Getting Back (45 page)

Jed's nose hairs had already frozen. The cold ached in his lungs. His goggles were fogging up, and his cheeks felt numb. He'd only been outside a few minutes. It was worse than he expected.

They descended a snowy ramp to a dark, garage-sized entrance at the base of the dome, Lewis mincing in his Frankenstein-sized boots so he wouldn't fall and slide on his butt. His guide paused to wait for him and let their eyes adjust to the dimness inside the door. Two cavelike corrugated-steel arches extended into gloom to his left and right. "BioMed and the fuel arch that way, generators and garage over here." Jed had a shadowy impression of walls and doors of plywood and steel, unpainted and utilitarian. Before he could peek into the arched tunnels he was led straight ahead. "The dome where we're quartered is this way."

The overturned bowl shielded the core of the South Pole base like a military helmet, keeping warmth-sucking wind and blowing snow off the metal boxes where people lived. Three of these boxcar-shaped structures, colored orange, sat on short stilts under its shelter. Since the base was built on snow, the powder didn't stop at the entrance but formed the dome floor, drifting over wooden crates and mounding against the orange housing units. Dirt and grease had colored the snow tan, like sand.

"It never melts," his guide said, scuffing at it. "The ambient temperature in here is fifty-one below."

Lewis tilted his head back. There was a hole at the top of the dome that let in pale light from a remote sky. The entire underside of the uninsulated structure was covered with steel gray icicles, pointing downward like a roof of nails. It was beautiful and forbidding at the same time.

"You didn't finish the roof."

"Ventilation."

Someone bumped Lewis, and he staggered to one side. It was another winter-over, rushing a crate of fresh fruit to the galley before it could harden in the cold. "Sorry! Freshies are like gold!" They followed the hurrying man to a freezerlike door and opened it for him. To get inside you pulled a metal rod sideways and tugged at a slab like a wall. Jed realized that the freezer wasn't inside here, it was the Outside: Anything not carried into the orange housing modules would turn hard as a brick. They followed the fruit bearer. There was a vestibule hung with parkas and beyond it a galley of bright fluorescent light, warmth, and the excited chatter of more people saying good-bye. Their duffels were heaped like sandbags. People were packed to go.

His guide let Jed's gear drop with a thud and pushed back his goggles and hood. "Rod Cameron. Station manager."

"Hi." Lewis tried to fix the face, but the men in their parkas looked alike. He had an impression of beard, chapped skin, and red raccoon lines where the goggles cut. Lewis was wondering about the absentee at the plane. "Someone not show up for work?"

Cameron frowned. He had a look of rugged self-confidence that came from coping with cold and administration, and a hint of strain for the same reason. The Pole wore on you. "Egos in kindergarten." He shook his head. "My job is to herd cats. And I'm having a bad day. We had a little alarm last night."

"Alarm?"

"The heat went off."

"Oh."

"We got it back on."

"Oh."

The station manager studied the newcomer. Jed still looked smooth, sandy-haired, and tanned, with the easy tautness of the recreational athlete.

It would pass.

"You got your file?"

Lewis dug in his duffel and fished out a worn manila envelope with employment forms, medical records, dental X rays and a list of the personal belongings he'd shipped to the Pole in advance of his own arrival. His new boss glanced inside, as if to confirm Jed's presence with paper, then put the folder under his arm. "I've got to go back outside to see this last plane off," Cameron said. "I'll show you around later, but right now it's best to just sit and drink."

Jed looked around the galley in confusion.

"I mean drink water. The altitude. You feel lousy, right? It's okay. Fingies are supposed to."

"Fingie?"

"F-N-G-I. Fucking New Guy on the Ice. That's you."

Lewis failed at a grin. "Latecomer."

"Just new. Everybody's a fingie at first. We know we're lucky to get you last minute like this. Jim Sparco e-mailed about you like the Second Coming."

"I needed a job."

"Yeah, he explained that. I think it's cool that you quit Big Oil." Cameron gave a nod of approval.

"That's me, man of principle." Lewis had a headache from the altitude.

"Course we need their shit to keep from freezing down here."

"Not from a wildlife refuge, you don't."

"And you just walked out."

"They weren't about to give me a helicopter ride."

"That took some guts."

"It had to be done."

Cameron tried to assess the new man. Lewis looked tired, disoriented, chest rising and falling, half-excited and half-afraid. They all started like that. The station manager turned back to the door, impatient to get away, and considered whether to say anything else. "I've got to go get the plane off," he finally said again. "You know what that means, don't you?"

"What?"

"That you can't quit, down here."

