The Nexus Colony Page 3

  Grimes was a mild-tempered individual, and other than his aversion to flying, he was one rugged son-of-a-bitch. They all were. They had to be. Living on the Antarctic ice fields for weeks at a time under the harshest conditions on planet Earth, you had to be tough or else you didn’t survive. All it took was one little mistake, one momentary mind lapse, like not watching out for crevasses or leaving your fingers exposed for too many seconds, and you could be a goner. The temperature even in the summer time averaged around zero degrees Fahrenheit. And then there was the wind. Always blowing along the glaciers, at most times anywhere up to 20 knots, and that was when there weren’t even any storms. The research team had to do their work in the high wind lanes along the ice fields. They were meteorite hunters.

  Meteorites aren’t any more abundant in Antarctica than anywhere else on the planet. They’re just easier to find. The glacial ice fields were perfect hunting grounds, as the glaciers themselves acted like huge conveyor belts bringing all sorts of rocks and debris—including meteorites—to the surface as they transported them away from the glacial moraine. And the winds were always blowing along the glaciers, and the ice crystals, omni-present in the air, acted like an abrasive continually wearing away the surface crust and keeping the glacier relatively free of any significant snow accumulation. As the ice evaporated, a lot of the debris became exposed at the top. And a lot of the debris were chunks of meteorites, some tiny, some significantly large, but easily identified by the experts.

  Grimes loved it. Meteorite research was heavily sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and he regarded it most fortunate that he was one of the primary field researchers. The United States had been mounting meteorite research since the early 1970’s and always worked out of McMurdo Station. Grimes’ team, which numbered eight individuals including two mountaineers, were headed out for another five weeks of hunting. That would take them up to the end of January. February was the last full month of the summer, but past experience along the glaciers proved that the gathering effort was minimal during that month due to the increasing winds, which when they blew beyond 20 knots, prevented anyone from leaving the shelters. You spent more time battling the intense winds and temperatures than you did gathering specimens. Statistics showed that the added effort just wasn’t worth it.

  They’d had a good season so far, collecting close to four hundred meteorite specimens. The university wanted the team to close out the season by searching along the top portion of the Mulock Glacier which had been on the list for about three years now. Grimes’ group was more than happy to accommodate. That’s why they all had come to Antarctica in the first place. It was the last remaining pristine frontier left on the planet.

  The plane hit another air pocket, and the sudden drop created a whump in Grimes’ ears. Shaking his head in agitation, he looked across at two of his colleagues, who were shoving their fingers in their throats in a gesture of mock gagging. It didn’t seem to bother anybody else on the plane when they hit the pockets. Grimes knew that someday one of these things was just going to break apart in the sky and some unfortunate research team was going to end up as a permanent part of the Antarctic landscape.

  It was a relatively short flight from McMurdo Station to the Mulock Glacier, and Grimes was none too sad when one of the flight crewmen came over to inform him they were approaching the target area. The Navy pilot – his nametag said Daniels – wanted to know if somebody was going to come up front to watch the downhill run, as the pilots all called it. Grimes deferred to Mike Ruger, the head mountaineer, but Ruger was busy doing something with his gear and responded, “You go on up, Hilly. I want to get this thing straightened out before we land.”

  “Right,” Grimes replied. Ruger wasn’t as much interested in scoping out the terrain from the air simply because he’d been out here along the Mulock Glacier a number of times. He knew right where they were. But somebody always went up front on the flight deck to get a bearing on the area, and it was usually one of the mountaineers. Grimes felt comfortable with Mike Ruger. This guy was the best there was on the continent. German born, but raised and educated in the USA. They didn’t get any better than Ruger. Everybody liked and trusted him, as solitary as he was.

  Feeling closed in, Grimes thought to himself, what the hell, then unbuckled the harness and worked his way through the piles of skids toward the flight deck.

