Antarctica

5 A Site of Special Scientific Interest

Hello again my friends. As you can see, I am now out on the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf, a few kilometers south of Ross Island. I have come out here to spend a day at the Americans’ Happy Camper Camp, where visitors are trained in ice skills to better prepare themselves for their time in Antarctica. The camp is well-named; I am happy indeed. The mountaineers have shown us how to light the stoves, to put up the tents, and to use the radios. I have learned how to tie several knots. I know now that if you need to get a badly injured person inside a tent but are afraid to move them for fear of injuring them more, you are to slit the bottom of the tent open and erect the tent directly over the unfortunate person. Antarctica is a dangerous place. It is easy, looking around as we are now, to think that I stand on a broad snowy plain; in fact I am standing on cracked ice, with deep fissures all around, and the Antarctic Ocean below me.

Captain Cook, one of the greatest feng shui masters of all time, sailed the circumference of this Antarctic Ocean in the 1770s, trying to get as far south as he could. His wooden sailing ships ran into the pack ice at seventy degrees south, and as far as they could see to the south was only more ice. With the technology of his time they could go no farther. Later Cook wrote “I can be bold to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored.”

This sounds odd to us, shortsighted and even a bit foolish. But we must remember that the man who said it was extremely intelligent and capable, accomplishing much more in his life than any of us have. His shortsightedness as exhibited in this remark has to be understood then not as a personal attribute, but as one of his age generally. For Cook lived just before the great accelerations of the industrial age; his time was as it were the foothills of a mountain range so precipitous that the heights could not be guessed. Thus the radical foreshortening of the kao-yuan perspective. Cook sailed in wooden ships, which in their materials much resembled those used in ships for the previous two thousand years; only improvements in design had made them more seaworthy, and Cook rightly judged that these improvements, wrested slowly over the centuries out of human experience, had gone about as far with the materials as they could go. Thus he could not foresee the immense changes that would come so rapidly in the industrial decades to follow.

We, however, have no such excuse as Cook. We live on the heights of that mountain range, in a culture changing so rapidly that it is hard to gauge it. We look back on two centuries of continuous acceleration into this unstable moment, so we should be able to foresee that much the same will occur in the time after us. Who can deny that the future will quickly become something very different than our time, quickly become one of any number of possible worlds?

And yet by and large I think we still do no better than Captain Cook. We assume that the conditions that exist now will be permanent. And yet every year the laws are amended, and even the ice shelf I am standing on now, that has been here for three million years, is melting away. Even the rocks melt away in time. This moment is like a dragonfly, hovering over a peach blossom; then off and gone.

Look then at this ocean I am camped on in this moment. A white immensity; nothing to say about it. Erebus stands in the air like a powerful deity. Before you can read a landscape, it has to become a part of your inmost heart. When I came before to Antarctica, as a proud young man, I saw the land and it baffled me, and I could not paint it in my poems. Nothing came to me. As the British explorer Cherry-Garrard said, “This journey had beggared our language.”

Only later, as I dreamed of it, did I grow to love it. What words I could find were the oldest words, in their simplest combinations. Blue sky; white snow. That is all language can say of this place; all else is footnotes, and the human stories.

Now I am back, and those of you who care to share my voyage, watching and listening in China, or wherever else you may be; I welcome you, because I feel now, all these years later, with the love of these stories in me, that I am ready to film the land I see, and talk to you my friends about it; not to reproduce the effects of light, but to tap this light at its source.

For Scott’s party in their first stay here, in 1902, this edge of this ice shelf was as far south as anyone had ever been, and no one knew what lay farther over the horizon. Except of course they knew for sure that that way lay the South Pole, the axis of the Earth’s rotation. On Ross Island they were still twelve hundred kilometers away, as they knew by geometrical calculation; but they had no idea what the land in between would look like; whether these Western Mountains across the bay would extend all the way south, as a great wall blocking them, or whether there would be an easy ramp up to the great plateau of ice, which short trips through the nearest Western Mountains suggested might guard the Pole. They could only tell by trying to walk there. It resembled the attempts on the North Pole, and the search for the Northwest Passage, which had been a major feature of British culture since Elizabethan times. As long as England had been a maritime power, as long as it had been an empire, it had been sending out brave men to explore the polar ends of the Earth, first the northern one, and now, with the invention of canned food and metal-reinforced steam-powered ships, they had been able to penetrate the pack ice surrounding the southern one—the ice that Captain Cook said would never be penetrated—and been able to establish a good base of supplies as close as they had, here on Ross Island. Directly south lay this broad featureless white plain of an ice shelf. And so they had to give it a try.

On their first trip south, Scott took along his friend and confidant, Edward “Bill” Wilson, and Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton was chosen for his physical strength and for his drive, his will, his spirit to achieve and to cross this land.

But the snow of the ice shelf was soft, and pulling a sledge through it proved difficult, like pulling it through sand; very slow, and very strenuous. Shackleton had a heart defect that he hid from others all his life, and in the rigor of this forced march south, making five miles a day only after fourteen hours of badly designed manhauling, he succumbed to scurvy faster than the other two.

Within days of starting they could see by the slowness of their progress that they were not going to make it to the Pole, so the push south continued to no very great purpose, even though they were killing themselves to do it. This made them irritable. They never even got off the ice shelf, but only managed to make it to the tidal cracks separating the ice from the shore. They confirmed that the Western Mountains extended far enough south that they stood across any very direct route from Ross Island to the Pole; a rather ominous and discouraging discovery, and yet the only one they had made when they had to turn back.

And even so Scott had almost left it too late. The moment of return was his call to make, and despite warnings from Wilson in early December that Shackleton was developing scurvy, and the other two were not far behind, Scott pushed on until the day after New Year’s. At that point they had a desperate struggle to get back to Ross Island alive. On the return Shackleton collapsed from the scurvy, and could no longer help haul the sledge; at the most he could ski along freely next to the other two, at what cost to the will we cannot well imagine, as sick as he was—so sick that on some days he was forced to lie on the sledge and let the other two haul him.

And Scott, not knowing about the heart defect, had no sympathy for Shackleton. Here was a younger man, who had been so much more dynamic back on Ross Island; his breakdown Scott regarded as a moral defect, and as it endangered all three of their lives, and therefore Scott’s own reputation for competence, he grew angry at Shackleton. He made contemptuous comments about “the baggage” within Shackleton’s hearing, often enough that Wilson had to pull him aside and tell him to stop.

And in the end Scott and Shackleton fought. Shackleton and Wilson were packing the sledges when Scott shouted at them, “Come here, you bloody fool!” Wilson said, “Were you speaking to me?” And Scott said “No.” Shackleton then said, “Then it must have been me. But you’re the worst bloody fool of the lot, and every time you dare to speak to me like that, you’ll get it back.”

Shackleton was an officer junior to Scott, on a British Navy expedition. This statement was therefore very like mutiny. It took Wilson to patch things up and insist that the two men calm down and continue. The incident was so traumatic that not one of the three men wrote about it in the journals they were keeping on the trek; it was too dangerous to mention. How then do we know about it? Because Wilson, who was the father confessor figure for everyone on the expedition, finally felt the need to speak himself, and at some point afterward told the geologist Armitage what had happened. Later still Armitage wrote down what he had heard. How accurate Armitage’s account was, and Wilson’s too for that matter, we have no way to tell. But certainly by the time they staggered back across this ice to the Discovery Hut at McMurdo, Scott and Shackleton were enemies for life. They could not stand each other, Scott used his command to invalid Shackleton out of Antarctica, sending him home on the supply ship that visited after their first year there, while the rest of them stayed on for another year and made more sledge journeys, testing routes to the polar cap and looking around.

And so Ernest Shackleton became determined to come back.

Val and Wade were given a ride in a pickup truck down the two hundred yards from Hotel California to the helo pad, even though they were carrying only backpacks for their walk up the Barwick Valley to the S-375 camp. Val watched Wade as they stood around waiting for the loadmaster to wave them over; he was observing the scene with great interest, and listened impassively to the loadie’s unconvinced and unconvincing intro to the helo’s safety features, basically a cranial that was no more protection than a bike helmet, and was mainly there to get an intercom on one’s head. But no smirks or rolled eyes or blanched dismay from Wade; no doubt he had done a lot of helo travel before in his line of work. He stepped up into the pax seats and took the throne, the seat just behind and slightly above the two pilot seats. Val sat behind him, and after that she only had a view of the back of his head, his cranial actually; but as they took off she could see him looking down at McMurdo, then out at Erebus, then down at the sea ice as they crossed over the frozen surface of McMurdo Sound. He got on twice to ask questions, first about the trash ice, which Val explained was caused by windblown grit from Black Island landing on the ice and melting in, causing a ghastly dark gray pitted badlands, impassable on vehicle or foot; then another about the giant greenish tabular bergs sticking out of the sea ice, which Val explained were pieces of the Ross Ice Shelf that had broken off the previous summer, and were on their way out to sea. The sea ice was studded with these big chunks, even though the ice shelf between Hut Point and White Island was not breaking away at anything like the same speed it was along its broad exposed front east of Ross Island. Wade nodded to indicate that he had heard Val’s explanations over the roar of the engine, and that was it. No excited commentary, no further questions.

They flew over the piedmont glacier lining the coast, and then between the rocky mountain points of Mt. Newell and Mt. Doorly, the last two peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges, respectively. Then up the broad bare-walled valley between these ranges; this was Wright Valley, one of the biggest and most famous of the Dry Valleys. The copilot said, “They’ll be calling them the Wet Valleys soon, see how much snow there is on the ground these days? Later in the summer that’ll all melt and run down the Onyx River, that white line there, into Lake Vanda.” Vanda was several feet higher than it had been in years past, its blue cracked surface ringed with a broad band of whiter ice. The copilot fell into his tour guide mode for the still-silent Wade, naming the peaks they passed and the hanging glaciers spilling out of the gaps between the peaks of the Asgaard Range to their left. Wade’s head whipped from left to right to take it all in. Then the pilot cut in on the commentary to tell Val they were picking up a couple of scientists at Don Juan Pond before taking them on to their drop point. The helicopter veered to the left of the flat-topped island ridge called The Dais, up a side valley to land beside Don Juan Pond, which was small, shallow, brown, and liquid. The pond was liquid because its water was too salty to freeze, the copilot told Wade. The scientists to be picked up were nowhere in sight, so they killed the engine and got out and wandered around the narrow brown valley. The ground around the pond was crusted white with salt crystals. Wade walked right out into the middle of the pond, as it was nowhere more than a few inches deep. Val followed him out, partly to make sure he did not step in a pothole.

“Now why doesn’t it freeze, again?” He was looking at everything very curiously, as if in an art gallery to view an exhibit by an artist he didn’t quite trust.

“It’s too salty.”

“Really?” He reached down and scooped up a handful—the water was perfectly clear and transparent in his hand, as thin as ordinary water—then before Val could say anything he put the handful to his mouth and drank it.

Only to spit it out in an explosive spray. “Acck!” he choked, and began turning red-faced as he hacked away, spitting over and over.

Val took her water bottle from her belt and opened it and handed it to him. “Drink?”

He nodded, still hacking away. He pointed down at the pond: “Poison?” he gasped.

“No. Just salty.”

“Wow.” He drank and spat, drank and spat. “Really salty. Like battery acid.”

“I know. I touched a finger of it to my tongue once.”

