Antarctica

4 Observation Hill

McMurdo’s Chalet was in effect the Government House of Antarctica, but the Americans didn’t have Government Houses, so only Sylvia Johnston thought of it that way. Sylvia was an American citizen by way of a brief but useful marriage many years before; otherwise she was English to the core, English in the way that only long-term expats became.

She arrived at the Chalet (in fact a little American prefab “chalet” from the 1960s, and one of the oldest buildings in town) at 7 A.M., as she did every day of the week except Sundays. She poured a cup of tea and went into her office. First up on the day’s schedule was the orientation meeting for W-003, the latest participant in the Artists and Writers’ Program, this one a Chinese man named Ta Shu, writer and journalist, with no equipment or office needs, which was a relief. Sylvia had come to the NSF as a biologist, having spent many seasons studying skuas and petrels; she was not much interested in the Woos.

Alan and Debbie and Joyce and Tom and Jan all filed in and sat where they usually sat in these meetings. Soon thereafter they were joined by Ta Shu, a short, wiry man with a gray goatee, and long gray hair pulled into a ponytail; his face however only lightly lined, so that Sylvia couldn’t guess his age. She would check his file after the meeting.

He sat in the single empty chair at the table and nodded to them. Sylvia asked them all to introduce themselves.

“I’m Debbie, from helicopter operations. I’ll be scheduling all your helo flights out of McMurdo.”

“I’m Joyce, from the Berg Field Center, where you’ll get all the gear you need that you didn’t bring along.”

“I’m Alan, head of the Crary Lab this year. I can show you the lab, and help you work with the scientists based there, if you need to.”

“I’m Tom and I work with Alan.”

“I’m Jan, NSF’s contact to the private contractors working down here.”

Sylvia went last: “I’m Sylvia Johnston, the NSF representative this year. You’ve been allotted ten helo hours for your time down here, I see. You share hours with other people on your flight, so you may be able to be in the air a lot longer than ten hours, if you work it right. You’ll need to go through the snowcraft course given by Search and Rescue before you’re authorized to go out in the field. I see you’re scheduled to join T-023, the ‘In the Footsteps of Amundsen’ expedition, which leaves a week from today. That’s a good one, I’ve heard. Joyce will help get you outfitted for-that, so you need to make an appointment with her office. Please feel free to use the map center and the library all you want, and come to any of us with any questions you may have.” She went through a short stack of documents they needed him to fill out, describing each as she gave them to him. He nodded, eyes watching her brightly.

She concluded with the usual warning, delivered with a serious look and a raised finger: “Now you must know that we are very pleased to host our artists and writers down here, but you have to understand that you will not be allowed to go off and meditate on your own.”

Ta Shu looked puzzled. “This is what I do.”

“Pardon me?”

“I am a geomancer. A practitioner of feng shui. I often must sit alone. I come to meditate in several sacred Antarctic places, tell people what I observe. As I said in proposal to U.S. Antarctic Program,” with a gesture at the pile of documents.

“I see. Well. In any case—nevertheless—you have to understand that you may have to do your meditation with someone else around, because we operate by the buddy system when in the field. Antarctica is a dangerous place.”

“Very true,” Ta Shu said, nodding deeply, as if there was more to it than she knew. “I will accommodate myself. With many thanks for your help.”

After Ta Shu had left the office they sat in silence for a while, looking down at their papers. Somewhat irritably Sylvia said, “All right, I didn’t read all of his file. But what in the world are they doing sending down a geomancer.”

“Giving him a chance to meditate on his own,” Alan suggested.

Sylvia stared at him, and he raised both hands in defense:

“This guy’s famous, really. He’s broadcasting this trip back to a big audience in China. And he’s been down here before in the Woo program, about fifteen years ago. His name was Wu Li then. He’s the one that wrote that book of really short poems?”

“That’s this same man?” Sylvia had seen the book, one of those volumes that lay on the Crary lounge’s coffee table for years at a time. People said the book’s author had come down as a very long-winded poet, a kind of Chinese Walt Whitman, but after his visit to the ice he had gone silent, and this little chapbook published many years later had been the only poetry ever published by him again. About forty pages of poems, if you could call them that, all of them four words long; things like

blue sky

white snow

or

white cloud

black rock.

Sylvia, swamped by her massive daily influx of NSF paperwork, had always liked the brevity of these things.

“After that book he took up feng shui,” Alan said. “He travels around the world and meditates in places to, you know, grasp their essence. He uses all the old Chinese methods, but apparently he’s into modern science as well. A kind of quantum mechanical feng shui. We at Crary are very interested.”

“Oh come on.”

“No, he’s very big, I’m telling you. He’s feng shuied half the skyscrapers in east Asia. His fibervideo audience for this trip will be huge.”

“So I suppose millions of people just saw me tell him not to go off and meditate in the field when that is the essence of his art.”

“In three-D,” Joyce added.

Sylvia pursed her lips. She had tried on a TV facemask for the first time just the previous year, and she had found the three-dimensional effect quite distinct, although somewhat shimmery and planar—quite beautiful, actually. Apparently people were trying various computer enhancements to render the images crystalline or kaleidoscoped or van Goghed or Rembrandted, whatever. No doubt many of Ta Shu’s audience would be surfing these effects, trying a little of everything. Antarctica as Cézanne or Seurat or Maxfield Parrish, with Ta Shu’s voice-over narration.

“I don’t think he was wearing his video glasses,” Alan reassured her.

Sylvia paged through his file. He was sixty-one years old. “Does it seem to any of you that the Woos have been getting stranger and stranger?”

“Compared to when?” Joyce said.

“Evolution of the arts,” Alan opined.

“Or they’re running out of candidates.”

“Remember the sound artist?”

