Antarctica

  Sylvia paged through his file. He was sixty-one years old. “Does it seem to any of you that the Woos have been getting stranger and stranger?”

  “Compared to when?” Joyce said.

  “Evolution of the arts,” Alan opined.

  “Or they’re running out of candidates.”

  “Remember the sound artist?”

  They smiled. This Woo had come down and learned to do vocal impressions of all the seals, penguins, skuas, and whales in the McMurdo area, also the helicopters, ventilators, generators, and winds, all then mixed together in his compositions. His farewell performance in the galley had been quite amazing, actually, an Antarctic symphony that put Vaughan Williams’s to shame.

  “Remember Jerry and Paul?”

  “Who could forget,” Sylvia grumbled. Those two had been administrative trouble; a painter and photographer traveling together, with a penchant for taking off in borrowed vehicles. They had also suborned the New York Air Guard into flying two of the Hercs in tandem over the Transantarctics, to get videos of one from the other. Randi had gotten a position fix from Herc 02, then heard 04 on the air and said, “Where are you, 04?” and 04 had given her exactly the same fix as 02, giggling like seven-year-olds.

  “What about Leslie, she was just as bad.”

  “True,” Sylvia said. Leslie was a photographer with an unerring instinct for the illicit and transgressive; her big coffee-table book had made Antarctica look like 1930s Berlin. A scandal at the NSF home office, and she shuddered to think what it had done at ASL. Heads would certainly have rolled.

  Having gotten started, they recounted once more some of the litany of memorable Woos: the painter still working on a single canvas of Cape Royds after four trips down; the modeler who had shaped a working replica of Mount Erebus too heavy to fly out, so that it was still out there in the lumberyard; the novelist whose book had portrayed the NSF as fascist villains, explaining in his acknowledgments that the NSF had been nice to him but mean to his characters; the filmmaker who had slithered around on the sea ice living the life of a Weddell seal pup, including a traumatic unplanned killer whale attack (this movie was still popular at the video rental); the sculptor who had spent all his time making traditional snowmen in the streets of McMurdo; the eminent science writer who had not heard that his flight down had had to turn back just before the Point of Safe Return, so that after eight hours he had climbed out of the Herc back in Christchurch and looked around and said, “Why all the trees?”

  Then Paxman came in to announce Sylvia’s next appointment, and they composed themselves a bit guiltily, as for the most part they had liked these Woos they had been laughing at. Compared to the scientists, who were often ambitious, tense, and resentful of NSF’s control over the purse strings, the Woos were great comic relief, an endless string of court jesters. And it looked like Ta Shu was going to fit right in.

  Then her next appointment was in the room, a slender good-looking bemused man with black hair. After introducing her colleagues to him, Sylvia excused them; she needed to talk to him alone. Wade Norton, advisor to the Wandering Senator, on an unscheduled visit; this was not good.

  Though obviously tired and disoriented, he was friendly in manner, and had focused on each of the others as they were introduced in a way that made Sylvia think he was fixing them in his memory. A man in his position would be greatly helped by a good memory for people. He seemed low-keyed; looked sympathetic; a good listener. Dapper still, despite the obvious hammering of the flight from Christchurch, and from Washington before that.

  “How was your trip down?”

  “It was interesting.”

  Awkward pause.

  “Well,” Sylvia said, gesturing out the window at what could be seen of the town. Her window faced across a dry gulch and a pipeline to the blank side of the Crary Lab. “Tell me what exactly you would like to accomplish down here, and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.”

  The man smiled and held up a palm: appeal for sympathy. “Senator Chase used to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as you know. Now the current committee majority is blocking the renewal of the Treaty. They’ve also noted that the new South Pole station is finished, at considerable expense, but that NSF has requested the same level of funding for the Antarctic Program for the next five-year budgetary period as for the period of construction. At the same time they’re hearing all kinds of reports from down here, this recent, um, disappearance of a polar traverse freight vehicle? And trouble of various kinds. I think it would be fair to characterize the committee majority as becoming skeptical about the idea of NSF continuing to run the U.S. Antarctic Program, rather than, I don’t know, privatizing things even further than they have been. ASL in combination with a university group or whatever. This is the same majority that advocates privatizing USGS and the EPA, so who knows what they might suggest. Now Senator Chase wants NSF in charge, but he needs to be able to support his support of NSF, so to speak. So he’s sent me down to investigate the situation and make a report, particularly about these recent, um, troubles. I take it there’s been some unusual activity.”