He nodded, spat out again. “That would be the way. I had no idea.”

The two scientists appeared on the rock-covered glacier up the valley from the pond, and soon they had hiked down to the helicopter. They said hello and apologized for keeping the helo waiting.

“That’s all right,” Val said, “it gave Wade here a chance to drink the water.”

Wade gave Val a quick look, and she grinned at him. The scientists regarded him with raised eyebrows. “Wow,” one said: “What did it taste like?”

“It was salty,” Wade confirmed. His mouth was still puckered into a little knot.

“I’ll say,” the other remarked as they climbed up into the silent helo. “There’s 126 grams of salt per liter in that water. As compared to 3.7 for sea water.”

“It tasted saltier than that,” Wade said.

“It makes for a kind of minimum temperature thermometer. The pond won’t freeze until it reaches fifty-four below zero, and then if it does the ice itself is fresh water and won’t melt until it gets above zero. So we can come out here in the spring and tell whether it got below minus fifty-four the previous winter. Hardly ever does, these days.”

Then they were strapped in and the loadie had unsheathed the blades, and they were off in the helo’s whacking roar again, going up the Don Juan Pond’s valley rather than back down. The copilot explained that they wanted to fly over the Labyrinth. Wade asked what that was, and one of the scientists got on to explain that the maze of intersecting canyons they were now over was probably carved by streams on the underside of a big glacier. “See, the glacier itself is still there, only not as big now.”

And then they were over Wright Upper Glacier, a broad smooth field of bluish ice covering the entire head of the valley, which was a kind of immense box canyon, walled by a huge shattered semicircle of cliffs. All the walls and promontories of this curved escarpment were layered light and dark, like a cake of alternating vanilla and chocolate layers. The same scientist explained that these were bands of light sandstone and dark dolerite, the dolerite harder and so nearly vertical in the cliffs, the sandstone softer and so sloping down at an angle. Above the cliffs loomed the ice of the great Antarctic polar plateau itself, extending off to the distant southern horizon; and in one place it spilled over the cliffs, like a Niagara Falls frozen in a second to perfect stillness. This was Airdevronsix Icefalls, the copilot said, named after the Navy helo division that had discovered it. The pilot took the helo right up next to the icefall, so that they were looking down just a couple hundred feet at holes in the ice where the banded rock was visible; then they shot up into the clear air over the cliffs, where the vast ice expanse of the plateau ran off to the southerly horizon.

It was an amazing sight, one that Val had never gotten used to, no matter how many times she saw it; and it was a staple of all the Dry Valley treks, of course, so that she had seen it a lot. If it had been back in the world it would have been as famous as Monument Valley or Yosemite or the Matterhorn—a cliché, seen countless times in movies and advertisements. But as it was down here it was still, even with the big surge in adventure tourism, the least-known of the great wonders of the natural world. And all the more thrilling for that, as far as Val was concerned. One of the glories of Ice Planet.

And indeed Wade was leaning down over the pilots’ shoulders to see more out the front, and looking left and right like a puppet head on a spring. But he did not get on the intercom to tell everyone how amazed he was, like the client who had gotten on to shout “WOW” perhaps fifty times during a similar flight; nor did he become obsessed with photography like so many other clients did, fussing with rolls and exposures until they did not seem to be seeing anything outside at all. On the contrary, Wade seemed thoroughly absorbed. Which was only appropriate; but Val had judged him on their first meeting to be a typical Washington politician, not really interested in the ice itself. She liked it that he seemed impressed. And had tried to drink from Don Juan Pond!

The pilots could have flown up and over the peaks of the Olympus Range directly to their destination, but as the destination was a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a no-fly zone, the whole complex of Balham Valley, McKelvey Valley, the Insel Ridge (another Daislike mid valley ridge), and Barwick Valley was off-limits to normal scientific investigation, all fly-overs, and all adventure treks. This was to try to keep a part of the Dry Valleys as uncontaminated as possible, for baseline comparisons with the other more intensively studied and therefore polluted valleys. The team they were visiting had had to show compelling need to get permission to set a small tent camp in the Barwick Valley for a couple of weeks, and they had been required to walk in carrying a minimum of gear.

So the helo flew back down Wright Valley, over the turquoise and lapis sheet of Lake Vanda, up the white line of the Onyx River, and up more steeply into the windy defile of Bull Pass, a hanging valley connecting Wright to McKelvey Valley. Then they were through the pass and out over the broad barren floor of Victoria Valley, and landing on the sandy dunes upvalley from Lake Vida. This was another cracked frozen lake, looking like something tucked at about twenty-five thousand feet in mountains anywhere else; in fact they were just over a thousand feet above sea level. But high latitude was the equivalent of high altitude in its effect on landscape, and so Val and Wade climbed out of the helo and moved out from under the loudly spinning main rotor blades, and straightened to stand upright on what seemed the Tibetan plateau, if not the moon itself.

Then the bright red helo was off, loud and fast, downvalley and away, disappearing quickly into Bull Pass, the noise of it receding from their pounding ears much more slowly, until finally they were left alone in the windy but still silence of a vast rockscape, a valley that seemed cut off from—well, from everything. Wade stared around, looking stunned.

“Pretty, isn’t it,” Val remarked out of habit, as if addressing a client.

“I don’t think that’s quite the word I’d choose.”

The gear they were carrying was minimal, and Wade’s backpack in particular was not very heavy; Val had kept it to perhaps fifteen kilos. Still he grunted as he hefted it onto his back, and remarked on the load.

“When I started working down here,” Val said, “your personal kit weighed around a hundred pounds, and was too bulky to be carried anywhere. That’s why that pickup truck took us down to the helo pad this morning; they’re still not used to bag drag being something you can carry yourself.”

“Hmm,” Wade said, as if not convinced they had reached that point even yet.

Val shrugged into her pack (she was carrying about twenty-five kilos), and took off. After walking up Victoria Valley for several minutes she pointed past the prow of Mount Insel, up Barwick Valley. “They’re up there, see, under that glacier at the head of the valley.”

Wade glanced up and nodded. “There by dinner.”

Val laughed, and Wade stopped and tipped down his sunglasses to have another look. “Longer?”

“Longer. That’s about twenty-five kilometers.”

“Oh wow. I would have guessed about five.”

“That happens a lot down here. There aren’t any trees or buildings to give you a sense of scale, and the mountains are big. And the air is clearer than you’re used to.”

“That’s for sure.”

They walked side by side, as no one way over the sand and rubble underfoot was easier than another. “People make big mistakes in perspective down here,” Val said. “Thinking a snowmobile is a mountain, or a pack of cigarettes a building. Or vice versa.”

“Everything looks big to me.”

“But you thought we were just a short walk from their camp.”

“True.”

The afternoon passed as they walked up and down over low waves of rock. Although in the distance their way looked nearly level, the immediate vicinity was always up and down—twenty feet up a ridge, thirty feet down a saddle crossing an even deeper bowl—forty feet up to get out of the bowl, then twenty down, then a steep staircase—and so on. That local unevenness, and the rough rubble covering the valley floor everywhere, made it hard walking. But Wade slipped through it like a dancer, Val noted, with small neat graceful steps; no complaints; and he kept up a good pace. Val liked this kind of walking very much, but usually she toured these valleys leading trekking groups of up to twenty people, with the tail of the group always stumble-blistering along and requiring delicate care. So she enjoyed this empty afternoon a good deal; and after a few hours, declared it time to stop and cook a meal.

She found them a nook between two big boulders, in the sunlight and out of the wind, and sat down and broke out the food bag and the stove. Wade sat watching her as she cooked up some soup. She gestured at his pack; “There’s hot chocolate in your thermos.”

He helped himself, but didn’t eat much soup or trail mix. Appetite a bit suppressed, as often happened to people when they started trekking out here. He would be ravenous by the time they reached the Hourglass Lakes, she judged. Although he was not a big man. But walking in the cold burned a lot of calories.

“So this is forbidden ground,” he noted as she cleaned up the site and packed her bag.

“Yes. It’s kind of nice to be able to see it.”

“They must be doing important work to be allowed to come in here.”

“Yes. Actually I’ve heard they’re controversial.”

“Letting them in here?”

“That, and also their work as a whole. If they’re right, then the ice caps might be fairly sensitive to climate changes like the one we’re in. Something like that. You’ll have to ask them about it.”

They hiked on into the evening. Some small stumbles, and a slowing pace, made it clear that Wade was tiring. But he made no complaint, nor any requests for rests. Val was impressed; for a slender city boy he was pretty tough. She had had many and many a client who had come out here wild for the mountains and not done anywhere near as well.

Then they topped a short wall of crushed rock, formed in a polygonal frost heave, and the white splay of the glacier filling the upper end of the valley stood there unexpectedly over the rusty rock. “Almost there,” Wade said.

“Actually it’ll be a couple more hours,” Val said. “Do you want to set camp for the night?”

“No. I think I can make it there.”

“Okay. How about another dinner, though.”

“Fine. Sounds good.”

And this time he wolfed down a whole pot of stew. A very quick adjustment, Val thought as she repacked the gear.

The S-375 camp consisted of four colorful small dome tents surrounding two Scott tents, which were tall four-sided pyramids of heavy canvas, looking archaic in the early twilight; one was lit from within like a yellow lantern, and wisps of steam escaped the tubular vent at its top. As they approached this one Val called out, “Hello in there!”

They were expected, so the shouts from inside were not surprised: “Come in!” “Come in!” “But take your boots off first, it’ll be crowded in here!”

It was. Even with their boots off they were bulky in their parkas, but the men inside were shifting around while they pulled them off, and Wade wedged into a corner while Val dropped into the gap between Misha, the group’s mountaineer, and the Coleman stove. Both burners were alight under big pots of water, and the heat felt good against her side. Wade would be crushed in his corner, bent forward like a tailor, but that would be his first lesson in the ergonomics of a Scott tent. One of the main reasons Scott’s group had perished, in Val’s opinion, was that their Scott tent was designed for four people and a stove, and not five. This one was bigger, but six was still more than it could accommodate comfortably, and it was crowded, stuffy, even hot; still, after the frigid barren expanse of the darkening valley, a very welcome refuge.

“Leave the door open for a bit,” the man on the other side of the stove said. He was bearded, and perhaps twenty years the senior of the other men in the tent; no doubt the P.I. that Wade had come to see: Dr. Geoffrey Michelson, a British veteran of over forty years of Antarctic geology, who had taught in the States for almost that long. Introductions were made: Michelson’s team consisted of a younger colleague from UCLA, Harry Stanton; a Kiwi glaciologist named Graham Forbes; and Misha Kaminski, with whom Val had worked on some memorable SARs. It was quite a melange of accents, and Val noticed for the first time the touch of Virginia in Wade’s speech as he said Hi to the others. He and Val were offered mugs of Drambuie, the traditional liquor of the Antarctic Kiwis, and they both accepted gratefully. Val’s feet were throbbing, and she imagined Wade’s were worse, though he had never complained about anything. And the day’s hike had totaled almost thirty kilometers.

“Where are you off to next?” Misha asked Val.

“Footsteps of Amundsen,” she said.

“Dogtracks of Amundsen, you should say!”

“True. But we’ll pull a sledge, as usual.”

“That’s so crazy. These people come down here and pull a sled across the ice cap for a month—”

“Six weeks.”

