When they stopped, outside the turbulence, Wade pulled off one bear claw to check his wrist GPS. They were in the Mohn Basin, it seemed; the spur of rock appeared to be D’Angelo Bluff; beyond it the black spike of Mount Howe. The ice between these nunataks was lined and cracked with entire cities of blue shatter. Carlos started up again and headed straight for one of these broken zones, finally maneuvering in broad turns until he appeared to be riding right into the open end of a broad ice ravine. Blue gleaming seracs overhung one wall; above those black rock towered high in the sky.
blue sky
black rock
blue ice
Happily Carlos stopped at this point in the growing chasm, and turned off his snowmobile engine. X and Wade did the same. Suddenly they were out there, in a silence so complete it seemed noisy.
Except there; a breeze, soughing over the ice. It was Debussy who should have been the composer for this continent, Wade thought. Debussy or Satie, or Sibelius, mystic spirit of snowy Finland. Sibelius the composer and Dalí the artist. Or Escher. Or Rockwell Kent, or Canada’s Group of Seven, or Nisbet of the Antarctic. Only a few could have caught it. Empty blue sky. It was a strange place to be.
Carlos and X converged on Wade, and Carlos pointed at a big snow block. “See it?”
Wade stared at the white snow. “See what.”
They laughed at him. “Come on.”
Over firn they crunched. It did not give underfoot, and they left no tracks. Quite close to the ice wall, Carlos pointed again. “There, see it?”
Wade peered. Against the white was a white shape. Then it jumped out at him, like one of those three-D mashes suddenly revealing its pattern: a white metal box on tracks, somewhat like the old Hagglunds he had seen at McMurdo, but smaller; only seven or eight feet tall. One would have to crouch to get in its door.
“Wow,” Wade said.
They approached it. The sides were covered by hoarfrost or wind-plastered snow, but under that appeared to be painted white as well. The metal tracks ran over small sprocketed metal wheels. All painted as white as the cab. The three men stood before it. X could look right into one of the wind-drifted windows.
“What is it?”
Carlos and X looked at him.
“It took a long time to answer that question,” Carlos said. “We found it here by accident, while putting out a geophone grid last year. This is nowhere near where anyone has been, you see. And the Americans didn’t have any vehicles missing, not then anyway. In any case, it’s a Weasel, made in England in the 1950s. There was a Weasel used by Edmund Hillary’s group when they drove tractors to the Pole in 1958. Most of their tractors were Fergusons, but they had one Weasel that they ran until it fell apart, and then they left it out on the polar cap.”
“But …”
“It must have been completely buried. Perhaps as much as ten meters down in the ice, and out there on the cap, with nothing for hundreds of kilometers in any direction.”
“Wow. Who could have found it?”
An expressive shrug from Carlos.
“Someone with a metal detector,” X said.
“And a bulldozer,” Carlos added.
“And the new ice borers.”
“And familiarity with Hillary’s route,” Wade suggested.
“That would be easy enough,” Carlos said. “Hillary wrote a book about his trip.”
“I never heard of this expedition,” Wade confessed.
“Who has? Driving tractors to the South Pole?”
“That would be hard,” X noted.
“Yes, but what is the point? You sit in the driver’s seat, you try to stay warm, you look for crevasses.”
“That would be hard.”
“I suppose. But it is not the right kind of method to make people notice. We could drive these snowmobiles to the Pole, eh? But so what?”
Wade said, “Can we look inside?”
“Sure, sure.” Carlos went to the door of the cab, and turned a handle—no lock—and pulled open a thin metal door. Clearly the Weasel had not been a warm experience. A box of thin metal, primitive controls for the driver, benches against the side. The heat of the engine would be all that made it possible.
“Whoever dug it out doesn’t seem to have refurbished,” Wade remarked, running his hand over a wooden bench.
“No. Except for the white paint, I think. But there’s no clue to their identity. As if they used it for something and then abandoned it.”
“Or stored it,” X said.
“Maybe so. Anyway, here it is.”
“Does it run?”
“Yes. Half a tank of gas.”
“It evaporates through the cap,” X said. “It could have been full not too long ago.”
They walked out of the shade of the chasm, back into the blazing light. Wade’s sunglasses shifted back to full strength. He looked around; still the empty icescape, the pure blue sky. The Hillary Weasel sat against its ice wall—a white oddity, incongruous, something like the prehistoric man found in the ice in Austria. Thrown up by the ice. Or excavated. Someone was out here doing things, Wade thought. Someone who liked rescuing bits of the past. Salvaging useful tools, giving them a try. Perhaps giving up on them if they didn’t work out, and leaving them around as exhibits in a kind of open-air museum, or art gallery. Or whatever. He shook his head, climbed back on his Skidoo.
They were running the snowmobiles back over their outgoing tracks, and at a certain point Wade’s Skidoo tilted and veered and he pulled it back on track with accidental ease, and realized that the vehicle was not going to tip over no matter what he did. All of a sudden he forgot all his cares and all the mysteries, and was just riding a big motorcycle-thing, a wonderful bit of Antarctic technology, fit for a museum or an art gallery itself, over the snow at the bottom of the world. He hummed some Wagner and christened this “The Ride of the Valeries,” because he was thinking of her again. This is what she liked, and perhaps this was how she felt when she was out here. This was what she lived for. Exuberance is beauty! And those distant low black mountains on the white horizon, that sky! An exaltation came over him: Wade on ice, humming Wagner through the mesh of his ski mask.
Such moments are transitory. Wade was already considering how much the roaring power of the Skidoo was implicated in his euphoria, how much it was the technological sublime he was feeling rather than the glory of Antarctica per se—when from ahead of Carlos came a flash, as from a mirror reflecting the sun. Immediately after that a black plume of smoke lofted into the air, narrow and dark, and suddenly choked off. A big puff, wafting off on the breeze.
Carlos’s Skidoo took off. Apparently he had been holding back as a courtesy to Wade’s inexperience, and now he was hellbent on getting back to the station as fast as possible, leaving Wade and X quickly behind. Wade pressed his tired thumb even harder on the accelerator, and his Skidoo shot over the snow faster than before. Despite this acceleration X drew up beside him, barreling over the untracked sastrugi, seeming unaware of the bumps, his whole being focused on the smoke puff ahead. He passed Wade and slammed his Skidoo into the tracks ahead so that he could go even faster.
Then both Carlos and X were stopped, and Wade let his cramping thumb relax, and his Skidoo quickly slid to a halt. He stood astride his snowmobile, looking at the station ahead of them. The main building was knocked flat and scattered all over the ice. One propane tank still burned, the fitful blue-orange flames pale in the sunlight. Otherwise there was no movement. The tents were flattened. The Jamesway and the machine shops were ripped to shreds. The drilling platform was on its side, its base shattered. There was no one to be seen.