Icequake Page 7

  His smile changed. “Ah. Well, it wasn’t the first time, you know. But the times before, I thought I knew what I was doing. It was frightening, I’ll admit. But you know, Jeanne, it was really quite lovely down there. Bloody cold, but even so — the light in the ice is the purest blue you’ll ever see, and the ice seems to glow. The sky looks a long way up, and down below it’s just — black. Nothing. You can’t tell how far down it might go. When those bits of the edge fell in, I couldn’t hear ’em hit bottom. But then I was cracking my skull on the wall at that point.”

  “You sounded so calm.”

  “Did I?” Will laughed. “After the quake, and the crash, I was getting almost used to it all — weren’t you?” Then, looking around the disordered lab, he added: “This is worse, in a way. I don’t even want to think about the drilling rig.”

  “Yes.”

  Will turned sideways to face her. “All right, House-mouse. What’s on your mind?”

  “You’ll think I’m pretty stupid.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’d — I want to move in with you, Will.”

  He looked carefully at her. “I’ll be damned. You’re not joking.”

  “No, I’m not joking.”

  “Well.” Will looked both pleased and alarmed. “Well. It’s a lovely idea, isn’t it? But it’d just upset everyone to no purpose — including me. There’d be jealousy, envy, resentment — ”

  “That Canadian girl last year — she moved in with Bob McCullough, and no one minded.”

  “Perhaps not. But it was nearly the end of the summer, and we were all about to go home.” He chewed his thumbnail. “I like you a lot, Jeanne. And you like me. But you’re not the sort to fall madly in love; you are certainly not madly in love with me.”

  “No — not in some soppy girlish way. But I do like you. And I need you. Ever since the quake, I’ve been — ” She covered her face with her hands and leaned against him, shuddering. “Oh, Will, I keep thinking this is all a dream, all a dream. But it doesn’t quit, and I’m so bloody frightened.”

  “Yes, yes.” He stroked her curly yellow hair. Her fingers were peeling from the touch of frostbite she’d suffered. She smelled sweet and clean. “Yes, yes. I know.”

  “God — I feel rotten doing this to you,” she murmured. “As if you didn’t have enough trouble, falling into crevasses and freezing your poor ears, you’ve got me blubbering all over you.”

  Will laughed, and kissed her gently. “All right. Look. Go back to bed. In the morning if you haven’t changed your mind, and I haven’t either, I’ll talk to Carter about it. Maybe he can give us that empty room McCullough had.”

  “I won’t change my mind, I promise you.”

  “Ough, you’re choking me, you brute. Now up you get. I’ll walk you home, if I may.”

  She had been up only an hour or two, but as she slid into her bunk Jeanne knew she would have no trouble getting back to sleep. Tomorrow, once they were settled, she could tell him what she was really frightened about. He’d understand. God, he’d better understand.

  *

  Katerina Varenkova lit a Rothman off the butt of the last one and poured herself some more brandy.

  “Those things are lethal, you know,” Herm Northrop remarked. His dark eyes gleamed behind his rimless glasses. “I’m always astounded to see a doctor smoking.”

  “Communists are brave people. And in-vul-ner-able.”

  “Not to our capitalist carcinogens. Nor to their own alcohol.”

  “You are saying I am drunk?”

  “Why, I believe I am. Katya, you are drunk.”

  “Good. I deserve to be drunk. Since yesterday morning I have two or three hours of sleep. I am not a young girl; I cannot stay up so long. But Terry and Hugh need attention. The emergency supplies for McMurdo, I must pack them. So I stay up. I have Big Eye anyway, unless I drink brandy. Then I get some sleep, or I am no good to anybody.”

  “At least you’re not being under-used.”

  “That is true. I am very busy. I will stay busy.”

  “Good. So will I.” He raised his Styrofoam cup. “To us — the workers of the world.”

  “To us.”

  It was quiet in the infirmary. Terry, drugged against the agony of his burns, slept heavily a few metres away behind a partition. A single lamp, flickering with power surges induced by solar flares, glowed on the desk next to Katerina. Herm sat in an uncomfortable armchair, looking avuncular as always but a bit drunk as well. He regarded the lamp suspiciously.