“—when they could be climbing in the Asgaards, or wherever, somewhere really spectacular. And all because someone did it a century ago.”

“History buffs,” Michelson suggested.

“Fools! People who are in love with ideas rather than real places.” Misha was an Australian who had grown up in Switzerland with Polish parents, and his accent was an odd mix of Aussie and Central Europe.

“It’s a fun trip,” Val said. But they only laughed.

“What about you?” Michelson asked Wade. “What brings you to our special Site of Special Scientific Interest?”

“Well,” Wade said. “I’m down to look into this situation with the African oil exploration that’s going on, among other things. I work for Senator Phil Chase from California, and he’s gotten interested. So, I’m curious to know just how—how realistic these people’s expectations of hitting oil are.”

“Not my field,” Michelson said.

“No,” Wade conceded.

Val saw that he was thinking hard how to gain the older man’s confidence.

“But I was told by Sylvia that you know more about the Transantarctics than, than most people, and that you might be able to tell me something about the geological situation.”

“Yes, I know about the Transantarctics, but there’s no oil there. That’s not where they’re drilling. They’re out on the polar plateau, from what I understand.”

“Yes, but near the mountains?”

“Two hundred kilometers away.”

“Yes … but I thought you might be able to, to extrapolate out—to tell me what you think about the likelihood of oil. Your contention is that East Antarctica had no ice sheet in the past, isn’t that right?”

“Well, but we are studying the Pliocene, about three million years ago. The oil, if there is any, would have been formed a couple hundred million years before that.”

“Ah. So it was warmer down here then?”

“Indeed it was, although at that time Antarctica was not down here, but up nearer the equator. Part of Gondwana.”

“Ah!”

Wade was being toyed with, and he knew it, Val judged. But he was keeping his cool, going along with it, playing the game. A quick learning curve must have been a necessary job skill, after all. “So oil deposits might have been established then, when it was up near the equator?”

“Possibly. Yes, almost certainly. One sees coal deposits right on the surface in parts of the Prince Charles Mountains—”

“Giant coal deposits,” Misha interjected.

“And so oil is quite likely. The Wilkes Basin, under the ice cap on the other side of the Transantarctics, is a possibility, certainly.”

“Out where this southern group is looking?”

“Well, up until now there has been no one looking out there, because it is forbidden by the Antarctic Treaty. Most of the oil assessment for the continent has been done by matching up the Antarctic craton with the continents it abutted when it was part of Gondwana, and going by analogy to those places. But there have been seismic tests done to try to determine other things, and no doubt some tests might have given people clues about where to look harder.”

“Why have they started now, do you think?”

Under his moustache a little smile tugged up the corners of Michelson’s mouth. “That’s for you to explain to us, right?”

“They want oil,” Misha said with a grin, and the others laughed.

Wade nodded, smiling easily. “So it may be there.”

“It may very well be. I don’t think they know yet.”

“But it’s not, you know—unlikely.”

“No no. Given the coal deposits, and the continent’s position in the Triassic, it’s more likely than not to be somewhere down here.”

“What about recovering it from under the ice cap?”

“It should be like ocean drilling, eh?”

“Except the ice cap is moving,” Graham said. He was washing dishes in a big bowl of steaming water, and listening to the conversation; but he was not the kind to add much to it, except when a point being overlooked forced him to say something.

“True. Their drilling holes would have to become slots over time, I suppose. Or they might be drilling in stable areas of the ice sheet.”

“In the lee of nunataks,” Graham suggested.

“What about transporting the oil out?” Wade asked.

They all looked at each other. “Pipeline, eh?” Michelson said.

“So there would be the danger of a spill.”

“Yes. As in Alaska. Which didn’t stop people there, as I recall.”

“No. But a spill on the ice plateau …”

“Messy. But perhaps they could use these bacteria that have been developed for cleaning spills on water. They eat the oil, die and are blown away. Or so the drilling cartel will claim, I’m sure.”

Michelson leaned over and picked up the Drambuie bottle, offered it to them. “More Drambers? You’ve had a long walk. How about a midnight snack? Chocolate bars?” He indicated a box which held perhaps a gross of wrapped chocolate bars. “Camp crackers?”

“Just the Drambers, thanks,” Val said. Wade nodded his agreement; then tried one of the camp crackers.

“What about shipping the oil out?” Wade asked.

“Tankers.”

“Dangerous?”

“They ship a big load of oil down to McMurdo every summer.”

“But if there was an accident, like the Exxon Valdez …”

“Very messy. The Bahia dumped a big load of oil off the peninsula some decades back, and it was years and years before the coast cleaned itself. It did, however, eventually. The environment is pretty good with oil, if you take the long view.”

“And add bacteria,” Misha said.

“Yes, those bacteria.”

Wade said, “We’ve heard rumors that the next generation of tankers might be submarines. Remotely operated submarines, with no crew on board.”

“Probably safer than staying on the surface, at least in this ocean.”

“Probably safer than sailing with sailors,” Misha noted.

Wade nodded, watching them all closely. Val felt herself getting drowsy in the warmth of the tent, but Wade showed no signs of it. “What about your work here?” he asked.

The geologists looked at each other.

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” Michelson suggested. “It’s after midnight, and everyone is tired. Come out with us tomorrow to one of our field sites, and we’ll show you what we’re up to out here in this bitter wilderness.” And he sipped his Drambuie with a little smile.

Outside the Scott tent the midnight sun was blinding, and the cold like a hard pinch all over. Wade’s eyes spilled tears, and the details of getting on his sunglasses while wearing mittens occupied him through the first gasps of adjustment to the cold. He followed Val to their packs, his stiff legs aching with every move, and watched as she pulled a tent and tent poles from her backpack. “Help me get this up,” she said. So he crouched and held down a corner of the tent while she clipped a maze of poles to its exterior. “Nice tent,” he offered, beginning to shiver. It felt like the tears were freezing to his cheeks.

“Not bad. Light, anyway. One of the monster winds off the plateau will tear it to pieces, though.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. I’ve been in them when they come apart. Very loud. Here, tie the ties around rocks. Big rocks, no, like this one.”

“What did you do?”

“When? Oh. Well, once when it happened we had a helo. Those are really cold though, the metal sucks the heat right out of you. Then the other times there have been Scott tents to retreat into.”

“Those are stronger?”

“Oh yeah. Bombproof, as long as you set them right. Here, throw the sleeping bags in to me.”

Wade pulled bulky but light sleeping bags out of their stuff sacks and tossed them in to her, realizing for the first time that they would be sharing a tent.

“Now the pads.”

“The what?”

“The sleeping pads. In the long red sacks.”

“Ah.” These too were very light. “All this gear is so light.”

“Yes. The new aerogels are fantastic. Here, blow it up.”

“It’s an air mattress?”

“Not exactly, it’s like a Thermarest. An air and foam combination, but in these the foam is incredibly light.”

“Why not just an air mattress, wouldn’t that be even lighter?”

“Yeah, but air mattresses are as cold as helicopters. They’re always just as cold as if you were sleeping on the ground, or even colder—the ground you could maybe warm up a little with your body, but the air in an air mattress keeps moving around and sucking the warmth away from you. The coldest I’ve ever been was on an air mattress my dad bought for us when I was a girl. I ended up sleeping on my pillow. Okay, all ready in here, come on in.”

“Ah, I guess I’ll use my pee bottle one last time first.”

“Good idea. I’ll do the same in here.”

Wade thought about that for a bit as he walked a few feet away and tried to pee; those images and the cold impeded him a bit. To distract himself he looked at the brilliant white glacier pouring down from the head of the valley. It was the middle of the night, and yet the mass of ice was glowing in the sunlight like an intrusion from some brighter dimension.

When he was done he regarded dubiously the yellow fluid in the plastic bottle. Apparently he was dehydrated. Then he got on his knees at the tent entrance and crawled inside. Val was already in her bag, apparently fully clothed except for her parka, which rested on her boots and served her as a pillow. It was brilliantly lit inside the tent, everything tinted the yellow of the nylon: Val’s blue eyes looked green, and her blond hair was as luminous as the glacier outside. Wade hauled off his bunny boots, feeling the white rubber flex in his hands. They had been surprisingly comfortable on the hike in, and quite warm. It was too cold for his socks to be smelly; nothing smelled at all down here, except the steaming food in the Scott tent. He lay down in his bag and closed his eyes. It was like trying to sleep with your face six inches from the headlights of a car. “How do you sleep when it’s this bright?”

“You get used to it.”

“Nobody uses those black sleep goggles that people wear on planes?”

“I’ve never seen anyone do it. Not a bad idea, though. Especially if you’re on ice or snow. Then it’s a lot brighter than this.”

Her voice was drowsy. The idea of sharing a tent with a strange man was obviously not of concern to her. Done it a thousand times. Already asleep, it appeared.

And soon after that, so was he.

He woke and it was still light. He had no idea what time it was. He checked his watch: 7:04 A.M. Val was not in her bag; it lay pulled down toward the door, a suggestively Val-shaped hole still in it.

He took his boots from under his head and put them on; then, as he was quickly chilling, his parka. He rolled forward with a stiff groan, and crawled out into the brilliant frigid morning. The sun was standing over a different ridge, no doubt the east ridge; he had given up trying to orient himself in McMurdo, but out here it might be possible, if you stayed put long enough. He needed to use his pee bottle again, and there was a rock outhouse up the hill, away from the white surface of the lake. Yellow hair shone over its top rocks. He looked away, down at the lake. It was cold, but in his parka he felt comfortable. Hungry, however. Very hungry.

He joined the group, which had already reconvened in the Scott tent, and they ate oatmeal and crackers and chocolate bars hastily, as if oppressed by the very same crowded tent that twelve hours earlier had been such a comfy refuge. Then it was outside again, where they occupied themselves filling backpacks, and taking turns up at the rock outhouse.

“Can I carry anything?” Wade asked Professor Michelson.

“No, thank you. But bring your pack, and you can help carry samples on the way back.”

Val and Misha took off ahead of the scientists, who followed them up the valley. Distant red dots, bobbing in the rock rubble under the white mass of the glacier.

“Why are the Dry Valleys dry?” Wade asked Michelson as they hiked along.

“It’s not entirely understood. But people usually agree that the mountains at the heads of these valleys are so high that they choke off the ice sliding down from the polar cap. In places some ice spills over, but the winds ablate the ice faster than it pours through the passes, and so you have the hanging glaciers you see—” gesturing ahead “—steep-sided because of the ablation, and fairly static in position. At least they have been since their discovery. Now, however …”

“The global warming?”

“Well, yes. There’s no doubt the climate has warmed in the last century, because of carbon dioxide that we’ve put in the atmosphere.”

Wade nodded sharply, intending to say that this was a fact known even to Washington bureaucrats.

“Yes yes,” Michelson acknowledged, “you know about that. But the effects of this warming on Antarctica aren’t entirely clear. At first, you see, the warming increases precipitation down here, in the form of more snow, it not being so warm as to rain. And so the ice caps and the glaciers and the sea ice actually tend to grow. At least that is one force involved. So the Dry Valleys could be iced over again, as they have been before, if that were the only thing going on. In fact this snow you see on the ground here—this would have been very unusual at this time of year, thirty years ago. Now the valleys are snowy more often than they’re bare, and they’re never less than piebald, if you see what I mean. Which is no help at all to people trying to study them.”

“What about the big ice shelves breaking off?”

