Spiff shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. They would have the same trouble with the old dog as the people here.”
“So who?”
Spiff shrugged. “Who knows? But we wanted you to have the full complement of mystery before you left here. I’m afraid the people who work here, the locals, the people you just saw at the dance, are going to get blamed for all this stuff. They need someone outside ASL to help. So I wanted you to know.”
“I appreciate it,” Wade said sincerely. A convulsive shiver vibrated through him, head to foot. “I’m cold.”
“I know. Let’s go take a slide down the rabbit hole, that’ll warm you up.”
“A slide?”
“Yeah. Have you ever been in a waterslide?”
“Yes,” Wade said, thinking of a park in Virginia, a hotel in Vancouver. “But—”
“I know. Come on, I’ll show you.”
This walk was shorter than the others. Up and out of the eerie crushed ghost town, then along a snow tunnel, into a snow-walled chamber, bigger than anything left in the buried station. There were a lot of parkas and clothes piled inside what looked like a giant dumbwaiter, next to a round opening nowhere near as big as the tunnels they had been walking through.
“You made this too?” Wade asked.
“A group of us. The new heating elements can cut through the ice very efficiently. Did they tell you about the Rodwell?”
“No.”
“Of course not. Did you ever wonder where the station gets its water? Well, it all comes from an underground lake, a chamber down in the ice that is heated until there is a big pod of liquid water. They just keep going deeper and deeper with it as the water is used. The sewage dump is the same; it’s just another underground pod of liquid, good old Lake Patterson, and when it fills they move the heating element to another spot, and the old stuff freezes and heads off in the ice cap, moving north ten meters a year.”
“Lake Patterson?”
Spiff pulled his head out of the hole. “Named after Patterson. Okay, it’s ready. Take off your clothes and down you go.” Spiff was already unzipping.
“You’re kidding.”
“No. The tube is ice, but we’re running some hot water down it now, hear that? And the air is warmed too, it’s almost up to freezing. So it’s like any other water slide, only darker. The ride only lasts a couple of minutes. It goes down about say five stories, in about three hundred meters, and then you land in a warm bath. Be ready for that, it’s a shock when you hit if you’re not forewarned.” He pulled off his pants, stood before Wade naked. “Hurry up, you go first and I’ll shut down here and follow. Hurry, I’m getting cold.”
“I’m already cold,” Wade protested. In fact he had never been colder in his life. But he did as he was told. By the time he had all his clothes off he was shivering violently.
“Okay, jump in and go for it. You can go head first or feet first, but you shouldn’t try changing from one to the other midway, or knee-riding. Not the first time anyway.”
“I won’t. Will it be dark all the way?” Wade said, peering down the hole.
“Black as the pit. Have a good ride.”
Wade took a step up and sat his bare bottom on the ice. “Jesus.”
“Have fun!” Spiff shouted, and gave him a push and he was off, sliding on his bottom. Then the tube dropped away in the blackness and he was on his back, like a luge rider. In fact it had all the qualities of luge—insane speed, rapid turns left and right, up and down, but mostly down, down down down in gut-floating no-g drops, sliding in a stream of warm water over cold slick ice, and all in pitch blackness so there was no way of telling where he would go next. He yowled. The cold of the ice seemed less severe as he sped up, but the air rushing over him was freezing. He shouted again at a heartstopping drop and right turn, you could crack your skull! Except he didn’t.
Three or four more dramatic turns and he began to enjoy himself. Then he was flying through free space, and he shrieked just as he plunged into boiling water. His skin went nova, especially along his bottom and back.
He shot up spluttering and took several gasping breaths, shouting once or twice between them, treading water desperately. It was pitch black, he could see nothing.
“Must be the senator.”
“Just stand up, man.”
“Jesus!” he said, finding his feet. “Hi!” He found he could stand, on an ice floor. The pool of hot water was chest deep. The air was steam. In the blackness he could hear several people talking, including Viktor. His skin was still blazing, but less painfully. “You guys are nuts.”
They laughed happily. No one contradicted him.
With a shout Spiff fired into the pool and rammed Wade, sending him under again. He was pulled to the surface and set on his feet. The person who had pulled him up was a woman. One of the big women from the dance. There were several of them in the pool, in the blackness and clatter of watery noise and voices, everyone moving about. “Ice is such a great insulator.” As his eyes adjusted Wade saw that the chamber was not pitch black, but black with just a touch of blue in it. He still could see nothing whatsoever, not even the basic shapes of the people around him. Under the general clatter he did hear lower voices, and right next to him a quick urgent low exchange: “Ah come on.” “Don’t or I’ll break it off.” “All right! Okay.” Wild laughter.
Wade sloshed around gingerly, wishing Val were in the pool with the rest of these unseen amazons. If you had a thing for jock women, he thought, the South Pole was definitely the place to be. The ice on the bottom of the pool was covered in some places with what felt like big rubber shower mats. Against the unseen walls there was a narrow bench, similarly matted. After a while Wade was thoroughly warmed up and his skin stopped burning. He began to see black shapes in the indigo blackness of the cave. He ran into Spiff, who told him more about the waterslide, with Andrea or someone else her size limpeted to his side, or so it seemed to Wade; it was too dark really to tell. Several years ago, Spiff told him over the noise, Viktor had come by and described a waterslide complex cut under Vostok Station. The local PICO crew, meaning the Polar Ice Coring Office, had included some folks very prominent in the Why Be Normal Club, and they were just beginning to use the new ice-cutting technology, which used hot laser melting elements and steam removal, “real Star Wars stuff, I mean it was developed by the space-beam people at Livermore and Los Alamos, and turned out to be good for nothing at all in the world except it turns ice to steam no problem, which is very useful down here of course—the old ice-coring tech used three thousand gallons of diesel fuel for every kilometer cut through the ice, at ten dollars a gallon, and slow. Basically like melting it with your shower head. But with these lasers you could cut a whole city into the ice, man, and so these PICO freakos helped some winterovers cut this slide here, just to pass the time and keep up with those Vostok Russkies. Although later Viktor confessed that he had made that whole thing up, and Vostok had no such thing. He just thought it would be a good idea.”
Wade heard Viktor’s booming laugh across the chamber. “A good idea!”
“A great idea,” Spiff said. “People here need to resist. It’s been hard here for a long time. I mean ASA wasn’t bad, and yet even then people snuck down and explored old old station, stuff like that. And now, no one likes ASL at all. They treat people like shit, and NSF lets them get away with it. So people resist. It’s a way of staying sane. You can only spend a few weeks here before you begin to go nuts.”
“It was only a few hours for me,” Wade confessed.
They laughed, and someone kissed his cheek; although it was someone with a beard. Viktor no doubt. “Sounds like Viktor is having quite an impact on polar cap society,” Wade said.