  “I don’t mind the flickering,” he said, “but I do worry about the reactor’s electronics. The silly thing might decide to shut itself down. Or go for a walk.”

  She seemed not to have heard him. “Herman — what will happen to my husband?”

  “I don’t know, Katya. But I’m pretty sure he and the others will pull through all right.”

  “And why?”

  “Vostok’s a long way from all this, isn’t it? A good thousand kilometres or more. And it sits on three kilometres of ice — goes down below sea level, if I’m not mistaken. That won’t move very easily. In any case, they can fly out to Mirny Station. Good lord, with those monstrous tractors of theirs, they could drive out if they liked.”

  “Yes. That is so.” She obviously didn’t believe him, but she brightened a little. “Poor Vanya. He is probably worrying over me. And your wife — she will be worrying over you.”

  “I suppose so.” He realised he hadn’t thought about his wife since the quake. Toronto seemed very far away, farther and stranger than Vostok.

  *

  Penny went to the greenhouse after the meeting. The plants seemed unchanged, but after a while she noticed that a few were missing — probably knocked off their shelves by the quake. The long fluorescent day went on for the rest, and the air held a faint scent of sweet peas despite the ventilation fans.

  She got out her notepad and began to reconstruct the events of the last two days. Her hands still hurt a bit, and the right one was peeling badly with frostbite; it reminded her that what she was describing had really happened. So did the sunburn on her face, which was the worst she’d ever had.

  She wrote steadily, ignoring her own doubts about the adequacy of her words to convey what they had gone through at Beardmore and on the Shelf. When she got a chance, she would develop and print the photos she’d taken, but even they would fail to show the true scale and power of the surge. Maybe nothing could.

  An hour passed quickly. She heard footsteps, and Steve walked in.

  “Hi, Penny.”

  “Hi. Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

  “Too wound up. And Tim’s snoring and talking in his sleep.” He sat down on the bench next to her, his back against the table on which Penny was working. “I’m sorry — am I interrupting?”

  “Nothing serious.” She patted his hand. “How are you?”

  “…I’m not sure. Scared and happy.”

  “Mm. I can understand scared, but — ”

  “Well, I was pretty accurate about the quake, and too conservative about the surge.”

  “Uh-huh. Very expensive vindication for a crackpot theory.”

  Steve nodded sombrely. “Yes, it is. And this is just the down payment.”

  “I guess so. What next?”

  “Mass extinctions. A new ice age. A temporary rise in sea level of ten or twenty metres. More earthquakes and volcanism.”

  “Can I quote you?”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. It suits you too well.”

  “Sorry. But it isn’t going to be quite that bad, is it?”

  “I think it’ll be very bad. Since the Roche Event, the whole planet has taken a huge dose of radiation. It’s been aggravated by the solar flares, which have damn near finished off the ozone layer.” He smiled faintly at the blisters on her cheeks and nose; he had them, too. “The ozone will recover eventually when the sun quiets down, but until then we’ll take far more ultraviolet than we’re used to. And until the magnet
ic field builds up again — which will probably take generations — we’ll also get a lot of ionising radiation.”

  “Which means increased mutation rates and reduced fertility rates, at least for land animals.”

  He nodded. “Bad time to be a big vertebrate. It’ll affect sea life as well. But those are things we’ll be worrying about a year or two from now, as the cows and pigs start dying off. It’s the long-range effect that really scares me.” His voice was flat and emotionless: “The new super-shelf will start the ice age. The sheer volume of ice going into the sea will cause the rise in sea level. With some help from increased melting. A rise of ten or twenty metres will drown every major seaport in the world, and a good percentage of usable farmland. After a century or two the sea level will drop again as the glaciers start expanding into ice sheets. So much for Canada and northern Europe, and maybe the USSR. The redistribution of ice and water will put more strain on faults, so we’ll have more earthquakes and more eruptions. The volcanic dust in the atmosphere will help cool us down even more.” He shrugged.

  “Then we’re finished, aren’t we?”