They smiled. This Woo had come down and learned to do vocal impressions of all the seals, penguins, skuas, and whales in the McMurdo area, also the helicopters, ventilators, generators, and winds, all then mixed together in his compositions. His farewell performance in the galley had been quite amazing, actually, an Antarctic symphony that put Vaughan Williams’s to shame.

“Remember Jerry and Paul?”

“Who could forget,” Sylvia grumbled. Those two had been administrative trouble; a painter and photographer traveling together, with a penchant for taking off in borrowed vehicles. They had also suborned the New York Air Guard into flying two of the Hercs in tandem over the Transantarctics, to get videos of one from the other. Randi had gotten a position fix from Herc 02, then heard 04 on the air and said, “Where are you, 04?” and 04 had given her exactly the same fix as 02, giggling like seven-year-olds.

“What about Leslie, she was just as bad.”

“True,” Sylvia said. Leslie was a photographer with an unerring instinct for the illicit and transgressive; her big coffee-table book had made Antarctica look like 1930s Berlin. A scandal at the NSF home office, and she shuddered to think what it had done at ASL. Heads would certainly have rolled.

Having gotten started, they recounted once more some of the litany of memorable Woos: the painter still working on a single canvas of Cape Royds after four trips down; the modeler who had shaped a working replica of Mount Erebus too heavy to fly out, so that it was still out there in the lumberyard; the novelist whose book had portrayed the NSF as fascist villains, explaining in his acknowledgments that the NSF had been nice to him but mean to his characters; the filmmaker who had slithered around on the sea ice living the life of a Weddell seal pup, including a traumatic unplanned killer whale attack (this movie was still popular at the video rental); the sculptor who had spent all his time making traditional snowmen in the streets of McMurdo; the eminent science writer who had not heard that his flight down had had to turn back just before the Point of Safe Return, so that after eight hours he had climbed out of the Herc back in Christchurch and looked around and said, “Why all the trees?”

Then Paxman came in to announce Sylvia’s next appointment, and they composed themselves a bit guiltily, as for the most part they had liked these Woos they had been laughing at. Compared to the scientists, who were often ambitious, tense, and resentful of NSF’s control over the purse strings, the Woos were great comic relief, an endless string of court jesters. And it looked like Ta Shu was going to fit right in.

Then her next appointment was in the room, a slender good-looking bemused man with black hair. After introducing her colleagues to him, Sylvia excused them; she needed to talk to him alone. Wade Norton, advisor to the Wandering Senator, on an unscheduled visit; this was not good.

Though obviously tired and disoriented, he was friendly in manner, and had focused on each of the others as they were introduced in a way that made Sylvia think he was fixing them in his memory. A man in his position would be greatly helped by a good memory for people. He seemed low-keyed; looked sympathetic; a good listener. Dapper still, despite the obvious hammering of the flight from Christchurch, and from Washington before that.

“How was your trip down?”

“It was interesting.”

Awkward pause.

“Well,” Sylvia said, gesturing out the window at what could be seen of the town. Her window faced across a dry gulch and a pipeline to the blank side of the Crary Lab. “Tell me what exactly you would like to accomplish down here, and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.”

The man smiled and held up a palm: appeal for sympathy. “Senator Chase used to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as you know. Now the current committee majority is blocking the renewal of the Treaty. They’ve also noted that the new South Pole station is finished, at considerable expense, but that NSF has requested the same level of funding for the Antarctic Program for the next five-year budgetary period as for the period of construction. At the same time they’re hearing all kinds of reports from down here, this recent, um, disappearance of a polar traverse freight vehicle? And trouble of various kinds. I think it would be fair to characterize the committee majority as becoming skeptical about the idea of NSF continuing to run the U.S. Antarctic Program, rather than, I don’t know, privatizing things even further than they have been. ASL in combination with a university group or whatever. This is the same majority that advocates privatizing USGS and the EPA, so who knows what they might suggest. Now Senator Chase wants NSF in charge, but he needs to be able to support his support of NSF, so to speak. So he’s sent me down to investigate the situation and make a report, particularly about these recent, um, troubles. I take it there’s been some unusual activity.”

“Yes,” Sylvia said, feeling like she should imitate the geomancer’s knowing nod: more than you know, sir.

He watched her closely. “Well—the senator is curious about that. I think he’s wondering if things happening down here might not be used to advantage to get the Treaty out of committee and back on the table. If he weren’t in the middle of his Asia aid walk he’d be down here himself, because he’s a big believer in the power of face to face. But he can’t come now, so he’s sent me. What he wants is more information to work with.”

Sylvia nodded cautiously. Many people came down claiming to be sympathetic allies, and they usually had their own agendas and were merely hoping to use the Antarctic situation somehow to push those agendas. That’s more or less what this man had just said about Senator Chase. In any case it would be imprudent to reveal anything of a truly confidential nature to an outsider. Which he knew as well as she did. Therefore laying groundwork for later, perhaps.

In the meantime his visit was much like yet another DV outside committee budget review. Why did Antarctica cost so much? Why should American taxpayers pay for it? What was going on down here that was so valuable to ordinary Americans? Review boards and committees came down to ask these questions frequently, and often they were adversarial exchanges, in that they sometimes wanted to look like brilliant cost-cutters, while the Antarctic budget had already been pared to the bone at the same time that NSF had been asked to do more with it, in an environment where safety factors could not be scrimped. Visitors like this man could influence the people in Washington making the money decisions, so to a certain extent they held the purse strings for NSF the way NSF held the purse strings for the scientists down here—a thought which gave Sylvia new insight into the feelings the scientists must occasionally have toward her—an unpleasant mix of caution, hope, and fear.

But still, this one was claiming to be an ally, and she thought it was likely to be true. Like everyone she had heard a fair bit about Senator Chase, and though she did not think he was any longer a serious player in Washington, she admired a lot of what he had done.

