After the helo had dragonflied away and the vast windy silence had descended on him, a group of beakers hiked over to the pile of dropped gear and shook gloved hands with him, and introduced themselves: an older man, Geoffrey Michelson, no doubt the principal investigator; and three somewhat younger men, one the group’s mountaineer. X’s boss for the day was a Kiwi named Graham Forbes. A grad student had gotten sick and been medevacked out, and so on this day Forbes needed some help writing down figures he would be reading off the landscape. It would make the work go a lot faster. He looked to the side as he told X about this, almost as if embarrassed, although otherwise he showed no sign of any emotion at all; on the contrary he exhibited what X had come to think of as the pure beaker style, consisting of a Spocklike objectivity and deadened affect so severe that it was an open question whether he would have been able to pass a Turing test.
So: writing down numbers. “Fine,” X said. It had to beat picking nails off the floor.
And at first it did. Forbes wandered away from the other beakers, and X followed, and they got right to work. But it was a windy day, the katabatic wind falling off the polar ice cap and whistling down the dry valleys, making all outdoor work miserable indeed, especially if you were just sitting on the ground writing figures in a notebook. Forbes was doing fabric samples, he explained as he wandered around looking at the ground through a box. That meant measuring the compass orientation of fifty random elongated pebbles in a particular area. So he was looking at pebbles through the compass box and calling out “351 … 157 … 18 … 42,” and so on endlessly, and X was writing the numbers down in columns of ten. Fine.
Over and over they did this. As they worked and the day passed it got windier, and the chill factor went plummeting far below zero—down, down, down—into the minus 40s, X reckoned, even perhaps the 50s. Between samples he tried first all the gloves in his daypack, then all the mittens, then all the mittens over the gloves, his cold hands so numbed inside the thick masses of cloth that he could scarcely grip a pencil, much less write legibly—nose and eyes running—his face getting so numb that he could barely answer the group’s mountaineer’s questions when the mountaineer came by, barely even remember to conform to the mountaineer’s protocol, which consisted of answering him by putting both hands on one’s head and exclaiming “I AM FINE SIR!” The mountaineer had instituted this regime because in situations of severe cold, common sense was one of the first things to go, causing many a deeply hypothermic person to mutter “I’m okay” and soon after fall like a block of ice and die. So they were supposed to remember something slightly out of the ordinary to show they had not done a Paul Revere (and gone a little light in the belfry), and thus when the mountaineer came by, grinning crazily and inquiring how they were, X and Forbes lifted their mittens onto their heads and replied “I AM FINE SIR,” when obviously any group that had to institute such a system was not fine at all, and needed to get to shelter as fast as possible. Not that there was any shelter. They were many miles from shelter of any kind, the beakers’ camp being over in the next valley, and X’s helo pickup not scheduled for hours and hours. Of course they could have huddled in the sunny lee of a boulder and eaten chocolate bars for the caloric infusion of warmth; but no. This Forbes compassed pebble after pebble, section after section, doggedly oblivious to the frigid chill. Of course X had been out in bad cold before, exposed to the bitter winds through the gap just behind the cold workyards of Mac Town. He had been teamed there with old iceheads who sometimes worked on in the teeth of the coldest windy colds, as a kind of icehead rite or contest, punishing themselves to the limit and carrying on anyway, cursing brutally and muscling through everything with a tight hunched savage cold efficiency, so that they could finally finish whatever it was they were doing and stagger down into the galley near dead, take their temperatures and get readings like 93 or 92 and say “Yar” and “Fuck” and thaw themselves out over giant hot meals, and mug after mug of hot coffee and hot chocolate, growling at the beaker girls and their icy hearts, or at friends who passed by, “Grrrrrrrr, grrrrrrrr,” knowing that they were the iciest of iceheads, the hardest Antarcticans of all. Just growl and go, as the old Brit seamen had said. Grin and bear it. It was a real cold macho thing.
But this guy Forbes wasn’t like that. He seemed oblivious to the cold, and was certainly ignoring it; hunkering down a bit perhaps, pinched, focused on the work to the exclusion of all else; so focused that he might not notice if he precipitated and flashfroze in position, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz: the Ice Beaker, still creaking his numbers through frozen jaws, intent on the rock under him to the point of crystallization and beyond. It was a scary thing to witness. X’s hands were now so cold they felt like insufficiently microwaved steak from the freezer, soft at the edges but stiff underneath. His butt was cold and the ground was cold and the light slanting down the valley was cold in his eyes. The cold air rushed over him, each gust a bitter chill slap pushing into his cold lungs, and though X had to admit that the passage down his cold throat appeared to thaw the air to the point that his chest did not actually freeze from inside, still, as the cold had been filtered on its cold way down, his cold nose had frozen and his cold brain was a frigid white block of hard cold clay, plunging further down the scale of coldness with every cold breath, colder and colder, down toward absolute zero, his cold thoughts numbly syruping from crystallizing synapse to frozen axon, every molecule of mind freezing slowly as it chilled in sad cold viscous thrall to helpless memories of his ice maiden’s cold treatment of him, terrible freezer burn from her brutal cold treatment that had frozen his heart forever. A bronze man in a bronze land. Absolute zero cold. Total frozen immobility. End of timespace. Very cold. Cold cold cold.
Finally the mountaineer came by and rescued X from his insane master for the day. “His helo’s coming soon,” he told Forbes, “and we need to get back to camp.”
“All right.”
X got to his feet, a ten-part movement with lots of care necessary to balance all the frozen components. As they creaked back to the helo rendezvous he tried to concentrate on the figures he had written rather than his painful fingers. “Looks like the average of this last fifty will be about a hundred or so,” he noted.
Forbes looked up from the ground which he was still inspecting, hunched forward as they walked. “That’s not what we do.”
He explained that the figures had to be run through a sophisticated analysis, which only then would tell one how randomly the pebbles had fallen. If there were patterns of a certain kind, then a stream had probably run over them and sorted them lengthwise to the flow, while a completely random orientation indicated deposit through the still water of a lake or pond.
“Ah,” X said, amazed at what beakers came up with. It was really quite beautiful. Not so beautiful as to justify freezing to death, of course—not unless you were very obsessive-compulsive—but then again so many beakers were obsessive-compulsive. It was practically the definition of the type. So it could be said that Antarctica was an entire continent ruled by obsessive-compulsives—just like all the rest of them, now that he thought of it, but elsewhere not so cold-hardened by their obsessions. This Forbes was almost as bad as the mountaineers, who ran around the ice as ecstatic as dogs all the time, because these were just the kinds of dreadful conditions they craved and sought out all over the world; Antarctica gave them a continuous supply, so they loved Antarctica and were happy all the time, like Val. No, the beakers were more normal than that, even the cold-hardened ones like this guy. Just as normal and friendly and hard-working as anyone else. And the occasional high-handed snob—well, there were jerks in every job. Like Ron, for instance. No, jerks were scattered at every level up and down the hierarchy; but most people were not like that.