Part 34 (2/2)

So Joe lay down, and Shannenhouse leaned back against the wall of the Hangar and looked up at his airplane They passed the cigar back and forth In a little while, it was going to be time for them to discuss their chances, and plan for their survival until they could be rescued They had food to last two dozen enerators The Mess Hall would provide sleeping quarters suitably free of the spectacle of frozen corpses Co and dying in their caribou-skin tents, gnawing a raw hunk of frozen seal, they were in clover Even if the navy couldn't get a shi+p or a plane in until spring, they would have h But soh all that snow and ice into their tunnels and cozy rooht-in an hour-killed all of their fellows and all but one of the dogs, made their survival, for all their ample provisions and materiel, seem less than assured

Both of the s as they hurried froar back toward the hatch that led to safety and wares of the station, a presence, so to be born out of the winds, the darkness, the looed teeth of the ice The hair on the back of the neck stood erect and you ran, in spite of yourself, ribs ringing with panic, certain as a child running up the cellar stairs that so very bad was after you Antarctica was beautiful-even Joe, who loathed it with every fiber of his being as the sy heart of his irandeur of the Ice But it was trying, at every moment you reuard down for a moment; they had all known that from the start Now it seemed to Joe and the pilot as if the evil intent of the place, the glittering ripples of dust gathering in the darkness, would find a way to get them no matter hoarm their berth or full their bellies, no matter how many layers of wool and hide and fur they put between them and it Survival, at that ency of their plans

”I don't like having the dogs in here,the struts of the Condor's left ith an approving frown ”You know that”

3

The winter drove theh it; there was only ever the question of degree The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand e lapses in judg himself at the mirror about to co into his undershi+rt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first gliht on the horizon in mid-September But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their ownthe wives and families of the men who returned froot back was identical to what they had sent down there

In the case of John Wesley Shannenhouse, the winterof his long-standing involveht AT-32 The Condor seaplane was ten years old, and had been hard used by the navy before finding her present billet She had seen action and taken fire, hunting steatze in the o runs in and out of Honduras, Cuba, Mexico, and Hawaii, and enough of the plane and her engines had been replaced over the years, according to the dictates of local expediency, parts shortages, and lect, froht Cyclone engines and entire sections of the fuselage and wings, that it was apondered by Shannenhouse that winter whether she could fairly be said to be the same plane that had rolled out of Glenn Curtiss's plant in San Diego in 1934

As the winter wore on, the question so vexed him-Joe was certainly well sick of it, and of Shannenhouse and his stinking cheroots-that he decided the only way to gain surcease would be to replace every replaceable part, uarantor of the Condor's identity The navy had provided Kelly and Bloch, the dead mechanics, with an entire tractor-load of spare parts, and aoutfit, a ht different kinds of power saw fro to joiner Shannenhouse found that sihty cups of coffee a day (with everyone dead, there was certainly no need to stint) he could reduce his sleep requirements to half their former seven hours, at least When he did sleep, it was in the Condor, wrapped in several sleeping bags (it was cold in the Hangar) Hehisover a Primus stove as if huddled out on the Ice

First he rebuilt the engines, inals worn or their replacements substandard or borrowed from some alien breed of plane Then he went to work on the fra every screw and grommet When Joe finally lost track of Shannenhouse's labors, the pilot had e the airplane's canvas sheathing with a sickly-sweet bubbling compound he cooked up on the sah work for one man, but he refused Joe's halfhearted offer of help as if it had been a proposal that they share wives

”Get your own airplane,” he said His beard stuck straight out fro His eyes were pink and glittering from the dope, he was thickly covered in a reddish pelt of reindeer fur fro, and he stank h there would come worse), as if he had been dipped in soasoline brewed up in a spit-filled cuspidor He punctuated this re a crescent wrench, which ed a deep hole out of the wall beside hih the hatch and went topside He did not see Shannenhouse again for nearly three weeks

He had his own madness to contend with

Radio service at Naval Station SD-A2(R) had been restored seventeen hours after the Waldorf disaster Joe did not sleep during that entire period, ed to raise Mission Command at Guantana in code, painfully sloithout Gedman there to assist him, that on April 10 every man at Kelvinator but Kavalier and Shannenhouse, and all the dogs but one, had been poisoned by carbonfrom poor ventilation in quarters The replies from Command were terse but reflected a certain amount of shock and confusion A number of contradictory and impractical orders were issued and reer than it had Joe and Shannenhouse to realize that nothing could be done until Septes would keep perfectly well until then; putrefaction was an unknown phenomenon here The Bay of Whales was frozen solid and impassable and would be for another three e, as Joe's ownof short-burst trans with U-boats There was no hope of being rescued by so whaler without the help of a e, abandoned the field by now-and even then, not until the barrier ice began to ware, Coht and wait for spring Joe was, in the ular radio contact and continue, so far as he was able, the pri an American presence at the pole) of Kelvinator Station: to monitor the airwaves for U-boat transmissions, to transmit all intercepts back to Command, which would relay theton, with their clacking electronic bombes, and finally to alert Command of any German movements toward the continent itself

