“But we really can fly it to New Zealand?”
“We’d better hope so,” said Ivan. “There’s not enough food here to keep us all until spring.”
“And when could we go?”
“Ask Al.” Ivan beckoned to Al Neal, who had been talking animatedly to Hugh and Carter. Al came over; he looked thinner, and his beard and ponytail were longer. When he smiled, Katerina saw that his front teeth were only blackened stumps.
“Your teeth—” she said.
“Believe it or not, they froze and cracked about three weeks ago. Darn annoying, but I’ll get ’em fixed in New Zealand. How are you, Kate?”
“Very well, thank you. How good it is to see you! And the plane is ready to fly.”
“Almost. When the wind dies down, Kyril and I will run some last-minute checks while everybody else digs the plane out. By the time that’s done, we ought to be ready.”
Katerina’s examination of Jeanne was slow and thorough. When it was over she called Will into the cubicle. Jeanne and Katerina sat on the bunk; Will squatted against the raw plywood wall.
“It looks good, but not as good as I would like. You are young and strong, but this is no place to be pregnant. You are underweight for seven months, and the baby has already dropped.”
“Not sorry about that. At least I can breathe again.”
“Yes, but you may very likely deliver prematurely. Anywhere else, it could be prevented or delayed. But here I can do nothing except to keep you rested until we fly.”
“That’s no problem either,” Jeanne grinned. “I’m too bloody pooped to do anything.” She winked at Will. “You’re sleeping in the top bunk, mate.”
“Judging from the looks of you, there’d be no room in the bottom one,” Will said. “Don’t worry, Katerina — I’ll see she gets plenty of rest.”
When Katerina left, Will moved shyly over to sit beside her. It was good to put his arms around her again, to smell her hair.
“God, I was so worried about you,” she murmured. “We all thought you’d be here in no time, but then it was two weeks, and I was sure you were all dead.”
“And I was sure you’d crashed the Otter.” He lightly touched her belly, feeling the baby’s kicks and tapping gently back at it.
“I feel like a bloody cow.”
“More like a cheetah with a good breakfast.”
Jeanne began to cry. “Will, I’m scared again”
Late in the evening of August 3 Hugh and Carter sat down with Al and Bob Price in the mess hall. The huts were quiet at last. All four men looked exhausted. Al had cracked lips, with scabs that kept breaking, and his hands were mottled pink and grey. Bob was in better shape, but his clothes hung loosely on him. Hugh’s red moustache was turning off-white, and his eyes seemed a little unfocused; Carter, now that the traverse was over, felt dizzy with fatigue and relief.
“The main problem is fuel,” Al said. “We gotta run the generator around the clock — not just for this place, but for the Herc. With all the available heaters going, we can at least keep the hydraulics from seizing up. And we have to keep the plane’s batteries charged. But we only have a little more fuel available. Unless we want to freeze, we gotta get out of here by the 7th or 8th.”
“Can we do that?” asked Hugh.
Al nodded. “If the weather cooperates. Kyril and I are gonna need another day, maybe, to check everything out. If the wind drops, it’ll take a day to dig out—”
“Yes?” said Hugh.
“But I’m worried about the skis. They’re really frozen in, and it’ll be some job to get ’em loose.”
“We’ll manage,” Carter said. “So it’s just the weather.”
Al turned and smiled blackly at him. “Yeah, just the weather.” He guffawed, and the others joined in.
“What if something goes wrong?” Carter asked. “Suppose the weather stays bad for a week or more?”
“We start running out of everything,” Bob said. “Food, fuel, water — there’s just not enough to keep thirty-three people going for very long. Four or five could winter over all right, but not everybody.”
“Well, if we are stuck,” Hugh said, “we’ll eat the pessimists first.”
All the next day the wind blew. Al and Kyril worked inside the Hercules, sometimes drafting two or three others to help for a while. When Penny went outside for a few minutes at noon, she saw the plane glowing crimson under a flaming sky. Lights burned in the big flight-deck windows. She was about to get in out of the wind and drift when one of the Here’s starboard engines boomed into life. The propeller blades merged into a shimmering red disc, and the noise drowned out the wind. Then another engine caught, and the third and fourth. The plane’s nose turned golden as a limb of the sun rose — by diffraction — above the Grid South horizon. A moment later it was gone again, but the big engines kept up their thunder.
Penny went back inside and hugged the first person she saw; it was Howie. “We’re really going to go,” she shouted. “We’re — you should see what it looks like out there, with those engines going and the lights on and—”
“Aw, calm down,” Gordon said. “Think you’d never seen an aeroplane before.”
That night yet another blizzard hit. It was one of the worst of the winter, with winds that never dropped below 100 k.p.h. A marathon Monopoly tournament started after supper, and went on all night and all the next day. Al, Kyril and their helpers played as energetically as everyone else. The air in the mess hall was thick with smoke and profanity, but no one seemed perturbed by the weather.
Around suppertime on August 5 the Jamesways shook briefly: another quake. It caused little comment and no concern. It was as if everyone had grown jaded with danger; people preferred to gossip, insult each other, and plan their homecomings.
An hour later Bruce Robinson yelled “Shuddup!” He had been sitting at the radio, headphones on and a growing stack of empty beer cans under his chair. Conversation stopped dead. For a minute or two Bruce scrawled rapidly, then took off his headphones and stood up.
“Got something from Australia,” he told the people in the mess hall. “They have an unconfirmed report that President Wood has resigned and handed over executive power to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A military government has been formed in Britain. And a typhoon has wrecked Darwin. Which never was much to begin with,” he added.
“Know what I’m gonna do when we get home?” Gordon asked. “Going to move into a hotel in Calgary and drink myself stupid until autumn. Then I’m gonna go get a job in someplace like Saudi Arabia. Between the booze and the heat, I figure I’ll thaw out by this time next year.”
“If you melt the permafrost between your ears, you’ll have mud for brains,” Ben remarked. Gordon ignored him — which, for Gordon, was equivalent to retreat.
“For some of us,” Max Wilhelm said, “it’ll be easy to decide what to do. We’ll just get back to New Zealand, go home and go back to work.
There was an uncomfortable silence. After all the months of speculation, they realised they would soon be in a world very different from the one they had left last year. At length, Yevgeni said: “All scientists, all technicians, they will need. Every place will be good place for us.”
“Probably for all the wrong reasons,” Colin added.
Early the next morning Will tapped lightly on the Varenkovs’ door. Ivan opened it. “Jeanne says she’s lost the mucous plug.”
“What is — ? Oh.” He turned and called to his wife in Russian. Katerina appeared in the doorway, buttoning her shirt.
“When?”
“Sometime during the night.”