Then, in mid-March, a food cache that they had neglected to get into the storehouse had been lost in the first great blizzard of the winter. Joe pitched in to help find it. He went on skis, for only the third time in his life, and soon was separated from the others in the party out searching for the lost ton of food. A sudden wind blew up, suspending him in an impenetrable gauze of snow dust. Blind and frantic, he had skied into a hayc.o.c.k and fallen, with a sound of chimes and splintering rafters, through the ice. It was Oyster, driven by ancestral Bernardine impulses, who had found him. After that, Joe and Oyster had become semiregular bedmates, according to the vagaries of Lupe Velez. Even when he slept in his bunk, Joe visited Oyster every day, bringing him hunks of bacon and ham and the dried apricots to which the dog was partial. Apart from the two dog men, Casper and Houk, who viewed the dogs as a coach viewed his linemen, as Diaghilev his corps, as Satan his devils, Joe was the only denizen of Kelvinator Station who did not find the animals merely an ill-smelling, loud, and perpetual source of annoyance.
It was only because he had lost so often at Lupe Velez and had, as a consequence, slept with the dog so many times, that Joe became aware, even deep in his own poisoned sleep, of an alteration in the usual pattern of Oyster"s breathing.
The change, an absence of the dog"s usual low, steady, grumbling wheeze, disturbed him. He stirred and woke just enough to become aware of an unfamiliar buzzing sound, faint and steady, in the dog tunnel. It droned on comfortingly for some time, and in his groggy state, Joe very nearly fell back into a slumber that undoubtedly would have been final. He sat up, slowly, on one arm. He could not seem to focus his thoughts, as if a gauzy curtain of snow dust hung and floated across the inside of his skull. He could not see very well, either, and he blinked and rubbed his eyes. After a moment it occurred to him that the sudden motion of his sitting up ought to have awakened at least his bedmate, who was always finely attuned to the least of Joe"s movements; and yet Oyster slept on, silent, the rise and fall of his grizzled flank shallow and slow. That was when Joe realized that the buzz he had been contentedly listening to in the warmth of his sleeping bag for who knew how long was the chilly hum of the electric lights that were strung at intervals along the tunnels. It was a sound he had never heard, not once, in all his nights in Dog-town, because the ordinary wailing and termagancy of the dogs drowned it out. But now Dog-town was completely silent.
He reached out and slapped Oyster, gently, on the back of his head, then poked a finger into the soft flesh where his left foreleg met his body. The dog stirred, and Joe thought he might have whimpered softly, but he did not raise his head. His limbs were slack. Joe, feeling very wobbly, crawled out of the crate and went on his hands and knees across the tunnel to check on Forrestal, Casper"s pure-breed malamute, who had succeeded lost Stengel as Dog Ring. He saw now why rubbing his eyes had done no good: the tunnel was full of fog, curling and billowing down from the Main Stem. Forrestal did not respond at all when Joe patted him, or poked him, or shook him hard, once. Joe lowered his ear to the animal"s chest. There was no discernible heartbeat.
Quickly, now, Joe unhooked Oyster"s collar from the chain whose other end was bolted into the wooden crate, picked up the dog, and carried him down the tunnel toward the Main Stem. He felt as if he was going to vomit, but he didn"t know whether this was because there was something the matter with him, something that was going to kill him, too, or merely because to get to the end of the tunnel he had to walk past seventeen dogs lying dead in their carved-out niches. He was not thinking very clearly at all.
The Dog-town tunnel ran at right angles to the central tunnel of Kelvinator Station, and directly across from its mouth was the door of the Waldorf. The original plans had called for Dog-town to lie at some distance from the men"s quarters, but they had run out of time here, too, and so been forced to shelter the dogs right at their doorstep, as it were, in a tunnel that had originally been dug for food storage. This door was supposed to be kept closed, to prevent the precious warmth of the stove fom escaping the sleeping quarters, but as he approached it, struggling along with eighty-five pounds of dying dog in his arms, Joe saw that it stood open a few inches, prevented from closing by one of his own socks, which he must have dropped on his way out to Dog-town. He had been folding his clothes on his bunk that evening, as he later reconstructed, and the sock must have clung to his bedroll. A warm, flatulent breath of beer and unwashed woolen underwear came sighing into the tunnel from the Waldorf, melting the ice, filling the tunnel with ghostly clouds of condensation. Joe nudged the door open with his foot and stepped into the room. The air seemed unnaturally stuffy and far too warm, and as he stood there, listening for the usual congested snuffling of the men, his dizziness increased. The weight of the dog in his arms grew intolerable. Oyster fell from his arms and hit the plank floor with a thud. The sound made Joe gag. He stumbled to his left, wildly veering to avoid touching any of the bunks he walked between or the men lying in them, toward the light switch. No one protested or rolled away from the blaze of light.
