As they skimmed in toward the hollow end of Hut Point, overrun with McMurdo’s clutter of buildings, Wade found himself uncertain. The court was still out, no doubt about it. But the tunes kept fountaining out of him. A sort of plan was beginning to take shape in his mind.
They passed a big chunk of broken sea ice, a flat iceberg almost awash in the waves. A crowd of Adelie penguins was standing on it watching the Zodiac pass, some waving their flippers. Wade waved back at them. He saw that other penguins were shooting up out of the water and landing on their stomachs on the ice, sliding over it like big hockey pucks and sometimes colliding with other penguins already up there. Sudden explosions of sundrenched water, and then a slick gleaming penguin suspended in the air over the ice; yet another Escher moment to add to the rest, fish-to-bird, metamorphosis. Wade laughed to see it.
McMurdo now looked like a big town to him, a metropolis, as big and tawdry as any freeway strip in the United States. No; hard to feel the glory there. Hard not to feel a sense of diminution, looking back at the fata morgana to the west, and then forward to Mac Town. He would have to figure out how to hold on to this moment of grace.
The pilot idled in to the dock, the crew tied the Zodiac to the claws. The members of the expedition stepped back into Little America.
Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last. After this trip away, which had lasted only—well—Wade was too tired to calculate it, but it couldn’t have been more than a week or so—the sheer weirdness of McMurdo shot in his eyes like the overexposed sunlight, image after image knocking him back on his heels. Scott’s Discovery hut, looking much like the Cape Evans hut, dwarfed and empty out on its point beyond the docks and the mall. The buildings of the little town scattered over the volcanic rubble, all snow-plastered by the recent storm; but the snow was thawing at this very moment, and all the streets were filled with frozen runnels of ice-crusted mud.
The Zodiac crew led the nine travelers into a big building at the back of the docks, next to the minimall. Inside a group of U.S. Navy officers greeted them with paper cups of hot chocolate and coffee, asked them to sit down on folding chairs, and with tape recorders and clipboards ran through their story, asking question after question. They answered everything as clearly as they could, told them the whole story, though it was clear from the inconsistencies, repetitions and confusions that they were tired. But the Navy men were businesslike and friendly, and soon they were hustling Jack into a pickup truck for a ride up to the medical clinic for a check-up on his shoulder and general condition. The others they asked apologetically to check in at the Chalet, where Sylvia and her team would ask them many of the same questions before they could go to their rooms and get some rest. Those who had given up their room on leaving for their trip were given keys to new rooms, and off they went.
Beeker Street, Crary Lab, the Chalet. The eight remaining travelers slowed, then bunched in the muddy open area above the Chalet.
Wade turned to Val, who was looking around at the town as spaced as any of them, or more so. “Why don’t I go check in at the Chalet for us, and tell them the rest of you will come down after you’ve had a chance to clean up.”
“Sure,” Val said.
Ta Shu was circling slowly, baffled. “This place,” he said. Jorge and Elspeth headed toward Hotel California. X led Carlos off to the BFC. Jim took off for the Holiday Inn. Wade drifted over to the Chalet, climbed laboriously the steps onto the porch. He looked back; without further ado the group that had traveled together so far, the group that had huddled on Shackleton Glacier bare to the storm, had dissipated in all directions.
Wade pulled back the heavy door of the Chalet. Inside things looked just as they had when he had last seen them, and he realized ruefully that he had expected everything everywhere to be changed.
But of course not. Paxman led him across the main room to Sylvia’s office. She was standing behind her desk, listening to a short man speak to her in a low voice. She saw Wade and waved him into the office without ever taking her attention from this man, who talked on in a low monotone, not acknowledging Wade’s appearance with even a glance. Something in Sylvia’s look told Wade that she had been listening to him for quite some time.
“My clients are not associated with Earth First! or the Sea Shepherds or the Arctic Peoples’ Defense League, or the Antarctic World Park Emergency Rescue Action, or the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or any of the mainstream environmental groups, or any of the underground groups.”
