“Yes, we do.” someone croaked.
“Belt up, there!” Carter roared. “Anyway, we’ll do everything we can to keep you safe and well, House-mouse. It’s a — a factor to consider.” He looked very unhappy. “Does anyone else have any exciting revelations for us? I sincerely hope not.”
“I want to talk about this rationing,” Gordon said. “Hugh’s being cagey about sending Al out, but it looks to me like you’ll have to send him, Hugh And if he goes, we’ll be evacuated within a week or two. So there’s no need for rationing, and we can start eating enough to do our goddamned jobs.”
“Gordie deserves to get stuffed if anyone does,” Suzy Dolan muttered.
“I’m sorry, Gord,” Hugh said. “Inside people get two thousand calories a day; outsiders get three. If we’re evacuated, you can make it up in New Zealand.”
Gordon was about to say something more, but everyone else applauded Hugh so loudly that he thought better of it. Katerina popped in again, looking furious.
“We must have quiet!”
“Meeting adjourned,” Carter said. “Everybody out of the lounge.”
The weather was, unexpectedly, very good: temperatures stayed below -35°C, the sky was clear, and there was very little wind. People found excuses to go outside, if only for a walk around the station. The moon, half-full, was bright; haloes often formed around it, and Penny once saw three moon dogs arrayed across the sky. The Grid South horizon would begin to glow around 1000 hours. By noon the sky was pink or orange, and the sun made a brief appearance; twilight lasted until past 1500. It was never wholly silent outside. Distant rumbles and creaks came from all sides, and even the snow underfoot often vibrated. In the drilling shed the whine and clank of machinery went on around the clock.
Al, Will and Sean made a short flight around Laputa to survey its progress towards the Ridge. As Will had predicted, Blefuscu — the island Grid South of them — was breaking up: short-lived peaks were forced as much as a hundred metres above the Shelf before collapsing of their own weight. Deep crevasses opened up and crashed shut all around the pressure ridges, but they were encouraged to see that beyond the Ridge the Shelf still showed many extensive flat surfaces. Apparently the big ice islands were breaking into relatively small ones, linked by wide belts of pressure ice like scar tissue.
To the Grid North, Lilliput continued to grind against Laputa; beyond Lilliput was the growing area of chaotic surge ice, an uneven mass that rose up to two hundred metres above the Shelf. The Otter ventured as far Grid North as the Dufek Coast, which was almost unrecognisable under the glacial overflow. The remote station near the old mouth of Shackleton Glacier was gone, overwhelmed by ice, and many coastal hills were now nunataks.
“I’d love to see what it looks like up on the plateau,” Steve said to Penny on the evening after the flight. “There must be whole mountain ranges exposed. Like Atlantis risen from the sea. Well, maybe we’ll get a look at it in the spring.”
“Christ, not again,” Penny groaned, pulling away from him. The bunk seemed narrow and uncomfortable. “We’ve got to be out of here by then.”
He grunted. “Well, maybe. But I’ll be back.”
“And what am I supposed to do while you’re falling into crevasses and freezing your balls off? Knit baby booties by the fireside?”
“—Good lord, don’t tell me you’re—”
“No, no! I just — oh, forget it. Forget it.”
“Come on, Pen, what is it?” His bafflement was obvious, and infuriating.
“I had some idiotic sentimental idea that we’d stay together when we got home,” she said wearily.
“Ah. Well. I hadn’t really thought that far ahead.”
“Not about us, no. Just about coming back to this — this place.”
“This place is important to me, Penny. It’s the most important place in the world.”
“And I’m not important, of course.”
“Not in the same way, no. In another way you’re far more important, and you know it. Shush! But this is my work. My work. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand me at all.”
“I understand you, all right. I used to be married to someone exactly like you.”
He turned over. “This is ridiculous. Good night.”
The hole through Laputa was exactly 511.5 metres long. On April 20, after several attempts, Will and Jeanne managed to drop a gadget called a snake-eye all the way to the sea. It was technically known as a Mobile Remote Fiberoptic Underwater Observation Module, and was a considerable advance over the television cameras that had first probed the underside of the Shelf in the late ’70s. The snake-eye looked like a miniature torpedo, just over a metre long and about as thick as a man’s arm. Its nose contained a powerful lamp and three lenses, as well as instruments to measure temperature, salinity and turbidity. Attached to a cable running up the drill hole, it could be steered — clumsily — by jets of compressed air from a tank in its midsection. The operator of the snake-eye sat at a console in the drilling shed, using three controls to steer it and six others to run its cameras and instruments.
Jeanne had a knack with the snake-eye, and Will automatically assigned her to the console. He, Gordon and Simon stood behind her as the snake-eye finally got all the way down without mishap. The console video lit up and the VTR went on.
“My God,” Jeanne said. “Looks like chocolate syrup down there.” The screen was a muddy grey-brown. “Awfully turbid.” She lowered the snake-eye about ten metres and aimed its nose up at the ice. A swirl of bubbles glittered in the beam of the lamp, rising past the orange line of the cable. The bottom of the ice was a mottled grey surface; the bubbles crawled around on it like droplets of mercury, with a few finding their way back into the black circle of the drill hole. Jeanne lowered the snake-eye to the horizontal and turned it slowly through 360°. The same mottled grey of old ice showed through the murk; the drill had come through into a crevasse.
Jeanne had to lower the snake-eye more than fifty metres before it reached the true bottom of the island. She sent it cruising Grid South, pausing every few metres to turn its lenses upward. After it had travelled almost four hundred metres and the cable was near its fullest extent, Jeanne sent it on a roughly circular clockwise course. Angled upward, it scanned a surface as bleak and scarred as some Neptunian moon’s. Crevasses slashed deep into the ice, with sometimes only a metre or two between them. Mud had drifted into cracks and been trapped there, giving much of the ice a resemblance to clay. Countless ice fragments, broken loose, had refrozen to the island like stalactites.
“Not bad,” Will said cheerfully when the circuit was completed. “I counted twelve major crevasses in eight hundred metres, and lots of little ones. We might just slide over the Ridge with a few thumps.”
“Wishful thinking,” Jeanne retorted. She began drawing the cable in, watching it wind around a rotating drum. “Our bottom’s no different from the ice under Blefuscu. Those crevasses are wide, but they’re not all that deep. And they’ll start closing up when we hit the Ridge, instead of breaking off.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, and then at Gordon and Simon. Will sighed and shook his head. “She’s right, I’m afraid.”
“What’s it mean if the crevasses close up?” Gordon asked.
“They’ll absorb some of the impact,” Jeanne told him. “But only a little. Then we’ll start breaking up, vertically and horizontally. Everything will be all jumbled up; we could end up with another chunk of ice on top of us, or we could turn turtle.”