"Shannenhouse," he said. He had gone barreling down the steps without giving the pilot any warning and, as it turned out, had caught him during one of his rare periods of sleep. "Wake up, it"s daytime! It"s spring! Come on!"
Shannenhouse stumbled out of the plane, which glistened eerily in its tight glossy sheath of seal hides. "The sun?" he said. "Are you sure?"
"You just missed it, but it will be back in twenty hours."
A softness appeared in Shannenhouse"s eyes that Joe recognized from their first days on the Ice long ago. "The sun," he said. Then, "What do you want?"
"I want to go kill Jerry."
Shannenhouse pursed his lips. His beard was a foot long now, his smell excoriating, probing, nearly sentient. "All right," he said.
"Can that plane fly or not?"
Joe started around the tail, over to the starboard side of the plane, where he noticed that the hides covering the front part of the fuselage were of a much lighter color and a different texture than those on the port side.
Stacked in a neat pyramid beside the plane, like cargo waiting to be loaded on board, sat the skulls of seventeen dogs.
4
Wahoo Fleer, their dead CO, had been at Little America with Richard Byrd in "33 and again in "40. When they went through his files, they found detailed plans and orders for transmontane Antarctic flights. In 1940 Captain Fleer himself had flown over part of the territory they would be crossing to kill the Geologist, over the Rockefeller Mountains, over the Edsel Fords, toward the shattered magnificent vacancy of Queen Maud Land. He had made carefully typed lists of the things a man ought to carry with him.
1 ice-chisel 1 pair of snow-shoes 1 roll toilet paper 2 handkerchiefs The great anxiety of such a flight was the possibility of a forced landing. If they crashed, they would be alone and without hope of rescue at the magnetic center of nothingness itself. They would have to fight their way back to Kelvinator Station on foot, or press on ahead to Jotunheim. Captain Fleer had typed up lists of the emergency gear they would need in such an instance: tents, Primus stove, knives, saws, ax, rope, crampons. Sledges that they would have to drag themselves. Everything had to be considered for the weight it would add to the payload.
Engine m.u.f.f and blow-torch 4 lbs. 2 reindeer-fur sleeping-bags 18 lbs. Flare gun and eight cartridges 5 lbs.
The precision and order of Captain Fleer"s instructions had a settling effect on their minds, as did the return of the sun, and the idea of killing one of the enemy. They resumed each other"s company. Shannenhouse came in from the Hangar, and Joe moved his bedroll into the Mess Hall. They said nothing about their descent over the past three months into some ancient mammalian despair. Together they ransacked Wahoo Fleer"s desk. They found a decoded tidbit from Command, received the previous autumn, pa.s.sing along an unconfirmed report that there might or might not be a German installation on the Ice, code-named Jotunheim. They found a copy of the Book of Mormon, and a letter marked "In the Event of My Death," which they felt ent.i.tled, but could not bring themselves, to open.
Shannenhouse took a shower. This necessitated the melting of forty-five two-pound blocks of snow, which Joe, grunting and cursing in three languages, cut and shoveled, one by one, into the melter on the Mess Hall"s roof, whose zinc maw, like the bell of a gramophone, broadcast the thin reedy voice of the pilot singing "Nearer My G.o.d to Thee." They spoke little, but their exchanges were amiable, and over the course of a week they resumed the air of comradely put-uponness that had been universal among the men before the Wayne disaster. It was as if they had forgotten that flying unsupported and alone across one thousand miles of storm-tossed pack and glacier to shoot a lonely German scientist had been their own idea.
"How would you feel about a nice ten- or twelve-hour stretch of, oh, say shoveling snow?" shoveling snow?" they would call to each other from their bunks in the morning, after they had spent the previous five days doing only that, as if some unfeeling superior had put them on shovel duty and they were just the unlucky stiffs who had to obey the order to dig out the Hangar and the tractor garage. In the evening, when they came aching, faces and fingers seared with cold, back into the tunnels, they filled the Mess Hall with cries of "Whiskey rations!" and "Steaks for the men!" they would call to each other from their bunks in the morning, after they had spent the previous five days doing only that, as if some unfeeling superior had put them on shovel duty and they were just the unlucky stiffs who had to obey the order to dig out the Hangar and the tractor garage. In the evening, when they came aching, faces and fingers seared with cold, back into the tunnels, they filled the Mess Hall with cries of "Whiskey rations!" and "Steaks for the men!"