“Okay,” Sylvia said. “Who are they then?”
“They don’t tell me,” the man replied levelly. “They’ve given me to know that they are private individuals, of no affiliation, who have decided to practice civil disobedience and direct action in the form of targetted nonlethal ecotage, to resist and hopefully bring to an end all transgressions of the Antarctic Treaty, which was until its expiration the only law this continent had. They feel that the other environmentalist groups allied with their cause can provide the arguments, the legalities, the publicity, and all the rest of the apparatus of resistance, all important, and their function is to take direct action, and then to stay out of sight and remain undiscovered. In this particular case only, they’ve gone so far as to hire me to speak for them here to you, because none of the other groups they contacted would agree to do that.”
Sylvia looked at him closely; Wade would not have wanted to be on the receiving end of that flinty gaze. She could not have been at all happy that the Navy was back in town, Wade thought. And this man was representing the people who had gotten them there.
The man did not seem to notice her gaze. Sylvia said, “Mr. Smith, this is Wade Norton, an assistant to Senator Chase from California.”
“Hello,” Mr. Smith said, shaking Wade’s hand. “I admire many of the things Senator Chase has done.”
Sylvia nodded, as if to say Of course. “Wade, this is Mr. Smith. He has shown up here in McMurdo by sea, unannounced.”
“I came privately,” Mr. Smith explained. “I’m from Smith, Jones and Robinson, environmental law.”
“I see,” Wade said.
“Wade has been out in the field, and I believe he has witnessed the impact of your clients’ actions. Is that right, Wade?”
Wade nodded. “We survived,” he said.
Mr. Smith was dressed in standard trekker’s garb, which meant he was too warm in the Chalet. In spite of the prisming blue photovoltaic suit he looked innocuous, like a small-town lawyer; he had so well practiced the semiotics of the nonconfrontational that he had become nearly invisible. A puppet only, his appearance said; a spokesman for his clients and that was all; no views of his own, no thinking, nothing but a medium of transmission, like a walking telephone, or a microwave signal repeater.
Of course that had to be a front, and a front Wade was quite familiar with; in fact it was a popular style in Washington these days, usually practiced by very sharp lawyers indeed. He said, “How do you communicate with your clients?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. I can say I have never met any of them in person.”
“So some of them might be down here among us, and you wouldn’t know.”
“That’s correct.”
“I might be one of them, and you wouldn’t know.”
“That’s correct.”
The bland little man looked closely at Wade for the first time, as if trying to ascertain whether this were the case.
Wade thought it over. He said to Sylvia, “Senator Chase has suggested to me that since we have all the players involved in the recent events here at hand, you might consider meeting to discuss the issues involved openly, with the idea of making a report to the investigators who no doubt are on their way to join us, or are already here.”
“Most of them will get here tomorrow, weather permitting,” Sylvia said. “The storms have held them up in Christchurch.”
“The senator wonders if we could even make some recommendations for future policy which would help to avoi
d any repetitions of incidents like this one. And I think Mr. Smith’s presence here means this meeting could have even wider representation than Senator Chase imagined. I could also invite some friends into town to participate as well—the people who helped us get back here.”
“Ferals?” Sylvia asked sharply.
“Why yes,” Wade said. “So you do know about them.”
She met his gaze calmly. “I’ve heard rumors. I’d be interested to hear what they had to say. I’ve tried to make contact with them before. But never any reply.”
“No. But now they may be willing to come in. Given what has happened.”
Sylvia nodded, thinking it over.
“If anything positive is to come out of all this,” Wade said, “it will have to happen here, I think. Up north it will sink into the mass of everything else.”
“Possibly,” Sylvia said. “Although SCAR, and the Treaty negotiating committee, and now it looks like a UN committee, will all be considering the matter, along with our Congress and other governments.”