Houk was dead; Mitch.e.l.l was dead; Gedman was dead. That was as far as Joe got in his investigations before a sudden desperate understanding drove him to the ladder that led up through the hatch in the roof of the Waldorf and out onto the ice. Coatless, bareheaded, feet clad only in socks, he stumbled topside across the jagged skin of the snow. The cold jerked at his chest like a wire snare. It fell on him like a safe. It lapped eagerly at his unprotected feet and licked at his kneecaps. He took great breaths of that clean and wicked coldness, thanking it with every cell in his body. He heard his exhalations rustle like taffeta as they froze solid in the air around him. His blood filled with oxygen, quickening the nerves of his eyes, and the dark dull sky over his head seemed to thicken suddenly with stars. He reached an instant of bodily equipoise, during which the rapture of his survival to breathe and be burned by the wind perfectly balanced the agony of his exposure to it. Then the shivering took hold, in a single crippling shudder that racked his whole body, and he cried out, and fell to his knees on the ice.
Just before he pitched forward, he experienced a strange vision. He saw his old magic teacher, Bernard Kornblum, coming toward him through the blue darkness, his beard tied up in a hair net, carrying the bright glowing camp brazier that Joe and Thomas had once borrowed from a friend who went in for mountaineering. Kornblum knelt, rolled Joe over onto his back, and gazed down at him, his expression critical and amused.
"Escapistry," he said, with his usual scorn. he said, with his usual scorn.
2
Joe woke in the Hangar to the smell of a burning cheroot and found himself gazing up at the oft-patched wing of the Condor. "Lucky you," said Shannenhouse. He snapped shut his lighter and exhaled. He was sitting on a canvas folding stool beside Joe, legs spread wide in best cowboy manner. Shannenhouse was from a raw town called Tustin in California and cultivated cowboy habits that sat unlikely on his slight frame, with his professorial mien. He had fair thinning hair and rimless spectacles and hands that, while h.o.r.n.y and scarred, remained delicate. He tried to be taciturn but was given to lecturing. He tried to be stern and friendless but was an inveterate kibitzer. He was the old man of Kelvinator Station, an eight-kills ace from the first war who had spent the twenties flying in the Sierras and in the Alaskan bush. He had enlisted after Pearl and was as disappointed as any of them by his a.s.signment to Kelvinator. He had not seriously hoped to fight again, but he had been doing interesting work all his life and was looking for more. Since their arrival at Kelvinator- the official, cla.s.sified name was Naval Station SD-A2(R)-the weather had been so bad that he had been up in the air only twice, once on a recon mission that was aborted after twenty minutes in the teeth of a blizzard, and once on an unauthorized, failed jaunt to try to find the base of the first Byrd expedition, or of the last Scott expedition, or of the first Amundsen expedition, or the site of something something that had happened in this waste for which the adjective "G.o.dforsaken" appeared to have been coined. He was nominally a first lieutenant, but n.o.body stood on ceremony or rank at Kelvinator Station. They were all obedient to the dictates of survival, and no further discipline was really necessary. Joe himself was a radioman second-cla.s.s, but n.o.body ever called him anything but Sparks, Dit, or, most often, Dopey. that had happened in this waste for which the adjective "G.o.dforsaken" appeared to have been coined. He was nominally a first lieutenant, but n.o.body stood on ceremony or rank at Kelvinator Station. They were all obedient to the dictates of survival, and no further discipline was really necessary. Joe himself was a radioman second-cla.s.s, but n.o.body ever called him anything but Sparks, Dit, or, most often, Dopey.
The smoke of the cigar smelled very good to Joe. It had an unantarctic flavor of autumn and fire and dirt. There was something lurking inside him that the smell of the burning cheroot seemed to keep at bay. He reached for Shannenhouse"s hand, raising an eyebrow. Shannenhouse pa.s.sed the cheroot to Joe, and Joe sat up to take it in his teeth. He saw that he was tucked into a sleeping bag on the floor of the Hangar, his upper body propped on a pile of blankets. He leaned back on one elbow and took a long drag, inhaling the strong black stuff into his lungs. This was a mistake. His coughing spasm was long and racking, and the pain in his chest and head reminded him abruptly of the dead men and the dogs in the tunnels with their lungs full of some kind of agent or germ. He lay back down again, forehead st.i.tched with sweat.
"Oh, s.h.i.t," he said.
"Indeed," Shannenhouse said.
"Johnny, you can"t go down in there, okay, you promise? They all-"
"Now you tell me."
Joe tried to sit up, scattering ash down the blankets. "You didn"t go down in there?"
"You were not awake to warn me, remember?" Shannenhouse reclaimed his cigar as if in reproach, and shoved Joe back down to the floor. He gave his head a shake, trying to clear away a memory that clung. "Jesus. That." Normally his voice was fluting and animated by a scholarly verve, but now it came out cowboy flat, dry and flat as Joe imagined Tustin, California, to be. "That is the worst thing I have ever seen."
A good deal of Shannenhouse"s talk over the months had been of awful things he had seen, tales rife with burning men, arterial fountains of blood spraying from the armless shoulders of fellows who strayed into the whirl of propellers, hunters half-devoured by bears dragging their stumps into camp in the morning.
