The Green Organization base reposed slightly beyond Scott Base, the New Zealand research station that was established just over the hill from McMurdo. It was there for a couple of reasons. First, the Kiwis were sympathetic to the cause, so it was a comfortable place to be. Second, they were close enough to McMurdo to keep watch on the Americans, and to make their presence felt. They were sure that they were having an impact, which was correct.
“Thanks,” the leader of that year’s expedition, who was known only as Frodo, said to the woman as she left the camp. The woman, a grad student from Santa Cruz, California, had brought a letter from Beardmore. She had been befriended by Dr. Engen before Susan had gone inland. They discovered they shared the belief that environmental activism was as important a thing as a person could do in life. They also resisted the sense that working for the Antarctic program was something close to being a part of the problem, but Dr. Engen was able to convince the young student that change was something that mostly happened from the inside out, with a few well-placed nudges. So now the newly minted activist enjoyed the sensation of finding herself acting as a clandestine agent, passing information to the partisans. Susan had sent the note through the “guard mail”, which were basically just bags that were picked up by the flight crews as they passed through and delivered to whatever station they were addressed to, whenever an opportunity could be arranged. It had never occurred to anyone that the internal mail was something that needed monitoring, and it wasn’t.
The camp was made up of modules that looked exactly like Christmas ornaments. While there could be no doubt that it was operated in a perfectly environmentally friendly way, it couldn’t possibly have looked more out of place. The casual observer would have expectations of what they expected to see and the unusual seemed somehow wrong. When considered logically, it didn’t appear any more out of place than anything else. Everything should have seemed like it didn’t belong except what was there naturally. He read the note.
“Son of a bitch!” Frodo rasped.
“What?” his companion, Crystal, asked. She was reading a three-month-old magazine that she’d taken from Scott Base. She was maybe twenty-two, and her blondish hair was twisted into dreadlocks, long before they became fashionable, and of which she would later be proud. She was from Belgium; the others were all Americans.
“Son of a bitch!” Frodo said again. He handed the letter over.
“Holy shit!” Crystal exclaimed, after learning the contents.
“I knew it!” he shouted, knowing that he couldn’t possibly have known, except that everyone knew it would happen eventually.
“What are we going to do?” she asked as the hatch opened. The other two members of the group came in. They passed the letter around, each complaining bitterly of the horror that was to be visited upon them. Upon reflection, however, it occurred to them that this was the very reason why they were there: to expose the crime before it could be committed, and organize a defense. As they were only four people, the only defense that could be conceived would be to get information out to their well-established media machine and to inspire international condemnation, which was what they had been doing all along.
“Let me think,” Frodo said. They all stopped talking and watched him while he did so. “We can’t get to where they are now, and I don’t want to wait until they get somewhere that we can. That means we have to act on what we know now.”
“How are we supposed to do that?” they asked.
“Pictures.”
“If we can’t get up there,” they asked, “how are we supposed to get pictures?”
“We’ll just have to use the ones we have. Don’t we have pictures of them drilling through the ice?”
“Yeah, but that is drilling through ice.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s the story that counts. Those will do.”
This troubled the other of the girls, Sierra, who told him that it seemed kind of crummy to use phony pictures. She thought that they had the moral high ground.
“We do have the moral high ground. That is why it is so important to get something out now.”
“It seems like a dirty trick,” she persisted.
“It’s what they want to do that is dirty,” he said vehemently. “We know that what we are doing is right and what they are doing is wrong. That is all that matters now. Come on, I’ll show you.”
They went out of the ornament and traversed the short distance to the sea ice where there was a seal hole. Several Weddell seals were sunning themselves around it.
“Does anyone doubt that garbage from McMurdo is spread all over the ice?” he asked.
“Of course not,” they answered. “We’ve all picked up tons of it.”
“Okay then,” he said. He took the bag of trash he dragged along with him and spread it among the seals. He took out a camera from its bag and snapped two rolls of film.
“Bastards!” he said. “We need to stop them.” They put the trash back in the bag, not missing a single scrap.