Antarctica

7 Down the Rabbit Hole

blue sky

white snow

The South Pole was cold. At first when Wade climbed out of the Herc and saw the white glare and the dark blue sky, it was familiar enough to make him think it was going to be like McMurdo or the Dry Valleys. Then the cold shot up his nostrils into his head and his snot froze, with a tickling sensation that was only a little painful. After that there were icicles inside his nose. This seemed to stabilize the nasal situation, and after that his nose stayed relatively warm—warm, with icicles inside it!—and the sensation of cold shifted elsewhere, to the various joints in his clothing: between boots and pants, and at his wrists, neck and eyes. Cold!

By this time he had rounded the nose of the Herc, and was walking across the smashed snow of the runway. He passed a little glass-walled booth topped by a big sign: “South Pole Pax Terminal.”

Beyond it stood the new Pole Station, gleaming in the sun like a blue spaceliner stranded on the snow. Actually like three spaceliners, all standing on thick blue pylons, and linked by blue passage tubes. At the end of the leftmost module a cylindrical blue control tower stood overlooking the scene. Farther across the glittering white plain, past heaped mounds of snow and a line of yellow bulldozers, he could see just the tops of a little sunken village of antique Jamesways. Farther still, a pale blue geodesic dome stuck out of snow that appeared to be in the process of burying it entirely; the old station, apparently.

A man approached Wade and introduced himself: Keri Hull, NSF rep for the Pole. He led Wade to the spaceliner and up metal grid stairs like those Wade had seen in ski resorts. From here the new station looked like a segmented flying wing, aerodynamic in the polar winds. They went through the usual meat-locker doors, inset into the curved blue wall.

Keri led Wade down a hall to a bright warm galley. They sat down at a long table with a few other people; one of them got him a mug of hot chocolate, and he held the mug in both hands gratefully. The inside of his nose began to defrost. The room was full of people eating and talking. It was steamy.

“First a few words about the station,” Keri said. “We’re supposed to do this for everyone. We’re at 9,300 feet here, and because of the Earth’s spin the atmosphere is thinner at the poles than at the equator, so our nine three is the equivalent of about 10,500 feet at the equator. It’s a hard ten thousand, too, because of the cold and the dryness. So stay hydrated and don’t run around too much in the first days of your stay. And if you have a persistent headache or loss of appetite, see the station doctor and she’ll fix you up. Officially we recommend avoiding caffeine and alcohol, but, you know—moderation in all things.” He grinned and sipped from a giant coffee mug with his name painted on it. “Just pay attention to your body signals and behave accordingly. Okay? Good. Now—how can we help you down here at ninety degrees south, Mr. Norton?”

“I’d like to have a look at the whole station, with the idea of going through the various, um, incidents that have been reported, kind of step by step.”

Keri frowned. “You mean going into the old station?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. That’s against regulations, I’m afraid.”

“Of course. But it seems that it will be necessary, given that some of the, the removals, have been happening there.”

Keri raised his eyebrows. “Necessary?”

“I’m down here to investigate the incidents,” Wade said firmly.

The other man’s look made it clear he thought this was a waste of time. “It’s potentially dangerous,” he warned. “The snow accumulation is crushing down the dome.”

“But the archway next to the dome is still in use, as I understand it?”

“Yes.”

“So the approach is safe.”

“Yes, but—”

“So we could go down the archway, and just have a quick pop in to see under the old dome, and hope that it won’t collapse at that very moment.”

Keri didn’t appreciate that way of putting it. “You’ve talked to Sylvia about this?”

Wade nodded.

“All right. We’ll take you in tomorrow, okay? We’ll have to get some gear and people together to do it safely.”

“Fine.”

So he had a day to kill. Keri appeared to be done with his orientation, and for some reason miffed at him. A young woman named Lydia took him down the hall and showed him what would be his room—like a nice hotel room, greatly miniaturized—and gave him his room key. He was free to do what he wanted.

But it quickly became clear that the South Pole was not a place where there was much to do. He went back outside to snap some photos of the station. There were not many places he was allowed to walk, as the snowy plain surrounding the station to all horizons was forbidden ground in three of four quadrants: the dark sector for astronomy, the quiet sector for seismography, and the clean sector for incoming air from the prevailing wind, which almost always came from that particular north. He was left with the area between the station and the runway, where a short barber pole with a mirror ball on its top stood inside a curve of flags. This was the ceremonial South Pole, there for photo purposes. He walked over to the mirror ball and looked at the bulbous reflection of his hooded face. In the tiny reflected image of his mirrored sunglasses he could make out two little mirror ball-topped poles, marked by even tinier reflections of himself. An infinite regress of person and place. He tried to take a photo, but nothing happened; it seemed his camera battery had frozen.

Well. This was not the actual geographical pole anyway, which was located somewhere inside the forbidden old station, Keri had said; it would be moving through the station for another couple of years, until the station had been carried over it by the ice cap as it made its slow flow north to the sea.

There seemed little else to do outdoors but freeze. Wade gave Phil Chase a call on the wrist, and was a bit surprised when he answered. “Phil, it’s Wade! I’m at the South Pole!”

“That’s good, Wade. Is it cold? Is it bright?”

“It’s cold. It’s bright.”

“That’s good. Here it’s warm, and dark. I’m asleep, Wade. Call me back when it’s daytime here. I want to hear more about it.”

So much for outdoors. Wade retreated inside, grateful for the spaceliner’s sudden warmth. He looked out a tinted window at the view: a snowy plain in all directions, to a horizon which was about six miles away, Keri had said; Wade found it hard to tell. The surface snow was marked by sastrugi; these hundreds of small waves, and the chiselled sandlike snow that lay between them, must make skiing hard work indeed. He tried to imagine what it would be like to ski across such a plain plane of a plain, day after day for hundreds of miles, a whole continent, like walking from New York to LA, all the while pulling a heavy sledge, and often against the grain of the sastrugi, no doubt. And yet there were people out there doing it at that very minute, the Herc pilot had said, crossing the continent for fun, some of them following the SPOT route from the Pole to McMurdo. It must have been a disheartening sight to see a train of giant yellow tractors clumping past them on autopilot. But presumably their motivations had nothing to do with practicality.

It was not for him. And as he walked down the hall to his cubicle, to rest from his half-hour trip outside, he thought, What if there was no indoors? What if one had to stay out in this cold all the time, day and night, fresh in the morning or sweat-soaked (if one could sweat) in the afternoon? He didn’t think he’d last more than a few hours.

Although indoors required a different sort of fortitude. How long could one stand to stay locked up in a motel? Wade did not think of himself as an outdoor person, but he did like to be able to go places. Here there was no there there, and scarcely a here here. He went to the galley and had a leisurely lunch, and watched the inhabitants of the station come in and go through the food line, and sit down and eat in small groups, talking busily, not paying too much attention to the other people in the room. When he was done himself he cleared his plate and went down the main hall of the southernmost module to the library; then the games room; then the gym; then the coms rooms, first the official use room, filled with big radios and other machinery, then the personal use room, filled with computers and video screens. Most of the terminals in the room were occupied, by off-duty personnel making contact with the world.

The second module of the station was mostly private quarters and bathrooms, with some lounges, mostly empty. Every hall window had the same view, of course. And the third module was locked. Wade retreated to the first module to ask about that, and Keri looked up from his computer screen (distracted) and said “Oh, it’s empty, didn’t you know?” In the fluctuating vagaries of Congressional funding, he went on, keeping his face carefully blank, the money to complete all of the station had been cut, and NSF had decided to use what they had to build the outer shell of the third module, leaving the completion of the inside to some flusher or more southerly-thinking Congress. The Japanese were willing to contribute the money to complete it if part of it were turned into a small hotel, but so far NSF was resisting the temptation.

