And so, no guillotines. No revolution; no strike. Obviously. X shook his head, trying to rid it of that whole train of thought, and said, “What’s your field? What are you guys studying?”
Forbes glanced at him, trying to judge the level of answer he should make. “I’m a glaciologist. A glacial sedimentologist.”
This struck X as a bit fine; next he’d be saying that he was actually a lateral morainologist. But X let it pass.
“We’re looking at sandstones in the Sirius group. They’re at the center of a controversy concerning the age of the big polar cap. The standard view had the polar cap being a stable feature about fourteen million years old, or older. But this group thinks the ice was mostly gone three million years ago, during a warm period in the Pliocene.”
“You don’t agree?”
“No no, I think they have a good case. They’ve identified marine microfossils in Sirius rock that date from the Pliocene, and biostratification is a well-established dating method. So there had to be liquid water, in places where now there’s only ice. Now they’re looking for other confirmation of this view, and so they’ve invited me to join them.”
“And as a glaciologist, you …”
“The Sirius group is fossil glacial till, that much is clear. So I’m looking for things that glacial sediment can tell us. How the sediment was laid, in what conditions—disconformities to show where things changed—that kind of thing.”
In cold slow motion, X considered it. “Liquid water? Like sea level?”
“Possibly. The dry valleys that open onto the sea are paleofjords, that much is clear.”
“But aren’t we really high here? You aren’t saying that sea level was this high, are you?”
Forbes glanced at him again. “No. The idea would be that these deposits were made when the land was much lower, and then the Transantarctics rose substantially.”
“This far up in the last three million years?” X asked. “Isn’t that kind of fast for mountain uplift?”
He had no idea, actually, but again Forbes glanced at him, eyebrows raised. “I’m not a geomorphologist,” he said at last.
Now that was the pure beaker style. And the other scientists were closing on them as they all approached the helo rendezvous from different directions, converging at a flat spot on the empty brown valley floor. This guy would not want to talk about the group’s project to an amateur with the other members of the group there to hear; none of them liked to do that. So X shrugged and slouched down heavily in the lee of a rock. “Neither am I,” he said to Forbes, sharply enough to get yet another surprised look.
Then the red dragon choppered out of the pale sky, and X was heloed back to Mac Town like a big side of frozen beef. And the next morning, still cold even after huddling all night in his thick blankets, he was back in the heavy shop on the floor, picking up nuts and bolts as if the Nevada freeze-drying had never happened. The pile of metal parts on the floor did not look any smaller than when he had started. It began to seem a kind of Sisyphean labor, and X wondered if Ron might be dumping new junk on the pile at night, in one of his awful practical jokes. The pile would never end. It was the Good For Anything’s nightmare job. He was Sisyphus; he was the Golem, made for dead work; he was Frankenstein’s monster, big and misshapen and clumsy. Call me X. It was interesting how many flaws there were in screw threading, and how few washers were truly flat. But not really.
The heavy shop was nowhere near as bad, however, as running into Val. This painful event was unfortunately unavoidable, and happened time after time; Mac Town was just too small to avoid people. Even if he spent his off-hours skulking in the few spots where he knew Val did not go, he still ran into her; and each time it was as traumatic as ever, so that he would spend the rest of the day fulminating, sweating as he fantasized stinging denunciations arid/or revenge scenarios, which often involved saving her from death and then walking disdainfully away—sad wastes of his mental time, as he knew even while he was in the midst of them. But he couldn’t help it.
And he kept running into her. Usually it happened in the galley; he would go in feeling perfectly equable, empty as a gourd, and then there would be Val, sitting at one of the big round tables with her women friends, the usual gang, a group of gals that was loud, boisterous, confident, a bit intimidating to walk past, giving off the faint whiff of xenophobia that all groups exude when their esprit de corps is pitched just a bit too high—but a good crowd nevertheless, in fact admirable in X’s view, given the situation in America—no shopping anorexics here, but skilled and tough people, just the kind of women he was attracted to in fact, and among them a fair number of his best friends in town—but with Val smack in the middle of them, the queen of the amazons, laughing at something and ignoring him. And another meal would turn to lead in his gut. He even tried spending the extra money to eat in the Erebus View, the private restaurant over the minimall on the docks (which did not have a view of Erebus, of course); but then she would appear there too, and it would be expensive lead in his gut. They seemed to be on the same eating wavelength, as they had been when they first started talking. It got to the point where X would rather go hungry than risk running into her. But of course he had to eat; he had a big appetite, and skipping meals only made him feel faint and irritable, so that he would rush down at midnight the moment the galley opened for mid rats, starving, and there she would be coming in from a late survival class at Happy Camper Camp, or an expedition or something, and he would go faint and feel like screaming Leave Me Alone! But of course it was just Oh hi, oh hi, and he would be doomed to another desperate gulping meal, hands shaking from hunger, followed by a sweat-chilled gut-twisted revenge fantasia, in his room or up on the peak of Ob Hill or on the floor of the heavy shop picking up nails.
And no one to talk to about it. This after all was the group of acquaintances who had just recently been calling him the Earl of Sandwich. And even when he ventured to say something about it to Joyce, the sole friend he trusted enough to talk to about such matters, she only gave him a look from across the great crevasse of gender, a very complicated look, which seemed to be saying among other things that he was a fool to get so involved with a beauty like Val in the first place.
Then, after more complicated looks, and some indirect mutterings, she finally said, “Oh come on, X. Just grow up and get over it. Men have been dumping women just like this for generations, I’ve got no patience with guys who come down here and find the situation is somewhat altered and start moaning about it. So there’s some buyer’s market behavior from some of the women, surprise surprise, but it’s no excuse for all the whining I hear, all the accusations and remonstrations concerning us terrible trolling ice women, and all from men who were doing the same kind of shit all their lives right up to the very moment they arrived in Mac Town.” She shook her head. “Come on, X. Get real. If you wanted a relationship to go well,” stressing the word like it was an archaic silly concept to begin with, “then why did you come to Antarctica?”