And nothing to do but follow Carlos, and try to ignore the fatigue in his thumb. He wondered about the two men he was with, men he scarcely knew. Everything out here depended on the support of one’s companions. Without them there was only the cold, and it could kill you in a matter of hours—he could feel that in his face, feel the stiff numbness that led to frostbite and then fatality. Hypothermia straining to get in and do its work. Any tilt of the snowmobile could start the sequence that ended in hypothermia; broken ski, broken knee, anything would do it. So haul left! No right! No left!
On he drove.
Three very long hours later—it felt to Wade more like eight—Carlos waved an arm, and his Skidoo quickly halted. All along he had been following the road in the snow blasted by the hovercraft—the sastrugi that so impressed Wade were actually much flattened—and now the three of them stomped around on the road’s crust, trying to get the circulation going in their extremities. Carlos and X taught Wade to windmill his arms rapidly to speed the return of blood and warmth to his hands. For a while they stood around spinning their arms like a bunch of Pete Townshends. Then Carlos took a shovel and an ordinary carpenter’s saw from his Skidoo’s back box. He stuck the saw in the snow and began cutting.
“Shouldn’t we keep going?” Wade asked.
Carlos shook his head. “We need food to stay warm. Roberts isn’t going anywhere.”
So he sawed blocks of snow, and Wade shoveled them up to X, who carried them over to a curving wall built around the south side of the Skidoos, protecting them from the breeze. The big blocks had the consistency and feel of Styrofoam, and were not much heavier.
Then they sat in the lee of the wall while Carlos set up the Primus stove, a skeletal little piece of equipment that obviously came from the dawn of the industrial age. Wade watched in appalled fascination as the physics of Ice Planet were again revealed: Carlos applied the flame of a lighter to a pool of stove fuel under the cooker, a move that should have caused a small explosion, and the fuel lay there under the flame, inert, until after a time it flickered bluely, like the burning brandy on a crêpe Suzette. “Incredible,” Wade said. “Not possible.”
Carlos glanced at him. “Yes. A cold day.” He had recovered from the first shock of his station’s destruction, and was now calm and unhurried, even somewhat cheerful; certainly he did not appear to be feeling the dread that chilled Wade’s gut. He jammed snow into a pot, and began melting it over the growing flames of the stove, and got packets of lemonade powder and soup ready. A pot of snow melted down to only a third of a pot of water, and when that was boiling Carlos made mugs of hot lemonade and soup. Several pots of snow were transformed over time into dehydrated stew, hot chocolate, and finally mud-thick coffee. The chunks in the stew did not fully rehydrate, so that they tasted like bits of chalk, but Wade did not complain; he had discovered with the first mouthful that he was ravenous, and the stew tasted fine. The chalky bits just gave it some needed texture.
After the meal they packed up. Wade felt considerably warmer, from the stomach outward. Carlos checked the radio and GPS again, and though the radios were still out, apparently some of the GPS satellites were coming back online, for he got a brief fix before the system crashed again. “About three hours more,” he declared. “Not long.” They started the Skidoos—a moment of great fear to Wade, followed by relief—and took off again. Wade followed Carlos as always, impressed by the man’s calmness at lunch. It was comforting to be out here with a local.
And there they were again in their row, Carlos, Wade, then X, chuntering across the hard-packed firn. Occasionally they passed some of the new snow dunes people talked about, areas with fields of crescent dunes marring the smoothness of the cap, the snow looking just like sand, and the dunes like a very pure part of White Sands in New Mexico. Up close these dunes were much more textured and sastrugilike than any sand would be, like Georgia O’Keeffe stylized dunes, Wade thought, or some kind of fractalized hyper-realist hallucination. But the hovercraft road avoided going directly through any of these.
All too soon the cold began to gnaw again at Wade’s knees and face and hands. He felt more clearly than he ever had the struggle between heat and cold in his body, a kind of war fought on many fronts, with differing success depending on exposure. His core heat was definitely there, Still radiating as a result of the hot food and drink, sending out reinforcements to fight the encroachment of cold on the distant fronts of the extremities. Out there the battles were being fought capillary by capillary.
And lost, at least on the farthest fronts. Not in his torso; but away from that furnace it was a matter of slow ache, loss of feeling, numbness. Carlos called a short stop to help them fight the fight, and with the engines still running they stomped around and danced and did jumping jacks and Pete Townshends, and kneaded their sore butts and excruciated right thumbs. New heat was sent out from stomachs to the distant fronts. Then they were off again.
The next time they stopped it was to refill their fuel tanks, a very cold operation in itself. Then off again, and another long interval of snowmobiling and thumb pain and getting cold. The cold penetrated everywhere, until Wade could not drive as well as he had at the start, awkward though he had been then, because of the stiffness of his cold arms.
He was considering speeding up to Carlos and waving him down for another session of warm-up exercises, and perhaps a hot drink, when stopping became a moot point. His engine sputtered, ran, sputtered, ran, sputtered, died. The Skidoo skidded to a halt. Carlos looked back, hearing or otherwise sensing that something had changed, and as he turned, his vehicle also slowed and stopped. X coasted up next to Wade, shaking his head. They were out of gas.
“We’re close,” Carlos said to Wade. The green flags marking the hovercraft route were numbered, apparently, and the last one had been Number 10, so they were only ten kilometers out. The rusty mountains marking the horizon ahead were Roberts Massif. Very soon the station would appear over the horizon. They could ski, or, if Wade did not want to ski, walk on crampons.
“I’ll try skiing,” he said. Ten k was not too bad; just over six miles. Before his arrival in Antarctica he would have laughed at such a distance, perhaps five minutes on the highway; how bad could it be? But now he had the memory of his walk with Val up Barwick Valley to tell him just how long ten k would feel. In fact the knowledge still tweaked a little in his left knee. It was a significant distance. But he could do it.
And they were beyond choices now. So he changed his bunny boots for heavy cross-country ski shoes, chilling his feet and hands thoroughly in the process. “Damn.” It was difficult if not impossible to hurry any of these operations, no matter how much he tried. In fact it took an effort to manage them at any speed.
He had tried cross-country skiing a few times before, and had fallen a lot. He would have to get better fast. X’s skis looked like popsicle sticks at the bottom of his massive tree-trunk legs. It was hard to believe they would support him. X did not look convinced either; he shook his head at the sight. Curious how with their faces behind ski masks and sunglasses, so much was yet communicated. Body language indeed.
When they were all set they stood on their skis, Wade and X propped on their poles. Like a trio of bank robbers on ice, anonymous and insect-eyed. The sunlight prismed on their photovoltaic gloves and overalls and parkas, and Wade was grateful for their warmth, but still his fingertips, nose, ears and feet were cold, and getting colder.