IAN R. MACLEOD

  HOME TIME

  MORNINGS HERE ARE JUST as bad as mornings anywhere else. I sit up in my bunk and scowl at the mirror. The ceiling feels close as a coffin over head, and if I reach out either way, I can touch the walls. We travelers need a tight place to call our own; a burrow to crawl into. Here at Epsilon Base, we call them torpedo tubes.

  It's my turn to fix breakfast. The three of us chomp shriveled waffles and pseudo-bacon hunched around the little table in the kitchen area. We've all put on weight during our stay; stress and boredom do that to you. Janey's in jeans that were tight three months ago when we started out and now look simply painful, the same T-shirt as yesterday and the day before. Figgis rereads one of his old technical mags, a glob of butter hanging on the strands of the beard he's grown over a face still neat with youth. No one says a word. Janey tosses her greasy blonde hair. She sighs. As I didn't hear any sleep-period ramblings between their torpedo tubes, I guess I'm sitting in the chilly slipstream of a lover's argument.

  My turn to clean up. Funny how often the rota works that way, but still I can't be bothered to argue. Gives me something to do before we get ready for the final lump. In a nice domestic touch, Epsilon's Korean designer placed the tiny basin beside a porthole so you can see out as you stand there. I plunge my hands into the warm recycled water.

  Outside, the storm has died. My hands pause, aimless fish swimming. Ice furs the rim of the porthole like the white spray that was used in shop windows at Christmas back in England when I was a kid. It's October, which means that the sun here dances a fire around the horizon. The high . winds of a few hours ago have left streaks in the ice like the claw marks of some giant animal. The storm may have died, but faintly through the filtered triple glass, I can still hear the wind. In the Antarctic, it never stops.

  By the same cosmic coincidence that made it my turn to cook and clear, it also falls to me to check the outside of Epsilon before our next Jump. There's no room for me to kit up in my outsuit in my torpedo tube, so I have to do it in the one corner of the cramped living pod that isn't strung with washing. Figgis and Janey just sit around and watch as I strip down to bra and knickers. I'm conscious of my wobbling marbled flesh and the stray bits of body hair, but of course I'm just good old Doctor Woolley; she's past modesty and all that kind of thing.

  It feels good to squeeze into the privacy of the inner hatch, to bang it shut and watch the warm air cloud to crystal as the frozen atmosphere gushes in.

  There's no question that, barring the ocean floor, I'm facing the most hostile atmosphere on Earth. Nothing compared to Io or Venus, of course, but astronauts don't have to breathe the atmosphere or fiddle barehanded with bits of frozen machinery that can peel the skin off your hands like a rubber glove. And astronauts have up-to-date equipment. And they're all Taiwanese.

  The outer hatch booms open. The shiny outsuit hisses and squeals as it adjusts to the 60-degree drop in temperature. I climb out and down. The white hits my eyes. My lungs go solid tight inside my chest. I glance back. Janey's face is at the porthole. She gives me a smile and a wave, like someone moving off on a train. I stomp a few yards across the ice.

  Epsilon is shaped like a dumpy starfish. The central mound contains the main life support systems and the comms bay, with the kitchen, the torpedo tubes, the living bay, the medical bay and snout of the canhopper fanning off. I can't say that Epsilon actually looks like a starfish because --in the one part of the deal that our college really held out for--the whole of the outer body was re-coated in military-grade camouflage paint before we left our home time. Even now, from what must be no more than twenty shuffling paces away, I have to squint hard to make it out as more than another frost ghost given momentary reality by the wind. Janey's gone. Figgis, too. I could almost be alone.

  I pick my way around the drifts and hollows, checking for accidental debris; anomalies that would almost certainly destroy us. The bitter wind pushes and pulls at me like an argument. It roars in my ears. I do a slow circuit of Epsilon, then another for luck. The wind has already raked away my first footsteps. I brush ice away from the canhopper's cockpit.

  "Woolley!" Janey's voice suddenly crackles over the wind in my ears. "What are you doing out there?"

  "Won't be long," I say, then pluck off a glove to reach inside my hood and dislodge the comms wire. I don't need you, Janey, not out here. Woolley doesn't need anyone.