"Oh, s.h.i.t," Joe said again.
Shannenhouse nodded. "The worst thing I have ever seen."
"Johnny, I beg you not to say this again."
"Sorry, Joe."
"Where were you, you, anyway? Why didn"t you ..." anyway? Why didn"t you ..."
"I was out here." The Hangar, though buried in the snow of Marie Byrd Land like all the other buildings of Kelvinator Station, was not connected to the rest by tunnel, again because of the heavy weather that had come so viciously and early this year. "I had the watch, I came out here just to have a look at her." He jerked a thumb toward the aging Condor. "I do not know what Kelly thought he was doing, but the wire-"
"We have to raise Gitmo, we have to tell them."
"I tried to raise them," Shannenhouse said. "The radio is out. Could not raise s.h.i.t."
Joe felt panic lurch up inside him now, as it had on the day he fell through the hayc.o.c.k, in a clatter of skis and bindings, the wind knocked from his lungs, mouth packed with snow, a cold blade of ice jabbing for his heart.
"The radio is out? Johnny, why is the radio out?" In his panic, the melodramatic notion, worthy of one of Sammy"s plots, that Shannenhouse was a German spy and had killed them all streaked through his thoughts. "What is going on?" "What is going on?"
"Relax, Dopey, all right? Please do not lose your s.h.i.t." He pa.s.sed the cheroot back to Joe.
"Johnny," Joe said, as calmly as he could, letting out smoke, "I feel that I am going to lose my s.h.i.t."
"Look here, the fellows are dead and the radio is out, but there is no connection between the two. One has nothing to do with the other, like everything else in life. It was not some n.a.z.i superweapon. Jesus Christ. It was the f.u.c.king stove."
"The stove?"
"It was carbon monoxide from Wayne." The Antarctic Waldorf was heated by a gasoline stove, affectionately known as Wayne because of the legend ft. WAYNE iron works Indiana usa stamped on its side. The naming madness that came over men when they arrived here in the unmapped blankness seeped quickly into every corner of their lives. They named the radios, the latrine, they named their hangovers and cuts on their fingers. "I went up and checked the ventilators in the roof. Packed with snow. Same thing with Dog-town. I told Captain they were poorly made. Maybe I did not. The thought did occur to me at the time we were laying them in."
"They all died," Joe said, the statement rising at the end with just the faintest hopeful intimation of a doubt.
Shannenhouse nodded. "Everyone but you and your boyfriend, maybe I guess because you were lying at the very end of the tunnel from the door. Now, as far as the radio goes, who the f.u.c.k knows. Magnetism. Sunspots. It will come back."
"What do you mean, my boyfriend?"
"The mutt. Mussels."
"Oyster?"
Shannenhouse nodded again. "He is all right. I tied him up in the Mess Hall for the night."
"What?" Joe started to his feet, but Shannenhouse reached out and forced him back, not gently.
"Lie down, Dopey. I shut down the d.a.m.n stove, I dug out the ventilators. Your dog will be all right."
So Joe lay down, and Shannenhouse leaned back against the wall of the Hangar and looked up at his airplane. They pa.s.sed the cigar back and forth. In a little while, it was going to be time for them to discuss their chances, and plan for their survival until they could be rescued. They had food to last two dozen men two years, plenty of fuel for the generators. The Mess Hall would provide sleeping quarters suitably free of the spectacle of frozen corpses. Compared to the early heroes of the continent, starving and dying in their caribou-skin tents, gnawing a raw hunk of frozen seal, they were in clover. Even if the navy couldn"t get a ship or a plane in until spring, they would have more than enough of what they needed to make it through. But somehow the idea that death had reached down through all that snow and ice into their tunnels and cozy rooms and in a single night-in an hour-killed all of their fellows and all but one of the dogs, made their survival, for all their ample provisions and materiel, seem less than a.s.sured.
Both of the men had felt all along, on certain evenings as they hurried from the transmitter tower or the Hangar back toward the hatch that led to safety and warmth, a stirring at the fringes of the station, a presence, something struggling to be born out of the winds, the darkness, the looming towers and jagged teeth of the ice. The hair on the back of the neck stood erect and you ran, in spite of yourself, ribs ringing with panic, certain as a child running up the cellar stairs that something very bad was after you. Antarctica was beautiful-even Joe, who loathed it with every fiber of his being as the symbol, the embodiment, the blank unmeaning heart of his impotence in this war, had felt the thrill and grandeur of the Ice. But it was trying, at every moment you remained on it, to kill you. They could not let their guard down for a moment; they had all known that from the start. Now it seemed to Joe and the pilot as if the evil intent of the place, the glittering ripples of dust gathering in the darkness, would find a way to get them no matter how warm their berth or full their bellies, no matter how many layers of wool and hide and fur they put between them and it. Survival, at that moment, seemed beyond the reach or agency of their plans.
"I don"t like having the dogs in here, messing up my airplane," said Shannenhouse, studying the struts of the Condor"s left wing with an approving frown. "You know that."
