It made perfect sense. The basic sensibleness of the co-op system: it was more just, and therefore would increase employee motivation and loyalty, and thus make for better work, leading to more efficiency, even by the standards of the downsizers. X found it very easy to make a case for this. It meshed coherently with what most Americans were taught as kids to be the basic values, fairness, justice, democracy—it was easy to defend using those base values. So he described to his old friends and acquaintances a McMurdo that had become a kind of miniature Mondragon, every business structured as an employee-owned co-op in an interlocking system of co-ops, including the banks. In a McMurdo like that, X would say, emphasizing this point very heavily, people would finally be able to take control of their careers in Antarctica, and not have their lives fatally split between their love of the place and the whim of the one boss in town.
That got them thinking. And though there were a lot of skeptics, a lot of other people nodded and said “Sounds good, count me in.”
Returning from the latest of these meetings he ran into Wade, and they stopped to confer without having to say a word about it, like two brothers crossing paths in a city. “Listen,” X said, “you ought to try talking to Professor Michelson about what they found out in the Dry Valleys this season. That Graham Forbes told me they found something good—he wouldn’t say more, but it seems to me that your senator ought to be able to use this dynamicist scenario to make it clear just how dangerous global warming is, and then press his program that much harder.”
“I’ve been thinking that myself,” Wade said. “I’ll ask Michelson as soon as I see him, thanks. How’s it going otherwise?”
“Pretty good. I’m helping Joyce and Randi and some of the other folks here to mount a bid for the field services subcontract. We’re forming a co-op of all the people in town that we think would do well, and it’s a lot of the best people here.”
“Phil will love that too, that’s one of his current obsessions. Keep at it, and I’ll see how I can help from my end.”
“Okay I will.”
A brief hand to shoulder and they were off, each in his own direction.
Wade for his own part was working the town almost as hard as X was. Soon after the first meeting was over he went back into the Chalet and found Sylvia on the phone in her office, and tapped on her open door. She gestured him in and he went to the big wall map of Antarctica, looking at Sylvia’s system of dots. He had forgotten her code, and the patterns the colored spots made still suggested nothing to him.
She got off the phone. “That was Christchurch. The storm is finally clearing off Cape Adare, and so they should be sending down the whole crowd any time now.”
“So we have eight hours more on our own?”
“Yes.” She didn’t look happy at the prospect of all the official investigators who would soon be descending on them.
He gestured at the map. “So do the dots match with the ecotage events, as far as you can tell?”
“Some of them correlate with the satellite dishes that were disrupting communications,” she said, coming around the desk and pointing to some of the orange dots, all over the continent. “Then others would appear to mark camps of the ferals whom you met.”
“Hard to see patterns when there’s more than one thing going on.”
“True.”
“Are you confident that your satellite photo analyst is giving you all the sightings that he’s making?”
She looked surprised. “Not confident, no. I suppose I was assuming as much, but I don’t have the wherewithal to check him.”
“Would you mind if I gave him a call and asked him some questions? I’d like to discuss some ideas I’ve had with him, and if you give me a reference, perhaps he would agree to talk with me.”
She looked at him, making an unspoken question.
“I’d like to help if I can,” Wade explained. “Help the Treaty process. Help keep NSF in control of the American Antarctic program. And so on. It all fits with what Phil Chase is trying to do. With what I’m trying to do.”
She thought it over. “I don’t see how it could hurt. He’s in the security agencies, some kind of split position, but he can always take a call and then make his own decision. I’ll get you his phone number,” she said, going to her desk to look it up and write it down.
“And his name?”
“Ask for Sam.”
Wade nodded. “Thanks. Now about the ecotage. Can you tell me the …?”
“I have an overview from Search and Rescue here.” She plucked another piece of paper from her desk. “Apparently everything was synchronized to start on October 15th—let’s see, just six days ago, my. It feels like longer.”
“So true.”
“Whether they waited for a Condition One storm to hit or it was just a coincidence, I can’t say. Automated satellite tracking dishes coupled with powerful radios—we’ve found seventeen of them, stretching from the Peninsula down the length of the Transantarctics to Cape Adare, with five more out on the polar cap beyond the Pole. The assumption is there are more we haven’t found yet. They appear on initial investigation to be chop-shop compilates with east Asian source materials from the turn of the century. The dishes were pointed at carrier satellites, mostly Ku-band fourteen gigahertz, the report says, and some twenty gigahertz hub satellites; unmodulated signals were sent at frequencies that captured these satellites. When the captured satellites’ traffic was rerouted, dishes then found and captured the new carriers. All that activity ended after forty-eight hours of disruption. At its start, however, seven of the SCAG consortium’s test drilling sites were destroyed, as were the base camps at Roberts Massif and Pioneer Hills. The bombs appear on initial investigation to be home brewed and contain no taggants. Before they exploded all occupants of the oil stations were rounded up at gunpoint by masked teams carrying assault weapons, and they were taken by snowmobile or blimp,” raising her eyebrows, “to the nearest scientific field camps. Most of them to Shackleton Glacier, some to Byrd, some to the Italian camp in the Ellsworth Range.”
“Except they missed us, because we were out on a trip,” Wade said.
“Yes. They appear to have gotten everyone else, however, and no casualties have been reported. No identification of the kidnappers made so far.”
Wade explained what he had seen with the ferals. “So, you know, as far as I can tell, which isn’t all that far, the ferals who are still out there didn’t have anything to do with this, and the ones who did are somewhere in South America.”
“Hmm.”
“So do I take it that no NSF property was damaged, then?”
“No no, we took our share. Small hits but carefully placed, and quite debilitating. There are some lessons to be learned, no doubt. A small bomb on the roof of the radio building, and another at the repeater on Crater Hill, augmented the satellite failure. And lastly sixteen fuel tanks, including all the big ones up in the Gap, and several outlying helo fuel bladders, were contaminated with a variant of one of the oil-eating bacteria designed to clean up oil spills on water. This particular species grew into thousands of small clumps until it died, so that it was dangerous to use the fuel remaining in those tanks. That was a real nightmare—we had to figure out how to filter the fuel, and then test it for reliability.”