The Nexus Colony Page 4

  While Ruger’s partner conducted setting up camp with Grimes and the other five scientists, Ruger held his final debriefing with the crew. Then he headed back to the camp as the LC-130 revved its engines, surging forward to begin its 180 degree turnabout in the small radius that had already been checked out for hidden crevasses. The ski attached to the front wheel easily guided the massive bulk of the aircraft as it slid effortlessly on the crust of the frozen surface. It was always impressive to see how deftly these Navy LC-130 pilots maneuvered the bulky machine back into the path of the ski trail.

  The engines roared, and the backwash from the powerful turbo-props sent what little powdery snow was there into the air like a big puffy cloud, and the wind instantly carried it away in swirls. The aircraft lumbered slowly at first, then picked up considerable speed until finally it lifted like a great bird rising off the surface of the glacier. It was an awesome sight as the silver machine contrasted against the subtle blue sky, heading back to McMurdo. It would be five weeks before they saw the plane again.

  Almost immediately upon lift off, Mike Ruger was zipping along the ski track following behind the plane. Once at the end of the track—which had been the beginning when the plane landed—Ruger drove a brightly colored pole into the ice off to the side of the ski tracks to mark the end of the runway. Five weeks from now, barring any major storm, the pole would be the landing marker for the incoming pilot. When the plane arrived and circled in a holding pattern awaiting confirmation that the runway was still safe, Ruger would make one last run down the tracks to make sure no crevasses had opened in the five week interval. Then he’d light a flare next to the pole. Even if the pole had somehow been knocked down by the winds, Ruger had the distance marked off as a back-up. It was always possible for a hidden crevasse to be just a few yards beyond the end of the ski track. You took no chances out here on The Ice, no matter how insignificant it seemed.

  As the days and weeks passed, the camp location Ruger had chosen proved to be logistically ideal, as the team of researchers were able to fan out in all directions without much of a hassle. The twelve foot tall pyramidal teepees—called Scott tents after the famous Antarctic explorer—stood out on the glacial plain as the only evidence of human habitation. Two men each lived in a tent, and in spite of the perpetual below zero temperatures, the team lived in moderate comfort. Not like back home at McMurdo, but acceptable considering the elements they were facing in the best interests of science.

  The winds were interminable in Antarctica. Here in this region they were called katabatic winds, howling winds that came down off the glacier slopes sometimes with such intensity that you began to think the Scott tents weren’t going to hold up. Katabatic winds were gravity-induced by the ice itself. The air became super-cooled far inland high up in elevation on the polar plateau, and as it rolled unimpeded down toward the oceans, it met with the relatively warmer air currents coming in off the water. The effect often caused dense fog and localized blizzards. The winds were everything. They dictated all human activity. For the past month, the katabatic winds had been mostly cooperative.

  Morning wasn’t much different than midnight or mid afternoon. The sun still hovered low on the horizon like a surreal painting hung against the backdrop of a crystalline landscape. Hilliard Grimes poked his head outside the tent. It was about six forty five a.m., and thankfully he felt rather rested this morning, probably because the last twelve hours had been relatively calm, the katabatic winds giving them a short period of minimal activity. It was always difficult to get any sleep when the winds were howling so loud that you thought at any minute you were going to be swept away into oblivion.

  For two days they had remained confined to the tents, as the winds were blowing at a steady 25 to 30 knots, making conditions too severe to go out into the field. There was plenty to do inside, though. There were always new specimens that needed cataloguing and initial analysis. They had lucked out for the past month, the weather cooperating almost daily. Then yesterday morning they went back out on the ice and were hit suddenly by a katabatic wind that sneaked up on them. It blew the ice and snow crystals around so intensely that everyone knew they had been lucky to get back to camp without anyone getting lost in the blizzard. Thank God for the brightly colored orange and black Scott tents that stood out against the whiteness of the landscape. And thank God even more for Mike Ruger’s incredible sense of direction. By the time they got back they were totally exhausted. Then the winds died down again, and they had spent the last ten hours sleeping in a relative calm weather hiatus.