3
The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand miles away. At best, a man suffered from strange lapses in judgment and perception, finding himself at the mirror about to comb his hair with a mechanical pencil, stepping into his undershirt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea. Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first glimpse of a pale hem of sunlight on the horizon in mid-September. But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their own melancholy that they were lost forever. And few among the wives and families of the men who returned from a winter on the Ice would have said that what they got back was identical to what they had sent down there.
In the case of John Wesley Shannenhouse, the winter madness was merely a kind of modulation, a deepening of his long-standing involvement with his Curtiss-Wright AT-32. The Condor seaplane was ten years old, and had been hard used by the navy before finding her present billet. She had seen action and taken fire, hunting steamship pirates on the Yangtze in the mid-thirties. She had flown thousands of cargo runs in and out of Honduras, Cuba, Mexico, and Hawaii, and enough of the plane and her engines had been replaced over the years, according to the dictates of local expediency, parts shortages, and mechanics" ingenuity and neglect, from the tiniest bolts and wire clasps to one of the big Wright Cyclone engines and entire sections of the fuselage and wings, that it was a metaphysical question long pondered by Shannenhouse that winter whether she could fairly be said to be the same plane that had rolled out of Glenn Curtiss"s plant in San Diego in 1934.
As the winter wore on, the question so vexed him-Joe was certainly well sick of it, and of Shannenhouse and his stinking cheroots-that he decided the only way to gain surcease would be to replace every replaceable part, making himself the guarantor of the Condor"s ident.i.ty. The navy had provided Kelly and Bloch, the dead mechanics, with an entire tractor-load of spare parts, and a machine shop equipped with a toolmaker"s lathe, a milling machine, a drill press, an oxyacetylene welding outfit, a miniature blacksmith"s shop, and eight different kinds of power saw from jig to joiner. Shannenhouse found that simply by dint of drinking sixty-five to eighty cups of coffee a day (with everyone dead, there was certainly no need to stint) he could reduce his sleep requirements to half their former seven hours, at least. When he did sleep, it was in the Condor, wrapped in several sleeping bags (it was cold in the Hangar). He moved in a dozen crates of canned food and took to cooking his meals in there, too, crouching over a Primus stove as if huddled out on the Ice.
First he rebuilt the engines, machining new parts where he found the originals worn or their replacements substandard or borrowed from some alien breed of plane. Then he went to work on the frame of the aircraft, milling new struts and ribs, replacing every screw and grommet. When Joe finally lost track of Shannenhouse"s labors, the pilot had embarked on the long and difficult job of doping, repairing the airplane"s canvas sheathing with a sickly-sweet bubbling compound he cooked up on the same stove he used to make his dinner. It was tough work for one man, but he refused Joe"s halfhearted offer of help as if it had been a proposal that they share wives.
"Get your own airplane," he said. His beard stuck straight out from his chin, bristling and orange-blond and seven inches long. His eyes were pink and glittering from the dope, he was thickly covered in a reddish pelt of reindeer fur from his sleeping bag, and he stank more than any human Joe had ever smelled (though there would come worse), as if he had been dipped in some unG.o.dly confection of Camembert and rancid gasoline brewed up in a spit-filled cuspidor. He punctuated this remark by hurling a crescent wrench, which missed Joe"s head by two inches and gouged a deep hole out of the wall beside him. Joe quickly climbed back up through the hatch and went topside. He did not see Shannenhouse again for nearly three weeks.
He had his own madness to contend with.
Radio service at Naval Station SD-A2(R) had been restored seventeen hours after the Waldorf disaster. Joe did not sleep during that entire period, making a fresh attempt every ten minutes, and finally managed to raise Mission Command at Guantanamo Bay at 0700 GMT and inform them, transmitting in code, painfully slowly without Gedman there to a.s.sist him, that on April 10 every man at Kelvinator but Kavalier and Shannenhouse, and all the dogs but one, had been poisoned by carbon monoxide resulting from poor ventilation in quarters. The replies from Command were terse but reflected a certain amount of shock and confusion. A number of contradictory and impractical orders were issued and remanded. It took Command longer than it had Joe and Shannenhouse to realize that nothing could be done until September at the earliest. The dead men and dogs would keep perfectly well until then; putrefaction was an unknown phenomenon here. The Bay of Whales was frozen solid and impa.s.sable and would be for another three months, at least. In any case, Drake Pa.s.sage, as Joe"s own monitoring of short-burst transmissions to BdU had confirmed, was teeming with U-boats. There was no hope of being rescued by some pa.s.sing whaler without the help of a military escort-the whalers and chasers had, by and large, abandoned the field by now-and even then, not until the barrier ice began to warm and fracture. At last, five days after Joe"s first message, Command somewhat superfluously ordered them to sit tight and wait for spring. Joe was, in the meantime, to stay in regular radio contact and continue, so far as he was able, the primary mission (apart from the more elemental one of maintaining an American presence at the pole) of Kelvinator Station: to monitor the airwaves for U-boat transmissions, to transmit all intercepts back to Command, which would relay them to the crypta.n.a.lysts back in Washington, with their clacking electronic bombes, and finally to alert Command of any German movements toward the continent itself.
