Antarctica

1 Ice Planet

First you fall in love with Antarctica, and then it breaks your heart.

Breaks it first in all the usual sorry ways of the world, sure—as for instance when you go down to the ice to do something unusual and exciting and romantic, only to find that your job there is in fact more tedious than anything you have ever done, janitorial in its best moments but usually much less interesting than that. Or when you discover that McMurdo, the place to which you are confined by the strictest of company regulations, resembles an island of traveler services clustered around the offramp of a freeway long since abandoned. Or, worse yet, when you meet a woman, and start something with her, and go with her on vacation to New Zealand, and travel around South Island with her, the first woman you ever really loved; and then after a brief off-season you return to McMurdo and your reunion with her only to have her dump you on arrival as if your Kiwi idyll had never happened. Or when you see her around town soon after that, trolling with the best of them; or when you find out that some people are calling you “the sandwich,” in reference to the ice women’s old joke that bringing a boyfriend to Antarctica is like bringing a sandwich to a smorgasbord. Now that’s heartbreak for you.

But then the place has its own specifically Antarctic heartbreaks as well, more impersonal than the worldly kinds, cleaner, purer, colder. As for instance when you are up on the polar plateau in late winter, having taken an offer to get out of town without a second thought, no matter the warnings about the boredom of the job, for how bad could it be compared to General Field Assistant? And so there you are riding in the enclosed cab of a giant transport vehicle, still thinking about that girlfriend, ten thousand feet above sea level, in the dark of the long night; and as you sit there looking out the cab windows, the sky gradually lightens to the day’s one hour of twilight, shifting in invisible stages from a star-cluttered black pool to a dome of glowing indigo lying close overhead; and in that pure transparent indigo floats the thinnest new moon imaginable, a mere sliver of a crescent, which nevertheless illuminates very clearly the great ocean of ice rolling to the horizon in all directions, the moonlight glittering on the snow, gleaming on the ice, and all of it tinted the same vivid indigo as the sky; everything still and motionless; the clarity of the light unlike anything you’ve ever seen, like nothing on Earth, and you all alone in it, the only witness, the sole inhabitant of the planet it seems; and the uncanny beauty of the scene rises in you and clamps your chest tight, and your heart breaks then simply because it is squeezed so hard, because the world is so spacious and pure and beautiful, and because moments like this one are so transient—impossible to imagine beforehand, impossible to remember afterward, and never to be returned to, never ever. That’s heartbreak as well, yes—happening at the very same moment you realize you’ve fallen in love with the place, despite all.

Or so it all happened to the young man looking out the windows of the lead vehicle of that spring’s South Pole Overland Traverse train—the Sandwich, as he had been called for the last few weeks, also the Earl of Sandwich, the Earl, the Duke of Earl (with appropriate vocal riff), and the Duke; and then, because these variations seemed to be running thin, and appeared also to touch something of a sore spot, he was once again referred to by the nicknames he had received in Antarctica the year before: Extra Large, which was the size announced prominently on the front of his tan Carhartt overalls; and then of course Extra; and then just plain X. “Hey X, they need you to shovel snow off the coms roof, get over there!”

After the sandwich variations he had been very happy to return to this earlier name, a name that anyway seemed to express his mood and situation—the alienated, anonymous, might-as-well-be-illiterate-and-signing-his-name-with-a-mark General Field Assistant, the Good For Anything, The Man With No Name. It was the name he used himself—“Hey Ron, this is X, I’m on the coms roof, the snow is gone. What next, over.”—thus naming himself in classic Erik Erikson style, to indicate his rebirth and seizure of his own life destiny. And so X returned to general usage, and became again his one and only name. Call me X. He was X.

The SPOT train rolled majestically over the polar cap, ten vehicles in a row, moving at about twenty kilometers an hour—not bad, considering the terrain. X’s lead vehicle crunched smoothly along, running over the tracks of previous SPOT trains, tracks that were in places higher than the surrounding snow, as the wind etched the softer drifts away. The other tractors were partly visible out the little back window of the high cab, looking like the earthmovers that in fact had been their design ancestors. Other than that, nothing but the polar plateau itself. A circular plain of whiteness, the same in all directions, the various broad undulations obscure in the starlight, obvious in the track of reflected moonlight.

