Kim Robinson: Antarctica

“Not good Randi, I think I’m being hijacked!”

“Say again X, I did not copy your last message, over.”

“I said I am being hijacked . Over!”

“Hey X, lot of static here, sounded like you said say Hi to Jack, but Jack’s out in the field, tell me what you mean, if that’s what you said, over.”

“ Hi -JACKED. Someone’s locked me in the cab here and taped over the windows! Over!”

“X, did you say hijacked? Tell me what you mean by hijacked, over.”

“What I mean is that I’m in a storm up here and just now some, somebody landed on my roof and covered my windows on the outside with black plastic, and none of my doors will open, something has been done to them on the outside to keep them from opening! So I’m going to go back and try to cut through a bar holding the back doors together, but I thought I’d better call you first, in case, to tell you what’s happening! Also to ask if you can see anything unusual about my train in any satellite images you have of it! Over!”

“We’ll have to check about the satellite images, X, I don’t know who is getting those, if anyone. Just stay put and we’ll see what we can do. Don’t do anything rash, over.”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” X muttered, and pushed the transmit button: “Listen Randi, I’m going to go to the back doors and see if they’ll open, be right back to tell you about it, over!”

He went to the back and shoved out on the doors again. Again they stopped, but this time he fit the hacksaw into the crack over the bar, and began to saw like a maniac. Some kind of hardened plastic, apparently, and the doors impeded the saw. By the time he cut through the bar he was sweating profusely, and when he flung the doors open the air crashed over him like a wave of liquid nitrogen. “Ow!” he said, his throat chilling with every inhalation. He pulled his parka hood up, and held onto the door and leaned out into the wind, his eyes tearing so he could barely see.

But he had a door open. He was no longer trapped. He leaned out to look; the next vehicle in the line was following as if nothing had happened. It was like being in a train of mechanical elephants. No one in sight, nothing to be seen. Rumbling engines, squeaks of giant tractor wheels over the dry snow, the whistle and shriek of the wind; nothing else; but a gust of fear blew through him on the wind, and he shivered convulsively. He needed more clothes. Back up in the cab he could hear Randi’s voice, a clear Midwestern twang that cut through static like nothing else: “Mac Coms calling SPOT 103, answer me X, what’s happening out there? Weather says you’re in a Condition One out there, so be careful! They also said their satellite photos do not penetrate the cloud layer in any way useful to you. Answer me X, please, over!”

Instead he dropped down the steps and onto the hard-packed snow beside the vehicle. It squeaked underfoot. “Shit.” He ran forward and leaped onto the ladder steps that were inset into the lower body of the cab. Black plastic on the windows, sure enough. “Shit!” He tore at it, and the freezing wind helped pull the sheet away from the metal and plastic; he held onto the sheet with a desperate clench, so he would have evidence that he had not hallucinated the whole incident. Then he hesitated, irrationally afraid of jumping down wrong somehow and screwing up, as in his ski fantasy. But surely in the state he was in, he could run a lot faster than the tractors were moving; and it was too cold to stay where he was, the wind was barreling right through his clothes and his flesh too, rattling his bones together like castanets. So he leaped down, and landed solidly, and as his tractor lumbered past he ran out of the line of the treadmarks, to be able to see back the length of the train. It looked short. He counted to be sure, pointing at each tractor in turn; while he did his vehicle got a bit ahead of him, and when he noticed that he ran like a lunatic back to the side of the thing, and leaped up and in, panting hard, frightened, frozen right to the core. There were only nine vehicles now.

High rapid beeping came from her crevasse detector, and Valerie Kenning stopped skiing and leaned on her ski poles. She was well ahead of the rest of her group, and with a check over her shoulder to make sure they were coming on okay, she stabbed her poles deeper into the dry snow of the Windless Bight, causing a last little surge of heat in the pole handles, and took the pulse radar console out of its parka pocket and looked at the screen, thumbing the buttons to get a complete read on the terrain. A beepbeepbeep; there was a fairly big crevasse ahead. They were entering the pressure zone where the Ross Ice Shelf used to push around the point of Cape Crozier, and though the pressure was gone the buckling was still there, causing many crevasses.

She approached this one slowly and got a visual sighting: a slight slump lining the snow. She would have noticed it, but there were many others that were invisible. Thus her love for the crevasse detector, like a baseball catcher’s love for his mask. Now she used it to check the crevasse for a usable snowbridge. The music of the beeps played up and down—higher and faster over thin snow, lower and slower over the thicker bits. In one broad region to her left, snow filled the crevasse with a thickness and density that would have held a Hagglunds. So Val unclipped from her sledge harness, plucked her poles out of the snow and skied slowly across, shoving one ski pole down ahead of her in the old-fashioned test, more for luck than anything else; by now she trusted the radar as much as any other machine she used.

She recrossed the bridge, snapped back into her sledge, pulled it across the crevasse, and stood waiting for the others, chilling down as she did. While she waited she checked her GPS to scout their route through the crevasses ahead. A bit of a maze. The three members of the 1911 journey to Cape Crozier, the so-called “Worst Journey in the World,” had taken a week of desperate hauling to pass through this region; but with GPS and the latest ice maps, Val’s group of twenty-five would thread a course in only a day, or two if Arnold slowed them too much.

There were only two days to go before the springtime return of the sun to Cape Crozier, and at this hour of the morning Mount Erebus’s upper slopes were bathed in a vibrant pink alpenglow, which reflected down onto the blue snow of the shadowed slopes beneath it, creating all kinds of lavender and mauve tints. Meanwhile the twilit sky was pinwheeling slowly through its bright but sunless array of pastels: broad swathes of blues, purples, pinks, even moments of green; as Val slowly cooled down she had a good look around, enjoying the moment of peace that would soon be shattered by the arrival of the pack. A guide’s chances to enjoy the landscapes she traveled through came a lot less frequently than Val would have liked.

Then the pack was on her and she was back at work, making sure they all got across the snow bridge without accident, chatting with the perpetual cheerfulness that was her professional demeanor, pointing out the alpenglow on Erebus, which was turning the steam cloud at its summit into a mass of pink cotton candy thirteen thousand feet above them. This diverted them while they waited for Arnold. It was too cold to wait comfortably for long, however, and many of them obviously had been sweating, despite Val’s repeated warnings against doing so. But even with the latest smartfabrics in their outfits, these folks were not skillful enough at thermostatting to avoid it. They had overheated as they skied, and their sweat had wicked outward through several layers whose polymer microstructures were more or less permeable depending on how hot they got, the moisture passing through highly heated fabric freely until it was shoved right out the surface of their parkas, where it immediately froze. Her twenty-four waiting clients looked like a grove of flocked Christmas trees, shedding snow with every move.