It was in the furtherance of this mission that Joe"s sanity entered its period of hibernation. He became as inseparable from the radio as Shannenhouse from his Condor. And, again like Shannenhouse, he could not bring himself to inhabit the rooms that they had formerly shared with twenty other living, breathing men. Instead, Joe made the radio shack his princ.i.p.al lodgings, and although he continued to cook his meals in the Mess Hall, he carried them through the tunnels to the radio shack to eat them. His direction-finding observations, and intercepts of short-burst transmissions of the two German submarines then active in the region, were extensive and accurate, and in time, with some coaching from Command, he learned to handle the quirky and delicate navy code machine nearly as well as Gedman had.
But it was not just military and commercial shipping channels to which Joe tuned in. He listened through his powerful multiband Marconi CSR 9A set to anything and everything the three seventy-five-foot antenna towers could pull down out of the sky, at all hours of the day: AM, FM, shortwave, the amateur bands. It was a kind of ethereal fishing, sending out his line and seeing what he could catch, and how long he could hold on to it: a tango orchestra live from the banks of the Plate, stern biblical exegesis in Afrikaans, an inning and a half of a game between the Red Sox and the White Sox, a Brazilian soap opera, two lonely amateurs in Nebraska and Suriname droning on about their dogs. He listened for hours to the Morse code alarums of fishermen in squalls and merchant seamen beset by frigates, and once even caught the end of a broadcast of The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, learning thus that Tracy Bacon was no longer playing the t.i.tle role. Most of all, however, he followed the war. Depending on the hour, the tilt of the planet, the angle of the sun, the cosmic rays, the aurora australis, and the Heaviside layer, he was able to get anywhere from eighteen to thirty-six different news broadcasts every day, from all over the world, though naturally, like most of the world, he favored those of the BBC. The invasion of Europe was in full swing, and like so many others, he followed its fitful but steady progress with the help of a map that he tacked to the padded wall of the shack and studded with the colored pins of victory and setback. He listened to H. V. Kaltenborn, Walter Winch.e.l.l, Edward R. Murrow, and, just as devotedly, to their mocking shadows, to the snide innuendos of Lord Haw-Haw, Patrick Kelly out of j.a.panese Shanghai, Mr. O.K., Mr. Guess Who, and to the throaty insinuations of Midge-at-the-Mike, whom he quite often thought of f.u.c.king. He would sit awash in the aqueous burbling of his headphones, for twelve or fifteen hours at a time, getting up from the console only to use the latrine and to feed himself and Oyster. learning thus that Tracy Bacon was no longer playing the t.i.tle role. Most of all, however, he followed the war. Depending on the hour, the tilt of the planet, the angle of the sun, the cosmic rays, the aurora australis, and the Heaviside layer, he was able to get anywhere from eighteen to thirty-six different news broadcasts every day, from all over the world, though naturally, like most of the world, he favored those of the BBC. The invasion of Europe was in full swing, and like so many others, he followed its fitful but steady progress with the help of a map that he tacked to the padded wall of the shack and studded with the colored pins of victory and setback. He listened to H. V. Kaltenborn, Walter Winch.e.l.l, Edward R. Murrow, and, just as devotedly, to their mocking shadows, to the snide innuendos of Lord Haw-Haw, Patrick Kelly out of j.a.panese Shanghai, Mr. O.K., Mr. Guess Who, and to the throaty insinuations of Midge-at-the-Mike, whom he quite often thought of f.u.c.king. He would sit awash in the aqueous burbling of his headphones, for twelve or fifteen hours at a time, getting up from the console only to use the latrine and to feed himself and Oyster.
It may be imagined that this ability to reach out so far and wide from the confines of his deep-buried polar tomb, his only company a half-blind dog, thirty-seven corpses human and animal, and a man in the grip of an idee fixe, might have served as a means of salvation for Joe, connected in his isolation and loneliness to the whole world. But in fact the c.u.mulative effect, as day after day he at last doffed the headphones and lowered himself, stiff, head buzzing, onto the floor of the shack beside Oyster, was only, in the end, to emphasize and to mock him with the one connection he could not make. Just as, in his first months in New York, there had never been any mention in any of the eleven newspapers he bought every day, in any of three languages, about the well-being and disposition of the Kavalier family of Prague, there was now never anything on the radio that gave him any indication of how they might be faring. It was not merely that they were never personally mentioned-even at his most desperate, he didn"t seriously imagine this possibility-but that he could never seem to get any information at all about the fate of the Jews of Czechoslovakia.