Once they had the snow tractor dug out, it required a full day of tinkering and heating various parts of its balky Raiser engine to get it running again. They lost an entire day driving it thirty yards across level snow from the garage to the Hangar. They lost another day when the winch on the tractor failed, and the Condor, which they had managed to tow halfway up the snow ramp they"d crafted, snapped loose and went sledding back down into the Hangar, shearing off the tip of its left lower wing. This required another three days of repair, and then Shannenhouse came into the Mess Hall, where Joe had a Royal Canadian Mounted Police manual for 1912 open to the chapter ent.i.tled "Some Particulars of Sledge Maintenance," and was struggling to make sure the man-sledges were properly lashed. mare sure sledges properly lashed was item 14 on Captain Fleer"s Pre-Flight Checklist. Three languages did not suffice for his cursing needs.
"I"m out of dogs," Shannenhouse said. The new tip he had grafted on the Condor"s wing needed to be covered and doped to the rest of the sheathing, otherwise the plane would not take off.
Joe looked at him, blinking, trying to take in his meaning. It was the twelfth of September. In another few days, perhaps, if it could break through the melting pack, a ship bringing soldiers and planes would be returning to Jotunheim, and if they had not managed to get aloft by then, their mission might have to be called off. That was part of Shannenhouse"s meaning.
"You can"t use the men," Joe said.
"I wasn"t suggesting that," Shannenhouse said. "Though I would be lying, Dopey, if I said the thought hadn"t occurred to me."
He stroked at his whiskers, looking at Joe; he still hadn"t shaved his bearish red beard. His eyes rolled toward Joe"s bunk, where Oyster lay sleeping.
"There"s Mussels," he said.
They shot Oyster. Shannenhouse lured the not wholly unsuspecting dog topside with a slab of frozen porterhouse and then put a bullet point-blank between the good eye and the pearl. Joe couldn"t bear to watch; he lay on his bunk fully dressed, zipped into his parka, and cried. All of Shannenhouse"s former loutishness was gone; he respected Joe"s grief at the sacrifice of the dog, and handled the grisly work of skinning and flensing and tanning himself. The next day Joe tried to forget about Oyster and to lose himself in vengeful thoughts and the stupendous tedium of adventure. He checked and rechecked their gear against Captain Fleer"s lists. He found and removed the ice-hammer that had somehow fallen into the gearbox of the tractor"s winch. He waxed the skis and checked the bindings. He dragged the sledges back in from the tunnels, undid them, and lashed them again the Mountie way. He cooked steak and eggs for himself and Shannenhouse. He plucked the steaks from the salted pan, set them steaming on two big metal plates, and deglazed the pan with whiskey. He set the whiskey on fire and then blew the fire out. Shannenhouse came in stinking of processed flesh. He took the plate gratefully from Joe, his expression solemn.
"Just big enough," he said.
Joe took his plate, sat down at the captain"s desk, and, hoping to absorb from the instrument some of the captain"s thoroughness, typed the following statement: To those who will come searching for Lt John Wesley Shannenhouse (j.g.) and Radioman Second Cla.s.s Joseph Kavalier: I apologize for our presence being elsewhere and probably in all truth dead.
We have confirmed an establishment of a German military and scientific base located in the Queen Maud Land, also known as Neuschwabenland. This base is presently manned by one man only. (See, if you please, attached transcripts, intercepted radio transmissions A-RRR, l.viii.44-2.ix.44.) As there are two of us the situation seems clear.
Here Joe stopped typing and sat chewing for a minute on a piece of steak. The situation was far from clear. The man they were going to kill had done nothing to harm either of them. He was not a soldier. It was unlikely that he had been involved in any but the most tangential, metaphysical of ways with the building of the witch"s house in Terezin. He had had nothing to do with the storm that blew up out of the Azores or the torpedo that had blown a hole in the hull of the Ark of Miriam. Ark of Miriam. Rut these things had, nonetheless, made Joe want to kill someone, and he did not know who else to kill. Rut these things had, nonetheless, made Joe want to kill someone, and he did not know who else to kill.
To those who quite reasonably inquire as to our motives or authorities in performing this mission, He stopped typing again.
"Johnny," he said. "Why are you doing this?"