“Interesting,” Wade said. “I’d like to see that too.”

Keri held his eyebrows in position, and merely rooted in a drawer and handed Wade a large key. “Be sure to lock it when you leave,” he said, and went back to his screen.

Wade looked at him curiously, then shrugged and went back down the halls to the closed door of the third module. The door was heavy. Inside, he saw the empty shell of a building; vertical struts were all that broke the expanse of a room which looked both larger and smaller than he would have expected. The view out the windows was the same as everywhere else.

He went back to the first module and returned the key, then sat down in the library, which had two walls covered with books, most looking very well-read indeed. A captive audience. It was all very interesting; but not. Only the idea that all these rooms were at the South Pole made them other than a weird cross of military base, airport lounge, lab lounge, and motel. It was, to his surprise, extremely boring; boring in a way that contrasted very strongly to his experience in Antarctica so far.

So the next morning, when Wade put on his heavy clothing and clumped down the hall after Keri and another man named George, he was greatly relieved, so anxious was he to do something. He followed the other men watchfully.

Outside on the landing the cold gave him its pop on the nose. They descended to the snow and walked past the little sunken village of Jamesways, and a small blue dorm on stilts that looked like a model for the big station, and then down a long slope in the snow, like one half of a funnel placed on its side. Tracks in the dry snow made it clear that the depression had been cut by bulldozers. At the thin end of the funnel was a dark corrugated metal arch, the opening of a tunnel that was about ten meters below the surface of the plain.

This was the archway, essentially a long metal-covered tunnel, which when built had stood on the surface of the snow in front of the dome, which had been much taller then. As they walked inside, Keri explained that this station had been built in the early 1970s, and had been sinking under the accumulated snow ever since. The tall inner curve of the archway above them was completely covered by a fuzz of hoarfrost, the ice crystals large and flaky and arranged in big chrysanthemum shapes, all mashed together. To their right as they walked the tunnel was jammed with one big box after another, like meat lockers again, or containers from a container ship. The passageway was squeezed against the white wall to the left. They walked on hard-packed snow. It got darker fast. They passed a short pole with a knob on top, stuck in the floor; this was the current geographical south pole, the thing itself, such as it was.

They came to a crossroads of tunnels. To the left a short tunnel led to two large doors that met imperfectly, revealing snow behind. “The old entrance to the station,” George said. To the right an ice-bearded low tunnel led in to the darkness under the old dome.

They followed their flashlight beams down the tunnel into the center of this chamber. At the high point of the dome a round circle of open air let in some light. The underside of the dome was coated with a fur of ice crystals so thick that the hexagonal strut system of the old fullerdome was only suggested, as if it were a feature of the crystallization process. The effect for Wade was of some kind of immense igloo cathedral, the filtered light pouring down onto three or four large red-walled boxes, buildings that looked like two-story mobile homes, with exterior metal staircases like the new station’s, and metal landings outside their second-story entrances.

Keri and George led Wade through each of these buildings in turn. They were all much the same; narrow halls connecting tiny rooms, all packed with boxes, or empty chairs, or filing cabinets. One upstairs room had a pool table in it. “Come on to the galley,” Keri said as Wade stared at this lugubrious sight. “That was the real place to hang out.”

They went out onto a metal landing and downstairs, then across to another refrigerator door, and in through a coat room to the darkened galley. In the flashlight beams long shadows barred the walls. The narrow room looked much too small to feed a whole station. One side was open to the old kitchen; stoves and ovens and refrigerators were still there. Only a few holes in the cabinetry marked where scavenged items had been taken away, to the new station or elsewhere.

“They just left all this?” Wade asked.

“As you see. By the time they built the new station, this was all old stuff, breaking down. Or it wouldn’t fit, or wouldn’t match the energy requirements. It was too much trouble to integrate it. And too expensive to haul away. Actually they were going to dismantle this whole station and dome, but it was too expensive. So here it is. Someday we’ll break it all down and spot it to Mac Town and they can use it there, or put it in the dump ship and landfill it.”

“Or put it in a museum,” George said.

“But meanwhile,” Wade said, “someone else appears to be taking things.”

The two men were silent.

“Right?”

“Well,” Keri said. “We don’t know what’s happening. Some items have disappeared from here, it’s true. But it may be a kind of, I don’t know, a kind of game being played.”

“A prank, you mean?” Wade asked.

“Something like that. We’re not sure. But it doesn’t make sense any other way. The stuff being taken is not that useful. Old refrigerators. Stoves. Boxes of files.”

“Hmm,” Wade said.

“It just doesn’t make sense. Unless it’s a game.”

“Would people play games like that?”

“Well …”

“Most of this stuff happened during winterover,” George explained.

Keri nodded. “During the winters there are only seventy people here. They’re all evaluated by ASL and NSF ahead of time, of course, and they spend two weeks together to see how they’ll do. But naturally there are some times when people get down here who are not exactly, ah, normal. Or maybe they start normal, but during the winters here they, uh …”

Wade nodded. Next to a restroom door was a shelf of condiments, still filled with boxes and bottles of sugar, salt and pepper, creamer, hot chocolate powder, tea bags, mustard. Heinz ketchup. A strawberry syrup bottle with a round Haz-Mat sticker on it. All the contents frozen for sure, as it was bitterly cold.

“I was at the last Thanksgiving dinner they had in this galley,” George said, “and it was about a twelve-course meal, the complete Thanksgiving feast, with all the trimmings. We smoked the turkey in an old fifty-five-gallon steel drum, right outside that door. Best Thanksgiving I ever had.”

On this nostalgic note they left the dark freezer of a building, and tromped over ice flowers back out to the archway, and the blaze of light at its end. As they walked toward this light at the end of the tunnel it grew brighter and brighter.

After all the black little rooms, the infinite white plain of the polar cap was too bright to see properly—shockingly sunny, windy, vast, all under a low blue sky. Like a geometrical plane. Like the frozen bottom of a world. It was hard to reconcile the two places, in and out. “They built themselves a cave,” Wade said. To comfort themselves on Ice Planet.

“More an igloo,” George said. “It was brighter then.”

Still—something to hunker down into, to make the place habitable. Now replaced by the long blue metallic flying wing of the current station, like any postmodern hotel anywhere. We are here!

And that was that. The old station, the empty spaces in it where some unremarkable things had disappeared. Nothing more to see. Obviously Keri and George and the others here did not think there was any purpose to his visit. Professional investigators from the NSF and the National Transportation Safety Board and the FBI had already been down to investigate the hijacked SPOT vehicle. It stood to reason a Senate aide couldn’t do anything they hadn’t already. So Keri’s looks said, and George’s too, to an extent; and Wade did not know exactly how he would argue the point, if he had cared to. Phil Chase had sent him, and that was reason enough; and more power, perhaps, than these men suspected. But he had to do more than be Phil’s roving eyes if he wanted to exert the power.

But what? This damned place was balking him; it was a kind of no-place, a blank on the map. No reason to be here except for the abstract fact of the spin axis of the planet, which was a pretty strange reason once one thought about it. Ridiculous in fact. He glanced out a window at the ubiquitous view. It was like a minimum security prison for affluent white-collar criminals, or a spaceship for real. But even if it had been on a trip to a paradise planet Wade would have had to refuse the trip, to avoid dying of boredom en route. There was no interest to it at all, except perhaps for the human factor.

But the scientists rushed by, obviously very busy, and, from what Keri had said, involved in subjects too esoteric to explain to mere mortals. And the support crew were working, or sitting in the galley in small groups, talking among themselves. Insular.

Wade went to the coms room. Two young women were looking at screens; one looked up at him. “Keri said I could get an email line?” Wade asked.

“You sure can,” one said, standing up. Strong southern accent, short, quick in her movements. “I’m Andrea,” she said. “How long are you gonna be here?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re on a DV tour?”

