refueling stop at MacTown. Ought to be fairly short. Then we take off for Cold Corners.”
“I assume it’s back to coach class for me.”
Evers nodded. “Sorry. They do a nice job grooming the ski way at Willy, but it can be bumpy.” He paused. “I’m banking to port in just a second. You might want to take a peek out the right-hand windows before you go aft and buckle up.”
Nimec felt the aircraft tilt gently, and looked.
Below them now, the ice shelf was a continuous sheet of whiteness that gleamed so brightly in the sun it made his eyes smart. A stepped ridge of glaciers sat atop it, extending seaward from the interior like a wide, rough tongue questing for water. At the far end of this glacial wave, two frozen mountain peaks reared thousands of feet above a great hump in the otherwise flat plain of ice. A plume of smoke flowed from the summit of the larger mountain, tailing into the wind.
Evers glanced over his shoulder at Nimec.
“That area where the ice looks like it bulges up is Ross Island. Home to Mount Erebus, his baby brother Mount Terror, and the fifteen hundred Americans at McMurdo Station,” Evers said. “Terror’s the quiet one. As you can tell, Erebus is something of a hothead.”
Nimec kept looking out the window.
“I knew MacTown wasn’t too far from a volcano,” he said. “Didn’t have any idea the volcano was active.”
“You bet it is,” Evers said. “Regular with its tantrums too. Erebus has been in a constant state of eruption for almost three decades now… what amounts to a slow boil. It vents six times a day, sometimes with a rumble you can hear for miles. Sends bullets of molten lava and ash over the rim of the crater. The past couple of years those discharges have gotten more intense, and there’ve been some significant seismic tremors on the island.”
Nimec turned to face him.
“Fire and ice,” Nimec said. “I’ve been around a little, seen some unusual places. None of them were anything like this.”
Evers briefly met his gaze.
“Terra Australis Incognita,” Evers said. “ ‘Unknown to the sons of Adam, having nothing which belongs to our race.’ That’s what the legend says about Antarctica on a map by one of those Benedictine monks who tried to keep the gears of civilization turning in the Dark Ages. His name was Lambert of Saint Olmer.”
Nimec grunted. “You know your local history.”
“I read between flights… helps me cope with the endless holdups,” Evers said. “You know what, though? Old Lambert was right on. This is a different world. Or may as well be. Nobody will really ever belong here. Not a single one of us.”
“Just visitors, huh,” Nimec said.
“
Nimec was still looking at him.
“Namely?” Nimec said.
Evers moved his shoulders up and down again.
“Its sting can be fatal to humans,” he said, and got to work landing the plane in silence.
“Willy” was Williams Field, a prepared airstrip on the fast ice eight miles from McMurdo Station proper. As the Herc taxied to a halt, flight directors in hooded red-issue ECW outfits used hand signals to guide it into position.
A fleet of different vehicles hemmed the fringes of the ski way. Immediately alongside it were bulldozers and other equipment for clearing, raking, and compacting the snow pile. An enormous 4X4 shuttle raised on six-foot- high balloon tires — Ivan the Terrabus, said the lettering on its flank — stood ready to cart deplaned passengers to the station’s main receiving center. There were forklifts for off-loading the cargo pallets, fire trucks in case of a landing emergency, scattered vans, tractors, and motor sleds.
Willy’s operational facilities were identical to those of an ordinary small airfield in so many respects, it almost blunted one’s appreciation of the fact that the whole thing had been constructed on a plate of floating sea ice. It had air-traffic control towers and a considerable number of maintenance and supply buildings with corrugated metal sides. But each of these structures rested on skids, and had been towed from the main field six miles closer to the station, a seven-thousand-foot strip that could be used by aircraft with standard wheeled landing gear until sometime in December, the middle of the polar summer, when the ice runways there began to give in and melt to slush.
Nimec had learned much of this from his files, and seen more with his own eyes upon touchdown. He had adequate time to hear about the rest from Halloran and two other members of the aircrew as they sat together in a heated visitors’ lounge near the apron, sipped passably decent coffee, and watched the Herc being emptied of freight as it took fuel through the lines.
The stop was lasting longer than he’d expected. Almost two hours after the plane’s arrival at McMurdo it remained parked on the ice, the activity around it ongoing without any hint of a letup, its engines running because the minus-50° Fahrenheit temperature was just eight degrees above the danger threshold at which its hydraulics would begin to fail — the rubber hoses, gaskets, and valve seals getting brittle enough to crack, the JP8 fuel that powered the Allisons becoming too viscous to flow freely despite its special cold-weather formulation.
Draining his paper cup, Nimec glanced at his watch, then at the busy airstrip outside the window to his left. He let out a grumbling sound and stretched his arms.
“You have to get in sync,” Halloran said, eyeballing him from across the cafeteria table.
Nimec shook his head, turned his wrist to display the watch’s face.
“I switched to New Zealand time at Christchurch,” he said.
Halloran looked sideways at his fellow Guardsmen. Then all three laughed.
Nimec bristled. “Didn’t realize I said something funny.”
Halloran fought in vain to stifle a chuckle. “Sorry, no offense intended. I meant you should synchronize the clock in
His explanation, such as it was, only made Nimec grumpier.
“I don’t care if the sun balances on the tip of my nose for half the year,” he said. “Things need to get done.”
“Sure. I’m just saying to remember where you are.”
“So your advice is, what, that we check our schedules on arrival?”
Halloran frowned.
“Listen,” he said, motioning his chin toward the window. “You have any idea how long it takes to plot and cut an ice runway?”
Nimec shook his head, shrugging, uncertain whether he cared at that particular moment. He’d spent the better part of his week hurtling through transoceanic airspace, spent much of the week before getting poked, prodded, and pissing into paper cups in an accelerated barrage of medical examinations. He was annoyed by his own crabbiness. And he missed his sweetheart Corvette.
“At least sixty, seventy hours,” Halloran was saying in answer to his own question. “Think about it. The field groomers get through with all their snow-moving and grading, then a storm plasters the area and they’re back to square one. That happens so often — with a vengeance — nobody even thinks to rag. It’s just business as usual.”
“Your point being…?”
“Exactly what it was when we started this conversation,” Halloran said. “Adjust. Don’t try to impose yourself on this place. Even most governments acknowledge it’s ungovernable.”
Nimec looked at him.