As the people who had warned him had said, there was nothing for him to do. The train of vehicles was on automatic pilot, navigating by GPS, and nothing was likely to malfunction. If something did, X was not to do anything about it; the other tractors would maneuver around any total breakdowns, and a crew of mechanics would be flown out later to take care of it. No—X was there, he had decided, because somebody up in the world had had the vague feeling that if there was a train of tractors rolling from McMurdo to the South Pole, then there ought to be a human being along. Nothing more rational than that. In effect he was a good-luck charm; he was the rabbit’s foot hanging from the rearview mirror. Which was silly. But in his two seasons on the ice X had performed a great number of silly tasks, and he had begun to understand that there was very little that was rational about anyone’s presence in Antarctica. The rational reasons were all just rationales for an underlying irrationality, which was the desire to be down here. And why that desire? This was the question, this was the mystery. X now supposed that it was a different mix of motives for every person down there—explore, expand, escape, evaporate—and then under those, perhaps something else, something basic and very much the same for all—like Mallory’s explanation for trying to climb Everest: because it’s there. Because it’s there! That’s reason enough!

And so here he was. Alone on the Antarctic polar plateau, driving across a frozen cake of ice two miles thick and a continent wide, a cake that held ninety-five percent of the world’s fresh water, etc. Of course it had sounded exciting when it was first mentioned to him, no matter the warnings. Now that he was here, he saw what people had meant when they said it was boring, but it was interesting too—boring in an interesting way, so to speak. Like operating a freight elevator that no one ever used, or being stuck in a movie theater showing a dim print of Scott of the Antarctic on a continuous loop. There was not even any weather; X traveled under the alien southern constellations with never a cloud to be seen. The twilight hour, which grew several minutes longer every day, only occasionally revealed winds, winds unfelt and unheard inside the cab, perceptible to X only as moving waves of snow seen flowing over the white ground.

Once or twice he considered gearing up and going outside to cross-country ski beside the tractor; this was officially forbidden, but he had been told it was one of the main forms of entertainment for SPOT train conductors. X was a terrible athlete, however; his last adolescent sprout had taken him to six foot ten inches tall, and in that growth he had lost all coordination. He had tried to learn cross-country skiing on the prescribed routes around McMurdo, and had made a little progress; and sometimes it was a tempting idea to break the monotony; but then he considered that if he fell and twisted an ankle, or stunned himself, the SPOT tractors would continue to grind mindlessly on, leaving him behind trying to catch up, and no doubt failing.

He decided to pass on going outside. Monotony was not such a bad thing. Besides there would be some crevasse fields to be negotiated, even up here on the plateau, where the ice was often smooth and solid for miles at a time. Although it was true that the Army Corps of Engineers had mitigated all crevasses they didn’t care to outflank, meaning they had blown them to smithereens, then bulldozed giant causeways across the resulting ice-cube fields. This process had created some dramatic passages on the Skelton Glacier, which rose from the Ross Sea to the polar plateau in less than thirty kilometers, and was therefore pretty severely crevassed in places, so much so that the Skelton had not been the preferred route for SPOT; the first trains had crossed the Ross Ice Shelf and ascended the Leverett Glacier, a gentler incline much farther to the south. But soon after SPOT had become operational, and quickly indispensable for the construction of the new Pole station, the Ross Ice Shelf had begun to break apart and float away, except for where it was anchored between Ross Island and the mainland. The Skelton route could make use of this remnant portion of the shelf, and so every year the Corps of Engineers re-established it, and off they went. X’s nighttime ascent of the Skelton, through the spectacular peaks of the Royal Society Range, had been the most exciting part of his trip by far, crunching up causeway after causeway of crushed ice concrete, with serac fields like dim shattered Manhattans passing to right and left.

But that had been many days ago, and since reaching the polar plateau there had not been much excitement of any sort. The fuel depots they passed were automated and robotic; the vehicles stopped one by one next to squat green bladders, were filled up and then moved on. If any new crevasses had opened up across the road since the last passing of a train, the lead vehicle’s pulse radar would detect it, and the navigation system would take appropriate action, either veering around the problem area or stopping and waiting for instructions. Nothing of that sort actually happened.

But he had been warned it would be this way, and was ready for it. Besides, it was not that much different from all the rest of the mindless work that Ron liked to inflict on his GFAs; and here X was free of Ron. And he wasn’t going to run into anyone he didn’t want to, either. So he was content. He slept a lot. He made big breakfasts, and lunches, and dinners. He watched movies. He read books; he was a voracious reader, and now he could sit before the screen and read book after book, or portions of them, tracking cross-references through the ether like any other obsessive young gypsy scholar. He made sure to stop reading and look out the windows at the great ice plain during the twilights bracketing noon, twilights that grew longer and brighter every day. Though he did not experience again anything quite as overwhelming as the indigo twilight of the crescent moon, he did see many beautiful predawn skies. The quality of light during these hours was impossible to get used to, vibrant and velvet beyond description, rich and transparent, a perpetual reminder that he was on the polar cap of a big planet.