  The ride seemed to smooth out as the LC-130 descended down toward the glacier. The co-pilot, a pleasant young lieutenant with a Boston accent – Grimes couldn’t read his nametag – positioned Grimes in the trainee seat in between and slightly behind the pilot and co-pilot. From here, Grimes had a panoramic view of the whole world outside the aircraft.

  The view was sensational, and it always seemed to temporarily alleviate the fears Grimes felt about flying. His thoughts focused on the spectacle. Antarctica is an incredible journey. It has two basic topographies—one is perennial ice and snow, the other rock. About ninety nine percent of the continent is covered by a permanent ice sheet. The average thickness is estimated to be one mile. Ninety percent of the Earth’s total ice is locked up in Antarctica, as well as about seventy percent of the world’s fresh water. Yet it is the driest place on Earth. The coldness is so intense that it allows no moisture in the air, and even the dew that forms in the air cannot exist as droplets of water but rather as miniature ice crystals known as diamond dust. The snow, when it is present, is so powdery dry that is squeaks like Styrofoam when walked on.

  Grimes reflected about the climatology, the scientific wheels always clicking in his mind. The coastline along the eastern end of Antarctica is subjected to the most violent storms on the face of the planet. The ice is so abounding that it creates huge frigid air masses rising above the continent that blend with the prevailing warmer westerly air masses, creating the most intense storm belt on the planet. The permanent low pressure system is known as the Antarctic Trough, and the storms rage so violently that few living things can survive, least of all man. Occasionally, the storms make their way inland. When they rage over the face of the glaciers, the winds test the survival of even the fittest.

  Grimes understood how difficult it was to conceptualize the fact that if all the ice in Antarctica were to suddenly melt, it would raise the level of the world’s oceans about two hundred feet. An intimidating thought when trying to understand the power of Mother Nature. The Ice. It was what everybody called it without ever having to be told. As far as the human eye could see, everything was coated by it, and as he peered through the checkered Plexiglas window panels of the LC-130, it left him with the impression that the whole world was one crystalline mass.

  The plane began to bank, and it interrupted his sobering thoughts. The pilot, who up to this time hadn’t said a word to Grimes, cast him a brief acknowledging smile, then went right back to the task at hand. As the aircraft came out of its bank between two magnificent spires, the Mulock Glacier appeared in all its splendor, fanning out before them toward the horizon just a mere five hundred feet below.

  The LC-130 lumbered along as the pilot reconnoitered the prospective landing area. The initial pass over the area showed it to be a promising site for touchdown. Not for Grimes and his meteorite hunters, but promising as a runway for the especially ski-equipped aircraft. Like everywhere else on the Antarctic continent, there were no airports, no airfields, no constructed runways per se. Everything was ice. Airplanes made their own runways.

  When the transports took research teams into the interior, the pilots looked for flat, lengthy areas along the ice fields. Then they flew over them once or twice to get a preliminary look at the potential runway to see if it was smooth enough to attempt landing. The skis attached to the wheels had a large surface area, and it really wasn’t all that difficult to land one of these babies. As long as the ice was relatively smooth and there were no crevasses. You hit a crevasse, and you and the plane were goners.

  What the pilots did was make a ski drag—affectionately call the downhi
ll run. They came in as if to land, but instead of setting the plane all the way down, they kept the throttles open just enough to get airborne once the skis dragged across the ice field, making deep, distinctive tracks through the shallow snow covering. Then they throttled back up and got airborne again, circling the area to look at their ski tracks.

  It was no big deal for a pilot. It was very similar to performing routine touch-and-goes practiced by every pilot in the world. When the plane gets airborne after the run across the field, they look closely at the pattern created in the ski tracks. If the line is straight and uninterrupted, the runway has potential. If the line looks broken like a series of dots and dashes, it’s an indication that there are crevices hidden just below the crust of snow.

  Crevasses are the pilot’s bane. It could mean instantaneous destruction of the plane if you hit a crevasse on landing. If the pilot had even an inkling that the ski drag might be showing crevasses, they wouldn’t take you in no matter how promising the ice field looked to your research. For that matter, you couldn’t even get a bush pilot to take you down, and some of those guys were real kamikazes. Antarctica was a dangerous place. If you didn’t respect that, you didn’t last very long.