“No doubt. But the fuller our report, the more they’ll have to work with.”
“My clients would welcome such a meeting,” Mr. Smith said.
“How do you know?” Wade and Sylvia said together.
Mr. Smith returned their stares blandly. The role of the spokesperson was an ambiguous one, as Wade very well knew, having just put words into Phil Chase’s mouth. Walking telephone or mastermind? There was no way to tell.
“Have you gotten all stranded parties back to safety?” Wade asked Sylvia. “I mean, is it appropriate to start holding such a meeting?”
Sylvia nodded. “S-375 have been heloed back from the Dry Valleys, and I’ve just heard from Palmer and Pioneer Hills that all the affected oil personnel have been recovered. Everyone’s in.”
“Nobody was hurt by my clients’ actions,” Mr. Smith noted.
“That was luck,” Wade said. “That was sheer luck, I can tell you that personally. If it weren’t for the help of people your clients don’t even know about, a good number of us would have died. Destroying life support systems on the polar cap is very, very dangerous. Reckless endangerment at the very least.”
“Nevertheless,” Mr. Smith said. “The fact remains.”
“Let’s not get into that now,” Sylvia said. “The fact is that Mr. Smith’s clients committed serious criminal acts, very dangerous to people down here, and that will be taken into account I’m sure.” She looked at the man. “I hope you’re prepared to answer for what these clients of yours have done, Mr. Smith. It could come to contempt of court and more, I imagine, if you choose to shield them from the law.”
“I’ve never been cited for contempt, and don’t plan to be now,” Mr. Smith said. “Of course I’m prepared for anything. I brought my toothbrush.”
Sylvia and Wade looked at each other.
“I have to get cleaned up,” Wade said. “Get some food, and see if I can contact the ferals. And talk to the senator.” Or not. He too was a spokesperson. You’re the senator, as they kept saying at the Pole. Or wherever it had been.
Sylvia said, “I’ll talk to some of the others. Let’s meet again after dinner with whomever is available, for starters. As you say, there’s no time to lose.”
Val kicked the muddy snow off her boots and stomped up the stairs of dorm 308, then dragged down the hall to her room on the top floor. She opened the door and went inside, and sat down heavily on the bed. Everything in its place, same as always. A functional little space, like a ship’s cabin. It appeared that Georgia, her roommate for the season, was out on a trip of her own; her bags were gone, her closet doors shut. They had barely even met.
She felt utterly drained. Hollow. McMurdo looked terrible. Her trekking group had dispersed with barely a word, off to dorm or hotel, no plans for a final dinner together that night, nothing. She had got them all home after losing the sledge in the crevasse, but it hadn’t really been her doing. If it weren’t for the ferals Jack very possibly would have died on Shackleton Glacier, and none of them could be sure they would have survived that storm; weather said it was still going strong out there. Besides, back home without anyone dead wasn’t exactly how you wanted to characterize a trip, given that it had been an expedition undertaken for pleasure. There needed to be more than “Got home alive.”
Better luck next time, she always said to herself after the bad trips. There were bad ones and good ones. There had been good trips too. And there would be more of them in the future. No doubt about it.
Still she couldn’t shake the low feeling. Postexpedition blues, sleep deprivation, polar T-3 syndrome, whatever; she felt bad. Right on the edge of tears. It was a mood she hated. Whenever she saw it coming she fought it tooth and claw, she would not allow it. The antidote was action. She stood up and left the room, which at this moment seemed a black trap. She pulled on her parka and stumped back down the metal stairs at the end of the dorm, went back outside into the bitter wind.
Funky old Mac Town. There was nowhere to go. She was weary to the bone, her muscles stiff and sore—a feeling she usually liked, but not now. It had gone beyond that. She was hungry but the galley was closed. She went by the Chalet but it was after hours, and Sylvia and Wade had already left. There would be friends to talk to at the BFC, although they would no doubt still be busy sorting out the mess caused by the ecoteurs.
