So the nine said quick good-byes to Scott and his men, and locked up the Cape Evans hut, and piled into the boat with their nearly empty daypacks, and off they went purring over the black water. Through the steep riven Dellbridge Islands, past the broken stub of the Erebus Ice Tongue. To the left soared steaming Erebus. To the right, across the black water, the Western Mountains stood two or three times their usual height, raised by a fata morgana into a kind of fantasy range, the super-Himalaya of Ice Planet.
Wade sat in the bow of the Zodiac, looking around. He was tired, vibrated, spaced out. A bitter wind blew splinters of sunshine. Antarctica had never looked so surreal to him, so sublime; whether this was because he was on the last leg of his adventure or because of the intrinsic beauty of the scene was hard to say. He felt both detached and absorbed at the same time; happy in some Buddhist sense: desiring nothing. Clarified. The buzz of the craft’s engine was loud enough to allow him to hum at full volume without anyone else hearing him, and so without thought or choice he happily hummed his soundtrack to the scene, the music buzzing in him as if transmitted by the landscape, as if he were a mere radio receiver—the end of Beethoven’s 131 quartet, then the bass phrase from the Ghost Trio and the Ninth that Berlioz had termed the work of a madman, Wade humming it over and over and feeling more glorious the more glorious he felt, the muscular tunes bouncing along with the boat over the low waves, melodies so stuffed with meaning that they were landscapes in themselves, landscapes very like the one they hummed through now, vast and clear and clean of line. Could they live up to the greatness of these tunes, to the greatness of this planet, so vast and beautiful?
As they skimmed in toward the hollow end of Hut Point, overrun with McMurdo’s clutter of buildings, Wade found himself uncertain. The court was still out, no doubt about it. But the tunes kept fountaining out of him. A sort of plan was beginning to take shape in his mind.
They passed a big chunk of broken sea ice, a flat iceberg almost awash in the waves. A crowd of Adelie penguins was standing on it watching the Zodiac pass, some waving their flippers. Wade waved back at them. He saw that other penguins were shooting up out of the water and landing on their stomachs on the ice, sliding over it like big hockey pucks and sometimes colliding with other penguins already up there. Sudden explosions of sundrenched water, and then a slick gleaming penguin suspended in the air over the ice; yet another Escher moment to add to the rest, fish-to-bird, metamorphosis. Wade laughed to see it.
McMurdo now looked like a big town to him, a metropolis, as big and tawdry as any freeway strip in the United States. No; hard to feel the glory there. Hard not to feel a sense of diminution, looking back at the fata morgana to the west, and then forward to Mac Town. He would have to figure out how to hold on to this moment of grace.
The pilot idled in to the dock, the crew tied the Zodiac to the claws. The members of the expedition stepped back into Little America.
Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last. After this trip away, which had lasted only—well—Wade was too tired to calculate it, but it couldn’t have been more than a week or so—the sheer weirdness of McMurdo shot in his eyes like the overexposed sunlight, image after image knocking him back on his heels. Scott’s Discovery hut, looking much like the Cape Evans hut, dwarfed and empty out on its point beyond the docks and the mall. The buildings of the little town scattered over the volcanic rubble, all snow-plastered by the recent storm; but the snow was thawing at this very moment, and all the streets were filled with frozen runnels of ice-crusted mud.
The Zodiac crew led the nine travelers into a big building at the back of the docks, next to the minimall. Inside a group of U.S. Navy officers greeted them with paper cups of hot chocolate and coffee, asked them to sit down on folding chairs, and with tape recorders and clipboards ran through their story, asking question after question. They answered everything as clearly as they could, told them the whole story, though it was clear from the inconsistencies, repetitions and confusions that they were tired. But the Navy men were businesslike and friendly, and soon they were hustling Jack into a pickup truck for a ride up to the medical clinic for a check-up on his shoulder and general condition. The others they asked apologetically to check in at the Chalet, where Sylvia and her team would ask them many of the same questions before they could go to their rooms and get some rest. Those who had given up their room on leaving for their trip were given keys to new rooms, and off they went.
Beeker Street, Crary Lab, the Chalet. The eight remaining travelers slowed, then bunched in the muddy open area above the Chalet.
Wade turned to Val, who was looking around at the town as spaced as any of them, or more so. “Why don’t I go check in at the Chalet for us, and tell them the rest of you will come down after you’ve had a chance to clean up.”
“Sure,” Val said.
Ta Shu was circling slowly, baffled. “This place,” he said. Jorge and Elspeth headed toward Hotel California. X led Carlos off to the BFC. Jim took off for the Holiday Inn. Wade drifted over to the Chalet, climbed laboriously the steps onto the porch. He looked back; without further ado the group that had traveled together so far, the group that had huddled on Shackleton Glacier bare to the storm, had dissipated in all directions.
Wade pulled back the heavy door of the Chalet. Inside things looked just as they had when he had last seen them, and he realized ruefully that he had expected everything everywhere to be changed.
But of course not. Paxman led him across the main room to Sylvia’s office. She was standing behind her desk, listening to a short man speak to her in a low voice. She saw Wade and waved him into the office without ever taking her attention from this man, who talked on in a low monotone, not acknowledging Wade’s appearance with even a glance. Something in Sylvia’s look told Wade that she had been listening to him for quite some time.
“My clients are not associated with Earth First! or the Sea Shepherds or the Arctic Peoples’ Defense League, or the Antarctic World Park Emergency Rescue Action, or the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or any of the mainstream environmental groups, or any of the underground groups.”
“Okay,” Sylvia said. “Who are they then?”
“They don’t tell me,” the man replied levelly. “They’ve given me to know that they are private individuals, of no affiliation, who have decided to practice civil disobedience and direct action in the form of targetted nonlethal ecotage, to resist and hopefully bring to an end all transgressions of the Antarctic Treaty, which was until its expiration the only law this continent had. They feel that the other environmentalist groups allied with their cause can provide the arguments, the legalities, the publicity, and all the rest of the apparatus of resistance, all important, and their function is to take direct action, and then to stay out of sight and remain undiscovered. In this particular case only, they’ve gone so far as to hire me to speak for them here to you, because none of the other groups they contacted would agree to do that.”
Sylvia looked at him closely; Wade would not have wanted to be on the receiving end of that flinty gaze. She could not have been at all happy that the Navy was back in town, Wade thought. And this man was representing the people who had gotten them there.
The man did not seem to notice her gaze. Sylvia said, “Mr. Smith, this is Wade Norton, an assistant to Senator Chase from California.”