He reached the top. He could see a long way in every direction. A knee-high bronze panorama plaque named the various features one could see. At the foot of the other side of the hill lay the Kiwis’ Scott Base, a dozen green buildings clustered on the shore of the smooth white plain of the Ross Ice Shelf. Ross Island broke steeply out of this smooth plain, and rose in the distance to the stupendous broad white volcano that was Mount Erebus, looking somewhat like the cone Wade stood on, only white and ten million times bigger.
In all directions the sea was frozen white, the ice either permanent or annual. Far out on the sea ice Wade could make out the faint lines that marked the airport where his Herc had landed. The airport’s trailer buildings were the merest black specks on the ice, which gave Wade a sudden sense of how vast everything was. Far beyond the airport lay what the panorama informed him were Black Island and White Island, appropriately named, and beyond them Mount Discovery, a black cone maypoled with white glaciers, and the Royal Society Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, jumping out of the white sea. Buttery shafts of yellow sunlight lanced down the valleys of these far mountains.
Struck by the views, Wade only in a final dizzy turn noticed that there was already someone else on the peak. A man, sitting on the rocks just under the wooden cross, protected from the wind. “Hi,” Wade exclaimed, startled.
A big man, massive in a dirty dark green parka, broad face brooding behind sunglasses and the fur fringe around his parka’s hood. Tan overalls, knees dark with accumulated oil and grease. One of the ASL employees, evidently.
He grunted something at Wade and continued to survey the scene. Wade maneuvered past him to the big wooden cross he had seen from the town below. It was about ten feet tall, a thick squared-off beam. The letters they had carved into it in 1913 had been painted white, and the paint had withstood the flensing of the wind so much better than the bare wood that though the letters had been carved in to begin with, they now stood out a little from the surface. The grain of the wood also stood out. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. And then five names, with military ranks included. Wade stared at it for a while, at a loss. Tennyson was not a poet that postpostmodernism had managed to convert to its own purposes. And the Scott expedition had been a bit of a mess, as far as Wade recalled. He had never studied the matter.
The man sitting on the peak stirred, and Wade glanced down at him, again at a loss. Finally he said, “Do you come here often?”
The man stared at him, impassive behind mirrored sunglasses. “Often?”
“You’ve been up here before?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice view.”
“Great view.”
“Yes. A great view.”
They looked down on McMurdo together. The buildings’ roofs were all metal of one sort or another: ancient corrugated tin, the latest photovoltaic blue gloss, everything in between. Except for a row of six brown dormitories, no two buildings were alike: gleaming blue spaceships, ramshackle wooden shacks, black Quonset huts, open fields of lumber, the Holiday Inn, the docks, the tourist mall, the row of brown dorms, the little Crary Lab, the even littler Chalet next to it, down by the helicopter pad and the shore …
“Have you lived here long?” Wade asked.
“No.”
“What do you do?”
“GFA.”
“GFA?”
The man turned to look at him; Wade saw that the question branded him a newcomer. “General Field Assistant.”
“I see.”
“And you?”
“I work in Washington, for a member of the Senate.”
“Which one?”
“Chase.”
“The one that’s never there?”
“That’s right.”
The man nodded. “You must be here to look into the ice pirates.”
“Yes,” Wade said, surprised. “I am.”
“I’m the one who was in the SPOT train that lost a vehicle.”
“I see…. There seems to be a lot of stuff like that happening.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any idea what might be going on?”
“Me?” The man was amused.
They sat there looking down at McMurdo. “Not a particularly attractive town,” Wade ventured.
“It grows on you.”
“Really?”
The man shrugged. “It’s ugly, but … you can see everything about it. Right there before your eyes.”
As he finished this statement a figure appeared below them: a woman, coming around a rocky knob as she climbed the same trail Wade had. Thick gloss of dark blond hair, long thighs in sky-blue ski tights, rising rhythmically under a black parka, covering broad shoulders. The two men watched her climb. Wade’s companion had hunched forward. She was taking big steps up, in iridescent blue mountaineer’s boots. She looked up and they caught a brief glimpse of blue mirrored sunglasses, broad cheekbones, fine nose, broad mouth. Wade’s eyebrows shot up; a beauty, it seemed, with the shoulders of a rower or weightlifter. Wordlessly the two men stared. And then she was there, stepping easily, breathing easily; “Hi,” she said easily. She had the breezy insouciance that Wade thought of as a cheerleader’s cheeriness; the confidence of an attractive woman, brought up in the American West somewhere. An outdoorswoman.
“Hi,” the two men replied.
Startled, the woman looked again at Wade’s companion. “Oh hi, X. I didn’t see you.”
“Uh huh.”
Uh oh, Wade thought, looking at the two of them. The man was hunched into a kind of boulder.
“Valerie Kenning,” the woman said to Wade, and extended a hand.
“Wade Norton.”
“Nice to meet you. What brings you down here?”
“Looking around,” he said, explaining again about Chase as he rubbed his mittens together.
“Are you cold?” she asked. “Let’s move down just a bit and get out of the wind.”
They all moved down into the lee of the gnarly brown peak. When the man she had called X stood, Wade realized that he was really tall, almost seven feet it seemed. Taller than the woman, but not by a great deal; and the woman was a good bit taller than Wade. X sat down again heavily.
“Aren’t you cold?” Wade asked the woman, noting her relatively thin parka, tights and gloves.
“Why no. Can’t say I am.” She laughed: “A good fat layer I guess.”
“Uh huh,” Wade said doubtfully, glancing at the impassive X. A good fat layer indeed. “What about you?” Wade asked him.
“I’m always cold,” X said shortly.
Wade tried to draw him back out. “You were saying something about how everything in the town is visible?”
X nodded once. “Nothing’s buried. The whole town is right there where you can see it. There’s its power supply, see the fuel tanks up in the gap, and the main generators there under us. There’s the power lines, and the sewer lines, and the sewage treatment facility. Down there you see the raw materials for building, and then all the working shops, the warehouses, the vehicle parking lots. Then all the people stuff takes up just a small part of the space, around the galley and Crary.”
“The stomach and the brains,” Valerie said. “It’s like one of those transparent bodies with all the organs visible.”
X nodded but said nothing. He didn’t want to have a pleasant conversation with her, Wade saw; he was resisting her attempts to be pleasant. She continued to point out features to Wade: the helicopter pad as airport, the harbor and docks still iced over, the mall behind the docks as entertainment district, also in deep freeze until the tour ships arrived. Then the radio building as communications industry, and even a historical district, in the single dot of the Discovery Hut on the point opposite them.