Shannenhouse looked up from a nine-month-old copy of All Doll. All Doll. Cleaned up and bearded, he looked like one of the faces that had lined the main hall of Joe"s old gymnasium, the portraits of past headmasters, stern and moral men untroubled by doubt. Cleaned up and bearded, he looked like one of the faces that had lined the main hall of Joe"s old gymnasium, the portraits of past headmasters, stern and moral men untroubled by doubt.
"I came here to fly airplanes," he said.
let it be not doubtful that we thought only to serve our country (adopted in my case).
Please see to the care of the men in quarters who are dead and frozen.
Respectfully, Joseph Kavalier, Radioman Second Cla.s.s.
September 12, 1944.
He pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, then rolled it in again, and left it like that. Shannenhouse came over to read it, nodded once, and then went back out to the Hangar to see to the plane.
Joe lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes, but the sense of conclusiveness, of putting his affairs in order, which he had sought in typing up a final statement, eluded him. He lit a cigarette and took a deep draft of it, and tried to clear his mind and conscience so that he could face the next day and its duties untroubled by any scruple or distraction. When he had finished his smoke, he rolled over and tried to sleep, but the memory of Oyster"s single trusting blue eye would not leave his mind. He turned, and tossed, and tried to lull himself to sleep, as Rosa had once instructed him to do, by imagining that he lay floating on a black raft, on a warm black lagoon, in the blackness of a moonless tropical night. There was nothing inside or outside of him but soft warm blackness. Presently he felt himself slipping toward sleep, pouring into it like sand racing toward the neck of an hourgla.s.s. In this twilit hypnogogic state he began to imagine-but it was stronger than a mere imagining, it was as if he were remembering the fact, believing it-that Oyster had been capable of speech, had possessed a sweet, calm, plaintive voice capable of expressing reason and pa.s.sion and concern, and that he could not now get the dead dog"s voice out of his ears. We had so much to say to each other, he thought. What a shame that I only realized it now. Then in the instant before he went under, a sharp barking sounded in his inner ear and he sat bolt upright, his heart pounding. He realized that it was not the betrayed love of Oyster, but of someone far dearer and more lost to him, that haunted him now and prevented him from making peace with the possibility of his own death.
He crawled down to the foot of the bunk and opened his footlocker, and took out the thick sheaf of letters that he had received from Rosa after his enlistment at the end of 1941. The letters had followed him, irregularly but steadily, from basic training at Newport, Rhode Island, to the navy"s polar training station at Thule, Greenland, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he had spent the fall of 1943 as the Kelvinator mission was a.s.sembled. After that, as no reply from their addressee was ever forthcoming, there had been no more letters. Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and finally ceased; the heart had stopped.
Now he took out the penknife that had been a gift from Thomas, and that had once saved the life of Salvador Dali, and slit open the first of the letters.
Dear Joe, I wish that we could at least have said goodbye to each other before you left New York. I think I understand why you ran away. I am sure that you must blame me for what happened. If I had not sent you to Hermann Hoffman, then your brother would not have been on that ship. I don"t know what would have become of him in that case. And neither do you. But I accept and understand that you might hold me responsible. I suppose that I might have run away, too.
I know that you still love me. It"s an article of faith for me that you do and that you always will. And it breaks my heart to think that we might never see or touch each other ever again. But what is even more painful to me is the thought-the certainty I have- that right now you are wishing that you and I had never met. If that is true, and I know it is, then I wish the same thing. Because knowing that you could feel that way about me makes all that we had seem like nothing at all. It was all wasted time. That is something I will never accept, even if it"s true.
I don"t know what is going to happen to you, to me, to the country or the world. And I don"t expect you to answer this letter, because I can feel the door to you slamming in my face and I know that it"s you slamming it shut. But I love you, Joe, with or without your consent. So that is how I plan to write to you-with or without your consent. If you don"t want to hear from me, just throw away this and all the letters that follow it. For all I know these words themselves are lying at the bottom of the sea.
I have to go now. I love you.
