“She isn’t that bad-looking,” Scott observed.
“It’s not that. You can’t get too picky here, and not everyone gets a nice-looking girl like Zoe. But Heather, she’s a chatterbox. An hour in her company, and you can’t stop your ears from buzzing. So… tell me — you went out in the chopper with Lindholm today?”
Scott nodded, and hurriedly took another bite of chicken to give himself an excuse to chew rather than talk.
“That’s what I heard through the grapevine, and it left me curious. You went to the AN-85, didn’t you? Not far from here, but I’ve never been to the area. Approach is forbidden to all but a handful of people, they say. I wonder why.”
“There’s some… classified research going on. They don’t want people to disrupt the, er, biological balance.”
“Ah, another place with some million-year-old amoebas, then,” Jerry said, an expression of mingled understanding and disappointment upon his face. “But why take you there? And on your first day on the job, too?”
“Lindholm decided it’s a necessary part of my briefing. He wants me to do some… some updates on safety regulations,” Scott invented wildly.
Jerry didn’t seem to notice his confusion. He stifled a yawn of boredom. “Ah, I see. Safety regulations, yadda yadda… as if we don’t have enough rules around the place controlling how we breathe. Well, I’m about done here. It’s too early to go to sleep, and I’m not in the mood for TV or the club. I think I’m going to check on the greenhouse once more before I turn in. You wanna come?”
Scott had no objection, and the two of them made their way across the station to a plain dark building, which hardly looked like the greenhouses he was familiar with.
“No glass panes,” Jerry explained. “With the local light patterns, this wouldn’t make sense. In winter, it’s one long night, of course — and during the summer, it’s way too much light. Plants need light to grow and develop, but they also need dark to breathe. Otherwise they get tired.”
The greenhouse was flooded with artificial light. It was rather small, but every square inch of space was made the most of. The place was a veritable jungle of tomato plans, peppers and climbing beans. There were small forests of lettuce in every imaginable variety, tiny radishes just poking out of their beds, and even small fruit trees in containers.
“Everything grows in a hydroponic solution or an artificial growth mix,” Jerry said. “One can’t import soil to Antarctica, you know, even for potted plants, because some microorganisms can supposedly escape to the local soil and compete with the local species. The Antarctic Conservation Act,” he rolled his eyes. “Baloney, I call it. What imported microbe would survive in the frozen wasteland out there?”
“The place looks wonderful,” Scott complimented him. Indeed, the contrast between the dry and frozen landscape outside, all austere and rocky and white and grey and black, and the lush greenery within, was fantastic. Jerry looked gratified.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m kind of proud of doing all the work here myself. The plants grow well, though I can’t get the humidity above 20% no matter how hard I try. This is without a doubt the greenest place in Antarctica.”
Scott suppressed a smile as he thought of the lush, hospitable, warm valley he had visited that day, with its geysers and grasses and mosses, and its strange and fascinating people. He merely nodded and followed Jerry to a tiny corner where the latter had carved out a space for a couple of hammocks and garden chairs.
“For people who like to relax in a green atmosphere,” he explained. He pulled one of the chairs aside, revealing a little refrigerator, pulled out a couple of beers, knocked the caps off them, and offered one to Scott.
“Some fancy New Zealand brew,” he said, eyeing the label with mistrust. “Came in the last shipment. I’d rather have a plain old Heineken, but this isn’t too bad.”
It was extremely pleasant to sway in the hammock among the lush green plants, sipping a cold beer. The greenhouse was warm, and the two soon cast aside their parkas and sweaters. “You know,” Jerry observed, “I often wonder how crazy I am, working here. In my heart, I’m nothing but a gardener. I could go home, and I could roll real earth between my fingers, and grow plants in the open air. There’s really no reason for me to be here. Yet I stay at McMurdo year after year.”
“There’s something about the place,” Scott said. “It’s so… detached.”
“Yeah. Sometimes I almost forget there’s a world beyond this station. One does after a time, you know. I used to chat with my mom every day. Now she’s lucky to get a sign of life from me once a month. And I hardly ever watch the news anymore.”
“Nothing very cheering to see there.”
“You bet! Have you heard the latest news? The European Union is all torn to shreds, and it looks like Europe is about to be divided into two war camps, north and south. For the life of me I have no idea what all those little countries have to fight about.”
Scott shook his head. “Neither do I. How can humans be so stupid as to waste time and resources on war? I’m glad I’m not a soldier.”
Jerry grinned, draining the last of his beer. “In a way,” he said, “you are. We all are.”
Around 9 PM, after the two had shared another beer and a bag of chips, Jerry yawned and declared he’s ready to turn in. Scott walked with him part of the way, but said he isn’t tired yet, and would rather take another turn around the station.
“It’s the light,” Jerry said. Indeed, though so late, it was barely twilight, and the snow contributed to the brightness outside. “You’ll feel sleepy if you pull down the blinds and go to bed.”
“I’ll do that in a little while,” Scott said.
He headed for the library, and though it was long closed for the night, he gained access to the building and the classified section by scanning his card. His heart suddenly all aflutter, he used the computer to look through the section, and soon located the research done on the Anai over the years. There was a considerable volume of material, but most of it was purely technical — the structure of their clothes, tools and houses, their outward appearance, their social customs. It was all fascinating in its way, but there was very little that probed into the great mystery of their existence.
According to the findings of the researchers, the Anai civilization was very ancient, dating back at least eight hundred years and possibly more, though nobody dared to estimate at which point in history they had come to Antarctica, and from where. The nearest populated land was New Zealand, but the Anai bore absolutely no resemblance to New Zealand natives in their looks, genetic material or language. Their language, indeed, was a puzzle in its own, and Scott spent an hour looking through the one grammar guide that was written on it. The structure of the Anai language had nothing in common with any other language group on earth, though its agglutinative nature suggested a faint resemblance to the Ugro-Finnic group — further connection, however, was refuted by other elements of the grammar structure. The vocabulary was extensive and, as the author of the grammar guide confessed, barely touched upon. There was also a written language, a complex combination of hieroglyphs, symbols and runes, which no researcher had obtained satisfactory knowledge of so far. The Anai were a separate race and culture, a drop of humanity in its purest form.
Scott closed his eyes and sat like that for a while, and the images of the valley came flooding back to him. The uniqueness of its nature was irresistible. The simple stone dwellings breathed repose and harmony, and the people looked, though he hated to think in these terms, as belonging to a superior race. He approached them not with the fascination of a researcher bending over a fine specimen in his laboratory, but with the simple admiration and humility of someone prepared and eager to learn.