Then one night he got some weather. The stars were obscured to the south, the rising moon did not rise on schedule, though clearly it had to be up there, no doubt shining on the top of the clouds and, yes, making them glow just a little, so that now he could see them rushing north and over him, like a blanket pulled over the world; no stars, now, but a dim cloudy rushing overhead; and then through the thick insulation of the cab he could for once hear the wind, whistling over and under and around his tractor. He could even feel the tractor rock just a tiny bit on its massive shock absorbers. A storm! Perhaps even a superstorm!

Then the moon appeared briefly through a gap, nearly a half moon now, full of mystery and foreboding, flying fast over the clouds, then gone again. Black shapes flicked through the clouds like bats. X blinked and rubbed his eyes, sure that he was seeing things.

A light tap tapped on the roof of his vehicle. “What the hell?” X croaked. He had almost forgotten how to talk.

Then his windshield was being covered by a sheet of what looked like black plastic. Side windows and back window also. X could see gloved fingers working at the edges of the plastic, reaching down from above to tape the sheets in place. Then he could see nothing but the inside of the cab.

“What the hell!” he shouted, and ran to the door, which resembled a meat-locker door in both appearance and function. He turned the big handle and pushed out. It didn’t move. It wouldn’t move. There were no locks on these tractor doors, but now this one wouldn’t open.

“What-the-hell,” X said again, his heart pounding. “HEY!” he shouted at the roof of the vehicle. “Let me out!” But with the vehicle’s insulation there was no way he would be heard. Besides, even if he were …

He ran down the narrow low stairs leading from the cab into the vehicle’s freight room. On one side of the big compartment were two big loading doors that opened outward, but when he twisted the latch locks down, and turned the handles and pushed out, these doors too remained stubbornly in place. They were not as insulated as the cab doors, and when he pushed out on them hard, a long crack of windy darkness appeared between them. He put an eye to the thin gap, and felt the chill immediately: fifty degrees below zero out there, and a hard wind. There was a plastic bar crossing the gap just below eye level; no doubt it was melted or bonded to the doors, and holding them shut. “Hey!” he bellowed out the crack. “Let me out! What are you doing!”

No answer. His face was freezing. He pulled back and blinked, staring at the crack. The bar was welded or glued or otherwise bonded across the doors, locking them in place. No doubt it was the same up there on the outside of the cab door.

He recalled the emergency hatch in the roof of the cab, there in case the vehicle fell through sea ice or got corked in a crevasse, so that the occupants had to make their escape upward. X had thought it a pretty silly precaution, but now he ran back and pulled that handle around to the open position, a very stiff handle indeed, and shoved up. It wouldn’t go. Stuck. He was trapped inside, and the windshield and cab windows were covered. All in about two minutes. Ludicrous but true.

He thought over the situation while putting on the layers of his outdoor clothing: thick smartfabric pants and coat, insulated Carhartt overalls, heavy parka, gloves and mittens. He would need it all outside, if he could get outside, but now he began to overheat terribly. Sweating, he turned on the radio and clicked it to the McMurdo coms band. “Hello McMurdo, McMurdo, this is SPOT number 103, SPOT calling Mac Town do you read me over over.” While he waited for a reply he went to one of the closets of the cab, and pulled a brand new hacksaw from a tool chest.

“SPOT 103, through the miracle of radio technology you have once again manipulated invisible vibrations in the ether to reach Mac Coms, hey X, how are you out there, over.”

“Not good Randi, I think I’m being hijacked!”

“Say again X, I did not copy your last message, over.”

“I said I am being hijacked. Over!”

“Hey X, lot of static here, sounded like you said say Hi to Jack, but Jack’s out in the field, tell me what you mean, if that’s what you said, over.”

“Hi-JACKED. Someone’s locked me in the cab here and taped over the windows! Over!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And what does that make us?”

Arnold laughed wildly. “That makes us stupid.”

black sky

white sea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We should be filming this,” Geena noted.

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s too dark now.”

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

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

“Taken.”

“I can’t believe they camped in such an exposed place.”

“They wanted to be close to the penguins.”

“Yeah, but still.”