Rosa
He read through the rest of them after that, proceeding in chronological order. In the second letter, she mentioned that Sammy had quit his job at Empire and gone to work for Burns, Baggot DeWinter, the advertising agency that handled the Oneonta Woolens account. In the evenings, she said, he came home and worked on his novel. Then, in her fifth letter, Joe was startled to read that, in a civil ceremony on New Year"s Day of 1942, Rosa had married Sammy. After that, there was a gap of three months, and she wrote to say that she and Sammy had bought a house in Midwood. Then there was another gap of a few months, and then in September 1942 she wrote with the news that she had given birth to a seven-pound, two-ounce son, and that, in honor of Joe"s lost brother, they had named the baby Thomas. She called him Tommy. Subsequent letters gave news and details of little Tommy"s first words, first steps, illnesses, and prodigies-at the age of fourteen months, he had drawn a recognizable circle with a pen. The sc.r.a.p of paper place mat from Jack Dempsey"s restaurant on which he had drawn it was included in the envelope. It was wobbly and poorly closed off, but it was, as Rosa said in the letter, as round as a baseball. There was a single photograph of the child, in undershirt and diaper, holding himself up against a table on which some comic books lay scattered. His head was big and luminous and pale as the moon, his expression at once wondering and hostile, as if the camera frightened him.
Had Joe read the letters from Rosa as they arrived, with gaps of weeks and months between them, he might have been deceived by the falsifying of the date of baby Thomas"s birth, but read all at once-as a kind of continuous narrative-the letters betrayed just enough inconsistency in their accounting of months and milestones that Joe became suspicious, and his initial stab of jealousy and his deep puzzlement over Rosa"s hasty marriage to Sammy gave way to a sad understanding. The letters were like fragments from a old-fashioned novel-they contained not only a mysterious birth and a questionable marriage, but a couple of deaths as well. In the spring of 1942, old Mrs. Kavalier had died, in her sleep, at the age of ninety-six. And then a letter from late summer of 1943, just after Joe"s arrival in Cuba, reported the fate of Tracy Bacon. The actor had joined the Army Air Forces shortly after completing the second Escapist serial, The Escapist and the Axis of Death, The Escapist and the Axis of Death, and had been shipped to the Solomon Islands. In early June, the Liberator bomber of which Bacon was the copilot had been shot down during a raid on Rabaul. At the bottom of this letter, the last letter in the packet, there was a brief postscript from Sammy. and had been shipped to the Solomon Islands. In early June, the Liberator bomber of which Bacon was the copilot had been shot down during a raid on Rabaul. At the bottom of this letter, the last letter in the packet, there was a brief postscript from Sammy. Hi buddy Hi buddy was all it said. was all it said.
Until now, Joe had told himself that he had buried his love for Rosa in the same deep hole in which he had laid his grief for his brother. She had been right: in the immediate aftermath of Thomas"s death, he had blamed her, not merely for having introduced him to Hermann Hoffman and his cursed ship but also more vaguely and more crucially for having lured him into betraying the singleness of purpose-the dogged cultivation of a pure and unshakable anger-that had marked his first year of exile from Prague. He had all but abandoned the fight, allowed his thoughts to stray fatally from the battle, betrayed himself to the seductions of New York and Hollywood and Rosa Saks-and been punished for it. Although his need-indeed, his ability-to blame Rosa for all this had pa.s.sed with time, his renewed resolve and his craving for revenge, which grew in intensity as it was frustrated again and again by the inscrutable plans of the U.S. Navy, so filled his heart that he believed his love to have been completely extinguished, as a great fire can put out a smaller one by starving it of oxygen and fuel. Now, as he returned the last letter to the packet, he was almost sick with longing for Mrs. Rosa Clay of Van Pelt Street, Midwood, Brooklyn.