“Well, those turned out to be very sensitive to slight temperature increases. They’ve broken off because of their own dynamic with the ocean temperatures and currents, or so we think. Then as they detach and float off north, the ice coming down from the polar cap has nothing to slow it down, and so there are the immense ice tongues that we’re seeing, and very fast ice streams and glaciers, and even a slight sinking of the polar cap itself, if the Ohio State people’s results are correct. But with more snow up there as well, it’s hard to know what the upshot will be.”

Wade nodded again, more agreeably. Establishing the ground of understanding with experts who were explaining things to him was his responsibility; nod too often, and the expert was likely to give up entirely; but in the absence of any sign of response, some of them would begin to explain everything. Michelson appeared to have a tendency in the latter direction, so Wade said, “But if global warming takes things up to the point where it’s above freezing down here for periods every summer?”

“Well, then things start melting.”

“Uh huh …”

“And with the ice shelves already substantially gone, and the ice streams, which are like ice rivers within the West Antarctic ice sheet, speeding up—then the ice sheets themselves will begin to detach. The western Antarctic ice sheet is grounded on land that is well below sea level, so it comes off very quickly. The eastern sheet is much larger, and more of it is grounded above sea level, so it will hold longer, but still, the warmer it gets the faster it will go, more precipitation or not. And if the eastern sheet goes, then sea level will be some sixty to seventy meters higher than it is now.”

“You’d think that would be enough of a threat to get everyone’s attention.”

“Yes, but it’s so inconvenient. If we have to take global warming seriously, then everything changes. CO₂ levels have to drop, industrial society can’t keep burning fossil fuels—we would have to live differently. It’s so much easier to find some scientist somewhere who would be ever so happy to appear before a Congressional committee and declare that there is no such thing as global warming, or if there is that it isn’t really a problem, or that burning fossil fuels has nothing to do with it. Then the problem can be declared nonexistent by law and everyone can go back to business as usual.”

“You mean Professor Warren?”

“Yes,” Michelson said, nodding in approval at Wade’s recognition.

In fact Professor Warren’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had caused quite a stir, as Wade well knew, having been put in charge of substantiating Phil Chase’s rebuttal to the professor. It was slightly possible Michelson was aware of Chase’s opposition to the renegade professor, rather than knowing only that the committee as a whole had endorsed Warren’s views enthusiastically, and used them to justify the blockage of the CO₂ joint implementation treaty with China. But it was hard to tell; between beard, sunglasses, and black leather nose protector attached to the sunglasses, Michelson’s was a hard face to read. A face from a Breughel painting, really. Best to make no assumptions.

“Is this where we’re going?” Wade asked, pointing up a side valley where Graham Forbes was just in view.

“Yes. Follow Graham. Up into the Apocalypse Peaks,” he announced with some satisfaction.

Hiking uphill on the brown pebbly snow-crusted rubble was hard work, and Wade started to heat up. He unzipped his parka and let the cold air cool him a bit. Unfortunately no matter how hot his torso became, his ears and nose continued to freeze.

As they climbed higher they could see farther up the hanging valley. A glacier ran down its middle, reaching almost to the frozen lakes on the floor of Barwick Valley. Higher still and they could see the source of the glacier, a big tongue of ice pouring through the gap between two black rock ridges. Above and beyond that tongue the whole world was white. The edge of the polar cap, as Michelson confirmed; enough ice to cover the United States and Mexico. “These Dry Valleys are very unusual, you must remember that. It will be a shame if they get overrun by the ice.” Michelson ascended at a steady relaxed pace, and appeared neither too hot nor too cold. “That’s Shapeless Mountain. Beyond it is Mistake Peak. Over there, Mount Bastion and the Gibson Spur. These are all peaks of the Willett Range, and the ice cap is running up against their southern flanks, and through the passes between them, as here.”

“You like the names.”

“Yes,” surprised, “I do.”

He led Wade under the side of the glacier, right up to its faceted cliff of a sidewall, which gleamed pale blue in the bright sun. Spills of broken ice splayed out from the wall here and there, as if ice machines had churned out a vast oversupply of ice cubes. “See how rounded all the chunks are,” Michelson pointed out. “They’re subliming away in the arid winds, and they’ll be gone before there’s another calving in the same spot. That’s why there’s no build-up of ice, and the glacier’s sides are sheer like this. They break off as a result of slow pressure from behind, and then the wind cleans up the mess at the bottom.”

Eventually they climbed onto a section of rubble bordering the glacier that ramped up until it was level with the broad surface of the glacier, then just above it, so that they could see beyond the glacier, and a long way up the ice plain of the polar cap, rising gently to the south. It was not perfectly smooth, but had broad undulations that formed very low hills and valleys, Wade saw; subtle contours of up and down, all very smooth except in certain zones, where it was completely shattered. A kind of white frozen ocean, pouring through a break in the shore and down to a lower world. Also curving down in places to stand right over the shore, like waves that would never break. Puffing, sweat stinging one eye, Wade was nevertheless fascinated by the sight, glaring even through his polarized sunglasses; it was surreal, a kind of Dalí landscape, with all its features made impossible and subtly ominous, as the ocean bulked higher than the land, and one surge of the immense white wave would sweep them all away.

But of course it stayed put. Michelson had hiked ahead, and joined Graham Forbes between the glacier and a broken cliff of reddish stone facing it. There at the foot of the red stone was a band of lighter sandstone, freckled with pebbles embedded in it. Graham Forbes was already kneeling before this sandstone, tapping away with a geologist’s hammer.

“Now this is a very nice example of the Sirius group,” Michelson said as Wade approached them. “Almost a textbook example of it, in that it would make a good photo in a textbook. See how it’s laminated against the dolerite? Like the dirty ring of a bathtub. It’s a sedimentary rock, called tillite or diamictite, depending. Glacial till, from an ancient glacier.”

“Not from this one?” Wade said, gesturing at the ice mass looming behind them.

“No, from a predecessor. It’s been here a while.”

“How long?”

A snort from Forbes.

Michelson’s moustache lifted at the corners. “That’s the question, isn’t it. We maintain that some Sirius group sandstones date from around three million years ago.”

“Other people don’t agree?”

“That’s right. There are those who say that the eastern ice cap has been very stable, and has been here for fourteen million years at least. So—” He shrugged. “We look at Sirius sandstone wherever we can find it, and see what we can see.”

“How have you established the three-million-year date?”

“There are microfossils buried in the rock, the fossil remnants of marine diatoms and foraminifera. These creatures have evolved over time, so that different kinds have lived in different eras, and the diatom record on the ocean floor is very well stratified and preserved. So when you find certain kinds of diatom fossils, you can match them with the record and say with fair confidence that the rock they are in is of a certain age.”

“And this is a real method—I mean, an accepted method?”

The little smile. “Oh yes, very real. It’s called biostratification, and it’s very well established.”

“I see.”

“We’ve also found evidence of a fuller biological community than just marine diatoms—members of a beech tree forest biome. Which suggests it was so warm that the ice cap would have been substantially gone, with western Antarctica an archipelago, and even eastern Antarctica covered in parts by shallow seas.”

“You carbon-14 dated the beech trees?”

“No no, carbon-14 dating only works for a short distance back in time. These are much older. And beech trees have remained stable evolutionarily for many millions of years, so we can’t date them by their type. There are some beetle fragments among the beech remains, however, and some other plants, lichens and mosses, and some of these can be dated using various methods, uranium-lead, argon-argon, amino acid … every little bit of biological material in Sirius tends to add its part to the puzzle.”

“Look,” Forbes said to Michelson, pointing with the geologist’s hammer to the rock of the slope at about his knee level. “A dropstone of diamictite, within the massive diamicton here.”

Wade saw that a round boulder of sandstone, the same color as the rest but with more pebbles in it, was embedded in the rest of the sandstone.

“Interesting!” Michelson said, going to one knee to have a closer look. “So this boulder must be very much older than the matrix.”

“Older, anyway,” Forbes allowed.

They continued to discuss the band of sandstone, pointing out features invisible to Wade. “Do you think this could be our D-7 disconformity again, cropping up here?”

“It looks like that could be some crude stratification below it, see that.”

“And above, massive clast-rich diamictite, with dolerite boulders, and more water-lain gravels.”

Back and forth they went, in a flurry of terms, as they wandered up and down the slope: deformed laminites, clast-poor muddy diamictite, rudimentary paleosols, lonestones, metasediments; “And then at the bottom the Dominion erosion surface again, perhaps. See how scoured this dolerite is, with north-south striations.”

“Very nice,” Michelson said.

They were seeing much more in this rock than Wade had ever realized could be there, much as he might hear more than them if confronted with an unfamiliar piece by Poulenc. They were reading the landscape like a text, even like a work of art in some senses.

“See here!” Michelson exclaimed to Forbes, pointing at a patch of whitish rock at one end of the sandstone band, laminated very finely. “Silt layers, calcite crystals perhaps, and deposited here certainly—these couldn’t have been moved here, they’re much too delicate, see? You can break the layers with a finger.” He demonstrated. “Beautiful.”

“I’ll take some samples,” Forbes said, getting a flat rectangular white canvas bag out of his daypack.

“Is this the first time you’ve found this kind of thing?” Wade asked, feeling pleased: a scientific discovery!

“The first time here, anyway.”

“And what does this indicate?”

“Well, these silt or clay layers suggest the bottom of a lake, and as you can see, boulders have dropped onto the layers while they were still wet and could be bowed down under the weight, see that? One explanation of that could be that this was a lake in a glacier’s margin, and icebergs calving would melt, and drop the boulders in them onto the silt on the bottom of the lake. We certainly see results just like these around living glaciers. So we may be looking at the bottom or shore of a lake.”

Michelson and Forbes got on their knees and began dismantling some of the precious layered deposit, putting chunks of it into sample bags, discussing more invisible features in their highly technical language. “Here,” Michelson said to Wade. “If you care to help, you can count the number of vertical layers this deposit has.”

Wade got on his knees and went at it, getting colder by the minute. The other two continued inspecting the sandstone inch by inch, apparently oblivious to the biting chill air, even though they were wearing less than Wade was.

Michelson looked back at Wade. “Try counting how many fit against your fingernail, then measuring how many fingernails high the stack is, and multiply,” he suggested.

Wade, shocked at the idea of that sort of approximation entering the pure realm of science, continued to count the layers one by one.

Eventually they all stood up. Wade was cold, and very stiff from the previous day’s hike, and his hands were numb inside their mittens. “Six hundred and six,” he reported. “So there was liquid water down here for six hundred years!”

“Or six hundred tidal cycles,” Forbes said. “Which would be about one year.”

Wade saw the little smile reappear under Michelson’s moustache. “Liquid water, in any case,” Michelson said. “And very possibly this disconformity in the succession represents the transition from a marine environment to a subaerial one. What we called D-7 over on the Cloudmaker.” At the end of his black noseguard an icicle curved down almost to his chin, turning his face from a Breughel into something out of Bosch. “Let’s get back to camp,” he said, glancing up at the sun as if consulting a clock. “I’m famished, and we mustn’t be late for dinner. It’s Misha’s turn to cook, and he’s planning something special, I can tell.”

