George Bartram - Under the Freeze

He sniffed the air. “Snow coming,” he said aloud. His breath came out like smoke. The cold of night was coming down.

He awoke before sunrise and enjoyed those moments that first waking in a cold room allows, the luxury of lying in a down-filled bag while just beyond that shell the cold waits. The room was dark. The cabin creaked in a wind, which snuffled at the corners like an animal. The cabin was as tight as logs and six inches of insulation could make it, but when the “Montreal Express” blew, a damped-down stove would not keep it warm all night. He put his head out and felt the fresh shock of cold air on his cheek. He smiled. He was beginning to feel better.

He slipped out of the bag and stood naked in the dark, feeling the cold like a fluid poured over his body. He pushed three chunks of wood into the stove and opened the damper, and for a few seconds he held his hands over the brightness of the coals before he closed the door.

By the time the sun was up he was padding around the now warm cabin in stockinged feet, wearing wool-lined khaki pants and a thick sweater. He opened the interior shutters to the light. Pale pink and yellow, the sunlight turned the snow shadows blue and lavender; the rising sun hung in the black trees like a ball of ice. There was cloud between him and the sun. By nine o’clock the first snow would begin to fall.

He made biscuits in a stovetop oven and ate them with strawberry jam that had been frozen all winter, and Danish butter from a can, and coffee like liqueur. Then he sat at the computer, wiping his fingertips on his pant legs.

QUERY MODE , he typed.

ACCESS: BLACK SUN.

VISUAL PRESENTATION: SOVIET SUBMARINES

CARIBBEAN AND SOUTH ATLANTIC/ END.

It gave him a map, white on green, with a column of more or less parallel lines running down to Cuba, then out around the bulge of Brazil and south to a common point east of the Falklands. From there the routes diverged, one cutting east toward the tip of Africa, the other cutting between the Falklands and South Georgia to head close to Tierra del Fuego and the southern islands of Argentina and Chile, and from there into the Pacific.

DELETE NUCLEAR-POWERED , he typed.

One line disappeared, but the patterns were the same.

DELETE DISPLAY/ VISUAL PRESENTATION: SOVIET SUB SUPPLY STATIONS.

Four areas were lighted — one in the Atlantic well east and north of Florida; one in Cuba itself; one east of the Falkland Islands; one in the Pacific far west of Chile.

The computer gave him data on number of missions, on submarines actually sighted and identified over the past five years, on routes taken leaving Russia by conventional subs — out of Murmansk and Archangel, some down the White Sea Canal and into the Baltic; some out of Tallinn into the Baltic directly.

He called up a map of the tip of Argentina that stretched from the Soviet supply point on the northeast to a point equally far west of Tierra del Fuego, which stood at the center. Below the Argentine tip was only open ocean; far toward the upper-right corner were the Falklands; and beyond them was the area worked intermittently by the Soviet submarine supply.

Where the hell is Antarctica ? he thought.

OPEN VISUAL TIMES TWO.

The scale halved. Now a curving finger of land beckoned from the bottom of the screen.

IDENT . He moved a stylus of light toward the finger.

IDENT FOLLOWS: ANTARCTIC PENINSULA AKA GRAHAM LAND/PALMER LAND/ PRINCIPAL ISLANDS: ELEPHANT/KING GEORGE/SOUTH SHETLAND/BISCOE.

Tarp rubbed a finger down his jaw. QUERY: LOCATION ICE , he typed.

SEASONAL OR PERMANENT?

BOTH: SEGREGATE AND IDENT.

A thread of light ran around the finger of land. PERMANENT . A series of dots marked another line farther out. SEASONAL .

QUERY: SEASONAL ICE?

DEFINED AS DRIFT ICE/ FORMS ANTARCTIC WINTER/ WIDEST EXTENT SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER/ SHRINKS TOWARD PERMANENT OR PACK ICE SUMMER.

QUERY: NAVIGABLE?

NO NAVIGATION PACK ICE CONVENTIONAL VESSELS/ DRIFT ICE NAVIGABLE BUT UNPREDICTABLE/ EXAMPLES: N B PALMER YEAR 1820 EXPLORER/ SAILING SHIP/ REACHED PENINSULA FROM FALKLAND ISLANDS/ SCOTT 1910 EXPLORER REACHED MCMURDO SOUND FROM NEW ZEALAND/ AMUNDSEN 1911 EXPLORER REACHED KAINAN BAY FROM

ENOUGH , Tarp told it sharply. He was thinking.