Indeed, Val thought. She would never have set a camp here on the ridge; it was one of the last places on Cape Crozier she would have chosen. And Wilson had known it was exposed to the wind, his diary made that clear. But he had decided to risk it anyway, because he too had been concerned about losing their camp in the darkness, and he had wanted it to be where they could find it at the end of their trips out to look for penguins. Fair enough, but there were other places that would have been relocatable in the dark. Putting it up here had almost cost them their lives. Oddly, Cherry-Garrard had claimed in his book that the hut had been located on the lee side of the ridge, thus protected from direct blasts; he had also explained that later aerodynamic science of which Wilson could not have been aware had revealed that the immediate lee of a ridge was a zone of vacuum pull upward, which is what had yanked their roof off when the wind reached Force Ten. But since the shelter actually was right on the spine of the ridge, as Hillary had noted (Val was pretty sure she could see it down in the saddle below her, a big hump of snow among other big humps of snow) it was hard to know what Cherry had been getting at—either making excuses for Wilson’s bad judgment, or else so blind he truly hadn’t known where they had been.

“It certainly looks like another stupid move to be chalked up against the Scott expedition,” Elliot said.

“Maybe it’s infectious,” Geena said. “A regional thing.”

“Below the 40th latitude south,” Elliot intoned “there is no law. Below the 50th, no God. And below the 60th, no common sense.”

“And below the 70th,” Geena added, “no intelligence whatsoever.”

There was little Val could say to contradict them. After all, here were a couple dozen people staggering around in a frigid wind, just to the left, the right, the before and the beyond of an oval rock wall that any of them could have found after a ten-second consultation with their GPS. One of them was actually tripping over the end of the shelter at this very moment!

But Val said nothing.

It got colder.

“These Footstep things,” Geena complained. “Want some hot chocolate?”

“I like them,” Elliot said, taking the thermos from her. “You get to add historical footage to the usual stuff, it’s great.”

“Be careful, it’s hot.”

“I worked for Footsteps Unlimited for a while. Popularly known as F.U., because that’s what the clients were most likely to say to each other after they got back.”

“Ha ha.”

“I also freelanced for Classic Expeditions of the Past Revisited, which its guides called Stupid Expeditions of the Past Revisited, because the trip designers always chose the very worst trips in history, sometimes with the original gear and food.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. But you’ll notice they’re out of business now.”

“Masochist travel—a new genre, still underappreciated.”

“It’ll catch on. All travel is masochist. People will do anything. I shot Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, elephants included—Marco Polo, Italy to China by camel—Scott’s walk to the Pole—Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.” He pulled up his facemask and drank from the thermos. “That one was colder than this.”

“Wow. I shot a gig with Condemned to Repeat It once, where we followed Stanley’s hunt for Livingstone. People said it was more dangerous to do now than it was then.”

“Condemned to Repeat It?”

“You know—those who know history too well are condemned to repeat it.”

“Ah yeah. But some of those old trips are unrepeatable no matter what, because they were impossible in the first place.”

“Sure. I heard Shackleton’s boat journey was a total disaster.”

Val’s stomach tightened. She had guided that one herself, and did not want to talk or think about it. Now she saw Elliot making a gesture with his thumb up her way, to warn Geena. That’s the guide right there, shhhh, don’t mention it! God. What a thing to be known for. Val had guided every Footsteps expedition in Antarctica, from Mawson’s death march to Borchgrevink’s mad winter ship, even fictional expeditions like the one in Poe’s “Message Found in a Bottle” (including the whirlpool at the end), or in Le Guin’s “Sur” (the latter of which ended with an emotional meeting with the author, the women thanking her for the idea and also making many detailed suggestions for logistical additions to the text, all of which Le Guin promised to insert the next time she revised it)—all these very difficult trips guided, practically every early expedition in Antarctica re-enacted—and what was she remembered for? The fiasco, of course.

Suddenly there were wild shouts from down the ridge. George and Ann-Marie were standing next to the snowy hump Val had picked out as the likely site.

“Show time,” Elliot declared, and hefted his camera pack. “I hope this baby stays warm enough to keep its focus.”

George had Elliot and Geena and the other camera operators shoot him and Ann-Marie re-enacting the rediscovery of the hut, their shouts thin compared to the happy triumph of the originals. Then they tromped back down to the dining tent, and ate the happiest meal they had had so far, while Val set up the rest of the sleeping tents. After that they slept through the long dark hours of the night, snug in their ultrawarm sleeping bags, on their perfectly insulated mattress pads. By the first glow of twilight on the next day they were all back on the ridge and working around the mound, some of them carefully clearing ice and snow away from the stacked rocks with hot-air blowers and miniature jackhammerlike tools, the others building a little wooden shelter just up the ridge; for they were there to undo the work of Edmund Hillary, so to speak, and return all of the belongings of Wilson’s group that Hillary and his companions had found and taken away.