  “Yes,” Sylvia said, feeling like she should imitate the geomancer’s knowing nod: more than you know, sir.

  He watched her closely. “Well—the senator is curious about that. I think he’s wondering if things happening down here might not be used to advantage to get the Treaty out of committee and back on the table. If he weren’t in the middle of his Asia aid walk he’d be down here himself, because he’s a big believer in the power of face to face. But he can’t come now, so he’s sent me. What he wants is more information to work with.”

  Sylvia nodded cautiously. Many people came down claiming to be sympathetic allies, and they usually had their own agendas and were merely hoping to use the Antarctic situation somehow to push those agendas. That’s more or less what this man had just said about Senator Chase. In any case it would be imprudent to reveal anything of a truly confidential nature to an outsider. Which he knew as well as she did. Therefore laying groundwork for later, perhaps.

  In the meantime his visit was much like yet another DV outside committee budget review. Why did Antarctica cost so much? Why should American taxpayers pay for it? What was going on down here that was so valuable to ordinary Americans? Review boards and committees came down to ask these questions frequently, and often they were adversarial exchanges, in that they sometimes wanted to look like brilliant cost-cutters, while the Antarctic budget had already been pared to the bone at the same time that NSF had been asked to do more with it, in an environment where safety factors could not be scrimped. Visitors like this man could influence the people in Washington making the money decisions, so to a certain extent they held the purse strings for NSF the way NSF held the purse strings for the scientists down here—a thought which gave Sylvia new insight into the feelings the scientists must occasionally have toward her—an unpleasant mix of caution, hope, and fear.

  But still, this one was claiming to be an ally, and she thought it was likely to be true. Like everyone she had heard a fair bit about Senator Chase, and though she did not think he was any longer a serious player in Washington, she admired a lot of what he had done.

  “Since this is a continent for science,” Norton said now, “NSF is in effect the government here, isn’t that right?”

  “Not exactly,” Sylvia said, though she had often thought of it in just those terms. “There’s SCAR, for instance, the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research. They work under the auspices of the Antarctic Treaty nations, and do a lot to direct what kind of research is done here, and how it’s done as well. In many respects they are as powerful as NSF.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “But do they have a budget? I mean, do they fund research?”

  “No.”

  He left his point unsaid: money was government, here as elsewhere.

  She walked him over to the big wall map of Antarctica. “Here are all the field camps deployed this y
ear—the blue pins—and all the trekking groups, the green pins. And I’ve marked the location of all the non-Treaty camps that we’re aware of as well, with the red pins.”

  “Are these all that there are?”

  “All that we can confirm,” she prevaricated.

  He nodded, staring at the map. There were perhaps ten red pins, some around the Weddell Sea, some here in the Ross Sea region, some on the polar cap. “And the yellow pins?”

  “Those represent odd sightings on satellite photos, for the most part. Things or shapes, or mostly heat signals from the IR. We don’t have the resources here to investigate all of these sightings, I must admit, and those we have looked into have not revealed anything on the ground. So we mark them, and look at especially interesting ones, but we don’t know what they mean.”

  “I see.”

  He stared at the map, looking puzzled; perhaps at what he should do next. Sylvia suggested what was in effect a short version of the DV tour, designed to show distinguished visitors exceptionally scenic places in the hope of making them Antarctic advocates when they went home. It very often worked like a charm. “Perhaps the Dry Valleys, and South Pole Station of course, and up onto Mount Erebus,” pointing at the map.