  “Nonsense — it’s not the end of the world, Penny.”

  “Dope! I mean us, here.”

  “Oh. No, not that either. We may be stuck here over the winter, but we’ll probably get home somehow.”

  “Uh-huh. How?”

  “Well — weather or no weather, they’ll want to know what’s going on down here. By spring there may be more people in the Antarctic than ever.”

  She thought for a moment. “You know, no matter how bad it is out there, they’ll never understand what we’re going through.”

  “No, I guess they won’t. We probably won’t understand it ourselves, once we’re back.”

  He leaned over and kissed her, tentatively at first and then with something like fierceness. There was a pleasant, faintly acrid smell to him, and she felt her sexuality waken for the first time in weeks. Her responsiveness surprised them both. After a long moment she pulled away.

  He smiled, without complacence or arrogance, and kissed her again. It was the same smile she had seen when the quake began, the smile of astonishment and delight of a man seeing the world marvellously shape itself to obey his private vision.

  They made clumsy, gentle love on the greenhouse floor, between the ice and the flowers and the nodding green leaves.

  Chapter 6 – The Otter

  Howie and Simon winched the Otter out of the hangar into the sunlight. The morning sky was clear; there were light winds from Grid North-East, and the temperature was -35°C. Al went smoothly, almost absentmindedly through pre-flight checkout and engine-starting procedure while Max Wilhelm squinted into the sun. Someone was up in the geophysics dome, but no one else was up to see them off.

  “If we hustle, we can be back before anybody’s up,” Al said as he started the first engine.

  “I’m hoping we’re back before I’m up,” Max muttered.

  The engines started without difficulty, and Al taxied out on to the ski-way. The blizzard had blown right across it, so there was little drift; Howie’s work with the D8 two days before hadn’t been entirely in vain. Carrying nothing more than the two men and three fifty-kilo emergency packs of food and medical supplies, the Otter moved lightly and easily. It bumped briskly along the ski-way and lifted off.

  “Camera ready?” Al asked. Max nodded. In his lap was a Nikon with a 150mm telephoto lens.

  “Nothing much to see yet,” he remarked.

  “Even so, take a picture every three or four minutes.”

  “What for?”

  “It’ll give us a better idea of what’s happening to the Shelf. You should be able to get a couple of good shots in just a minute anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  Al followed the Sno-Cat tracks back to the crevasse field and then tried to find the crash site, but it was lost in dazzle and shadow. As they flew low over the pressure ridge, Max stared down in astonishment at the abyss beyond.

  “Take pictures!” Al ordered. He changed course slightly to follow the gap between Shacktown’s island and the next, while Max shot a dozen frames. In some places the gap was up to five hundred metres wide; in others it narrowed to a crack one could step across, but it never entirely vanished. The depth of the gap was hard to measure: too much ice had carved off the floes. But there was one short stretch where the bottom was evidently covered with only a thin crust of berg bits, and the cliffs rose over fifty metres to the top of the Shelf.

  Max put down his camera at last. “You were very lucky,” he said.

  “Yeah. Sloppy good luck. I’ve had a lot of it.” Al lit a cigar. “When I was a kid in the Navy, fresh out of training, they put me in a Search and Rescue outfit in Vietnam. We sat on a carrier offshore, keeping an eye on the traffic. Guys were going down almost every day — sometimes it’d be a fighter pilot coming back from the North, but usually it was some artillery spotter or a gunship crew. We figured we had about half an hour, tops, to get to him before the VC did.

  “Well, one morning a Huey gets shot down. Four guys in it. We go roaring off, another chopper and me, to collect them off a hillside, and damn if they haven’t come down in the middle of a North Vietnamese regiment. I get close enough to see about two hundred guys racing up the hill, and all of a sudden I’ve got no oil pressure. Some of those guys could really shoot.

  “So I veer off and manage to bring the chopper down about three kilometres away, almost on top of some US Marines. The other chopper goes in, lands next to the Huey and takes a mortar round. Killed instantly. I never did find out what happened to the guys in the Huey.”