But by now the Erebus View would be open. She walked past the Holiday Inn and up the stairs to the private restaurant, stomach growling, almost faint with hunger. She walked through the door, into an ambrosia of food smells. Looked around for an empty table.
And there were Jim and Jack and Jorge and Elspeth, having dinner. Jack saw her and quickly looked away, scowling. Elspeth saw him turn his head, and glanced over her shoulder: “Oh hi Val,” riding over any awkwardness, “come join us.”
But Jack was glowering still, and after glancing at him, Jim would not meet her eye. Elspeth and Jorge, necks craned to look at Val over their booth back, didn’t see the other two.
Val waved a hand: “I’m looking for Joyce right now, I’ve got to talk to her. I’ll come back and catch you for dessert maybe.” And she retreated out of the restaurant.
Standing outside in the chill of McMurdo. Cloud shadows flitting through town. Blindly she stumped down the street behind the docks, helplessly thinking of all the bad expeditions she had ever been on, the ones people had walked away from furious or ashamed or sick at heart. It happened, oh yes it happened; under the stress of some of these radical endeavors people cracked, and the truth came out. And sometimes it was ugly. That ugly scowl on Jack’s face—Val had seen it before. One time she had been on the receiving end of that look for a whole week, on the ship returning them to the Falklands from South Georgia Island. After the one and only “In the Wake of Shackleton” expedition.
It had been one of the groups that had worn period clothing, a particularly crazy idea when repeating the boat journey, as the stuff the old guys had worn was ridiculously inadequate, and they could not have been more soaked, cold, and miserable. If they had been in a boat like the James Caird they would have died many times over; and even though their twenty-two-foot ultramodern boat had resembled a floating submarine more than Shackleton’s little lifeboat of the same length, and thus kept them afloat even in horrifying seas, it had still been a complete nightmare: everyone seasick, always lost unless they turned on the emergency GPS, cold and wet in the terrible gear, hurting with an accumulation of injuries as the result of being hammered relentlessly by huge waves. By the time they made their GPS-aided landfall on South Georgia Island, they were all wasted.
With the hardest part yet to go. For Shackleton and his men had been forced to land on the west side of the island, when all the Norwegian whaling stations were on the east side. And the island was a mountain range sticking up out of the South Atlantic.
Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had made it over, however, and Val’s three clients were stubbornly determi
ned to do the same. So they had set off from King Haakon Bay to make the thirty-six-mile crossing of the island’s spine in a single push. It was a long way given the shape they were in, and over a steep range five thousand feet high, no small height when both ends of the trip were at sea level, and the island right in the Furious Fifties storm track. And they were minimally equipped for the hike, carrying only what Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had carried in 1916. It was a radical trip; a real test.
As they ascended and began to cross the island’s high empty glaciers, however, struggling through the deep snow, Eve had begun to tire fast. She had been the most seasick on the boat journey, and it became clear that she just didn’t have any gas left in the tank. The two men were almost as weak, and even Val was not feeling the usual dynamo effect that a hard hike had on her; it really hurt to give it her usual push. So they were in bad shape as they approached the crux of the journey, a ridge called The Trident directly blocking their way. There were four high passes to choose from, between the five tines so to speak. Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had started at the right and climbed up to each of the passes in turn, looking down the other side of each and finding them cliffs too steep to descend; then traversing under the towers to the next pass, each time with a terrible effort.
Without discussion Val’s group gave up on following this precise route and went straight for the fourth pass, the one Shackleton and his men had finally forced their way over. By the time they got close, the weather was degenerating. They had no tent or sleeping bags with them, and little food or clothing. And darkness was coming on fast, with the strong possibility of losing the moonlight to cloud cover, and perhaps even being stormed in. And then on the final approach to the pass, very steep even on that side, Eve had slipped and had to be arrested by Val, and in the jolt Eve somehow twisted her ankle pretty badly.