Indeed he was. After a long walk back weighted down by many sample bags filled with rocks, they crawled into the Scott tent and the sharp smell of cooking garlic butter raked down their nostrils directly to their empty stomachs. They oohed and aahed and knocked around against the sloping canvas of the tent until they were properly arranged, Wade back in his corner, which was very hard on his back—harder work physically than the whole rest of the day. But on this night Val was seated next to him, in fact jammed against him leg to leg, so that the entire evening he had the more-than-just-somatic warmth of that contact pouring into him. “Just in time,” Misha told them, handing out hors d’oeuvres: mugs of cold Scotch and melted brie on camp crackers, followed quickly by the main course: lobster tails sautéed in the garlic butter, with a side of corned-beef hash, followed eventually by a dessert of chocolate bars and Drambuie.

It was heavenly. Wade sawed away at the flesh of his lobster tails with a big Swiss Army knife, marveling that food could taste so good. “Four star,” someone muttered, and there were various hums and purrs and clattering as they all gulped down their meals. Near the end of the main course Michelson leaned on one elbow next to the radio and stretched out like a Roman emperor, the little V of a smile lifting his moustache. “Remember,” he said to Wade, “you must tell them what hell it was down here.”

“Ninth circle,” Wade agreed, wiping melted butter off his chin and licking it from his fingers.

“You liked the lobster?” Misha asked him.

“Kind of salty,” Wade said, which caused Val to choke.

“Don’t worry,” she said to the frowning Misha when she had recovered, “things are going to taste salty to Wade here for the rest of his life.” She explained what he had done at Don Juan Pond and the scientists laughed at him.

Then as they slowly downed dessert, and Misha heated water on the Coleman stove to wash dishes, the talk turned to the day’s work. Wade asked them to tell him more about the Sirius group controversy, and Val seconded the request, and the scientists were happy to oblige. All four of them contributed to the telling, even Misha, who to Wade’s surprise took the lead; he had had training in geology, that was clear. “The old view,” he explained, “was that the East Antarctic ice cap is an old and stable feature. The west sheet comes and goes, but the east sheet was established after Antarctica detached from South America, forty or fifty million years ago. Then it was here in place, and growing ever after, except for some warming periods, maybe, but those all long ago; most recently fourteen million years, at the latest.

“Then in the 1980s Webb and Harwood and their group found diatoms in the Sirius sandstone, and dated the diatoms at three million years old. When they published that data and their conclusion, that the eastern ice sheet hadn’t been there three million years ago, the battle was on.”

“Battle,” Wade said around a final salty mouthful of lobster.

“Well, you know. Scientific controversy.”

“Battle,” Harry Stanton confirmed.

“The two sides wouldn’t shoot each other on sight,” Michelson objected.

“No no,” Misha said, “it’s not like people after a divorce or something, you know, totally personal and vindictive. But still, they were both convinced that the other side weren’t being …”

“Scientific,” Michelson supplied with his little smile.

“They both thought the other side was being a blockhead,” Harry said. “Scientifically speaking of course.”

“Yes,” Misha said. “They didn’t like each other, after a while.”

“Suggesting lab contamination didn’t help,” Michelson said.

“Lab contamination?” Wade asked Misha.

“Well, when Harwood and Webb first said they had found these diatoms in the Sirius sandstone, some of the stabilists suggested the diatoms had come from other studies in the same lab. That went over very poorly in Ohio, as you can imagine.”

“Indeed. Stabilists?”

“The old ice group. This is the battle of the stabilists and the dynamicists.”

“So we won the name battle at least,” Michelson murmured.

“Then next, when it was established that the diatoms were actually inside Sirius rocks, the stabilists suggested there were so few diatoms that they had probably just blown in on the wind from the coast.”

“That infamous coast-to-plateau wind,” Harry noted.

“Which blows so hard that it shoves the diatoms right under the ice cap that the stabilists claim has always been there,” Michelson said.

“Yes, of course,” Misha said. “Blown over from Australia, perhaps. But they did find some diatoms in the ice at the South Pole, so the stabilists had some support for this idea.”

“And how did the Ohio group deal with that?”

Misha grinned. “With quantity. Sometimes you have quality results, and sometimes you need quantity results. They blew up tons and tons of the Transantarctic Mountains. They went to every Sirius site they could find with a great big dynamite license from NSF, and they blew up great masses of Sirius and took them back home and dumped them on the stabilists’ desks, metaphorically speaking of course. Diatoms by the ton.”

“Not tons,” Michelson objected. “Nothing in excess.”

“Tons. Whole nunataks you see on the map, now entirely gone and removed to labs at Ohio State.”

“No no—”

“Yes yes,” laughing, “I was the mountaineer for one of those expeditions, I set the charges myself! It was awesome. There should be an Ohio State Glacier named up there, we tore a brand new pass in the Transantarctics.”

Much laughter in the tent at Michelson’s expense, who clearly had been involved with this project. Wade saw that the younger scientists were fond of him. “And they found good evidence?” Wade said.

“Quite good,” Misha judged. “No doubt there were beech forests here when the Sirius group was laid down.”

“Parts of the Sirius group,” Michelson qualified. “It could easily be that the Sirius group is fossil till from several different glacial periods.”

“And so the stabilists were convinced, and they recanted,” Wade said, to more hoots of laughter.

“Of course not,” Misha said, grinning and refilling their mugs with Drambuie. “That isn’t how it works, of course. No one is ever convinced of anything.”

“So how do new ideas take hold?”

“The old scientists die,” Misha said, kicking Michelson as an example.

The corners of the moustache lifted. “That’s the point,” he said to Wade. “It’s careers, you see. Whole careers have been given over to the stabilist position. Grad students are getting Ph.D.s, assistant professors are getting tenure, all on the strength of papers advocating the stabilist position. They can’t just admit they were wrong all along. But biostratification is a very solid dating method. So the diatoms are a problem for them. Not to mention the beetles and moss and beech trees.”

“But what do they say about those?” Wade asked.

“They say the beech forests are older than fourteen million years, perhaps even Cretaceous. They say the diatoms blew in from elsewhere. They ignore the beetles entirely.”

“The beetles flew in too,” Misha suggested. “Flew down from Lemuria.”

Michelson chortled, then raised a finger. “Mostly they ignore us now,” he said. “They concentrate on finding areas that have been dry or covered with ice for more than three million years, which is certainly possible. Even at its warmest there would certainly have been glaciers down here. All we’re saying when we call it warm is that there was liquid water possible for a minimum of five months of the year, which is all that Nothofagus need to survive.”

“And you’re also saying that the eastern ice cap was gone,” Wade added.

“Yes, but there would certainly have been glaciers in the higher or more southerly places, probably big glaciers. But the diatoms are sea-bottom diatoms, so there must have been seas. The cap was melted in the Pliocene! It’s the only explanation that works for all the evidence we have. Glaciers in the mountains, and in the permanent shade, sure. And sea ice in the winters, of course. But water, nevertheless, over much of this area. Fjords filling the big glacier basins.”

“They have kind of a hard case to prove,” Val noted. “They have to try to show that it stayed iced over everywhere.”

“Very true,” Michelson said. “And a hard thing to do.”

“They could find climate data showing it stayed cold throughout,” Val said.

“Yes, and the oxygen isotope ratio in the offshore sediments even seems to support them in that idea, I must admit. But there is a lot of other climate data from the north that show that the early Pliocene was quite warm. It was a high CO₂ era, just like today.”

“Can’t you date the ice cap outright?” Wade asked. “Drill right to the bottom and count layers of ice, like I counted the layers today?”

“There are no layers below a certain level. They get crushed together. After that the ice has certain chemical signatures revealing a bit about the atmosphere that the snow fell out of, but it isn’t useful for precise dating.”

“Ah.” Wade thought about it. “So if the Pliocene climate was CO₂ high, like today, and Antarctica was an open sea with islands and some glaciers, then why isn’t it like that today?”

“Well,” Michelson said, “maybe it’s on its way. The ice shelves are going, the ice streams are speeding up, the grounding line under the west sheet is receding fast. The east sheet is higher and thicker, so it will take longer. But it could happen.”

“How quickly could it go?”

“Very quickly indeed!”

“Meaning …”

“A few hundred years, perhaps.”

Wade and Val laughed, but Michelson waved a finger at them: “No, that’s very fast. A blink of the eye!”

“I’ll tell Senator Chase that,” Wade said.

“No no,” Michelson protested, “what you have to tell him is that nobody knows. No one can say. The Laurentian ice sheets went in just such a short time, a few thousand years perhaps, and they didn’t have humans around pumping CO₂ into the air. There’s some powerful positive feedback loops involved. Things can change rapidly. These methane hydrate deposits on the sea bottom are likely to stay put at first, because that’s a matter of water pressure holding them in. But if the methane hydrates under the ice caps are substantial and that methane is released, then the greenhouse effect will be pushed even harder.”

They sipped Drambuie as Misha washed and Val dried the dishes. It was steamy warm in the tent. Wade’s neck was killing him. The Drambuie was salty.

“There must be people who don’t want to believe your scenario,” Wade said. “I mean people besides the stabilists.”

“Oh yes. The same people who found Professor Warren, eh? You can always find a potted professor to back your claim.”

“So the stabilists are like Professor Warren then.”

“Oh no. Not at all. Warren is saying there is no human effect on global warming, when the entire scientific community outside of conservative think tanks believes the evidence is obvious that there is. Warren is a charlatan, or delusional. The stabilists on the other hand are serious scientists. They are trying to prove a hypothesis, they are down here gathering data every season, they’re publishing results in peer-reviewed journals. They’re wrong, I think, but they are still scientists. Many scientists are wrong, perhaps most. They end up serving as devil’s advocates for the ones lucky enough to be right. Even we may be wrong.”

“No!” the others cried.

“No,” Michelson agreed. “Those are Pliocene diatoms, and they grew here.” He raised a mug to toast them. “Here in this cold frozen hell.”

The conversation shifted to the day’s work in the field, and a long discussion of what they would do the following day. Wade and Val would be hiking out in the afternoon, to make their rendezvous with a helicopter on the edge of the no-fly zone. The scientists would hike downvalley partway with them. Harry said, “We’ll either find some Sirius above Lake Vashka, or else just have a day of shits and giggles.”

“Shits and giggles?” Wade said.

“Recreation,” Misha explained.

“I hate that expression,” Val announced firmly. “As if if you’re not doing science you’re not doing anything. It’s offensive.”

“Sorry,” Harry said, looking surprised. “It’s something the grad students say.”

“I know.”

“The grad students who never get to leave their one research site,” Michelson added. “It’s no doubt compensatory.”

“No doubt.”

The Coleman stove roared airily in the awkward silence.

“I suppose there are people in Washington who think that all activities down here are nothing but shits and giggles,” Wade said. “Science as much as anything.”

Val gave him a grateful look, but the awkward silence persisted.

“So that eastern ice sheet,” Wade went on. “If it wasn’t here three million years ago, then it grew back pretty fast, didn’t it?”

Michelson raised an eyebrow. “The three sounds small, but you have to remember the millions. Snow accumulation at the South Pole was ten centimeters a year before these so-called superstorms became a regular thing, and at that rate you get the three kilometers of the ice sheet in three hundred thousand years.”

“Compaction,” Forbes pointed out.

“Yes, but it’s already almost firn, so the compaction rate may not be as great as with snow. Even if it is, a centimeter of ice for every ten of snow, that’s what …”

“Three million years,” Forbes said.

“Well, you see,” the V under the moustache, “there you have it! Just as thick as expected.”