“Kind of,” Wade said. “I’m down from Washington.”

“That makes it a DV tour.”

Wade nodded, and as she led him down the hall to a terminal in the personal coms room, he told her a bit about his visit.

“Oh, the old dome, yeah. Good idea.” Meaning not a good idea; meaning there were better ideas. “Did they show you the utilidor?”

“No.”

She shook her head. She looked at him curiously; she wanted to help him, he thought. Either just to show him their place, or something more, he couldn’t tell. She had been noticeably blank-faced about Keri. “We’ll have to show you the utilidor, at least.”

Then the door to the coms room burst open and the other woman said “Viktor’s here, Viktor’s here,” pronouncing the name in a way that somehow made the k spelling clear.

“Who’s Viktor?” Wade asked.

“Oh, he’s our Russian friend,” Andrea said. “He lives out here and comes by occasionally, he’s great.”

“He lives out here?”

“Yeah, come on,” and as she headed down to the rec room Wade followed. She explained over her shoulder: “He skis around the polar cap between Vostok and Dome C and the Point of Inaccessibility, and here and the oil stations. Wherever. He’s got his sled filled with everything he needs and just skis around, or puts up his sail and sails.”

“Where does he resupply?” Wade asked, thinking of the disappearances.

“Well, there are ways. You know Vostok is closed now, but they left everything behind, and so he drops in occasionally and takes things.”

“Ah ha! I’d like to meet this Viktor.”

“Yes you would.” She leaned her head into the rec room and shouted, “Viktor is here!” and there was a cheer from inside. “Come on, he’ll be down at Spiff’s place.”

She led him to the outer door of the first module, and Wade followed her outside with his parka barely zippered and his hood still on his back; the cold’s snap to his head almost knocked him down the stairs. Andrea was running ahead of him toward the quiet zone, and Wade saw she wasn’t wearing a parka at all, but was in the same light clothes she wore in the office. “Aren’t you cold?” he cried out as he followed her.

“Why?”

She led him to a pickup truck and unplugged it from its battery warmer and drove him across the runway to the Dark Sector, where a little rectangular building stood on stilts in the midst of a network of poles and lines. They went up stairs and into one of these buildings, Andrea shouting, “Is he here yet?”

“I am here!” boomed a voice from inside the room.

“Viktor!”

In the room, walled everywhere with big machines, a group of people stood around a tall bulky man, dressed in blue photovoltaic clothing the same color as the new station’s exterior. Several conversations were going on at once, but most were listening to Viktor give his news:

“Yes, I have big new project going! Hello, Andrea! Hello! And here is the senator we have visiting, I see! Hello, Wade! Yes, a new project with the Sahara mitigation people. You know they have a very great problem with spread of the Sahara, and I have designed a plan to help, and have just gotten a grant to start. You know,” he said to Wade, “how there is Lake Vostok underneath Vostok Station—a freshwater lake at the bottom of the ice, with as much water in it as your Lake Ontario.”

Wade said, “No, I didn’t know that.”

“Yes, it is one of the biggest bodies of fresh water in the world. And under four kilometers of ice, so the water down there is under most enormous pressure. Drilling through the ice cap is of course no problem these days, and now the materials scientists at Chevron are making flexible pipelines, a Kevlar and soy plastic mesh, very strong, very light, and very cheap! And so we are going to drill down to Lake Vostok, and pipe the water in a direct pipeline to sub-Sahara desert border!”

“No!” several exclaimed. “You’re kidding!”

“Impossible!” one of them declared, with a grin that said he was only egging Viktor on.

“No, Spiff! Is possible! Is quite possible! The height of the ice cap and its pressure on the water will be such to drive it all the way to the equator. Just a few pumps near the end to keep the flow going. The pipe will sink to a few hundred feet under the sea, and come up in Gabon. After that, fresh water for free! The Saharan mitigation group is very excited.”

“Then when the lake is drained the weight of the ice will melt more water,” Spiff suggested, again egging him on.

“No, no. Is not possible, I’m afraid. Not possible. But it will take years to spread Lake Vostok over the Sahara, years.”

Spiff extricated little tumblers from a cabinet of scientific equipment. Viktor pulled a large glass bottle of vodka from his backpack and poured shots all around. Everyone gulped down a toast, except for Wade, who sipped his. Viktor explained the details of his new project to Spiff, who was saying things that would force Viktor to say either “Is possible” or “Is not possible.” Wade had heard other people around the station using these two phrases earlier, and now he heard someone else insisting to a man sitting on the desk, “Is possible, is very possible.”

Viktor came over to Wade. “So you work for Senator Chase. That is good, I admire him very much. The nomads will inherit the Earth, this is what I say.”

Wade nodded. “Sometimes it seems so.”

“What is it like to work for him? Do you ever see him?”

“I very rarely see him,” Wade admitted. “Perhaps twice a year.”

“Twice a year! Very good! This is like an equinox.”

“More like the solstices,” Wade said, which caused Viktor to grin and nod very rapidly. No doubt he was more aware of the difference between solstice and equinox than anybody on the planet.

Spiff came over and joined them, and Viktor gave him a hug with one arm. “My crazy astronomer friend. You are jealous because finally there is a project on the ice crazier than yours!”

“I think I still win,” Spiff said, smiling.

Viktor laughed: “Indeed so.” He looked at Wade: “Do you know Spiff’s work?”

“No.”

“He is the greatest astronomer in the world.”

Spiff rolled his eyes.

“Is not possible,” someone else around them said.

“Exactly,” Spiff said.

“From here Spiff studies the northern sky,” Viktor told Wade. “He is part of famous AMANDA project. They use the whole body of Earth to catch neutrinos. The neutrinos that fly through Earth from the north mostly miss everything completely and fly right through without obstruction, am I right, Spiff? Weakly interacting particles, like me. But sometimes they hit atoms from Earth and knock off muons, and muons fly into this ice cap from underneath and cause a particular blue light, Cherenkov light, yes? So they use the planet for their filter, and the ice cap for their lens, and they record the blue lights with strings of photomultiplier tubes extending one, two kilometers down. These tubes are like lightbulbs in reverse—they take in light and put out electricity—but what lightbulbs! They amplify incoming signals by a hundred million times, isn’t that what you said, Spiff? And from that they determine how many neutrinos, and even where in the sky they came from.”

“You’re-kidding,” Wade said. “Impossible.”

“No, no! Is possible, is quite possible!”

Spiff was laughing at Wade. “Andrea,” he said across the heads in the room, “isn’t the dance starting soon?”

“Yeah!”

“You know me,” Viktor said to Spiff, “I always arrive in time to take a shower.”

“Oh yeah, of course. Here, here’s my key. I’ll see you at the dance.”

Viktor took the key and left. The party in Spiff’s office went on without him; people were getting ready for the dance, Spiff explained to Wade.

“The dance?” Wade asked.

“Hadn’t you heard?” He shook his head. “Keri probably didn’t think to tell you. It’s October 12th, you know.”

“A Columbus Day dance?”

“No, no, this is the day Lake Bonney camp was first established.” He cracked up at the look on Wade’s face. “Not really. The Polecats, the band here, just want to try to convince NSF to make ASL send them to Ice-stock, and so they’re putting on a dance every Saturday night for a while. This one’s a special one because Viktor’s here.”

He asked what Wade was doing at the Pole, and Wade tried to explain. Spiff nodded and took him to his desk for a vodka refill. “They took you into the old pole station, did they?”

“That’s right. Very interesting place.”

“Uh huh. Did they take you into the utilidor?”

“No, what’s that?”

Spiff nodded. “Did they tell you about how the Rodwell works?”

“No.”

“Lake Patterson?”

“No.”

“The buried Here?”

“Buried Here?”

