3
In the Antarctic Grain
Within hours of his arrival at the South Pole, X was on a Herc back to McMurdo. His welcome at the Pole was wary at best; no doubt he was regarded as some kind of Jonah; and as there was a plane on the skiway waiting to take off, he was whisked onto it without seeing a thing of the celebrated new station. Ninety degrees south, bye-bye.
Back in McMurdo he was taken directly from the Herc to the Chalet, where he was questioned intensively by his ASL bosses and many NSF people, as well as investigators brought down especially from the north; a big meeting, to which X was able to contribute very little, and indeed after telling his story he was soon ignored by the others while they discussed a number of other odd incidents of which he had been heretofore unaware. The nature of some of these incidents made it clear that his trip as conductor of the SPOT train had not been anywhere near as straightforward as he had been led to believe, a fact which no one at the meeting noticed, of course. He was just part of the train’s software, in an oversized package. A kind of organic robot.
In fact, he thought as he watched the others talk things over, his entire job as General Field Assistant was in effect to be doing the robot work that robots could not yet do. He had come to Antarctica to seek adventure and here he was stuck in Mac Town, shoveling snow, cleaning bathrooms, washing galley ovens, humping loads, yes, even peeling potatoes. Every day a different mindless labor. Good For Anything indeed.
As if to illustrate this thought, he was excused from the meeting to answer a call from Ron to report to the heavy shop. There he found that a forklift operator had accidentally forked through a wall and struck the frame of some shelving in the next room, knocking it onto the floor along with all its bins and cups and drawers full of nuts, bolts, screws, nails, clips, cotter pins, washers, and other assorted small hardware, now all strewn on the floor in a big heap.
Ron came in and smiled cruelly. “Clean this up, X.”
As head of Mac Town maintenance Ron was often X’s boss; also president of the local chapter of the Why Be Normal Club, which in McMurdo was saying a lot. He was one of several old iceheads who had been around so long they thought they were secret masters of McMurdo, and Ron was more correct in this opinion than most. But his charm for X, such as it was, had long since worn off.
“Yes, boss,” X said to the now-empty doorway. Clearly it was robot work of the worst sort, except that robots were still too stupid to distinguish between a nut and a bolt. So X sat down heavily on the chilled concrete floor and started sorting, trying to treat it like some kind of Zen exercise, but fuming more and more as the hours passed: it was not human work. And it did not help that at every meal break he shambled into the galley black-fingered and smelling of motor grease and concrete floors, to contemplate over his meal the beakers at their round tables chatting away, completely oblivious to him. Of course there was no such thing as class in America, which was why the beakers here could be outfitted in red parkas with their names on their lapels, while the ASL folks generally wore tan Carhartt overalls with labels on the lapels that said Small, Medium, Large or Extra Large—pick your size!—and yet no one noticed this distinction or commented on it. The beakers wandered over to the galley from the Crary Lab, on their own schedules, clearly having the time of their lives; they were on fast career tracks by being down here doing whatever they were doing, mostly wandering the landscape and knocking off bits of it, as far as X could see, and then dating the bits. And this was their work; people paid them money for this; they had nice upper-middle-class homes and families and lives and careers, all from doing this kind of thing. This was how they earned their paychecks! While fraternizing with them in the same galley were people working for hourly wages, on seasonal contracts—lifting loads, freezing their butts, losing fingernails crushed under metal objects, running machinery, crawling in utilidors, gaining no career credits to speak of—all to keep the infrastructure and services going which allowed the beakers to gallivant about fishing or watching penguins, or deciding whether their bits of rock were old or real old.
So X fumed as he returned from the galley to his concrete floor and resumed sorting ironmongery. No, it was a class system, no doubt about it. Watching the scene in Mac Town, X’s reading was finally beginning to coalesce for him; it was all beginning to fall into place. Back in the world the overwhelming flood of information clouded the certainty of any analysis, there was just so much of everything that any description of it might be true. But here they were living in a stripped-down microcosm, “Little America” as one precursor base had been named; and X saw that it was the global class system in miniature, everything clearly laid out, and shockingly similar to accounts he had read of Tsarist Russia, not to mention pharaonic Egypt: a ruling caste and an underclass, aristocrats and serfs, with a few middlemen thrown in. The red parkas and tan Carhartts only color-coded it, as if ASL and NSF knew all about it and knew also that they could shove it in people’s faces and no one would protest, not in this the globally downsized postrevolutionary massively fortified stage of very late capitalism. The in-your-face effrontery of it made X even angrier, and as he continued to pluck up nuts and washers from the concrete and drop them in their proper bins, he fantasized images of slave revolts, Spartacus, general strikes—in short, revolution. Guillotines on Beeker Street!
Except with a little more thought—and sitting on that cold concrete, he had a lot of time for thought—the image of the guillotine made it clear how impossible these fantasies were. Not in the practical logistical sense, as the heavy shop could probably bang together a guillotine in a day—but in the problem of all the fraternizing, the small numbers, the close quarters, the common galley. The common workout on the ice. All that meant that he and the rest of the Carhartts met a lot of beakers at least briefly, and 90% of them were very nice people—or say 80%—or at least 75%—but wait, there he was going into beaker mode himself, got to watch out for that, it was catching—anyway, they were just people. Lucky to have good jobs, and often kind of eccentric, but nice—the young women very nice, in fact, and seldom at all standoffish, nicer often than the ASL women in fact, counting on the red parka to protect them perhaps—but nice smiles, very friendly, and often very smart. But also quite often deeply spaced, in classic beaker absent-minded-professor mode; all the ASL folks cherished their various stories of beaker spaciness, the latest going the rounds being the one about a beaker who had decided to end thumb fatigue on snowmobiles by tying the throttle lever tight to the handlebar and then starting the engine with a pull start while standing beside it, so that the snowmobile had taken off solo across the sea ice never to be seen again, no doubt ending up down on the bottom of the bay next to the motor tractor the Scott party had mishandled over the side of their ship, an early example of beaker incompetence—
Ron appeared in the door, breaking this train of thought with a rude snort. “Still picking this shit up, X? You’ve been at it for three days now!”
“Yes.” Through clenched teeth.
“Well now you’re needed elsewhere. Get down to the helo pad real quick, you needed to be there ten minutes ago, and finish this off soon as you get back. Du musst schon gegangen sein!”
“Jawohl, Herr Commandant.”
And suddenly he was down at the helo pad, earplugs in, then wedged in the back of a helo with a bunch of equipment, no view, no headset, feeling the thing chuntering over the Sea ice to somewhere in the Dry Valleys, he didn’t even know where. He was dropped with some equipment in brilliant low sunshine and frigid cold, in a brown shadow-crossed windy valley like a freeze-dried Nevada.