“Loosen up!” Danzig cried over his own shoulder, and Michael thought, Easier said than done.
Still, he tried to let his shoulders fall and his arms bend a bit, and he willed his knees to unlock.
“If you want ’em to go straight ahead,” Danzig advised, though Michael had a hard time hearing him over the wind battering at his hood, “shout ‘Straight ahead!’”
Okay, that one wouldn’t be hard to remember.
“And if you want ’em to go slower, pull back on the lines and shout, ‘Easy!’”
Michael had no idea how fast they were actually going, but the impression of speed was incredible. As he clung to the rubberized handlebars, the icy landscape went flying by on either side. When he’d been hunkered down in the shell, it had been quite different; he’d been warm and protected, and everything had been seen from just a few feet off the ground. But standing up, with the wind smacking his face and rippling at his sleeves—the sound reminded him of the snapping flag at Point Adélie—it was both exhausting and invigorating. A cloud of ice crystals, thrown up by the paws of the running dogs, stung his lips and spattered like rain on his goggles. Carefully, he raised one glove, swiped the crystals away, then grabbed for the handlebars again.
But as he began to feel the rhythm of the team and became accustomed to the swooshing movement of the sled, he began to relax. He could look beyond the bushy heads and tails of the dogs and off into the distance. The base was still too far off to be seen at all, and that was just as well. What he saw instead was simply a limitless continent of snow and ice and permafrost—larger, he knew, than Australia, but so desolate that it made the great outback look crowded. The sled was clinging to the shoreline, which comparatively teemed with life, but just a few miles inland, the seals no longer frolicked, the birds ceased to fly, and even the modest lichen disappeared from sight. It was a desert, as bereft of life—in fact, as hostile to it—as anyplace on the planet. Humans had found a way to reach the South Pole; they could fly over it, they could plant a flag, they could take some measurements, but they could never really claim it. No one could really stay there, and only a madman would want to.
The coppery sun was hanging like a watch fob, in an empty sky. Time had become as fluid for Michael as it did for everyone in the Antarctic—he’d already used up nearly half of the time on his NSF pass, but the days simply flowed into each other like a running stream. He had to check his watch constantly, but even then he couldn’t always tell if it was a.m. or p.m. There were several times when he had gotten confused, and occasions when he had suddenly had to part the blackout curtains around his bunk, stagger into the hall, and confirm whether it was night or day with the first person he saw. Once it had been Spook, the botanist, who was seldom seen outside his lab—or “the flower shop,” as it was known to the grunts—and together they had agreed it was afternoon, when it actually turned out to be the dead of night. They’d gone to the commons and been surprised to find it so empty. That was when Michael had looked at Spook more closely and seen the telltale signs of Big Eye—the glassy stare, the slack, though oddly bemused, expression.
It was also when he’d started regulating his own sleep cycle with Lunesta or lorazepam—whatever he could get the good Dr. Barnes to prescribe for him that night.
“There’s an old saying,” she’d advised. “If one person tells you that you look tired, don’t worry about it. But if two people tell you that you look tired, lie down.”
“What are you telling me?”
“Lie down—and take it easy.”