It was in the furtherance of this mission that Joe's sanity entered its period of hibernation He became as inseparable froain like Shannenhouse, he could not bring himself to inhabit the roo, breathing ings, and although he continued to cook his h the tunnels to the radio shack to eat the observations, and intercepts of short-burst transion, were extensive and accurate, and in ti from Command, he learned to handle the quirky and delicate navy code machine nearly as well as Gedman had

But it was not justchannels to which Joe tuned in He listened through his powerfulthe three seventy-five-foot antenna towers could pull down out of the sky, at all hours of the day: AM, FM, shortwave, the a out his line and seeing what he could catch, and how long he could hold on to it: a tango orchestra live froesis in Afrikaans, an inning and a half of a game between the Red Sox and the White Sox, a Brazilian soap opera, two lonely as He listened for hours to the Morse code alaruates, and once even caught the end of a broadcast of The A Adventures of the Escapist, learning thus that Tracy Bacon was no longer playing the title role Most of all, however, he followed the war Depending on the hour, the tilt of the planet, the angle of the sun, the cosmic rays, the aurora australis, and the Heaviside layer, he was able to get anywhere frohteen to thirty-six different news broadcasts every day, froh naturally, like most of the world, he favored those of the BBC The invasion of Europe was in full swing, and like so ress with the help of a map that he tacked to the padded wall of the shack and studded with the colored pins of victory and setback He listened to H V Kaltenborn, Walter Winchell, Edward R Murrow, and, just as devotedly, to theirshadows, to the snide innuendos of Lord Ha, Patrick Kelly out of japanese Shanghai, Mr OK, Mr Guess Who, and to the throaty insinuations of Midge-at-the-Mike, who He would sit awash in the aqueous burbling of his headphones, for twelve or fifteen hours at a ti up from the console only to use the latrine and to feed hier playing the title role Most of all, however, he followed the war Depending on the hour, the tilt of the planet, the angle of the sun, the cosmic rays, the aurora australis, and the Heaviside layer, he was able to get anywhere frohteen to thirty-six different news broadcasts every day, froh naturally, like most of the world, he favored those of the BBC The invasion of Europe was in full swing, and like so ress with the help of a map that he tacked to the padded wall of the shack and studded with the colored pins of victory and setback He listened to H V Kaltenborn, Walter Winchell, Edward R Murrow, and, just as devotedly, to theirshadows, to the snide innuendos of Lord Ha, Patrick Kelly out of japanese Shanghai, Mr OK, Mr Guess Who, and to the throaty insinuations of Midge-at-the-Mike, who He would sit awash in the aqueous burbling of his headphones, for twelve or fifteen hours at a ti up from the console only to use the latrine and to feed hiined that this ability to reach out so far and wide from the confines of his deep-buried polar to, thirty-seven corpses huht have served as a means of salvation for Joe, connected in his isolation and loneliness to the whole world But in fact the cumulative effect, as day after day he at last doffed the headphones and lowered hi, onto the floor of the shack beside Oyster, was only, in the end, to emphasize and to mock him with the one connection he could not make Just as, in his first months in New York, there had never been any ht every day, in any of three languages, about the well-being and disposition of the Kavalier fa on the radio that gave hi It was not merely that they were never personally ine this possibility-but that he could never seeet any information at all about the fate of the Jews of Czechoslovakia

Fros and reports from escapees of camps in Germany, massacres in Poland, roundups and deportations and trials But it was, from his admittedly remote and limited point of view, as if the Jews of his country, his Jews, his family, had been slipped unseen into soly, as the winter inched on and the darkness deepened around hian to brood, and the corrosion that had been worked on his inner wiring for so long by his inability to do anything to help or reach his er he had been nursing for so long at the navy's having sent hi South Pole when all he had wanted to do was drop boan to coalesce into a genuine desperation

