“I will come to see her very soon.”
She quickly examined Jeanne. “Well, it will not be long now. Everything looks all right, but it will be early. Having you been doing your breathing exercises?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I will be back later.”
She went into the next Jamesway and found George Hills. He woke slowly and heavily.
“George, I need you to build for me an incubator.”
“A what?”
Patiently, she sketched her requirements on the plywood walclass="underline" a solid, double-walled box that could hold plenty of insulation. A small heating coil in the base would be plugged in to the huts’ electrical system. “Or into the system of the aeroplane. Can you do this?”
“Oh, I guess. Have to talk to Al. But I think so.”
“Very good. I will need it by noon.”
By breakfast time, everyone knew Jeanne might have her baby very soon. The atmosphere in the mess hall was subdued; the blizzard was still going strong. Hugh held a meeting that morning, as much to give people something to do as to plan the details of the evacuation. After lunch most of the men met in smaller groups to plan loading, snow clearing and the flight itself. A few people irritably did the inevitable chores: refuelling the generator, filling the snow melter, cooking and cleaning up. Penny found herself working with the Dolans again, but now that the flight was so close she didn’t mind. Every time I wash a dish for the rest of my life, I’ll think of the ice.
So the day passed.
Between 0500 and 0600 hours on August 7 the blizzard ended.
A dead calm hung over the Shelf, and the stars glittered in a clear sky. Al Neal stood outside the Jamesways and looked around. The snow was thick and soft, at least on top; a few centimetres down it seemed hard-packed. In the distance the Hercules rose like a long hill, heavily drifted over. The Otter stood not far from it, with only its tail and one wing showing above the snow.
The cold made Al’s teeth hurt badly. He went back inside, where the American geologists were having breakfast with Penny and Suzy.
“It really looks good out there,” Al said. “But I don’t know how long it’ll last. Let’s get everybody up.”
“Only quietly,” Penny urged. “Jeanne didn’t sleep well. Katerina thinks the baby might—” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, Al, we can’t go today. We can’t.”
“Not with a baby due any minute,” Suzy agreed.
Al looked distressed. “Kids, it’s now or never. We could lose this weather by noon, for all we know.”
“You better talk to Katerina,” Penny said. “Then wake up the others.”
He tugged his white beard. “Damn it, you talk to her. I’ve got better things to do.” And he strode angrily into the tunnel to the next hut.
“Wow, is he angry!” Suzy whispered. “I never heard him swear before.”
“Me neither,” Penny said. “Look, I’ll start getting breakfast ready. You go get Katerina.” Then she added: “Gee — the kid might even get born in a proper hospital.”
“You don’t have to sound so disappointed,” Bob said.
By 0645 the mess hall was crowded with men who bolted their hotcakes and sausages and hurried outside. Hugh, Carter and Bob went from table to table, assigning people to different jobs. The temperature was down to -40°C, and it wasn’t until well after 0700 that blowtorches and the flamethrower had warmed the bulldozers’ engines enough to let them be started. After that, the huts shook whenever the D4 or D8 passed nearby.
Katerina ignored the vibration in the floor as she sat beside Jeanne’s bed, watching the sweep hand of her wristwatch.
“Only ten seconds,” she said when Jeanne gasped and nodded. “And the contractions are still twenty minutes apart. It will be several hours, maybe a day, before the delivery.”
“God, I really timed it well, didn’t I…”
“Yes. Suppose it had come while we were still on the traverse. How would these men have done?”
“Ugh. I don’t want to think about it. Katerina, am I going to be all right? Really?”
Katerina’s deep laugh boomed out. “You will be very good.”
Penny and the Dolans hastily prepared food for the journey: sandwiches, soup, cold cuts and big urns of coffee. Around 1030 they lugged it all outside in cardboard boxes. The sky and the snow were the same predawn pink. The bulldozers were working around the sides of the Hercules, clearing away the drifts. As they approached the plane, Penny saw a dozen men digging and chopping at the snow around the nose landing gear. One of them was Steve; he paused as Penny and the Dolans came by.
“How’s it going?” Penny asked.
“Not fast. The snow and ash are mixed together like cement.” He grinned at her and went back to work.
As she followed the Dolans in through the crew door on the port side, Penny could see the problem: the plane was low-slung, and the whole underside of the fuselage was buried in compacted drift. Tom Vernon, driving the D4, was clearing most of it away, but he couldn’t get too close or the fuselage might be damaged; it had to be cleared away with shovels, axes and even hands.
The interior of the Hercules was almost as cold as the outside. They stowed their boxes in the galley, just ahead of the crew door, and Penny took a quick look around. With the lights on and the snow cleared away, the plane looked very different from the last time she’d seen it. The flight deck was littered with tools, tattered maintenance manuals and the remains of meals; the cargo compartment looked even more cavernous than before, now that it was cleared and lit. The aft cargo door was open, and men were hauling in boxes and duffel bags while others lashed them down in the broad aisle between the rows of seats. Near the cargo door Katerina supervised Ben and Simon as they rigged a stretcher along the wall. The white glare of the overhead lights, reflecting on the frosted walls, reminded Penny of Shacktown, and she felt a pang of homesickness.
“Come on, Pen,” Terry said. “Let’s get the hell back inside and warm up. These buggers’ll want elevenses pretty soon.”
When everyone was in the mess hall for coffee and sandwiches, Hugh stood up.
“We are about ready to go,” he said quietly. “Al tells me the aircraft is in good shape for the flight. But I want everyone to understand that this will be a very dangerous trip. It’s almost five thousand kilometres to Christchurch. We have no idea what the weather will be like en route. If anything goes wrong, and we go into the sea, we will have virtually no chance of survival. And there is always the chance of something going wrong, even in the best of circumstances. If anyone chooses to stay here, they should be fairly comfortable until spring. There will surely be flights to the ice then, and anyone here could count on being picked up.”
No one spoke.
“Very good,” Hugh went on. “Then good luck to us all. We’ll be in Christchurch by suppertime, I trust.”
While most of the people went aboard, a small crew resumed cutting the Hercules’ landing gear free of the snow. Once a ski was cleared, the crew forced tar paper under it to keep it from refreezing to the snow. Ben Whitcumb then went along the sides of the plane with the flamethrower, melting the last few lumps of ice from the fuselage. By noon the job was done. Will and Howie carried Jeanne out on a stretcher and made her as comfortable as possible.
“I feel such a twit, with everyone else doing something,” she said to Will.
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “Still, it’s a pity the baby couldn’t have been born in Antarctica.”
“Oh, Will, I’m sorry.” She started to cry.
“Och, there, there,” he consoled her. “I’m only joking, love.” He patted her hand and she calmed herself. Then he strapped himself into the seat at the foot of her stretcher; Katerina was sitting by her head.