“That’s probably very much what it looked like here in the Pliocene,” Michelson said, staring over his glasses again. “Odd to think that temperatures have risen now to the point where such a forest could survive here again. People would have to plant it, but after that …”
Harry was shaking his head. “The Treaty forbids bringing in exotic plants.”
“But this wouldn’t be an exotic, would it? Merely native vegetation, returned home after a period of exile. The Chileans and Argentinians already tried growing beeches up in the Peninsula. It didn’t work then, but it’s considerably warmer now than when they tried.”
The other three let this pass. It was not the kind of thing they would consider doing, and it was hard even to know if Michelson was serious or not.
After staring at the laptop photo for a time, lost in their own thoughts, they stirred themselves, and prepared to make the cold transfer to their sleeping tents. “I wonder what’s happening in McMurdo,” Harry said.
“We’ll find out soon,” Michelson said. “Randi will call us the moment she gets back on the air, we can be sure of that. Meanwhile, we’re self-sufficient here for longer than it will take to sort things out. So we can continue to work while we wait.”
Wade sat in the passenger compartment of the hovercraft, clutching the warmed ceramic of a mug of hot chocolate, gulping at it and scalding the roof of his mouth, and slowly, slowly coming back up out of the depths of hypothermia. Back from the deepest cold he had ever felt in his life; back to the point where he could shiver; then through violent shivering, to the point where he could stop all but a residual quiver.
Carlos was out on another exploration of the burned station. X sat across from Wade, hunched over the stove to catch as much of its warmth as possible, sucking down his own hot chocolate.
“This is turning into quite a trip for you,” X observed.
“Yeah.” Wade glanced at X. “I wish I still had Val assigned to me as a guide. I’d feel better.”
X grunted. “This’d be nothing to her.”
“Is that right?”
“You should hear some of the stories she tells.”
“So she’s an exceptional mountaineer.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. I think a lot of mountaineers are like her. It’s just that they all have lots of really scary stories to tell. They go out close to the edge, I’m telling you. It’s scary.”
“It seems decadent to me.”
“Decadent?”
“Well, you know. I hear a good version of La Mer and I’m thrilled, I mean really thrilled. So, you know, if you need to risk your life to get your thrills, I don’t know. It seems jaded to me.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure it’s the same kind of thrill you’re talking about. I’m not sure it’s the risk itself these people are hooked on. It’s something else, I don’t know. I never understood it. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, trying to understand it. One time Val told me about getting avalanched on the side of Mount Cook and carried down the mountainside toward the bergschrund at the bottom of the slope, you know the crack at the bottom? Certain death. But the avalanche carried them right over it. They were left waist-deep in the snow on the flats, unharmed, except Val had busted a rib. And she said it hurt like hell, but they had to walk ten miles to get to a roadhead, and somewhere on the way they started laughing so hard that she almost died of the pain, but she couldn’t stop laughing. It was so great, she said. She says it with this little Aussie accent sometimes—it was grayte. Like an Aussie gal. Totally scary.”
“So you two were some kind of a …?”
“Yeah yeah. We had an affair, an ice romance you know, end of last season.”
“Wow.”
“I know.” Brooding. “But this season when we got back to Mac Town she wasn’t interested.”
“What?”
“Yeah. It was over.”
“No.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh man. I hate that kind of thing.”
“Yeah well.” X sipped his hot chocolate. “Better for your chances with her anyway, right?”
“What!”
“Come on.”
“Come on yourself!” Wade shook his head. “Why would she even consider me. A Washington bureaucrat, a functionary.”
“She liked you.”
“I can’t even ski.”
“That’s true.”
“Hey now. Neither can you, and I notice she went with you.”
“See?”
“Oh, so maybe there’s hope. Maybe I can be so lucky as to get the same treatment you got.”
They cackled briefly.
“We can dream,” X said.
Carlos slammed in and made for the stove. “Not good,” he told them. Apparently the blast had knocked apart all the buildings and set the fuel bladders on fire, and almost everything had burned after that. The force of the explosion appeared to have broken the hover-craft’s mooring ropes and skidded it across the ice a few feet, saving it from further harm. Carlos rooted in his bag of finds, cursing again in Spanish, but almost absentmindedly now.
“But where did everyone go?” X asked again, as he had out at the station on the ice cap. It seemed to Wade that they had made the crossing of the polar plateau only to find themselves in the same situation they had been in before, except now much more tired, sore, cold and hungry. His legs lay there before him like Jell-O held in long balloons, and his tailbone was aching, though he did not think his spectacular fall had broken it again.
Carlos poured himself some hot water from the pot on the stove into a mug of powdered chocolate. For a moment Wade smelled the sweet dark smell. He felt intense relief at being indoors. They were still on their own, in the interior of Antarctica, in the midst of what appeared to be a general terrorist attack; but at least they were indoors.
“First another meal,” Carlos said, as he put more ice in the pot to melt. “And warm up some more. Then we’ll try the radio again and see if we can make coms with Shackleton or McMurdo. Or anybody.”
The other two nodded, staring hard at the pots on the stove. They were all now sitting encased in thick sleeping bags Carlos had pulled out of the hovercraft’s cabinets, the red nylon bunching around them to the chest. With their ski masks rolled up into thick-rimmed caps, they looked almost human.
“Is there much food?” Wade asked. “If we have to wait to be rescued?”
Carlos frowned. “The galley burned. There’s some scattered around in other buildings, in emergency bags. And some here on board. Enough to feed us for a week or two, certainly.”
“Surely it won’t take that long to get to us.”
“One would think so. Hopefully we can find out by radio.”
“Could we drive this thing down the glacier to Shackleton Camp?”
Carlos and X looked at each other.
“I was thinking about it,” Carlos said. “I’ve driven it a few times, I know how to do it, but it takes two….” He looked at X.
“I’ve watched,” X said, hand up. “I could do the copilot, I guess. We could try if we had to.”
“Maybe we could figure it out,” Wade said. “How hard could it be?”
The other two shared another look.
“Maybe,” Carlos said. “We’ll see what Mac Town says first. If we can get them.”
Then they heard shouts outside.
Ice like white paper before the first brush stroke. The original emptiness from which all begins. A fifth element beyond space and time, emptiness in its supreme degree.