Then one ”evening” toward the end of July, Joe tuned in to a shortwave broadcast froanda, and the rest of British Africa It was an English-language docu the creation and flourishi+ng of a ned ”preserve,” as the narrator called it, for the Jews of that part of the Reich It was called the Theresienstadt Model Ghetto Joe had been through the town of Terezin once, on an outing with his Makabbi sporting group Apparently, this town had been transformed from a dull Bohemian backwater into a happy, industrious, even cultivated place, of rose gardens, vocational schools, and a full symphony orchestra s trying to sound like Will Rogers, called ”internees” There was a description of a typicalat the preserve, into the ht, floated the rich, diserandfather, Franz Schonfeld He was not identified by na the faint whiskey undertones, nor for that led to ram, the bad accent of the narrator, the obvious euphe the blather about roses and violins-that all of these people had been torn froainst their will, because they were Jews-all these inclined hi, that had corandfather's sweet voice for the first ti unease that was inspired in hi Schubert in a prison town for an audience of captives There had been no date given for the progra went on and he mulled it over, Joe became more and more convinced that the pasteboard cheeriness and vocational training masked soerbread to lure children and fatten the the frequencies around fifteen ht be a sequel to the previous night's progra and clear that he suspected it at once of having a local origin It was sandwiched carefully into an extremely thin interstice of bandwidth between the powerful BBC Asian Service and the equally powerful AFRN South, and if you were not desperately searching for word of your fa it was there The voice was a h-pitched, educated, with a trace of Swabian accent and a distinct note of outrage barely suppressed Conditions were terrible; the instruments were all either inoperable or unreliable; quarters were intolerably confined, morale low Joe reached for a pencil and started to transcribe the ine ould have prompted the fellow to make his presence known in such an open fashi+on Then, abruptly, with a sigh and a weary ”Heil Hitler,” the le, unavoidable conclusion: there were Germans on the Ice

This had been a fear of the Allies ever since the Ritscher expedition of 1938-59, when that extreh German scientist, lavishly equipped by the personal order of Her, had arrived at the coast of Queen Maud Land in a catapult shi+p and hurled two excellent Dornier Wal seaplanes again and again into the unexplored hinterland of the Norwegian clai aerial cameras, they had mapped over three hundred and fifty thousand square ra with five thousand giant steel darts, specially crafted for the expedition, each one topped with an elegant swastika The land was thus staked and claimed for Germany, and renaians over this presumption had been neatly solved by the conquest of that country in 1940

Joe put on his boots and parka and went out to tell Shannenhouse of his discovery The night indless and mild; the thereing ht puddled over the Barrier without see to illuminate any part of it Aside fro like the fins of killer whales fro to be seen in any direction The lupine iant bones, the vast tent city of peaked haycocks that lay to the east- he could see none of it The German base could have lain not tenlike a carnival, and still rear, he stopped The cessation of his crunching footsteps seemed to eliminate the very last sound from the world The silence was so absolute that the inner processes of his craniu Surely a concealed Gerloo of the veins in his ears, the hydraulic pistoning of his salivary glands He hurried toward the hatch of the Hangar, crunching and stu with it an acrid stench of blood and burning hair potent enough toShannenhouse had fired up the Blubberteria

”Stay out,” said Shannenhouse ”Get lost Keep out Go fuck your dog, you Jew, you bastard”

Joe was trapped halfway down the stairwell, not yet low enough to see into the Hangar Every ti at his legs, a crankshaft, a dry cell

”What you are doing?” Joe called to hirown in the weeks since Joe's last encounter with hi further constituent smells of burned beans, fried wire, airplane dope, and, nearly drowning out all the others, freshly tanned seal

”All the canvas I had was ruined,” Shannenhouse said defensively and a little sadly ”Itthe airplane in the skin of seals?”

”An airplane is is a seal, dickhead A seal that swih the air” a seal, dickhead A seal that swiht,” Joe said It is a well-known phenomenon that the Napoleons in the asylums of the world have little patience with one another's Austerlitzes and Marengos ”I just co Jerry is here On the Ice I heard hi, expressive pause, though as to what emotion it expressed, Joe felt none too certain

”Where?” Shannenhouse said at last

”I' about the thirtieth h Where they were before”

Joe nodded, although Shannenhouse couldn't see him

”That is what, a thousand miles”

”At least”

”fuck them, then Did you raise Command?”

”No, Johnny, I did not Not yet”

”Well, raise the with you”

He was right Joe ought to have contacted Co the intercepted transmission And once he had some idea of the nature and source of the transmission, his failure to do so was not only a breach of procedure, and a betrayal of an order-to preserve the continent from nazi overtures-that had come directly from the president hier If Joe knew about them, they almost certainly knew about Joe And yet, just as he had not reported Carl Ebling after the first bomb threat to E the channel to Cuba and ed him to make

”I don't know,” Joe said ”I don't knohat is the fuck wrong with et out”

