An objective report on the station itself would sound like anti-Commonwealth propaganda. They didn’t call it ‘Shacktown’ for nothing: the place was a mishmash of sophistication and sloppiness. Much of its scientific equipment was the most advanced in the world, but had been supplied as much for publicity purposes as for research. However, most of the station’s transport had been scrounged from the Americans’ cast-offs at McMurdo, or salvaged from Scott Base, which the Kiwis had closed after joining CARP in ’82. Even the design of the station was obsolete; the Americans had tried under-surface installations in the 1960s, and gone on to more efficient designs for surface buildings.
Colin Smith, the station’s meteorologist, had predicted clear weather for today. If he was right, Al Neal would fly to McMurdo to ask for a Hercules to evacuate them all. Otherwise they might be stuck here for weeks more — and that might mean months, the whole winter, marooned like old Shackleton’s crew on Elephant Island. She’d be glad to leave, but sorry to go home: home was power failures, ‘security’ investigations, 50 per cent annual inflation; home was a growing fear as everyone began to realise that there wasn’t enough of anything to go around anymore, except for the military and the police and the bureaucrats and the corporations and the Ben Whitcumbs…
Now she was really awake. It was 0515; breakfast wouldn’t be ready until 0600. She decided to get up and go to the dome to see if the weather really had cleared up. But Jeanne beat her to it. Penny heard her groan a little, then get up and shuffle down the corridor to the women’s latrine.
Unzipping her bag, Penny swung down to the floor and gasped like a sunbather plunging into cold water. She switched on the overhead light and shivered as she pulled wool pants and a heavy shirt over her waffle-weave underwear. (Something else to hate: you couldn’t sleep naked.) Fur-lined Wellingtons went over thick socks; in most of the huts the temperature gradient was so steep you could wipe sweat off your face while your feet went numb with the cold.
Women and married couples (this year only the Dolans) were housed at the end of Hut 6; the women’s latrine was a buffer between what the men called the Harem and Eunuchsville, the rest of the dormitory huts. The latrine stank, as always. Jeanne was crouched over one of the toilets, throwing up.
“Hey, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Jeanne mumbled. “Go away. Go back to bed.”
“Should I go get Katerina? She’s just down the hall—”
“Just leave me bloody well alone, Pen.”
“I will, as soon as I pee.”
That was about par for the course these days, Penny thought as she sat delicately on a freezing-cold toilet seat. Hugh Adams, the station leader, did a good job in keeping people as busy as possible, but there were still too many empty hours: cliques formed and broke up, everyone snapped at everyone else, people went looking for arguments or retreated into sullenness or sleep.
Feeling sullen herself, she left Jeanne and walked up the corridor. A short, insulated passageway led to Hut 5, another dormitory; from there, service tunnels ran to Tunnels A and C. She turned left and walked to Tunnel C, where most of the labs and offices were housed.
No one was around. Much of the equipment in the glaciology and seismology labs was already crated, ready for shipment home. In the geophysics lab, a few instruments still hummed and clicked. Although the fluorescent lights were on as always, the place looked odd; Penny realised after a moment that genuine sunlight was reflecting down the spiral stairway from the dome. Her boots clanging on the steps, she hurried up towards the light.
The dome was a double-layered Plexiglas hemisphere atop a tower three metres across and standing four metres above the surface. The work area was a muddle of electronic equipment, clipboards, coffee cups, technical manuals and cameras. Two wooden folding chairs filled most of the floor space; Penny sat down in one and looked around.
Low in the northeast the sun blazed. The sky was a deep, saturated blue, all the stronger for its contrast with the bright red-orange of Shacktown’s few surface buildings. Those buildings were heavily drifted over on their lee sides, and the empty oil drums lining the ski-way were scarcely visible. Nearby, twin radio masts gleamed against the sky; farther away, beyond the smooth curve of the hangar roof, was the smaller tower of the drilling project. Ventilation pipes, crusted with ice, steamed just above the surface. According to some gauges on a workbench in front of her, the temperature outside was -25°C, air pressure was 1240 millibars and there was no wind at all.
This was the first time since New Year’s morning that Penny had seen her surroundings in full sunlight. She felt more cheated than ever. To the north, east and west the Shelf extended to the horizon: a vast plain of ice, hundreds of metres thick, as large as France. On the flight from McMurdo she’d seen something of the Shelf’s immensity and its varied beauty; even here, from this low vantage point, it revealed much of itself. In one place shadows clustered blue-black against a low ridge; in another the sun gleamed on a field of sastrugi, wind-carved ice sculptures that sometimes stood taller than a man. Ice crystals glittered, catching the sun for an instant as they condensed somehow from the desert-dry air.
To the south the horizon crumpled into the pinkish-beige peaks of the Queen Maud Range, part of the Transantarctic Mountains. In the clear air they seemed much closer than forty kilometres; the sun was so bright on their glaciers and snowfields that it hurt to look at them. Due south of the station was Shackleton Glacier; a little to the west, but invisible from here, was Axel Heiberg, the steep glacier up which Amundsen had driven his dog teams to the pole. And off to the east, two hundred kilometres or more, was the great Beardmore, which Scott had struggled up and down on his doomed journey. Beyond the mountains, she knew, was the polar plateau, the greatest desolation in the world.
But she had seen no more than a glimpse of all this through the scratched windscreen of the Twin Otter and the blurred Plexiglas of the dome. What she would really remember would be blowing snow, grey and dense, racing past the dome in a screaming wind. This clear, sunlit stillness was lovely but transient; the real Antarctic was fluid, chaotic and meaninglessly violent.
On her way to the mess hall, she made a detour to the greenhouse, down at the end of Tunnel C. The hut that housed it had originally been intended for storage, but the first station crew had been full of plant lovers. They had smuggled in sacks of potting soil and packets of seeds, and had later added kitchen compost, discarded soil samples from geological surveys and sawdust. After four years the greenhouse was dense and lush, the envy of other polar stations. Under fluorescent lamps, flowers, houseplants and vegetables grew in flats on tiered shelves or in pots made from soup cans.
Unlike most of the huts, the greenhouse was so well insulated that there was little temperature difference between floor and ceiling, and it was the only place in Shacktown — except for the kitchen — that was reasonably humid. As the pleasantest part of the station, it normally had plenty of visitors at all hours, but this morning it was deserted.