A stream of people followed Cameron out, some looking at Lewis curiously and others ignoring him: the winter-overs going to off-load the supplies and the last from summer flying home. The Pole had a brief four-month window when weather permitted incoming flights, then in February the last plane left, fleeing north like a migrating bird. In winter it was too dark to see, too windy to keep the ice runway clear, and too cold to risk a landing: Struts could snap, hydraulics fail, doors fail to open or close. The sun set on March 21, the equinox, and wouldn't rise again until September 21. From February to October the base was as remote as the moon. There were twenty-six winter-overs who retreated under the dome to maintain its functions and take astronomical and weather readings: eight women and eighteen men this year. It was like being on a submarine or space station. You had to commit.

The galley had emptied, and Lewis took a place at a Formica table. The room was low-ceilinged, bright, and warm. A bulletin board was thick with paper, a juice dispenser burbled, and in the corner a television monitor displayed outside temperatures. It was fifty-eight below zero near the runway, the breeze lowering the windchill to minus eighty-one. The reading was an abstraction except for the freezer door he'd come through. That was old, and cold leaked around its edges to rime its inner face with frost. The frost reached all the way across it in stripes, like fingers. The pattern reminded Lewis of a giant hand, trying to yank the door away.

"Drink as much as you can. Best cure for the altitude."

Lewis looked up. It was the cook, bald except for a topknot that hung from the back of his head. His skull looked knobby, as if knocked around more than once, and he had a gray mustache and forearms tattooed with a bear and eagle. Here was somebody easy to remember.

"It doesn't look high."

"That's because it's flat. You're sitting on ice almost two miles thick. Our elevation is ninety-three hundred, and the thinning of the atmosphere at the Poles makes the effective altitude closer to eleven thousand. Walking out of that transport is like being dumped on the crest of the Rockies. Your body will adjust in a few days."

"I feel hammered." The short walk from the plane had made him ill.

"You'll be racing around the world before you know it."

"Around the world?"

"Around the stake that marks the Pole." He sat down. "Wade Pulaski. Chief cook and bottle washer. Best chef for nine hundred miles. I can't claim any farther because Cathy Costello back at McMurdo is pretty good, too." McMurdo was the main American base in Antarctica, located on the coast.

"Jedediah Lewis, polar weatherman." He shook.

"Jedediah? Your parents religious?"

"More like hippies, I think. When it was a fad."

"But it's biblical, right? You're a prophet?"

"Oracle of climate change by temporary opportunity. Rock hound by training. And it's actually just another name for Solomon. 'Beloved of the Lord.' "

"So you're wise."

His head was pounding. "I take my name as God's little joke."

"What do you mean by 'rock hound'?"

"Geologist. That's my real job."

"So you come to the one place on earth where there aren't any rocks? Doctor Bob will have a field day with that one."

"Who's Doctor Bob?"

"Our new shrink. NASA sent him down to do a head job on us before they plant too many people on the space station. He's wintering over to write us up while we fuck with each other's minds. He thinks we're all escapists."

Lewis smiled. "Rod Cameron just told me we can't quit."

"That's what I told Doctor Bob! It's like being paid to go to prison!"

"And yet we volunteered."

"I'm on my third season." Pulaski stretched out his arms in mock enthusiasm, as if to claim ownership. "I can't stay away. If the generators stop like they did last night, we've got maybe a few hours, but we always get them running again."

"Why'd they stop?"

"Some moron turned the wrong valve. Rod went ballistic, which meant nobody was in a mood to confess this morning. But it was a stupid annoyance, not a threat. And you're going to learn that as long as you don't freeze to death things are really good down here, especially now that the last of summer camp is leaving and the bureaucrats are ten thousand miles away. I give you better food than you'd get back home and there's no bullshit at the Pole. There's no clock to punch, no bills, no taxes, no traffic, no newspapers, no nothing. After today everything calms down, and this becomes the sanest place on earth. Cozier than most families. And after eight toasty months you come out with your head straight and your money saved. It's paradise, man."

Lewis reserved agreement. "You got any aspirin?"

"Sure." The cook got a bottle from the kitchen and brought it back. "You feel like shit right now, but you'll get better."

"I know."

"You even acclimate to the cold. A little."

"I know."

Pulaski went to the counter where food was passed. He bent under it to get a commissary-sized soup can, its label stripped and its inside cleaned to a bright copper. "Here, your arrival present."

"What's this for?" Lewis realized he felt stupid from the altitude.

"You'll drink all day and pee all night, this first night. It's your body adjusting to the cold and altitude. This can saves you about three hundred trips to the real can."

"A chamber pot?"

"Welcome to Planet Cueball, Fingie."