“A Columbus Day dance?”
“No, no, this is the day Lake Bonney camp was first established.” He cracked up at the look on Wade’s face. “Not really. The Polecats, the band here, just want to try to convince NSF to make ASL send them to Ice-stock, and so they’re putting on a dance every Saturday night for a while. This one’s a special one because Viktor’s here.”
He asked what Wade was doing at the Pole, and Wade tried to explain. Spiff nodded and took him to his desk for a vodka refill. “They took you into the old pole station, did they?”
“That’s right. Very interesting place.”
“Uh huh. Did they take you into the utilidor?”
“No, what’s that?”
Spiff nodded. “Did they tell you about how the Rodwell works?”
“No.”
“Lake Patterson?”
“No.”
“The buried Here?”
“Buried Here?”
“They didn’t take you anyplace else, did they?”
“No.”
“Is not possible.” Spiff shook his head, thinking it over. “They’re afraid of fingies like you. They’re paranoid after all these years.”
“Fingies?”
“Fucking new guys. Tell you what, talk to Andrea after the dance, and we’ll see what we can do. The truth is, the people down here are going to need some help pretty soon. Someone who isn’t in NSF or ASL who might take their side. Talk to Andrea.”
“Okay. I will.”
“We’ll go over in a second, let me close down here.”
While he was working at a boxy unidentifiable machine that filled half the room, Wade read a small flowchart diagram that had been taped to the wall.
“It’s like a map of Washington D.C.,” Wade observed.
“What—oh, that? It’s a map of the world, man. Here I’m done, come on, the band is supposed to start now, and even with the Antarctic factor thrown in they might be starting soon.”
“The Antarctic factor?”
“Murphy’s law to the power of ten. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Nor the spin axis. Come on.
Out they went, down the stairs in the blaze of day. The pickup truck was gone, however, and Spiff led Wade back over chewed snow toward the station; it looked close, but ten minutes later it was as far away as it had been when they had started, and they were walking fast. “How far is it?” Wade puffed.
“Two k. Good for you.” Spiff upped the pace.
“How’d you get the name Spiff?” Hoping to slow him down.
“Well, the original name was Spliff, but I was going through New Zealand so often I had to change it.” He grinned over his shoulder at Wade.
“The dogs, you mean?”
“Yeah. Insane. It’s an alcoholic nation, basically, so they do the dog thing to convince themselves that they’re really all right. But it can be damned inconvenient. Once I flew down straight after a going-away party without changing my clothes, and the dogs in Auckland went off like a smoke alarm.”
“Scary.”
“Oh yeah. It took hours to get through customs after that, I missed my flight to Christchurch and everything. And I was sweating it anyway, because I had three big spliffs inside sealed pipettes floating in the shampoo in my shampoo bottles, and I couldn’t be sure the damned dogs wouldn’t smell them even so. They’re very good. It would have ruined my thesis. After that I gave it up. Too stressful. Now I just knock back two shots of Scotch and try to imagine it’s a decent buzz. So much noise to signal though. Terrible drug, alcohol. So now I’m Spiff.”
“I see. Was it you thought up this AMANDA experiment?”
“Oh no, no. It’s an old idea. Pretty neat, but I’d rather be doing the cosmic background stuff. Phase-change vortices in the first second of the universe. That’s what we are, man. Flaws in the fabric. Eddies in the whirlpool. Pattern dustdevils.”
“Hey, aren’t we here?”
Spiff was walking past the big blue station.
“No, the dance is in the old summer camp. They tried doing it in the empty module, you know, and it’s a good space, but the windows meant you could never really get away, if you know what I mean. It’s a lot more fun out here.” He led Wade through rows of low mounds, the tops of buried Jamesways, and then down a slope cut by bulldozers into an area like a sunken plaza, where a dozen Jamesways and some blockhouses were still sitting on top of the ice. “This is the old summer camp, where they kept the summer overflow crowd before the new station was built.”
“They meant to pull it out but never got around to it.”
“Right. Besides there’s always a use here for sheltered space. Nothing ever gets pulled out, you’ll see. It’s like hermit crabs moving from one shell to the next.”
The Jamesways they passed had names over their doors: Larry, Curly, Moe, Shemp. “Just say Moe!” Spiff exclaimed, heading for a somewhat larger Jamesway. “Sounds like they’ve started. Yow!”
He stopped outside the door of a longer Jamesway, pulled a flask from his parka, unscrewed the top and handed it to Wade. Wade took a swallow of cold fiery whisky and gave it back to Spiff, who did the same. Then Spiff opened the door—a simple metal handle, Wade noted, on an ordinary wooden door—and walked into loud darkness.
Wade followed him in, through a second door. Inside it was dark and hot. The whole Jamesway was a single long space—half a cylinder, just like a Quonset hut. A band at the far end was playing loud rock and roll. Red stage lights and some strings of ancient Christmas tree lights were the only illumination. A cloth sign spread behind the band said “The Polecats.”
Wade took off his parka and hung it on a rack crowded with them, watching the band as he did. The lead guitarist was good, that was instantly obvious; the rest of the band was like that in any other garage band, or worse. One of the astronomers Wade had seen in the Dark Sector was being urged onto the stage to play sax. He had sheet music in hand, and the bass player clipped it to a mike stand, and then as they began to play, paused to stick the mike right down into the sax bell, after which Wade could just hear a few strangled honks cutting across the grain of “Louie Louie.” Wade himself could have done better; anyone in the room could have done better. The astronomer’s eyes bugged out as he tried to read his music.
But the bass player, after replacing the mike on the stand, was solid; the drummer was solid; the rhythm guitarist was inaudible; and the lead guitarist was great. He was a balding man wearing wire-rims, which windowed an intense abstracted expression. Wade waded into the thick press of dancers to see the man’s hands better, then jounced up and down with everyone else, and found that near the front it cleared out a bit for some real dancing. Here the women of the station were performing a very complicated dance indeed, like that of high schoolers or bees, the social tangle of their minority numbers problematizing matters pretty severely, so that they were dancing with each other a lot, and also with any number of the men around them, but seldom with any one man, except for Viktor. Everyone knew everyone, Wade saw; and even in pantomime he could see example after example of rude or bumptious invitations to dance, the shy awkward men trying to get one of their female friends from daily life to turn into something else, for one dance or even part of one. Many of the women were solving the problem by dancing with three or four men at a time. It probably did not help the awkward interactions going on all over the floor when Spiff and Andrea broke into some very blatant dirty dancing, and both very good at it, having a lot of fun, Spiff making exaggerated pelvic thrusts and holds, Andrea straddling his outstretched thigh and wiggling over it, all without touch or eye contact, all in time to the music, in their own private world but very public too, of course, and peculiar when the music was “Summertime Blues,” but perfect for “Wild Thing.”