Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

This had been a fear of the Allies ever since the Ritscher expedition of 1938-59, when that extremely thorough German scientist, lavishly equipped by the personal order of Hermann Goring, had arrived at the coast of Queen Maud Land in a catapult ship and hurled two excellent Dornier Wal seaplanes again and again into the unexplored hinterland of the Norwegian claim where, using aerial cameras, they had mapped over three hundred and fifty thousand square miles of territory (introducing the art of photogrammetry to the Antarctic) and then pelted the whole thing with five thousand giant steel darts, specially crafted for the expedition, each one topped with an elegant swastika. The land was thus staked and claimed for Germany, and renamed New Schwabia. Initial difficulties with the Norwegians over this presumption had been neatly solved by the conquest of that country in 1940.

Joe put on his boots and parka and went out to tell Shannenhouse of his discovery. The night was windless and mild; the thermometer read 4°F. The stars swarmed in their strange arrangements, and there was a gaudy viridian ring around the low-hanging moon. Thin watery moonlight puddled over the Barrier without seeming to illuminate any part of it. Aside from the radio towers, and the chimneys jutting like the fins of killer whales from the snow, there was nothing to be seen in any direction. The lupine mountains, the jutting pressure ridges like piles of giant bones, the vast tent city of peaked haycocks that lay to the east- he could see none of it. The German base could have lain not ten miles away across level ice, blazing like a carnival, and still remained invisible. When he was halfway to the Hangar, he stopped. The cessation of his crunching footsteps seemed to eliminate the very last sound from the world. The silence was so absolute that the inner processes of his cranium became first audible and then deafening. Surely a concealed German sniper could pick him out, even in this impenetrable gloom, just by hearing the storm-drain roaring of the veins in his ears, the hydraulic pistoning of his salivary glands. He hurried toward the hatch of the Hangar, crunching and stumbling. As he approached it, a breeze kicked up, carrying with it an acrid stench of blood and burning hair potent enough to make Joe gag. Shannenhouse had fired up the Blubberteria.

"Stay out," said Shannenhouse. "Get lost. Keep out. Go fuck your dog, you Jew, you bastard."

Joe was trapped halfway down the stairwell, not yet low enough to see into the Hangar. Every time he tried to get to the bottom, Shannenhouse threw something at his legs, a crankshaft, a dry cell.

"What you are doing?" Joe called to him. "What is this smell?"

Shannenhouse's odor had grown in the weeks since Joe's last encounter with him, slipping free of the confines of his body, absorbing further constituent smells of burned beans, fried wire, airplane dope, and, nearly drowning out all the others, freshly tanned seal.

"All the canvas I had was ruined," Shannenhouse said defensively and a little sadly. "It must have got wet on the trip down."

"You are covering the airplane in the skin of seals?"

"An airplane is a seal, dickhead. A seal that swims through the air."

"Yes, all right," Joe said. It is a well-known phenomenon that the Napoleons in the asylums of the world have little patience with one another's Austerlitzes and Marengos. "I just come to tell you one thing. Jerry is here. On the Ice. I heard him on the radio."

There was a long, expressive pause, though as to what emotion it expressed, Joe felt none too certain.

"Where?" Shannenhouse said at last.

"I'm not sure. He said something about the thirtieth meridian, but… I am not sure."

"Over there, though. Where they were before."

Joe nodded, although Shannenhouse couldn't see him.

"That is what, a thousand miles."

"At least."

"Fuck them, then. Did you raise Command?"

"No, Johnny, I did not. Not yet."

"Well, raise them, then. Christ, what the fuck is wrong with you."

He was right. Joe ought to have contacted Command the moment he finished transcribing the intercepted transmission. And once he had some idea of the nature and source of the transmission, his failure to do so was not only a breach of procedure, and a betrayal of an order-to preserve the continent from Nazi overtures-that had come directly from the president himself, but it also put him and Shannenhouse in potential danger. If Joe knew about them, they almost certainly knew about Joe. And yet, just as he had not reported Carl Ebling after the first bomb threat to Empire Comics, some impulse now prevented him from opening the channel to Cuba and making the report that duty obliged him to make.

"I don't know," Joe said. "I don't know what is the fuck wrong with me. I'm sorry."

"Good. Now get out."

Joe climbed back up the stairs and out into the mercury-blue night. As he started north, back toward the opening of the radio shack, something flickered in the middle of all the nothing, so tentatively that at first he thought it was an optic phenomenon akin to the effect of the silence on his ears, something bioelectric happening inside his eyeballs. No; there it was, the horizon, a dark seam, piped with an all but imaginary ribbon of pale gold. It was as faint as the glimmer of an idea that began to form, at that moment, in Joe's mind.

"Spring," said Joe. The cold air crumpled up the word like fish wrap.

When he got back to the radio shack, he dug out a broken portable shortwave that Radioman First Class Burnside had been planning to repair, plugged in the soldering iron, and, after a few hours' work, managed to fix up a set that he could dedicate exclusively to monitoring the transmissions of the German station, which, it transpired, was under the direct command of Goring's office, and referred to itself as Jotunheim. The man who made the transmissions was very careful about concealing them, and after the initial outburst that Joe had chanced upon, he limited himself to more spare and factual, but no less anxious, accounts of weather and atmospheric conditions; but with patience, Joe was able to locate and transcribe what he estimated to be around 65 percent of the traffic between Jotunheim and Berlin. He accumulated enough information to confirm the location at the thirtieth meridian, on the coast of Queen Maud Land, and to conclude that the bulk of their enterprise, at least so far, was of a purely observational and scientific character. In the course of two weeks of careful monitoring, he was able to reach a number of positive conclusions, and to listen as a drama unfolded.

The author of these hand-wringing transmissions was a geologist. He took an interest in questions of cloud formations and wind patterns, and he may also have been a meteorologist, but he was primarily a geologist. He was continually pestering Berlin with details of his plans for the spring, the schists and coal seams he intended to unearth. He had just two companions in Jotunheim. One was code-named Bouvard and the other Pecuchet. They had started out their season on the Ice at almost exactly the same time as their American counterparts, of whose existence they were fully aware, though they seemed to have no idea of the catastrophe that had struck Kelvinator Station. Their number had been reduced, too, but only by one, a radioman and Enigma operator who had suffered a nervous collapse and been taken away with the military party when the latter left for the winter; in spite of the risk of exposure without coded transmissions, the Ministry had seen no reason to force soldiers to winter over when there would be neither chance nor need of soldiering. The military party was due back on September 18, or as soon as they could get through the ice.

On the eleventh day following Joe's discovery of Jotunheim, for reasons that the Geologist, in the face of intense pressure and threats from the Ministry, refused to characterize as anything more than "unbecoming," "unsuitable," and "of an intimate nature," Pecuchet shot Bouvard and then turned his weapon fatally on himself. The message announcing the death of Bouvard three days later was filled with intimations of imminent doom that Joe recognized with a chill. The Geologist, too, had sensed that loitering presence in a veil of glittering dust at the fringes of his camp, waiting for its moment.