The Pole of Inaccessibility Read online

The Pole of Inaccessibility

  Copyright 2012 A. Michael Bronston

  ISBN 9781476358178

  Chapter 1

  Beardmore Glacier Camp

  Trans-Antarctic Mountain Range

  Dr. Susan Engen lay hunched over the rough-hewn surface of the plywood table, cradled her forehead in her cupped palm, and breathed out an astonishingly descriptive string of obscenities as artfully and with as much conviction as she was capable of providing. Inhaling deeply, she made a vague attempt at calming herself, aware that the effort was in vain, but going through the motion anyway as a matter of habit. After the interval in which she was supposed to be composing herself had passed, she keyed the microphone again and spoke.

  “Steven, I have no equipment!” she repeated emphatically. “We’re three weeks behind already, and now I have no equipment!”

  “I heard you the last two times, Susan,” the voice from the other side said, annunciating the words in such a way as to project the impression that he was attempting to sound reasonable, yet firm in his explanation. “What I am saying is that all the paperwork shows that it did, in fact, ship.”

  A pencil, which until then had been comfortably reposed in her lightly clenched fist, suddenly snapped, the sound making her jump. She looked at the broken lead core that lay within the tattered shards of wood as if wondering how it came to be in her hand, let alone to be exploding there.

  “I know something shipped,” she explained as patiently as she could to the gray metal microphone. “It just wasn’t mine.”

  “Oh,” Dr. Steven Atkinson, replied the chief scientist, the point she was making finally having penetrated all the way through. “What did arrive?”

  “Does it matter?” she asked, exasperated. She wondered how someone of such supposed brilliance could be so dense when it came to deciphering the obvious.

  “It does to whomever it belonged to before,” he pointed out, contributing a broader perspective.

  She resisted the nearly overpowering inclination to provide an appropriate commentary to this extraneous observation with another profanity and settled upon reflection instead. Steven Atkinson was the chief scientist that year, a largely ceremonial position to which he was elected by the other PI’s, or Principle Investigators. The National Science Foundation awarded grant money to the PI’s, who then put together their projects budgeted by whatever funds had been granted and space arrangements that could be made for them on the continent. There were to be four PI’s working at the Beardmore Glacier Camp the summer of 1979, of which Susan Engen was one, representing Ohio State University. Dr. Atkinson was another. He didn’t hold any real power, per se, but he did have influence as far as determining priorities went, and she needed all the help she could get with that right now.

  “I’ll send it back. Just try to find mine, please?” she asked nicely. When challenged with having to choose between asking for favors sweetly and browbeating obstacles into compliance, it was not always a foregone conclusion which course she would select. At this moment, she opted for the softer touch.

  “All right, we’ll try and figure it out,” he answered over the airwaves.

  “Thank you,” she replied, exaggerating in a heavy tone that was probably wasted on him. Vocal inflection didn’t translate well through the static and background noise of the high-frequency radio.

  She took another deep breath, hoping this time it would help. When it didn’t, she got up and walked around the newly-constructed hut toward the heater, where the support crew were all sitting. They looked as if they were dangerously close to knocking off for the day, but she still had work to do.

  “Are you ready to go?” she asked her guide, Jake, as she pulled on the oversize mittens. He had been yucking it up with the cook, the weatherman, and the mechanic while she tried to get things straight with Dr. Atkinson at the main base in McMurdo. They had been hard at it, building the hut over the last couple of days and it was a safe bet they considered themselves due for a break.

  “Ready when you are,” he confirmed, which helped to settle her nerves somewhat. She didn’t need another fight that day, but was well primed should it come to that.

  “Good, I’ve lost enough time already,” she said with more firmness than was strictly necessary since he had already agreed to going without a struggle.

  While Jake prepared himself for the outside, Susan took the opportunity to take a better look at the wood frame and plywood shelter that would be her base for the next three weeks. It was spare but serviceable. There was no insulation, just heat from a stove that vaporized diesel fuel in a barely containable cycle of combustion, a design which had previously been known to make huts like this one spontaneously combust when handled improperly. A galley-it couldn’t be a kitchen with so much naval history behind it-consisted of a propane stove and some shelves. Some folding tables and chairs filled out the furnishings. It was still much more than she was accustomed to while in the field.

  She hadn’t met the three support-workers with whom Jake had been sitting; she’d barely had time to exchange a hurried greeting with him. She looked them over from where she stood by the door. The weatherman in his navy greens was chewing tobacco and spitting into a beer can, some of the putrid drool clinging to his mustache. The cook was in a dirty T-shirt and sported a rat-tail of black hair hanging from the back of his head. The unkempt appendage that looked like an afterthought was tied up with a pink elastic band that was clearly begging for someone to take exception to it.

  The mechanic seemed like a likeable sort, strangely intelligent and reserved, which struck her as odd for someone who would be doing that job in that place. Still, all kinds were drawn there, just to be there. She would have shoveled horse manure to be there if they had horses and hired people to shovel it.

  If she were trying to clandestinely look them over, they showed no such reserve in regard to her. Women were still a rarity in that part of the world, which made her unique enough, but a PI not far removed from her twenties, who wore her long blond hair in a ponytail halfway down a particularly well-shaped back, was extraordinary. They wore the blank looks while checking her out that gentlemen such as these tended to assume when they don’t know what to make of a beautiful woman, especially one who seemed so out of place, and just happened to be one of the big-wigs. They were equally subdued by the incongruity of her soft features being the backdrop for her hard eyes. They were the blue-gray of burnished steel, and bore the testimony of a spirit no less firm.