“They didn’t take you anyplace else, did they?”

“No.”

“Is not possible.” Spiff shook his head, thinking it over. “They’re afraid of fingies like you. They’re paranoid after all these years.”

“Fingies?”

“Fucking new guys. Tell you what, talk to Andrea after the dance, and we’ll see what we can do. The truth is, the people down here are going to need some help pretty soon. Someone who isn’t in NSF or ASL who might take their side. Talk to Andrea.”

“Okay. I will.”

“We’ll go over in a second, let me close down here.”

While he was working at a boxy unidentifiable machine that filled half the room, Wade read a small flowchart diagram that had been taped to the wall.

“It’s like a map of Washington D.C.,” Wade observed.

“What—oh, that? It’s a map of the world, man. Here I’m done, come on, the band is supposed to start now, and even with the Antarctic factor thrown in they might be starting soon.”

“The Antarctic factor?”

“Murphy’s law to the power of ten. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Nor the spin axis. Come on.

Out they went, down the stairs in the blaze of day. The pickup truck was gone, however, and Spiff led Wade back over chewed snow toward the station; it looked close, but ten minutes later it was as far away as it had been when they had started, and they were walking fast. “How far is it?” Wade puffed.

“Two k. Good for you.” Spiff upped the pace.

“How’d you get the name Spiff?” Hoping to slow him down.

“Well, the original name was Spliff, but I was going through New Zealand so often I had to change it.” He grinned over his shoulder at Wade.

“The dogs, you mean?”

“Yeah. Insane. It’s an alcoholic nation, basically, so they do the dog thing to convince themselves that they’re really all right. But it can be damned inconvenient. Once I flew down straight after a going-away party without changing my clothes, and the dogs in Auckland went off like a smoke alarm.”

“Scary.”

“Oh yeah. It took hours to get through customs after that, I missed my flight to Christchurch and everything. And I was sweating it anyway, because I had three big spliffs inside sealed pipettes floating in the shampoo in my shampoo bottles, and I couldn’t be sure the damned dogs wouldn’t smell them even so. They’re very good. It would have ruined my thesis. After that I gave it up. Too stressful. Now I just knock back two shots of Scotch and try to imagine it’s a decent buzz. So much noise to signal though. Terrible drug, alcohol. So now I’m Spiff.”

“I see. Was it you thought up this AMANDA experiment?”

“Oh no, no. It’s an old idea. Pretty neat, but I’d rather be doing the cosmic background stuff. Phase-change vortices in the first second of the universe. That’s what we are, man. Flaws in the fabric. Eddies in the whirlpool. Pattern dustdevils.”

“Hey, aren’t we here?”

Spiff was walking past the big blue station.

“No, the dance is in the old summer camp. They tried doing it in the empty module, you know, and it’s a good space, but the windows meant you could never really get away, if you know what I mean. It’s a lot more fun out here.” He led Wade through rows of low mounds, the tops of buried Jamesways, and then down a slope cut by bulldozers into an area like a sunken plaza, where a dozen Jamesways and some blockhouses were still sitting on top of the ice. “This is the old summer camp, where they kept the summer overflow crowd before the new station was built.”

“They meant to pull it out but never got around to it.”

“Right. Besides there’s always a use here for sheltered space. Nothing ever gets pulled out, you’ll see. It’s like hermit crabs moving from one shell to the next.”

The Jamesways they passed had names over their doors: Larry, Curly, Moe, Shemp. “Just say Moe!” Spiff exclaimed, heading for a somewhat larger Jamesway. “Sounds like they’ve started. Yow!”

He stopped outside the door of a longer Jamesway, pulled a flask from his parka, unscrewed the top and handed it to Wade. Wade took a swallow of cold fiery whisky and gave it back to Spiff, who did the same. Then Spiff opened the door—a simple metal handle, Wade noted, on an ordinary wooden door—and walked into loud darkness.

Wade followed him in, through a second door. Inside it was dark and hot. The whole Jamesway was a single long space—half a cylinder, just like a Quonset hut. A band at the far end was playing loud rock and roll. Red stage lights and some strings of ancient Christmas tree lights were the only illumination. A cloth sign spread behind the band said “The Polecats.”

Wade took off his parka and hung it on a rack crowded with them, watching the band as he did. The lead guitarist was good, that was instantly obvious; the rest of the band was like that in any other garage band, or worse. One of the astronomers Wade had seen in the Dark Sector was being urged onto the stage to play sax. He had sheet music in hand, and the bass player clipped it to a mike stand, and then as they began to play, paused to stick the mike right down into the sax bell, after which Wade could just hear a few strangled honks cutting across the grain of “Louie Louie.” Wade himself could have done better; anyone in the room could have done better. The astronomer’s eyes bugged out as he tried to read his music.

But the bass player, after replacing the mike on the stand, was solid; the drummer was solid; the rhythm guitarist was inaudible; and the lead guitarist was great. He was a balding man wearing wire-rims, which windowed an intense abstracted expression. Wade waded into the thick press of dancers to see the man’s hands better, then jounced up and down with everyone else, and found that near the front it cleared out a bit for some real dancing. Here the women of the station were performing a very complicated dance indeed, like that of high schoolers or bees, the social tangle of their minority numbers problematizing matters pretty severely, so that they were dancing with each other a lot, and also with any number of the men around them, but seldom with any one man, except for Viktor. Everyone knew everyone, Wade saw; and even in pantomime he could see example after example of rude or bumptious invitations to dance, the shy awkward men trying to get one of their female friends from daily life to turn into something else, for one dance or even part of one. Many of the women were solving the problem by dancing with three or four men at a time. It probably did not help the awkward interactions going on all over the floor when Spiff and Andrea broke into some very blatant dirty dancing, and both very good at it, having a lot of fun, Spiff making exaggerated pelvic thrusts and holds, Andrea straddling his outstretched thigh and wiggling over it, all without touch or eye contact, all in time to the music, in their own private world but very public too, of course, and peculiar when the music was “Summertime Blues,” but perfect for “Wild Thing.”

Wade got into the rhythm at the edge of the crowd, enjoying the lead guitarist’s work, which just kept getting better and better as the band warmed, playing solo after solo that stung, ripped, howled, soared. The crowd became one big group creature as it followed him outward, singing all the lyrics for the hapless singer/rhythm guitarist, whose guitar was completely inaudible in every song no matter how fast he strummed; he might as well have been unplugged, and possibly was. So it was lead guitar, bass, and drums, and the bassist and drummer were rising to the task of laying a groundwork for their leader on his explorations.

Spiff drifted over at one point to shout in Wade’s ear: “—used to play in five bands at once! Club bands—never recorded—every night of the week—New Hampshire, Vermont—” He gestured at the guitarist, shaking his head in awe. “Not possible!”

Wade nodded to show he had heard. He took another couple of swallows from Spiff’s flask. They danced and danced. Someone turned on black lights, and even a strobe, apparently damaged, so that it changed frequency rapidly. Whenever the mass of dancing bodies overheated the room someone would open the door at the back and in about twenty seconds the room would chill so far that all the sweaty moisture in the air fell to the floor and lay there, a white dust that never melted. At floor level it was always below freezing, Wade realized as he watched the swirls underfoot. “Great air conditioning,” he shouted at Spiff.

Time passed in its own uneven strobe, with some long patches of timeless dancing thrown into the mix of quick choppy impressions. The band finished everything in their repertory and threatened to quit, but the crowd refused to let them; Andrea and Lydia and two or three other women kneeled at the lead guitarist’s feet as if begging him to continue, though it also seemed clear that if he refused they might tear him to pieces. Briefly he smiled, his only expression of the night as far as Wade saw, and looked back at the band and started up again. In the interval the bass player had taped his right fingers with duct tape, and he played on with a happy expression.