“Since this is a continent for science,” Norton said now, “NSF is in effect the government here, isn’t that right?”

“Not exactly,” Sylvia said, though she had often thought of it in just those terms. “There’s SCAR, for instance, the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research. They work under the auspices of the Antarctic Treaty nations, and do a lot to direct what kind of research is done here, and how it’s done as well. In many respects they are as powerful as NSF.”

“Interesting,” he said. “But do they have a budget? I mean, do they fund research?”

“No.”

He left his point unsaid: money was government, here as elsewhere.

She walked him over to the big wall map of Antarctica. “Here are all the field camps deployed this year—the blue pins—and all the trekking groups, the green pins. And I’ve marked the location of all the non-Treaty camps that we’re aware of as well, with the red pins.”

“Are these all that there are?”

“All that we can confirm,” she prevaricated.

He nodded, staring at the map. There were perhaps ten red pins, some around the Weddell Sea, some here in the Ross Sea region, some on the polar cap. “And the yellow pins?”

“Those represent odd sightings on satellite photos, for the most part. Things or shapes, or mostly heat signals from the IR. We don’t have the resources here to investigate all of these sightings, I must admit, and those we have looked into have not revealed anything on the ground. So we mark them, and look at especially interesting ones, but we don’t know what they mean.”

“I see.”

He stared at the map, looking puzzled; perhaps at what he should do next. Sylvia suggested what was in effect a short version of the DV tour, designed to show distinguished visitors exceptionally scenic places in the hope of making them Antarctic advocates when they went home. It very often worked like a charm. “Perhaps the Dry Valleys, and South Pole Station of course, and up onto Mount Erebus,” pointing at the map.

“That would be great,” he said agreeably. “But what about visiting these oil explorations? What they’re doing complicates the Treaty ratification process a good deal. Can you tell me more about them, and perhaps arrange a meeting with one of them?”

Sylvia waggled a hand. “We can ask, of course, to visit one of their stations. But we’ve done that already, and so far they’ve not answered. We could do a Greenpeace on them, I suppose, and drop in uninvited. But the diplomatic repercussions of that might be more than you want. The Southern Club Antarctic Group is a very mixed bag of countries.”

“Yes, I take your point. But how serious are they? Do we know how much oil might be out there, or how much methane hydrate?”

“There are estimates, but the drilling they’re doing now is exploratory only, as I understand it.”

“But they’re pretty sure oil is there.”

“Some oil. There are no supergiant fields, but a few suspected giant fields, and many smaller ones. The old USGS estimate is fifty to a hundred billion barrels. As compared to the eight billion that were under Alaska’s North Slope, or the five million sequestered under the Arctic National Park. But spread around the continent inconveniently, you see. It’s not certain that even in the current state of the global inventory it will be economically viable to mine them. You’d think the new photovoltaics would be supplanting the need for fossil fuels pretty effectively.”

“Capitalization troubles. Besides I’ve heard talk about how important the remaining oil is going to be for its nonfuel uses.”

“Yes, there is that.”

“Is there someone I could talk to who would know how realistic these estimates are? And can tell me more about the methane hydrate situation under the ice cap?”

Sylvia thought it over. “Yes, there are several people, I suppose. Geoff Michelson would be good, I think. He’s been coming down here for a long time and knows the geology of Antarctica very well. He’s also very high up in SCAR, part of their policy-making echelon. So you could kill two birds with one scientist.”

“Where is he?”

“They’re out in the Dry Valleys this season.” She pointed to the spot on the map. “They’re spending a very short time in the Barwick Valley, which is an SSSI, a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Essentially it’s a valley closed to human presence, to keep it as free of contamination as possible. So theirs is an unusual visit. In fact we wouldn’t be able to fly you in there, because overflights by helo are forbidden. You could perhaps walk in with one of the groups we have touring the Dry Valleys.”

He was frowning; not a hiker, perhaps. Or perhaps he was only thinking of the time he had.

“You’d like to talk to him quickly.”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Sylvia thought about it. “We might be able to send you out with one of our mountaineers, if one is free. We could drop you at their helo rendezvous, and you could walk in with the mountaineer.”

“That would be great.”

Sylvia called Joyce. “Joyce, is there a mountaineer free to take Mr. Norton out to S-375 in the Barwick Valley? They’ll just need a day or two there?” She looked at Wade, who was nodding confirmation. “Okay, that’s fine. When does the Amundsen leave? Yes, we can get them back in time for that. Thanks, Joyce.”

She hung up.

Norton said, “What are these trekking groups about? Don’t they infringe on the Treaty as well?”

“Well, the Treaty promised free access to everyone. Not that NSF encouraged tourism before, of course. But it’s a matter of coping with the reality in the field. On the one hand there were more and more private adventure travel companies bringing expeditions down here, flying them in little old planes from Chile into Patriot Hills and other private camps. Then they were skiing or hiking or climbing about. And the Russians were coming down to the Dry Valleys in old Arctic icebreakers and dropping off big groups. Really, they were going everywhere. And the environment down here is very delicate because of the cold; a campsite that leaves behind refuse or human waste will have it here for centuries. You can still find all the depots of the first expeditions down here, it’s quite amazing. But it’s an archeological site when Amundsen or Scott’s people did it, whereas when it’s an expedition from last week, it’s just trash. So that was a problem which NSF was helpless to prevent, because no one owns Antarctica, as you know.”

Norton nodded. “It’s a bizarre situation.”

