The landing, however, went smoothly, and as the plane coasted along the ice, Cooper had the strange feeling of being on a seventy-seven-ton toboggan. Relieved cheers filled the cabin as they coasted to the end of the skiway. Almost before the plane had come to a complete stop, the doors were opened and everyone began filing out, but Cooper couldn’t move. McMurdo had been the last exit, a place with bowling alleys and an ATM. This was the end. This was South Pole.
When she finally made her way to the exit, she stopped short, holding up the rest of the line as she stared into infinity—sheer white of a character she’d never seen in life or art. She felt light-headed.
“Your goggles,” Birdie shouted over the din of the roaring engine. He pressed them into her hands. She pulled them over her head and onto her face, and began walking down the stairs, but on the last step she stumbled. As if in slow motion, she landed face-first on her bag, which had been thrown out of the cargo hold. Immediately, a mouthful of polar air seized her lungs, and she started to choke. It was as if her throat had instantly crystallized. Birdie hauled Cooper to her feet.
“Thanks,” she croaked.
All around her was a landscape of snow without end; there was no horizon. She felt seaborne, bodiless. There was no edge, no crust to hold it all in. Crowded around the runway were groups of people wearing the green parkas that distinguished the Polies from the McMurdo-ites, who wore cherry-red. Again, the tall Russian scientist disembarked and carried his oversize duffel with ease, his aviators glinting in the sun. Cooper watched as other hoodless men in aviators surrounded him, clearly excited to see him. Beyond them was a large silver geodesic dome: South Pole Station.
“How was McMurdo?”
Cooper peered into yet another fur-lined hood and saw Tucker’s face. Relief washed over her.
“We bowled,” she said, her body beginning to shake from the cold. “Two games.”
“Put on your hood,” Tucker said, and Cooper complied. “I’m glad you’re here. You were missed.” The passivity of the sentence only underscored its weirdness. “Come on, let’s go inside.”
The entrance to South Pole Station had nearly been swallowed by drifting snow. The ramp leading into the dome sloped down into the frozen earth like a long, swollen throat. Cooper stopped to watch a group of people shoveling out a trench that encircled the dome like a moat. On seeing the artists pass into the tunnel, one of the workers stopped and leaned on his shovel. He pointed toward a wooden sign speared into the ice. In handwritten letters, it spelled Caution! Crevasse of Death.
“Live it. Learn it. Love it,” he said.
As the Fingys inched farther down the tunnel, a town the color of a safety-hazard cone materialized beneath the frozen Spaceship Earth dome. A collection of ugly, two-story prefab buildings sprouted from the dirty ice. One of the novelists began hacking uncontrollably as a tractor and forklift rumbled past them coughing exhaust that wreathed the buildings in smog. Cooper glanced at an enormous digital thermometer hanging over the entrance to one of the trailers. Inside the dome it was thirty-five degrees below zero. Outside it was negative fifty. This, Cooper knew from the station guide, was a balmy summer’s day.
Tucker led the artists into the galley, located on the first floor of the largest trailer. As they shuffled in, a pair of guys playing chess looked up at them, then looked at each other, and flashed the international sign of cultural superiority—the Star Trek finger-split.
Tucker stopped near the soda dispenser. “This is the galley. This is where you’ll come to eat,” he said. “Our production cook is Miss Pearl here.” The woman in the pink bandana Cooper had seen at fire school now stood in the middle of the kitchen. She was smiling, both hands on her apron-wrapped hips, her ash-blond hair gathered in a short ponytail, the same bandanna wrapped around her head. A small cadre of galley workers buzzed behind her, preparing for lunch.
“Hi, artistes, welcome to South Pole! I’ll give you a quick run-down of how the eats work around here, and I’m sorry if I’m short on details—we’re in the middle of the lunch prep and also, this is my first year so I’m going by what the binders tell me.” In the kitchen, soups bubbled in industrial-size pots and a couple of guys in hairnets chopped vegetables. “I’m told food is really the only unequivocally nice thing about institutionalized life down here,” Pearl said as she led the group between prep tables. “We really try to make it special, make it nice. Lots of people have told me that they haven’t eaten better food than the food they ate here on the ice.” Pearl slipped past the meat slicer, where a thin guy was running a ham across the blade. “And this is Kit. He’s our rock star DA.”
“District attorney?” one of the artists asked, and Cooper caught Tucker rolling his eyes.
“Nope, here DA stands for dining assistant,” Pearl said cheerfully. “Everyone say hi to Kit.” Everyone murmured a hello, and the group moved through the kitchen. As Cooper passed him, Kit began moving his pelvis in rhythm with the slicer, tongue hanging out, eyes half closed.
“Your zipper’s down,” Cooper whispered. Kit shrugged and continued slicing.
Pearl was now standing in front of a stack of cabinets, saying that there were three squares a day, six days a week. “If you need to eat at Midrats, let me or Bonnie know,” she said, gesturing to a heavy-set dark-haired woman working the stove across from the cabinets. “Bonnie’s the head cook.”
“Excuse me, but what are Midrats?” Birdie asked, smiling stupidly at Pearl. Cooper could see he was already enamored.
“Midrats is the term we use for our midnight meal cooked for the workers on the graveyard shift. It’s short for ‘midnight rations’—Midrats! Does that answer your question?” Birdie signaled his assent with a thumbs-up. “Anyway, leftovers are stored in the white fridge over there, and you can warm up whatever you want in the microwave. But if you’re seriously unmotivated, you can check out the cabinets.” She turned around and pulled open the door to a large cupboard. A pile of ramen noodles and plastic-wrapped Melba toast tumbled out. Cooper picked up one of the ramen soup packages from the floor.
“This expired in 1996,” she said.
Pearl shrugged. “We’re at the end of a long supply chain.”
*
Across an expanse of snow a quarter mile from the Dome, the Jamesways lay atop the ice like giant prehistoric grubs. This tent city, called Summer Camp, was where most of the Polies slept. The rest bunked in the Hypertats, closer to the station, while a select few had rooms in the elevated dorm under the Dome. Cooper was halfway to camp with her bag—bag-drag was an individual sport and a rite of passage for Fingys—when she heard the sound of footsteps, which, on dry Antarctic snow, sounded like boots crushing Saltines.