Then they started up “Little Wing,” which Wade had not heard in the first set, and after a strangled vocal from the singer, the lead guitarist hammered out the powerful succession of minor chords that Hendrix had laid down, and slowly but surely cast loose from the rest of the band, and, from the look in his eye, from the rest of the universe as well—away from the song, away from the hut, out into some private space of his own, drawing the entire Jamesway along with him, out to that distant place of pain and suffering that was the world, all those nights playing unheard in those bars while he played about the ice, his blues and the South Pole Blues become one and the same, the blues of someone who had come back down to the ice for the nth time after swearing he never would again, drawn down here away from the bars and bands and women and friends, seduced away again by the ice and then stuck down here in its cold boredom. First you fall in love with Antarctica and then it wrecks your life, breaks it in half year after year, every year the same, going north and not knowing where you are or where your home is or what you’re going to do next, swearing never to return and then returning anyway, over and over, to work all day in the frigid sub-biological chill, talking a mile a minute until people actually would say No Robbie no be quiet don’t say a word for at least ten minutes, okay but I’m only saying one millionth of what I’m thinking and then shutting up, zooming in silence, working in solitude—until suddenly here’s a chance to play the guitar and speak all those thoughts, no matter that it was all in music, better that way, for this was the language that meant more than any other even though no one could quite understand it. The awestruck Wade, who had not known until now how much he had been missing music, stopped dancing just to listen to it, and watch those two hands fly about speaking such beautiful untranslatable sentences. Many other dancers had already done the same, standing stock-still as if hearing the national anthem or some great hymn; they all shared this guy’s situation, they all knew what he was feeling, they felt it themselves, and this “Little Wing” was deep, better than Jimi’s or Eric’s or Duane’s or Stevie Ray’s—bigger, darker, more profound. Wade found himself next to Spiff, and tried to convey to the astronomer this perception that had struck him again so forcefully, that music was the language simultaneously the deepest and the most incomprehensible, and the swaying Spiff nodded and cried back in Wade’s ear, “It means the whole project of science is backwards, the more you understand something the less it moves you, my goal now is to reverse that, to do antiscience, to know less, to understand less and thus feel it all more, I want less understanding. Come with us after this and I’ll show you what I mean.” Wade nodded, fell back into the guitarist’s infinite traveling. Far away from Earth, far away from Ice Planet, out to the far reaches of their shared inescapable predicament …

At the end of this great solo the guitarist bowed his head, crushing the last brutal chords, shoving the guitar next to the amp for some shrieking feedback. It seemed to Wade that he was not only done for the night, but could justifiably hang his guitar up forever. He would never play better than that; no one could.

But then the women were on him again, like sirens or succubi, laughing as they tugged his arms and wrapped around his knees, begging him to play another one, demanding it; which, after a big sigh, and a single shake of the head at their greed and lack of understanding, he did. He played “Gloria,” singing the words himself this time, and he led the hoarse crowd through a singalong that lasted many, many, many choruses, clearly intending to bludgeon them all into insensibility so that they would let the band quit before they died. During this eternal “Gloria” Wade was pulled by Andrea into the middle of the network of women, and he was passed from one sort-of partner to another for a few score choruses, soaking in what he could of these women, who were so obviously tough strong people, wearing greasy Carhartts, sweaty and wild-eyed, a lot of them big and tall and so reminding him of Val, fluid in their stocking feet, working-class Americans with a lot of bar hours in their dance moves and their dangerous sharklike smiles, their sidelong glinting private expressions which told Wade they were wild people who had done wild things, so wild that the South Pole was a terrible confinement to them. Watching them Wade could not stop thinking of Val, and he wished like anything she were there; he would have danced with her, not diffusely as he was with these sirens spelling G-l-o-r-i-a over and over, but directly and, in some much less blatant way, like Spiff and Andrea had been dancing before. If only she were here!

As “Gloria” ended the lead guitarist hurried around pulling all the plugs out of the amps. Abruptly the music halted. The grinning bassist held up his bleeding right hand, the duct tape long gone. Someone turned off the strobe and black lights, leaving them in a dim Christmas-tree glow.

Wade was surprised to see that Spiff and Andrea were still there; he had figured they would be hustling off to one of their rooms given the incendiary nature of their dancing, but here they were coming over to him, and Andrea took his arm. “Come on,” she said under the noise of the applause, “get your coat.” Struggling into his parka Wade followed them out the door.

Brilliant sunlight exploded in his head. The cold slammed into him like a great side of frozen beef, nearly knocking him down. He was wet under his parka, and the cold hurt right to the bone. It was a relief when the others started running and he could run too, blinded by a flood of cold-induced tears. Running brought freezing sweat in contact with various parts of him as he moved.

He followed Spiff and Andrea and some others down the ramp into the archway of the old station. In the tunnel it was black as the pit, and by the time his sight returned he was past the geographical pole’s pole and being led into the center of the domed area. Next to the box that had held the old galley there was a round railing and a round trapdoor, like the cover of a giant sewer hole. “This is the old utilidor,” Spiff said up to Wade. “Follow me.”

Wade climbed down a metal ladder so cold he had to yank on his hands to get them to detach from the rungs. At the bottom of the ladder a flashlight beam revealed that ice-crystal flowers had covered everything to the point that it was impossible to tell what was under them. It was like spelunking in a white cave. Spiff brushed off a handful of crystals, and jammed it in his mouth after a swallow from his flask. “Scotch snow-cone,” he mumbled. “Real good. This is the utilidor.”

“Which is?” Wade said, watching their breath freeze and fall to the floor.

“It was the passageway they used to work on the guts of the old station. Cold down here.”

“Yes it is.”

“Sixty-six below, all the time.”

“Sixty-six below?”

“Fahrenheit. That’s right. You can imagine the guys working down here on some busted plumbing or broken wiring or the like. And this was before heated gloves.” Now they were moving along at a good speed, crouched under a ceiling of ice chrysanthemums, and when Wade slowed down Andrea pinched him in the butt. “Now here’s the start of the tunnel to the rest of the underground complex.”

“Complex?”

“That’s right. Did they tell you about old old station?”

“No.”

“Not possible! Those guys. The old station above us here is not the oldest station. The old old station is the one they built back in the IGY, in 1956. It’s about thirty meters under the surface now. The buildings are all getting squished, but there’s a fair amount of space down there still, and a lot of stuff.”

They ducked through a hole at the end of the utilidor, and stepped into a tunnel walled by crystal-coated plywood, which was bowed in at the sides, and down from the ceiling, and up from the floor, and in places even shattered. “It’s okay,” Spiff said. “It’s a slow-motion process. Now we don’t even mess with plywood, because we can remelt the holes so easily with the new laser melters.”

“So you cut this tunnel?”

“Parts of it were cut by a number of different people. Here, look here.” He gestured in a side door at what looked like a closet, with a mattress on the floor and some boxes next to it. “This is really old. There was a winterover when one guy started only showing up for dinners, and no one knew where he was the rest of the time. Then several seasons later the seismograph crew came through and found this place. He must have brought in a lamp, and maybe a space heater. But when they found it there was only a single page from a Playboy, and this stuff here.”

“Wow,” Wade said, peering into this memorial to mental illness.

“They keep it on the route to remind people to be more active in their resistance. See, NSF and ASL think they own this station, they think it’s here for beakers like me, but the people who work here, they know better. They know a lot that NSF doesn’t know about this place.”

They moved on in the frigid tunnel, past a side tunnel that ran, Spiff said, to a crashed Herc buried at the end of the landing strip; then down a branch tunnel that led into the quiet zone, where Spiff shouted out “Hey Ed, come on, we’re going to go sliding!”

No response, so they went down and pounded on the door. It opened, and a pony-tailed head stuck out. “Six of you, three in bunny boots, three in tennis shoes.”