Much later they crawled out into the blaze and bite of the frigid brilliant midnight, and Val and Wade went to their tent. Already they had a little domestic routine, he noted; he peed outside, she peed inside; when he crawled in she was already in her bag, on her side of the tent. Their second night together; and in the weird yellow overexposure she was as beautiful as before. It was ridiculous what a little pitter-patter of the heart he got from lying next to her. Even as exhausted as he was—from the day’s fight with the cold, he assumed—it still kept him awake for a while; at least ten minutes; then he followed her into slumber.

Sometime in the bright yellow night, however, Wade woke to find that he was on his side, and wedged against Val’s backside. And something about the pressure of the contact, or the warmth, or the contents of a dream, or simply the physiology of the REM state, had given him an erection. If it were not for their thick sleeping bags it would be pressed firmly against her bottom.

This comfortable snug was a position he and his girlfriend Andrea had often taken. She too had been a big woman, taller than he. She had hated Washington, D.C., however, and their relationship had not long survived the move there. And after that Wade had been too busy to start any other relationship, or so he told himself; it had been a hard thing, having Andrea leave.

Now that was not what he was thinking about. He felt he should move; he did not want to be misunderstood. The sleeping bags were extremely thick, however, so that nothing could be felt through them. And the tent was quite small. And bitterly cold; though the sky was still bright, the sun seemed to have dipped behind the Apocalypse Peaks. So it made sense to snuggle for warmth. In any case Val was asleep, breathing deeply. He couldn’t see anything of her face from where he lay, but he could remember it. She had been really good in the Scott tent, very easy in the company of those men, trading banter with Misha, pressed unselfconsciously against people, joining the conversation when she felt like it, listening when she didn’t. Everyone at ease, even with this big beauty in their midst. The men might have been even happier than on an ordinary evening, more alive and on their toes, as if the Drambers had an extra fire in it; but nothing more than that, nothing to draw any notice. It was skillful; as a diplomat Wade admired it. Not everyone could have ensured that the situation be so normal.

And the same with sleeping with a strange man in a small tent. Except now she was stirring. Quickly Wade rolled over in his bag.

But now it was she who was pressed up against his back. Hard against him, in fact, from his head to his heels; and she was so much taller than he that she enfolded him entirely, the back of his head down against her chest. More than ever before he realized he liked being smaller than the woman he was with. It was ravishing. No chance of that REM erection going away. He turned his head ever so slightly, and there was her face, inches from his; again the surgical glare of tent light; again her disconcerting beauty. The weathering of an outdoor life made her face look fiftyish, though asleep of course she also looked like a child, as everyone did. Mouth open, deeply asleep, breathing smoothly, pressed against him hard. He turned his head back and snuggled it into his parka hood, and after a long while his heart rate returned to something like normal, and after another while he fell asleep again.

The next day, after breakfast and taking down their tent and packing their backpacks, Wade followed Val down the piebald snow-and-rock valley toward Lake Vida, which from certain high points along the way was visible as a white line on the valley floor. Again, it looked only an hour’s walk away, but now Wade knew better. Professor Michelson was accompanying Harry and Graham down to look at the striated cliffs above Lake Vashka, and so for the first part of the walk they kept Wade and Val company. Wade and Michelson lagged behind to talk.

As they conversed, a red fly appeared in the distance over Lake Vida. No sound; but it was a helicopter. It descended on Lake Vida, and then flew up again and away, toward Wright Valley.

“Were we late, or they early?” Wade called down to Val.

“Not for us,” Val called back.

“That was one of the NSF trekking groups,” Michelson said. “Starting an expedition, or ending one, or both.”

“I’m surprised NSF has gotten into that.”

“Are you?” Michelson glanced at him, once again in his Breughel nose guard. “They need money like anyone else.”

“But here they are, in charge of this whole continent …”

“On a budget smaller than that of most universities. Besides, they are not really in charge. I mean they control the American presence here, which is in itself amazing, I agree. I’m astonished some of your State Department colleagues haven’t taken it over.”

Wade gestured at the brown-and-white desolation around them. “They probably don’t see the point.”

Michelson laughed. “Well, so NSF keeps control. But with an ever-shrinking budget. It’s Mars that is the hot place these days, scientifically speaking at least, and that’s where all the money is going. This is a kind of backwater now, scientifically. Anyway, your NSF is just one player down here. There are about thirty national groups in the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research, and that’s the group that decides how things are run down here. NSF generally just goes along with SCAR. And within SCAR there’s the old boys’ club, of the countries who were down here from the beginning in the IGY, and then the new countries that have joined since, to make sure they have a say in case resource extraction ever starts. There used to be conflicts between those two groups, but all that has been forgotten because of the conflicts between SCAR and the UN, and SCAR and the non-Treaty nations. And now that the Treaty renewal is being held up—by people in the American government, as you know, though there are others who are not unhappy about that—it’s more uncertain than ever. There are people in the UN who would like to be running Antarctica, because then the votes in the General Assembly could overwhelm any scientific advice, and the UN bureaucrats involved would be in charge here.”

“Complicated.”

Michelson laughed. “Very complicated. Land without sovereignty! That’s too odd not to be complicated, in this world. The Antarctic Treaty held in its time, but now it’s a new world.”

“The Treaty always seemed fragile.”

“Fragile, idealistic—all those things. And even when it was in effect the Treaty nations broke its rules all the time. France, Russia, they did what they wanted, more or less. Now that the stakes are getting higher, the Treaty is revealed as the house of cards it always was.”

“I see.”

“So the NSF running trekking expeditions down here is actually a very small matter. It preempts the private companies, so that NSF can keep control of the visitors—keep them from coming up here, for instance. Keep them clean and neat, and so on. It’s a good idea, I think.”

“Interesting.”

“Yes. The conflicts are endless. Not unlike your turf battles back in the Senate, I would guess.”

“Yes,” Wade said absently, watching Val’s backside as she hiked down the valley with Graham and Harry. She walked like someone who had hiked a million miles, and no doubt she had. Now it was a kind of boulder ballet, a very graceful flow. He pulled back out of his distraction: “Very much the same. In fact it’s the same battle, I’m afraid. Different parts of the same battle, everywhere. This is only the outermost edge.”

The geologists said their farewells and took off around the other side of Lake Vashka. Wade and Val continued on down Barwick Valley together.

blue sky

brown valley

“Did you enjoy your visit?” Val asked when they were some way down the valley, and out of earshot of the scientists.

“It was very interesting.” So interesting that he could think of nothing further to say about it. He was still sorting out his impressions of the final conversation with Professor Michelson. Which was too bad, as he would have liked very much to say more to her. He didn’t want to seem to be holding his cards close to the vest, when he had no cards at all. “I don’t know quite what to make of them,” he confessed.

She nodded. “Beakers are funny people.”

“You must find it interesting, the way they look at mountains.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. The things they notice. And the time spans …”

“Only three hundred years! Blink of the eye!”

They laughed. She waved a hand at the abrupt ridges walling the valley on both sides: “As if rock were toothpaste, flowing from one position to the next.”

“Strange. Do any of them climb?”

“Oh sure. Bob, over in Taylor Valley, he climbs a lot. And vice versa—some of the mountaineers have degrees in geology. Misha back there is a geomorphologist, for instance.”

“I knew he was into it somehow.”

“Oh yeah, he tries to fit his research in when he can, although it’s hard to do—they’re never in the right place for him, and he has a lot of work to do just to take care of them.”

He looked at her. “You talk about it like it’s babysitting.”

“Well, you know. This place can kill you in a matter of hours if you blow it. And a mountaineer’s profession is keeping people from blowing it, and then also knowing how to stay alive even when you have blown it. You wait till your first storm, then you’ll be happy you have me along.”

“I’m already happy to have you along.”

“Thanks,” she said, dismissing the comment. “Anyway, a lot of these beakers are not thinking very much about survival, to say the least. The mountains are just data for their papers. For some of them, if they could get the data while sitting back home, they would be perfectly happy. I hiked with a group of them around a nunatak up on the ice, after a helo didn’t make skeds, and it was incredibly beautiful, the ice pouring around the rock, you know, and they complained the whole way home because the nunatak was nothing but dolerite. They hiked along singing ‘Dolerite, dolerite, dolerite, dolerite.’”

Wade grinned. “They were teasing you.”

“Sure. But the beauty of it, for them, it was only—whatever.”

“Data.”

“Yeah. And data can be beautiful, but still.”

“Beakers.”

“Right. Still, you gotta love ’em. For one thing they’re really what gets the rest of us down here.”

“The continent of science.”

“Right. Science, and some really incredible shits and giggles.” She shook her head, disgusted again at the phrase.

“Expensive.”

“You aren’t kidding. Once Bob told me he and a friend had calculated how much it costs to do science down here, just by taking the total Antarctic budget and dividing it by the number of scientist days—you know, it was the usual kind of beaker calculation—and it came out to something like ten thousand dollars a day per scientist.”

“You’re kidding!”

“That’s what he said. But hey, don’t tell your boss that. I don’t want to be responsible for NSF getting yanked out of here. I’m pretty much toast myself, but my friends would never forgive me.”

Wade laughed. “I promise not to tell.”

Much of the rest of the morning they hiked on in silence. Then Val called a lunch break, and they sat in the sunny lee of a boulder eating trail mix and drinking hot chocolate from thermoses.

“How did you get into guiding?” Wade asked.

“Just fell into it, ha ha.” She thought it over. “It was a long time ago now. A boyfriend, I guess. We climbed together and he was making money guiding, and that sounded good to me. At the time. I’ve actually tried to quit several times, because there’s a lot of things about it I don’t like, but one thing about it, it keeps you in the mountains, and making some money. So I keep getting back into it.”

“You’ve actually quit?”

“Not down here—that would be it—but a couple times before, yeah. I was guiding in the Tetons for a few seasons, and I had this client…. Well, have you heard the three rules of mountain guiding?”

“No.”

“First rule is, the client is trying to kill you. Second rule, the client is trying to kill himself. Third rule, the client is trying to kill the rest of the clients.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. I told you there were parts of the job I didn’t like, and one of them is that it makes you cynical about people.”

“Many jobs do.”

“I suppose so. Anyway, I was leading this guy up the Grand Teton, and we were on the ridge above the emergency hut, on a cloudy day, with a cloud smack against the east face, so that there was a slot of air there we could look down, like a crevasse five thousand feet deep. And I don’t know, he had a thing about the Grand Teton I guess, and suddenly rules one and two came into play both at once, literally.”

“He tried to kill you?”

“He tried to kill both of us. It was a suicide thing. We were roped together, and when we were climbing a section of the ridge overlooking the east face, he let out this kind of funny yelp and threw himself off the ridge and down the face.”

“On purpose!”

“Yeah.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, I arrested us, obviously—threw myself the other way and got a hold, and luckily I was a lot heavier than him, and we held. Broke a couple of fingers,” she added, holding out her right hand for inspection.

“Ouch!”

“Oh, I’ve broken a lot of bones in the mountains, it’s not so bad.”

“But what then!”

“Well, I had to talk him out of it, or at least I tried to—but when I had him calmed down and got up, he tried it again! So after that I throttled him, basically, and hauled him back down the ridge to the emergency hut and had us medevacked out of there. I don’t know why I expected a suicide to be honest with me when he’d just tried to take me with him, but I did. That second try really shocked me. It made me mad.”

