Apparently aircraft carriers made excellent polar stations, being nuclear powered, and outweighing ordinary icebreakers by a thousand times or more. Sea ice stood no chance against such behemoths, they were icebreakers from God and could leave anytime they wanted to; but they didn’t. They made a little floating city, anchored by the shore of Antarctica, supporting various inland encampments, all of which had been airlifted upcountry from here.
They passed over the carrier city and landed on the snowy surface of the continent itself. Out of the Clipper onto flat snow. Very bright and very cold, although no colder than Zurich on a windy winter’s day.
Around them cloth-walled huts, blue-glassed boxes. The camp managers were happy to meet Mary, seemed to consider her their patroness, which made her laugh. And they were well-acquainted with Captain Art, a frequent visitor.
The glacier slowdown operation had been a success. Ice fields had therefore also slowed. All this would have been impossible without the navies helping. Aircraft carriers were mobile towns. Deploying them like this was a chance to make use of the huge amounts of money that had been spent building them. Swords into plowshares kind of thing.
“Like the Swiss,” Mary observed. “Can we see a pumping site?”
Of course. Already scheduled. For sure a feature of interest.
All of Art’s passengers occupied only a corner of one of their giant helicopters. Helmets on, sit sideways looking out through a small window, then up, straight up, not like the Clipper’s rise. Then over endless white snow, listening to the pilot and her crew discuss things in a language she didn’t recognize. Black sea behind them receding from view.
“Why is the ocean black down here?” she asked into her helmet’s microphone.
“No one knows.”
“I heard one guy say it’s because the water is so clean down here, and the bottom so deep starting from right offshore, that you’re seeing down to the dark part of the ocean where the sunlight doesn’t penetrate. So you’re seeing through super-clear water to the black of the deeps.”
“Can that be right?”
“I heard the plankton down here are black, and they color the water.”
“Lots of days it looks as blue as anywhere, I think.”
“No way!”
Then they were descending. Snow or ice as far as they could see. Then a cluster of black dots. Around the dots black threads, like a broken spider web. These dots and lines held civilization suspended over the abyss.
“How many stations are there like this one?” she asked.
“Five or six hundred.”
“And how many people does that add up to?”
“The stations are mostly automated. Maintenance and repair crews fly in as needed. There are caretakers in some of them. But mainly it’s construction crews, moving around at need. I don’t know, twenty thousand people? It fluctuates. There were more a few years ago.”
The helo landed with a foursquare thump. They unbelted, stood awkwardly, filed down the narrow gap between seats and wall and down metal steps to the ice.
Cold. Bright. Windy. Cold.
Light blasted around the edges of her sunglasses and blinded her. Tears were blown off her eyes onto her sunglasses, where they froze in smears. She tried to see through all that. Blinking hard, she followed the others toward this settlement’s main hut, like a blue-walled motor home on stilts.
“Wait, I don’t want to go inside yet,” she protested. “I want to see.”
A couple of their hosts stayed out with her and walked her to a pump, which stood inside a little heated hut of its own. Not very heated, as the floor inside was ice, with the black housing of the pump plunging right into it. The saving of civilization, right there before her. A piece of plumbing.
They went back outside and followed one of the pipelines up a gentle gradient. It stretched across the land from black box to black box, lying right on the ice. Mary stopped to look around. The snow seemed to her like a lake surface that had flash-frozen, all its little waves caught mid-break. Glowing in the light. Her guides explained things to her. She liked their enthusiasm. They were happy to be here not because they were saving the world, but because they were in Antarctica. If you like it, one told her when she asked, you like it a lot. It gets into you, until nowhere else seems as good.
A white plane under a blue dome. Some cirrus clouds over them looked close enough to touch.
“It’s like another planet,” Mary said.
Yes, they said. But actually just Earth.
“Thank you,” she said to them. “Now I’m ready to go back. I’m glad to have seen this, it’s just amazing. Thank you for showing it to me. But now let’s go back.”
Because I too have a place I love.
They flew north up the Atlantic, to see St. Helena and Ascension. Before Art dropped Mary off in Lisbon, where she would train home, she joined him in his understudy one last time. When they were sitting in their usual spots, sipping their drams, she said, “Will we meet again?”
He looked uncertain. “I hope so!”
She regarded him. A shy man. Some animals are reclusive.
“Why do you do this?” she said.
“I like it.”
“What do you do when you’re on the ground?”
“I resupply.”
“Aren’t there any places you like to walk around?”
He considered this. “I like Venice. And London. New York. Hong Kong, if it isn’t too hot.”
She stared at him for a while. He shifted his gaze down, clearly uncomfortable. Finally he said, “Mostly I just like being here. I like the sky people. The sky villages are a lot of fun to visit. I like the way they look. And the people in them. Everyone’s on a voyage. Did you ever read The Twenty-one Balloons? It’s an old children’s book about a sky village.”
“Like your Jules Verne.”
“Yes, but for kids.”
Verne is for
