Beep beep. “Hey Wade, are you awake?”
“No.”
“Where are you.”
“… I’m not sure.”
“That happens to me sometimes too.”
“—oh yeah! Hotel California.”
“You’re in California?”
“Hotel California. McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Wow. I couldn’t remember there for a minute where I was.”
“That happens to me a lot.”
“What’s up?”
“I couldn’t sleep. You know Wade, sometimes I don’t see why half the people in America don’t just walk off their jobs and start up their own companies. I say that right on the floor of the Senate.”
“Yes, Phil. We read it in the Post and we gnash our teeth. We can’t believe our eyes. Only in California would you have even the slightest chance of getting elected.”
“I get elected by seventy percent majorities, Wade.”
“That shows what California can do.”
“I get almost a hundred percent of the Hispanic vote.”
“That’s because you’re a Democrat, plus you speak Spanish like a barrio textile worker.”
“That’s because I was a barrio textile worker. And those girls work hard let me tell you. My fingers are still all scarred from that.”
Phil had spent three months working in a legal sweatshop with legal aliens, part of his Ongoing Working Education as he called it, the OWE program (pronounced Ow in the office) that he had instituted for himself, in which he spent three months working full-time at a great number and variety of Californian occupations, so many that the list was beginning to look like the dust-jacket copy for a new novelist.
“I know,” Wade said. He got out of bed and went to the room’s sink and began to clean up. “It’s great what you’ve done. You’re very popular and you deserve it. But only in California. And even there you have high negatives.”
“How high can they be when I get seventy percent of the vote?”
“They can be thirty percent, and that’s what they are. A record high negative.”
“Any time you create a high positive you’re going to get a high negative. Even in California.”
“Especially in California.”
“God bless our state.”
“The most volatile in the nation. Pendulum swings that defy all laws of physics and political science. You’re one of the big left swings, up there with the Browns or Warren or Boxer, but shuffled in with you guys are people like Reagan and Nixon, with no rhyme or reason to it. You’re all the way off the charts anywhere else in America.”
“So now you’re comparing me to Richard Nixon. You’re waking me up in the middle of the night to compare me to Richard Nixon.”
“He was great at foreign policy.”
“Please, Wade. I get elected because people like what I stand for. It’s populism come back again. In California that’s important.”
“Used to be populism anyway. Now, Phil? A leader in the Democratic Party? Having changed your tune over the years from calling for the complete revamping of everything to advocating legislation to encourage cooperatives?”
“I’ve grown up in fifteen years, better have or else.”
“Everyone in the middle of the road says that, it must be like a chorale there on the painted line, you really sing well together.”
“Hey. Gorz is even worse than me, he went from demanding the impossible to suggesting a thirty-hour work week.”
“You’ve called for a thirty-hour work week too.”
“It’s a good idea. Reform by increments, Wade, it’s the only way. You demand the impossible you get nothing. In co-ops people own their work, that’s a very big step right there. After we get that, we can think about further steps.”
“If you can even get that far. Maybe these days asking for co-ops and a thirty-hour work week is demanding the impossible.”
“Maybe so. We’ll find out when we try for it, Wade. You can only learn useful lessons by trying things out. I like things you can try, rather than big systems that you can’t figure out how to move toward or test out.”
“You’re a true Democrat, Phil.”
“Yes, I am. So what’s next for you down there?”
“I’m flying to the South Pole today.” It was a sentence that felt odd in the mouth.
“You be careful. How was your trip to the Dry Valleys?”
“It was interesting. Good background.”
“How was your mountain guide?”
“She was very competent.”
“Ooh.”
“Please, Phil.”
“Well, you have fun out there Wade. I’ll be calling you again to get a report from the Pole.”
“Yes you will.”
It’s a dog-eat-dog world, especially if you shoot half your huskies and feed them to the rest. This had been the Amundsen expedition’s method of operation; they had started out with fifty-two dogs, and most of those had not only pulled the sledges but somewhere along the way been turned into food, for both dogs and men. Each dog eaten provided about fifty pounds of meat, and therefore saved that much from the sledge loads. It was a classic case of pulling your own weight, or of what the American weapons industry called “dual-use efficiency” when pointing out that their high-heat laser weapons would also make very nice ice borers (which they did). Amundsen however lost a lot of style points for this particular dual use; he was criticized for it ever afterward, especially in Britain.
Obviously Val’s “In the Footsteps of Amundsen” expedition, the thirteenth to trace Amundsen’s route to the Pole, was not going to be using the same methods the Norwegians had used. For one thing dogs were now banned from Antarctica; for another, the Ross Ice Shelf, the crossing of which had comprised about half of Amundsen’s trek, was no longer there. The ice shelf had been an amazing feature in its time: a stable floating cake of ice nearly a thousand feet thick, covering an area about the same size as California or France, and at its outer edge towering a couple hundred feet over the open sea. As it turned out, however, it had been highly sensitive to small changes in air and ocean temperatures, and the global warming had been enough to break most of it up and carry it off to sea. It had been replaced by a jumble of thinning annual sea ice, remnant iceberg chunks of the shelf, and enormous ice tongues pushing out from the Transantarctic glaciers and the West Antarctic ice streams; with the brake of the shelf gone these outpourings had greatly accelerated, and they slid out onto the sea and floated there, long white peninsulas that occasionally broke off and joined the iceberg armada.
As a result of all this the Ross Sea was no longer a viable proposition for foot travel. And Val was among those who considered this a great blessing, for to start a trek with three hundred miles of hauling over soft snow, entirely flat but frequently crevassed, was not really how modern wilderness adventure travelers wanted to spend their vacation time. In truth it had been the kind of miserable travel no one would do unless they had to. But of course there had been purists who had insisted on doing it because the early explorers had, and so their guides had had to oblige and lead them across it, bored out of their minds and working to keep the rapidly disillusioned clients from getting surly. Now that option was gone, and no one was happier about it than Val.