Penny could not get up. It was easier to lie face down on the rock, to wait for the rock to stop shaking and the thunder to die away. A long time seemed to pass. Then someone took her arm and pulled her to her feet.
“I’m blind!” she screamed. Hands guided her deeper into the freezing wind, lifted her onto a floor that swayed and trembled more than the ground itself.
Someone must have shut the helicopter’s door, because the wind stopped and the thunder lessened slightly. Penny let herself be lowered into a seat. She felt someone push back her hood and gently remove her sunglasses. Warm hands were cupped beneath her eyes; warm breath fell on her eyelids. They stung, then swam with tears. Steve’s face appeared above her and slowly came into focus.
He put his lips next to her ear, and his voice came from far away: “Your eyelids froze.” She nodded. He touched her cheekbones. “Frostbite. Don’t worry.” She pulled off her mitts and held her hands to her face. Steve sat back beside her, and the helicopter lifted abruptly.
Tears poured down her face and over her fingers; she found herself shuddering uncontrollably. She was dimly aware of Jeanne and Tim in the seat opposite her, and supposed Will must be up in the cockpit with Al. The endless roar diminished as they climbed, but was still too loud to permit speech.
When her eyes stopped watering, Penny put her sunglasses back on and looked out the window. Far below, the Beardmore was covered with a dazzling white haze that glinted prismatically here and there. On the horizon the mountains had lost their sharp edges; mists and clouds were forming around them. Beyond them, over the polar plateau, a high overcast was growing. The helicopter turned and she glimpsed clear skies over the Shelf.
The intercom system wasn’t working. Penny found a pencil and paper in her many-pocketed trousers, scribbled a note and gave it to Steve: Is this the surge?
He nodded. Quake was bad, he wrote beneath her question. 7.5 at least.
Why the noise?
Glacier sole full of stones — scraping over bedrock.
She looked out the window again, towards the unseen ice sheet that fed the Beardmore, the Shackleton and hundreds of other glaciers. — Up there the ice is over two kilometres thick, she thought. What could stop it once it began to move?
Will came in from the cockpit. Something about him seemed odd even to Penny’s dulled perceptions. He leaned close to her, inspecting her frostbitten cheeks and nose. Smiling a little, he leaned forward and kissed her. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him back. — The crazy bastard’s delighted. He’s positively delighted!
Will turned to Steve and gripped his shoulders in an awkward hug, then shook Tim’s hand and then kissed Jeanne. She had been sitting curled up, leaning against Tim with her eyes shut and her hands over her ears. When Will kissed her, she reached out as Penny had, embraced him and began to cry.
He held her for a long minute; the sun, shining through the window behind him, made a halo of his curly red hair. — A ministering angel, Penny thought, but in the same moment Will detached himself, gave Jeanne a business-like pat on the shoulder, and left her to go rummaging in a chest at the rear of the passenger compartment. He got out some acoustic earmuffs and handed them to the others. Penny put hers on, and with the sudden drop in the noise level she realised her body was as clenched as a fist. She took a deep breath and made herself relax.
Seeing the scrawls on Penny’s paper, Will took her pencil and wrote quickly: I want to get down near the ice.
Steve mouthed: Why?
Check the speed of the surge.
What about noise? Steve wrote.
Earmuffs should help. Won‘t be long. OK?
Steve nodded reluctantly.
Penny looked at the terse questions and answers they had written. Is that all we have to say about this?
Will went back into the cockpit, and almost at once the helicopter began to descend. As they approached the glacier surface, the noise grew loud enough to make them nauseous. They were near the Grid West edge of the Beardmore, but the glacier was invisible under the ice haze. Then they were low enough for the downdraft of the rotors to blow much of the haze away in the area directly beneath them; it was only a couple of metres deep. The helicopter hovered, and they could see the chaotic surface of the ice moving steadily towards the Shelf.
It was like nothing Penny had ever seen before. Perhaps a planetoid, rotating its shattered surface under an orbiting spacecraft, might present a similar image. Blue-grey blocks slid into view out of the haze, sank, rose and fell apart. Splinters of ice speared upward and toppled, to be replaced by crevasses that crashed open and shut and open again. For a moment the helicopter’s downdraft combined with the wind to wrap everything in swirling glitter; then the air cleared again as an ice thrust heaved up almost close enough to touch.
Steve timed a particular ten-metre lump as it slid by beneath them; then, as the helicopter rose again, he scribbled a calculation or two. Will returned from the cockpit.
About 3 k.p.h.? Will wrote.
Steve nodded. Faster in the centre than here.
5-8 k.p.h. in centre?
Not yet. Soon — maybe faster when surge really gets going.
Penny grabbed the penciclass="underline" Half ice sheet will go in 1 week at that speed. Hollin had calculated that in his paper on Wilson’s surge theory.
Will and Steve looked at each other and then showed the paper to Tim. Tim wrote: Maybe. Depends how many glaciers involved.
The helicopter swept over the flank of Mount Kyffin; its mantle of snow-and ice had slid away, leaving bare brown rock at its peak and avalanche scars down its sides. When Penny turned to look at Mount Kaplan, it too seemed barer than it had been. They flew out across the mountains, over a small glacier that was moving in a jumble of broken ice. The dull roar of the surge was broken every few seconds by a distant screaming sound as ice and rock shattered each other. When she could remember to, Penny took a few photos, but the view from the window had an almost hypnotic quality that kept her staring open-mouthed.
Then they were over the Shelf, and the Shelf had cracked.
These were no mere crevasses. For some kilometres out from the coast, the Shelf was grounded on the floor of the Ross Sea, but even the enormous weight and anchoring of seven hundred metres of ice could not withstand the surge. Some of the fissures were already over a hundred metres wide, and glowed blue in their depths. A long network of cracks ran roughly parallel to the coast; others ran Grid South until they vanished in the glare of the sun. The thunder of the surge lessened. From the Shelf came occasional creaking and detonations, like a great wooden ship caught in a storm.
The helicopter circled one of the north-south fissures. Blowing snow obscured the gap until the wind abruptly changed, and they looked down into a blue-black abyss. Penny saw glints of light far down in the darkness, a suggestion of something moving, and realised after a moment what it was: the waters of the Ross Sea, open to the sky for the first time in a hundred thousand years. The glimpse was brief: great slabs of ice, fifty metres thick and a hundred long, calved off the sides of the fissure and crashed down into the darkness.