All through the morning of February 10, tremors ran through the station. Nothing was damaged, but Howie had a bad moment in Tunnel D when all the newly stacked crates and drums began to sway, and a miniature snow flurry fell gently from the frosted steel ceiling. Howie stood still for two minutes, his breath steaming in the light of the swinging lamps overhead. Then he went on down the tunnel to the lounge.
Al was sitting in an armchair, his slippered feet on a coffee table. He had had thirteen hours’ sleep, a hot shower and a big breakfast; now he was contentedly lighting his first cigar of the day.
“Morning, Howie.”
“Hi, Al. You’re lookin’ pretty goddamn comfortable.”
“If you’re through in the hangar, I won’t be comfortable for long.”
“Well, she’ll fly. But she looks like you tried to fly her through a mountain. Pretty bad up there, eh?”
“Yeah. Yeah. We were lucky; could’ve sucked a big chunk of pumice into one of the engines. Well, you go find Carter and tell him we’ll be on our way in a few minutes.”
“Steve goin’ with you this time?”
“Yeah, Max says he’s bored with flying.”
“Gonna take Penny, too?”
“Don’t I wish!” Penny yelled from the mess hall. She appeared in the doorway; her face was peeling, there were blisters on her nose, and her thick red hair was tied back in a disintegrating bun. “I’ve been put on permanent KP.”
Steve and Carter came into the lounge; Steve was carrying a stereo camera and a portable videotape recorder. He glanced at the monitor screen in the corner of the lounge. “Still looks good outside.”
“Yup. Let’s get going.”
“Have fun, you two,” Suzy called from the mess hall. “Don’t be late. No stopping off for a quick drink on your way home.”
Al shook his head sadly. “You know, the Antarctic used to be so nice before they let women in.” He blocked Penny’s punch and said to Steve: “I’ll be dressed in ten minutes. See you in the hangar.”
Penny wanted to kiss Steve goodbye, but knew better; it wasn’t done in front of others, least of all in front of men without women.
He waved at her. “See you, Pen.”
“See you.” But she felt irritated at his casual attitude; if he couldn’t kiss her, he could at least look as if he wanted to.
The day was almost cloudless, but there was an autumnal quality to the sunlight as the Otter lifted from the Shelf. Even now, at noon, the sun was not far above the horizon, and the dust of Erebus dulled the sky like a faint overcast. Al set a course for Axel Heiberg Glacier, about fifty kilometres Grid West. It was one of the shortest and steepest glaciers in the range, and would get them up to the polar plateau in the least time.
Though both men kept earmuffs nearby, the deafening noise of the surge seemed to have abated. The Shelf below was broken in long, surprisingly straight lines, and the gaps between the islands seemed to Al to be larger than they had been yesterday. The most dramatic change, though, was along the coast: the landward edges of the islands were already six or seven kilometres offshore. The steep sides of the islands were up to fifty metres above the chaos of broken surge ice that filled the gap between Shelf and land.
“Looks like the worst pressure ice anyone ever dreamed of,” Al shouted over the growing roar from below. Steve nodded and put the videotape camera to his eye.
The glaciers were moving fast, carrying immense blocks of ice into the sea faster than the Shelf could move. This ice piled up in the gap until in some places it actually rose higher than the surface of the Shelf. Steve watched one raft of ice, a hundred metres wide and five hundred long, nose under another berg and lift its landward end right into the air. For a few seconds it loomed over the jumbled surface like a monstrous cannon aimed at the mountains; then it snapped of its own weight and fell in a glittering cloud. The surge ice absorbed it and moved onward; from the air it reminded Steve of the ‘chaotic terrains’ in photographs of the surface of Mars. He smiled without amusement: precise and elegant physical laws were the cause of this chaos, as spectacular a proof of entropy as one could hope for — or fear.
They reached the mouth of Axel Heiberg and began to gain altitude. Here the noise was still bad, and they were grateful for the earmuffs. The glacier — the one which Amundsen had ascended on his way to the Pole in 1912 — looked like a rapids filmed in slow motion. The surface at its centre was moving at a stately ten to twelve kilometres per hour, and almost as fast along its edge. The mountains on either side were slashed and scarred, and most of the snow on them had already avalanched to merge with the glacier. The crevasses seemed narrow but deep, contorted into elongated U’s by the speed of the surge. Occasionally the moving ice struck some obstacle below the surface, and bulged upward for a few seconds before riding over it. The air was almost windless, and very little of the glacier was obscured by the kind of ice haze they had seen on the Beardmore just after the quake.
Neither man spoke for some time. The Otter climbed hundreds of metres in a few minutes, following the rising terrain. As they approached the ice falls near the top of the glacier, Steve swore in surprise: where the ice had once hung still as it imperceptibly crept down the cliffs, it now shot out, sending great blue-white chunks, some the size of apartment buildings, toppling free to drop a hundred metres.
Then they were over the plateau, and the mountains slipped behind them. Ahead was a white emptiness, little different from the Shelf but far vaster. Both men were familiar with the plateau, and at first it seemed unchanged. Then Al pointed straight ahead.
“It’s moving.”
Steve had been taping a crevasse field; when he took his eye from the camera, he saw that the field had no end. The plastic ice far below the surface was too compressed to break, but the upper layers were shattered into thousands upon thousands of narrow parallel crevasses. Here and there they crushed themselves out of existence as the ice struck some buried mountain. The noise was like constant distant thunder; the sun seemed slightly dimmed.
“It can’t be like this all the way to the Pole,” Steve yelled. Al looked at him and shrugged.
Steve slumped in his seat and shook his head. Al checked his bearings and altered course a few degrees; a shaft of sunlight fell through the side window and gleamed on the instruments. Steve watched dust particles sparkle in the sunlight and then vanish. We get a few moments in the light, and we see some marvels, and we go into the dark again.
They almost missed Amundsen-Scott Station. The surface at the Pole was heavily crevassed, and there were few visible vehicle tracks. Al spotted a dark blur and flew lower. Near the top of a wide crevasse was a twisted mass of metal that still kept a vestige of geometry: the remains of the geodesic dome that had covered most of the station.
“They must have gone into the crevasse and then burned,” Steve said. “Go around again.”
The Otter orbited the Pole six times, just a few metres above the broken surface. There were no signs of life, and no place that looked safe enough to land on. Apart from the dome a few tractors and a collapsed rawin tower were all that was left of the station. Steve taped their last orbit and said: “Let’s go home.” He stared down at the ice, watching its shadows lengthen as the sun dropped lower.
Al looked at the altimeter. It should have read 3,500 metres; instead, it indicated they were only 3,100 metres above sea level. The ice sheet had already dropped here by four hundred metres.