  The long stretch of ice directly ahead of the plane came up to meet them quickly as Daniels backed off just enough on the throttles to allow the plane to touch the surface of the ice. The plane slowly dropped out of the sky, and Grimes realized he had been holding his breath when the massive bulk of the LC-130 Hercules hit with a pronounced thump against the solid ice surface. The vibration started immediately upon touchdown, and Grimes could feel the rumble coming up through his feet right into his chest cavity. The pitch of the powerful engines changed as the pilot throttled up and commenced plowing his way straight across the ice field.

  Nervously, Grimes held on tightly as the plane shuddered and rumbled, bouncing him sideways back and forth in the poorly-secured trainee seat. He noticed that the pilot and co-pilot, along with the flight engineer, were strapped securely in their shoulder harnesses while all he had was a seat belt holding him down to the canvass pad. Great ergonomics for the poor bastards being trained. Grimes often wondered if these Navy flyboys did this as a joke on the wimpy scientists, asking them to come up front to observe. They probably got a good laugh watching the observer getting his brains and his balls knocked all around. But anyway you looked at it, it was something that had to be done. Grimes hated it, the pilot and co-pilot seemed indifferent, and his team colleagues sitting in the back end thought it was like an amusement park ride.

  It seemed like the pilot had been doing the ski drag for a very long time before Grimes finally heard the engines roar back to full power as the plane abruptly stopped its vibrating, the bulky transport finally airborne again and no longer engaged in the ski drag. It probably took all of a minute and a half, but to Grimes, it seemed a hell of a lot longer. But it was finally over with. At least phase one was. If this was a good runway, they would go around again and come in for a landing, basically setting the plane down in the same tracks he had just made across the ice field. Most of the pilots referred to it as a controlled crash landing in the same vein of carrier pilots. Grimes couldn’t agree more. If a pilot didn’t like what he saw, well…he’d start all over again and find another promising runway somewhere else along the glacier field.

  The plane continued to climb in altitude until Grimes could see by the altimeter on the instrument panel that they were up at about six hundred feet. As the plane made one more bank, the ski tracks came into view across the flat, unending surface of the glacier. Grimes unbuckled his belt—which wasn’t doing much good anyway—and peered out the window at the field below. To him the ski tracks looked okay, but he was glad it wasn’t him who was going to make the decision.

  Daniels looked over at his co-pilot, who said, “Looks all right to me. What d’ya think?”

  “Felt okay.” Daniels replied placidly. “Seemed pretty solid.” Then turning around to Grimes, he asked, “What do you think, doc? Give her a try?”

  “You’re asking me?” Grimes responded, surprised, not really sure if they were kidding or not. He’d never been asked before by a pilot for his opinion about a ski drag.

  “Well, as long as you say it’s all right, doc,” the pilot said, “we’ll take her in.” Then he put the plane into a steep bank to circle around for the landing.

  Grimes still didn’t know whether they were yanking his chain or not. Thinking it had to be a joke, he opted to say nothing. Wouldn’t have mattered one way or another, because they were obviously taking this plane down regardless.

  The co-pilot pointed to Grimes’ seatbelt. He buckled up quickly. The aircraft leveled off again as the pilot re-oriented his landing approach and backed off on the throttles again. The plane dropped in altitude, and as the ground rapidly came up to meet them, Grimes held tightly to the undercarriage of the seat and hoped these crazy sons-of-bitches really only were kidding about the safety of the landing site.