QUERY: DEPTH OF DRIFT ICE?

INSUFFICIENT DATA.

QUERY: IS DRIFT ICE AREA NAVIGABLE BY SUBMARINE?

INSUFFICIENT DATA.

He looked at that unpromising message for a while, and then he looked at a map of Argentina.

QUERY: SUBMARINE FLEET/ ARGENTINA?

The answer was not interesting to him until the following message spread across the screen:

SUBMARINE VESSEL ADMIRAL JORGE CANOSSA COMMISSIONED 1978/ LAUNCHED MURMANSK, USSR, 1963 AS WHISKEY CLASS SOVIET VESSEL SVETAN-LAYOSK/ PURCHASED BY ARGENTINA 1977/ REFITTED MURMANSK 1977-78 FOR MARINE RESEARCH.

He waited, but nothing more came.

QUERY: DETAILS ADMIRAL JORGE CANOSSA?

NO FURTHER DATA.

He played with the Argentine submarine fleet for a few minutes, but nothing more of interest appeared. The Argentines had a small, conventional undersea navy and had used part of it to try to resupply their troops during the Falklands war. Their subs were a conglomerate of other nations’ secondary vessels — conventional boats from the United States, France, Israel, and the U.S.S.R. There was no indication that Argentine submarines ever made contact with the Soviet subs that plied the area. Still, he found the coincidence of the Argentine marine-research submarine provocative. There was at least an Argentine-Soviet connection there. Could it lead to “Maxudov”?

What did the Argentinians want a submarine to do marine research for? he wondered.

QUERY: ARGENTINE SUBMARINE PENETRATION DRIFT ICE/PACK ICE?

NO DATA.

The ice fascinated him. It suggested another world, one unexplored and so full of possibilities. Its closeness to Argentina was inescapable. The Argentinians had fought a war over the little duster of rock that they called the Malvinas. Would they extend their ambitions to include Antarctica? And might they, if they did, want nuclear weapons to back a claim? If they did, they would again find themselves in a confrontation with Great Britain, and Tarp wondered how much the British refusal to cooperate in unmasking “Maxudov” might have to do with their apprehensions about Argentina.

If the Soviets decided to help the Argentinians , he speculated, beginning with some sort of venture in Antarctica …

QUERY: SOVIET ACTIVITY ANTARCTICA?

The screen came alive with a map of the Antarctic. Many lines flowed into it from the perimeter, most of them headed for the Soviet base at Mirnyy. Laboriously, Tarp queried one after the other, got nothing.

There was one rather short penetration of the drift ice, however, that was well away from the usual Soviet activity and closer to South America. He touched it with the stylus.

QUERY?

SOVIET U.S. JOINT SCIENTIFIC EXPEDITION/ SOVIET ICEBREAKER MIKHAIL SOMOV/OCTOBER 1981/ PURPOSE: INVESTIGATION OF POLYNYA.

QUERY: POLYNYA?

POLYNYA: RUSSIAN NOUN/ MEANING: OPEN WATER SURROUNDED BY ICE/ CAUSE UNKNOWN? HYPOTHESIS: WARM WATER SUB SURFACE.

QUERY: RESULTS OF SOVIET-U.S. MISSION?

ENDED NOVEMBER 1981/ ICE/ NO POLYNYA.

QUERY: LOCATIONS ANTARCTIC POLYNYA?

POLYNYA SIGHTED 1974, 1975, 1976 LONG DEGREES: ZERO/ LAT DEGREES: SIX TWO/ ESTIMATED SIZE: TWO HUNDRED FIFTY MILES DIAMETER PAREN HIGHLY VARIABLE PAREN/ SUMMER PHENOMENON.

Tarp called up the map of the tip of South America and the Antarctic finger. The polynya lay seven hundred miles east.

Tarp got up and stretched and made himself a curious lunch from the foods that had stood in the cabin all winter. He moved around the cabin, eating, looking out the window, looking at his feet, occasionally returning to the computer terminal and asking questions that produced fruitless answers. What he wanted to ask it was its opinion of an idea, but the computer did not give opinions. What he wanted then was Repin or Juana to talk to; and then when he had thought about them for a little, it was Juana that he wanted.