Their pleasure was short-lived, however, because Roberts Station was destroyed—knocked apart and burned. They stepped onto rock and climbed up to the edge of the wreck, Carlos shouting curses in Spanish again but almost absently now, as he began to probe the ruins in search of the equipment it would take to keep them from freezing. A hard wind keened over the rock and they tottered like wooden men, finding nothing, the ruins revealing how small the buildings had been, like trailers in a trailer park, and now all black sticks and lumps. “Where is everyone?” X croaked over and over. Wade stumbled with every step, his boots would not rise high enough.
“They’re gone,” Carlos said. “Come on, let’s get in the hovercraft.”
The hovercraft was out on the ice some six or eight feet from the wharf, pushed out there apparently by the blast that had leveled the station. X found a piece of singed paneling and carried it over and dropped it on the gap as a gangplank, and they staggered across it onto the deck of the craft, and fell through the door into the cabin. It was as cold inside as out. Wade could barely move. Carlos banged open a cabinet and lifted out a green Coleman stove, and dropped it on the shelf under the windows and slapped it open. Painstakingly he screwed a gas cannister onto the coupling at the side of the stove, then fumbled in his parka for his lighter and applied it to a burner, turning a dial on the stove and flicking the lighter repeatedly; the scraping flint was a primeval sound. Then with a whoosh they had fire.
10
Roberts Massif
It was Misha’s night to cook again, and the heavenly smells of corned-beef hash filled the yellow Scott tent. They wolfed down the food and then slowed down, moving easefully into the dishwashing and Drambers phase of the evening. Graham Forbes sat back taking wet dishes from Harry and drying them, while a recumbent Geoffrey Michelson tapped the McMurdo code on his wrist phone to make their nightly sked coms with Randi.
No Randi, however, on this night. No Mac Town at all. Static all up and down the dial, in fact.
“What’s this,” Michelson said, looking at his phone.
“Try the box,” Misha suggested, indicating the big old radio in the corner of the tent.
“A clever idea.” Michelson turned on the radio, clicked the dial to the McMurdo frequency, tried a call. Again, nothing but static. Graham put down his dishtowel and leaned over to inspect the radio.
“Something odd going on,” Michelson said.
“More than something,” Misha noted with a puzzled expression. “They’re different systems. For both of them to malfunction at once—” He shook his head, sipped his Drambers.
“You’re suggesting something more than accident?” Michelson asked.
“It doesn’t look like an accident to me.”
“But what?”
“Don’t know. Sabotage?”
The four of them thought it over, looking at each other.
“The satellite links are vulnerable,” Misha said. “You only have to train a tracking dish on a satellite, and send a stronger signal at it than the one it’s supposed to be getting, and you’ve captured it.”
“But there are so many satellites up there,” Michelson objected. “The system is massively redundant, I would have thought.”
Harry and Misha were both shaking their heads.
“There’s a lot of satellites because there’s a lot of traffic,” Misha said. “And they all are part of various overlapping networks, with a lot of carriers and hub satellites transferring messages before they’re sent back down to Earth. So if you had your dishes down here, and targeted the right hubs as they came over this area, you could knock down a lot of the system.”
“Especially down here,” Harry said. “There aren’t that many fully polar satellites.”
“But if one satellite failed wouldn’t they switch to another?”
“Sure,” Misha said. “But it might be possible to track that and redirect the disruption as well. Just find the new hub and point the dish that way. It could all be done by a single program, I bet.”
“The hard part isn’t making it break down,” Graham said, remembering pub talk with a friend in the corns business. “The hard part is making it work at all.”
Michelson looked at his three companions. “Well,” he said. “I’ll thank you gentlemen to stay out of Greenpeace, please. And I’m shocked to learn we live in such a vulnerable system.”
“The satellites are up there,” Misha said, waving up. “Easy to see, easy to disrupt. Anyone with a transmitter at fourteen gigahertz can do it.”
“But it doesn’t explain McMurdo,” Graham pointed out.
They considered it in silence. “Disable the radio building,” Misha suggested finally.
“But the town is full of radios like this one,” Harry said. “They should be back on the air pretty soon, no matter what.”
Michelson nodded. “And we should still be able to contact Burt right now. Let’s try that.”
He clicked the tuning dial over two stops, and pressed the transmit button on the handheld mouthpiece. “S-374, this is S-375, are you there Burt and crew, do you read me, over.”
A pause, the faint hiss of a radio connection: “We read you, Geoff! But we haven’t been able to contact Mac Town or make calls out, and our GPS isn’t working!”
“That’s our situation here too, Burt, although we didn’t know about the GPS.”
“That’s even more satellites,” Misha said.
“It’s not just that, Geoff, our helo pick-up didn’t show tonight either! We had to walk back to camp, it was pretty hairy!”
“They must have had to cross some ice,” Misha joked.
Michelson waved him quiet and pressed the transmit button: “Something’s gone wrong in Mac Town, I’m afraid. But they’re sure to be back on the air soon, so I suggest we sit tight out here until we find out more about what’s happened.”
“That’s fine by us, Geoff. No way do we want to walk all the way back home. Besides, we’re finding some great stuff over here. What about you, have you found anything?”
“We’re plugging away, Burt. Nothing extraordinary so far.” With a warning glance at Misha not to guffaw while he was transmitting. “Let’s keep in close contact while this situation continues, Burt. Talk again at nine tomorrow morning, all right? And let us know immediately if you hear from Randi or anyone else.”
“Sure thing, Geoff! I’ll bet you anything it’s Greenpeace again, gone after those oil camps!”
“Mac Town would seem to have little to do with that. But we’ll find out. Have a good night, you fellows, and over and out.”
“Same to you, over and out.”
Michelson put down the radio transmitter. They sat in the hiss of the Coleman stove, sipping their Drambuie.
Misha said, “So you didn’t want to tell your co-P.I. about your find, eh?”
“Misha.” Michelson sipped. “Not on the radio. Anyone could be listening.”
“All those people out here,” Graham said, needling Michelson like Misha always did. It was a bit catching.
“There are other field camps out here,” Michelson said. “Besides, even if it was just Burt, he might be tempted to crow about it to people in Mac Town, or in the north.”
Graham nodded. He liked Michelson’s caution in this respect, because he thought he understood what caused it. A premature announcement, indulged in before all the work was done and the results accepted for publication, could actively endanger the results themselves. Internet science and press-release science were both potentially dangerous in that respect. The beech litter mat they had found in the Apocalypse Sirius was a crucial find, Graham was sure; but only when properly fitted into their case, and supported. Then it would be a very solid brick in the wall, maybe even one of the things that tipped the balance to general acceptance of the dynamicist view of things. But they were very far from that at this point. Right now what they had was just some rusty-yellow organic matter, no more; it could be two hundred years old, it could be two hundred million years old. The stabilists would certainly challenge them on that basis, and on every other basis they could think of. They had to build a framework for these fragments, so to speak, and forestall all possible objections to their interpretation of what they meant; for objects remained objects until the objections were countered. One had to locate them in dense meshes of history to turn them into facts, facts that would then support a theory. This part of the process was crucial to doing any lasting, influential work. And so Michelson would be enlisting an array of paleobotanists, paleobiologists, geomorphologists, geophysicists, paleoclimatologists, and glaciologists like Graham himself, all bringing their specialty to bear on the subject at hand, all of whose own careers, if they took part in this effort, would then become at least somewhat connected to the success or failure of the dynamicist view.