  It might have been still, but the frigid air stung Grimes’ face nonetheless, and the air circulating through the tangled mesh of his beard felt like it had instantly frozen all the follicles of his skin. A shiver went down his spine, and he quickly withdrew back into the relative warmth of the tent. Dr. Tracey, his tent mate, had just turned up the burners of both camp stoves to get some more heat circulating.

  “How’s it look?” his partner asked. The look on his face said it all. Cabin fever. In a tent.

  “Superb,” Grimes replied. “But I said that yesterday, didn’t I?”

  “Might as well get it in.”

  “Might as well,” Grimes agreed, taking the cup of hot coffee handed to him.

  The zipper of the tent opened and Mike Ruger entered.

  “Coffee, Mike?” they offered.

  “No thanks. Just had one,” he replied. “We a go, Hilly?”

  “Yeah. What d’ya think? Look okay?”

  “I’d say so,” Ruger said, nodding his head. “You want to try that area at the base of the western slope?”

  “Yeah,” Grimes replied. “But I still think the rest of them are wrong about the ice flow up there.” But what the hell, we might as well try it. We don’t have hardly anything worthwhile to show for this whole trip so far.

  “All right,” Ruger responded. “I’ll call McMurdo and inform them.”

  Each morning Field Team Ruger would make contact with McMurdo Station to report their status and their itinerary for the day. It was important to do that in case something went awry and they had to send out search planes looking for you.

  By seven thirty all four of the snowmobiles were revving loudly across the ice field, breaking the relative silence of the glacial plain. Led by Ruger, alone in the lead snowmobile – Ruger’s partner had stayed behind to effect some needed repairs on some gear—the team headed due west across the glacier toward the area where one of Grimes’ colleagues had theorized that there should be some debris fields. The specimens would later turn out to be scarce. What they were going to find there in the next few days, however, would overshadow any significance of meteorites.

  Along the gently rising slopes of the glacier, the sastrugi painted the landscape in subtle patterns. Sastrugi were deep ruts carved into the layers of snow by the winds blowing down the slopes off the plateau. They were like sculptures etched away on the surface of the land, and they were always changing their appearance according to the whim of the katabatic winds. You had to be careful, because it was easy to drive a snowmobile into a sastrugi or even tumble into one while walking around the field looking for specimens. They were beautiful, but like everything else in this land, you learned to respect the natural order of things.

  It was late astral summer, and the low rays of the sun created a surreal effect, casting an orange-ish glow over the field. In the shadows, the aesthetic patterns of the sastrugi were plainly evident where the snow was piled up along the gentle rising slopes. As the entourage slowly made their way across the barren landscape—Grimes now riding in the back seat of Ruger’s snowmobile—they could sense how true it was that humans were only transients here, out of time and out of place in a totally alien world.

  The day looked promising so far. The winds were only blowing with enough intensity to remind them that they were still out on the ice fields. Ruger slowed, then brought the machine to a stop. Ahead in the distance, the sloping of the glacier could be disc
erned as it backed up along the plain toward the plateau where the massive ice sheet originated high up in the Transantarctic Mountain Range. It was an awesome sight, still almost incomprehensible how the massive weight of the continent’s ice literally crushed the earth beneath it causing the land to sink in some places even below the level of the ocean.

  Ruger pointed out the search site, Grimes getting visual confirmation from his colleagues that this was the area they wanted to search. Grimes and the others dismounted, but then Ruger headed out into the area alone to mark off the boundaries by tracking the snowmobile around the perimeter of the search area. What he was doing was searching for any crevasses, aside from the sastrugi, that would signify danger. Glaciers were great rivers of ice, and as they “flowed” they opened up crevasses which you could easily stumble into before you knew what was happening. That was one of Mike Ruger’s primary jobs—scout out the cracks in the ice and make sure none of the team members fell in. Some of the crevasses went down a long way. If you fell in, there was a good chance you’d never get out.

