William Dietrich - Ice Reich

The captain was in a pleasant mood. It was the day after the whale sighting. The weather was still fine, progress good, and the airplanes appeared in excellent working order. They'd crossed the equator that morning and were entering the southern latitudes. There'd been a ceremony on board with Heiden as King Neptune, christening those who hadn't yet made the crossing. Drexler had recovered his equilibrium and was determined to take his dousing with good humor. He even seized the bucket to spray Greta, who laughed and hurled water back, Neptune backing off hurriedly. The seamen craned to look at the clothes plastered on her body before she ran below to change.

"I felt free as a bird," the American now replied. "I think you've got an agile airplane there. Reinhard let me put her through some paces."

"Yes, I heard your flying was quite… exuberant."

"My stomach is still up there, I'm afraid," Drexler said, trying to make light of his experience. "Hart is quite the stunt pilot." He poured himself some tea. "In good weather."

No one missed the allusion.

"I've had a lot of experience," Hart said evenly. "In all kinds of weather."

"The Dornier's a good plane," Drexler went on mildly. "Range of a thousand kilometers, ceiling of four." He didn't forget what the pilots had told him. "It's part of Germany's leadership in the air." He took a sip of Earl Grey from England and looked at Greta. "I expect someday all of us will travel by air, everywhere. Aircraft will be as commonplace as the auto."

As if everyone would want one, Hart thought. Sick as a dog and now an aeronautical visionary. The man didn't back down an inch.

"Well," Feder put in, "it will be interesting to see how the planes perform in Antarctica."

"I suppose you'd stick to dogs, Alfred?"

"It worked for Amundsen," Feder replied, referring to the first man to reach the South Pole.

"Ach, the Norwegians again. A nation living in the past."

"I think you need to take the best of the past and the future," Hart said. "In Antarctica, wood sometimes works better than metal. Fur better than linen."

"And a gun better than an arrow," said Drexler. "That's why the airplane will let us explore more territory in a day than the Norwegians or British saw in a year."

"I don't disagree with that," said Hart. "I'm a flier. But airplanes have their limitations too. You can only see so much detail. Airplanes break down. Some days they aren't usable. I respect bad weather."

"Yes, a prudent flier," Drexler said. "So we've heard."

"A live flier," Hart countered.

"Jurgen, for goodness' sake," Greta said. "Owen is helping us and you pretend there is some contest of views."

"I'm just making a point. After he made his."

"He agrees with you and you insult him. You need to get to an iceberg to cool your head."

Drexler looked truculent at this scolding but said nothing.

The first icebergs were huge flat chunks from the ice shelf of the Weddell Sea, looking to Hart like mesas rising from a watery desert. They gleamed as if lit from within, shining with pearly translucence under a pale gray sky. In the emptiness of the Southern Ocean their exact size was impossible to gauge but as the Schwabenland steamed closer their immensity became apparent. The white cliffs of their sides were taller than a fortress wall and their bulk was enough to produce a harbor of calm water on their lee side. To windward, ocean swells ate caves into their bulk. The white was veined with blue like marble and just below the slate-gray water the bergs shelved into brilliant turquoise. Their top was snowy and unmarked: the perfect face of snowfalls stretching back ten thousand years.

The days were growing steadily longer as they steamed south. Hart spent the twilight after dinner watching the bergs slide by, wrapped in his flying jacket and wool hat.

"They look like cake, yes?"

Hart turned. It was cold at the railing and Greta was bundled in her Antarctic parka, the fur ruff of its hood framing her face. Her eyes were the same blue as the fissures in the icebergs, but he didn't say that.

"You'll make me hungry," he joked lamely. He was pleased she'd joined him but he didn't say that, either. They seemed to have repaired the awkward dinner and he'd been secretly pleased at her defense of him at tea. Still, he was cautious.

"They're like wedding cakes," the biologist said. "Beautiful but sad. You know that something sublime is about to be consumed, or, in this case, melted. It heightens the beauty, I think- like leaves in autumn."

"Things are more beautiful when they're lost?"

"Yes, because the loss makes the feeling more intense. Sometimes life seems to me to be an endless slipping away."

"Well, things seem more beautiful when you can't have them," said Hart. "Sometimes life seems to me to be an endless anticipation of arrival. Like this voyage."

Greta smiled wistfully. "Ach, what a pair we are! Arriving, leaving, never in the moment! Perhaps we should take a lesson from the whales, who are always in the moment. It would be interesting to be them for a while, don't you think? To have every fiber of your being focused on the now, to drink in all the endless sensations, the colors, the feelings, the scents and tastes. It must be a comfort: not even realizing the inevitability of your own death."

"You seem less a biologist than a philosopher," Hart said, meaning to joke but feeling uncomfortable. He'd never met a woman who talked like this. He was intrigued by her mind but not quite sure how to respond.

"You seem less a pilot than an artist," she countered. "I catch you watching things but not in the way the other men do, as an obstacle or a prize. You have an eye for beauty."

"Yes, I do," Hart risked, looking at her. Tendrils of her red hair fluttered against her ruff in the breeze and her skin was pale and taut in the cold. She blushed, then looked up at him, her eyes searching his.

"Greta, I…"

Abruptly, she turned away and was gone.

The Schwabenland met its first Norwegian whaler the next day. It was a large pursuit vessel, part of a flotilla of harpoon ships that would kill and tow whales to a factory vessel or shore station somewhere beyond the horizon. Its harpoon was mounted like a cannon on its bow.

"I'd like to see the dart that's loaded into that thing," said the pilot Kauffman, watching with Hart from the wing of the bridge deck.

"I saw them hunt last time," the American said. "The harpoons are as long as a man and weigh as much as Fritz. The tip alone is as long as your forearm. They explode inside the whale with a charge of powder. It's spectacular and violent."

"I would have thought it overkill. But then we saw the size of those whales."

The foreign ship swung about from its routine prowl and steamed over. Heiden watched the whaler's approach through binoculars and then spoke to a mate. "Break out the flag," he said. The German ensign began fluttering from a mast.

The Norwegian skipper called by radio, speaking a heavily accented German. "This is Sigvald Jansen from the Aurora Australis," he greeted. "We don't get many aircraft carriers at sixty degrees south! Are you lost, my friends?"

Drexler smiled thinly. "We should tell him to get lost. After we stake our claim he is going to find himself in Reich territory."

Heiden ignored this. "This is Captain Konrad Heiden of the German seaplane tender Schwabenland," he radioed back. "We're on a scientific mission to explore the continent by air. Do you have any word on the extent of the pack ice?"

There was a moment's hesitation as the Norwegians digested this information. "No, we haven't gone that far south," Jansen's voice crackled. "Maybe that's where our whales are hiding! We've had poor hunting so far."