Antarctica Read Free

over.”
    “
Hi
-JACKED. Someone’s locked me in the cab here and taped over the windows! Over!”
    “X, did you say hijacked? Tell me what you mean by hijacked, over.”
    “What I mean is that I’m in a storm up here and just now some, somebody landed on my roof and covered my windows on the outside with black plastic, and none of my doors will open, something has been done to them on the outside to keep them from opening! So I’m going to go back and try to cut through a bar holding the back doors together, but I thought I’d better call you first, in case, to tell you what’s happening! Also to ask if you can see anything unusual about my train in any satellite images you have of it! Over!”
    “We’ll have to check about the satellite images, X, I don’t know who is getting those, if anyone. Just stay put and we’ll see what we can do. Don’t do anything rash, over.”
    “Yeah yeah yeah,” X muttered, and pushed the transmit button: “Listen Randi, I’m going to go to the back doors and see if they’ll open, be right back to tell you about it, over!”
    He went to the back and shoved out on the doors again. Again they stopped, but this time he fit the hacksaw into the crack over the bar, and began to saw like a maniac. Some kind of hardened plastic, apparently, and the doors impeded the saw. By the time he cut through the bar he was sweating profusely, and when he flung the doors open the air crashed over him like a wave of liquid nitrogen. “Ow!” he said, his throat chilling with every inhalation. He pulled his parka hood up, and held onto the door and leaned out into the wind, his eyes tearing so he could barely see.
    But he had a door open. He was no longer trapped. He leaned out to look; the next vehicle in the line was following as if nothing had happened. It was like being in a train of mechanical elephants. No one in sight, nothing to be seen. Rumbling engines, squeaks of giant tractor wheels over the dry snow, the whistle and shriek of the wind; nothing else; but a gust of fear blew through him on the wind, and he shivered convulsively. He needed more clothes. Back up in the cab he could hear Randi’s voice, a clear Midwestern twang that cut through static like nothing else: “Mac Coms calling SPOT 103, answer me X, what’s happening out there? Weather says you’re in a Condition One out there, so be careful! They also said their satellite photos do not penetrate the cloud layer in any way useful to you. Answer me X, please, over!”
    Instead he dropped down the steps and onto the hard-packed snow beside the vehicle. It squeaked underfoot. “Shit.” He ran forward and leaped onto the ladder steps that were inset into the lower body of the cab. Black plastic on the windows, sure enough. “Shit!” He tore at it, and the freezing wind helped pull the sheet away from the metal and plastic; he held onto the sheet with a desperate clench, so he would have evidence thathe had not hallucinated the whole incident. Then he hesitated, irrationally afraid of jumping down wrong somehow and screwing up, as in his ski fantasy. But surely in the state he was in, he could run a lot faster than the tractors were moving; and it was too cold to stay where he was, the wind was barreling right through his clothes and his flesh too, rattling his bones together like castanets. So he leaped down, and landed solidly, and as his tractor lumbered past he ran out of the line of the treadmarks, to be able to see back the length of the train. It looked short. He counted to be sure, pointing at each tractor in turn; while he did his vehicle got a bit ahead of him, and when he noticed that he ran like a lunatic back to the side of the thing, and leaped up and in, panting hard, frightened, frozen right to the core. There were only nine vehicles now.
     
    High rapid beeping came from her crevasse detector, and Valerie Kenning stopped skiing and leaned on her ski poles. She was well ahead of the rest of her group, and