“Right again. This is Wade. Ed can identify the number and footwear of his visitors by reading his seismographs.”

“As well as Chinese nuclear tests, oil exploration blasts anywhere in the southern hemisphere, rocket launches from Canaveral, arguments my ex gets into with her new victims, and dropped bowling balls in Iowa.”

“Sensitive instrumentation,” Wade ventured.

“You bet.”

Ed scribbled an explanation for the sudden explosion of squiggles on the paper rolls slowly emerging from his machines, and followed them down the tunnel.

Another half hour’s freezing walk, and then they climbed down a ladder set in a crack, into another station. Wade looked around, amazed.

This station was crystallized entirely. The walls were buckled, the ceiling in some places only waist high. In the flashlight gleams it looked like a museum exhibit of artifacts from the 1950s, shattered and crystallized. Thick wires looped down like strings of jewels, or the long-sunken rigging of a shipwreck. “Don’t worry, there’s no power here anymore.”

“So you say.”

“No electricity, then. Here, let’s go to the galley. See, look in here.”

Wade noticed that no one was behind them anymore. “Where are the others?”

“Oh, they’re setting up the slide. Here, take a look.”

Wade followed the astronomer into the next broken-walled white cave. Here tables were still covered with china plates and Styrofoam cups, and the walls had shelves of condiments and galley equipment—just like the old station he had already visited, in fact, except more iced-over. A pair of dirty bunny boots on a table. A big coffee pot. Heinz catsup. Over in the corner on the floor lay a spill of rib-eye steaks, badly freezer-burned, and topped by what looked like a human turd.

“This was the first permanent settlement,” Spiff said. “They lived here about twenty years. It was mostly Jamesways buried in the snow, and some bigger plywood boxes, and the connecting archways.”

“Incredible.”

“Yeah. But listen to this. There was a lot of stuff down here just a few years ago, that isn’t here anymore. Most significantly, a big generator. They even considered pulling it when they built the current station, and putting it back to work, because there was nothing wrong with it. But it wouldn’t meet the safety codes and so on. In the end they just left it here. But two seasons ago we came down here, and it was gone.”

“Gone from down here?”

“Exactly. So how did it get out of here, you ask?”

“I do.”

“So did we. We went to every corner of this station that hadn’t been crushed, to try and find out. And on the far side of the station, near where the generator was, we found a snow wall that had been repacked. We cut through it, and there was a tunnel like ours, going off in the other direction. There were wheel marks in the floor. And that tunnel went on for ten kilometers.”

“Not possible.”

“I agree, but there it was! And then it came up to the surface, where there was a little trapdoor covered by snow. And outside that, the polar cap. Nothing else. We were over the horizon from the station. We had gone under the snow the whole way. And no sign of where they went.”

“None?”

“No tracks of any kind!”

“How could that be?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe a helo had dropped people, but there are no helos on the polar cap. Ed thought a hovercraft might have come in, but I thought the sastrugi weren’t disturbed enough.”

“Are there any hovercraft on the polar cap?”

“Yes, there’s an old Hake at the oil camp on Roberts Massif.”

“So you think they took the generator?”

Spiff shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. They would have the same trouble with the old dog as the people here.”

“So who?”

Spiff shrugged. “Who knows? But we wanted you to have the full complement of mystery before you left here. I’m afraid the people who work here, the locals, the people you just saw at the dance, are going to get blamed for all this stuff. They need someone outside ASL to help. So I wanted you to know.”

“I appreciate it,” Wade said sincerely. A convulsive shiver vibrated through him, head to foot. “I’m cold.”

“I know. Let’s go take a slide down the rabbit hole, that’ll warm you up.”

“A slide?”

“Yeah. Have you ever been in a waterslide?”

“Yes,” Wade said, thinking of a park in Virginia, a hotel in Vancouver. “But—”

“I know. Come on, I’ll show you.”

This walk was shorter than the others. Up and out of the eerie crushed ghost town, then along a snow tunnel, into a snow-walled chamber, bigger than anything left in the buried station. There were a lot of parkas and clothes piled inside what looked like a giant dumbwaiter, next to a round opening nowhere near as big as the tunnels they had been walking through.

“You made this too?” Wade asked.

“A group of us. The new heating elements can cut through the ice very efficiently. Did they tell you about the Rodwell?”

“No.”

“Of course not. Did you ever wonder where the station gets its water? Well, it all comes from an underground lake, a chamber down in the ice that is heated until there is a big pod of liquid water. They just keep going deeper and deeper with it as the water is used. The sewage dump is the same; it’s just another underground pod of liquid, good old Lake Patterson, and when it fills they move the heating element to another spot, and the old stuff freezes and heads off in the ice cap, moving north ten meters a year.”

“Lake Patterson?”

Spiff pulled his head out of the hole. “Named after Patterson. Okay, it’s ready. Take off your clothes and down you go.” Spiff was already unzipping.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. The tube is ice, but we’re running some hot water down it now, hear that? And the air is warmed too, it’s almost up to freezing. So it’s like any other water slide, only darker. The ride only lasts a couple of minutes. It goes down about say five stories, in about three hundred meters, and then you land in a warm bath. Be ready for that, it’s a shock when you hit if you’re not forewarned.” He pulled off his pants, stood before Wade naked. “Hurry up, you go first and I’ll shut down here and follow. Hurry, I’m getting cold.”

“I’m already cold,” Wade protested. In fact he had never been colder in his life. But he did as he was told. By the time he had all his clothes off he was shivering violently.

“Okay, jump in and go for it. You can go head first or feet first, but you shouldn’t try changing from one to the other midway, or knee-riding. Not the first time anyway.”

“I won’t. Will it be dark all the way?” Wade said, peering down the hole.

“Black as the pit. Have a good ride.”

Wade took a step up and sat his bare bottom on the ice. “Jesus.”

“Have fun!” Spiff shouted, and gave him a push and he was off, sliding on his bottom. Then the tube dropped away in the blackness and he was on his back, like a luge rider. In fact it had all the qualities of luge—insane speed, rapid turns left and right, up and down, but mostly down, down down down in gut-floating no-g drops, sliding in a stream of warm water over cold slick ice, and all in pitch blackness so there was no way of telling where he would go next. He yowled. The cold of the ice seemed less severe as he sped up, but the air rushing over him was freezing. He shouted again at a heartstopping drop and right turn, you could crack your skull! Except he didn’t.

Three or four more dramatic turns and he began to enjoy himself. Then he was flying through free space, and he shrieked just as he plunged into boiling water. His skin went nova, especially along his bottom and back.

He shot up spluttering and took several gasping breaths, shouting once or twice between them, treading water desperately. It was pitch black, he could see nothing.

“Must be the senator.”

“Just stand up, man.”

“Jesus!” he said, finding his feet. “Hi!” He found he could stand, on an ice floor. The pool of hot water was chest deep. The air was steam. In the blackness he could hear several people talking, including Viktor. His skin was still blazing, but less painfully. “You guys are nuts.”

They laughed happily. No one contradicted him.

With a shout Spiff fired into the pool and rammed Wade, sending him under again. He was pulled to the surface and set on his feet. The person who had pulled him up was a woman. One of the big women from the dance. There were several of them in the pool, in the blackness and clatter of watery noise and voices, everyone moving about. “Ice is such a great insulator.” As his eyes adjusted Wade saw that the chamber was not pitch black, but black with just a touch of blue in it. He still could see nothing whatsoever, not even the basic shapes of the people around him. Under the general clatter he did hear lower voices, and right next to him a quick urgent low exchange: “Ah come on.” “Don’t or I’ll break it off.” “All right! Okay.” Wild laughter.

