The little Twin Otter stopped next to an oblong fuel bladder, lying on the ice at the end of the dock. When the props had stopped spinning X followed the pilot out the little door and down the steps. Out from under the wing he straightened up, and was greeted by a bearded man in a plaid shirt and Carhartt overalls, approaching hand out, smiling.
They shook hands. “I am Carlos,” the man said. “Welcome to Roberts Massif.”
“Thanks,” X said. It was frigid out, and breezy, but the man’s bare hands were warm. He led X to one of the buildings, and in through the meat-locker door. “Pretty windy to be out in shirtsleeves,” X remarked.
“Oh, yes, Roberts is a windy place. Even when it’s not windy it’s windy.”
“That’s too bad,” X said with feeling. Wind was the hard part of the cold.
“Yes, well, you know, the katabatic. Air is always falling off the polar cap just from its own weight, and we are right on the edge of the cap. So it can be perfectly still out on the ice, or down on Shackleton, but never here. We have entered it in the Windiest Town on Earth contest, but so far no reply.”
“That’s an environmentalist contest though, isn’t it?”
“Precisely. A great one to win when they finally admit we are the windiest.”
Carlos, as he told X while heating soup for their lunch, was Chilean. His father had been an officer in the Chilean Air Force, and during one of the periods when Chile and Argentina had been actively trying to substantiate their overlapping claims to the Antarctic, he had been stationed on the Antarctic Peninsula. So Carlos had spent the first ten years of his life as a resident of the Chilean stations Arturo Prat and General Bernardo O’Higgins, up in the Banana Belt as he put it, which was somewhat warmer than most of the continent, but notorious for storms.
“It was a wonderful childhood,” he told X cheerfully. “Wonderful! I can bicycle on ice, I can pilot a Zodiac through anything, I can talk to penguins and skuas. Not to mention the more usual skills. I’m a true Antarctican, one of the few. Most of them are Chileans like me, although there are some Argentinians as well, not as good at it of course. One of my first memories is of the time that their Almirante Brown station burned down, and the old Hero brought its people by on their way out. They were sad, and the commandante had fallen into a loco antartida. And of course now both countries have given up on the occupation program, so there are no Antarctic children growing up anymore, which is also sad, I think. Because it was a great, great childhood. The happiest time of my whole life.”
“And now you’re out on Roberts Massif.”
“Yes.” A quick glance from the stove, to see what X meant. “There is opposition to this project, admittedly. But from people ignorant of what we are doing and how we are doing it. This is a clean project, a very clean project, the latest in everything, you will see. Everything has been engineered with massive redundancies at the criticalities. Because of the latest advances in extraction technology, that means it is very safe indeed. A sure thing. Here, there is some of our new stuff out the window now, look.”
He pointed out the little building’s one window, and X saw a vehicle like a ferry glide down from the high horizon and float across the slope of blue ice into the bay, then slowly up to the dock.
“A hovercraft. The latest thing, a Hake 1500a.” Something in his grin made it clear he was joking, but X didn’t get it.
“Wow.”
Carlos stroked his black beard, which was as dense and fine as seal fur. “Okay, let’s eat quick and go load it, and then we can go out to the drilling site itself. Your work will take you back and forth, but mostly you will be out there, on the ice.”
The hovercraft was not quite as smooth to ride as it was to watch, but once the pilot and copilot got it up and running, it was at least as smooth as flying a plane; and faster than a boat; and not quite so loud as a helicopter. One set of fans blew air down into the space under the skirts of the craft, lifting the body of it, which they called the tub, off the ice and onto the air cushion; then a big fan set in a tall housing at the back of the craft propelled it forward, kind of like an Everglades boat. Little stripped-down snowmobiles had been attached to outrigger booms on each side of the craft, and usually these machines hung in the air from the booms, but they could be let down and the snowmobile treads run, in order to give the floating hovercraft some traction against a side wind, or a steeper undulation than usual on the ice. These outrigger booms, as they called them, were late additions to the craft, and the pilots were proud of them. It was an older vehicle than X had expected, functional on the inside, well-worn, even battered, which was perhaps the explanation for the joke Carlos had made back at Roberts. X inquired over the roar, and Carlos nodded. “A product of Corrosion Corner,” he replied loudly. “Miami Beach, Florida. Three Hakes cannibalized and rebuilt as one. With improvements.” He grinned.
The ice flowing past them on either side was a rolling white sea, broken by ferocious-looking shear zones, where for some reason the ice was broken to shards; perhaps a submerged rock reef, or a clash of two ice currents; Carlos shrugged when X asked him. Red flags flying on poles set at kilometer intervals marked their way, and at the base of the poles were round radio transponders, guiding the hovercraft’s automatic pilot; at this point the human pilot and copilot, Geraldo and German, were up and about, refilling their coffee mugs. Previous passes of the hovercraft had blown down the sastrugi en route, so that the craft traveled over a distinct road, dull white through bright white and vice versa, running from flag to flag. As the hovercraft floated along it tilted gently up and down, and sometimes side to side, as they hummed over the big shallow waves of the polar cap, its extremely slight hills and valleys, basins and mounds.
“There is our camp, straight ahead.”
A black dot on the sunburnt white horizon.
“Another ten kilometers, but we’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“We’re going that fast?”
“Yes, look—a hundred kilometers an hour! It is the fastest vehicle on the ice, by a long way. Not quite so fast as helicopters, but it hauls a lot more. And helicopters, you know …”
“Yes,” X said. He had seen the wrecks on Erebus and in Wright Valley: burnt skeletons.
“The flying refrigerator, as they say. You talk about criticalities! But this thing, even if it fails you can get out and walk. No crash and burn. Now you can see the main building, just showing. It’s a very little camp, you see.”
Geraldo and German took over the controls and brought the hovercraft slower and slower into its parking lot, next to a fuel bladder and a warehouse. Carlos saw the look on X’s face, and laughed. “Ah good, I see you’re going to like this place, eh? Good man.”
The drilling station was even smaller than the supply depot on Roberts Massif. It was manned for the moment by Carlos, Geraldo and German, two Malaysians, a Namibian and a Zimbabwean. All of them greeted X in a friendly way, looking up at him from their seats in the station’s common room and grinning as one of the Malays said, “We can get you to do the work on the top of the derrick!”
After a ceremonial hot chocolate, Carlos took X around the facility to show him what they had. Carlos now wore a thick parka over his Carhartts, X noticed; it was really cold out here, even though the wind was not as stiff as at Roberts. As soon as they got back outside X asked, “Where’s Ron?”