Penny turned to see Steve using her Nikon to take pictures; his face reflected nothing. The helicopter flew on. Will came back again, more elated than ever, and scribbled a frantic exchange with Steve:
Fracture’s very clean — shelf more homogen than I thought.
Think fissures will stay open? Steve wrote.
No. Surge will push shelf out to open sea, all packed together.
How fast?
Will shrugged.
Has Al raised Shacktown?
Will shrugged again, then left to check with Al. He came back, shaking his head.
Penny had a sudden hideous vision of a fissure opening up right under the station: the sudden flash of daylight in the tunnels as the roof caved in, the boom of the breaking ice, the huts falling far down into the blue darkness — Quit it! Stupid neurotic chicken-shit moron fantasies. They’ll be all right. They’ll be all right. Worried sick about us. What a time we’ll have, sitting in the mess hall comparing notes.
Notes. This had been going on for almost an hour and she hadn’t even made any notes. She found some more paper and tried to organise her thoughts; after five minutes she gave up and slumped wearily back into her seat. Steve gently took the paper from her lap and began scrawling figures. But after every calculation he drew a line through what he had just written.
He’s in the same predicament. Trying to make sense out of this with black marks on a piece of paper.
She leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder. Her face was beginning to hurt badly. Steve absently patted her hand.
A crosswind gusted off the mountains and made the helicopter sway. More gusts followed. The helicopter rose and fell; the overcast had spread clear across the sky. Dry snow began to hiss against the window, driven from the glaciers and avalanches by katabatic winds blowing down from the plateau. Penny saw long snakes of snow crawl across the Shelf; they thickened rapidly until the surface vanished and they were flying through a roaring sunlit fog, a whiteout.
Al lifted the helicopter above the blizzard, back into pale sunlight. The blizzard swept under them, its upper layer almost as sharply defined as the Shelf had been until a few minutes ago. Like a layer of cloud, it stretched in all directions, from the mountains to the Grid South horizon.
The world had vanished. There seemed nothing to do, nothing to say or write that was not grotesquely absurd and futile. They would not get back to Shacktown. They would not be rescued by the Americans at McMurdo. This place of empty blue and formless white was going to kill them in a little while, and they would leave no trace. Penny thought of Scott, Wilson and Bowers, dying on the Shelf side by side, with love and sorrow for one another and the hope that friends would someday find their bodies, that their letters and diaries would link them at last with the living and make some sense of their deaths. We won’t have even that much. Just scrawls on a couple of scraps of paper, and some reels of magnetic tape lost in the snow. And no one will ever find us. Ever.
Time passed. Jeanne went into the cockpit and returned almost at once. She mimed a radio conversation.
Shacktown? Steve wrote. Jeanne grinned and nodded.
20 km, she wrote.
A little later they began their descent. The wind and snow enveloped them again. If Al lost Shacktown’s TACAN signal, they would be in trouble at once. The light dimmed from a blinding white to a deep, featureless grey. Penny removed her earmuffs and found she could stand the noise; the helicopter’s engines sounded almost normal, but there was still a low background rumble interrupted by sharp cracks that must be caused by the Shell’s continuing breakup.
A few more minutes. Then we’ll be home, safe and sound after all, piling out into the hangar, groaning and laughing, hugging people, running down through the tunnels to the mess hall, finding out what happened to them, oh shit —
The helicopter had been living at an altitude of only five metres; Al had thought it was much more. Below them a fissure had opened and then closed again, creating a pressure ridge about five metres high and invisible in the whiteout. The Huey raked its belly on the ridge, shearing away its landing gear and snapping its fuel line and some of its control cables. It lost power instantly, plunged to the surface beyond the ridge and slid over a hundred metres before coming to rest.
Snow rattled against the helicopter’s crumpled sides, and the wind was suddenly very loud. Somewhere far away the Shelf broke again with a long, reverberating boom.
Chapter 3 – The Shelf
By 1000 hours the Otter was fuelled, warmed up and ready to fly as soon as Al got back. Howie O’Rourke took out the big D8 bulldozer to clear the ski-way; the Otter wouldn’t need it, but it would help a Hercules. Ploughing was a slow, noisy, cold and boring job, and when he turned the D8 around at the end of the ski-way, Howie swore furiously. The dome and Shacktown’s other surface structures were almost invisible in a thickening ice fog. Looking up, he saw the sky growing overcast. It would be a piss-off if they got another blow — not just because the evacuation would have to be postponed, but because he would have frozen his butt for nothing and would have to freeze it again when the weather cleared up.
In the reactor control room Herm Northrop was going methodically through shutdown. It was a slow, cautious process, and the station would not have to switch over to its emergency generator for at least four more hours. By then Al should be at McMurdo. Assume at least three more hours for a Hercules to be readied and flown in. By 1800 hours the core would have to be stored in its transport module, a lead-and-steel cylinder over two metres long. The module would then have to be wheeled through the tunnels and out to the plane.
Herm was not afraid of flying. But he hated the thought of a plane going down with a core aboard.
“By God, I’m not sorry,” Terry Dolan announced to his wife. “This time next week, we’ll be lyin’ on the beach in Sydney, thinkin’ how to spend our money.” He was making soup in two huge pots, whilst his last batch of bread baked in the oven. It would be enough to keep people fed until they pulled out.
“It’s all going in the savings,” Suzy said firmly. “Every penny. And you might loaf on the beach, but I’ll be looking for a job soon as we get home.”
“Suit yourself, love. Just pray the unemployment’s all gone.”
“People got to eat, don’t they? Always work for cooks.”
Katerina Varenkova had been too efficient. With all her belongings packed by 0900 she had had nothing to do since then but smoke, and the air in the infirmary was now almost opaque. If the West was so convinced that cigarettes caused lung cancer, why did it produce such good ones? She would miss them.
Strange to think that she might be seeing Ivan soon — at Vostok, or Mirny, or perhaps back in Leningrad. They might well have evacuated Vostok already, it was the most remote of the Soviet bases, and the coldest place on earth — not a good spot to be in during the worst Antarctic summer on record. Compared to Vostok, this place was a vacation spot. Here there was no need to gasp for air on an ice sheet three kilometres above sea level, doing research with ancient equipment, fighting the cold with unreliable diesel generators and bearskins — bearskins! — hanging in the doorways to fight drafts. Here these pampered babies lived snug and relaxed, complaining because there was no mail and the TV projection screen was scratched. And all for propaganda.