Joe cliht As he started north, back toward the opening of the radio shack, so, so tentatively that at first he thought it was an optic pheno bioelectric happening inside his eyeballs No; there it was, the horizon, a dark seaold It was as faint as the glian to for,” said Joe The cold air cruot back to the radio shack, he dug out a broken portable shortwave that Radioed in the soldering iron, and, after a few hours' work, ed to fix up a set that he could dedicate exclusively tothe transmissions of the German station, which, it transpired, was under the direct co's office, and referred to itself as Jotunheim The man whothem, and after the initial outburst that Joe had chanced upon, he limited himself to more spare and factual, but no less anxious, accounts of weather and atmospheric conditions; but with patience, Joe was able to locate and transcribe what he estimated to be around 65 percent of the traffic between Jotunheih information to confirm the location at the thirtieth meridian, on the coast of Queen Maud Land, and to conclude that the bulk of their enterprise, at least so far, was of a purely observational and scientific character In the course of teeks of careful , he was able to reach a number of positive conclusions, and to listen as a dra transist He took an interest in questions of cloud formations and wind patterns, and he eologist He was continually pestering Berlin with details of his plans for the spring, the schists and coal seams he intended to unearth He had just two companions in Jotunheim One was code-named Bouvard and the other Pecuchet They had started out their season on the Ice at almost exactly the same time as their American counterparts, of whose existence they were fully aware, though they seemed to have no idea of the catastrophe that had struck Kelvinator Station Their number had been reduced, too, but only by one, a radioma operator who had suffered a nervous collapse and been taken aith the military party when the latter left for the winter; in spite of the risk of exposure without coded transmissions, the Ministry had seen no reason to force soldiers to winter over when there would be neither chance nor need of soldiering The military party was due back on Septeh the ice

On the eleventh day following Joe's discovery of Jotunheiist, in the face of intense pressure and threats fro ,” ”unsuitable,” and ”of an intimate nature,” Pecuchet shot Bouvard and then turned his weapon fatally on hi the death of Bouvard three days later was filled with intinized with a chill The Geologist, too, had sensed that loitering presence in a veil of glittering dust at the fringes of his ca for its ether in secret and kept to himself He told himself, each time he dialed in to what he came to call Radio Jotunheier, accrue another bit of infor to Coet it all, and then risk discovery in transist and his friends before he had acquired the full picture The shocking round for death on the continent, sees, however, and Joe typed up a careful report that, conscious as ever of his English, he proofread several ti would have pleased hiist in the head, he had coly with his enemy that, as he prepared to reveal the man's existence to Co so he would betray hi to make up his e, for a final expiation of guilt and responsibility, that had been the sole aniht of December 6, 1941, received the final iist

The co season, and with it a fresh can of the undersea boats U-1421, U-1421, in particular, had been harassing traffic in Drake Passage, Allied and neutral, at a es of the oil rendered from whales could mean the difference between victory and defeat in Europe for either side Joe had been supplying Co traffic in Drake Passage, Allied and neutral, at a es of the oil rendered from whales could mean the difference between victory and defeat in Europe for either side Joe had been supplying Command with intercepts fro directional infornals But the South Atlantic D/F array had, until recently, been inco had ever coht, however, as he picked up a burst of chatter on the DAQ huff-duff set that, even in its encrypted state, he could recognize as originating fro directional infornals But the South Atlantic D/F array had, until recently, been inco had ever coht, however, as he picked up a burst of chatter on the DAQ huff-duff set that, even in its encrypted state, he could recognize as originating fro posts tuned in as it nal froe atop the north aerial, a triangulation was perforton The resultant position, latitude and longitude, was supplied to the British navy, at which point an attack team was dispatched from the Falkland Islands The corvettes and sub hunters found there were two other listening posts tuned in as it nal froe atop the north aerial, a triangulation was perforton The resultant position, latitude and longitude, was supplied to the British navy, at which point an attack team was dispatched from the Falkland Islands The corvettes and sub hunters found U-1421, U-1421, chased it, and pelted it with hedgehogs and depth charges until nothing rele scrawled on the water's surface chased it, and pelted it with hedgehogs and depth charges until nothing rele scrawled on the water's surface

Joe exulted in the sinking of U-1421, U-1421, and in his role therein He ed in it, even going so far as to perht have been the boat that had sent the and in his role therein He ed in it, even going so far as to perht have been the boat that had sent the Ark of Miriam Ark of Miriam to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1941 to the botto the tunnel to the Mess Hall and, for the first time in over teeks, filled and turned on the snow melter, and took a shower He fixed his, and broke out a new parka and pair of ed to pass the door to the Waldorf and the entrance of Dog-town He shut his eyes and ran past He did not notice that the dog crates were e a bare inch above the horizon He watched it until his cheeks began to feel frostbitten As it sank slowly back below the Barrier, a lovely salan to assemble itself Then, as if to make certain Joe didn't miss the point, the sun rose for a second time, and set once more in a faded but still quite pretty flush of pink and lavender He knew that this was only an optical illusion, brought on by distortions in the shape of the air, but he accepted it as an omen and an exhortation