Sammy had once told him about the capsule that had been buried at the World"s Fair, in which typical items of that time and place-some nylon stockings, a copy of Gone with the Wind, Gone with the Wind, a Mickey Mouse drinking cup-had been buried in the ground, to be recovered and marveled at by the people of some future gleaming New York. Now, as he read through these thousands of words that Rosa had written to him, and her raspy, plaintive voice sounded in his ear, his entombed memories of Rosa were hauled up as from a deep shaft within him. The lock on the capsule was breached, the hasps were thrown, the hatch opened, and with a ghostly whiff of lily of the valley and a fluttering of moths, he remembered-he allowed himself to enjoy a final time-the stickiness and weight of her thigh thrown over his belly in the middle of a hot August night, her breath against the top of his head and the pressure of her breast against his shoulder as she gave his hair a trim in the kitchen of his apartment on Fifth Avenue, the burble and glint of the a Mickey Mouse drinking cup-had been buried in the ground, to be recovered and marveled at by the people of some future gleaming New York. Now, as he read through these thousands of words that Rosa had written to him, and her raspy, plaintive voice sounded in his ear, his entombed memories of Rosa were hauled up as from a deep shaft within him. The lock on the capsule was breached, the hasps were thrown, the hatch opened, and with a ghostly whiff of lily of the valley and a fluttering of moths, he remembered-he allowed himself to enjoy a final time-the stickiness and weight of her thigh thrown over his belly in the middle of a hot August night, her breath against the top of his head and the pressure of her breast against his shoulder as she gave his hair a trim in the kitchen of his apartment on Fifth Avenue, the burble and glint of the Trout Trout Quintet playing in the background as the smell of her c.u.n.t, rich and faintly smoky like cork, perfumed an idle hour in her father"s house. He recalled the sweet illusion of hope that his love for her had brought him. When he had finished the last letter, he slipped it back into its envelope. He went back to Wahoo Fleer"s typewriter, pulled out the statement he had left, and laid it carefully on the desk. Then he rolled in a clean sheet and typed: Quintet playing in the background as the smell of her c.u.n.t, rich and faintly smoky like cork, perfumed an idle hour in her father"s house. He recalled the sweet illusion of hope that his love for her had brought him. When he had finished the last letter, he slipped it back into its envelope. He went back to Wahoo Fleer"s typewriter, pulled out the statement he had left, and laid it carefully on the desk. Then he rolled in a clean sheet and typed: To be delivered to Mrs. Rosa Clay of Brooklyn U.S.A.
Dear Rosa, It was not your fault; I do not blame you. Please forgive me for running away, and remember me with love as I remember you and our golden age. As for the child, who can only be our son, I wish This time he could not think how to continue. He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much-indeed to revolve around him-could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all. The little boy"s name, and his serious, wide-eyed stare in the photograph, jabbed at some place inside Joe that was so broken and raw that he felt it as a kind of mortal danger to consider the child for very long. Since he did not plan to return alive, one way or another, from the trip to Jotunheim, he told himself that the boy was much better off without him. He made up his mind then and there, sitting at the desk of the dead captain, that in the unlikely event his plan went awry and he should find himself somehow still living at war"s end, he would never have anything to do with any of them, but in particular with this sober and fortunate American boy. He pulled the letter out of the typewriter and folded it into an envelope on which he typed the words "In the event also of my death." He laid his envelope under that in which Captain Fleer had made his final wishes known. He tied up the packet of letters and photographs from Rosa and fed them, in a single swallow, to Wayne. Then he picked up his sleeping bag and went out to the radio shack to see if he could tune in Radio Jotunheim.
5
Shannenhouse spent a minute considering the cloudless sky, the light wind from the southeast. They had had a weatherman, Brodie, but even when he had been alive, Shannenhouse had disdained his counsel, agreeing with his old friend Lincoln Ellsworth that no one could predict the weather in this place. As long as they could get the plane off the ground, they might as well go. He was complaining of bowel troubles, and Joe afterward said in his report that he noticed Shannenhouse looked a little pale, but attributed this to drink. They backed the tractor up to the ramp once again and hooked the plane to it. This time the winch performed correctly, and they got the plane up onto the surface. While Shannenhouse set to work heating the engines and readying the plane, Joe loaded on their gear. They closed up all the hatches on the buildings and took a look around at the place that had been their home for the last nine months.
"I will be glad to get out of here," Shannenhouse said. "I just wish we were going someplace different."
Joe went to the tip of the wing where Oyster was. In his haste, Shannenhouse had not done an especially good job, and the skin looked half-cured and hung a little loose and puckered over the frame. The entire airplane had a pied appearance, reddish-brown blotches of seal st.i.tched against a background of silver-gray, as if it had been splashed with blood. Where the dog skins were, the plane looked bleached and sickly.
"Now or never, Dopey," said Shannenhouse. He pressed a hand to his side.
Thirty seconds later, they were b.u.mping and sc.r.a.ping over ground as jagged and shining as rock candy, and then something seemed to cup its hand underneath and bear them up. Shannenhouse let out a cowboyish yip, a little shyly.
"Never going to know what hit him," he shouted over the ba.s.so profundo chorusing of the big twin Cyclones.
