'Everybody needs money,' Lewis recited. He trod a circle around the stake. 'Around the world. I read that Admiral Byrd said it was the middle of a limitless plain. You get here, and that's all. He said it was the effort to get here that counted.'
'That, and getting away. But Byrd said that back in the 1920s, way before the base started in '58. Nowadays it's the staying that counts. We're here for a purpose. Your job is important. Mine is important. They're all important. Scientifically. Politically. We're at a place that no single nation owns, dedicated to knowledge. I think that's pretty cool.'
'Cool.' Lewis brushed the frost on the ruff of his hood.
'You know why people like it down here, Jed?' Cameron was looking directly at him, but with the goggles on the effect was odd, like being looked at by an insect.
'Why?'
'Because the purpose of life is to learn. That's why we exist, to learn. That's my belief, anyway. That's why the station exists. Moss and Adams and Mendoza have the world's best window on space. Jerry Follett and Dana Andrews are deciphering the atmosphere. Hiro and Alexi are trying to understand the aurora, which is one hell of a show. You do climate, Lena hydroponics… it doesn't get any purer than this.'
The hood against Lewis's ears made everything like listening through a blanket. 'So how do we tell direction down here?'
'We make our own grid. The Greenwich Meridian is grid north; the opposite way south. Mostly, though, we point. There's nowhere to go, so it's like being on a small island. Disneyland. Come on, let's go see where you'll work.'
They trudged toward the Clean Air Facility, a brown metal box a half mile from the Pole. It was elevated on stilts and festooned with instruments and antennas. As they walked, Lewis felt as if he'd gained a hundred pounds. His feet felt hot and heavy and his lungs were unhappy with air that remained too thin, too dry, too cold. His neck gaiter had become a muffler of ice, scratchy and smothering. He swatted at it, breaking some bits loose, but more clung to the fabric. At the same time he realized he was sweating.
The snow squeaked as they walked, dry and powdery, a loose coverlet on harder blue-white ice. Wind blew this skin into small, shin-high drifts that Cameron called sastrugi. 'Alexi says it's the Russian word for eyebrows.' It was laborious to lumber over or through them.
'What's his story?'
'There's no money in Russia. He's one of the top aurora experts in the world. So we gave him a posting here.'
'He said he liked that movie The Thing.'
'I think there's something in that film that gets to our ex-Commie. The fact that no one can trust anyone. I think he was into some pretty heavy science politics in the old Soviet. Down deep he's pretty serious, you know, kind of quietly ambitious. He'd love to accomplish something down here to bring credit to Mother Russia. Point of pride to bring out something new. But he's also a lot of fun. So's Hiro.'
'They the only foreigners?'
'Dana's a Kiwi and Lena emigrated from the Czech Republic, but nobody's a foreigner, not down here. Antarctica is the only place on earth where you don't need a passport and you don't go through customs. No single nation owns anything. That's pretty cool, too.'
There was the distant chug of the generator but no other sound. No bird call, no rustling leaves, no distant shout of children, no drone of highway noise. Lewis pushed back his hood and pulled down his gaiter a moment to listen, ignoring the bite of cold, his exhalation a puff of steam.
There was a quiet whisper behind him.
He turned his head. No one there.
They kept walking, puffing over the drifts.
Again the whisper.
Lewis turned completely this time. Odd. The snow was empty. What the hell?
The station manager was watching him with amusement.
'I thought I heard something.'
'It's your breath, fingie. The moisture freezes as you walk and crackles behind your ear as it sprinkles down. Weird, isn't it?'
'My breath?'
'The vapor cloud.'
'Oh.' He puffed and listened as his exhalation floated away like fairy dust, with an audible crinkle. 'You notice the noise,' he conceded. 'There's nothing else to hear.'
'Just the voices in your head.'
An outside metal staircase led up to the Clean Air Facility, perched on its columns like a heavy bird. Inside were instruments he'd been briefed on at Boulder by NOAA. Windows looked out at the flat bleakness of the ice cap. The elevated structure was here because air at the South Pole was thousands of miles from human industry, and hence the most unpolluted on earth. Lewis's primary job was to sample that air for evidence of global warming. He actually had to keep track of thirty-five separate measurements, some of them automated and some requiring manual sampling of air, snow, sunlight, and atmospheric ozone: temperature, carbon dioxide concentrations, wind, snowfall, pollutants, barometric pressure. My job is important. If the planet was heating, it would perversely show up here first, just like the ozone hole had. If their ice plateau melted, it would drown the world's ports. Antarctica was a global trip wire, warning humans if industrialization had gone too far. Jed Lewis was this winter's Paul Revere.
'Kind of cozy,' he commented. Indeed, the elevated building felt like a tree house. A boy's fort.
'You've got good duty,' Cameron said. 'Your job forces you to get outside each day so you don't become a dome slug, and you get some privacy and independence out here. It's the closest thing to a vacation condo this side of the KitKat Club.'
'The what?'
'An old balloon-launching shack. We don't need it anymore because the balloons have gotten smaller and lighter. A carpenter turned it into a getaway pad with carpeting, heat, stereo, and VCR TV. Since then it's seen more consummations than Niagara Falls. Not that we station managers approve, of course.'
'There's a lot of nooks and crannies to this place, aren't there?'
'Oh yes indeedy.'
'And this building is a rendezvous as well?'
'People come out to Clean Air sometimes to break the monotony and party. Carl Mendoza is promising to cook up some dome-brew.'
'He'd better not spill beer on my instruments.'
'Nah, they spill it over here.' The station manager walked out on the platform ringing the building and pointed downward to a yellow-stained cleft in the snow. 'Our Grand Canyon is the pee crevasse. It's a long run to the john in the dome so guys just piss over the rail here. It's quite a sensation when the wind's blowing.'
'Clean air, dirty snow?'
'We don't take our drinking water from here, needless to say. Storms cover up the evidence each winter.'
'What do women do?'
Cameron laughed. 'Who knows what women do?'
'You certainly don't,' a female voice said.
They turned. A young woman about Lewis's age was standing in the doorway, nylon windpants over her legs but her feet in wool socks and her upper half clad only in long underwear, which showed some nice shape to her. She was holding a screwdriver and seemed oblivious to the cold.
'We look for a leafy bush,' she confided to Lewis. The closest one was two thousand miles away.
'Hello, Abby,' Cameron said.
'Hello, pig,' she replied pleasantly.
'You were hiding under one of your computers.'
'I was getting our planned obsolescence ready for our newcomer.' She looked at Lewis. 'Please pay no
