“Ah, we’re over the Shelf, bearing Grid 125°, about three hundred kilometres Grid South-West of Cape Crozier. What is your location? Over.”
“We figure we’re about a hundred and fifty kilometres Grid South of Ross Island. Where are you going at this time of night? Over.”
“Just stepping out for a beer,” Al laughed. “We’re en route to Cape Hallett, from New Shackleton Station. Over.”
“I’ll be damned. You guys got through okay? Over.”
“Yup. But we’re trying to get help. Hey, I thought Outer Willy was abandoned before Erebus blew up. Over.”
“It was. We got here too late to be picked up, and we’ve been sitting here ever since. There are three of us. Over.”
Al had already switched on the radio direction finder. “Any problems? Over.”
“Wow. Well, no, but we’d kind of like to be rescued. Over.”
The Otter banked left on to a new course.
“If we can land,” Al said, “we’ll take you along to Hallett. And if there’s enough gas there, we’ll go on to the Balleny Islands; if there isn’t, we’ll play poker all winter until somebody shows up. Is that all right? Over.”
There was a pause. “Sounds interesting. Listen, you must be pretty close. We’ll start sending up flares, once a minute. Let us know if you can’t find us. Over.”
“I’ll find you. Just keep sending. Where were you guys when everything happened? Over.”
“Up on Nimrod Glacier, doing geology. We had some trouble with our helicopter — by the time I got it fixed, everybody must’ve been evacuated. We had a few bad days until we got past Erebus. It’s been okay since then. What happened with you fellas? Over.”
Al described events at Shacktown, speaking almost absent-mindedly. He had turned down the instrument lights again and was scanning the blue darkness ahead. A thin belt of cloud passed under them. Penny began to think they must have overflown the airstrip; she wondered what would happen if the Otter ran low on fuel before they could reach the geologists. Presumably Al would then fly them all back to Shacktown and try again for Hallett. If the weather held. In a way she would be relieved to be back in the familiar stinks and drafts and noises; but it would be horrible as well — especially to have to deal with Steve again.
“—barely got over the Ross Sea Ridge in one piece,” Al was saying. “Woops, there you are!” A brilliant red star burned in the darkness, a little to the right of their course, and Al changed direction. “Send up another one, will you? Over.”
“Will do. Earl, he wants another flare. Okay. Uh, we don’t have a real landing field now, but we can burn a couple drums of gas just to show where the buildings are. Over.”
“Thanks. Can you give me wind speed and direction? Over.”
“No wind to speak of. Uh, maybe you better make a couple of passes, just to see what it’s like. Last time we looked, there were some sastrugi Grid North of the buildings. And there’s a big old Herc half-buried out at the end of the ski-way.”
“A Herc — right, I remember it.” The next flare went up, visibly closer. “Keep those flares coming; we’re almost there.”
The surface below them was strangely mottled now, like the marbled endpapers of an old book. Penny realised that the dark patches and streaks must be a layer of volcanic ash, buried in some places and exposed in others.
“Can we land on that stuff?” she asked. “On skis?”
“Well, I’d rather not try it.”
The third flare was very close, and they could see a rosy blur of reflected light under it. A few moments later the Otter dropped low over the huts of Outer Willy. There was little to see: three burning fuel drums and rows of snow-buried buildings. Al circled, searching for a smooth, safe place to put down. The best he could find was over a kilometre Grid East of the buildings. After one trial approach just a few metres above the surface, he landed the Otter without incident.
The air seemed much colder than it had at Shacktown, and it made their noses run. Won’t I look lovely? Penny thought, annoyed to be meeting strangers with a lump of frozen mucus on her lip. They walked quickly across the wind-crust towards the burning drums, crossing some patches of ash that grated under their mukluks. Off to the left the horizon was reddening a little.
A white spark appeared not far ahead and came flickering towards them. A minute or two later they heard someone call, “Hello!”
“Is that the welcoming committee?” Al called back.
“Sure is.” A bulky shape in a blue-and-orange anorak became visible. The man extended a hand. “Hi — I’m Mike Birnbaum. Glad to meet you.”
“Al Neal. And this is Penny Constable.”
The flashlight glared in Penny’s face. “Well, hello. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a dump like this?”
“I keep asking myself the same question,” Penny laughed. She took Mike’s hand and felt oddly shy.
Mike must have felt the same way, because he said little as they went on to the buildings. He led them past the half-buried orange helicopters and into a Jamesway hut, a big semi-cylinder of canvas. The hammering of a diesel generator was loud until they got inside.
The Jamesway had been Outer Willy’s mess hall and kitchen; most of the tables had been shoved to the far end of the room to make way for cases of canned food brought from elsewhere. Oil stoves burned at both ends of the hut, making it almost too warm; fluorescent lamps threw a bluish light. The ripe smells of oil, food and sweat reminded Penny of Shacktown.
Two men in dirty trousers and plaid shirts stood by the cold porch. There was a round of handshaking and backslapping, and one of them gave Penny a hairy, unselfconscious kiss.
Mike Birnbaum, Penny now saw, was a short, slender man in his early twenties, with a downy black beard and dark eyes. Bob Price, the man Al had spoken with on the radio, was tall, gaunt and very blond, with a silver ring in one ear; it gave him a piratical look, but Penny wondered how he kept from freezing his earlobe. Earl Bollinger, the third man, was a round-faced black, even bigger than Howie O’Rourke, with a meticulously trimmed goatee.
“It’s really great to see you,” Bob said. “Would you like some lunch?”
They all sat down at a table near a big oil-burning range; Bob served them corned-beef sandwiches on fresh rye bread, fried potatoes, bean salad and canned peaches.
Over coffee the geologists described how they had been caught by the quake; they’d had to clear a frozen fuel pump before they could get back to McMurdo Sound. They had finally reached Outer Willy a couple of days after Al and Max had tried to land there; seeing Erebus in continued eruption, the geologists had stayed put. As their ice island had moved past Hut Point Peninsula, ash falls had nearly buried the buildings, but a change in wind direction had saved them from the worst of it. Outer Willy had moved rapidly down McMurdo Sound, and hadn’t frozen into the new Shelf until June.
The geologists weren’t surprised to learn that the earth’s magnetic field had reversed, since their own compasses had behaved crazily since last summer. They listened with professional interest to Al’s description of the effects and extent of the surge.
“Sounds like you folks have had a lot of fun,” Bob remarked. “Least you’ve been getting out and seeing things. We’ve been sitting on our butts for six months, wondering what the hell’s been going on.”
“Well, here’s your big chance to see the world,” Al said. “We’re planning to check out Cape Hallett. If there’s gas, we’ll go on to the Balleny Islands and maybe even New Zealand. If not, we’ll hole up at Hallett till spring.”
Bob lit a cigarette and looked thoughtfully across the hut; then he looked at Penny. She recognised something in that look. He was a calculator, like Steve, a weigher of costs and benefits.