“Yes. And with Congress asking NSF to run a full program down here on a smaller and smaller budget, it’s gotten quite difficult. The Pole Station had to be finished for it to be occupied at all, and everything else was pinched by that effort. So about ten years ago NSF decided to try a plan whereby we offered carefully designed trekking expeditions through our own private contractor for services, ASL. That way the expeditions could be kept to certain areas and routes, and kept also to very high standards of cleanliness and environmental accountability. We even added a certain amount of data collection to some of the treks, modeling them on the Earthwatch expeditions. So we gave it a try, and our operation here is so big compared to any of the private firms that had been coming down, that the expeditions we offered could be that much better.”

“So you can offer better tours, and presumably at less expense.”

“Well, we charge top rates. But the expeditions are better in every way. And cleaner.”

“And has this in fact cut off the proliferation of small companies?”

“Yes, it’s worked very well. We have to offer the same kind of small groups and adventurous itineraries, of course, or else the industry niche wouldn’t be filled, so to speak. But ASL has done pretty well that way, and I’d say we have ninety percent of the business now. It’s kept the environment cleaner, and it adds a bit to the operating budget down here as well, so it’s a winner both ways. Of course there are those who object to bringing so many people down here at all, but the truth is it’s no more people than would have come anyway, and this way we have a chance to control the conditions of their visit.”

“Interesting.”

“It is, isn’t it.”

Of course it was government muscling out private business in a way that the current Congress would probably hate. But Senator Chase was now part of the opposition, so probably would not mind. Hard to say. It occurred to Sylvia that she could use a political officer, like any other governor of a large province. But no such luck.

Perhaps this man could temporarily fill the role. In any case he did not appear offended by the trekking arrangement; on the contrary, he seemed to approve. He was a civil servant himself, after all.

Now he said, “What about these disappearances—the South Pole overland vehicle, I mean, and the other irregularities we’ve been hearing about?”

Sylvia sighed, and pulled from her desk’s In tray a sheet of paper detailing all the incidents from the previous two years. “As you see by the chronology, there has been a fairly sharp increase in incidents of theft.”

“Indeed,” Norton said, glancing through the list.

“We have ASL looking into it, of course, and the National Transportation and Safety Board has been called in for this last case, as well as the FBI.”

“What do you think is happening?” He looked at her closely.

She shrugged. “There are a lot of people down here. Civilians of various sorts. ASL itself has subcontractors. And despite our efforts with adventure travel, there are still private groups down here as well. So …”

“You’re saying it could be just ordinary theft.”

“Yes.”

“It seems weird to steal things down here, though. Impractical.”

“Yes.”

A long silence. There was more to be said, but it seemed to Sylvia that some of it had better wait until he had seen some of the DV tour.

“Well,” he said, apparently reaching similar conclusions himself. “What do I need to do to get ready for the Dry Valleys?”

After the meeting Wade was led by a young man who introduced himself as Paxman to a building nearby, a grubby old two-story box sporting a painted sign declaring it “Hotel California.” Paxman showed Wade into one of the rooms on the ground floor, and Wade threw his two orange bags on a single bed. The room reminded him strongly of his college freshman dorm—small, institutional, a sink and mirror in one corner, the bathroom shared with the room on the other side of it. Drapes permanently pulled, it appeared, no doubt to provide darkness to sleep in.

Paxman said, “Sorry, there are some great rooms up in the Holiday Inn, but they’re all full on such short notice.”

“No problem.”

Not a place to hang out, however. So after Paxman left, Wade went down the stairs in the big freezing stairwell on the end of the building, and walked out into a frigid breeze. The sun was hanging in the west over white-and-black mountains that were as vertical as cardboard cutouts. Wade wandered the unpaved lava rubble streets of the settlement—not so much streets, actually, as mere open spaces between clusters of buildings. The buildings were a mix: new flying-wing shapes, covered entirely in metallic-blue photovoltaic film; worn functional wooden or cinder-block warehouses and dorms; military barracks or Quonset huts from the Navy years, or perhaps even from the town’s founding during the International Geophysical Year of 1956–57.

His wristphone beeped.

“Hi Wade! It’s Phil. Where are you now?”

“I’m in McMurdo Station, Antarctica.”

“Are you! Is it cold?”

“It’s cold.”

“What does it look like?”

“Well—” Wade looked around. “It’s what people mean when they say adhocitecture.”

“Hockey texture?”

“It’s a real mix. All kinds of buildings.”

“Just tell me what you see, Wade. You’re my eyes.”

“Well, I’m walking by the Crary Lab now. It’s quite small, composed of three small buildings on a slope, with a passageway connecting them. There’s a street sign saying that I’m on Beeker Street, but it’s not much of a street. There are a lot of pipelines right on the ground.”

“Much traffic?”

“Not much traffic. Now I’m passing a building like a giant yellow cube, with a bunch of antennas on the roof. Must be the radio building. Now I’m passing a little chapel.”

“A church?”

“Yes. Our Lady of the Snows. Now I’m on a road going out to the docks. Right now the docks are empty, because the bay is iced over. In fact there are trucks and snowmobiles out on the ice. There’s a kind of minimall behind the docks, one of the newer buildings. A restaurant on the second story, with windows. Looks like it would have a good view of town. Here’s a sign that tells me I’m on the way to the Discovery Hut, built by Robert Scott’s party in 1902.”

“It’s still there?”

“Yes. A small square building.”

“Amazing. So did you meet with the NSF rep? How did it go?”

“It was interesting. She’s a Brit, she’s very polite. She was pretty much in damage-control mode, I’m afraid. Playing it cautiously. But I wouldn’t expect anything else right now. I tried to lay the groundwork. The thing is, I don’t know how much she knows. If she’s just an annual appointment rotated in here, I can imagine she might be temporary enough, and formidable enough in person I might add, not to be told about some things.”

“Yeah sure.”

“So, I’m off to see a Professor Michelson, an old veteran down here. He’s big in the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, apparently one of the major players.”

“Okay, good. Get the view from the top and then proceed. Give me a call if you need any help, and I’ll call again to get the news myself soon.”