Wade sloshed around gingerly, wishing Val were in the pool with the rest of these unseen amazons. If you had a thing for jock women, he thought, the South Pole was definitely the place to be. The ice on the bottom of the pool was covered in some places with what felt like big rubber shower mats. Against the unseen walls there was a narrow bench, similarly matted. After a while Wade was thoroughly warmed up and his skin stopped burning. He began to see black shapes in the indigo blackness of the cave. He ran into Spiff, who told him more about the waterslide, with Andrea or someone else her size limpeted to his side, or so it seemed to Wade; it was too dark really to tell. Several years ago, Spiff told him over the noise, Viktor had come by and described a waterslide complex cut under Vostok Station. The local PICO crew, meaning the Polar Ice Coring Office, had included some folks very prominent in the Why Be Normal Club, and they were just beginning to use the new ice-cutting technology, which used hot laser melting elements and steam removal, “real Star Wars stuff, I mean it was developed by the space-beam people at Livermore and Los Alamos, and turned out to be good for nothing at all in the world except it turns ice to steam no problem, which is very useful down here of course—the old ice-coring tech used three thousand gallons of diesel fuel for every kilometer cut through the ice, at ten dollars a gallon, and slow. Basically like melting it with your shower head. But with these lasers you could cut a whole city into the ice, man, and so these PICO freakos helped some winterovers cut this slide here, just to pass the time and keep up with those Vostok Russkies. Although later Viktor confessed that he had made that whole thing up, and Vostok had no such thing. He just thought it would be a good idea.”

Wade heard Viktor’s booming laugh across the chamber. “A good idea!”

“A great idea,” Spiff said. “People here need to resist. It’s been hard here for a long time. I mean ASA wasn’t bad, and yet even then people snuck down and explored old old station, stuff like that. And now, no one likes ASL at all. They treat people like shit, and NSF lets them get away with it. So people resist. It’s a way of staying sane. You can only spend a few weeks here before you begin to go nuts.”

“It was only a few hours for me,” Wade confessed.

They laughed, and someone kissed his cheek; although it was someone with a beard. Viktor no doubt. “Sounds like Viktor is having quite an impact on polar cap society,” Wade said.

Spiff laughed. “Yes, yes. But it’s mostly talk,” he said louder.

A volley of splashes struck them.

“It is! You say so yourself, Viktor. The great idea man. Is very possible! He comes up with a lot of ideas, but he’s undercapitalized. This water pipe to the Sahara—”

More splashes.

“It’s not happening?”

“Well, I’m sure it’s technically feasible, but that doesn’t mean it will ever get done. Hey, stop that! And if it does, it probably won’t be by Viktor.”

“I have grant in hand. Is very possible.”

Then one of the women called out, “Whirlpool, whirlpool!” People began to move by Wade around the perimeter of the pool, all in the same direction; and soon enough he was pulled along as well, in the whirlpool growing because of their movement. “At the North Pole we’d go the other direction, right?” No one replied.

Floating in blue-black darkness. Spinning down a maelstrom, blind. Wade struggled to keep his head above water, then deduced from the splashing, and from people’s breathing patterns, that the others were mostly submerged. He took a deep breath and went under himself, the water very hot on his face, and reached down to the floor and pushed along in the flow. Banging into the icy walls of the bench. Bumping into the bodies of other people, their limbs slick and muscular. Men or women, there was usually no way to tell. His dives got longer and longer. While submerged he turned and tumbled, upside down, rightside up; it got hard to tell, it did not matter, except when it was time to breathe. He let the water tumble him however it wanted to. He was flotsam.

“Look for the Cherenkov light,” he heard Spiff gasp at one point. “Look down at the northern sky, see the muons coming up at us. This ice is as transparent as pure diamond, you can see the light from three hundred meters away, the PMTs see a neutrino every second, blue light,” and then Wade was swept under again, and looking down. Then he was seeing blue streaks from far, far below. The light of distant supernovas. The ice was clear. He did not want this rolling tumble ever to stop. Apparently no one else did either, for it went on and on and on and on and on and on and on. Eventually it achieved a sort of no-time, a limbic limbo, such that afterward Wade could not have said how long it went on; perhaps an hour, perhaps two. What in the world could possibly tempt them back from such amniotic bliss?

Finally Spiff hauled him up. “Come on, man, we don’t want to drown a senator.”

“Oh go ahead.”

They laughed and pulled him up again. “Come on, we’re going to miss breakfast.”

Food; that was what would bring them back. Bare necessity.

Now they were all getting out, climbing up a rubber mat and into a passageway Wade couldn’t see. Blind and freezing, though they assured him it was heated air. Flashlights were turned on, and towels and clothes lay piled in the same dumbwaiter, which was open on two sides; there were two changing rooms, it appeared, one for men one for women, it seemed. In any case there were only men in this room, which was walled by ice rather than the compacted snow in all the tunnels and chambers above: Spiff, and Ed, and Viktor, and the bass player, who appeared utterly blissed-out, though he whimpered as he tried to dress, using fingers that were like Polish sausages. “Snackbar gave his hands so we might live.” They had to zip up his fly and his parka for him. Then they were dressed, thank God, and walking along a crystalline tunnel, the women and the men, all of them steaming like horses, and the steam falling to the floor as white dust.

“If we didn’t heat the air you couldn’t dry off fast enough. You can take a pot of boiling water and sling it up in the air and it hits the ground as dust and pebbles,” Spiff said to Wade. “Crackles like mad.” Wade’s snot was already refrozen, in fact; but his body core was warm, and he felt fine, just fine.

They came to a vertical shaft with a wooden ladder extending up one side. Above they could see nothing. Wade began to climb. It went on till his hands hurt. Then they were climbing snow stairs in a snow-walled passage on a slant, taking a turn on a snow landing, going up stairs again.

Finally they banged up through a trapdoor. They were in the little glassed South Pole Pax Terminal, out by the runway, crowding into it and spilling out.

Wade stumbled back in the stupendous light. He couldn’t stop blinking, and the cold-shocked flood of tears froze on his cheeks. He had been struck blind for sure this time, going from pure black to pure white. Out the door of the shelter and the wind hit like another smack from the invisible side of beef. Wade felt his body ringing like a bell from the blow. It still looked to be the very same time of day it had been when Viktor had arrived, so many eons ago. In an earlier incarnation.

Wade staggered up the metal stairs of the new station, into the stuffy warmth of the blue flying wing. He was reeling, he could barely stand. He could barely pull off his mittens.

He was headed for his room, one pruned hand propping him against the wall, when he ran into Keri.

“So how did you like old station?”

Wade jumped, composed himself. “Very interesting,” he said. “Kind of like a, a cave.”

“Indeed. Now look, there’s a Herc coming in tonight, do you want to take it back to McMurdo?”

“Um, ah.” Wade tried to think. He gaped, and Keri stared at him curiously. “You know, I’d like to visit Roberts Massif, actually.”

“Roberts? The oil folks?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Well, there’s no direct transport there, of course. You’ll have to go back to McMurdo, and then fly out to Shackleton Glacier camp, and then helo up to Roberts.”

“Fine,” Wade said. “Whatever it takes.” He floated past the man into his room.

Sylvia stood before her wall map of Antarctica, marked now with a variety of red, orange, and yellow numbered dots. There were only a few reds and oranges, though each one was individually troubling, of course. But there were a lot of yellows, especially along the coast of Victoria Land, and down the long spine of the Transantarctics. Some of these could be explained by the recent influx of oil exploration groups, and the few remaining private adventure firms. Others couldn’t.