The rock shelter itself was a small oval of rough stacked stones, many of them about as heavy as a single person could lift. The old boys had been strong. The wall at its highest was three or four rocks tall. The interior would have been about eight feet by five. The old boys had been small. They had put one of their two sledges over the long axis of the oval, then stretched their green Willesden canvas sheet over the sledge, and laid the sheet as far over the ground as it would go, and loaded rocks onto this big valance, and rocks and snow blocks onto the roof itself, until they judged the shelter to be as strong as they could make it. Bombproof; or so they had thought. A small hole in the lee wall had served as their door, and they had set up their single Scott tent just outside this entryway, to give them more shelter while affording the tent some protection from the wind, Val assumed; Wilson’s reason for setting up the tent when they had the rock shelter had never been clear to her. Anyway, the shelter had been pretty damned strong, she could see; the wind that destroyed it had not managed to pull the canvas out of its setting, but had instead torn it to shreds right in its place. As she had on her previous visits, Val kneeled and dug into the snow plastering the chinks in the wall, and found fragments of the canvas still there in the wall, more white than green. “Wow.”

And looking at the frayed canvas shreds, Val again felt a little frisson of feeling for the three men. It was like looking at the gear in the little museum in Zermatt that Whymper’s party had used in the first ascent of the Matterhorn: rope like clothesline, shoes, light leather things, with carpenter’s nails hammered into the soles…. Those old Brits had conquered the world using bad Boy Scout equipment. Like this frayed white canvas fragment between her fingers. A real piece of the past.

Not that they didn’t have a great number of other, larger real pieces of the past, there with them now to return to the site. For Wilson and his comrades had left in a hurry. The storm that had struck them had first blown their tent away, and then blown the canvas roof off their shelter; after that they had lain in their sleeping bags in a thickening drift of snow for two days, the temperatures in the minus 50s, the wind-chill factor beyond imagining—singing hymns in the dark to pass the time, although with their tent gone they were doomed, with no chance at all of getting back to Cape Evans alive. So when the wind had abated enough to allow them to stand, and they had gotten up and wandered around in the dark, and miraculously found their tent at the foot of the ridge, stuck between two boulders like a folded umbrella, they had carried it to their shattered camp and packed what they could find into one sledge and left immediately, in a desperate retreat for their lives. Thus began the third and worst stage of the Worst Journey, when they had hauled the sledge asleep in their traces, and slept in sleeping bags that had become nothing more than bags of ice cubes, which were nevertheless warmer than the air outside.

So when Hillary and his men had come on the site forty-six years later, they had found a lot of gear scattered about. They had collected it all up and put it in their farm tractors, and taken it all back with them to Scott Base at the other end of Ross Island; eventually it was all taken back to New Zealand, where the items were distributed to a number of Kiwi museums. Cherry-Garrard, still alive at the time, had written from England to approve this recovery and disposal of the gear, although since it had already been done when he was asked about it, he might very well have felt there was little else he could say. Val suspected that he had been the kind of person who would not complain about something when it could make no difference; and he certainly wanted his two long-dead comrades remembered as much as possible—not realizing that his book was so much greater a memorial to them than any objects in museums, that it would end up inspiring many people every year to return to Cape Crozier itself. And yet find there at the site only the emptied rock shell.

George Tremont had at some point come to feel that this removal of gear from the site had been a grave mistake. George was a Kiwi, and during a season’s film work at Scott Base, which included a few visits to Cape Crozier, he had become convinced that all the objects taken from the site—“looted,” he would say privately after a few glasses of warm Drambers, “vandalized; plundered”—ought to be returned and replaced. In other places around the globe one had these kind of inspired ideas in the bar and then sobered up the next day and dismissed them. But there was something about Antarctica that fueled obsessions, that created all manner of idées fixes which then took over whole careers and lives. The ice blink, some called it. Roger Swan, for instance, sitting in a college movie theater watching Scott of the Antarctic, had thereafter devoted his life to repeating Scott’s journey, an unlikely enough reaction one would have thought to a tale of continuous grim suffering; but the idea had obsessed him, and the Footsteps movement had been born.

And George had become the same way about the Cape Crozier artifacts. He had labored for ten years to argue all the relevant authorities over to his side—ten full years, like a bureaucratic Iliad and Odyssey combined, involving New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust (which George had joined and become president of before announcing his plan), the Historic Sites Management Committee of the Ross Dependency Research Committee, the New Zealand Antarctic Society, the Antarctic Treaty committee concerned with historic sites, the UN’s World Heritage Site committee, and scores of other societies, government agencies, university departments, and museum boards all over the world. The agreement of the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch had been the critical battle won, as they were in possession of the majority of the artifacts; this agreement had taken the advocacy of the Prince of Wales himself, but after that convincing everyone else had become progressively easier, as there grew more and more muscle to bring to bear on any little Kiwi museum that did not want to part with its relic of the holy crusade. Even Sir Edmund Hillary had eventually written a letter in support of the idea of returning the objects to the site, turning out to be as agreeable as Cherry-Garrard had been earlier. So in the end George had gotten all of the items donated back, and had also gotten permission to build a small wooden shelter to hold them, located nearby (“but out of photo range,” Elliot noted), and modeled on the old meteorological instrument shelter standing on Windvane Hill over the Cape Evans hut, on the other side of the island.

