This was the archway, essentially a long metal-covered tunnel, which when built had stood on the surface of the snow in front of the dome, which had been much taller then. As they walked inside, Keri explained that this station had been built in the early 1970s, and had been sinking under the accumulated snow ever since. The tall inner curve of the archway above them was completely covered by a fuzz of hoarfrost, the ice crystals large and flaky and arranged in big chrysanthemum shapes, all mashed together. To their right as they walked the tunnel was jammed with one big box after another, like meat lockers again, or containers from a container ship. The passageway was squeezed against the white wall to the left. They walked on hard-packed snow. It got darker fast. They passed a short pole with a knob on top, stuck in the floor; this was the current geographical south pole, the thing itself, such as it was.
They came to a crossroads of tunnels. To the left a short tunnel led to two large doors that met imperfectly, revealing snow behind. “The old entrance to the station,” George said. To the right an ice-bearded low tunnel led in to the darkness under the old dome.
They followed their flashlight beams down the tunnel into the center of this chamber. At the high point of the dome a round circle of open air let in some light. The underside of the dome was coated with a fur of ice crystals so thick that the hexagonal strut system of the old fullerdome was only suggested, as if it were a feature of the crystallization process. The effect for Wade was of some kind of immense igloo cathedral, the filtered light pouring down onto three or four large red-walled boxes, buildings that looked like two-story mobile homes, with exterior metal staircases like the new station’s, and metal landings outside their second-story entrances.
Keri and George led Wade through each of these buildings in turn. They were all much the same; narrow halls connecting tiny rooms, all packed with boxes, or empty chairs, or filing cabinets. One upstairs room had a pool table in it. “Come on to the galley,” Keri said as Wade stared at this lugubrious sight. “That was the real place to hang out.”
They went out onto a metal landing and downstairs, then across to another refrigerator door, and in through a coat room to the darkened galley. In the flashlight beams long shadows barred the walls. The narrow room looked much too small to feed a whole station. One side was open to the old kitchen; stoves and ovens and refrigerators were still there. Only a few holes in the cabinetry marked where scavenged items had been taken away, to the new station or elsewhere.
“They just left all this?” Wade asked.
“As you see. By the time they built the new station, this was all old stuff, breaking down. Or it wouldn’t fit, or wouldn’t match the energy requirements. It was too much trouble to integrate it. And too expensive to haul away. Actually they were going to dismantle this whole station and dome, but it was too expensive. So here it is. Someday we’ll break it all down and spot it to Mac Town and they can use it there, or put it in the dump ship and landfill it.”
“Or put it in a museum,” George said.
“But meanwhile,” Wade said, “someone else appears to be taking things.”
The two men were silent.
“Right?”
“Well,” Keri said. “We don’t know what’s happening. Some items have disappeared from here, it’s true. But it may be a kind of, I don’t know, a kind of game being played.”
“A prank, you mean?” Wade asked.
“Something like that. We’re not sure. But it doesn’t make sense any other way. The stuff being taken is not that useful. Old refrigerators. Stoves. Boxes of files.”
“Hmm,” Wade said.
“It just doesn’t make sense. Unless it’s a game.”
“Would people play games like that?”
“Well …”
“Most of this stuff happened during winterover,” George explained.
Keri nodded. “During the winters there are only seventy people here. They’re all evaluated by ASL and NSF ahead of time, of course, and they spend two weeks together to see how they’ll do. But naturally there are some times when people get down here who are not exactly, ah, normal. Or maybe they start normal, but during the winters here they, uh …”
Wade nodded. Next to a restroom door was a shelf of condiments, still filled with boxes and bottles of sugar, salt and pepper, creamer, hot chocolate powder, tea bags, mustard. Heinz ketchup. A strawberry syrup bottle with a round Haz-Mat sticker on it. All the contents frozen for sure, as it was bitterly cold.
“I was at the last Thanksgiving dinner they had in this galley,” George said, “and it was about a twelve-course meal, the complete Thanksgiving feast, with all the trimmings. We smoked the turkey in an old fifty-five-gallon steel drum, right outside that door. Best Thanksgiving I ever had.”
On this nostalgic note they left the dark freezer of a building, and tromped over ice flowers back out to the archway, and the blaze of light at its end. As they walked toward this light at the end of the tunnel it grew brighter and brighter.
After all the black little rooms, the infinite white plain of the polar cap was too bright to see properly—shockingly sunny, windy, vast, all under a low blue sky. Like a geometrical plane. Like the frozen bottom of a world. It was hard to reconcile the two places, in and out. “They built themselves a cave,” Wade said. To comfort themselves on Ice Planet.
“More an igloo,” George said. “It was brighter then.”
Still—something to hunker down into, to make the place habitable. Now replaced by the long blue metallic flying wing of the current station, like any postmodern hotel anywhere. We are here!
And that was that. The old station, the empty spaces in it where some unremarkable things had disappeared. Nothing more to see. Obviously Keri and George and the others here did not think there was any purpose to his visit. Professional investigators from the NSF and the National Transportation Safety Board and the FBI had already been down to investigate the hijacked SPOT vehicle. It stood to reason a Senate aide couldn’t do anything they hadn’t already. So Keri’s looks said, and George’s too, to an extent; and Wade did not know exactly how he would argue the point, if he had cared to. Phil Chase had sent him, and that was reason enough; and more power, perhaps, than these men suspected. But he had to do more than be Phil’s roving eyes if he wanted to exert the power.
But what? This damned place was balking him; it was a kind of no-place, a blank on the map. No reason to be here except for the abstract fact of the spin axis of the planet, which was a pretty strange reason once one thought about it. Ridiculous in fact. He glanced out a window at the ubiquitous view. It was like a minimum security prison for affluent white-collar criminals, or a spaceship for real. But even if it had been on a trip to a paradise planet Wade would have had to refuse the trip, to avoid dying of boredom en route. There was no interest to it at all, except perhaps for the human factor.
But the scientists rushed by, obviously very busy, and, from what Keri had said, involved in subjects too esoteric to explain to mere mortals. And the support crew were working, or sitting in the galley in small groups, talking among themselves. Insular.
Wade went to the coms room. Two young women were looking at screens; one looked up at him. “Keri said I could get an email line?” Wade asked.
“You sure can,” one said, standing up. Strong southern accent, short, quick in her movements. “I’m Andrea,” she said. “How long are you gonna be here?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re on a DV tour?”
“Kind of,” Wade said. “I’m down from Washington.”
“That makes it a DV tour.”
Wade nodded, and as she led him down the hall to a terminal in the personal coms room, he told her a bit about his visit.