Shivering in her bag, Penny tried to decide on an angle for the story. Do it ironically, she told herself. The brilliant seismologist surprised by the earthquake he’d predicted. The escape from one treacherous shelter to another, each in turn destroyed, until a flimsy nylon tent was all they had. And they would have to escape again, to the doubtful safety of Shacktown. Then where? It would make a grimly amusing story.
She was suddenly aware that Al, lying beside her, was crying. She turned to him and touched his shoulder, trying to comfort him as he had comforted Jeanne. He was facing the wall of the tent; his weeping stopped at her touch, and he rolled over to face her. His eyelids were caked with ice.
“I really messed us up, Penny,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. Too old for this kind of work. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”
One by one they fell asleep despite the wind and the occasional tremor in the ice. Steve and Tim lay side by side on the far side of the tent from Al and Penny. Their faces were close together, and they spoke softly.
“If McMurdo’s out of action,” Tim said, “we’re screwed. There’s nowhere else to go. At least nowhere the Otter could reach, especially in bad weather.”
“I know.”
“What’ll we do?”
“Depends on how Shacktown survived the quake. If it’s okay, we can winter over.”
“Steve, for God’s sake — you’ve got your bloody surge, and we’ve seen what it’s already done to the Shelf. It’s floating out to sea. How are we supposed to winter over on a goddamned iceberg?”
“With luck.” Steve said nothing for a while. “If Shacktown isn’t habitable, we can still rig some kind of emergency shelter on the surface. If old Shackleton himself could do it, so can we.” He rubbed some of the frost from his moustache and beard. “Anyway, we’ve got more immediate problems. Go to sleep.”
“I’m too hyper. And scared.”
“Think about that nice can of beer I owe you.”
“Hey, yeah. By the way, congratulations on your quake. Your reputation is made.”
“Why thank you, thank you. I owe it all to my brilliant assistant… God, Tim, wasn’t it beautiful? Wasn’t it just beautiful?” They chuckled softly together, like boyish pranksters.
Millions of tonnes of snow blew across the Shelf that afternoon. By 1500 the wind had increased until its roar made sleep impossible. The tent was not too cold, thanks to the shelter of the pressure ridge and the insulating layer of snow. Around 1600 Will went outside for some ice, which he melted to make tea and soup. They had their meal without saying much — the wind was too loud — and settled into their bags again.
At 1700 the wind suddenly dropped. An occasional gust hummed over the ridge, but it was at least possible to talk.
“I shouldn’t have had so much tea,” Penny said. “I’ve got to go.”
“It’s the cold more than the tea,” Al said. “And the ladies room is right outside.” He was his old self again, calm and business-like. “Take the ice axe and chop yourself a little hole in the ridge, so you’re out of the wind. You can freeze your sphincter if you’re not careful.”
“That’s not all I can freeze,” Penny muttered.
“I’d better come, too,” Jeanne said.
They had to dig their way out. The whiteout was fading, but it was still hard to find the horizon. A drift had built up over the helicopter until just one rotor was showing. The air was bitterly cold and full of snow. Penny chopped at the rock-hard ice until she had gouged a shallow niche. It seemed to take forever just to loosen her trousers, and pulling them down was agony. Jeanne squatted beside her. Their urine crackled and sputtered on contact with the ice, freezing almost instantly. When they crawled back inside, Will gave them each a hug.
“Well,” he sighed, “if you two can do it, so can we.”
Sobbing and giggling, Penny burrowed into her sleeping bag. “I n-n-never f-felt less p-p-penis envy in my life.”
Inevitably the traffic in and out let a lot of snow into the tent. Much of it got into their sleeping bags, where it melted. Penny found herself shuddering uncontrollably and could scarcely hold the biscuits Will gave her.
“We aren’t so b-badly off,” he told her. “When Bowers and Wilson and Ch-Cherry Garrard made their w-winter trip to Cape Crozier, they h-had to th-thaw their way into their bags w-with their own body heat, inch b-by inch.”
“Get stuffed,” Penny moaned.
By 1800 the wind had picked up again, and it blew all night. They slept, woke, ate and slept again. Penny dreamed she was in the tent and woke unable to tell dream from reality. There was always the wind, and sometimes muffled voices; there was the glow of the primus and the glitter of frost on the tent. Once during the night she wanted to reach up and touch the sloping wall of the tent, but didn’t; she was afraid that if she did the snow above them would collapse the tent and bury them alive.
Silence woke them all a little before 0600 the next morning. After more stew, pemmican and tea, Al got two fluorescent-orange pennants out of the survival packs and went outside to plant them at the top of the pressure ridge. When he came back there was an odd, excited expression on his face.
“Come on out. It’s clear and not too cold — no wind, anyway.”
Everyone had full bladders, and followed him outside without much delay. While they stood or squatted by the wall of ice, they looked around. This side of the pressure ridge faced Grid South-West; the Shelf was a gently undulating white plain, gleaming white in the light of the sun. Even the buried helicopter scarcely stood out.
“What the hell is this pressure ridge doing here?” Jeanne asked Will.
“Dunno. Unless we’re right on a fracture zone—”
He looked as if he’d been hit. Then he floundered up the path Al had made to the top of the ridge. The others trailed after him, their breath crackling in the cold stillness, and stood in silence as they looked out towards Grid North-East.
Less than twenty metres from where they stood, the drifted crags of the pressure ridge came to an end. Beyond them was a gap over two hundred metres wide, the bottom of which could have been seen only by standing nearer the edge than anyone cared to go. Across the gap the blue-white ice cliffs of the next island reflected the sun from a hundred great facets; at the top of the cliffs was a pressure ridge like the one they were standing on.
“We could have flown right into this cliff if I’d been coming down a little more steeply,” Al said. “Or hit the ridge on the far side there, and gone all the way to the bottom.”
As he spoke, a chunk of the opposite cliff — about forty metres thick, twenty metres high and a hundred metres long — creaked, snapped and fell. It must have hit relatively thin ice at the bottom and broken through it, because its impact threw a dazzling geyser of frozen spray high above the Shelf. The noise would have seemed very loud to them even twenty-four hours earlier.
“And that could have happened to us last night,” Tim observed. “Or in the next thirty seconds, for that matter. We’d better get the hell away from here.”
Al pointed Grid North. “There are the mountains. I’d say we’re only ten-fifteen kilometres Grid East of Shacktown. We could walk it.”
“Might be hard going through the drifts,” Will said. They were already moving back down the ridge.
“Sastrugi look bad,” Al said, “but the surface shouldn’t be too rough. Probably a good hard wind-crust in most places.”
“What if we get another blow?” Tim asked. “Just stop and camp?”
“Right. But we shouldn’t need to. Ought to be home and dry before suppertime.”
“I’m game,” Penny said. “Anything’s better than soaking in that bag.”