The Winter Over(11)
There’s our VIP . Putting the face to the name finally clicked for Cass. Senator Graham Sikes, most likely visiting Shackleton in order to reassure a vaguely troubled public that the one-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar base—the crown jewel of NSF research stations little more than a year ago—would be just fine under the control of the giant multinational corporation TransAnt.
Cass smiled, ignoring the senator’s remark but inwardly imagining her fist connecting with his face. “You can take off your shells now that we’re inside, everyone, but hold on to them. It’s a toasty seventy degrees in the upper station, but I’ll be giving you a full tour today, which means we’ll be going down into the service arches below the station, where it’s a constant sixty below.”
She waited patiently through the rustling of Gore-Tex, the mechanical rasp of zippers unzipping, the jokes and groans about having just put all this junk on. “Welcome to Ninety South and the Shackleton South Pole Research Facility, formerly the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. You’re visiting us at an interesting moment—we’re just a few days from starting our winter-over season, the first under the auspices of TransAnt. Wintering over means when the final flight leaves today, it’ll be the last plane the crew will see until mid-November, two hundred and seventy days from now. For most of that time, the South Pole is in complete darkness, outside temperatures can drop to as low as one hundred degrees below zero, and the base is, in effect, completely cut off from the rest of the planet.”
She’d memorized the lists of salient facts that she threw at them now, from the two miles of ice under their feet to the average wind speed at the station to reiterating the most significant fact of all: once winter arrived, there was no physical way to reach the outside world.
An aide raised his hand. “Isn’t there a snow road from here to McMurdo Station?”
Cass nodded. “The South Pole overland Traverse, or the SPoT. When your plane takes off from here, look out the window to your right and you’ll see it, a trail of thin blue sticks leading away from the base. It ends almost a thousand miles away at McMurdo Station. But it’s operational only during the summer, when the sun shines twenty-four hours a day. Even then, it takes more than a month for a fully loaded convoy to reach Shackleton. If it made the run without freight, it might make the trip in half that time. And, of course, there are frequent flights, like the one you’ll take back to McMurdo. But during winter, neither is possible due to the constant darkness and the potential for extreme winds.”
“So what would you do in case of a real emergency?”
“We’d have to take care of it ourselves,” Cass said. “We’re equipped to handle almost any contingency. We have a full trauma center—we’ll see that later—and possess the power, food, and emergency equipment to last the nine months until the summer crew arrives.”
“No one can fly in, even in an emergency?”
“There have been three recorded winter flights, all of them small craft performing life-saving medevacs,” Cass conceded. “But winter winds have been clocked at hurricane force and the skiway has no lights, which, as you can imagine, is particularly inconvenient when there’s complete darkness for half the year. No plane can take off or land in those conditions. Those three flights were major exceptions.”
“So it can be done, but only in extremis and, I imagine, only for one or two lucky—or unlucky—souls,” Sikes said.
“Exactly. The reality is, we’re stuck here.” She smiled, getting ready to deliver the punch line in three . . . two . . . “During winter-over, what happens at Shackleton stays at Shackleton.”
That got the expected chuckle and, rapport established, she coaxed them into moving with her down the corridor, showing them the science lab, the gym, the galley and mess hall where everyone took their meals. If one ignored the setting, it was the stuff of tours at college campuses and army bases everywhere and not the most scintillating stuff. To snap the group out of its complacency, she paused to point out the flags and medals from various visiting dignitaries from around the world, as well as memorabilia—South Pole markers from years past, a harpoon from a nineteenth-century whaling ship, and the station’s prized possession, a page from Ernest Shackleton’s journal during his time as a young mariner on the Tintagel Castle . Sikes and his clan murmured and hummed their appreciation, then they climbed a short set of stairs to continue to the library, the lounge, and the movie room.
“They didn’t spare any expense, did they?” This from one of the young staffers who had laughed the loudest at the VIP’s joke. “I guess TransAnt wants its people to be treated to the best.”
“The shortest staff assignment at Shackleton is the summer rotation, at just four months,” Cass explained patiently, “but the winter crew is required to stay for nine, and some elect to stay for the entire calendar year. You can see how morale can be a problem if there aren’t at least a few comforts. Over that long winter, we also have to combat T3 syndrome, a mental fugue state brought on by the lack of sunshine and the repetitive environment. Four decades of human behavior studies concluded that it would be foolish to spend millions on a scientific research facility only to fail because the crew had cabin fever.”
“Speaking of research, the experiments are still conducted to the standards set by the NSF?” He furrowed his brow.