Carlos looked over his shoulder and then spun the steering wheel to the right. “Full left outrigger,” he said to X. “We need to go hard left.” He shoved the prop fan throttle to full power and took the steering wheel in both hands, standing before it with his head swiveling around in an attempt to see all directions at once. And then they were jetting sideways across the slope of the ice, sliding downhill still but making tremendous progress across the slope as well. If they went into a spin now they would be doomed to slip down into the crevasse field and crash. X ran the left outrigger motor faster or slower depending on the craft’s yaw, and Carlos did the same with the steering wheel, and suddenly it seemed as if they were two parts of a mind that actually knew what it was doing, shooting a traverse across the Zaneveld Glacier like an Everglades fan boat going full speed, jiggling their controls minutely, absolutely locked onto the scene rushing at them, the glacier surface here a smoothly curving drop, with some small crevasses straight ahead; they flew right over them; to their right and below, a veritable Manhattan of blue seracs was flashing by. They were rounding Wiest Bluff at about ninety miles an hour.
But then as they rounded the great turn, another chaos of blue ice reared up directly before them, across all the glacier they could see. Without a word Carlos brought the hovercraft around so that it was facing uphill again, and X stabilized as much as he could with just a single outrigger; they were still working together with perfect coordination, and the craft held its rear to their destination and with the fan at full power slowed, slowed, slowed; but the shear zone was coming up at them so fast that Val hissed. X leaped onto the lift fan throttles and muscled them down with all his strength, and the skirts puffed out and collapsed and the tub slammed down onto the ice, and they were all thrown about as in a giant earthquake, Carlos and X holding on hard to try to keep the craft pointed uphill. They slowed, slowed, slowed. Then with a huge metallic crash the craft fell backward into the first crevasse of the shear zone and smashed to a halt, tilted up at about forty-five degrees.
X pushed himself off the floor. Carlos had already leaped back to the controls to kill the engines. The craft remained tilted up at the sky. The rear of the hovercraft was stuck down in a crevasse, which fortunately for them was both narrow and shallow. Not that they would ever get the craft out; but at least they had not fallen all the way into an abyss. Carlos and X and Val looked at each other, white-faced and round-eyed.
“Everyone all right back there?” Val called to the others.
Moans, curses. “What the fuck was that!” Jack said.
“Glad to hear you’re feeling better,” Val said.
“We are fine!” Ta Shu called up. “This is a good place!”
More curses.
“Let’s get off this thing before it falls all the way in,” Val said. “It’s back to walking for us.”
No one could object. The hovercraft was obviously out of commission. And it had, as Val pointed out when they staggered back to the cabin door, gotten them down the steepest section of the glacier. “We’re only about twenty miles from Shackleton Camp, and it’s only a few hundred meters lower than we are here. Easy sailing all the way! It’s going to be fine! We’re almost there.”
“If you had missed this crack we would have been there in about half an hour,” Jack said.
Val’s jaw clenched so hard that X could see all the muscles on that side of her face bulge out. Carlos and X merely looked at each other. They shook hands. “Let’s get going,” Carlos said.
white sky
white ice
Val ran around at full speed until they all stood on the ice beside the tilted hovercraft: nine people encased in full extreme weather gear, crampons on their boots, two of them pulling banana sleds piled with equipment and bags. They had skis and ski poles tied to the sleds, but they were on bare ice here, and crampons were mandatory. High thin clouds covered the sky, and down the broad glacier, between its cliff-sided mountain walls, a bloom of thick cumulus cloud sat right on the ice. It was windy, although fortunately the wind was from above, and so would be behind them as they walked. It was cold. No one looked happy.
Val surveyed the group one more time before starting out. “We’ll walk down to Shackleton Camp and take breaks every hour on the way,” she said. “It’ll be fine.”
No response. Jack had not said a word since they had climbed off the hovercraft back into the frigid blast. Probably they should have been hauling him in one of the banana sleds right from the start, but he had refused to cooperate, and the sled was there if needed; and anyway it was a good sign that he was still well enough to be himself. All the clients looked weary and tense, she thought, except for Ta Shu, who was wandering away from the rest and turning in slow circles, talking rapidly in Chinese. The others were huddled around her. Wade and X stood beside each other, watching her like a little Greek chorus. Wade had not gotten any further calls, either in or out. He seemed resigned to whatever happened next, pinched by the wind but resolute. X stoical as always. At least those two were fresh compared to her clients, who had already walked farther than their ordinary strength would have taken them. To tack on twenty more miles was a hard thing. But they needed to get Jack to the med clinic in McMurdo, and they were still very short on food. So there was no choice but to walk the remainder of the way.
Val took off, hauling the banana sled and keeping her pace down so that she would not get too far ahead of the rest. Carlos pulled the other sled; between the two of them they had everything they thought they might use on the hike.
Despite the sleds, the other seven were much slower than she and Carlos. Her clients were stiff and exhausted; and Wade and X not very good on the nobbled blue ice. Jim walked next to Jack, giving him something to grab onto if he slipped. A man who had hidden the fact that he had a broken collarbone, the fool. If he had known. Val sighed and shook her head. Lots of climbers were heavily psyched to do the hero thing, they knew all the great injury stories, Doug Scott getting off the Ogre with two broken legs, Joe Simpson smashed like a doll and crawling back to his partner in Patagonia; the stories were endless; but why not tell your companions you were hurt? What did that accomplish, except perhaps to make them feel guilty afterward for wondering why you were going so slow? Which was stupid. She was not going to feel guilty. It was so stupid that, combined with his periods of unconsciousness, she had to worry again about how hard he had been hit in the crevasse. Get stunned and go silent, like a hurt animal. It happened. Sad in a way.
But she was pulling too far ahead again, even ahead of Carlos. She waited while the others staggered to her. The worst part was the wind. Back in the world they said (way too often) It’s not the heat it’s the humidity. And in Antarctica they said just as frequently It’s not the cold it’s the wind. And it was just as true. On a windless day the proper clothing made it possible to withstand the coldest temperatures Antarctica had to offer—even to overheat in them. But with even the slightest breeze that warmth was ripped out and flung away. Even the best of the new spacesuit gear was not much shield against its bitter power. And if a wind rose to gale force, it became unbearable. You simply couldn’t face it.
Unfortunately, she could see that that kind of a wind was very possibly approaching them from downglacier. It was like being in a train wreck in slow motion; the wind was behind them, strong but at their backs, so that they could hunch over and endure it, and in some ways it even helped a little, pushing their legs forward as they lifted them; a wind at one’s back was not such a bad thing, no matter how cold. But despite this katabatic wind, the cumulus cloud lying on the glacier down near the NSF camp was coming their way, in what appeared to be utter defiance of the laws of physics. “God damn it,” Val said to herself as she watched it come. Something different was going on down there, of course; the cloud was impelled by some other wind, a northerly coming off the Ross Sea it looked like, pushing up and under the katabatic. Or whatever. Storms in Antarctica could do almost anything. In the ordinary course of things she would have been checking satellite photos on her wrist to see what was up, maybe calling Mac Coms for a detailed weather report, and if the forecast was bad she would probably be ordering her group to stop and put up their tents. As it was, she continued to watch the cloud come at them, hoping it would slow down, swearing at its apparent ability to move against the wind. “God damn it. There is a curse on this trip.”