China Mountain Zhang

'Have you ever been under the ice?' he says.

Sure, I think to myself, I spend all my time under ice, usually up around Macy's. What the hell does he think? New York is a glacier? I don't know what he means 'under the ice.' I don't understand these people when they talk. 'I just got here,' I say.

'It's not so bad,' he says.

Something never to believe, right up there with 'It tastes just like chicken,' is 'It's not so bad.' If it wasn't bad, they wouldn't have to tell me it wasn't bad.

We rumble out into the darkness and I can feel the force of the wind hit me and the floater, when Jim sets the hover he has to head the nose into the wind, but in my suit I'm not cold. If anything I'm a little warm. It's pretty. The sky is black, the land is white. It's so big and empty that it's scary. I wonder if I'm agoraphobic. Of course, I'm a city boy. It's not the space that makes me nervous, it's the absence of human reference. We head off, the nose of the floater about forty-five degrees the left of the direction in which we are actually heading, so we are kind of skidding sideways. I glance back at the station, expecting reassurance, but we scoot over the lip of the big hill down to Lancaster Straight and the station looks smaller and smaller. So I look forward again, which is slightly less unnerving than watching safety recede.

Jim tells me about where we are going. We're heading for Halsey Station, which, when it is finished will be the first of a series of stations that will monitor belukha whales. It's under water in the summer, under the ice in the winter. 'Why did you take this job, the chance to study in China?' he says.

'Nobody said anything to me about studying in China,' I say.

'That's what the guy before you was out here for,' he says. 'He said your government wrote it into a hazardous contract, if you renew your contract you get some kind of chance to study in China.'

I didn't really read the contract. All right, so you should always read a contract. 'I'll have to look,' I say. I don't believe it. They wouldn't give somebody a chance to study in China just for spending six months here.

'So why did you come? You don't seem very interested in the great outdoors.'

I wonder what I seem like to him. He's a scientist, here because he wants to be, he must get pretty tired of techies who want to do their six months and go home. 'It was my third alternate,' I say. 'I had to take it.'

'You mean your government made you come here?'

'Not exactly.' I explain about alternatives.

'Were you at all, you know, interested?' he asks. 'I mean I know it's not New York, but like you said, it's only for six months and it's a change, you know.'

'Yeah,' I lie, 'I thought it would be interesting. And I thought it would make me study for the engineering exam.' He doesn't want to hear how horrible I think this place is, he choose to come here. And I should study for the engineering exam. There isn't much social life here.

'You should check out that education thing,' he says. 'Kevin only had to work a year and now he's in Guangzhou.'

Stay here a year? It would be worth it if I could study in China. But I'm sure that it's more complicated than that, or that the regulations have changed. Madre de Dios, stay here a year?

'There's the station,' Jim says. We coast out onto the ice and he points to something that looks like an old- fashioned lighthouse. The ice is run with cracks, long spiderwebs. And as we get closer to the station I can see how the ice has piled up around it. 'Shit,' he says, 'we ought to clear that ice.'

The ice has ground against the west side, mounting the side of the tower. We'd need a light-hammer. I mention that.

'There's one in the station,' he says, 'we have to clear ice every couple of weeks.'

We park the floater on the ice and walk across to the station. Without the blow of the floater I can hear the ice groaning all around me. It groans like metal under stress, but there's hectares of it. Wind moan and ice groan, black sky and white blue ice in the dark. We climb slabs of ice to metal rungs set in the side of the tower, and I follow Jim up to the top where he opens a hatch and we see the lit stairs curling down at our feet. He gestures for me to go first and closes the top after us. The wind stops and I realize I've been holding my shoulders tense. They ache. The stairs are a circular metal staircase in a reinforced concrete tower with a ribbon light down the wall, but ugly as it is in here it's better than out there.

Our steps echo as we go down. Underneath is a large space, maybe twenty meters across, with windows for the outer walls. It's bare unfinished concrete floor and ceiling except where someone has started finishing one of the walls in porcelain white. 'The actual shell is raconite,' Jim says. 'We've got this level wired so the lights come on whenever anyone enters but then there are two more levels below us. The middle one isn't as finished as this one, the bottom is labs. I need some help setting up some stuff for a lab, then there's a building protocol you can use to do some work on the place while I run some tests. Ah, the hammer is under stairs, there's only one.' He's embarrassed that there's only one, he doesn't want to tell me to do the ice myself.

'Well,' I say, 'that's what they're paying my inflated salary for.'

He grins, relieved. He's a nice guy, big and wooly as a bear. 'It won't take you too long,' he says. 'Just break up the top stuff and be careful not to cut too deep, remember there's water underneath. I'll be on the first level.'

'Meishi,' I say.

'What?'

'Meishi, you know, 'no problem',' I say.

'Is that Chinese?'

I guess it is, I never thought about it. Everybody says meishi. Except Canadians.

I hoist the hammer, brand-new, just like the cutter, but a little more used, and climb back up the steps with it. When I open the hatch the wind is still going and the ice is still groaning and creaking and my shoulders bunch up again. I close the hatch behind me and wonder if people get accustomed to this. Man is an adaptable animal, I tell myself, you'll get accustomed to this. I sling the hammer across my back with the shoulder strap and climb down. How am I supposed to use a hammer on a substance I have difficulty standing on? Cleats would help. Remember when back at the base to ask someone about ordering some kind of mountain climbing boots. I wrap the contact round my wrist and jack into the hammer. Ice is freaky stuff, it's not like concrete because it's got a weird surface and the density is different. It's hard to judge how much headway I'm making, first I think I've done a lot and then when I look I haven't done anything. Then I really whale and suddenly I've cut the surface too deep and the hammer is skipping all over the place.

Someone who knows what they're doing would finish a lot faster than I do, but in an hour I've cut away a lot of ice. I don't know how close I am to water and that makes me nervous, there are all these cracks on the ice and I'm not sure it's safe, don't people get killed out here? I walk away from the tower out on the groaning ice-I almost think I can feel it move-to the floater and pull the cutter out of the back. I walk farther out, about thirty meters away from the tower and jack into the cutter. I focus the beam as tight as it will go and aim straight down and in no time I've cut a hole straight through the ice to water. One meter before I register a change in density. The ice is about a meter thick. Well, a meter of ice isn't likely to dump me into Lancaster Sound. But if it stress fractures it would shatter spectacularly and I'd hate to be there when it happened.

When we get back to the base I'm going to do some reading about ice.

In the evenings I study engineering, and a letter to the Bureau of Education brings back the information that workers under thirty-five years of age who take hardship jobs for one or more years get preferential treatment when applying for school in China and qualify for loans to help with their education, if needed.

To go to school in China. Chinese citizens can take the entrance exams, and ten percent of the seats are open to overseas Chinese and foreigners by competitive exam. If I could get a B.A. Engineering in China I'd be set. I'd be able to get good work anywhere, in New York, maybe even in China. I could probably get a job and stay in it, I'd be assigned good housing, maybe after a couple of years I could live in Manhattan. Talk about luck, like winning the numbers. I begin to request math texts from the library so I can prep for the entrance exam.

Most days I spend at Halsey Station doing construction while everyone else checks recordings and makes observations. Maggie Smallwood tells me everything is going to happen in the spring, when the belukha and the bowhead mate. She says the Sound is just constant activity then. Even now the lights attract plankton and the plankton attract all sorts of fish. Everyone is nice, everyone is friendly, but distant. They're scientists, they have a