Of course not everyone was interested, even after word got around about Sylvia’s approval, and it became clearer that they were going to have a shot at it. Some had prospered in ASL and become part of its management, or at least they thought they were, though since they were in McMurdo rather than Seattle they were certainly mistaken about that. Others had their lives focused back in the world and were on the ice simply to make as much money as fast as they could, and they didn’t want this project complicated by the responsibility and risk of any newfangled nonprofit system. And there were others still who had complained endlessly about ASL but were too chicken to try a coop, as Joyce put it, or too cynical to think it would make any difference. And lastly there were those who did not want to see change of any kind, because they did not like change. Or else for no reason at all, at least as far as X could tell. Four months ago this attitude would have shocked him; but he had been young then, and had not fully grasped how completely people could act in contradiction to their own best interests.
Here in McMurdo, however, enough people had been burned by the one-company town syndrome to make for a huge pool of talent waiting for a chance to move. Enough had had enough. And Joyce and Debbie and Alan and Randi and Tom, who had been here forever and seen it all, and had worked so hard to make little communities under the umbrella of their responsibility, humanizing their zones despite the pressure from above to downsize and rationalize—they were poised to act. And now was the time. X was just a messenger.
And how he enjoyed it. He seemed to have lost the need to sleep, or the ability, one or the other; as far as he recalled he had not slept since their return to McMurdo, and for a good long time before that; it must have been nearly a week all told, and all that time in the perpetual sunlight, hurtling sandy-eyed from one crisis to the next, spending the town’s brief downtime around 3 A.M. on the phone to the States talking to the Co-op Aid Co-op, as well as to any other groups and agencies that could help them in the preparation for their bid, talking until the sunlight sprayed over Erebus and the galley was opened and X ravenous for breakfast, no different than the sleepless day before except his eyes were twenty-four hours sandier and his mind twenty-four hours more sleep-deprived, in a hyperlucid derangement of high hopes and apprehension.
And that was the state he was in when he ran into Val as he left the galley, feeling the possibility of the return of sleep into his life: vastly tired; bone tired; completely wasted. But there she was, staring at him with a funny expression. After the retreat down Shackleton Glacier and the time with the ferals, he felt he knew her much better than he had during the weeks they had gone out together—better than he knew the members of his own family, if the truth were known. As Cherry-Garrard had said, in Antarctica you get to know people so well that in comparison you do not seem to know the people in civilization at all. But X hadn’t had much chance to speak with Val since their return, and now, he saw, there was something on her mind.
“How’s it going?” she said unsteadily.
“Okay! I think we’ve got the people we need to make a good bid for the field services. How about you?”
“Oh, I’m all right.”
They stood looking at the mud of McMurdo under their feet.
“So you think there’ll be a co-op?” she asked.
“I do! I sure hope so, anyway. It’s my only chance of staying.”
She nodded.
“What about you, Val? Do you think you’ll join?”
She shook her head. X felt it like a blow. He began to go blank inside, like he had when she had first broken up with him.
She put a hand to his arm. “I’m going out with the ferals.”
“Oh Val.”
He didn’t know what to say. To him the ferals had seemed like aliens.
“I can’t stay here, X. Even if the co-op works, my job would still be guide. And I can’t do that anymore. Those trips always reduce me to the level of the person having the worst time.”
“To the Jack level.”
“Yeah, exactly. But it isn’t just him. It’s always something. I’m a shitty guide.”
“You are not!”
“I am. I am not a good guide. You don’t know.”
“I do know, I’ve seen you! You shouldn’t let that guy get to you, he was a jerk. Hiding the fact that he was hurt, that was bullshit. He was setting you up.”
She shook her head. “It’s not him. I mean it is, but there are always people like him on these trips. Listen to me, X. I don’t like the clients anymore. I think the Footsteps thing is bullshit. I’m not even seeing Antarctica anymore when I’m guiding. I might as well not be here! I Gould get the same hassles and live in Jackson Hole. I’m toast, X. Burnt toast. But I want to be in Antarctica. I want to want to be here. I want to live here and work, but not as a guide.”
“What about search and rescue, couldn’t you do that?”
She shook her head, giving him a hard look. “The rescues don’t always work. A lot of times you’re going out to collect bodies. Have you ever gone out to a crash site where everyone has burned to death?”
“No,” X said, shocked.
“I have. I don’t want to do search and rescue, I don’t want to lead expeditions, I don’t want to be a guide. I just want to live in the mountains. And I liked the look of the ferals, I really did. I’d like to try what they do, try living here.”
“Ah.”
He thought it over. Listen to me, she had said, so sharply, as if he never had. She had always been one of the mountaineers, ever since he met her; crazy to be out in the frigid landscape, clambering around. He wasn’t like that, but now he wanted to understand her, really understand her; and that meant understanding that wild urge, that craziness in her that he wasn’t sure he even approved of. He had to get that or he wouldn’t get her.
“What about you?” she asked, suddenly intent, squeezing his arm. “You could come too, you know. You could join.”
“Join the ferals, or join you?”
“I don’t know! Who knows how things will be out there! I don’t know at all. But if we were both out there, then …”
Then they would have a chance. Or at least she would have company among all those strangers.