She took the orange marker from her desk and carefully entered a “14” next to the Amundsen cairn on Mount Betty. Another USO, an unidentified sitting object; some kind of radio with satellite dish, apparently, placed much too close to the historic site; owner unknown; discovered by T-023, Val Kenning’s Amundsen trek. She wrote all this down on a sheet of paper numbered “14” in orange, and put it in a file. Helo pilots had seen two other such objects when flying S-046 around the Beardmore Glacier, and another had been stumbled upon near Ice Stream C, by one of the ASL team working out of Byrd Station. That one had been brought back in by the worker, and proved to be a satellite dish and radio transmitter of unknown provenance. She had had it mailed out to Cheech and then Washington for analysis, but no word had come back yet. Geoff often spoke of black boxes in science; here were the ultimate black boxes.

She was still staring at the map, trying to see a pattern in the dots, feeling balked and apprehensive, when she heard Paxman’s light tap-tap-tap at her door. “Come in.”

He stuck his head in. “Wade Norton’s back from the Pole, and he wants to talk with you.”

“Certainly, send him in.”

She moved behind her desk, and Wade entered the room. He presented quite a different appearance than he had on arrival, all very predictable of course: sunburned except around the eyes, which had an unfocused, somewhat stunned expression; hair slicked down into the characteristic Antarctic bad hair mat.

“How did you like the Pole?”

“It was very interesting.”

A long pause, as he appeared to be lost in reminiscence. “In what way?” Sylvia prompted at last.

“Ah, well. Lots of ways. Tell me—are you aware of any other, ah, incidents at the Pole like the ones we discussed when I arrived?”

She stared at him. “None except the ones I told you about.”

“Ah.” Another pause. “And the NSF rep at the Pole, and the ASL station manager; they’re in your full confidence?”

“Why yes. Did they seem not to be?”

“I don’t know.”

Now his gaze was focused, and he was staring at her. Their gazes met for a matter of seconds.

“They weren’t particularly helpful,” he said. “The NSF rep in particular appeared to think I might represent a threat to the Pole station, somehow.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He waved a hand. “It’s not really important. But …” He thought for a moment, appeared to change tack. “I’m thinking of trying to visit the oil exploration camp on Roberts Massif, at the head of Shackleton Glacier.”

“I see,” Sylvia said, taken aback. “And why that one, in particular?”

“Well …” He drifted over to her wall map, found the Shackleton and put his fingertip on Roberts. “See, it’s not so far from the Pole. And it’s not so far from the place where the SPOT train was hijacked or whatever.”

“Here’s the actual site of their current cost well,” Sylvia said, pointing to another red dot, out on the polar cap and even closer to the Pole. “That’s even closer to the Pole and the SPOT incident site.”

“Ah ha. And they use a hovercraft to get around on the cap?”

“Why yes, I’ve heard they do.”

“Do you know anything about this hovercraft?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at him closely. “It’s an old Antarctic veteran, actually. Or part of one. It was based here at McMurdo long ago, then shipped out to Christchurch when it was found not to be very useful.” Actually the rumor Sylvia had heard was that the pilots had been a pair of wild women who had hotdogged around in the thing until the ASA brass in charge at that time had gotten annoyed and taken it away from them. But that was the kind of rumor one heard when out in the field. Transmission error in gossip was a phenomenal thing, and there was no way to know now what had really happened. “Anyway, when these people put together their program they tracked the Hake down in a warehouse in New Zealand and bought it, and had it modified and flew it back down. But why are you interested?”

He shrugged. “There were indications at the Pole that a hovercraft might be involved in some of the thefts from old station.”

“Really? What were the indications?”

“It was something some people said. Just a matter of seeing tracks, you know. Or not seeing tracks. They didn’t want me to break confidentiality, so I shouldn’t say more. I guess because they didn’t tell the NTSB investigators about it. Something about seeing the tracks only because they were out where they weren’t supposed to be, in one of the proscribed zones.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, I thought I’d visit Roberts and see what I could find out there. Keri at the Pole said I had to come back here and fly out to Shackleton field camp, and then get heloed up to Roberts.”

“Yes, that’s right. And we can certainly do that for you. There’s a flight to Shackleton leaving in, let’s see …” She consulted the schedule: “Oh my. In three hours. Think you can make it?”

He blew out a breath. “Ah why not. I can sleep in the Herc.”

“That’s right. First law of Antarctic travel; go when you can.”

“Yes.”

“But what about the people at Roberts, and out at this drill site? What makes you think they will talk to you, or even take you in? They haven’t acknowledged a single one of our messages.”

“I’ve got Senator Chase talking to them directly, and to the home offices in the consortium. It sounds like they’re willing to have me visit.”

“Really! Well, that’s good. That’s progress. I’ll be very interested to hear what you learn there.”

He nodded, looking at her oddly. Another pause. He was not laying all his cards on the table, she saw; and he suspected that she wasn’t either. Well, that was life: NSF and Congress did not have identical interests. Of course NSF reported to Congress, and so in theory she should be telling him everything she knew, or else she would be getting in trouble. “Let’s meet again when you get back,” she said, “and go over everything we don’t have time for now. You’d better get out to the skiway, or else you’ll miss your flight. I’ll have Paxman call out and tell them you’re coming.”

“Thanks.” Wearily he rose and went to the door. Two Herc flights in a single day; and already he looked wasted. He stopped in the doorway and allowed a flash of irritation to show, then shifted it into a wry smile. “If we were to put together the pieces of the puzzle we each have, we might be able to make enough of the picture to recognize it.”

“Yes,” she said.

He stared at her, then continued out the door.

When he was out of the Chalet, Sylvia checked her watch; nine P.M. She sighed; she’d have to wait until mid rats to eat, and she was starving already. She pulled a box of camp crackers out of her desk and got on the phone and had Randi patch her on a radio link out to S-375.

“Geoffrey, it’s Sylvia here, do you read me, over?”

Radio static, harsher than usual; then Geoff’s voice: “Yes, Sylvia, we read you, how are you? What’s up, over?”

“I’ve just had the assistant to Senator Chase here, Geoff. He’s just back from Pole, and he’s off to visit the oil exploration camp in the Mohn Basin.”

“Ah yes. He visited us here, as you know.”

“What did you think of him?”

“Well, he seemed to have a good head on his shoulders. Interested in us, or so it seemed. He asked good questions. We enjoyed his visit, anyway.” Voices and laughter in the background. “Although that may have been because of his mountaineer, or so my young libidinally starved colleagues seem to be implying, yes.” More laughter. “I myself am far above such things, as you know.”

“Oh of course, of course.”

“But do you think he means trouble for NSF?”

“No no, not necessarily. But I think he might have stumbled into the local culture at Pole, and been told some things that he thinks we don’t know.”

“Ah, I see.”

“Tell me, Geoff, did the discussions at SCAR last winter shed any light on what we were calling the unfunded experiments?”

“Not really, no. There were stories, of course. Everyone agrees that there is some of that going on, but no one really knows how much. That’s the nature of the beast, isn’t it.”

“Yes. Do you think Mai-lis is still part of it?”

“I would guess so, yes. I think it very likely.”

Sylvia stared at the wall map. The colored dots on it were like the connect-dots of some foreign alphabet. “Well, thanks, Geoff. How is your work going out there?”

“Oh fine, fine. Field work. You know how that is, Sylvia.”

“Yes,” she said with a pang. Compared to NSF administration in McMurdo, he meant to say, it was paradise. Beaker heaven, as the ASL staff put it. But it was after the fall for her. “Let me know if you hear anything more.”

“I certainly will, although out here we are not in much of a position to hear anything. But some nights we surf the radio waves for entertainment, and if we hear anything interesting I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks, Geoff. Good luck out there.”

“And the same to you, Sylvia. You need it more than we do.”

“I suppose so. It would certainly be nice to have some kind of serious regulatory ability for a change, that’s for sure.”

“Well, you’re a U.S. Marshall yourself, right?” Sounds of laughter behind him.

“That’s right,” she said. “But it may be that we will end up needing a bit more firepower than that.”