Val took her water bottle from her belt and opened it and handed it to him. “Drink?”
He nodded, still hacking away. He pointed down at the pond: “Poison?” he gasped.
“No. Just salty.”
“Wow.” He drank and spat, drank and spat. “Really salty. Like battery acid.”
“I know. I touched a finger of it to my tongue once.”
He nodded, spat out again. “That would be the way. I had no idea.”
The two scientists appeared on the rock-covered glacier up the valley from the pond, and soon they had hiked down to the helicopter. They said hello and apologized for keeping the helo waiting.
“That’s all right,” Val said, “it gave Wade here a chance to drink the water.”
Wade gave Val a quick look, and she grinned at him. The scientists regarded him with raised eyebrows. “Wow,” one said: “What did it taste like?”
“It was salty,” Wade confirmed. His mouth was still puckered into a little knot.
“I’ll say,” the other remarked as they climbed up into the silent helo. “There’s 126 grams of salt per liter in that water. As compared to 3.7 for sea water.”
“It tasted saltier than that,” Wade said.
“It makes for a kind of minimum temperature thermometer. The pond won’t freeze until it reaches fifty-four below zero, and then if it does the ice itself is fresh water and won’t melt until it gets above zero. So we can come out here in the spring and tell whether it got below minus fifty-four the previous winter. Hardly ever does, these days.”
Then they were strapped in and the loadie had unsheathed the blades, and they were off in the helo’s whacking roar again, going up the Don Juan Pond’s valley rather than back down. The copilot explained that they wanted to fly over the Labyrinth. Wade asked what that was, and one of the scientists got on to explain that the maze of intersecting canyons they were now over was probably carved by streams on the underside of a big glacier. “See, the glacier itself is still there, only not as big now.”
And then they were over Wright Upper Glacier, a broad smooth field of bluish ice covering the entire head of the valley, which was a kind of immense box canyon, walled by a huge shattered semicircle of cliffs. All the walls and promontories of this curved escarpment were layered light and dark, like a cake of alternating vanilla and chocolate layers. The same scientist explained that these were bands of light sandstone and dark dolerite, the dolerite harder and so nearly vertical in the cliffs, the sandstone softer and so sloping down at an angle. Above the cliffs loomed the ice of the great Antarctic polar plateau itself, extending off to the distant southern horizon; and in one place it spilled over the cliffs, like a Niagara Falls frozen in a second to perfect stillness. This was Airdevronsix Icefalls, the copilot said, named after the Navy helo division that had discovered it. The pilot took the helo right up next to the icefall, so that they were looking down just a couple hundred feet at holes in the ice where the banded rock was visible; then they shot up into the clear air over the cliffs, where the vast ice expanse of the plateau ran off to the southerly horizon.
It was an amazing sight, one that Val had never gotten used to, no matter how many times she saw it; and it was a staple of all the Dry Valley treks, of course, so that she had seen it a lot. If it had been back in the world it would have been as famous as Monument Valley or Yosemite or the Matterhorn—a cliché, seen countless times in movies and advertisements. But as it was down here it was still, even with the big surge in adventure tourism, the least-known of the great wonders of the natural world. And all the more thrilling for that, as far as Val was concerned. One of the glories of Ice Planet.
And indeed Wade was leaning down over the pilots’ shoulders to see more out the front, and looking left and right like a puppet head on a spring. But he did not get on the intercom to tell everyone how amazed he was, like the client who had gotten on to shout “WOW” perhaps fifty times during a similar flight; nor did he become obsessed with photography like so many other clients did, fussing with rolls and exposures until they did not seem to be seeing anything outside at all. On the contrary, Wade seemed thoroughly absorbed. Which was only appropriate; but Val had judged him on their first meeting to be a typical Washington politician, not really interested in the ice itself. She liked it that he seemed impressed. And had tried to drink from Don Juan Pond!
The pilots could have flown up and over the peaks of the Olympus Range directly to their destination, but as the destination was a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a no-fly zone, the whole complex of Balham Valley, McKelvey Valley, the Insel Ridge (another Daislike mid valley ridge), and Barwick Valley was off-limits to normal scientific investigation, all fly-overs, and all adventure treks. This was to try to keep a part of the Dry Valleys as uncontaminated as possible, for baseline comparisons with the other more intensively studied and therefore polluted valleys. The team they were visiting had had to show compelling need to get permission to set a small tent camp in the Barwick Valley for a couple of weeks, and they had been required to walk in carrying a minimum of gear.
So the helo flew back down Wright Valley, over the turquoise and lapis sheet of Lake Vanda, up the white line of the Onyx River, and up more steeply into the windy defile of Bull Pass, a hanging valley connecting Wright to McKelvey Valley. Then they were through the pass and out over the broad barren floor of Victoria Valley, and landing on the sandy dunes upvalley from Lake Vida. This was another cracked frozen lake, looking like something tucked at about twenty-five thousand feet in mountains anywhere else; in fact they were just over a thousand feet above sea level. But high latitude was the equivalent of high altitude in its effect on landscape, and so Val and Wade climbed out of the helo and moved out from under the loudly spinning main rotor blades, and straightened to stand upright on what seemed the Tibetan plateau, if not the moon itself.
Then the bright red helo was off, loud and fast, downvalley and away, disappearing quickly into Bull Pass, the noise of it receding from their pounding ears much more slowly, until finally they were left alone in the windy but still silence of a vast rockscape, a valley that seemed cut off from—well, from everything. Wade stared around, looking stunned.
“Pretty, isn’t it,” Val remarked out of habit, as if addressing a client.
“I don’t think that’s quite the word I’d choose.”
The gear they were carrying was minimal, and Wade’s backpack in particular was not very heavy; Val had kept it to perhaps fifteen kilos. Still he grunted as he hefted it onto his back, and remarked on the load.
“When I started working down here,” Val said, “your personal kit weighed around a hundred pounds, and was too bulky to be carried anywhere. That’s why that pickup truck took us down to the helo pad this morning; they’re still not used to bag drag being something you can carry yourself.”
“Hmm,” Wade said, as if not convinced they had reached that point even yet.
Val shrugged into her pack (she was carrying about twenty-five kilos), and took off. After walking up Victoria Valley for several minutes she pointed past the prow of Mount Insel, up Barwick Valley. “They’re up there, see, under that glacier at the head of the valley.”
Wade glanced up and nodded. “There by dinner.”
Val laughed, and Wade stopped and tipped down his sunglasses to have another look. “Longer?”
“Longer. That’s about twenty-five kilometers.”
“Oh wow. I would have guessed about five.”
“That happens a lot down here. There aren’t any trees or buildings to give you a sense of scale, and the mountains are big. And the air is clearer than you’re used to.”