Joe said nothing. He never told Shannenhouse that the night before, just before he lay down in his sleeping bag, he had broken the fict.i.tious invisible barrier that had hitherto been maintained between Kelvinator Station and Jotunheim, transmitting the following six words to the Geologist, in German plaintext, at one of the frequencies regularly used by Berlin to contact him: WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU.
He could never have prized apart to explain it to Shannenhouse the elf-knot of pity, remorse, and a desire to torment and terrify that had prompted this admonishment. In any case, it would have been superfluous to try, since on the third day of their journey, in a tent pitched on a plateau in the lee of the Eternity Mountains, Shannenhouse"s appendix burst.
6
The piebald airplane, off-kilter, coughing, trailing a long black thread from her port engine, hung in the sky for a moment a hundred feet west of Jotunheim, as if her pilot doubted his eyes, as if the glyph of huddled oblong mounds in the snow, the black barbell of the radio tower, and the ice-stiffened crimson flag with its spider eye were merely others in the long string of mirages, the phantom airplanes and fata morgana fairy castles, that had bewitched him in the course of his halting and baffled flight. He paid for his moment of hesitation: his remaining engine stalled. The plane dipped, jerked upward, wobbled, then fell, in silence and with surprising slowness, like a coin dropped into a jar of water. The plane hit the ground, and with a whisper, the snow exploded. A great hood of glittering spray, kicked up by the nose of the plane as it plowed along the ground, billowed and drifted across the clearing. The sounds of splintering timbers and steel bolts shearing away were caught up and m.u.f.fled in the roiling surf of snow. The silence deepened, broken only by a soft teakettle ticking and the snap of fabric as a torn section of fuselage sheathing flapped in the wind.
A few moments later, a head appeared over the top of the rugged furrow of ice and snow that the crash landing had piled up alongside the airplane. It was hooded, the face concealed by a narrow circular ruff of wolverine fur.
The German Geologist, whose name was Klaus Mecklenburg, and who had been emerging from his solitary quarters to watch the skies over Jotunheim at regular intervals of twenty minutes, raised his left hand, the fingers of his reindeer-skin glove outspread. The greeting had a somewhat incongruous appearance since, in his other hand, pointed loosely but generally in the direction of the pilot"s fur-trimmed head, he held a .45-caliber Walther service pistol. He had not slept at all in the five days since receiving the message that he had identified as originating from the American base in Marie Byrd Land, and had not slept well for nearly two months before that. He was drunk, jacked up on amphetamines, and suffering from the effects of a spastic colon. He kept the gun leveled at the man coming toward him over the ice, watching for other heads to appear, conscious of the tremor in his hand, aware that he might have time to get off only one or two shots before the others brought him down.
The American had halved the hundred meters that separated them before the Geologist began to wonder if he might not have been the only survivor of the crash. He came unsteadily, dragging his right leg behind him, the opening of his hood pointed straight ahead, as if without expectation of being followed or joined. He had pulled his arms down into his coat for warmth, and with the face invisible within the fur hole of the hood and the herky-jerk scarecrow gait, the sight of the sleeves flopping at the man"s sides unnerved the Geologist. It was as if he were being stalked by a parka filled with bones, the ghost of some failed expedition. The Geologist raised the gun, extending his arm, and aimed directly for the vapor emerging from the center of the hood. The American stopped, and his parka began to crumple and squirm as he struggled to get his arms out. He had just thrust his hands through the cuffs of his sleeves, extending his arms in a gesture of protest or supplication, when the first shot hit him at the shoulder and spun him around.
Mecklenburg had shot at birds and squirrels as a boy but had never fired a pistol before, and his arm rang with pain, as if the cold had frozen his arm and the recoil shattered it. Quickly, before pain and fear and doubt of his actions could stop him, he squeezed off the rest of the clip. Only after he had emptied it did he realize that he had been firing with his eyes closed. When he opened them again, the American was standing directly in front of him. He pushed back the circle of fur, and his hair and eyebrows, moistened by the condensation of his breath in-side the hood, began almost at once to rime over with frost. He was surprisingly young in spite of his beard, with an aquiline elegant face.
"I am very glad to be here," the American said in flawless German. He smiled. The smile caught for an instant as if on a sharp wire. There was a neat black hole in the shoulder of the parka. "The flight was difficult."