The new shelter had been built in Christchurch and then disassembled for transport to the site, so now, even in the cold and dark and wind, it only took a few hours to reassemble it. When it was finished, and its footing securely anchored by piles of stones similar to the piles in the rock oval itself, the happy group tromped back down to camp, and began hauling up the sledges full of the old items.

Val helped pull these sledges up the slope, feeling peculiar as she did so. All these items had been pulled up this very ridge by the three men who had first come here; then they had been hauled away by Hillary, the first man to climb Everest, a half century later. Now up they went again, with Elliot and Geena and several other camera operators recording every step, and Arnold and George and Ann-Marie all shouting frantically for various angles and so on. That part was awful, really. But something about the feel of the load, tugging hard at her harness … Then one of the people hauling slipped, and for a second it looked like the lead sledge might slide back down and hit the following one. George and Arnold and several others (especially the people hauling the second sledge) shrieked in panic. Ridiculous, really. Still, there was something about it…. They looked like pilgrims. Perhaps, Val thought, there was always something ridiculous about a pilgrimage, something self-conscious and theatrical. Maybe that didn’t matter.

Eventually they got all the holy relics safely on the ridge. George and his assistants went to work installing the pieces in the display shelter. The shelter did indeed look like a larger version of the wooden box on Windvane Hill, and when the items were installed, glass would protect them. A fair number of visitors would then get to see these things here at the site; not as many as would have seen them in the Kiwi museums, true, but it would mean more to those who did see them. So George had argued, for ten long years, and now Val could see his point. And in the boom market of wilderness adventure travel, re-enacting the trip called the Worst Journey in the World was always going to be popular. So a fair number of people would see this in the long run.

When they were done Val walked over with the rest to have a look. It was a nice display. Most of the items had been left unlabelled, as they were self-explanatory. The spindly wooden sledge they had left on the rock hut, stripped to the grain and bleached by its first stay out here, was now placed next to the shelter in a kind of cradle of rock. Then under the roof and behind the glass of the shelter itself, were a pick-axe, a blubber stove, a tin of salt, a hurricane lamp with a spare glass, a tea towel, a canvas bag, a thermos flask, several little corked bottles of chemicals, a bulb atomizer, a magnifying glass, several microscope slides, seven thermometers (three Fahrenheit, one Celsius, one minimum reading, two oral); a lead weight on a string, five eye droppers, a pair of tweezers, thirty-five sample tubes, all corked; a skewer, a bottle of alcohol, two enamel dishes, four pencils, a glass syringe, four envelopes with “TERRA NOVA” printed on them; six plain envelopes, some perforated stickers, three rolls of Kodak film marked “TO BE DEVELOPED BEFORE MAY 1ST, 1911,” two tubes of magnesium powder for an Agfa camera flash; and then, along with the letters from Cherry-Garrard and Hillary concerning the disposition of the artifacts, reproductions of the two photographs that had been taken of the three explorers by Herbert Ponting, one before they took off, and the famous one after they got back, in which they were sitting at the big table inside the Cape Evans hut. Lastly, in George’s finest coup of all, they had the shells of the three penguin eggs that Cherry-Garrard had donated to the uncaring keepers at the South Kensington Museum of Natural History in England; George had tracked them down in a specimen drawer in Edinburgh University, and now they were in the display too.

The camera pros were checking out the old film and flash powder, oohing and aahing. It certainly did seem that these objects served to make the three travelers more real to the imagination. There was so much of it—and this was just the stuff they had left behind!

“They sure traveled heavy, didn’t they?”

“Wilson was interested in a lot of things.”

“And back when there was such a thing as amateur science.”

“Hey, unpack your bag and tack it up and it’d look just like this.”

“I don’t know—a tea towel? Seven thermometers? A chemistry set?”

George was now wandering around the ridge, looking at the new structure from all the angles he could. Mercifully the wind had died for the moment, so that people could pull up their ski masks. Val saw that George was stuffed with a contentment beyond happiness; serious, as in the midst of a religious ritual. This was his moment, and it had actually come off. Elliot and some other camerapeople were still filming, but everyone had forgotten them. As George passed by, Arnold said, “It’s beautiful, George! It’s a great idea! The people who make it here will really appreciate this.”