“Where are you again?”

“I’m in Turkestan right now, but I’m off to Kirghiz tomorrow. I’ll be in touch. Stay warm!”

“I’ll try.”

It would not be easy. Out on Discovery Point the breeze was really cutting, so cold by Wade’s standards that it was beyond cold really and down into some new kinetic sensation entirely. If it weren’t for the very warm clothing encasing him he would have been, he didn’t know—petrified perhaps. Instantaneously.

The historic hut proved to be locked. A bronze plaque declared it a World Heritage Site. Beyond it stood a memorial to a man named Vince, drowned nearby in 1902. Across the town stood a tall dark cinder cone, topped by another little cross. Wade found it hard to imagine what it had been like here in 1902. Walking back into the center of town took only ten minutes, and though his nose and ears were cold, the rest of him was warming up just from walking around in his many layers of clothing. Before he knew it, he was at the other side of town; it was only a few hundred yards wide. He started climbing the volcanic cone. Paxman had pointed up at it from Hotel California, and mentioned that it had a good view, and that the cross was a memorial to Scott. And he was in Antarctica, after all. Had to get out and around.

A rough trail led over pipelines running behind the last row of buildings, then up the brown volcanic rubble of the hillside, following the spine of a ridge directly to the peak. It was a braided trail with lots of alternatives, the rubble tromped to sand by hundreds of pairs of feet making their way up the cone, including the feet of Scott and Shackleton, Wade supposed. Though the air was still cold he heated up inside his parka, and soon had it entirely unzipped and pulled open. Hands in pockets, climbing up a hill in Antarctica. He was on the lee side of the cone, and it began to feel like he was in a skin-tight envelope of hot air, on which the cold air still pressed tangibly.

Near the top the rock became a single mass of cooled cracked lava, twisted and gnarly. The wind whistled over the peak and blew his envelope of hot air away. He zipped up the parka quickly, impressed at how quickly the cold bit.

He reached the top. He could see a long way in every direction. A knee-high bronze panorama plaque named the various features one could see. At the foot of the other side of the hill lay the Kiwis’ Scott Base, a dozen green buildings clustered on the shore of the smooth white plain of the Ross Ice Shelf. Ross Island broke steeply out of this smooth plain, and rose in the distance to the stupendous broad white volcano that was Mount Erebus, looking somewhat like the cone Wade stood on, only white and ten million times bigger.

In all directions the sea was frozen white, the ice either permanent or annual. Far out on the sea ice Wade could make out the faint lines that marked the airport where his Herc had landed. The airport’s trailer buildings were the merest black specks on the ice, which gave Wade a sudden sense of how vast everything was. Far beyond the airport lay what the panorama informed him were Black Island and White Island, appropriately named, and beyond them Mount Discovery, a black cone maypoled with white glaciers, and the Royal Society Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, jumping out of the white sea. Buttery shafts of yellow sunlight lanced down the valleys of these far mountains.

Struck by the views, Wade only in a final dizzy turn noticed that there was already someone else on the peak. A man, sitting on the rocks just under the wooden cross, protected from the wind. “Hi,” Wade exclaimed, startled.

A big man, massive in a dirty dark green parka, broad face brooding behind sunglasses and the fur fringe around his parka’s hood. Tan overalls, knees dark with accumulated oil and grease. One of the ASL employees, evidently.

He grunted something at Wade and continued to survey the scene. Wade maneuvered past him to the big wooden cross he had seen from the town below. It was about ten feet tall, a thick squared-off beam. The letters they had carved into it in 1913 had been painted white, and the paint had withstood the flensing of the wind so much better than the bare wood that though the letters had been carved in to begin with, they now stood out a little from the surface. The grain of the wood also stood out. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. And then five names, with military ranks included. Wade stared at it for a while, at a loss. Tennyson was not a poet that postpostmodernism had managed to convert to its own purposes. And the Scott expedition had been a bit of a mess, as far as Wade recalled. He had never studied the matter.

The man sitting on the peak stirred, and Wade glanced down at him, again at a loss. Finally he said, “Do you come here often?”

The man stared at him, impassive behind mirrored sunglasses. “Often?”

“You’ve been up here before?”

“Yeah.”

“Nice view.”

“Great view.”

“Yes. A great view.”

They looked down on McMurdo together. The buildings’ roofs were all metal of one sort or another: ancient corrugated tin, the latest photovoltaic blue gloss, everything in between. Except for a row of six brown dormitories, no two buildings were alike: gleaming blue spaceships, ramshackle wooden shacks, black Quonset huts, open fields of lumber, the Holiday Inn, the docks, the tourist mall, the row of brown dorms, the little Crary Lab, the even littler Chalet next to it, down by the helicopter pad and the shore …

“Have you lived here long?” Wade asked.

“No.”

“What do you do?”

“GFA.”

“GFA?”

The man turned to look at him; Wade saw that the question branded him a newcomer. “General Field Assistant.”

“I see.”

“And you?”

“I work in Washington, for a member of the Senate.”

“Which one?”

“Chase.”

“The one that’s never there?”

“That’s right.”

The man nodded. “You must be here to look into the ice pirates.”

“Yes,” Wade said, surprised. “I am.”

“I’m the one who was in the SPOT train that lost a vehicle.”

“I see…. There seems to be a lot of stuff like that happening.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea what might be going on?”

“Me?” The man was amused.

They sat there looking down at McMurdo. “Not a particularly attractive town,” Wade ventured.

“It grows on you.”

“Really?”

The man shrugged. “It’s ugly, but … you can see everything about it. Right there before your eyes.”