  But the thump didn’t come this time. Instead, the touchdown was as smooth as silk, and the next thing he knew he heard the whoosh of the engines as the four powerful turbo-prop engines hit reverse thrusters. Grimes felt the plane begin to slow, the vibration start again, and suddenly the machine started a freestyle skid across the glacier at a speed faster than any downhill ski racer ever dreamed about achieving. The ride got a little bumpy, but for some reason not nearly as much as when they dragged through the ice the first time. The only thing Grimes could figure out was that Daniels had set the machine right back down in the tracks he had made before. A pretty good piece of piloting, Grimes thought. This guy was good. Grimes was glad he had kept his mouth shut and hadn’t made a fool of himself to give these flyboys more cannon fodder to talk about back at McMurdo.

  When the reverse thrust effect of the engines had slowed the plane down to a speed lower than their effectiveness, the pilot pulled the throttles back to idle speed. Unlike landing an aircraft conventionally on a solid runway where a pilot could utilize the brakes, you were now literally in an uncontrolled skid across the ice. The only thing to slow you down and stop you now was whatever friction was created between the bottoms of the skis and the ice itself.

  The great bulk of the transport propelled the LC-130 along the surface of the glacier. Its momentum carried the plane for what Grimes thought was a long time. Too long. The only thought that suddenly came into his head was whether the damn thing was going to stop before it reached the end of the ski tracks. Then all of a sudden, it did. Grimes looked out the window. There was probably less than fifty yards of ski tracks remaining.

  “Not bad” he heard the co-pilot comment. “No cigar today. Thought you were going to make it, though.” The pilot shrugged indifferently. Once again, Grimes didn’t know if they were pulling his chain again or not. But at least one thing was for sure. They were down safely on the Mulock Glacier. Now the trek really began.

  If one tended to underestimate the effects of the cold, even when cocooned in the modern technology of polar clothing, the initial shock brought one back to reality. The first instant one was exposed to the blast of frigid air, one gained a rather abrupt awareness of what humility was all about. The bay inside the cargo plane was already cold despite the fact that the heaters had been going full blast. But when the loadmaster opened the hydraulic cargo ramp, it was as if the transport had opened its jaws like a giant beast, gulping in an enormous volume of the frigid Antarctic air.

  The temperature of the air must have instantaneously dropped fifty degrees as the icy air was sucked into the belly of the LC-130, and everyone’s lungs pumped out long streamers of white breath that seemed to hang like clouds for several seconds. Despite being wrapped in the finest polar outfits that man could manufacture, the cold somehow still seemed to penetrate like tiny needles prickling the skin, just subtle enough to create a constant awareness of its presence. Grimes remembered talking to one of the space shuttle astronauts not so long ago ab
out how cold it was in space. The coldness was so intense that even in the heated spacesuits, you could feel the iciness. It kept you constantly aware of your own mortality, the man had told him. It was the same as Grimes always felt when he first stepped into the Antarctic environment. Suit don’t fail me now.

  Grimes knew as well as any polar explorer that you had to maintain a minimal body temperature, because if it dropped below a certain level, you’d probably not be able to get it back up. If they couldn’t get you out, you’d die of exposure. Any signs of hypothermia and you were a candidate for immediate evacuation. On any of the expeditions, the communication link was paramount.

  Aside from the extreme cold, the day was not as harsh as they had expected, having anticipated worse conditions from the air turbulence they had experienced at altitude above the glacier. Surprisingly, the wind, at least for the moment, wasn’t blowing too strong. It was only coming down off the glacier at a few knots, to their advantage when setting up camp.

  The two loadmasters were already outside on the ice, having loosened all the straps holding the ski sleds and the four snowmobiles. Mike Ruger, the lead mountaineer, and his partner – a last minute replacement and a guy Ruger didn’t particularly like to work with – had started and mounted the first two machines. In another minute they were down the ramp and out onto the ice heading slowly off to the right where Ruger had already reconnoitered for their camp site. Ruger had it down to a science, and within the next hour the camp would be set up and ready for the next several weeks’ activities. About twenty minutes later, all four snowmobiles and ski sleds were unloaded and out of the way of the LC-130, which still sat idling in place. From two hundred yards away, the aircraft looked out of place against the backdrop of this unbelievable wilderness.