Cold War

sharing none of his colleague’s amusement. “We should move on instead of wasting our time here.”

Scarborough hesitated. Restraint, he thought. As the rover’s project director, Payton was used to the golden-boy treatment, and seemed miffed that even an act of God could screw with his agenda. He had urged an immediate start to their recovery mission, but a chain of sudden Force 10 storms with winds blowing at upward of sixty miles per hour — base meteorologists called them weather bombs—had imposed a week’s delay. A week of hand-wringing and restless conjecture. It was understandable that he’d be wound tight. His superior attitude was more exasperating.

“Okay,” Scarborough said in a controlled tone. “Let’s go.”

And so they did, Scarborough leading in silence for better than a mile. True to his prediction, the pass’s terrain changed radically toward its juncture with Wright Valley. Sand the color of tarnished copper first sprinkled its gritty top crust, then fanned out in thicker accumulations, then coated every inch of ground underfoot with dark, heavy drifts. But however useful Scarborough’s GPS unit had been in reckoning their progress, it hadn’t helped prepare them for the gaining intensity of the wind. It barreled down from the higher elevations, roaring and growling, flinging tattered sheets of sand over them, making every step forward a slow effort.

Scarborough soon found himself concerned that the tumultuous gusts would have blotted out any sign of the rover’s path, a feeling that deepened to quiet worry as they toiled onward with nothing for results. It had become almost oppressive when Payton abruptly halted and touched his shoulder.

“Wait!” He pointed. “Over there.”

Scarborough and Bradley turned to look. Scant yards to their left a chain of humpbacked dunes extended along the wall of the pass, unmistakable wheel marks threading up and down their flanks.

The group scurried across the sand to inspect them, crouching together at the base of a dune.

“The deeper, the fresher. And these are pretty deep,” Scarborough said. “They can’t be more than a couple weeks old, puts ’em in the right ballpark time-wise.”

“It’s our baby, Alan.” Bradley indicated a stippled pattern in the tracks and got out her digital camera for some snapshots. “We couldn’t ask for better identification.”

Scarborough nodded. Scout’s cleated titanium wheels would have left just such imprints. And their close spacing suggested the vehicle was too small to be anything but an unmanned drone. Also, his earlier remark to Bradley hadn’t been a colorful exaggeration. There truly weren’t any other mechanical ponies on the range. To reduce the environmental impact of their activities and preserve the dry valleys as a scientific resource, field workers refrained from operating wheeled or tractor-belted vehicles on ice-free ground, making the snowmobiles that towed their supplies and equipment across lake crusts the only motorized conveyances in use. This self-imposed restriction had been observed for three decades before it was formalized in a multinational code of conduct to which the United States was a signatory. In their negotiations to secure approval for the rover’s trials, UpLink and NASA had been firm about guaranteeing participant states that they would avoid leaving behind a mess — or in the language of their written application, would “minimize and remedy any disturbances caused to the natural landscape.”

Ultimately, though, the good name of Roger Gordian, UpLink’s founder and standard bearer, had carried more weight than diplomatic niceties or signed promises. As a practical matter, implementation of any treaty in this freezing, desolate wilderness relied on the honor system. Somebody broke the rules, who was going to catch on?

The story was in the math, and Scarborough had done his calculations long ago. Antarctica’s total land area was five and a half million square miles, double the size of Australia, triple that of Europe. With a winter population of about two thousand cocooned in the research stations, and maybe four times that many summer residents, it averaged between fifty and a hundred fifty thousand miles of open space per person, depending on the season. A tough chunk of real estate to police and patrol. Almost impossible, in fact, because the same agreement that regulated experimentation in the dry valleys imposed a continent-wide ban on military bases, effectively forbidding armed enforcement of its protocols.

But none of this presently concerned Scarborough. He rose from his squat, took his binoculars from the case strapped around his neck, and raised them to his eyes. What he saw of the rover’s trail encouraged him. Yes, the wind had scrambled the trail. Completely erased entire segments of it. And was dissipating it into spindling little wisps of sand even as he watched. However, it remained plain enough for several hundred yards before cutting around a sharp eastward bend in the pass.

