He pulled his gaiter over his nose and mouth, the moisture of his breath immediately starting a growth of frost. Goggles shielded his eyes and forehead. His hood kept a thin cocoon of slightly warmer air near his face. He took a moment to practice breathing, as if he were underwater.
Okay. He wasn't going to die.
Lewis looked around. The snow was flat and, beyond the cluster of human structures, utterly empty. Nothing moved. There was no natural feature to catch the eye.
"First of all, stay close to the base," Cameron lectured, leaving his neck gaiter down so he could be heard clearly. "Even when it's not snowing the wind can kick up surface powder into a blizzard six or seven feet high. The blowing snow is just high enough to put any human who isn't in the NBA into whiteout conditions. So, if you do go somewhere, sign out, take a radio, and take some bearings. Pay attention to where you are, where we are. Start memorizing the layout. People have died in Antarctica a dozen feet from shelter. Temperatures can drop fifty degrees in ten minutes."
Lewis nodded.
"Second, we're marking the most frequently used routes with flags." He pointed to long poles with pennants on the end. "In the dark that's coming you just follow one flag to another to get back to a building. One route goes to astronomy, which the beakers call the Dark Sector because lights aren't allowed out there: It screws up their telescopes. Everyone else calls it the Dark Side. Another goes to Clean Air, where you'll work. It's away from the generators and any air pollution. A third goes to Summer Camp, which is shut down now." He pointed at distant buildings. Summer Camp was a row of Korean-War-vintage canvas Quonset huts. "A branch goes to Bedrock, those little blue huts there. That's our emergency shelter if anything goes wrong in the dome."
"Goes wrong?"
"Fire. Generator failure. Battery explosions. Well poisonings. The usual." He smiled.
Cameron also pointed out antenna towers, telescopes, construction materials, supply crates, drifted-over vehicles, and random jetsam, everything raw and jutting from the snow like the debris of some midair collision. Lewis thought the place looked like a dump but wasn't surprised. All the treeless places he'd worked in had the same look: Where could you hide the mess? The chaos represented logistical evolution.
"Third, pay attention to your body. It's sort of like being an astronaut where you pay attention to your air. Are you staying warm? Are you still alert? Are you losing energy? If you start to feel frozen, get back inside for a while. Capisce?"
"Yeah. Common sense."
"You'd be amazed how quickly that can disappear around here."
Lewis looked out at the foggy horizon. "How far can we see?"
"About six miles, three in each direction. A few more if you get up on a tower."
The sun was low, a white disk behind fog like a dim headlight. It circled the horizon every twenty-four hours, each day settling lower, like a marble rolling down a funnel. On March 21 it would be gone.
"You been to The Ice before, Rod?"
"Four times."
"So you like it."
"I love it."
"Even the Pole?"
"Especially the Pole. It's like no place else on earth. Come on, I'll show you."
They started walking toward the astronomy complex that squatted three-quarters of a mile away, crossing the ice taxiway. Just beyond was a stake jutting two feet out of the snow.
"Here it is. Go ahead, walk around the world."
"This is the South Pole?"
"Yep. Bottom of the planet. When it gets dark I come out here sometimes on a clear night and lay down to watch the stars and the aurora. Sometimes I do feel upside down, like I'm about to float off and drift into the sky. It's spectacularly beautiful then, and the vertigo makes me high."
"I thought the Pole would look like something more."
"In summer there's a ceremonial pole over there." Cameron pointed vaguely. "We took it down for the winter a couple weeks ago. It looks like a Santa Claus pole- you know, with barber stripes and a silver globe on top? We put the flags of the Antarctic treaty nations around it and the VIPs who fly in for a few hours pose for pictures. But this stake is the real pole. The ice cap moves, flowing toward the sea, so every January we have to drive a stake about ten meters from the last one to keep pace." He pointed out a line of older stakes marching away across the snow, marking where the Pole had been. "Eventually the dome will roll right over it, except maybe we can win funding for the new base and the dome will be dismantled."
"Everybody needs money," Lewis recited. He trod a circle around the stake. "Around the world. I read that Admiral Byrd said it was the middle of a limitless plain. You get here, and that's all. He said it was the effort to get here that counted."
"That, and getting away. But Byrd said that back in the 1920s, way before the base started in '58. Nowadays it's the staying that counts. We're here for a purpose. Your job is important. Mine is important. They're all important. Scientifically. Politically. We're at a place that no single nation owns, dedicated to knowledge. I think that's pretty cool."
"Cool." Lewis brushed the frost on the ruff of his hood.
"You know why people like it down here, Jed?" Cameron was looking directly at him, but with the goggles on the effect was odd, like being looked at by an insect.
"Why?"
"Because the purpose of life is to learn. That's why we exist, to learn. That's my belief, anyway. That's why the station exists. Moss and Adams and Mendoza have the world's best window on space. Jerry Follett and Dana Andrews are deciphering the atmosphere. Hiro and Alexi are trying to understand the aurora, which is one hell of a show. You do climate, Lena hydroponics… it doesn't get any purer than this."
The hood against Lewis's ears made everything like listening through a blanket. "So how do we tell direction down here?"
"We make our own grid. The Greenwich Meridian is grid north; the opposite way south. Mostly, though, we point. There's nowhere to go, so it's like being on a small island. Disneyland. Come on, let's go see where you'll work."
They trudged toward the Clean Air Facility, a brown metal box a half mile from the Pole. It was elevated on stilts and festooned with instruments and antennas. As they walked, Lewis felt as if he'd gained a hundred pounds. His feet felt hot and heavy and his lungs were unhappy with air that remained too thin, too dry, too cold. His neck gaiter had become a muffler of ice, scratchy and smothering. He swatted at it, breaking some bits loose, but more clung to the fabric. At the same time he realized he was sweating.
The snow squeaked as they walked, dry and powdery, a loose coverlet on harder blue-white ice. Wind blew this skin into small, shin-high drifts that Cameron called sastrugi. "Alexi says it's the Russian word for eyebrows." It was laborious to lumber over or through them.
"What's his story?"
"There's no money in Russia. He's one of the top aurora experts in the world. So we gave him a posting here."
"He said he liked that movie The Thing."
"I think there's something in that film that gets to our ex-Commie. The fact that no one can trust anyone. I think he was into some pretty heavy science politics in the old Soviet. Down deep he's pretty serious, you know, kind of quietly ambitious. He'd love to accomplish something down here to bring credit to Mother Russia. Point of pride to bring out something new. But he's also a lot of fun. So's Hiro."
"They the only foreigners?"
"Dana's a Kiwi and Lena emigrated from the Czech Republic, but nobody's a foreigner, not down here. Antarctica is the only place on earth where you don't need a passport and you don't go through customs. No single nation owns anything. That's pretty cool, too."