  The field was perfectly flat inside the perimeter, and within the hour, the team was engrossed once again in their relentless search for meteorites. The team had collected four hundred and nine specimens so far this year, hardly anywhere near to the record of over six hundred several seasons ago. But it wasn’t so much the quantity as the quality. Grimes’ team had found a couple of incredible specimens so far this year, including two which had already been identified as possible pieces of the Martian landscape.

  Grimes explained it simply to the mountaineers. Collisions of celestial bodies in space are cataclysmic. Somewhere in the celestial past, Mars had been struck by a comet or an asteroid. The chunks of debris—called ejecta—traveled through space as meteoroids, some ultimately in the line of Earth’s orbital path by happenstance, a few finding their way to the surface in the form of meteorites. It always made Grimes ponder just how many million more specimens were laying all over the planet waiting to be picked up and identified if you could sort through the camouflage.

  Some areas around the glacial fields were studded with rocky debris, but some areas were relatively barren. It all had to do with the glacier itself, whether the flow brought the debris to the surface. Rocks—including meteorites—were easy to spot depending on the sun. Actually, today wasn’t the best of spotting conditions. There was an orange hue to the sun today. When you had blue light—when the ice crystals in the atmosphere cast a halo around the sun giving it an eerie blue tint—meteorite debris was easier to spot on the ice, as the shadows stood out on the bluish, non-glaring crust. While the team searched J24A—the first site on the 24th of January—Ruger moved off to scout for J24B, the back-up area, just in case the specimens were scarce.

  Mike Ruger was solitary by nature. That’s why he had come to Antarctica in the first place. Twenty years ago, the allure of a wild, untamed land brought him here from the mountains of Europe. He had returned every summer since. Ruger thought meteorite hunting was incredibly boring, but the National Science Foundation was funded well and they paid well. While the field teams searched within the safety of the perimeter, Ruger would wander off enjoying an endless commune with the eternal beauty of Antarctica. It was only appropriate that he was the first human to spot the object.

  It stood out against the landscape like a sore thumb. Out here in a world constructed in absolute harmony, when he looked down at the object it seemed so out of place that at first he thought something—his tool box, perhaps-- had fallen off his snowmobile. But of course, that was not possible. The tool box was secured tightly in the snowmobile, and he double-checked to make sure. Ruger looked around and could see that he had stumbled onto a significant debris deposit, rocks of all sizes and sorts spread out all over the ice. Getting off the machine, he picked up a few samples and threw the rocks into the snowmobile to take back for Grimes to examine.

  The object that had first caught his eye was embedded frozen in the ice, protruding out on a forty-five degree angle. Obviously, it had been there for some time, probably rising to the surface after a slow journey of many years up from the floor of the plain. It was odd—though not impossible—for something like that to be here. After all, humans have been present in Antarctica now for close to a hundred years. Obviously, it had to be from some prior expedition. Or maybe it was something that had fallen or had been thrown out of a passing aircraft. Ruger gently kicked it. He’d have to hack it out. Might as well wait until later when he brought Grimes back to scout out the field of debris.

  An hour or so later, Grimes heard Ruger approaching from the distance, the rising crescendo of the revving machine resounding across the glacial terrain, being born along with the wind that was suddenly beginning to pick up again. It was getting colder, and Grimes was considering calling it a day, as J24A was already turning out to be a wash. The debris was nothing more than sedimentary rocks, quite common in the Transantarctic region. There weren’t even a lot of them, and Grimes was elated when Ruger reported he’d found a promising bed of debris further up the glacier.

  “Jump on, Hilly,” Ruger yelled above the drone of the engine.

  “It’s getting colder, Mike,” Grimes responded.

  Ruger looked up at the blue sky. “Yeah,” he said. “We should be all right for a few hours.” They had to yell. Aside from the whining noise of the engine, you always had to yell outside to be heard anyway. Your face was always protected by a thermal mask and your ears were bundled up, deadening the sound.

