“Going to be a long winter,” he said quietly.
Chapter 7 – Laputa
The day after the Otter’s flight to the Pole, the weather went bad again for three straight days. When it cleared, Al and Max made a quick sortie back to Ross Island. The explosion of the satellite cone, they found, had created a steep-walled new bay on the Grid North-East shore of the island; Scott and McMurdo bases were gone. Hut Point Peninsula was now linked to the rest of the island only by a blackened isthmus of steaming rock. The Shelf went on forcing its way into the new bay, where it melted and froze again in a self-sustaining blizzard. The floes — ice islands, really — of the broken Shelf were deeply drifted with ash and pumice, especially downwind of Ross Island.
Part of the Shelf was bypassing Ross Island and moving down McMurdo Sound into the open sea. Al thought he saw Outer Willy, far to the Grid South, but since Erebus’s main crater was erupting again he didn’t dare fly close enough to make certain that he’d seen the abandoned airstrip. But he and Max both saw Scott’s old hut near the shore of the Sound, intact despite its nearness to the volcano. There was no sign of life anywhere — on the island, the ice or the mainland.
On their return Al and Max made two low-level circuits of Shacktown’s own island. It was relatively small, a rough rectangle slightly over a hundred kilometres along its north-south axis, and about fifty kilometres from east to west. To the Grid South the island drove against a somewhat larger one; to the Grid East and West, ice-choked leads separated it from other islands. To the Grid North a squarish island about fifty kilometres on a side was welded to Shacktown’s island by a seam of pressure ice; beyond was the surge ice, still pouring off the continent.
That was the last of the reconnaissance flights. Gerry Roche and Howie O’Rourke took one of the Sno-Cats out on February 12 and traversed the island from one end to the other. They found surprisingly few crevasse fields: pressure from the surge seemed to have crushed most of them, creating treacherous sinkholes and sastrugi-like surfaces. Wherever one island touched another, pressure ridges were growing; at the Grid South end the ridges were up to thirty metres high and three hundred wide. The noise of the grinding, splintering ice kept the men from venturing too close to the island’s edges, especially since here, at least, there were many new crevasses. They set off some seismic shots that indicated the island was still in one piece, and collected ash-filled snow samples.
By the time they returned, on February 15, Shacktown was beginning to resume its routine. Steve fussed over his instruments in the seismographic tunnel; Carter and Gerry watched the slow, slow growth of the earth’s new magnetic field, and the odd behaviour of solar protons striking the atmosphere in almost straight lines. Colin Smith watched the weather and stuttered through twice-daily forecasts that were usually bad and usually accurate.
Penny was working in the mess hall the night after the Sno-Cat returned. Around 2030 hours, just as the seminar was getting organised next door, Steve and Max wandered in, talking animatedly. She envied them their energy.
“Hi, Pen. Are we too late for supper?”
“I saved some for you. What took you so long?”
“We’ve been looking at Gerry and Howie’s snow samples,” Steve said.
“They have a lot of debris from Erebus,” Max added eagerly. “We should get even more as we move north.” He took a little plastic bag from his shirt pocket and drew from it a damp paper disc, speckled with fine grey-brown dust. “This is volcanic dust. Very characteristic of Erebus. And if there is this much in the snow around us, then there must be — God — tonnes and tonnes, millions of tonnes, in the atmosphere downwind of Ross Island. Maybe even more than Agung put into the atmosphere in — when, ’62? ’63?”
Penny poured three cups of coffee and followed them to their table. Max went on:
“If the dust in the stratosphere is on that order, it will be a bad winter in the southern hemisphere.”
“Because the dust will block the sunlight?” she asked. He nodded.
“It’d be bad even without the dust,” Steve said. “The surge is still going on. According to Gerry, we’re moving four or five kilometres a day — at that rate, we’ll be past Ross Island in six months. And the ice islands north of us will be cluttering up the Southern Ocean almost as far as New Zealand.”
“Six months from now will be the end of August,” Max said, shaking his head. “By then the surge will be all over, and we’ll slow down as sea ice forms, yes?”
“Maybe. But not for long. The surge ice will take months to reach equilibrium.” He rubbed at the peeling skin on his nose. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens.”
Max laughed. “You know, in German we have a word, Schadenfreude. It means, mm, taking pleasure, joy, in disaster.”
“That’s our boy,” Penny agreed. “Jolly Jeremiah. I don’t know which is more disgusting — your pessimism or your scientific detachment.”
Steve didn’t rise to the bait; his eyes were fixed on the photomural of a New Zealand sheep station. Penny waved a hand in front of his face, and he blinked.
“Sorry — I wasn’t listening.”
“God, you’re hopeless. You know, you remind me of those scientists in Gulliver. The ones on the flying island, remember? They had to be hit with bladders to bring them back to reality.”
“The Laputans.” Steve smiled. “Yes, I guess I am a bit like that. A lot of us are. They drove their wives crazy, didn’t they? The women used to sneak off the island to have affairs with ordinary men.”
“Some girls have all the luck,” Penny said.
Later that evening Max suggested at the seminar that their ice island be officially named Laputa. Hugh then offered Lilliput for the island Grid North of them, and Blefuscu for the one Grid South. The islands to the Grid East and West were called Lagado and Balnibarbi. “But I won’t hear of anyplace being named Brobdingnag or Glubbdubbdrib,” Hugh warned.
Jeanne and Will wasted no time before examining the ruins of the drilling hut with Gordon Ellerslee.
“Pretty bad, eh?” Gordon observed.
“But not impossible,” Jeanne said. “The roof needs reinforcing, but the rig doesn’t seem out of alignment. Gord, how long would it take to get us back in business?”
He gaped at her. “Jeez, I dunno. Ten days, two weeks, maybe. But why bother, House-mouse?”
“We need that hole open again. We can’t just sit and do nothing, and the hole will tell us a lot about what’s going on — won’t it, Will?”
“It will.”
“Shit,” Gordon mumbled. “By the time it’s ready, we’ll be pulling outa here. Why should Reg and Simon and me bust our asses for nothin’?”
“Och, it’ll not be for nothing,” Will assured him. “We may be here longer than you think. And if we are evacuated, it’ll be that much less work next year. Leave that roof like that and the shed’ll be full of snow in three months.”
“It ain’t worth it, Will. I got better things to do.”
“If you can’t do it, Gordon, just say so. We’ll understand.” Jeanne looked levelly at him; he rubbed his scarred, broken nose.
“Aw, I can do it, all right. But it’ll be a waste of time.”
“Good old Gordie!” Jeanne chuckled, hugging him. “What would we do without you?” Looking past Gordon’s arm, she sent Will an exasperated glance; this kind of manipulation disgusted her.
The look turned to faint alarm when Gordon showed reluctance to let her go, and she avoided his eyes when he freed her at last.