imperturbability.

The red dolerite of Roberts reared before her. Then she was stomping down the bare ice dropping to the massif, and she had to pull Jack around and let him down ahead of her. She leaned forward to look at his face; he appeared to be asleep. “We’re almost there,” she said. “We’ll get you some help.”

Then she turned the last corner and saw that the little station had burned down. Completely destroyed. A new kind of fear spiked into her. Her shouts brought no one out of the ruins. Then a figure appeared on the hovercraft still lying next to the dock.