  “It’s no good here, Mike,” Grimes replied, climbing onto the back seat of the snowmobile.

  “Found something up there interesting,” Ruger said over his shoulder.

  “What’s that?” Grimes asked.

  “A box or something. Solid black. Embedded in the ice. I’ll have to chop it out.”

  “How big?” Grimes asked.

  Ruger let go of the steering mechanism and estimated its size. “Can’t really tell. It’s down in the ice.”

  “Probably just a rock,” Grimes commented. “Solid black you said?”

  “Yeah. Looks pretty solid.”

  “Probably just a chunk of coal,” Grimes speculated. “It gets brought to the surface occasionally.” There were plenty of coal deposits in Antarctica, especially in this region, testament to a past when the continent was covered by verdant forests.

  “I don’t think so, Hilly,” Ruger replied. “Too symmetrical to be coal. Coal doesn’t fracture like a crystal. This thing’s squared off. Looks like a shoe box. Probably something somebody dropped it out here. Must have been here for quite a while, though.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Nobody’s been out here for a long time as far as I know.”

  Ruger would know that, Grimes thought. He knew every inch of the territory and everybody who had ever been here.

  “We’ll check it out,” Grimes said, burying his face deep behind Ruger’s back to ward off the blasting effects of the head wind.

  Initially, Grimes’ interest in the object was indifference—the prospects of meteorites whetting his scientific appetite—until Ruger showed it to him. The debris was certainly plentiful. But when Grimes saw the object, it struck him with the same oddity that had gotten Ruger’s attention.

  “What do you make of that?” Grimes said, kneeling next to it along with Ruger who had begun to chop it free.

  “No telling how long it’s been here, Hilly.”

  “You’re right, though, Mike. Looks like a box of some sort.”

  Ruger cleaned away most of the crusted ice. It was still caked, but they could see the perfect geometrical symmetry of the object.

  “What do you think it is?” Grimes asked, taking the box from Ruger to feel its weight, which was surprisingly light.

  Ruger shrugged. “No idea. Could be anything. If I had to guess, I’d say it fell out of a plane. I know there’s been no expeditions up here.”

  Grimes also shrugged inside his suit, handing it bac
k to Ruger. “Throw it in the snowmobile. We’ll take a look at it back at camp.” Though it piqued his interest, it wasn’t the black box that Grimes was interested in at the moment. It was meteorites.

  But over the next six day period, site J24B would relinquish a number of interesting artifacts for Field Team Ruger. Disappointingly, they would not be Martian meteorites. The field was indeed filled with rocky debris, but it was all of terrestrial origin. But on the same note they weren’t sure of the origin of the other strange things that were found. The rest of the objects were scattered sporadically all the way up the slope for a distance of about two miles. Mike Ruger at least had the presence of mind to mark each spot with a pole marker. Though he couldn’t have realized it then, marking the locations would turn out to be a big advantage in the weeks to come.

  On the last day they were scheduled to be in the field before the plane would return them to McMurdo Station, Mike Ruger took an extended trip farther up the glacier just to see if he could find any more of the strange debris. But the glacier leveled off, and the ice field was void of all debris. The only thing present was a huge crack in the glacier where the powerful force had split open a narrow crevasse that looked as deep as the Grand Canyon when Ruger tried to get close enough to look over the side. Though he couldn’t see much past twenty feet down along the sheer wall on the opposite side—safety concerns were paramount, especially when you were by yourself—Ruger could see that there seemed to be an appreciable amount of rocky debris embedded in the wall. He couldn’t make out what it was. Maybe more of the strange objects.

  But the schedule had run out on the expedition. It was the beginning of February. There was still about a month remaining, perhaps six weeks before ninety percent of the human population of Antarctica would depart the continent for the winter months, returning again at the beginning of next October. Grimes and his team were finished with their field activities and were going back to the States to conduct laboratory testing of their collection. Ruger was not going to stay the winter this year, but rather for the first time in three years was going back home to Germany until the start of the next mountaineering season in Antarctica.