  “That would be great,” he said agreeably. “But what about visiting these oil explorations? What they’re doing complicates the Treaty ratification process a good deal. Can you tell me more about them, and perhaps arrange a meeting with one of them?”

  Sylvia waggled a hand. “We can ask, of course, to visit one of their stations. But we’ve done that already, and so far they’ve not answered. We could do a Greenpeace on them, I suppose, and drop in uninvited. But the diplomatic repercussions of that might be more than you want. The Southern Club Antarctic Group is a very mixed bag of countries.”

  “Yes, I take your point. But how serious are they? Do we know how much oil might be out there, or how much methane hydrate?”

  “There are estimates, but the drilling they’re doing now is exploratory only, as I understand it.”

  “But they’re pretty sure oil is there.”

  “Some oil. There are no supergiant fields, but a few suspected giant fields, and many smaller ones. The old USGS estimate is fifty to a hundred billion barrels. As compared to the eight billion that were under Alaska’s North Slope, or the five million sequestered under the Arctic National Park. But spread around the continent inconveniently, you see. It’s not certain that even in the current state of the global inventory it will be economically viable to mine them. You’d think the new photovoltaics would be supplanting the need for fossil fuels pretty effectively.”

  “Capitalization troubles. Besides I’ve heard talk about how important the remaining oil is going to be for its nonfuel uses.”

  “Yes, there is that.”

  “Is there someone I could talk to who would know how realistic these estimates are? And can tell me more about the methane hydrate situation under the ice cap?”

  Sylvia thought it over. “Yes, there are several people, I suppose. Geoff Michelson would be good, I think. He’s been coming down here for a long time and knows the geology of Antarctica very well. He’s also very high up in SCAR, part of their policy-making echelon. So you could kill two birds with one scientist.”

  “Where is he?”

  “They’re out in the Dry Valleys this season.” She pointed to the spot on the map. “They’re spending a very short time in the Barwick Valley, which is an SSSI, a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Essentially it’s a valley closed to human presence, to keep it as free of contamination as possible. So theirs is an unusual visit. In fact we wouldn’t be able to fly you in there, because overflights by helo are forbidden. You could perhaps walk in with one of the groups we have touring the Dry Valleys.”

  He was frowning; not a hiker, perhaps. Or perhaps he was only thinking of the time he had.

  “You’d like to talk to him quickly.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well.” Sylvia thought about it. “We might be able to send you out with one of our mountaineers, if one is free. We could drop you at their helo rendezvous, and you could walk in with the mountaineer.”

  “That would be great.”

  Sylvia called Joyce. “Joyce, is there a mountaineer free to take Mr. Norton out to S-375 in the Barwick Valley? They’ll just need a day or two there?” She looked at Wade, who was nodding confirmation. “Okay, that’s fine. When does the Amundsen leave? Yes, we can get them back in time for that. Thanks, Joyce.”

  She hung up.

  Norton said, “What are these trekking groups about? Don’t they infringe on the Treaty as well?”

  “Well, the Treaty promised free access to everyone. Not that NSF encouraged tourism before, of course. But it’s a matter of coping with the reality in the field. On the one hand there were more and more private adventure travel companies bringing expeditions down here, flying them in little old planes from Chile into Patriot Hills and other private camps. Then they were skiing or hiking or climbing about. And the Russians were coming down to the Dry Valleys in old Arctic icebreakers and dropping off big groups. Really, they were going everywhere. And the environment down here is very delicate because of the cold; a campsite that leaves behind refuse or human waste will have it here for centuries. You can still find all the depots of the first expeditions down here, it’s quite amazing. But it’s an archeological site when Amundsen or Scott’s people did it, whereas when it’s an expedition from last week, it’s just trash. So that was a problem which NSF was helpless to prevent, because no one owns Antarctica, as you know.”

  Norton nodded. “It’s a bizarre situation.”

