“Try the left outrigger,” he said, stroking his beard.
“Okay.”
X pushed down the toggle. When the little snowmobile hit the ice and X squeezed its throttle, shredded ice shot out from its back end toward the hovercraft, and immediately they could see that they had some resistance to their leeway.
“That’s enough,” Carlos said, and X held the throttle at that point. After a bit: “Okay, we’re past that one. Wind should be directly behind us now. Pull the outrigger.”
“Left outrigger up,” X said, enjoying their imitation of copilot procedures.
Then the craft’s pulse radar began to ping, loud and fast. Carlos looked over at the radar screen: crevasses ahead, on the last section of their ramp between the sinks. “Damn.” He looked at Geraldo’s map again. “Ah yes. That’s why they made this turn, see here? We have to go down right against the shoreline of the massif. That’s blue ice without a break. At its side it curves down to the rock, so we can’t get too close and slide over that curve. We ride down on the flat stuff.”
So he slowed the craft, and brought it back in toward Roberts. X saw what he meant; there against the shore was a broad band of turquoise ice, very smooth and unbroken, as if these were calm shallows where the glacier did not move as quickly as it did out in the middle of the stream. The only complication was that the mass of the glacier was considerably higher than the rock of the shoreline, bulking over it in a way that added to the surreal quality of the view: the drop from the glacier to the shore was a smooth blue curve, like a wave bulging up ready to crest. Wind ablation of the grounded ice, Carlos said. If they got onto that slope they would slip sideways and crash down onto the rock.
But as Carlos had said, the level creamy blue ice above the curve was wide enough to travel on. And so they proceeded down the glacier, looking left and down at the shoreline of Roberts, the red of the shattered dolerite very pronounced against the blue of the ice. On their right a nasty shear zone broke the ice into a million glittering blue shards. So they could not shade far either right or left; but they had their road down.
They hummed along. On their left appeared a little side stream of ice separating Roberts Massif proper from an outlying island of rock called Everett Nunatak. After that they came to an overlook and could see down the broad expanse of the Zaneveld. From above their route was clear; they could glide down between two of the many parallel rubble lines marking the surface of the glacier, the rubble composed of boulders and pebbles that had fallen off or been ripped away from Roberts, and conveyed out gradually to the center of the ice, revealing the slow-motion currents by the way they were lined along the surface.
Val came up to the bridge. “This manual I found says the hovercraft should not be taken onto slopes more than three degrees off horizontal.”
Carlos shook his head. “The manual was not written for Antarctica.”
“This hovercraft wasn’t made for Antarctica.”
“True. But it does fine. We go down backwards, we have the outriggers. We take a line and cleave to it.”
“Uh huh,” Val said dubiously.
Yet it seemed to X that Carlos was right to be sanguine. Majestically they floated down the Zaneveld, over flat ice next to one of the main rubble lines, shooting over small cracks and rocks that would have eaten a snowmobile; floating down a slight incline, effortless and smooth. Carlos and X were sitting back, feeling quite pleased with themselves as Val peered suspiciously over their shoulders.
Then the ice tilted downward just slightly more than it had been before, and suddenly the hovercraft was like a ball in a gravity well demonstration, speeding up distinctly, and what was worse, sliding off to the right. With a brief clatter the craft ran directly over the nearest rubble line, and then it was flying downslope—the true downslope—right toward a gnarly shear zone underlying Wiest Bluff, on the other shore of the Zaneveld.
Carlos sat forward and turned the craft to the left, and it responded, swivelling on its axis; but they merely continued sideways in the same direction they had been going before. “Left outrigger,” he said tersely.
X brought it down onto the ice, and squeezed the snowmobile accelerator to full throttle. “How about going down backwards, like you said?” he suggested.
“Yes yes,” Carlos snapped, spinning the steering wheel.
“What about brakes?” Val asked.
“No brakes.”
“No brakes!”
“It’s like a boat. You cut the engines and it slows.”
“Except on a slope like this!”
“We have to turn around. Bring the outrigger up.”
Carlos spun the steering wheel harder left, and the craft came around so they were going backward, more or less, but still sliding down toward Wiest Bluff, never changing the overall direction of the craft’s movement at all. “Right outrigger now.”
X dropped the right outrigger. Then for a moment the craft was facing true uphill, and they were sliding down backward, and Carlos shoved up the prop fan’s speed; but X’s outrigger tracks caught the ice at that same moment, and the craft swung around and began sliding sideways again. Carlos cursed and turned the steering wheel the other way, but it took a while to stop their spin momentum, and when he got it going the other way it spun right past the backward position again.
“I’m going to try bringing the tub down into contact,” X said nervously, thinking it would act as a brake. He put his weight on the stiff lifters.
“Don’t,” Carlos said. “The ice is too rough.” As he spoke the craft began to chatter and jounce horribly underneath them.
X hastily yanked the lifters back up.
“What about in a smooth patch?” he asked.
“That was a smooth patch.”
“Oh. Well, what about when we’re over snow.”
“Sure.”
But the glacier was gleaming blue ice for as far as they could see in all directions: like a giant racing spill-way, with all its waves and turbulence frozen in place for them to observe as they slid farther down into it.
“When I get it straight backwards put both outriggers down,” Carlos said. “Then if we turn left accelerate the left one, right if we drift right. I’ll do the same with the steering.”
“Okay.”
“Then if we slow down enough, bring the tub down fast.”
“Okay.”
“God damn, you guys,” Val said, looking downslope. “You’re headed for a crevasse field.”
“We know that.”
Carlos began to spin the steering wheel again. He was getting the hang of it, and after a bit he held the craft going directly backward down the slope, long enough for X to engage both outriggers on the ice and set them running, which gave them a bit more stability. Unfortunately the slope of the ice grew even steeper at this point, and they crunched over a set of rubble lines and the right outrigger snowmobile snapped off and went spinning out of sight, boom and all. The hovercraft too was spinning again, dropping from time to time as they flew over crevasses at terrifying angles, hitting the tub then billowing up again on the skirts; if they hit one of those lengthwise they would shoot right down into it and be swallowed. Carlos struggled to get them oriented backward again. Out the front window they could see back up the glittering blue flood they had so far descended, all completely still and yet receding away from them at great speed. It was a steep slope. “We’re still headed for that crevasse field,” Val said. Behind them the whoops and hollers from the passenger cabin had been replaced by dead silence.