He pulled his right arm up inside the parka once more and felt around for a moment. When the hand reappeared, it was holding an automatic pistol. The American raised the gun up across his chest, as if to fire into the sky, and then his arm jerked. The Geologist took a step backward, then steeled himself, and threw himself onto the American, grabbing for the gun. As he did so, he realized that he had misinterpreted the situation, somehow, that the American had been in the act of tossing the pistol aside, that his unthreatening and even wistful air was not some elaborate ruse but merely the relief, dazed and unsteady, of someone who had survived an ordeal and was simply, as he had suggested, glad to be alive. Mecklenburg felt a sudden sharp regret for his behavior, for he was a peaceful and scholarly man who had always deplored violence, and one furthermore who liked and admired Americans, having known, in the course of his scientific career, a fair number of them. A gregarious man, he had nearly died of solitude in the last month, and now a boy had fallen out of the sky, an intelligent, able young man, one with whom he could discuss, in German no less, Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman, and now Mecklenburg had shot at him-emptied his clip-in this place where the only hope for survival, as he had so long argued, was friendly cooperation among the nations.
A chime tuned to C-sharp sounded in his ear, and with an odd sense of relief he felt his tormented bowels empty into his trousers. The American caught him in his arms, looking startled and friendless and sad. The Geologist opened his mouth and felt the bubble of his saliva freeze against his lips. What a hypocrite I have been! he thought.
It took Joe nearly half an hour to drag the German across ten of the twenty meters that separated them from the hatch of Jotunheim. It was a terrible expense of strength and will, but he knew that he would find medical supplies inside the station, and he was determined to save the life of the man who, just five days before, he had set out across eight hundred miles of useless ice to kill. He needed benzoin, cotton wool, a hemostat, needle and thread. He needed morphia and blankets and the ruddy flame of a stout German stove. The shock and fragrance of life, steaming red life, given off by the trail of the German"s blood in the snow was a reproach to Joe, the reproach of something beautiful and inestimable, like innocence, which he had been lured by the Ice into betraying. In seeking revenge, he had allied himself with the Ice, with the interminable white topography, with the sawteeth and creva.s.ses of death. Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him.
7
Informal German territorial claims to the regions bordering the Weddell Sea had first been advanced in the wake of the Filchner expedition of 1911-13. Flying the eagle of the Hohenzollerns, the Deutschland, Deutschland, under the command of scientist and Arctic explorer Wilhelm Filchner, had sailed farther south into this grievous sea than any previous ship, battering its way through the semipermanent pack until it reached an immense, impa.s.sable palisade of barrier ice. The under the command of scientist and Arctic explorer Wilhelm Filchner, had sailed farther south into this grievous sea than any previous ship, battering its way through the semipermanent pack until it reached an immense, impa.s.sable palisade of barrier ice. The Deutschland Deutschland then turned west and sailed for more than a hundred miles, finding no break or point of ingress in the sheer cliffs of the shelf that today bears Filchner"s name; explorers invariably give their names to the places that haunt or kill them. then turned west and sailed for more than a hundred miles, finding no break or point of ingress in the sheer cliffs of the shelf that today bears Filchner"s name; explorers invariably give their names to the places that haunt or kill them.
At last, with the end of the season only a few weeks away, they came upon a place, a fissure in the Barrier, where the level of the shelf dropped abruptly to no more than a few feet above sea level. A half-dozen ice anchors were quickly driven into the sh.o.r.e of this inlet, which the explorers named Raiser Wilhelm II Bay, and crates unloaded for the construction of a winter base. They chose a site some three miles inland for the erection of the hut, to which they gave the rather too-grand name of Augustaburg, and prepared to hunker down in the southernmost German colony until spring. A series of severe tremors in the ice, some lasting nearly a minute, and the subsequent calving, witnessed by the awed and deafened crew of the Deutschland, Deutschland, of a colossal iceberg a few miles east of the ship, put an abrupt end to their plans. After an uneasy week spent wondering and arguing whether they were about to be set adrift, they abandoned camp, returned to ship, and sailed north for home. They were almost immediately beset, and spent the winter being chewed by the molars of the Weddell Sea before warmer weather thawed them out and sent them limping home. of a colossal iceberg a few miles east of the ship, put an abrupt end to their plans. After an uneasy week spent wondering and arguing whether they were about to be set adrift, they abandoned camp, returned to ship, and sailed north for home. They were almost immediately beset, and spent the winter being chewed by the molars of the Weddell Sea before warmer weather thawed them out and sent them limping home.
