She shook her head, shouted “It might last a long time! Too long!”
“But can you walk in this!” X shouted, amazed at the very idea.
“If you wear crampons—and lie flat during the worst parts—you can do it! No problem! This stuff we’re wearing is like a spacesuit!”
X pulled his head away and stared at her. No problem? Was she kidding?
She was not kidding. She was a mountaineer, and what they thought to do out in the wild boggled the imagination. His heart began to pound hard in his chest. Carlos was the best candidate to accompany her on such a hike. But no doubt she wanted Carlos to stay and care for the people left behind. He leaned over and got her ear. “I’ll go with you!”
Now it was her turn to pull back and look at him. Sunglasses, mask; who knew what she was thinking. She caught his ear:
“I’ll be going fast!”
He nodded that he understood.
She said: “Carlos is cooking us a meal.”
So he was. Against and partly under the banana sled the stove was burning, the blue flames wavering somewhat, but burning fiercely nevertheless. That they had in this stupendous howl and rush created a pocket of air still enough to allow the stove to burn was amazing to him.
“Wade got a GPS fix! He says the system is coming back. His senator has reached him on a military satellite system we can use too. So as soon as we’re done eating we should go!”
He nodded that he understood. He realized he was going to do it. His heart was still pounding hard.
Then flickering dark shapes appeared overhead, like killer whales flying horizontally through the storm. X leaped to his feet, astonished, and the wind blew him right out of their shelter and down onto the ground. He pushed up to his knees; yes; blimps were flashing by overhead, colored like the clouds but still undeniably there, sweeping past over them. Harpoons on lines shot down and stuck the ice in little explosions. The blimps swung around on these anchor lines and were pulled right down onto the glacier next to the rubble line, at which point more harpoons shot down, holding the blimps fast to the ice. Three in a row, vibrating in the wind. They had big tail sections at the backs of the bags, containing fans in round housings. Stubby wings protruded from the taut sides of the bags, and underneath the bags narrow gondolas rested right on the ice. Doors in the gondola were shoved open against the wind, and out jumped three people on tethers, dressed in photovoltaic bodysuits much like the trekkers’.
“Want a lift?” the first person to reach them shouted. Sounded like a southern accent. A short young woman.
Everyone in the rock shelter was standing; even Jack had lifted his head up to stare. Clearly the woman’s question was rhetorical. Val and Jim got Jack onto the free banana sled and carried him to the nearest blimp and got him into the gondola. Jim followed him in, then Ta Shu.
“Three in each blimp!” the woman shouted. “We’ll meet up there!” She gestured beyond the rubble line and said something else X couldn’t make out.
Val looked at X, as if to ask him what they should do, and despite everything his heart warmed. He gestured in reply; what other choice did they have? She nodded and went back to retrieve some of their gear. X joined her, and as they leaned over the banana sled in their wall she shouted, “Who are they?”
“I don’t know!” X shouted. “But it reminds me of when my SPOT train was robbed!”
She stared at him, taken aback. “That’s not good!”
“No, but—” He didn’t know what else to say. “They seem to be rescuing us!”
“True!”
They stared at each other.
They returned to their visitors and helped Carlos and Jorge and Elspeth into the second blimp. Then Wade and Val wedged into the back seats of the third blimp’s gondola compartment, which reminded X of a Squirrel helicopter’s insides, the two front seats looking out big curved windows, the back seats jammed against the back wall of the cabin, with storage underneath for their stuff. X sat in the front seat next to the pilot. She was checking dials and flicking toggles, talking into a headset intercom. She pushed a button and the blimp began to vibrate madly as they rose off the ice on its anchor lines; then she pushed another button and the harpoons must have exploded free or been cut away, because all of a sudden they were off on the wind, spinning up and away, inside the cloud itself, the light flickering from dark gray to spun-glass whiteness and everything in between, changing instant by instant. The noise was terrific at first; then it got a bit quieter, and the ride smoother.
Their pilot watched screens before her, giving her data in various false color images that X couldn’t interpret. Powerful motors whirred behind them, and between their noise and the howl of the wind it was still too loud to say anything. The pilot indicated headsets hanging from hooks in the ceiling of the gondola, however, just like in a Squirrel, and X put on his set, and over the now-muffled roar heard Val saying “—you taking us?”
The pilot pointed forward. “Bennett’s Other Platform.” Her voice was clear over the headset, and she definitely had a southern accent. X pulled a folded topographic map out of the open compartment before him and studied it. Bennett Platform was a triangular plateau of bare rock overlooking Shackleton Glacier, across the ice from the Shackleton Camp, underneath a Mount Black. But Bennett’s Other Platform? The pilot did not elucidate, and neither Val nor Wade nor X wanted to bother her any more, as she suddenly seemed completely absorbed in the workings of the blimp, which was tossing wildly in some extra turbulence of the storm. She muttered to herself as she flew with both hands and both feet, looking out the windows more than at her screens, though they could see nothing but mist.
“Isn’t this dangerous?” X inquired.
The pilot looked at him briefly. “What, this? What could happen?” A high sweet laugh. Then she was talking to the blimp again, or the clouds: “Ah come on. Y’all stop it. This is ridiculous. Quit it. No way.” And so on.
“Where are you from?” X asked during a lull in this monologue.
“Mobile, Alabama.”
“No,” X said. “I mean down here.”
The pilot shrugged. Then she became preoccupied by another hard smack of wind. “Give me a break. I mean to tell you. No way.” After a prolonged struggle with the controls she said, “Okay. Here we are. Come on, you beast. Behave yourself for our guests here.”
“Can you give medical attention to the man in the other blimp?” Val asked.
“Sure. That’s why we came out in this kind of wind. It looked like you needed help.”
Below them black rock appeared through the rushing clouds, startling X so much that he jumped back in his seat.
“Don’t worry!” the pilot said, and laughed again.
white white
black
white white
X worried. It was frightening to be so close to rock in such a volatile craft. But their pilot merely coaxed the blimp around into the wind, and then began to wrestle the controls to force the thing downward, or so it seemed. Suddenly an orange pole poked up out of the cloud at them, and the pilot broke into the same muttered argument she had had before as she dropped the blimp down behind this mooring mast. She manipulated controls right in front of X, and a metal arm appeared under them, and a claw like an artificial hand clamped on the mast. “Gotcha!”
After that they descended slowly. The rear of the blimp attached to something else, it seemed to X by the reduced bouncing of the craft; and then they were suspended tautly some ten feet off the flat black rock, frozen mist shooting past on all sides. The pilot reached across X and opened the door. “Out we go!” she shouted, and X unbuckled his seat belt and took off his headset, and made his way down a swinging ladder, the metal rods cold through his mitts and gloves. When he stood on the ground again he found his knees were trembling. He helped Wade and Val down, then the pilot climbed down halfway and let the door slam above her. She jumped down beside them and gestured forward. “Come on in!”