  “Yes. And with Congress asking NSF to run a full program down here on a smaller and smaller budget, it’s gotten quite difficult. The Pole Station had to be finished for it to be occupied at all, and everything else was pinched by that effort. So about ten years ago NSF decided to try a plan whereby we offered carefully designed trekking expeditions through our own private contractor for services, ASL. That way the expeditions could be kept to certain areas and routes, and kept also to very high standards of cleanliness and environmental accountability. We even added a certain amount of data collection to some of the treks, modeling them on the Earthwatch expeditions. So we gave it a try, and our operation here is so big compared to any of the private firms that had been coming down, that the expeditions we offered could be that much better.”

  “So you can offer better tours, and presumably at less expense.”

  “Well, we charge top rates. But the expeditions are better in every way. And cleaner.”

  “And has this in fact cut off the proliferation of small companies?”

  “Yes, it’s worked very well. We have to offer the same kind of small groups and adventurous itineraries, of course, or else the industry niche wouldn’t be filled, so to speak. But ASL has done pretty well that way, and I’d say we have ninety percent of the business now. It’s kept the environment cleaner, and it adds a bit to the operating budget down here as well, so it’s a winner both ways. Of course there are those who object to bringing so many people down here at all, but the truth is it’s no more people than would have come anyway, and this way we have a chance to control the conditions of their visit.”

  “Interesting.”

  “It is, isn’t it.”

  Of course it was government muscling out private business in a way that the current Congress would probably hate. But Senator Chase was now part of the opposition, so probably would not mind. Hard to say. It occurred to Sylvia that she could use a political officer, like any other governor of a large province. But no such luck.

  Perhaps this man could temporarily fill the role. In any case he did not appear offended by the trekking arrangement; on the contrary, he seemed to approve. He was a civil servant himself, after all.

  Now he said, “What about these disappearances—the South Pole overland vehicle, I mean, and the other irregularities we’ve been
hearing about?”

  Sylvia sighed, and pulled from her desk’s In tray a sheet of paper detailing all the incidents from the previous two years. “As you see by the chronology, there has been a fairly sharp increase in incidents of theft.”

  “Indeed,” Norton said, glancing through the list.

  “We have ASL looking into it, of course, and the National Transportation and Safety Board has been called in for this last case, as well as the FBI.”

  “What do you think is happening?” He looked at her closely.

  She shrugged. “There are a lot of people down here. Civilians of various sorts. ASL itself has subcontractors. And despite our efforts with adventure travel, there are still private groups down here as well. So …”

  “You’re saying it could be just ordinary theft.”

  “Yes.”

  “It seems weird to steal things down here, though. Impractical.”

  “Yes.”

  A long silence. There was more to be said, but it seemed to Sylvia that some of it had better wait until he had seen some of the DV tour.

  “Well,” he said, apparently reaching similar conclusions himself. “What do I need to do to get ready for the Dry Valleys?”

  After the meeting Wade was led by a young man who introduced himself as Paxman to a building nearby, a grubby old two-story box sporting a painted sign declaring it “Hotel California.” Paxman showed Wade into one of the rooms on the ground floor, and Wade threw his two orange bags on a single bed. The room reminded him strongly of his college freshman dorm—small, institutional, a sink and mirror in one corner, the bathroom shared with the room on the other side of it. Drapes permanently pulled, it appeared, no doubt to provide darkness to sleep in.

  Paxman said, “Sorry, there are some great rooms up in the Holiday Inn, but they’re all full on such short notice.”

  “No problem.”

  Not a place to hang out, however. So after Paxman left, Wade went down the stairs in the big freezing stairwell on the end of the building, and walked out into a frigid breeze. The sun was hanging in the west over white-and-black mountains that were as vertical as cardboard cutouts. Wade wandered the unpaved lava rubble streets of the settlement—not so much streets, actually, as mere open spaces between clusters of buildings. The buildings were a mix: new flying-wing shapes, covered entirely in metallic-blue photovoltaic film; worn functional wooden or cinder-block warehouses and dorms; military barracks or Quonset huts from the Navy years, or perhaps even from the town’s founding during the International Geophysical Year of 1956-57.