“Pooped,” Will gasped.
“Yeah. Catch your breath and finish ’em off. We’re running into a little weather.”
“Right. Be done in a minute.”
But it was more like five minutes before Will felt ready to go on. He unlashed the fifth drum, heaved it into place, kicked it and lost his footing as the Otter lurched a little. The drum hit the edge of the doorway and caught there.
“Bloody hell.” He sidled across the cabin and gave the drum a shove with his boot. There wasn’t enough leverage, so he bent over and heaved at it with both hands. It spun with unexpected ease and toppled out. Will sprawled flat as the plane tilted to the right and then back again, a little too far. He fell within a hand’s-breadth of the doorway and felt himself rolling over, as helpless in his bulky clothes as a Weddell seal. He was looking out at the far horizon, a straight white edge marred by a chain of distant nunataks. A kilometre below was the tortured surface of the ice sheet, glittering and sharp and very far away.
Instinct wanted him to bend his knees as if in readiness for the long drop; reason made him straighten his legs and fling out his hands above his head. Feet and hands struck the sides of the doorway. He groped for a handhold and found nothing. With a grunt, he flung himself away from the door, rolling over until he reached the fuel drums and could hook an arm through their lashings.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered. His vision was blurred, and for a horrible minute he was afraid his eyes had frozen. At last the blue-painted drums and yellow nylon webbing came into focus. He pulled himself upright and shuffled around the remaining three drums. His hands were shaking so badly that he could scarcely undo the knots in the lashings. It took almost ten minutes to jettison the rest of the drums; then he slammed shut the door and went back to the flight compartment.
“What took you so long?”
“I got to admiring the view.”
Al handed him a thermos of hot coffee, thick with condensed milk and sugar. Will drank it all and felt almost drunk as its warmth spread from his belly to his hands and feet. Revived, he found Al’s howgozit. A new line had been drawn on it.
“I shot the sun again and found we were doing better than I’d thought,” Al said. He looked embarrassed. “Looks like I stuck you with a job that didn’t need doing. Sorry.”
Will took a deep breath and let it out very slowly.
As they flew deeper into the continent, the ice sheet’s surface grew less chaotic. Amidst the seracs and crevasse fields, smooth patches began to appear, some of them hundreds of metres on a side. “They must be on one of those spots,” Al observed.
“Have you picked up anything from them?” Another part of Will seemed to be speaking; his real self was still looking down through the doorway, reaching for a handhold that wasn’t there.
“Nothing.” Al checked their position and studied the fuel gauges. “We’re so close we ought to be able to smell the borscht.”
Will studied the terrain below. In all but the worst serac fields, there was something of a pattern in the surface features.
“Looks as if the ice is moving Grid South-East — towards the coast. We’re over the top of the dome. I’ll bet they’ve moved farther than they realise.”
Al looked at him, inscrutable behind his sunglasses. “We’ve got about seventy minutes’ flying left. You’d better be right.” He changed course, and they began a standard search-and-rescue sweep pattern.
Fifteen minutes later they saw a short line of black dots across a clear patch. Al brought the Otter almost to the surface and circled the station. “They’ve moved almost seventy kilometres,” he said. “I never would have believed it.”
There was no sign of life below. The ski-way was heavily drifted over, and both ends of it vanished into crevasses. Al estimated that no more than fifteen hundred metres remained of the four-kilometre strip. A row of half-buried buildings extended Grid South-East from the ski-way; several of them had collapsed, and one had obviously been gutted by fire. A few vehicles, mostly big green Kharkovchanka tractors, were nearly parked about fifty metres from the buildings.
“See anyone?” Will asked. Al shook his head. He was studying the ski-way.
“Bad. Looks bad,” he said. “If I don’t put us downright now, I’ll be too scared to try.”
It was a rough landing. The Otter dropped to the surface, bumping and skidding as it struck sastrugi buried like land mines under the drift. Al brought it to a halt not far from a crevasse field and turned it cautiously around. They taxied back to the buildings, and Al throttled back the engines.
“Don’t strain yourself,” he said. “The altitude and the cold will make you pretty clumsy. Let’s hope we don’t have to stay long enough to get acclimatised.” He looked at the altimeter, and his jaw dropped. “Twenty-six hundred metres. That’s wrong. That’s impossible.”
“This side of the dome must have surged even faster than the other side,” Will said. “It must have, to move Vostok this far and drop the surface by a thousand metres.”
“Mmm. Let’s get going.”
The air was very still, and very cold. A constant background rumble could be felt more than heard. Will took a few steps from the Otter and looked around. It was much like the Shelf, or most places on the polar plateau: a white flatness, disturbed here and there by sastrugi or drifts. The crevasse fields were invisible from here. Above them was an empty blue sky.
“Where are they?” he wondered. “They must’ve heard us.”
“Probably in no shape to move. We’ll find them.”
The nearest building was a pile of wreckage. “The American Pavilion, they used to call it,” Al commented as they made their way around it. “Used to be one or two guys from McMurdo here every year, back in the old days. We had some great parties here. We had a pissing contest once, right about here. It was fifty-five below. Your pee darn near froze in mid-air.”
They trudged on between the buildings and the Kharkovchanka. They were immense, like railway cars on caterpillar tracks. Each was ten metres long, five high, and five wide; Will recalled hearing that they could sleep ten men, and were divided into rooms — even a laundry.
“Gotta be in the main building,” Al said. “It’s down there, past the drilling sheds.”
“Buggers must’ve liked walking a lot,” Will wheezed. “Never saw such bloody urban sprawl.” His face felt stiff and masklike, and even his eyelashes were delicately picked out in frost. His head ached badly.
“You never saw so many guys in such good shape as the Russians. Really solid.” Al gripped the handle of the door to the main building’s cold porch, and pulled hard against the drift that blocked it. After a minute’s grunting and tugging, he got it open. They went through, leaving the outer door open to give some light.
The inner door of the cold porch opened into a narrow corridor. There was much of the same sort of clutter one found in any station; the chief differences Will noticed were the stencilled Cyrillic letters on the crates, and the brownish-black bearskins hanging over the doorways.
Al looked down the corridor. “Hello!” he shouted. “Anybody here?”
“Hello,” someone called back faintly. “We are here, hello.”
The two men blundered down the dark corridor. At its end was a door like all the others, but its frame was heavily crusted with frost. Will pulled aside the bearskin — it was as rigid as a plywood board — and fumbled with the knob. The door seemed frozen on its hinges, but yielded at last. They stepped into the station’s mess hall.
Three kerosene lamps, standing on tables, were the only illumination. The floor was slippery with ice except at the far end of the room, where long batts of fibreglass insulation had been laid down; some of them were covered with blankets. A long, narrow window in one wall had been blocked off with more insulation. A little stove made the room just warm enough to be dank. There was a sour stink of kerosene and human waste in the air.