Robert Silverberg - Thorns

“Minner! No, Minner! No!”

He thrust more snow at her. And she at him now. Convulsed with laughter, she forced it past his collar. It was so cold that it seemed to burn. Together they floundered on the snow. Then she was in his arms, and he held her tight, nailing her to the floor of the lifeless continent. It was a long while before they rose.

He woke screaming again that night.

Lona had been expecting it. For most of the night she had been awake herself, lying beside him in the dark, waiting for the inevitable demons to take possession of him. He had been brooding, on and off, much of the evening.

The day had been pleasant enough—barring that nasty moment right at the outset. Lona wished she could call back the admission she had made: that it was Chalk who had put her up to approaching him in the first place. At least she had withheld the most damning part of all: that Nikolaides had thought of presenting the cactus, that Nikolaides had even dictated her little note. She knew now what effect such knowledge would have on Burris. But it had been stupid even to mention Chalk’s promise of restoring the babies. Lona saw that clearly now. But now was too late to unspeak the words.

He had recovered from that taut moment, and they had gone off to have fun. A snowball fight, a hike in the trackless wilderness of ice. Lona had been scared when suddenly she realized that the hotel was no longer in sight. She saw flat whiteness everywhere. No trees to cast shadows, no movements of the sun to indicate directions, and no compass. They had walked miles through an unchanging landscape. “Can we get back?” she asked, and he nodded. “I’m tired. I’d like to go back now.” Actually she was not all that tired, but it frightened her to think of getting lost here. They turned back, or so Burris said they had done. This new direction looked just the same as the old. There was a darkness several feet long just below the snow in one place. A dead penguin, Burris told her, and she shuddered, but then the hotel miraculously appeared. If the world was flat here, she wondered, why had the hotel vanished? And Burris explained, as he had explained so many things to her (but in a more patient tone now) that the world was not really flat here, but actually nearly as curved as at any other place, so that they need walk only a very few miles for familiar landmarks to drop below the horizon. As the hotel had done.

But the hotel had returned, and their appetites were huge, and they had hearty lunches, washed down with flagon after flagon of beer. Here no one drank green cocktails with live things swimming in them. Beer, cheese, meat—that was fit food for this land of eternal winter.

They took power-sled tours that afternoon. First they went to the South Pole.

“It looks like everything else around,” Lona said.

“What did you expect?” he asked. “A striped pole sticking out of the snow?”

So he was being sarcastic again. She saw the sorrow in his eyes that followed his crackling comment, and told herself that he had not meant to hurt her. It was natural to him, that was all. Maybe he was in such pain himself—real pain—that he had to keep lashing out that way.

But actually the Pole was different from the surrounding blankness of the polar plateau. There were buildings there. A circular zone around the world’s bottom some twenty yards in diameter was sacrosanct, untouched. Near it was the restored or reproduced tent of the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, who had come by dogsled to this place a century or two ago. A striped flag fluttered over the dark tent. They peered inside: nothing.

Nearby was a small building of logs. “Why logs?” Lona asked. “There aren’t any trees in Antarctica?” For once her question was a shrewd one. Burris laughed.

The building was sacred to the memory of Robert Falcon Scott, who had followed Amundsen to the Pole and who, unlike the Norwegian, had died on the way back. Within were diaries, sleeping-bags, the odds and ends of explorers. Lona read the plaque. Scott and his men had not died here, but rather many miles away, trapped by weariness and winter gales as they plodded toward their base. All this was strictly for show. The phoniness of it bothered Lona, and she thought it bothered Burris, too.

But it was impressive to stand right at the South Pole.

“The whole world is north of us right now,” Burris told her. “We’re hanging off the bottom edge. Everything’s above us from here. But we won’t fall off.”

She laughed. Nevertheless, the world did not look at all unusual to her at that moment. The surrounding land stretched away to the sides, and not up and down. She tried to picture the world as it would look from a space ferry, a ball hanging in the sky, and herself, smaller than an ant, standing at the bottom with her feet toward the center and her head pointed to the stars. Somehow it made no sense to her.

There was a refreshment stand near the Pole. They kept it covered with snow to make it inconspicuous. Burris and Lona had steaming mugs of hot chocolate.

They did not visit the underground scientific base a few hundred yards away. Visitors were welcome; scientists in thick beards lived there the year round, studying magnetism and weather and such. But Lona did not care to enter a laboratory again. She exchanged glances with Burris, and he nodded, and the guide took them back on the power-sled.

It was too late in the day to go all the way to the Ross Ice Shelf. But they traveled for more than an hour northwest from the Pole, toward a chain of mountains that never got any closer, and came to a mysterious warm spot where there was no snow, only bare brown earth stained red by a crust of algae, and rocks covered with a thin coating of yellow-green lichens. Lona asked to see penguins then, and was told that at this time of the year there were no penguins in the interior except strays. “They’re water birds,” the guide said. “They stay close to the coast and come inland only when it’s time to lay their eggs.”

“But it’s summer here. They ought to be nesting now.”

“They make their nests in midwinter. The baby penguins are hatched in June and July. The darkest, coldest time of the year. You want to see penguins, you sign up for the Adelie Land tour. You’ll see penguins.”

Burris seemed to be in good spirits on the long sled ride back to the hotel. He teased Lona in a lighthearted way, and at one point had the guide stop the sled so they could go sliding down a glassy-smooth embankment of snow. But as they neared the lodge, Lona detected the change coming over him. It was like the onset of twilight, but this was a season of no twilight at the Pole. Burris darkened. His face grew rigid, and he stopped laughing and joking. By the time they were passing through the double doors of the lodge, he seemed like something hewn from ice.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Who said anything was wrong?”

“Would you like to have a drink?”

They went to the cocktail lounge. It was a big room, paneled in wood, with a real fireplace to give it that twentieth-century look. Two dozen people, more or less, sat at the heavy oaken tables, talking and drinking. All of them couples, Lona noticed. This was almost entirely a honeymoon resort. Young married people came here to begin their lives in icy Antarctic purity. The skiing was said to be excellent in the mountains of Marie Byrd Land.

Heads turned their way as Burris and Lona entered. And just as quickly turned away again in a quick reflex of aversion. Oh, so sorry. Didn’t mean to stare. A man with a face like yours, he probably doesn’t like to be stared at. We were just looking to see if our friends the Smiths had come down for drinks.