“All right,” he said. “Looks like we’re in business—”

Scarborough stopped. He’d noticed something out of the corner of his vision. A momentary wink of brightness far above him on the pass’s left wall, formed by the great soaring flank of Mount Cerberus. Curious, he turned the binoculars toward the slope for a better look, but saw only a series of naked ledges climbing to its uppermost reaches between vertical thrusts of stone.

“Find something of interest?” Bradley asked, coming over from behind him.

Scarborough waited before he replied. The flash of light did not repeat. Nor could he be sure exactly where it had originated. Then his view through the glasses blurred and he grunted with annoyance. In extreme cold weather conditions, the vapor from your exhalations puffed up into the air, condensed on the optical lenses of your field glasses, and quickly skimmed them with frost. It was the same with the snow goggles. Worse, really, since your eyelashes could freeze together if you removed them. This charming ECW phenomena didn’t get mentioned much in survival handbooks, presumably because their authors considered it a nuisance rather than a hazard. Polies knew the distinction could shift in a heartbeat.

He lowered the binoculars, wiped them with his mitten, and slid them back into their case.

“The sun reflecting off a glaze of ice, I think.” He shrugged. “Just happened to catch my eye.”

Payton had also approached now, his rigid stance the image of impatience. Scarborough hastened along Scout’s trail before he could invite another complaint that they were dawdling.

Bull Pass narrowed as it turned east, its walls pressing in close. Shadows spilled down their sides and pooled on the floor of the trench like black syrup. Channeled into rapid currents, the wind seemed to have inflicted its worst punishment upon the crumbled and broken left slope, a slow erosional process that must have begun untold centuries before. In his mind’s eye, Scarborough pictured some colossal ruminant grazing away at the ridgeline with stubborn, tireless persistence, leaving a huge projection of stone here, a fallen granitic slab there, spitting irregular mounds of rubble into the breaches. Opposite, Cerberus loomed in stark contrast: dominant, monolithic, its grooved face darkened with mountain shadows from base to icy brow.

It was perhaps thirty minutes later when Scarborough rounded a broad shoulder of rock and first saw the notch about a half mile up ahead. He paused for a long moment, suddenly reminded of the time he’d visited the Grand Canyon as a youngster. His parents had given him an assortment of educational materials in advance of that summer trip. Books, videos, travel brochures, the works. He’d digested them until he thought he had learned everything there was to know about the place. But when he actually stood gazing out over the chasm from the South Rim, Scarborough realized that neither words nor pictures could capture how it felt to see it with his own eyes. He recognized the natural landmarks. Shiva Temple. Hale’s Needle. Point Hanover. They looked just as they did in photos, yet were altogether different. This did not seem a contradiction to him. With his eleventh birthday barely past, Alan Scarborough had in a single shot gained a fundamental and lasting appreciation of direct participatory experience… as well as an insatiable yearning for it. He’d never since been content observing reality through windows of separation, framed within neatly bordered perspectives, but had always felt the urge to leap outside to where his feet touched the ground. Why else had he eagerly joined the Marines with an ROTC assignment out of college, and on retirement pursued a civilian gig in a land where the Ice Age had missed its final curtain by ten thousand years? Why else?

Scarborough studied the deep V-shaped notch near the valley intersection with rapt fascination. Like the photos and descriptions in those boyhood references, his satellite readouts had offered detailed information about the area’s geographic features. He had come here prepared. But the sheer immensity of the cleft overwhelmed his senses. And stirred his imagination. He again envisioned gargantuan creatures dining on solid rock as they thundered through the ancient pass. What he knew of glacial migrations was momentarily forgotten. Science was Bradley’s and Payton’s game. His was to see their expedition through the valleys and return them to Cold Corners safe and sound, ideally with the salvaged Martian rover in their possession. He could allow himself a brief flight of fancy. And right now it was easy to believe that the notch in the side of the pass had been left by a prehistoric monster of indescribable scale. Not the same trudging forager that might have munched away at the slope behind