“I’ll bet!” Wade tried to imagine it, shaking his head. “So you quit.”

“Yeah. For a while. But—” she shrugged. “I like to be out in places like this. All the time, basically. So … guiding is the best way to finance it.”

“All jobs have their downside,” Wade said.

“Yeah?” She shifted to look at him easier. “Tell me about yours.”

“Well,” he said, and waved a hand. Actually, thinking it over, he realized he liked his job quite a lot. But he wanted to share her situation, her predicament one might even say, and so he said, “Well, I have to live in Washington.”

“Don’t you like it? I visited once and thought it was exciting.”

“It’s a great town to visit, but living there is crowded—muggy—I don’t know. There is no there there, you know.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Oakland,” he said, grinning at his little joke. “No, all over, really.”

“San Francisco is a great town too.”

“Yes. And so beautiful. After that, Washington is just a swamp.”

She nodded.

“And then I have to work with politicians all the time.”

“Are they bad?”

He laughed. “Like your clients, I suppose. They think they’re professionals, but a lot of them aren’t.”

“Ah yeah. That can be hard.”

“Yeah.” But actually he liked it, and did not want to sound like a complainer; and so he said, “Well, it’s interesting anyway. A lot of the time I like it. I like Senator Chase. No, I like my job.”

She nodded her approval. “It’s like you said.”

“What.”

“All jobs have their downside.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Although right now I must admit mine doesn’t seem so bad.” And she smiled at him. He suddenly remembered waking in the night, and his heart did a little tympani roll inside him. He smiled back, offered her a chunk of his chocolate bar. She took it from him and their gloved fingers touched.

“Salty chocolate?”

“Very.”

The rest of the afternoon he followed her across the great silent rock valley, watching her. Which was wonderful; like watching one of Chagall’s long dancers come to life, flowing down the rock in her boulder ballet, total grace over the shattered fractal surface underfoot, and without looking at it at all, as far as he could tell. And she had such a tall muscular body. Again he remembered lying next to her in their tent, and that impression he had had, of being next to a bigger animal; that had been a thrill, a deep ravished erotic-thrill, just in the idea of it. He was six foot tall almost exactly, and had not spent enough time with women distinctly taller than him to know for sure that he had this—this predilection. He supposed there was some bit of a reversal in that, something feminine perhaps; but not enough to frighten him; one component of the thrill, perhaps. He liked her. He had figured her for a jock, but clearly there was a lot of thinking going on in there; an intellectual. He had heard that climbing included an intellectual element, that it was the intellectual’s sport, a kind of physical chess played against nature. Whatever; he liked her; he was attracted to her; and not just in that simple attraction that no doubt most men felt on seeing her, but more than that; her specifically, the thinker inside the amazon body. And what a body. In that yellow tent—oh what could have been—fantasy images of her on top of him, inside a single sleeping bag—

Then he was surprised to find that they were dropping down the final scree to the flat white surface of Lake Vida. There was a cluster of bright mountain tents at one end of the lake, and Val headed for that. As they approached she turned to Wade with a smile. “Well,” she said, “back to work.” And his heart melted a little; and he felt the kind of smile that was on his face, and knew it was giving him away, if she was watching.

Then they were in the camp. It was, Val pointed out, the NSF-regulated campsite for Lake Vida, occupied by every group that came through, on a bench just above the lake, under the broken face of Schist Peak, marked by cairns and another stacked-rock outhouse; all very unobtrusive in the grand landscape, there in the intersection of the Victoria and McKelvey Valleys, where everything seemed so vast. The few rock markers were as nothing to the vibrant neon colors of the tents. There were half a dozen dome tents for sleeping, and then a green walk-in dining tent, very much larger than the Scott tents at the scientific camp. Like everywhere else Wade had been, the campsite looked deserted as they approached. An incongruous collection of colorful children’s blocks, scattered in the immensity of rock. Val walked up to the communal tent, and calling out a hello stuck her head in the door.

They were welcomed inside without delay, to meet another guide named Karl, and his group of ten trekkers. They were backpacking around the Dry Valleys from camp to camp, and had already been out for ten days, with just a few more to go: a whiskery bunch, for the most part—only three women in this group—and with the slick oily hair Wade had noted in the scientists, and more and more in himself. Over hot drinks and salty hors d’oeuvres they enthusiastically described their trip: dropped in by helicopter on Wright Upper Glacier just below Airdevronsix Icefalls, then on foot down through the Labyrinth, past the Dais and Lake Vanda and up the course of the Onyx River to Lake Brownworth; then up and over the Clark Glacier, wearing crampons, and past Clark Lake, over the Saharan dunes of Victoria Valley, to their current camp. From here they were going to hike down the McKelvey Valley on the edge of the forbidden zone, through Bull Pass and down to Vanda again. Longer treks would then cross the Asgaard Range, a difficult crossing no matter what route one took, and then descend the Taylor Valley to the Lake Hoare camp, or even New Harbor for a snowmobile or hovercraft trip across the sound to McMurdo, depending on the season; but this was a shorter expedition, and would be heloed out from Lake Vanda.

Most of this was explained to them by two men pointing here and there on a big well-used map, with the guide and the others sitting back and letting them at it. The larger of the two men was a dark blond, handsome American, who was directing his description to Val, who had to know these treks all too well, Wade judged. And all in an ironic style that was charming in a way, but had little true wit in it. Val listened politely, and smiled in the designated places, but Wade could see she wasn’t interested in the same way she had been in the scientists’ conversation back in the Barwick.

“And that will be the end of the Great Dry Valley Circle,” the man said.

“I’ll be ready,” one of the other trekkers said. “I’m going to take my next trip in New Guinea.”

“No, Tahiti.”

They laughed.

“It’s so cold,” one of them said.

“And the same everywhere,” another added.

“And so much bigger than it looks—you hike along a valley expecting it to take an hour and it takes all day. It’s like the reverse of the Himalayas. Wright Valley goes on forever.”

“It’s the lack of haze.”

“It’s the cold.”

“The lack of trees.”

“The fact that we flew over it in ten minutes on the way in.”

“Whatever. Anyway this is it for me. Been there, done that.”

Others pooh-poohed this sentiment. “It’s beautiful!” “It’s so big.” “And beautiful!”

Which it wasn’t, not by any definition of beauty Wade had ever heard. But this was what one said when impressed by a landscape, this was how attenuated the language had become for some people. Depauperate, as Forbes had said to Michelson yesterday about some section of the rock. But if Wade had spoken up and said It’s not beautiful, it’s sublime, the distinction would not be understood. So he kept his mouth shut and listened to these stock responses, back in the soup of American speech, in all its basic talkshow mindlessness—

“It’s boring is what it is.”

And perhaps, Wade thought, without the science, without the politics, just walking around out here—maybe it was boring. Nothing but shits and giggles.

The other guide was smiling dutifully at all these criticisms, which were stated cheerfully, and in part just to tease him. These people would rave about the trek when they got back home, no doubt about that. So the guide nodded and shrugged as if he had heard it all before, and had already made his best attempt to counter them. It was all banter for the new folks.

“So, Val,” he said when he got a chance. “Where next for you?”

“Amundsen,” she said.

“Hey, that’s where we’re going too!” the tall handsome man exclaimed, with a quick glance at Val and then at his friend. “You must be Valerie Kenning?”

“That’s me,” Val said, showing nothing one way or another. “Yeah, it should be a good expedition.”

The other guide said, “I’ve heard the Axel Heiberg has become quite a challenge.”

Val shrugged. “There’s a steep section at the headwall, yeah. But if it’s bad this year,” with a lightning glance at the other guide that Wade took to refer to the it, “we’ll take the descent route and save some energy for it.”

“Oh we’ll manage the real route,” the tall client said confidently.

“Uh huh,” Val said, with an encouraging smile at him. Wade remembered the three rules of mountain guiding and winced inside. Happy chance that he had met her not as a trekking client, but in some slightly different capacity! Although Distinguished Visitor, ouch; but still, better than this. He watched her continue to converse cheerfully with the group, and it occurred to him that in a couple of hours their helo would arrive and take them back to McMurdo, and that might very well be the last he ever saw of Valerie Kenning. And then he winced in earnest.

Val sat in the trekkers’ dining tent, doing her best to conceal her irritation with the men who were going to be joining her Amundsen trip. Or man, to be specific; the other one, Jim McFeriss, was your typical sidekick and enabler; it was the main talker, Jack Michaels, who was going to be the real bummer. The way he looked at her, the way he talked to the others, complacent and assured and oh so certain he was the star of the movie: Val hated that manner with a fine passion. She had become so sick of the stink of bad testosterone that even the slightest whiff of it made her want to heave. And so she sat in one of the ultralight but unstable camp chairs at the end of the camp table, and became more bright and cheery than ever, an old technique she had picked up in high school when dealing with tremendous amounts of anger, anger often mysterious in origin but sometimes perfectly clear; and as it was inappropriate to scream at people, she had found that she could satisfy her need to lash out at them simply by lying to them so grossly, with the happy cheerleader routine. Hiding her real self and bearing down on people with a very aggressive happy face had always worked strangely well, in several different ways.

So now she was fine among this group of trekkers, though they looked to be a pretty lame bunch, as Karl’s private glance confirmed. And the prospect of leading a reproduction of Amundsen’s difficult direttìssima, with this Jack and Jim among other no doubt problematical clients, was in fact pretty dismal. There Jack sat, ostensibly telling a couple of his comrades from this trip about kayaking down the Dudh Khosi—oh no, now it was climbing the Matterhorn—and by their looks they had heard it before, and also they could see as well as Val could that he was not really telling the story to them but to her, looking left at them then right at her, pulling her into his audience. Men like him were seals, encased in a thick blubber of their own self-regard. Interested in her, however; looking at her, charming her, impressing her with his wilderness adventure credentials, which sounded extensive. They always did. Evaluating her as well; deciding that she was a simple cheerleader jock, a straightforward proposition, not as well-informed as he, but interested in learning more about the big wide world of which he had seen so much.

All so much crap. And all because of the way she looked. If she had been short and plain and unobtrusive, the wattage of his attention would have been so much lower that she might have had a chance to see something of him; as it was the dazzle had reduced her pupils to pinpoints, and she stared out at a chiaroscuro shadow tent, inflicting the cheerleader routine on its occupants full force, until soon they would be pinned to the floor by it and admitting that they too wished they all could be California girls, in four-part harmony.

Which caused Wade to look at her a bit oddly, no doubt nonplussed. But how different it had been up in the cramped Scott tent, sitting around the hissing stove talking about geology and politics, and the Antarctica below the ice and the f-stops. To those men she had been just a person, and so she had been able to relax and be just a person; which was such a relief that it made her much more pleasant and therefore more attractive, she was sure. Which was what they deserved for being so normal themselves. That was something she liked very much about Wade; he had been no more interested in her than any of the beakers he was meeting, no more and no less; and growing more interested in her the more he knew about her, and the more they talked about things in general. Which was how she liked it; indeed how she demanded it. No doubt about it, she was pretty demanding and intolerant when it came to men’s behavior toward her; she knew that; it had been that way for a long time. And was only getting worse.