  I breathe the air. The wind snatches the frozen vapor from my lips and throws it back in my face as grit. Overhead, the sky is lace over blue oblivion. When I was a child and my mother first told me stories about this place, I used to imagine that there really was a pole up here, striped like a candy stick, around which the planet revolved.

  I squint, darkening the lenses of my goggles by a couple of notches with the presspad inside my mittens as I re-inspect the ground. But it makes little difference. Pure Antarctic roars over my inadequate senses. I'm leaning twenty degrees into the wind just to stand up. Looking down at my feet, I see the drift ice racing. Nothing feels still. Snow here is as rare as rain in a desert; all that ever happens is that the wind drives the ice, scooping it into high drifts, baring the underlying strata, destroying-- thank God--every trace of life. White on white on white. I still have to keep reminding myself that we are in the Year of Our Lord, 1890.

  Gladstone is Prime Minister in England. Zeta Tauri is still a distant star.

  Etcetera, etcetera. Look at it this way: if I fumed my back and walked out across the ice away from Epsilon, if I crossed the Queen Maud Mountains and got as far as the McMurdo Sound and came across a whaler lost amid the penguins and icebergs far from its normal hunting ground, if those rough and stinking men would take me aboard, I could visit India in the Raj, Imperial Saint Petersburg, Venice before the flood. Chat with Marx or Freud, ride through London in a hansom cab. The whole world--if my very presence didn't cause it to heave into oblivion--would be mine.

  My toes are dying off. I turn back. When I reach the porthole, I remember that I've tom out my comms wire. A tiny worm of panic bores at my spine. But there's no need to worry. Janey's seen Woolley through the porthole, and she lets Woolley in. She and Figgis once again watch the show as this ugly butterfly strips from her chrysalis out-quit, but by now I can't be bothered to feel any irritation. We've all got other things on our minds.

  It's time for our final Jump up the line. We clamber through the internal hatch to the communications bay. Figgis is in charge of this aspect of the mission, so he gets the comfy chair in front of the console while Janey leans her rump against a mainframe that's so old it bears an IBM logo. I have to stoop awkwardly under a plastic strut.

  Figgis drums his fingers. Janey chews her lips vigorously. Pushing strands of graying mousy hair back from my face, I wonder what exactly it is that I do that gets on their nerves. The numbers on the 2D screen tick by in seconds. The console is a mess of the scribbled stickers that Figgis used to re-label the original Korean han'gul script. Taped beside it is a postcard of Interlaken where he took a pre-Epsilon break, blowing what little advance money the College had been prepared to loan him. The plastic ski runs on the arid mountain slopes look like spilled rolls of toilet paper.

  Jumps are something I can never get used to. This is the fifteenth if you count the big power surge that first threw us back to 1565 and the vicinity of the South Pole. From there we've moved up through the years --collecting data and growing increasingly weary of each other--by a series of smaller Jumps powered by our own internal batteries. Now at least we're that much closer to home.

  Figgis gives up drumming his fingers and begins to stroke his beard, tugging it as though he's trying to pluck a chicken. The minutes plod by on the screen, and each one is just like any other. Bus this time of waiting is special with worry.

  Jumps involve the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the rotation and the ever-outward drift of the Galaxy. And then you must add to that the flow of time itself. What actually happens is that for a dimensionless moment we exist in several times and places at once, hovering like a mayfly over the waters of reality as Epsilon calculates exactly where we should land. So far, the system has worked perfectly....

  That's what's happening now. We Jump and the porthole on our right fills with the soundless buzz of the Jump, which is almost the way the old-fashioned TV

  screens used to go between channels, but pushed back to three or possibly four dimensions. A blizzard without color or sound, a glimpse into the swirling plughole of the non-universe, a place where there is in fact no light at all, where the absence of everything means even an absence of nothing. We all know that our eyes are simply tricking us when we try to look. We know by now that it's better not to.