From time to time there were warnings and reports from escapees of camps in Germany, ma.s.sacres in Poland, roundups and deportations and trials. But it was, from his admittedly remote and limited point of view, as if the Jews of his country, his Jews, his family, had been slipped unseen into some fold in the pin-bristling map of Europe. And increasingly, as the winter inched on and the darkness deepened around him, Joe began to brood, and the corrosion that had been worked on his inner wiring for so long by his inability to do anything to help or reach his mother and grandfather, the disappointment and anger he had been nursing for so long at the navy"s having sent him to the f.u.c.king South Pole when all he had wanted to do was drop bombs on Germans and supplies on Czech partisans, began to coalesce into a genuine desperation.
Then one "evening" toward the end of July, Joe tuned in to a shortwave broadcast from the Reichsrundsfunk directed at Rhodesia, Uganda, and the rest of British Africa. It was an English-language doc.u.mentary program cheerfully detailing the creation and flourishing of a marvelous place in the Czech Protectorate, a specially designed "preserve," as the narrator called it, for the Jews of that part of the Reich. It was called the Theresienstadt Model Ghetto. Joe had been through the town of Terezin once, on an outing with his Makabbi sporting group. Apparently, this town had been transformed from a dull Bohemian backwater into a happy, industrious, even cultivated place, of rose gardens, vocational schools, and a full symphony orchestra made up of what the narrator, who sounded like Emil Jannings trying to sound like Will Rogers, called "internees." There was a description of a typical musical evening at the preserve, into the midst of which, to Joe"s horror and delight, floated the rich, disembodied tenor of his maternal grandfather, Franz Schonfeld. He was not identified by name, but there was no mistaking the faint whiskey undertones, nor for that matter the selection, "Der Erlkonig."
Joe struggled to make sense of what he had heard. The false tone of the program, the bad accent of the narrator, the obvious euphemisms, the unacknowledged truth underlying the blather about roses and violins-that all of these people had been torn from their homes and put in this place, against their will, because they were Jews-all these inclined him to a feeling of dread. The joy, spontaneous and unreasoning, that had come over him as he heard his little grandfather"s sweet voice for the first time in five years subsided quickly under the swelling unease that was inspired in him by the idea of the old man singing Schubert in a prison town for an audience of captives. There had been no date given for the program, and as the evening went on and he mulled it over, Joe became more and more convinced that the pasteboard cheeriness and vocational training masked some dreadful reality, a witch"s house made of candy and gingerbread to lure children and fatten them for the table.
The next night, trolling the frequencies around fifteen megacycles on the extremely off chance that there might be a sequel to the previous night"s program, he stumbled onto a transmission in German, one so strong and clear that he suspected it at once of having a local origin. It was sandwiched carefully into an extremely thin interstice of bandwidth between the powerful BBC Asian Service and the equally powerful A.F.R.N. South, and if you were not desperately searching for word of your family, you would have dialed past it without even knowing it was there. The voice was a man"s, soft, high-pitched, educated, with a trace of Swabian accent and a distinct note of outrage barely suppressed. Conditions were terrible; the instruments were all either inoperable or unreliable; quarters were intolerably confined, morale low. Joe reached for a pencil and started to transcribe the man"s philippic; he could not imagine what would have prompted the fellow to make his presence known in such an open fashion. Then, abruptly, with a sigh and a weary "Heil Hitler," the man signed off, leaving a burble of empty airwaves and a single, unavoidable conclusion: there were Germans on the Ice.
This had been a fear of the Allies ever since the Ritscher expedition of 1938-59, when that extremely thorough German scientist, lavishly equipped by the personal order of Hermann Goring, had arrived at the coast of Queen Maud Land in a catapult ship and hurled two excellent Dornier Wal seaplanes again and again into the unexplored hinterland of the Norwegian claim where, using aerial cameras, they had mapped over three hundred and fifty thousand square miles of territory (introducing the art of photogrammetry to the Antarctic) and then pelted the whole thing with five thousand giant steel darts, specially crafted for the expedition, each one topped with an elegant swastika. The land was thus staked and claimed for Germany, and renamed New Schwabia. Initial difficulties with the Norwegians over this presumption had been neatly solved by the conquest of that country in 1940.
Joe put on his boots and parka and went out to tell Shannenhouse of his discovery. The night was windless and mild; the thermometer read 4F. The stars swarmed in their strange arrangements, and there was a gaudy viridian ring around the low-hanging moon. Thin watery moonlight puddled over the Barrier without seeming to illuminate any part of it. Aside from the radio towers, and the chimneys jutting like the fins of killer whales from the snow, there was nothing to be seen in any direction. The lupine mountains, the jutting pressure ridges like piles of giant bones, the vast tent city of peaked hayc.o.c.ks that lay to the east- he could see none of it. The German base could have lain not ten miles away across level ice, blazing like a carnival, and still remained invisible. When he was halfway to the Hangar, he stopped. The cessation of his crunching footsteps seemed to eliminate the very last sound from the world. The silence was so absolute that the inner processes of his cranium became first audible and then deafening. Surely a concealed German sniper could pick him out, even in this impenetrable gloom, just by hearing the storm-drain roaring of the veins in his ears, the hydraulic pistoning of his salivary glands. He hurried toward the hatch of the Hangar, crunching and stumbling. As he approached it, a breeze kicked up, carrying with it an acrid stench of blood and burning hair potent enough to make Joe gag. Shannenhouse had fired up the Blubberteria.