Because beauty was a curse. It’s always getting worse, because beauty is a curse … in four-part harmony. She didn’t recall the Beach Boys singing that one, but the girls on the beach (who are all within reach) could have told Brian, if he had been able to listen from within his own layer of toxic blubber. Beauty is a curse. Of course it brought attention to you, that was not the issue. Val’s good looks had brought her attention all her life; but by now she hated it. She did not like attention. That was why she had taken off into the mountains every weekend of high school, and then permanently the moment high school had ended and she had been released from four years’ solitary in the prisonhouse of the American dream.

And it was silly anyway, silly at best. She was not that good-looking when it came right down to it, no fashion model—her face as she saw it in the mirror was utterly plain, and filled with irritations. Men were wrong about that, as they were about so much else. It was just that she was tall, and blond, and big, and athletic, with what in the end was fundamentally a friendly face—regular, pleasant, somewhat cheerleaderesque, she had to admit. And that was enough to have men lying to her her whole life long. They got in traffic accidents driving past her. One time one had braked his Toyota pickup to a screeching halt in a parking lot and stuck his head out the window and yelled at her “Will you marry me!” at the top of his lungs. This incident in particular had made her laugh, as it had at least had the virtue of straightforward honesty; but later it had come to stand in her mind as the purest image of what that particular kind of attention from men had really been. It didn’t matter what she was like, that had nothing to do with it; her looks alone were enough to justify men slamming on the brakes and spontaneously pitching their whole self at her. And what was she supposed to say to that? What was she supposed to do with all these strangers hitting on her, crashing in crying me me me, be mine, love always, will you marry me? It was so obvious they were coming on for the wrong reasons. And so from the very start they revealed themselves to Val as people with bad principles, fools, jerks, pathetos, sometimes as insecure as she was about the worth of their characters, sometimes idiotically certain that they were the greatest thing around, but either way worthless to her, their attentions useless, stupid, irritating, sometimes dangerous, often maddening. They made her mad.

And of course the ones who had laid her and left her, as they said, had made her frightened and uncertain as well as mad. Some of those guys she had really loved, or thought she had; they hadn’t come on in the usual idiot way, and she had thought they were different; and still it hadn’t worked out. How could that be, if she was so attractive? Was she too much of a bitch to live with? Or too boring? She didn’t think so. But then again she had always had trouble articulating her thoughts; somehow what she said aloud was always a platitude approximating the original thought, which had been far more interesting. She had never learned the trick of catching those hard thoughts on the fly, and indeed when she had caught them and expressed them properly, those were often the times that got her into biggest trouble, convincing people (men) that she was mean, or just weird. So it was either vanilla or bile, or staying silent. Or going climbing, free solo, the best way.

Or later, to make a living, leading tour groups of strangers and spending the whole time on automatic pilot, playing the role of the Happy Mountain Woman, earth mother, nature spirit, athlete philosopher, wild woman—which role actually seeped back into her, to an extent, as she became what she was playing at, like during her cheerleader days; inflicting a role, like spiking a volleyball right in their face; and this one felt good; a relief from the usual cynicism and distrust. Clients could very legitimately be held at a proper client distance, a professional relationship, and from there some fairly decent interactions could be had, with some nice men willing to treat her as the guide and no more. It was enough anyway, the client/guide relationship—it had a certain student/teacher or even child/parent aspect to it, depending on how the people in the roles played them. Taking care of people. So, many fairly pleasant human interactions. But the big man/woman thing; no luck. Lots of bummers, enough to disturb the whole thing. She wanted a big time-out.

Unfortunately Antarctica was not the place for that. The man-to-woman ratio was still about 70 to 30, and that made a lot of them even crazier than they were in the world. The women too sometimes went hectic with glee, women in some cases who had never had enough attention in the world and so revelled in it now, trolling around and having some hard fun, breaking hearts like gutting little fish they’d caught. She’d done a bit of that herself. Bit of revenge in it, no doubt. Other women went catatonic under the testosterone assault, or burst out laughing and said No to the whole fool lot. Others tried to keep their eyes open and their wits about them, to see if they could find a man they liked. After all, there were a lot of men there. As the Mac women said, The odds were good, but the goods were odd. So that took a little sorting out, usually—trying a few men to find the one you liked. Which could look like trolling. And this caused problems. In fact when it came to their love lives most of the women on the ice were like walking soap operas. Many went through one ice romance after another. Some did seasonal contracts, like ASL. Certainly nine out of ten ice romances ended badly.

Among them, unfortunately, her relationship with X. He was a lot of the things she liked, too—he was big, gentle, smart; as Steve had used to say, teasing her even in his last year, just her type: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. As Steve had been. No, not really. Anyway X had been many good things, but also overidealistic and moody, overintellectual, naive, indoorsy, inactive, unathletic, curiously passive; and even though she was sick of men’s aggressiveness, she had to admit that she did like a certain dash in a man, a certain fire and style, which X had lacked. He railed against the system all the time, and yet slouched around without doing much physical out in the world, which was her usual solution to frustration. He was just too mellow. And he was younger than Val too, four years younger, so that he often seemed like a kid to her, a sophomoric college kid, even though strictly speaking he was older than that.

So she had chafed a bit during their vacation in New Zealand. And it hadn’t helped to have him break into the I’m-being-tortured-by-a-Nazi-mountain-guide routine as they hiked up the utterly easy Bealey Spur, a routine that she had gotten so sick of that she could not even express it. Every time someone said anything to that effect, or even suggested it with a look, it made her so mad that it ruined the whole trip for her. And it happened every trip. Even walking up a green escalator into alpine mountain glory.

So they had said good-bye and she had flown back to the States, and gotten there with no plan, and just kind of wandered that whole off-season, from one climbing hole to the next. In the past she had spent her offseasons with her grandmother on the old family farm, taking care of the old woman and being taken care of by her, and that had been pleasant, a real anchor in her life; but Annie had died two years before while Val was in Antarctica, and now Val had no pattern to fall into when back in the world. It had been a strange few months. And by the time she went back down to the ice for the new season, she had lost any interest she had had in X. The on-ice/off-ice format of the McMurdo lifestyle was hard on even the good relationships, and if one was troubled, the big breaks made it very easy to end them. So when she got back to Mac Town she had had her eye out for an excuse to disengage from X, as she realized consciously only later. And a new mountaineer named Mike had served as about the perfect excuse, or so she had thought at first; she had been smitten, she had to admit it. Now it was clear that Mike had a bad case of what Val called climber’s syndrome, consisting of a self-absorption so deep that it could not be plumbed; compared to it the usual male blubber was no more than the subcutaneous layer with which everyone had to cope. Mike had been quite happy to sleep with her, of course, but in a month he had not learned a thing about her; it would probably be dangerous to ask him to recall her last name. In only two days this Wade Norton had learned a thousand times more about her. So it was bye-bye to Mike; and now X was gone from Mac Town, and she hadn’t even apologized. So it was back to trolling. Or not. In any case, yet another bad experience to add to all the rest. She had been the one to screw up this time, she had to admit it.

On the helicopter ride back to Mac Town, Wade sat next to her in one of the side compartments of the Huey, where they were alone together in their own sonic space; they were just barely able to hear each other, but could if they spoke directly in each other’s ears. Looking down at the sea ice flashing under them, they traded comments. When she thought about how nice he had been on this trip, it made her wince; to go from this smart, polite, interesting, somehow subtle, even withdrawn man, to Jack and Jim and the rest of the clients on the Amundsen! It was painful. She liked this man a lot; he had just the mellowness that she liked, but that extra dash she admired as well—a Washington operator—a sly sense of humor; paying attention to those beakers with what seemed his total interest; and then to her too, but as a guide, a person with career problems, an equal in the world; not to be instructed in Washington politics or the global situation or whatever, but just talked with, in mutual interest. Now of course leaving, and soon no doubt. It always happened that way.

“Do you have brothers and sisters?” he exclaimed in her ear, surprising her.

“No,” she said in his.

“Only child?” Sounding surprised.

He was looking down at the trash ice. “No,” she said in his ear, surprising herself. She never talked about this. “No, I had a brother. But he died.”

He nodded; looked at her briefly. Looked back down at the ice. All the way back to Mac Town he sat beside her, looking down at the ice, his arm pressed against hers, his hip against hers, his leg against hers. The pressure was saying, I’m sorry. It was saying, There’s nothing can be said about that. Which was true. This was how Steve himself had comforted her in his last year, sitting beside her with an arm over her shoulder, not saying anything. At sixteen and twelve, neither of them had been able to figure out much to say about it. Val stared down at the trash ice flowing underneath them. She liked this man who was leaving.

Back in Mac. She walked up to her room, lost in her thoughts.

She had been eleven when she first learned something was wrong. They told her that Steve was sick, that he had mononucleosis and it would take him a while to recover. He was in the hospital, and then in Houston, to go to a special hospital. That’s when they told her it was leukemia. He was gone for months, but came home for visits. In later years she didn’t remember much about those visits; but she did remember being shocked at how much thinner he was, and that he moved so slowly. All his muscles seemed stiff, including eventually his lips, so that it was hard for him to talk the same.

Most of their time together in that period they played a board game he had liked when they were younger. She couldn’t recall the details of the rules, but the board was a map of the world, and the game had to do with weather, and your piece was on a clear square that was a quadrant of the world map, and if you rolled a twelve the clear square had to be shifted to another quadrant of the map. Something like that. They had played it for hours, in near silence. Val had the impression that Steve had grown up very rapidly in Houston, and was a kind of grown-up now because of what was happening to him. He looked at her as from a great distance away. Once he rolled boxcars twice in a row, then three times; four times; five times. Moving the quadrant around the world every time. Then six times in a row, double sixes every time. They had stared at each other across the board, then looked down at the dice again, acutely uncomfortable, aware together that something very strange was happening. “Guess I’m going on a trip,” he said, and Val had interrupted his turn and picked up the dice and rolled them herself.

That little memory was all she had, for hours and hours of time—that and a few more fragments, like him walking slowly down the hall, bowlegged, to put the game away. Or when he left for Houston for the last time, and said to her, “See you later,” and she had said “See you later.”

Then horsing around in history class and Mr. Sanders coming in near the end of the period and taking her outside, very serious, to tell her her brother had died, he was very sorry, she had to go home. She remembered looking down from the second-story balcony at the parking lot, the scatter of teachers’ cars, the tennis courts in their line off to the left.

So her brother Steve had died. He had been bigger than her, and stronger than her, and more full of life; he had taught her to love the outdoors, and had taken her along when a lot of older brothers wouldn’t have. He had been trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, etc. Her hero.

And after that no one else had seemed quite as good. She had in him a standard for behavior that was no doubt very high. She had also a fuse that was no doubt very short. No doubt a lot of what had happened to her since then had followed from those characteristics. It is eerie sometimes to contemplate how much we create our own reality. The life of the mind is an imaginary relationship to a real situation; but then the real situation keeps happening, event after event, and many of those events are out of our control, but many others are the direct result of the imagination’s take on things. So she was aware that her problems were not just because men were so often screwed up; because sometimes they weren’t, and still she botched her relationships with them, sometimes with men she had liked a lot. But they hadn’t been as good as her Steve. Sooner or later they let her down, and she blew up. And on she went, getting more and more skittish. The shorter her fuse got, the shorter it got. She was a case of walking burnt toast; mountain guiding was the last thing she should have been trying. It was like trying to be an open-air therapist when she was the one that needed the therapy. She needed a big time-out from people in general. She needed to find a man she really and truly liked. But the goods were odd, and the odds were not good. And not just in Mac Town.