“Which means increased mutation rates and reduced fertility rates, at least for land animals.”
He nodded. “Bad time to be a big vertebrate. It’ll affect sea life as well. But those are things we’ll be worrying about a year or two from now, as the cows and pigs start dying off. It’s the long-range effect that really scares me.” His voice was flat and emotionless: “The new super-shelf will start the ice age. The sheer volume of ice going into the sea will cause the rise in sea level. With some help from increased melting. A rise of ten or twenty metres will drown every major seaport in the world, and a good percentage of usable farmland. After a century or two the sea level will drop again as the glaciers start expanding into ice sheets. So much for Canada and northern Europe, and maybe the USSR. The redistribution of ice and water will put more strain on faults, so we’ll have more earthquakes and more eruptions. The volcanic dust in the atmosphere will help cool us down even more.” He shrugged.
“Then we’re finished, aren’t we?”
“Nonsense — it’s not the end of the world, Penny.”
“Dope! I mean us, here.”
“Oh. No, not that either. We may be stuck here over the winter, but we’ll probably get home somehow.”
“Uh-huh. How?”
“Well — weather or no weather, they’ll want to know what’s going on down here. By spring there may be more people in the Antarctic than ever.”
She thought for a moment. “You know, no matter how bad it is out there, they’ll never understand what we’re going through.”
“No, I guess they won’t. We probably won’t understand it ourselves, once we’re back.”
He leaned over and kissed her, tentatively at first and then with something like fierceness. There was a pleasant, faintly acrid smell to him, and she felt her sexuality waken for the first time in weeks. Her responsiveness surprised them both. After a long moment she pulled away.
He smiled, without complacence or arrogance, and kissed her again. It was the same smile she had seen when the quake began, the smile of astonishment and delight of a man seeing the world marvellously shape itself to obey his private vision.
They made clumsy, gentle love on the greenhouse floor, between the ice and the flowers and the nodding green leaves.
Chapter 6 – The Otter
Howie and Simon winched the Otter out of the hangar into the sunlight. The morning sky was clear; there were light winds from Grid North-East, and the temperature was -35°C. Al went smoothly, almost absentmindedly through pre-flight checkout and engine-starting procedure while Max Wilhelm squinted into the sun. Someone was up in the geophysics dome, but no one else was up to see them off.
“If we hustle, we can be back before anybody’s up,” Al said as he started the first engine.
“I’m hoping we’re back before I’m up,” Max muttered.
The engines started without difficulty, and Al taxied out on to the ski-way. The blizzard had blown right across it, so there was little drift; Howie’s work with the D8 two days before hadn’t been entirely in vain. Carrying nothing more than the two men and three fifty-kilo emergency packs of food and medical supplies, the Otter moved lightly and easily. It bumped briskly along the ski-way and lifted off.
“Camera ready?” Al asked. Max nodded. In his lap was a Nikon with a 150mm telephoto lens.
“Nothing much to see yet,” he remarked.
“Even so, take a picture every three or four minutes.”
“What for?”
“It’ll give us a better idea of what’s happening to the Shelf. You should be able to get a couple of good shots in just a minute anyway.”
“Okay.”
Al followed the Sno-Cat tracks back to the crevasse field and then tried to find the crash site, but it was lost in dazzle and shadow. As they flew low over the pressure ridge, Max stared down in astonishment at the abyss beyond.
“Take pictures!” Al ordered. He changed course slightly to follow the gap between Shacktown’s island and the next, while Max shot a dozen frames. In some places the gap was up to five hundred metres wide; in others it narrowed to a crack one could step across, but it never entirely vanished. The depth of the gap was hard to measure: too much ice had carved off the floes. But there was one short stretch where the bottom was evidently covered with only a thin crust of berg bits, and the cliffs rose over fifty metres to the top of the Shelf.
Max put down his camera at last. “You were very lucky,” he said.
“Yeah. Sloppy good luck. I’ve had a lot of it.” Al lit a cigar. “When I was a kid in the Navy, fresh out of training, they put me in a Search and Rescue outfit in Vietnam. We sat on a carrier offshore, keeping an eye on the traffic. Guys were going down almost every day — sometimes it’d be a fighter pilot coming back from the North, but usually it was some artillery spotter or a gunship crew. We figured we had about half an hour, tops, to get to him before the VC did.
“Well, one morning a Huey gets shot down. Four guys in it. We go roaring off, another chopper and me, to collect them off a hillside, and damn if they haven’t come down in the middle of a North Vietnamese regiment. I get close enough to see about two hundred guys racing up the hill, and all of a sudden I’ve got no oil pressure. Some of those guys could really shoot.
“So I veer off and manage to bring the chopper down about three kilometres away, almost on top of some US Marines. The other chopper goes in, lands next to the Huey and takes a mortar round. Killed instantly. I never did find out what happened to the guys in the Huey.”
Something in Al’s tone made Max turn to look at him. “Did you feel bad about not being able to save them?”
“Oh yeah, for a while. A couple of months. I took some dumb chances. You start feeling guilty, y’know? And you think your buddies might think you’re scared. I wasn’t. Heck, I didn’t even believe in the law of gravity. Anyway, I got over feeling bad. But that’s what I mean by sloppy good luck.”
“Perhaps your real luck there was in outliving your feelings. I think about those days, and all the feelings come back as strong as ever.”
“You weren’t in the war, were you?”
“No, no. I was still in Europe. But I remember one day in 1968, in the spring. I was only 23, just a year out of university, without a job, and it looked like the revolution was about to happen in Paris. In Vienna in those days we were all radicals. So I decided to go and join the revolution. I spent the night before I left with a very sweet girl, a Swedish girl named Kaj. In the morning she walked me to the station, and that is what I remember: the smell of the air that morning, and the sound of our footsteps — it was very early, there was no traffic yet — what her hand felt like in mine. She said to me, “You’ll have such a good time you’ll never come back.” And I said “Nonsense, I’ll be back in the fall.” But she was right, you know? By fall I was in New Zealand. I never saw her again, never wrote to her, but I think of her almost every day and it makes me feel as happy and young as I did that morning. And sad also.”
“That’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make,” Al smiled. Then, after a pause, he said: “I know what you mean. With me, it’s the last time I saw my daughter. May 11, 1975, her birthday. She was four years old.”
They flew over several more immense fractures, as well as huge fields of seracs — the topographical nightmare caused by intersecting crevasses. Some were like miniature mesas, steep-sided and flat-topped; others rose from shadowed crevasses in razor-edged blue spires and ridges. In one place they could see the edges of a fracture part, close again and grind against each other in a cloud of wind-driven snow and ice fragments. The noise of the collision, even a thousand metres below them, was a blend of booms and shrieks that drowned the roar of the Otter’s engines.