  The screen registers contact. Stocking ladders of data flutter and clear. Figgis sits back and rests his hands behind his neck. The chair creaks. I can smell his sweat. I guess he can smell mine. We brace ourselves for something more. But that's it. This is March 14, 1912. Epsilon is well within tolerance--even if we're not. Figgis pulls harder at his beard. Janey draws another flake of skin back across her lips.

  "So what we have here," Figgis says, "is 1912. Tell us what's happening, Woolley."

  This is our ritual. I half-close my eyes and recite that Asquith is Prime Minister in Britain, that the Titanic will soon be starting her maiden voyage from Southampton. I describe how Nijinsky's wowing Paris, and explain that China teas just become a Republic. I don't mention that Roald Amundsen has reached the Pole a month and a half ago, and that Captain Scott's men ar e still struggling to get back to Cape Evans. That goes without saying.

  "You see," Figgis says to Janey, tipping her a smile, the beginnings of a reconciliation. "Woolley knows her stuff."

  "That's me," I say. I grin and slap the strut I'm leaning on with one of my big hammy hands. "Good old Doctor Woolley...." Epsilon booms faintly. "Let's get going."

  "You're the boss," Janey smiles up at me. For a weird moment, I can almost see why men find her attractive. And I wonder if I'd become a lesbian if she turned it on strongly enough using all that stuff with the pressing tits and the fluttering eyelashes, the way she does with Figgis. Perhaps that would be the answer to all Woolley's problems. Janey's smile widens. Woolley finds herself blushing as she heads for the ladder between the dangling knickers and Y-fronts.

  JANEY PILOTS the canhopper. Figgis and I squat on the rumbling seats over the engines with the stretcher I rack crammed behind. Watching Janey now, brushing the controls as though they were bruised, the sleeves of her outsuit rolled back from those narrow wrists, I can't help but admire her ease and absorption. The canhopper rocks slightly as the eddy from an ice dune tucks under the fuselage and her hand slides out to brush the boost control. The tone of the right engine alters a fraction through my pelvis, then resumes.

  Figgis has got the big Canon holocam balanced on his lap. He nods toward it and says to me, "Did I tell you that Janey and I gave this a trial run a few weeks ago in her torpedo tube?" He's grinning. Back in 1650, Janey and Figgis were at maximum rut for each other. It didn't exactly keep them quiet, but it did keep them more or less out of my way.

  I force a nod, and the skin of my outsuit crackles as if it shares my discomfort. Janey's eyes are still on the window. She doesn't even blink. She's so wrapped up in piloting the canhopper that Figgis and I can talk about her as though she isn't here. Over her head on the consale is the date and time. March 14, 1912. And the day is yet young; Epsilon's computers have thoughtfully avoided any kind of Jump lag. It's still only 10:30 in the morning.

  Trackless, unseen, undetected, we sail five meters above the ice desert on an electro-magnetic tide. I was expecting a storm, but everything looks clear and sharp as a wedding cake, the sun gold and midway down the sky now, well into the polar autumn. As always, I looked for changes when we first crawled out onto the shattered ice of this new era, but there was nothing. If it were safe for us to Jump as far 1950, it might be possible to pick out that hint grayish haze that the jet pilots had started to report in the sky, but the real differences in this polar environment are being sniffed out by Epsilon's many sensors. More methane, more nitrogen, more carbon dioxide. More of most things apart from oxygen. Even if the dictates of relative safety hadn't determined our choice, the very sterility of the Antarctic would still have made it an ideal place for monitoring the planet. But that's down to the data in the spectrometers that our college will eventually download and sell to the highest bidder. All our poor human senses can report is whiteness.

  Janey clicks her lips open. "This is it, folks," she says.

  I lean forward to see out of the windscreen. She's right; there are black specks on the horizon. The canhopper sails quickly toward them.

  Flags. Uptilted skis.

  "For God's sake don't knock anything over...." Figgis murmurs.

  But Janey's in control. The engines sigh to a halt. The canhopper settles its smooth underside a safe distance away across the ice.

  We bang elbows as we seal up the out-quits and the specially wide and flat-soled shoes. Figgis says he thinks Woolley should go first. Janey nods from underneath her hoot and mask. I feel a flood of gratitude, but as I unseal the hatch, I wonder if they're doing it this way just so that Woolley'll get the blame if anything goes wrong. Not that any of us really need to worry about that.

