Willy’s operational facilities were identical to those of an ordinary small airfield in so many respects, it almost blunted one’s appreciation of the fact that the whole thing had been constructed on a plate of floating sea ice. It had air-traffic control towers and a considerable number of maintenance and supply buildings with corrugated metal sides. But each of these structures rested on skids, and had been towed from the main field six miles closer to the station, a seven-thousand-foot strip that could be used by aircraft with standard wheeled landing gear until sometime in December, the middle of the polar summer, when the ice runways there began to give in and melt to slush.
Nimec had learned much of this from his files, and seen more with his own eyes upon touchdown. He had adequate time to hear about the rest from Halloran and two other members of the aircrew as they sat together in a heated visitors’ lounge near the apron, sipped passably decent coffee, and watched the Herc being emptied of freight as it took fuel through the lines.
The stop was lasting longer than he’d expected. Almost two hours after the plane’s arrival at McMurdo it remained parked on the ice, the activity around it ongoing without any hint of a letup, its engines running because the minus-50° Fahrenheit temperature was just eight degrees above the danger threshold at which its hydraulics would begin to fail — the rubber hoses, gaskets, and valve seals getting brittle enough to crack, the JP8 fuel that powered the Allisons becoming too viscous to flow freely despite its special cold-weather formulation.
Draining his paper cup, Nimec glanced at his watch, then at the busy airstrip outside the window to his left. He let out a grumbling sound and stretched his arms.
“You have to get in sync,” Halloran said, eyeballing him from across the cafeteria table.
Nimec shook his head, turned his wrist to display the watch’s face.
“I switched to New Zealand time at Christchurch,” he said.
Halloran looked sideways at his fellow Guardsmen. Then all three laughed.
Nimec bristled. “Didn’t realize I said something funny.”
Halloran fought in vain to stifle a chuckle. “Sorry, no offense intended. I meant you should synchronize the clock in here.” He tapped his forehead. “This place, the sun doesn’t rise or set, but kind of crawls around you in a circle like a snail on a basketball hoop for about six months. Then it hibernates for the winter.”
His explanation, such as it was, only made Nimec grumpier.
“I don’t care if the sun balances on the tip of my nose for half the year,” he said. “Things need to get done.”
“Sure. I’m just saying to remember where you are.”
“So your advice is, what, that we check our schedules on arrival?”
Halloran frowned.
“Listen,” he said, motioning his chin toward the window. “You have any idea how long it takes to plot and cut an ice runway?”
Nimec shook his head, shrugging, uncertain whether he cared at that particular moment. He’d spent the better part of his week hurtling through transoceanic airspace, spent much of the week before getting poked, prodded, and pissing into paper cups in an accelerated barrage of medical examinations. He was annoyed by his own crabbiness. And he missed his sweetheart Corvette.
“At least sixty, seventy hours,” Halloran was saying in answer to his own question. “Think about it. The field groomers get through with all their snow-moving and grading, then a storm plasters the area and they’re back to square one. That happens so often — with a vengeance — nobody even thinks to rag. It’s just business as usual.”
“Your point being…?”
“Exactly what it was when we started this conversation,” Halloran said. “Adjust. Don’t try to impose yourself on this place. Even most governments acknowledge it’s ungovernable.”
Nimec looked at him. This place. Nothing at all out of the ordinary about the phrase. But he somehow found Halloran’s repetition of it interesting… and hadn’t Evers also used it at least once rather than having named the continent?
“Take things as they come,” Nimec said, putting aside the thought. “Does that sound about right?”
Halloran continued to disregard the obvious pique in his tone.
“About.”
“You have a very Zen attitude for a military man,” Nimec said.
Halloran smiled, touched the circular ANG 139th TAS shoulder patch on the blouse of his flight suit. A nose-on view of a Hercules ski transport against a blue background, with the polar ice caps embroidered in white at the top and bottom, it was designed to be symbolic of a compass: the wings of the plane crossing east and west to the edges of the patch, the tail rudder similarly pointing due north, the skis lowered toward the southern cap.
“Very Zen,” Halloran said to the Guardsman beside him, a fellow lieutenant named Mathews. “Maybe we should have that stitched right here above the plane, make it our official motto. How about it?”
Mathews grinned and told him it sounded like a good idea. Then all three members of the aircrew were laughing again.
Nimec sighed, rapped the table with his fingers, listened to the engines of the plane humming outside the lounge.
Something told him he was at the hard rock bottom of what would be a steep and difficult learning curve.
Topped with fuel, the Herc finally got back under way some three hours after alighting at Williams Field. Its departure commenced with a jarring bounce as its wheels dropped to crack the ice that had melted around its skis from the friction of landing, and then had frozen over again to hold the plane steadily in position. After the wheels were retracted, it was a swift, smooth slide over the ski way to takeoff.
Cold Corners was four hundred odd miles south on the coastline, an aerial sprint of just about an hour. Nimec stuck it out in the webbing of the aft compartment, which he found much less disagreeable now that the bulk of its freight and over half its passengers — including the loud Russians and Australian adrenaline junkies — had gone on to their various destinations. The hold space freed up by their departure also gave Nimec a pretty well unrestricted choice of seating, and he grabbed a spot by a porthole that afforded good bird’s-eye views of both McMurdo and Cold Corners.
The contrast between them was striking. Seen from above, MacTown resembled an industrial park, or maybe a mining town that had sprung up without systematic planning over a span of many decades. Nimec guessed there were probably between a hundred and two hundred separate structures — multistory barracks-style units, rows of arched canvas Jamesway huts, smaller blue-skinned metal Quonsets, warehouse buildings, and upwards of a dozen massive, rust-blighted steel fuel-storage tanks strung out on the surrounding hillsides. Tucked among them were a couple of appreciably more modern complexes that Sergeant Barry identified as NSF headquarters and the Crary Science and Engineering Center, but Nimec’s overall impression of the station was one of rambling, indiscriminate sprawl and exceeding ugliness.
Very much on the other hand, Cold Corners looked like the working model for a future space colony… and by no accident. Roger Gordian’s innovative flair and penchant for cost efficiency made him an almost compulsive multitasker. Cold Corners was envisioned as an all-in-one satellite ground station, new space technology center, and human habitability and performance lab for long-term interplanetary settlements, and the heart of the base was configured of six sleek, linked rectangular pods on jack-able stilts that allowed it to be elevated above the rising snow drifts that eventually inundated most Antarctic stations. In his oversight of the installation’s security analysis, Nimec had stayed abreast of its development from conception to construction, and knew the few outlying buildings included a solar-paneled housing for its supplementary electrical generator, a desalinization plant to convert seawater beneath the ice crust into drinkable water, a garage for the vehicles, a trio of side-by-side satcom radomes, and of course the airfield facility that was its lifeline to civilization. The main energy, environmental-control, and waste-disposal systems were in utility corridors — or utilidors — beneath the permanent ice strata.