Penny sat on the floor of the cab next to Steve while Sean and Tim steered through sastrugi and drift. “Isn’t this fun?” she said. “Like going on a hayride.”
“I remember the last time you and I went for a ride in a Sno-Cat,” Steve said shyly. “You went to sleep on my shoulder.”
She felt comfortable and happy with him for the first time in weeks.
It took them six hours to cover fifteen kilometres. The Sno-Cat floundered through deep, soft snow most of the way, and finally came to a halt at the crest of a rise. Here they made camp; beyond they could see crevasse fields running in dark lines to a distant mass of pressure that gleamed blue in the moonlight. Snug in a warm tent, they made supper, drank beer and talked desultorily for a while before falling asleep. Penny found it odd to sleep in a bag by herself, with Steve on one side and Tim on the other.
During the noon twilight next day they took telephoto pictures of the pressure ridges between Laputa and Lilliput. To Penny they looked very much like the Queen Maud mountains: sharp peaks, mantled in drift, stretched from west to east. After she had watched the pressure for a while, though, she saw that the peaks kept changing. Directly ahead of them a spire of ice rose and snapped off; to the right a row of jagged-edged hummocks sagged almost flat. A constant snapping and creaking came from the pressure, and Penny could feel the ice shaking beneath her feet.
The moon was fairly high by noon, and by its light they could just make out a misty blueness beyond the pressure: the surge ice, rearing high above Lilliput. Penny got a brief glimpse of it through binoculars before the lenses iced over, and shivered.
“This place scares me,” she told the men.
“Me, too,” said Tim. “I think we’ve seen as much as we’re going to, Steve.”
“Right. Let’s get going. If we’re lucky we’ll be home for supper.”
They weren’t. About halfway back the Sno-Cat shuddered violently and slewed sideways down a slope into a drift-choked depression. When they got out to start digging snow away from the treads, they could feel the surface shaking.
“Another earthquake?” Sean asked.
“No,” said Steve. “I think this end of the island is breaking up.” He began digging, his breath glinting in the Sno-Cat’s headlights.
In the two hours it took them to get underway again, they felt several more shocks. Many small crevasses now intersected their track, but Sean drove straight across them without difficulty. They got back to Shacktown around midnight and stumbled into the mess hall for some coffee.
“Welcome back!” George Hills greeted them. He was hunched over a table with the Vostochni, teaching them Monopoly. Nearby were Ray Crandall and Herm Northrop, playing cribbage.
“How are things in Lilliput?” said Herm.
“Noisy,” Penny said. “And cold.”
“Lilliput is breaking up Laputa,” Steve said. He yawned. “If we’re still here tomorrow, I’ll go see how the seismographs are behaving. How’s the melting going?”
“Very well, I gather,” Herm nodded. “Jeanne says the tops of the crevasses are getting wider.”
“When are we scheduled to go over the Ridge?” Penny asked.
“A day or two. Will says we’ll know when it happens.”
George looked up from the game. “Damn stupid, if you ask me, Herm. Here we finally got some clear weather, and nobody’s even talkin’ about sending Al out. Even if we do get over the Ridge, we’ll be in the same fix.”
“Yes, George,” Herm said neutrally. He looked at his watch. “Well, it’s just past twelve; time to head down to the snow mine.”
Ivan and the others came over to talk to Steve. “We are worrying about arguments. You have problems here.”
“Some,” Steve agreed.
“Why is this arguments permitted? This is not good time.”
“We do things a little differently here, Ivan.”
He shook his head. “Very dangerous. Very dangerous. I am sorry; the guest shall not be critic. But we are worrying.”
“So are we,” Penny said.
On the morning of May 8 a tremor almost as violent as the icequake hit the station. No one was hurt this time, but boxes were once again strewn all over the tunnels. The shock was followed by lesser tremors for several hours.
Steve spent most of that day in his seismograph tunnels. At the seminar that night he said that Laputa’s Grid South end had probably broken up on the Ridge. Colin Smith agreed: he had determined that Laputa had moved some five kilometres since the tremor that morning.
“That’s a hell of a rate of speed,” Carter said. “Does it mean we’re over the worst of this?”
“I doubt it,” Will replied. “The broken-up parts of the island are passing over the Ridge now, and the rest of Laputa is shooting forward as a result. We’ll have more tremors. But at least we won’t have Lilliput treading on our heels for a while, I hope.”
“You’re probably right,” Steve said. “All the tremors have been coming from the Grid South today.”
“How’s the immersion heater doing?” Hugh wanted to know.
“Very well,” Jeanne said. “But I’ve given up trying to keep the cables evenly spaced around the station. The current from Grid North is too strong. So now they’re all fanned out in front of us, which is probably just as well. I had a little trouble with the snake-eye today — couldn’t see what’s going on too well because the water is just opaque. I think that’s because the melting is releasing a lot of mud from the ice. At least I like to think it is.”
Books suddenly catapulted from their shelves, and there was the sound of breaking crockery in the kitchen, followed by Terry’s violent swearing. The lights flickered for an instant, and Tom Vernon bolted from his chair to attend to the generator.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Gordon burst out. “Hugh, when are you gonna wake up? When are you gonna send Al out?”
“When I bloody well think we need to!” Hugh roared. It had been so long since anyone had heard him speak above a murmur that his bellow startled them more than the tremor had. Hugh stood up and walked deliberately up to Gordon. The Canadian was almost a head taller, but he seemed to shrink under Hugh’s glare. “Gordon, you have been a pain in the collective ass. If I hear any more of your nagging and complaining, I will have you confined to your room. I would rather do without your services than pay for them with divisiveness and low morale.”
“Well, gee, Hugh — I didn’t — you—” Gordon sat down. Hugh turned and went back to his chair.
“Let’s get on with the seminar,” he said calmly.
Within twenty-four hours Lilliput caught up again with Laputa and began pushing it across the Ridge. On May 11, after two days of almost constant minor tremors, there was another major shock that made the science huts temporarily uninhabitable; all the ventilation ducts above Tunnel C were disconnected. The seismographs indicated that the Grid North end of the island had crumpled under Lilliput’s pressure. Steve and Tim went out in a Sno-Cat and fired some seismic shots which Will monitored; they showed several stress belts running the length of Laputa.
That same day Al got drunk. During a quick check of possible damage after the shock, Roger Wykstra and Max Wilhelm found him in his cubicle, lying face down on his bunk. An empty bottle of Mortlach whisky lay on the floor beside him. Only half-conscious, Al was singing ‘Happy Birthday’ over and over again.
“What’s the matter with him?” Roger asked softly.
Max shook his head. But he remembered the conversation he had had with Al on the flight to McMurdo. “Let’s go,” he said. “He’ll be all right when he sleeps it off.”