But as Carlos pointed out, the work of skiing would cure that. He took off, wearing a backpack that contained much of what was detachable from the snowmobiles. Wade followed.
X hit a bump and fell like a tree. As if struck by his bow wave, Wade fell too. The snow was hard and his elbow hurt. Uneasily he got up again, faster than X, who was very awkward on his too-short skis. Carlos was skiing ahead effortlessly. When he looked back and saw his fallen comrades, he made a swooping turn and came back to them. “Follow me, I’ll find the flattest part of the track and it will be easier.”
So they followed him and it was easier, although sometimes Wade’s skis got caught on two sides of a little sastrugi ridge and drifted apart no matter what he tried. He fell often, and so did X. The sheer work of getting back to his feet tired him. He began to sweat, overheated everywhere except at his frozen tips, which stubbornly continued to freeze. He remembered encountering the phrase “penile frostbite” in an article on runners’ problems in wintertime. Hopefully the hot blood in his body core would warm that and all other chilled extremities, while the cold blood in the extremities would cool the hot core of him, like water from a radiator. But it didn’t seem to be working; he was too hot and too cold at one and the same time. He struggled on.
It was some comfort to see X falling as often or more often than he did. The two of them went down like bowling pins. After one fall, as they were both getting up and pushing off again, X said, “Too bad we don’t have those spacesuits the trekker groups wear.”
“What do you mean?” Wade said. “There’s better gear than this?”
“Yes.”
“There’s better gear than this and I’m not wearing it?”
“Ha.”
“Are there super DVs that get better stuff?”
“You tell me. Probably so. But what we’ve got is normal government issue, and you can buy gear that’s better. This stuff can’t convert piezoelectric energy from your walking into heat, it can’t melt you water, it can’t feed you—”
Wade fell again. “Can’t ski for you.”
“Can’t ski, that’s right. Nothing.”
“Why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why don’t we have the best stuff?”
“Expensive! And what we have is adequate for what we’re supposed to be doing out here. We’re not supposed to be out here skiing around. This is trekker stuff.”
“So if Val were here we’d be okay.”
“Probably so.”
They skied on side by side. The snow got smoother, and they glided along without mishap for a while. Carlos was a black mark on the horizon ahead of them; Roberts Massif was bigger, and they could see right to the ice shoreline at the foot of the rock, where the station would soon be visible to them, though they hadn’t spotted it yet. Then X said to Wade, “If that’s blue ice then we’re fucked.”
“How so?”
“It’s as hard as rock, and slick. Bumpy but slick.”
“Oh.” Wade’s heart sank. His only attempt at ice skating had broken his tailbone. He had had to sit on an inflated donut for three months.
“Shit. That’s blue ice all right.”
They came up to Carlos, who was on the last peninsula of white snow, sticking into a sea of blue ice.
“I can’t ski ice,” X said.
“Few people can,” Carlos replied. “We’ll have to put on crampons and walk.”
So they sat down and took off their skis, got their boots and crampons out of their daypacks, changed shoes for boots, strapped on crampons, repacked the daypacks, stood up, and walked on with skis and one ski pole over one shoulder—one hand for them, the other hand poling the ice with a ski pole. All parts of this operation were bitterly, numbingly cold.
But walking with crampons was absurdly secure after skiing, like walking on flypaper. The crunch of the ice underfoot reminded Wade of twisting ice trays back home, and for an instant he was desperately homesick for a world where ice came in one-inch cubes. The change of footgear had chilled him so deeply that his legs were shaking. His thighs felt like jelly. And the crampons quickly tired his feet and ankles, for they made him too secure on the ice. From too little traction to too much; nothing comfortable.
“We’re almost there,” Carlos called back to them.
“He starts saying that at around the halfway point of any trip,” X warned Wade. “He’s just like Val that way.”
“Ah.”
X was narrating his journey to himself; from the snatches Wade heard it sounded as if an unseen sports commentator of great cynicism was peering out from inside X’s ski mask. Past a gentle rise, snow returned to cover the bare blue ice. After a short conference they sat down and changed back into skis, which was welcome in one sense, as the weight of the skis over his shoulder was becoming oppressive to Wade; but the gear change chilled him even further. His hands would barely work. Carlos had them eat chocolate bars. Feeling famished, Wade bit into a frozen bar and what felt like a rock in the chocolate jolted a tooth filling with excruciating pain: “Ow ow shit ow!”
“Watch out for the frozen raisins!” X and Carlos warned together.
“Oh thank you very much!”
“Sorry. They’re like pebbles when they freeze.”
“Now you tell me.”
“I hate this kind of chocolate, for that very reason.”
Gloves back on, hands numb and clumsy. Frigid air, cutting right to the bone. Up and on. It seemed to Wade that he could feel parts of his mind begin to numb like his fingers; the outer layers of the cortex, the delicate lobes behind the nose, all chilling and shutting down. A pure white plain in a clear blue sky. Ups and downs, thankfully mild. Skiing as badly as ever, or worse. Over them the lowering sky. Looking toward the sun, off to his left, made it like noon, and the snow blazed in a mirrorflake fan. Looking straight ahead across the sunlight made it dawn, the sastrugi thrown in high relief by countless small shadows. Looking away from the sun made it midnight, the layered grainy bedding of the snow darkly lustrous. The angle of light the only landscape. Or rather the landscapes were all boot-high, so that they Brobdingnagged over them, left, right, left, right, in the cold one could never adapt to, the frozen air spiking up the nose like a dangerous drug directly into the brain, a drug needed but feared, the inescapable addiction to oxygen now something like a fatal necessity. Colder and colder, no matter the skiing. More parts of the brain regressing, losing the ability to talk or even to think, all the words fading out like stars at dawn. Ahead the rock seemed closer, and he saw gleams of color at the shoreline; the station, presumably. The sight made Wade feel dully better. They were going to make it.
Then the snow tilted down toward the massif, and he could pole along without moving his legs, a blessed relief. But then the snow turned to white ice, and he was sliding down without pushing at all—downhill skiing, in other words, and faster and faster, as if on a bike without brakes. His skis chattered, and he bent his knees and crouched, poles tucked under his arms and head down in a grim parody of real skiers, until an unseen bump up-ended him and he landed on his butt again, and slid down the slope almost as fast as before, spinning on his back like a cartwheel. His skis had detached and disappeared, but his ski poles were still flailing around him, so he grabbed the end of the left one with his right mitten as it bounced over him, and twisted on his side and jammed the point against the ice. It barely cut a line but it did slow him down a little, scraping like chalk on a blackboard, and by and by he was sliding slowly enough to jam his boot edges onto the ice without immediately breaking his legs. Eventually he bobbled to a halt, perhaps a hundred meters out from the hovercraft and a little wharf sticking out from the rock onto the ice. After that little shoves of his mittens slid him down a gentle incline, ten meters at a shove. Behind him Carlos and X were tromping down the slope upright, having stopped to take off their skis for the final descent. Wade waved at them weakly, and they cheered his survival.