  Something in Al’s tone made Max turn to look at him. “Did you feel bad about not being able to save them?”

  “Oh yeah, for a while. A couple of months. I took some dumb chances. You start feeling guilty, y’know? And you think your buddies might think you’re scared. I wasn’t. Heck, I didn’t even believe in the law of gravity. Anyway, I got over feeling bad. But that’s what I mean by sloppy good luck.”

  “Perhaps your real luck there was in outliving your feelings. I think about those days, and all the feelings come back as strong as ever.”

  “You weren’t in the war, were you?”

  “No, no. I was still in Europe. But I remember one day in 1968, in the spring. I was only 23, just a year out of university, without a job, and it looked like the revolution was about to happen in Paris. In Vienna in those days we were all radicals. So I decided to go and join the revolution. I spent the night before I left with a very sweet girl, a Swedish girl named Kaj. In the morning she walked me to the station, and that is what I remember: the smell of the air that morning, and the sound of our footsteps — it was very early, there was no traffic yet — what her hand felt like in mine. She said to me, “You’ll have such a good time you’ll never come back.” And I said “Nonsense, I’ll be back in the fall.” But she was right, you know? By fall I was in New Zealand. I never saw her again, never wrote to her, but I think of her almost every day and it makes me feel as happy and young as I did that morning. And sad also.”

  “That’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make,” Al smiled. Then, after a pause, he said: “I know what you mean. With me, it’s the last time I saw my daughter. May 11, 1975, her birthday. She was four years old.”

  They flew over several more immense fractures, as well as huge fields of seracs — the topographical nightmare caused by intersecting crevasses. Some were like miniature mesas, steep-sided and flat-topped; others rose from shadowed crevasses in razor-edged blue spires and ridges. In one place they could see the edges of a fracture part, close again and grind against each other in a cloud of wind-driven snow and ice fragments. The noise of the collision, even a thousand metres below them, was a blend of booms and shrieks that drowned the roar of the Otter’s engines.

  “There’s Erebus,” Al said after a while. “The smoke up ahead.”

  The flat horizon was beginning to blur, lost
in greyness. Off to the left the peaks of the Royal Society Range glittered sharply. Al tried to raise McMurdo, without luck.

  “It’s snowing,” Max said. “No, it’s ash.” A fine, greyish-white powder was swirling off the windscreen. He clicked off the remaining shots and rapidly reloaded the camera.

  They passed a few kilometres Grid West of Minna Bluff, a narrow promontory jutting into the Shelf from the mainland. Scott, Wilson and Bowers had died not far from here; they would scarcely recognise the Shelf now, it was so contorted and shattered. Just beyond Minna Bluff were Black and White Islands, clearly visible despite the growing haze. The Shelf had ridden up on the islands’ Grid North shores, and in some places had already moved over the lower slopes to the far side, like a wave breaking over rocks. In the lee of the islands the ice had parted, creating long leads of dully gleaming water.

  Now Erebus was dead ahead, its slopes obscured by ash and smoke. From its crest a black-and-white pillar of smoke rose boiling into the sky, only gradually yielding to the wind and smearing Grid West over Ross Island and the distant edge of the Shelf. Orange flares of light spurted through the smoke, and in three or four places lava streams picked their way delicately downhill. A deep, unending roar filled the air; the stink of sulphur was strong. A few kilometres Grid West of Hut Point Peninsula, beyond the site of Scott Base, a steep black cone rose from the shoreline. It was well over a hundred metres high, and like Erebus it was pouring smoke and ash into the sky.

  “A satellite cone,” Max shouted, pointing to it. “God — it must be growing faster than Paricutin did.”

  The new volcano was wrapped in mist; as the Shelf moved up its black slopes, ice melted, vaporised and then froze again as ice fog. But when the wind was right, they could see a red flare at the cone’s summit, pulsing like arterial blood and bright enough to throw shadows down the smoking slopes. In this world of white and blue, black and grey, the flare looked oddly artificial: crimson and orange here were the colours of man-made things.

  “Did you see Outer Willy?” Al yelled.

  “No.” Max was taking photos with tense deliberation.