“But there’s nowhere to go,” Al said out loud.
Laputa continued to move Grid South at about two kilometres per day; as the surge ice moved across the Ridge, it pushed the newly coalescing Shelf ahead of it. Temperatures rose and fell and rose again as storms swept in from the distant Pacific and collided with katabatic winds bearing dry, bitterly cold air from the polar plateau. Snow fell and consolidated into a hard crust; whisking parties used axes as much as shovels. The dome was repeatedly drifted over, frustrating Carter’s efforts to film the very faint auroras that sometimes appeared in clear weather. Gerry Roche’s instruments began to detect the fragile beginnings of a new ionosphere, one which vanished again and again under the onslaught of solar flares, but which persistently renewed itself.
“It’s like ice on a pond in the winter,” he said to Penny one day. “You keep throwing rocks in, the water’s too stirred up to freeze. It calms down a little and bingo, ice.”
“And we’re the minnows down at the bottom.”
“Yeah.” Gerry smilingly lit the stump of a cigar.
“Oh, please don’t!” she snapped. She was intensely conscious of the way things smelled these days: the latrines, the mess hall, the men who troubled less and less to keep themselves clean.
“You don’t like it, you can leave,” Gerry retorted. “It’s not like I had a whole lot of pleasures to choose from.”
She stalked out of the geophysics lab. Everybody and everything seemed to grate on her. The kitchen was a stinky, noisy pit where she slaved for a surly, self-pitying Terry and a slatternly Suzy. The mess hall furniture felt so greasy that one night, she had washed it all, only to find it just as bad a day later. The lounge was a claustrophobic box cluttered with shabby armchairs and couches, always filled by shabby men. The Kiwis’ and Australians’ nasal whines made her grit her teeth; the Brits’ accents weren’t much better; the Canadians’ slow drones made them sound like retarded Americans. She was ashamed of herself for it, but the Russians’ mutilated hands nauseated her.
Even the greenhouse was no solace. The fluorescent lights made her head ache, and the plants looked like drab, stunted parodies of what they might have been in a proper climate. Penny sat on the same bench where she had scrawled her impressions of the icequake all those long months ago, and glowered at the floor where she and Steve had taken part in the least graceful copulation in polar history.
On June 20 everyone began preparing for the Midwinter Day party; this meant extra work for the kitchen people, and Penny was exhausted when she got to her cubicle a little before midnight. Steve was asleep already, but he woke when she turned on the light and began noisily undressing.
“Hi, love. Had a long day, eh?”
“Yes, I had a long day, eh. I washed a lot of dishes, eh. I fed a lot of overgrown boys, eh. I’m goddam tired, eh. Why don’t you turn over, eh, and go back to sleep, eh?”
“With pleasure.”
Good; she’d annoyed him. “Don’t bother to be sympathetic — just go back to sleep and I can listen to you snoring all night.” She threw her clothes in a corner. “Keep yourself warm tonight; I’m sleeping in the top bunk for a change. At least I won’t have you thrashing all over me in your sleep, and groping me in the morning, if there ever is a morning in this goddamn shithole.” She turned off the light and hoisted herself awkwardly into the bunk. The sleeping bag there was cold, and out of habit she’d taken off her long underwear, but she would be damned before she’d get out and put it back on again.
“I can’t stand much more of this, Steve. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Thank you, Gordon Ellerslee.”
“Drop dead. Gordon’s not the only one who thinks we ought to do something, do something, do something! And you just want to sit and gloat over your goddamn seismographs and think about how famous you’re gonna be.”
There was a long silence. Then she felt the bunk sway as he got up. The light went on, blinding her. Steve put on his pants and shirt.
“What are you doing now?” she demanded.
“Moving out, Pen.” He pulled on his boots and began lacing them; she noticed how cracked and calloused his hands had become from weeks of work in the seismograph tunnel. “I’m sorry. This was all a bad mistake, I guess. I’m sorry.” He rolled up his sleeping bag and put it under his arm.
“Not as sorry as I am.” Penny turned over and glared at the raw plywood wall until he turned out the light, opened the door and quietly left.
The party was not a success. The Dolans’ special dinner was so good and so plentiful that it made some people resentfully aware of how little they got the rest of the time. Beer and wine were abundant, and two or three of the men were drunk before dessert. When the party got under way in the lounge, Roger Wykstra — with five cans of Swan Beer already in him — knocked over the big bowl of rum punch and nearly got into a fight with Terry about cleaning it up. Various bawdy toasts were drunk to Shacktown’s couples, embarrassing and annoying the women. Penny and Steve were absent, prompting cheerfully obscene comments from some, and alarmed gossip from those who already knew that they’d split up.
By 2200 half the station had turned in and the other half were quarrelling drunkenly. Carter ended the festivities half an hour later by enlisting Howie as bouncer and dousing the lights and heat.
Katerina and Ivan shared the last of the Bulgarian brandy she had brought with her to Shacktown last November. They lay comfortably bundled up in bed, listening to the Dolans’ arguing next door.
“Like student days in Odessa,” Ivan sighed. “Remember that Polish couple? Spitting at each other, throwing plates, and making love like cats all night.”
“Trust an old tomcat like you to remember that. You used to be one of her greatest admirers.”
“Another long memory!” He put down his empty glass and nestled under her arm, his eyes closed. His beard tickled her breasts. “This too I remembered at Vostok. I would lie in my bag, listening to the ice breaking all around us, feeling everything shake, and I would dream of you. Of the little scar on your breast, and the freckles on your shoulders, and that mole on your cheek. And now this seems like the dream.”
She kissed the top of his head. “To me, you are a wonderful dream also.” Terry’s voice, thick and bitter, rose over Suzy’s sobbing. “Ach, these people — they are much too real. Like spoiled babies someone has left us to look after.”
Ivan grunted. “I do not understand them. As individuals they are fine, wonderful people. Al and Will are very brave men — Hugh and Carter, good leaders — all are good people. But, my God, the bickering, the resentment! Never would they be picked for a Soviet station. Yet they survive, while our own people—”
“Hush, hush.” He had been having nightmares about the Vostochni who had left for Mirny before the icequake. “They are good people. But with nothing to do, they fall apart. If Hugh told them to build a ladder to the moon, they would be happy again.”
Ivan was silent for a moment. “No wonder these English swarmed all around the world. Without something to conquer, they go mad. If it goes on like this, when they find us in the spring there will be four Russians and nobody else.”
“No doubt a Soviet plot.”
His laughter was so loud and delighted that it brought an unexpected end to the squabbling next door.
Two nights after the party, Penny came back to her cubicle to find Ben Whitcumb sitting at her desk.