The little smile on George’s face was angelic.

Then he was busy organizing the start of the dedication ceremony he had worked up. While they did that, Val took a closer look at the two photos of the three explorers. After they had survived the hurricane on this ridge, and were given back their lives by the miraculous recovery of their tent, their struggle home had been a nightmare beyond anything a Footsteps expedition could reproduce, thank God. But they had made it back. And Ponting had taken this photo within an hour of their return, after they had cut their frozen outer clothing off of them and thawed them a bit over the stove. Wilson looked straight out at posterity, grim, shattered, knowing full well that he had escaped leading his friends to death by sheer luck alone. That he would just months later walk south with Scott to the Pole was amazing.

Cherry-Garrard also looked into the camera. He had suffered from depression much of the rest of his life, and in this photo he appeared crazed already, driven out of his mind by the extremities of the journey. Although possibly that was just his near-sightedness. But no; such naked looks, from both him and Wilson; that was not just astigmatism. Ponting had caught their souls on film, caught their souls in the act of slipping back into their bodies, abashed at having taken off prematurely for the afterworld.

And then there between them was Birdie Bowers, knocking back a mug as if just back from a walk down to the corner store—looking if anything more refreshed and rested than he had in the departure photo. Bowers! Henry Robert Bowers, God bless him, his beak of a nose profiled like a parrot’s; Birdie Bowers of the Antarctic, who never got cold, never got tired, never got discouraged; Bowers the Optimist, whose only fault appeared to have been an optimism so extreme that it sometimes made his companions want to strangle him. After the hurricane had relented, for instance, he had wanted to make one last visit to the penguins before retreating. And back at Cape Evans he had given a lecture explaining how perfect their Boy Scout equipment was, so perfect that it could not possibly be improved upon in any regard; this from a man wearing a canvas jacket and hat rather than a parka. And when he had been caught with some of their ponies on an ice floe that broke away from the ice shelf, he had refused to save himself until he could save the nags as well. And on the fatal trek to the Pole he had pulled the hardest of all, even deprived of his skis, and had cheerfully done most of the camp work as the other men slowly lost strength and died around him. And never a word of complaint, not right to his death; rather the opposite.

It must have taken a lot, Val thought darkly as she looked at the photo, to kill Birdie Bowers off. She felt a lot for that little man, she treasured his memory in particular, of all the old boys; because Val was an optimist herself. Or at least people often accused her of it. And indeed she did try to make the best of things. It seemed to her that that was the way one should behave—it was how her mother and grandmother, both dead now, had taught her to behave, by precept and example. And on adult reflection, she approved of the lesson fully. Making the best of things was what courage meant, in her opinion; that was right action in the face of life. And how hard it was, given how dark her thoughts had become, and how dismal everything sometimes appeared to her; how against the grain of her temperament it had become. But she kept at it anyway, as an act of the will. And all it did was get her laughed at, and most of what she said continually discounted or put down, as if being optimistic was a matter of a somewhat obtuse intelligence, or at best the luck of biochemistry, rather than a policy that had to be maintained, sometimes in the midst of the blackest moods imaginable.

No; the Birdie Bowerses of this world were only regarded as fools. And the world being what it was, Val supposed that there was some truth in it. Why be optimistic, how be optimistic, when there was so much wrong with so much? In a world coming apart it had to be a kind of stupidity. But still Val held to it, stubbornly, just barely. Without even thinking she would say the thing that took the most positive slant on the matter, and get laughed at, and grit her teeth and try to live up to that slant. Such an attitude was an asset for any mountain guide, of course, or should have been. But the way it was received was one of the things that were beginning to turn her into burnt toast. It took an effort to be optimistic, it was a moral position. But no one understood that.

“Those guys,” Arnold said, looking over her shoulder at the old photos. “They really were crazy.”

“Yes. They were.”

Then George was hustling them all around to their various stations, becoming more manic as time passed; for the sun was soon to come up, and they would not be able to film a second take of that. Happily the sky was clear, and the horizon to the northeast a straight line of startling clarity: shiny ice below, pale blue sky above.

With most of the group gathered in a little knot next to the rock hut, George began by reading the climactic passage from Cherry-Garrard’s book, when the storm had ripped away their tent and hut roof, and left them apparently with only a few more hours to live. Val, uneasy at hearing this passage that struck right to the heart of what she had been thinking, moved back up the ridge beyond the new structure, where she could just hear George’s voice, a reedy tenor wavering on the freshening wind: “‘Gradually the situation got more desperate…. There was more snow coming through the walls … our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks over the door.’” George read in a singsong like a preacher, and though Val could only catch a phrase here and there over the sound of the wind, Cherry’s King James cadences were obvious. “‘Bowers … up and out of his bag continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof … he was magnificent…. And then it went…. The uproar of it all was indescribable.’”