As he finished this statement a figure appeared below them: a woman, coming around a rocky knob as she climbed the same trail Wade had. Thick gloss of dark blond hair, long thighs in sky-blue ski tights, rising rhythmically under a black parka, covering broad shoulders. The two men watched her climb. Wade’s companion had hunched forward. She was taking big steps up, in iridescent blue mountaineer’s boots. She looked up and they caught a brief glimpse of blue mirrored sunglasses, broad cheekbones, fine nose, broad mouth. Wade’s eyebrows shot up; a beauty, it seemed, with the shoulders of a rower or weightlifter. Wordlessly the two men stared. And then she was there, stepping easily, breathing easily; “Hi,” she said easily. She had the breezy insouciance that Wade thought of as a cheerleader’s cheeriness; the confidence of an attractive woman, brought up in the American West somewhere. An outdoorswoman.

“Hi,” the two men replied.

Startled, the woman looked again at Wade’s companion. “Oh hi, X. I didn’t see you.”

“Uh huh.”

Uh oh, Wade thought, looking at the two of them. The man was hunched into a kind of boulder.

“Valerie Kenning,” the woman said to Wade, and extended a hand.

“Wade Norton.”

“Nice to meet you. What brings you down here?”

“Looking around,” he said, explaining again about Chase as he rubbed his mittens together.

“Are you cold?” she asked. “Let’s move down just a bit and get out of the wind.”

They all moved down into the lee of the gnarly brown peak. When the man she had called X stood, Wade realized that he was really tall, almost seven feet it seemed. Taller than the woman, but not by a great deal; and the woman was a good bit taller than Wade. X sat down again heavily.

“Aren’t you cold?” Wade asked the woman, noting her relatively thin parka, tights and gloves.

“Why no. Can’t say I am.” She laughed: “A good fat layer I guess.”

“Uh huh,” Wade said doubtfully, glancing at the impassive X. A good fat layer indeed. “What about you?” Wade asked him.

“I’m always cold,” X said shortly.

Wade tried to draw him back out. “You were saying something about how everything in the town is visible?”

X nodded once. “Nothing’s buried. The whole town is right there where you can see it. There’s its power supply, see the fuel tanks up in the gap, and the main generators there under us. There’s the power lines, and the sewer lines, and the sewage treatment facility. Down there you see the raw materials for building, and then all the working shops, the warehouses, the vehicle parking lots. Then all the people stuff takes up just a small part of the space, around the galley and Crary.”

“The stomach and the brains,” Valerie said. “It’s like one of those transparent bodies with all the organs visible.”

X nodded but said nothing. He didn’t want to have a pleasant conversation with her, Wade saw; he was resisting her attempts to be pleasant. She continued to point out features to Wade: the helicopter pad as airport, the harbor and docks still iced over, the mall behind the docks as entertainment district, also in deep freeze until the tour ships arrived. Then the radio building as communications industry, and even a historical district, in the single dot of the Discovery Hut on the point opposite them.

“Can you guess what’s missing?” she asked.

“Police station?” Wade ventured. “Jail?”

“That’s true, very good. But that’s not it.”

“The Navy would come in and be police, if they needed them,” X said darkly. “And they don’t need a jail because they take you away.”

“Hmm,” Wade said. “So there’s no law enforcement here at all?”

“Sylvia is a U.S. Marshall,” X said. “She could deputize people if she needed help locking someone up.”

“There used to be a town gun,” Valerie said, smiling at the memory, “but they were afraid of some winterover going postal, so they had it disassembled and the pieces distributed around town in three or four offices. And now some of the offices have lost their piece.”

She and Wade laughed; X continued to brood. He would not be pleased by her, Wade saw.

“So what’s missing, then?”

“People,” X said.

Val nodded. “Nobody in sight, see?”

Wade saw. “Too cold.”

“That’s right. No one hangs out outdoors. McMurdo looks like that twenty-four hours a day. Occasionally you see people going from one building to the next, but other than that, it always looks like a ghost town from up here.”

“Interesting,” Wade said.

They sat and looked down at the empty-seeming town, which nevertheless hummed and clanked with a variety of mechanical noises. Some vehicles moved, up among the acres of lumber and container boxes.

“Where do you go next?” Wade asked Val.

“I’ve got a Footsteps of Amundsen to guide next week. But first I’m taking a DV out to the Dry Valleys.”

“Oh, that must be me.”

“Really! Well—nice to meet you. It should be a good trip. I’m glad to get the chance to see Barwick Valley, people don’t get to go there very much.”

“So I was told. I still don’t know exactly where it is.”

She pointed at the mountains across the flat sea of ice to the west. “Over there.”

Wade nodded doubtfully. X was now staring at him, and though it was hard to tell with the sunglasses and hood and scarf and all, it seemed he was glaring at him. Perhaps because of this trip with Val. Though of course that was not exactly Wade’s doing. “Where will you go next?” he asked, trying to defuse the look.

X snorted. “GFAs go where they’re told. Although I might be quitting, now that you mention it.” Looking now at Val: “I might be resigning from ASL, so I can take an offer to go out and work for the African oil people.”

“No!” Val exclaimed. “X, are you really?”

“Yes,” he said. “I really.”

“Oh X.” She pursed her lips, shook her head. Wade saw that she didn’t want to talk about it in front of him. X was looking glumly down at the town.

Finally she turned to Wade: “You’re still cold, aren’t you.”

“Yes.” He was shivering hard enough to give his voice a vibrato, almost a trill.

“Well, we should get down. I’ll show you where we’re going on the maps. Also, have you gotten your gear yet?”

“No.”

“I’ll see that you get the good stuff.”

“Great, thanks.”

They stood up. X remained seated, staring at Val with that impenetrable look. Val returned the gaze:

“See you around, X.”

He nodded. “See you around.”

“Nice meeting you,” Wade said awkwardly, aware that he was being used to get out of a confrontation of some sort.

“Nice meeting you too.”