  And out. And down the steps. This really does feel like a historic moment. Even if Scott is a month gone from the Pole and Amundsen by longer, we're lonely travelers here, too. Amid these fragile signs of human presence, it feels as if we've arrived somewhere at last. The wind pours over me. It flutters the Norwegian and British flags. The little tent Amundsen left behind is half-buried in drift ice. He's already safely back at Framheim and preparing to report his triumph to the world, but Scott's team are still out there, with Petty Officer Evans already dead ant Captain Oates starting to limp badly....

  Black shapes of tent and ski poles, the sun low and distant across the sparkling ice. The whole scene belongs in some Edwardian painting, but it makes me feel incredibly nostalgic for past times of my own, for the stories my mother used to tell me on late afternoons after school by the lake in the park. Though she had never been to the Arctic, she filled my head with dreams of whiteness; a once-upon-a-time continent that, at least until this last dreadful century, remained almost untouched by man. She told me about Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott.... Their names grew sharp for me as pavement frost. I saw them as silhouettes in the wild white dark, hopeless and determined, their ships crushed by the ice, death walking beside them, struggling endleasly back toward base camp.

  We have a picture show back at Epsilon when we've finished. We're all unusually chatty. I don't know about Janey and Figgis, but for me the ordinary details we found out there were the biggest shock. These men may be legends from my childhood history, but here at the Pole they were just weary and afraid. They left an inconsequential litter behind them. God knows why, but one of those narrow bicycle repair tins was lying out on the rough ice. There were frozen dog turds from the huskies, a Norwegian cigarette packet, a screwed-up wrapper of Cadbury's chocolate. It almost looked like the remains of a picnic. I longed to touch.

  We kept the holocam running all of the time, and that's what we're watching now.

  We didn't realize what we were doing at the time as we grouped self-consciously around the tent and the flag, but our pose mimics with terrible clarity those old shots of Amundsen's and Scott's teams doing the same thing. It's eerie. We look almost as tired and afraid.

  Janey makes dinner for a change. She ransacks the store for freeze dried plaice and mushrooms, little balls of cardboardy rice. She looks at Figgis all the time he eats. A peace offering, of course. He gets the message and rumbles male comments about how good it tastes. And there's some acidic Frascati she's reconstituted to loosen us up. We keep the conversation safe, going over ground already worn smooth with repetition.

  After coffee, I offer to clear up in the expectation that Janey and Figgis will beat a swift retreat to the torpedo tubes to discuss more urgent matters. But something goes wrong behind my back and Janey storms off alone, shouting You Never this and Why Don't You that, leaving Figgis drumming his fingers on the table and the cramped atmosphere colder than it is out there beyond the porthole.

  More than happy to stay out of it, I take a shower and give myself a good rubdown, marveling at the swelling blue veins in my legs. Then I flop down inside my Korean-sized torpedo tube balled up in my dressing gown. Faintly, I can hear Janey still sobbing next door. I close my eyes. Relax, Woolley.

  Tomorrow's a big day. The biggest. I wish I could imagine--

  Figgis raps on the hatch. He wants to talk. I let him in.

  "This all is so ordinary," he says, crouched between the little shelf and the rim of the bunk. "Janey and I are arguing like kids. I wish I had your distance from this kind of thing, Woolley."

  "Didn't the College psychologists tell you what was going to happen when they did the profiles?"

  He shakes his head, then nods. "Yeah, but I didn't believe them." He pulls at his beard. "What did they tell you?"

  "They told me I'd be lonely.... They told me I was used to it and that I would cope." I pause, but why not speak the truth for a change? "They told me that you two squabbling and screwing would get on my nerves."

  He reaches out a hand. My veiny leg is sticking out of my dressing gown as far as my thigh. He gives it a pat. "I'm sorry, Woolley."

  "That's okay," I say, shifting slightly to cover myself. "You read any truthful account of this kind of mission, it's always the same. Think of Thigh on the Bounty."

  Figgis grins. "And Captain Oates is cursing Scott for his incompetence at this very moment."

 

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