Val bent her head, trying to imagine the scene; the thunder of the wind lashing the canvas to shreds, the rocks falling in, the snow pouring onto them, the means of return blown away.

“‘The next I knew was Bowers’s head across Bill’s body. “We’re all right,” he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement was helpful.’”

Val turned away abruptly and walked up the ridge, feeling a sudden increase in her strange pain. Who were these men? The clients she guided were not like that; and she was not like that either. Could people change so much, century by century?

“‘Birdie and Bill sang quite a lot of songs and hymns,’” she heard George exclaim. This was the cue for the music, George going a bit over the top in his enthusiasm. But everyone there began to sing except for Val and the film crew, anchored by a quartet of professionals from Wellington. They sang a version of the Tallis Canon, adapted by Benjamin Britten to fit some hymn verses written by Joseph Addison. The sky overhead was now fully light, a pure transparent pale blue, shading to a bright white over the northeastern horizon, where the sun was about to make its reappearance. They could see for many miles over the white sea ice covering the Ross Sea, clotted with icebergs from the old shelf, so that in the growing light the plain turned pewter and shaved silver, a mirror jumble. The quartet took off in the parts of the canon, somehow weaving together the words of the old hymn, George conducting them with great sweeps of his hands:

And as they sang the last line the sun cracked the horizon to the northeast, the incredible shard of light fountaining over the sea ice and the immense bergs caught in it, illuminating the scene with a blinding glare, the great world itself turning all to light, in a space spacious beyond words. The little group around the rock hut cheered, they hugged each other, they hugged George, and shook his hand, and clapped him on the back, all cameras forgotten; but Elliot and Geena kept filming.

God knew what the three explorers would have made of it. They had lain there in the midwinter darkness exposed to the hurricane for two more days without food and with very little sleep, before the wind dropped and they could go out and look for the tent, and find it. “Our lives had been taken away and given back to us,” as Cherry wrote. So that this was not an inappropriate site for a spring celebration, now that Val thought of it; the return of the sun, the rebirth, the gift of life.

So she went down to the others less reluctantly than she might have, and got them all back off the ridge to the team tent, and joined the celebratory meal, and when a toast was offered to the old boys she said “Hear hear” gladly, and with feeling; with too much feeling, really. For those three men were her saints, in a way—the patron saints of all stupid pointless expeditions into the wilderness, the Three Silly Men to match the Three Wise Men, silly men who yet remained gracious in the face of death. Who had made it back to Cape Evans alive, and thus turned all the stupid false stories of their Victorian youth into one stupid true story, transforming Tennyson to steel. The Worst Journey in the World! And now this memorializing group had done a proper homage to that best journey in Antarctic history, and made a shrine to craziness and decency that was, in some way she didn’t fully understand, something Val could believe in. Her own brand of religion. She proposed another toast, throat tightening as she did: “To Birdie Bowers, the optimist!” And they cried “Hear hear,” and drank hot chocolate, and Elliot, of all people, teasing her she supposed, cried out, “We’re all right! We’re all right!”

And so they were, for the moment. Though of course the return home would be a pain in the ass.

Then later, when she was back up on the ridge cleaning the site of any stray debris (cannister top, foil paper, etc.) Val got a call from Randi on her little wrist radio. “Hey Val, this is the voice of the south coming to you again through the miracle of shaped and directed radio waves, do you read, over?”

“I read you, Randi. What’s going on?”

“Did you hear what happened to your sandwich?”

“Don’t call him that, what happened?”

“Your ex, then. He’s out with the SPOT train, you know, and he just called in a while ago—he’s been hijacked!”

“What?”

“He’s been hijacked. Someone locked him in the lead vehicle during a Condition One, and when he got out there were only nine vehicles instead of ten! Plundered by ice pirates!”

“Who the hell would do that!”

“Ice pirates!” Randi laughed. “Who the hell knows. But isn’t that funny it happened to X?”

“No! Why the hell would that be funny?”

“Well, because it’s okay! I mean he’s okay, and now he’s finally had the big adventure he came down here looking for!”

“Maybe,” Val said darkly. Feeling bad about what she had done to X was another reason she was toast.

“Oh come on,” Randi was saying, “he’ll love it. That’s the kind of dreamer he is.”

“Maybe.”