  Susan climbed on board the snowmobile behind Jake and they clipped along at a good rate, covering the short distance from the hut to the base of the mountain. There they ascended as high as they could before leaving the machine and setting out on foot. The cold wind felt fresh on her face, which she had purposely left uncovered. It stung with the sharpness that she knew would lead to frostbite if she ignored it for too long, but it felt so good to finally be out there and on the snow, that she endured it for as long as she could.

  Although Jake was designated as her guide, Susan immediately took the lead as they set out, following an exposed outcropping until it ended where a small glacier barred their way.

  “That’s where I want to go, up there,” she said, pointing to a small ledge above them. “We’ll lay out this area tonight so the grad students can get started when they arrive without my having to direct them.”

  “Whatever you want,” Jake said obligingly. “That’s your department.”

  It was a small thing, but it was another encouraging sign that her guide would not be turning into a mule while she had work to do.

  They stopped to put on crampons-pointed steel attachments that were applied to climbing boots to grip the ice and keep the cl
imber from slipping-before starting up the slope. She tightened the straps over the orange plastic boots, and then pulled the cuffs of her heavy nylon wind pants over the boots. She had previously put aside the standard issue red coat that all the civilians headed for the ice were given in New Zealand, and resurrected her old and nearly worn-out blue mountaineering parka. It was more comfortable than anything else she owned, and made her feel like coming home just to put it on.

  “You’re good at this,” Jake observed, as they ascended the steep sloping glacier. “How do you get to be this good of a climber living in Ohio?”

  “Not from Ohio,” Susan answered, kicking steps into the ice and speaking in short clips in keeping with the rhythm of her breaths. “College in Boulder, Colorado. We used to climb everything there was back there.”

  “Aha,” the guide replied, Susan’s answer making perfect sense. “Then you don’t actually really need me here, do you?”

  “Not so much,” she agreed, “but the others will. That’s at least one thing off my plate. Besides, the NSF isn’t going to let me run around out here without you anyway.”

  “No, I don’t imagine they would,” the guide agreed.

  Now that she was on the mountain and nearing the site where she intended to work, Susan finally started letting the frustration of losing her boxes of supplies dissipate as she focused on the task at hand.

  “So how does a rock climbing geologist end up in Ohio?” Jake asked as he began setting anchors for safety lines to which they would attach themselves.

  “The usual way,” she explained. “There was a guy. We went there together. I was in love with him; he was in love with a pretty young student. When I moved into faculty and it became apparent I wasn’t going to remain a pretty young student forever, he stopped being in love with me and found himself a new one.”

  “Ouch,” Jake commiserated. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” she said, dismissing his concern. “To tell you the truth, it came as kind of a relief. It’s been over for more than a year now and I don’t have any regrets. Those kinds of distractions I can do without.”

  “Amen,” was all the reply that Jake seemed to think necessary.

  “So what’s your story?” Susan asked.

  “Me? Witness protection must have gotten a little carried away. I think they’ve gone too far this time.”

  “Is that right?” Susan inquired, laughing.

  “Absolutely,” Jake said, unconvincingly. “Actually, I’m a climbing guide in the Tetons. Taking the winter off.”

  “Came here to get warm?” Susan asked him, enjoying the banter.

  “You’ve obviously never been to Jackson Hole in the winter,” he said. “This is warm.”

  Susan worked rapidly, frenetically almost, as if trying to make up for lost time. She recognized the strangeness of working at such a pace on rocks that took millions of years to form, the incongruity manifest. But after five years of applying for grants, to finally be awarded a six-week window that summer, and having to watch three of them slip away while waiting for the weather to break, she was determined to salvage what was left of the season. And then they lose her equipment. Good god! What next, she wondered?

  Five years she had spent at the Byrd Polar Research facility at Ohio State waiting for this chance. She never thought she could do anything for five years. And now it came down to this: a three-year grant. Not that she had three years. The Department Chair was coming open and that was this year; the only year. It could be decades before that happened again, and a decade wasn’t a time frame that she was prepared to wait. Susan Engen was on as fast a track as tracks get. She had to get this research done this season, get the paper published, and be given that Chair. It had seemed like a reasonable plan. But then, who could have predicted that there would be a three-week storm and that her crates would disappear?

  “What are we looking for?” Jake persisted in asking questions now that he had nothing to do but watch her work and make sure she didn’t fall off the mountain.

  “Rocks,” she told him, without looking up from her notebook.

  “Okay,” he said, the point being taken. “I can be quiet now.”

  “Sorry,” she said, looking up with a mischievous smirk. “Everybody gets that one once. Couldn’t help myself. But in the simplest terms, we’re mapping the geology. What there is, where it is…with a twist.”

  “What kind of a twist?”

  “That, you are just going to have to read about in the papers.”

  As she finished laying out the florescent yellow tape that marked the areas where she wanted her grad students to focus, Susan thought about what she had just said to Jake. She sounded much more confident than she felt. As if her plans weren’t grand enough already, there was more. Much more, which even the NSF didn’t know about.

  When she had submitted her request for her grant, the proposal suggested that there might be mineral deposits in the area where they were working. She was pretty sure there would be. And while that information might be considered academic and interesting to some, she knew that it was only a matter of time before there would be those who found it more than merely academic. It was her intention to preempt any plan to get at the vast wealth that she knew would be there by forcing the issue, making the discovery, and driving the political battle to guarantee that it could never be touched. The mechanism for that campaign was already in place and awaiting her discovery. With luck, that would begin at the same time that she took over the department, a position from which she would have a global platform to enlist the scientific community to her side.

  The enormity of her own plan dwarfed her, so much so that it seemed unreal, as if it were the memory of a story she had heard somewhere else, a long time ago. In moments of supreme confidence, which were actually most of them, she saw straight through to the end with no obstacles to bar her way. Then, at other moments, it all seemed so impossible. But those didn’t last for long. She was committed. It would all work out as planned. As long as nothing else went wrong.