It was in the base camp abandoned by this expedition that Joseph Kavalier, Radioman Second Cla.s.s, was found by the navy icebreaker William Dyer. William Dyer. He had been in intermittent contact with the ship via a portable radio set, giving more or less accurate readings of his position. Commander Frank J. Kemp, skipper of the He had been in intermittent contact with the ship via a portable radio set, giving more or less accurate readings of his position. Commander Frank J. Kemp, skipper of the Dyer, Dyer, noted in his log that the young man had been through considerable hardship in the last three weeks, surviving two long solo flights conducted with only limited skill as a pilot and a dying man for a navigator, a crash, a bullet wound to the shoulder, and a ten-mile hike, on a fractured ankle, to this ghost town of Augustaburg. noted in his log that the young man had been through considerable hardship in the last three weeks, surviving two long solo flights conducted with only limited skill as a pilot and a dying man for a navigator, a crash, a bullet wound to the shoulder, and a ten-mile hike, on a fractured ankle, to this ghost town of Augustaburg.
He had been living in this hut, noted Commander Kemp, on thirty-year-old tins of meat and biscuits, his only company the radio and a dead penguin, perfectly preserved. He was suffering from the effects of scurvy, frostbite, anemia, and a poorly healed flesh wound, which only the Antarctic uncongeniality to microbes had prevented from becoming infected, perhaps fatally; he had also, according to the ship"s doctor who examined him, gone through two and a half thirty-year-old boxes of morphine. He said that he had set out alone across the ice from the German station, crawling the last part of the way, with no intention of getting anywhere at all, because he could not bear to be near the body of the man he had shot and killed, and had chanced upon Augustaburg just as the last of his strength was failing him. He was taken to the base at Guantanamo Bay, where he remained under psychiatric examination and investigation by a court-martial until shortly before V-E Day.
His claim to have killed the lone enemy occupant of a German Antarctic base some seventy-five miles to the east of the hut where he was found was investigated and confirmed, and in spite of certain questions raised by his behavior and his handling of the matter, Ensign Kavalier was awarded the Navy"s Distinguished Service Cross.
In August 1977 a huge chunk of the Filchner Shelf, forty miles wide and twenty-five miles deep, calved off from the main body and drifted north as a giant iceberg into the Weddell Sea, carrying with it both the hut and the hidden remnants, some ten miles distant, of the German polar dream. This event put an abrupt end to tourism at Augustaburg. Filchner"s Hut had become a required stop for the intrepid tourists who were just then beginning to brave the floe-choked waters of the Weddell Sea. The people would tramp in from out of the wind with their guide and respectfully examine the piles of empty tins with their quaint Edwardian-era labels, the abandoned charts and skis and rifles, the racks of unused beakers and test tubes, the frozen penguin, shot for examination but never dissected, standing eternal vigil under a portrait of the Kaiser. They might reflect on the endurance of this monument to a failure, or on the dignity and poignance that time can bring to human detritus, or they might merely wonder if the peas and gooseberries in the neat rows of cans on the shelves were still edible, and how they might taste. A few would linger a moment longer, puzzling over an enigmatic drawing that lay on the workbench, done in colored pencil, frozen solid and somewhat the worse from long-ago folding and refolding. Clearly the work of a child, it appeared to show a man in a dinner jacket falling from the belly of an airplane. Although the man"s parachute was far beyond his reach, the man was smiling, and pouring a cup of tea from an elaborate plummeting tea service, as if oblivious of his predicament, or as if he thought he had all the time in the world before he would hit the ground.
PART VI
The LEAGUE of the of the GOLDEN KEY GOLDEN KEY
1
When Sammy went in to wake Tommy for school, he found the boy already up and modeling his eye patch in the bedroom mirror. The bedroom furniture, a set from Levitz-bed, dresser, the mirror, and a hutch with drawers-had a nautical theme: the back wall of the hutch was lined with a navigation chart for the Outer Banks, the bra.s.s drawer pulls shaped like pilot"s wheels, the mirror trimmed in stout hawser rope. The eye patch did not look all that out of place. Tommy was trying different kinds of piratical scowls on himself.