"Stay out," said Shannenhouse. "Get lost. Keep out. Go f.u.c.k your dog, you Jew, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d."
Joe was trapped halfway down the stairwell, not yet low enough to see into the Hangar. Every time he tried to get to the bottom, Shannenhouse threw something at his legs, a crankshaft, a dry cell.
"What you are doing?" Joe called to him. "What is this smell?"
Shannenhouse"s odor had grown in the weeks since Joe"s last encounter with him, slipping free of the confines of his body, absorbing further const.i.tuent smells of burned beans, fried wire, airplane dope, and, nearly drowning out all the others, freshly tanned seal.
"All the canvas I had was ruined," Shannenhouse said defensively and a little sadly. "It must have got wet on the trip down."
"You are covering the airplane in the skin of seals?"
"An airplane is is a seal, d.i.c.khead. A seal that swims through the air." a seal, d.i.c.khead. A seal that swims through the air."
"Yes, all right," Joe said. It is a well-known phenomenon that the Napoleons in the asylums of the world have little patience with one another"s Austerlitzes and Marengos. "I just come to tell you one thing. Jerry is here. On the Ice. I heard him on the radio."
There was a long, expressive pause, though as to what emotion it expressed, Joe felt none too certain.
"Where?" Shannenhouse said at last.
"I"m not sure. He said something about the thirtieth meridian, but... I am not sure."
"Over there, though. Where they were before."
Joe nodded, although Shannenhouse couldn"t see him.
"That is what, a thousand miles."
"At least."
"f.u.c.k them, then. Did you raise Command?"
"No, Johnny, I did not. Not yet."
"Well, raise them, then. Christ, what the f.u.c.k is wrong with you."
He was right. Joe ought to have contacted Command the moment he finished transcribing the intercepted transmission. And once he had some idea of the nature and source of the transmission, his failure to do so was not only a breach of procedure, and a betrayal of an order-to preserve the continent from n.a.z.i overtures-that had come directly from the president himself, but it also put him and Shannenhouse in potential danger. If Joe knew about them, they almost certainly knew about Joe. And yet, just as he had not reported Carl Ebling after the first bomb threat to Empire Comics, some impulse now prevented him from opening the channel to Cuba and making the report that duty obliged him to make.
"I don"t know," Joe said. "I don"t know what is the f.u.c.k wrong with me. I"m sorry."
"Good. Now get out."
Joe climbed back up the stairs and out into the mercury-blue night. As he started north, back toward the opening of the radio shack, something flickered in the middle of all the nothing, so tentatively that at first he thought it was an optic phenomenon akin to the effect of the silence on his ears, something bioelectric happening inside his eyeb.a.l.l.s. No; there it was, the horizon, a dark seam, piped with an all but imaginary ribbon of pale gold. It was as faint as the glimmer of an idea that began to form, at that moment, in Joe"s mind.
"Spring," said Joe. The cold air crumpled up the word like fish wrap.
When he got back to the radio shack, he dug out a broken portable shortwave that Radioman First Cla.s.s Burnside had been planning to repair, plugged in the soldering iron, and, after a few hours" work, managed to fix up a set that he could dedicate exclusively to monitoring the transmissions of the German station, which, it transpired, was under the direct command of Goring"s office, and referred to itself as Jotunheim. The man who made the transmissions was very careful about concealing them, and after the initial outburst that Joe had chanced upon, he limited himself to more spare and factual, but no less anxious, accounts of weather and atmospheric conditions; but with patience, Joe was able to locate and transcribe what he estimated to be around 65 percent of the traffic between Jotunheim and Berlin. He acc.u.mulated enough information to confirm the location at the thirtieth meridian, on the coast of Queen Maud Land, and to conclude that the bulk of their enterprise, at least so far, was of a purely observational and scientific character. In the course of two weeks of careful monitoring, he was able to reach a number of positive conclusions, and to listen as a drama unfolded.
The author of these hand-wringing transmissions was a geologist. He took an interest in questions of cloud formations and wind patterns, and he may also have been a meteorologist, but he was primarily a geologist. He was continually pestering Berlin with details of his plans for the spring, the schists and coal seams he intended to unearth. He had just two companions in Jotunheim. One was code-named Bouvard and the other Pecuchet. They had started out their season on the Ice at almost exactly the same time as their American counterparts, of whose existence they were fully aware, though they seemed to have no idea of the catastrophe that had struck Kelvinator Station. Their number had been reduced, too, but only by one, a radioman and Enigma operator who had suffered a nervous collapse and been taken away with the military party when the latter left for the winter; in spite of the risk of exposure without coded transmissions, the Ministry had seen no reason to force soldiers to winter over when there would be neither chance nor need of soldiering. The military party was due back on September 18, or as soon as they could get through the ice.