And the big man sat watching them as they descended. Wade took one glance back and saw him there under the big wooden cross, hunched over and brooding.

X slouched down the ridge to Mac Town, his feet like two frozen turkeys attached to the end of his legs. His fingers were cold, his pulse sluggish, his heart numb. He went to the galley and caught mid rats. The night crowd was heavy, mostly the old iceheads done with the swing shift, plus some beakers done with their email. X took two Reuben sandwiches and a mug of coffee and sat at one of the empty round tables. First he downed the coffee, holding the cup in his fingers till they burned. Then while he was devouring the second sandwich Ron sat down beside him.

“So what do you say?” Ron said, leaning in toward X with an exaggerated conspiratorial leer.

X swallowed. “I’ll go for it.”

“Good man!” Ron nodded, first in surprise, then satisfaction: “I knew you would.”

“I didn’t.”

Ron grinned his pirate grin.

Abruptly X stood and grabbed his tray. “When do I go?”

“Day after tomorrow. They’ll drop by the Windless Bight station.” This was a private airstrip set beyond Scott Base, a kind of parasite on the two government bases, barely functioning these days. “Get yourself out there, and they’ll pick you up and take you out to their camp in the Mohn Basin.”

X nodded. “I’m gonna go resign.”

He left the galley and walked by Crary to the Chalet. Inside he told Paxman that he was resigning, and Paxman got him the forms to sign with no surprise or objection. It looked like he would not have to explain himself to Jan or Sylvia, as he had feared he would have to. Ever since Helen had resigned midseason and ASL had sued her for breach of contract and lost, it had become one of the options available to disaffected ASL employees. It was burning your bridges, because ASL would never hire you again, that was for sure. But they couldn’t stop you from doing it.

So he put his signature on the form, powerfully tempted to sign it “X.” But he signed his full name, to make sure everything was legal, and gave the form back to Paxman.

“What are you going to do?” Paxman asked.

“Work for the African oil people.”

“I’ve been thinking of doing that myself. Good luck out there.”

“Thanks.”

Then he turned, and there was Sylvia in the doorway, looking at him with a calm hard evaluative expression. She was NSF of course, and what an ASL employee did was in theory not her concern. But it was all connected down here. And the oil-exploration camps were the most visible sign that the Antarctic Treaty was in limbo, and in danger of falling apart forever. So X tried not to cringe under her sharp eye.

“Didn’t like general field assistance, I see,” she said.

“No.” He met her look and held it. “ASL doesn’t do right by its employees. We’re treated like it’s such a privilege to be in Antarctica that we can always be replaced. The hours are longer than is legal back in the world, there’s no security season to season, no retirement, no benefits beyond the bare minimum. Nothing that real jobs have, or used to have. And NSF sets the conditions, you let them do it. You could tell them what they can do and can’t do, and create better working conditions down here.” He kept his voice soft and calm; no fits here, just stating the facts.

Sylvia said, “There are legal limits to how much NSF can interfere with the contractors they hire.” She shook her head, turned toward her office. “Good luck, X.”

Back out into the wind, dismissed. He trudged up the torn snow and mud to the Berg Field Center warehouse. Ob Hill loomed behind the old building. There were things about Mac Town that he was going to miss. Joyce was in the BFC lounge, an area of the upper floor which had a few couches, a magazine rack, a table and a coffee machine.

“I came to say good-bye,” X said. “I’m off to one of the oil camps.”

“Oh X,” Joyce said, looking annoyed. “Not really.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

She didn’t believe him. He wasn’t sure he did either.

“Anyway I’m off,” he said.

“Does Val know?”

“Yeah. I ran into her up on Ob Hill.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh X. She misses you, you know.”

“Right.”

“No, really. I think she’s done her trolling, you know, and found out that she made a mistake. That guy Mike was a jerk. She likes you better than the rest of the guys down here.”

X shrugged. “Too late now,” he said, trying to squash a tiny little hummingbird of hope that was now zooming around in his chest. Irritated, he held a poker face. Joyce stood up awkwardly, and came around her desk to give him a hug, her head just higher than his belly button. He accepted the hug gratefully, feeling like a beggar.

“What a mess,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She pulled back to look up at him. “You shouldn’t go, X. Not just because of Val. We’re working on trying to improve things here.”

“Uh huh.”

“No, really. Listen X, the service contract comes up for renewal at the end of this season, and ASL very well might lose it.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“No, really!”

But Joyce had educated X on the history of the companies hired by NSF to run its Antarctic bases, so she was in large part responsible for X’s skepticism. The first company, Holmes and Narver, had won its bid during the height of the Cold War, and was rumored to have been a CIA front company. The second server, ITT, had just finished helping the CIA overthrow the Allende government in Chile, so there was no question about its CIA connection; and it had close ties with oil companies too.

The third company, Antarctic Support Associates, had been a great improvement over the previous two, Joyce had said. An ordinary and even good company—certainly the good people in it had made it as much of a home as they could, and they had been in the majority. Joyce and many other office heads still in McMurdo had started with ASA and still remembered it fondly. Its contract had been the usual ten-year deal, however, and NSF had required it to give potential competitors some subcontracts so that the competitors could learn enough to make truly competitive bids at contract time. ASA had dutifully done this, and in its third ten-year stint given a subcontract to a subsidiary of a multinational conglomerate, one of the most hardball in the new global economy. There were rumors that this subcontractor had conducted some cuckoo-in-the-nest type activities, subtly messing up ASA where it could; but in truth its aggressive downsizing had resulted in such low labor costs that it was able to make a very low bid simply by sweatshopping its McMurdo labor force, and counting on the attractions of the place and the tough times up north to keep positions filled. And as NSF was constrained by Congress to accept the lowest bid without judging labor practices for anything more than legal compliance, the new company had won easily, and ASA was gone. As they took over McMurdo the owners of the new company had rechristened it Antarctic Supply and Logistics, either because they had not looked closely at the resulting acronym or because they had and wanted to make it clear right away just what kind of tough lean no-nonsense 21st-century corporation they really were.

