For the next five days Laputa moved slowly and violently over the Ridge. Hugh instituted daily evacuation drills, regardless of the weather, and the Otter was kept fuelled and warmed for a possible trip to Taylor Dry Valley. The cables went on pouring heat into the water below them until 1335 hours on the afternoon of May 17, when they were snapped. The ice below Laputa was now in contact with the Ridge.
In a few minutes before she lost the snake-eye, Jeanne saw on the console that Herm had been right. The crevassed ice, weakened by days of heat, crumbled away as the island scraped over the immovable stone. Hugh told the people waiting in the chilly hangar to go back to bed.
The next day, just before noon, a crash like thunder pealed across the island. Howie and Simon went out on skis to investigate and found that Laputa had broken apart less than three kilometres Grid North of the station. The huge fragment left behind was breaking up in slabs that were rapidly filling the gap.
Laputa still moved Grid South, towards the distant Pacific Ocean, but more slowly than before. During the brief noon twilights those who wanted to could ski from the station to the new edge of the island. There they could look down on a grey-green plain of floes and bergs that extended to the dim horizon in all directions. The chaotic ice beyond the Ridge was lower and thinner than Laputa; in the grip of a deep-running current, the island drifted through the growing super-shelf.
“Now we start to winter over,” Steve said.
Chapter 10 – Winter
Will Farquhar stood near the edge of Laputa and looked Grid East. The night was still; the moon was full, and bright enough to smother the stars. Clear to the horizon, the Shelf glowed silver-blue, a gently rolling plain broken in many places by ice islands rising like desert mesas, with steep sides and flat tops. It was very quiet.
He looked down. Elsewhere, Laputa’s cliffs were as much as fifty metres above the new Shelf, but here they had collapsed into a kind of scree slope over which the blizzards of the past few weeks had formed a thick, hard wind-crust. The boxes which he and Tim Underwood had pushed down the slope had scarcely scratched it.
Tim came out of the Sno-Cat, his frosted beard glittering in the moonlight. He was lugging a crate of gelignite. “This is the last of it,” he said. Will nodded. The two of them dragged the crate to the top of the slope and shoved it over. It slid down with a faint hiss and came to stop near the rest of the gear in the shadows of a pressure ridge.
“All set, then?” Will asked.
“Yup.” Tim clipped himself to a rope secured to the Sno-Cat, and gingerly let himself down the slope. His newly-healed wrist took the strain without a twinge. The gradient was not very steep, but the wind-crust gave little purchase even to crampons; without the rope, he would have slid helplessly down into the pressure ridge.
Will followed a few moments later. Without talking much, the men dragged their gear through the pressure ice and out on to the snow. For an hour they hand-drilled holes in the ice beneath and then set off seismic shots. Each charge went off with a thump that echoed from the cliffs of Laputa and sent a silver-blue geyser of ice crystals and smoke into the still air.
When they were finished, they returned to the foot of the slope and Tim began to climb back. Will turned to look across the moonlit Shelf. He thought he had never seen anything as strange or as beautiful in his life.
Seminars were held less often now, and this one attracted only about a dozen people. Even so, Tim looked nervous as he stood up with a couple of sheets of paper in his hand, and Will’s encouraging smile seemed to fluster him all the more.
“Uh, we got some good data from the shots yesterday,” Tim began. “First, from the ones we did on Laputa, it looks like the island is pretty well intact, with no major stress areas or fractures. Our average thickness is about four hundred and fifty metres, so the Ridge must have taken off a bit more than we thought.
“The Shelf ice seems to be consolidating very fast. It’s about eighty metres thick, at least around Laputa. In a few places it’s as thin as—” he glanced nervously at his notes — “as, uh, forty metres, and as thick as a hundred and five. There’s a lot of new snow on it. We had to drill through damn close to ten metres before we hit proper ice.”
“Don’t tell us about new snow,” George Hills said. “We been whisking it off the roofs for weeks.”
“And we’ll be doing it some more,” Colin Smith added. “Looks like another storm coming in tomorrow.”
There was an outburst of groans and swearing. To the fascination of Colin and Sean, and the dismay of everyone else, more snow had fallen in the past month than this latitude of the Antarctic normally got in five years. The reason, Colin believed, was that warm, moist air was being drawn towards the Pole too rapidly to permit it to drop its precipitation out over the ocean. The Antarctic desert was turning into the equivalent of a rain-coast.
Steve raised his hand. “Tim, how solid is the new Shelf? Any big gaps or soft spots?”
“Not that I could find.” He turned to the map of Antarctica on the wall of the lounge and pointed to the Ross Sea. “Uh, we’re right about here, just where the old Shelf ended. The new Shelf must run way beyond, maybe all the way to 55° — the Antarctic Convergence. Will says the temperature gradient rises so fast north of there that you couldn’t keep the ice welded together. At least not until you had a few years to cool the ocean down. I don’t know if I’ll go along with him, but he says New Zealand could start seeing winter pack ice around South Island by 1995.”
“Serve the bloody Kiwis right,” Gordon Ellerslee laughed, but no one joined him.
Carter cleared his throat. “Well, we’ll see. Anything else to add, Tim? No? All right, thanks very much. Anything else, anybody?”
“One small thing,” Max Wilhelm said. “We’re almost due Grid West of Ross Island now, and whenever the wind blows from there we still get a great deal of volcanic ash. It looks as if Erebus is still at it.”
“Mm-hm. And on that cheery note, I think we’ll adjourn.”
“Monopoly? Monopoly?” Kyril asked; Yevgeni nodded eagerly.
“Okay,” said Gordon. “I’ll take you Communist bastards on and teach you how it’s really played.”
“You’ll be sorree,” Howie warned. The Russians had taken to the game at once; they consistently beat everyone else before turning on each other with a merry ruthlessness that vindicated Marx and Lenin. Tonight, as Cordon soon learned, was no exception.
Al Neal went down Tunnel D to the hangar next morning. The blizzard had arrived during the night and was gusting up to two hundred and twenty k.p.h.; wind moaned in the ventilators, and the air was full of fine snow that got in somehow and hung in the huts and tunnels like grain dust.
Gordon and Howie were playing cribbage in the machine shop while Tom Vernon methodically took apart one of the Sno-Cats’ engines. They greeted Al with casual nods.
“What’s new, Papa Al?” Howie asked.
“Nothing much, just wandered up to look over the plane.”
“Goin’ somewhere?” Gordon grunted.
“Nope. See you guys.” Al went into the hangar and made his way to the Otter. Laputa had drifted almost 90° counter-clockwise since passing over the Ridge, and the hangar doors now faced Grid East; they were solidly drifted over, but each gust still struck them like a battering ram. Al wrinkled his nose at the stink of diesel fuel and JP4. The ice floor of the hangar was soaked with it, the result of dozens of minor spills over the months, and it worried him.
He stepped up the ladder into the cabin and went forward to the flight compartment. Settling into his seat, he turned on the instrument panels. Everything read normal. All the fuel tanks were full, and the engines were being kept warm on current drawn from the reactor. The Otter could fly on a moment’s notice.