On the eleventh day following Joe"s discovery of Jotunheim, for reasons that the Geologist, in the face of intense pressure and threats from the Ministry, refused to characterize as anything more than "unbecoming," "unsuitable," and "of an intimate nature," Pecuchet shot Bouvard and then turned his weapon fatally on himself. The message announcing the death of Bouvard three days later was filled with intimations of imminent doom that Joe recognized with a chill. The Geologist, too, had sensed that loitering presence in a veil of glittering dust at the fringes of his camp, waiting for its moment.
All this, for two weeks, Joe pieced together in secret and kept to himself. He told himself, each time he dialed in to what he came to call Radio Jotunheim, that he would listen just a little longer, accrue another bit of information, and then pa.s.s everything he had along to Command. Surely this was what spies generally did? Better to get it all, and then risk discovery in transmitting it, than tip off the Geologist and his friends before he had acquired the full picture. The shocking murder-suicide, which broke new ground for death on the continent, seemed to put a point on things, however, and Joe typed up a careful report that, conscious as ever of his English, he proofread several times. Then he sat in front of the console. While nothing would have pleased him more than to shoot this haughty-sounding, languid Geologist in the head, he had come to identify so strongly with his enemy that, as he prepared to reveal the man"s existence to Command, he felt an odd reluctance, as if in doing so he would betray himself.
As he was attempting to make up his mind what to do with his report, the desire for revenge, for a final expiation of guilt and responsibility, that had been the sole animator of Joe"s existence since the night of December 6, 1941, received the final impulse it required to doom the German Geologist.
The coming of spring had brought on another whaling season, and with it a fresh campaign of the undersea boats. U-1421, U-1421, in particular, had been hara.s.sing traffic in Drake Pa.s.sage, Allied and neutral, at a moment when shortages of the oil rendered from whales could mean the difference between victory and defeat in Europe for either side. Joe had been supplying Command with intercepts from in particular, had been hara.s.sing traffic in Drake Pa.s.sage, Allied and neutral, at a moment when shortages of the oil rendered from whales could mean the difference between victory and defeat in Europe for either side. Joe had been supplying Command with intercepts from U-1421 U-1421 for months, as well as providing directional information on the submarine"s signals. But the South Atlantic D/F array had, until recently, been incomplete and provisional, and nothing had ever come of Joe"s efforts. Tonight, however, as he picked up a burst of chatter on the DAQ huff-duff set that, even in its encrypted state, he could recognize as originating from for months, as well as providing directional information on the submarine"s signals. But the South Atlantic D/F array had, until recently, been incomplete and provisional, and nothing had ever come of Joe"s efforts. Tonight, however, as he picked up a burst of chatter on the DAQ huff-duff set that, even in its encrypted state, he could recognize as originating from U-1421, U-1421, there were two other listening posts tuned in as it made its report. When Joe supplied his readings on the signal from Kelvinator"s HF/DF array in its cage atop the north aerial, a triangulation was performed at the Submarine Warfare Center in Washington. The resultant position, lat.i.tude and longitude, was supplied to the British navy, at which point an attack team was dispatched from the Falkland Islands. The corvettes and sub hunters found there were two other listening posts tuned in as it made its report. When Joe supplied his readings on the signal from Kelvinator"s HF/DF array in its cage atop the north aerial, a triangulation was performed at the Submarine Warfare Center in Washington. The resultant position, lat.i.tude and longitude, was supplied to the British navy, at which point an attack team was dispatched from the Falkland Islands. The corvettes and sub hunters found U-1421, U-1421, chased it, and pelted it with hedgehogs and depth charges until nothing remained of it but an oily black squiggle scrawled on the water"s surface. chased it, and pelted it with hedgehogs and depth charges until nothing remained of it but an oily black squiggle scrawled on the water"s surface.
Joe exulted in the sinking of U-1421, U-1421, and in his role therein. He wallowed in it, even going so far as to permit himself to imagine that it might have been the boat that had sent the and in his role therein. He wallowed in it, even going so far as to permit himself to imagine that it might have been the boat that had sent the Ark of Miriam Ark of Miriam to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1941. to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1941.
He trotted down along the tunnel to the Mess Hall and, for the first time in over two weeks, filled and turned on the snow melter, and took a shower. He fixed himself a plate of ham and powdered eggs, and broke out a new parka and pair of mukluks. On his way to the Hangar, he was obliged to pa.s.s the door to the Waldorf and the entrance of Dog-town. He shut his eyes and ran past. He did not notice that the dog crates were empty.
The sun, all of it, an entire dull red disk, hung a bare inch above the horizon. He watched it until his cheeks began to feel frostbitten. As it sank slowly back below the Barrier, a lovely salmon-and-violet sunset began to a.s.semble itself. Then, as if to make certain Joe didn"t miss the point, the sun rose for a second time, and set once more in a faded but still quite pretty flush of pink and lavender. He knew that this was only an optical illusion, brought on by distortions in the shape of the air, but he accepted it as an omen and an exhortation.