This of course had been a disaster for all the old ASA hands who wanted to stay on, who had had to reapply for the same jobs at a fraction of the old salary and benefits package, with all their seniority lost. And it had been a déjà vu disaster for Joyce, who had seen it all before in her first profession, nursing; there she had been downsized to “census-dependent full-time employment” early on, meaning that she was full time unless not enough beds in the hospital were filled, when she would be called and told to stay home without pay. She had gotten pissed off and decided that if taking care of sick people was going to be sweatshopped like everything else then she was going to quit and light out for the territory, in her case the white south.

So X’s skepticism concerning her hope for change only reflected what she had taught him. But now she held off all that bad history with an outstretched hand: “No, listen,” she said seriously. “We’ve got some plans, we’re really working on it. And you’d fit right in.”

“I’ve already resigned.”

“Shit.” She shook her head, disgusted. “Damn it, X, you should have talked to me first!”

“I want to go.”

She gave him a very hard look. He was taking things too far, the look said; he was being oversensitive, romanticizing the whole Val thing. Miserably he stared back at her, refusing to concede the point.

She shrugged, dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Okay. But you remember what I said. It’s the truth you know! We’re going to change things!”

He nodded and clumped down the stairs. There at the turn in the stairwell was the big photo of Thomas Berg in the middle of a polar dip, grinning and wet, chest-deep in the subzero water of McMurdo Sound, in a hole hacked in the sea ice like a seal hole, the man like a big seal. It had always struck X as a poignant memorial, as Berg had soon after that died in a helicopter crash in the Dry Valleys. Now it struck him harder than ever, as some sort of general comment on what one’s happy moments really meant, on how long they lasted. He walked out into the slap of the wind feeling worse than ever.

So he was in no shape to talk to anybody, much less Val herself, and when she came out of the galley door and saw him and approached, he groaned. This town was just too damn small. And yet there was that little hummingbird whirring around inside him now, trying to flit out one of his pupils with his look at her—a very close inspection indeed—trying to judge the possible truth of what Joyce had told him, looking for signs of regret, or friendliness, or anything but the dismissive nonlooks he had gotten from her since she ended their friendship.

And indeed she had such a look on her face, and no sunglasses to hide it; there was no mistaking it, she was distressed. Or else mad at him. “Are you really going?” she said.

“Yes. I just finished resigning.”

“Oh X,” she said. “God damn it, those folks are breaking the Treaty, you don’t know what’s going to happen down here if the Treaty doesn’t hold, they’ll wreck everything!”

Of course he wouldn’t be doing this if they had stayed a couple. They both knew it, but they wouldn’t talk about it. And here she was ragging on him while they were standing alone out in the wasteland of pipelines and telephone wires; but up on Ob Hill she had pretended not to care in the slightest, unwilling to show anything in front of the DV, that politico with his fancy haircut and his parka worn like a camel-hair overcoat, talking on the wrist to Washington and to wherever his roving senator was now, a handsome guy with money and prospects and a career, onto whom Val had immediately glommed. Women were drawn to power like iron to a magnet; it was sociobiology in action, the gals looking to protect their little babies no doubt; but still it made X sick to see it.

So he glared at her and did not reply. He could not think what to say when he was so mad at her and yet at the same time that hummingbird was zipping around in him like an attack of angina.

“People have been breaking the Treaty for years,” he said finally. “Your tour groups are breaking the Treaty as they used to interpret it. The southern countries doing this exploration are using really safe technology. And it’s exploration only. It won’t be a problem. I’m looking forward to doing some real work for a change.”

She waved a hand angrily, swatting him without actually swatting him. “You’ll end up doing the same kind of thing you do here.”

“They’re going to train me to do more.”

“Right.”

He looked down at her. Not very far down, it was true; this was one of the things he had loved about her, she was a woman his size. And not just physically, but in her mind and spirit. He had loved her, and sure, he loved her still. But this was too much. If she wanted to ask him to stay, or berate him for not staying for personal reasons having to do with them, if she wanted to apologize for dumping him so brutally after their arrival, she could do it; here he was, this was her chance, her last chance for months at least, maybe her last chance ever; and here she was nattering on about the goddamned Antarctic Treaty, as if that mattered any more or was the real point between them.

Maybe some of that got across to her in his look. She pursed her mouth and looked off to the side unhappily. Unhappy cheerleader; it was a sorry sight. But she was too stubborn to apologize, and by God he deserved an apology. They had been partners, they had been sleeping together, making love; they had been in love. Or so he had thought. Then they had gone off to do their business in the world and come back here, just a couple of months apart, and as usual on her return (just three days before him!) there had been a bunch of guys coming on to her—big deal, it was no excuse, when had it been any different for a woman who looked like her? No, McMurdo was no excuse. They had been an ice romance only—she had wanted to break it off for reasons of her own, and the great number of men in McMurdo was just an excuse and a damned lame excuse at that.

And she wasn’t going to apologize.

“I’ve got to pack,” X said, struggling to keep his voice level. He turned and walked away before he started to shout at her, or cry.

And the next day he was out at the little air station that the private tour companies had established in the Windless Bight—nothing more than two Jamesways and a fuel bladder next to the snowplowed landing strip, one of the smallest barest camps X had ever seen. The plane didn’t show, and he spent the night in a Jamesway named “The Random House,” sleeping uneasily on an ancient dead mattress, listening to the Preway roar like the ghost boos of a ghost audience, watching his life movie from inside his head: a remake of The Man Without a Country, starring The Man With No Name.