"When Antarctica Freezes Over"

Author: Richard Merk
Date: February 26, 2008
Location: Antarctica / San Nicolas Island

Richard Merk stood up and squinted into the harsh glare of the midnight sun. Snow and ice crystals swirled in fitful gusts against and around his legs, blown by the first promise of the coming winter's katabatik. Some subliminal something had been pecking away at his concentration for the last few minutes, but finally even through his thick parka hood, he could consciously hear the low wump wump coming from somewhere near the horizon. Taking a few steps away from his scattered instruments, he raised one gloved hand to block the light from the sun -- and spotted a small black speck low in the watery sky.

He frowned in annoyance, then sighed in resignation. Much as he enjoyed the supreme isolation out here on the Antarctic plateau where he could conduct his research in peace and quiet, he knew he wouldn't even be here if it weren't for the SDF. The recently-formed Space Defense Force, of which he was a small part, funded his activities, so the occasional intrusion into his blissful self-exile by outsiders was only natural. Walking back over to his equipment, he switched off the portable power unit and gathered up his precious samples, then just waited patiently for the approaching helicopter to arrive.

As it drew closer, he could see it was an American Huey. Its powerful downwash kicked up a frenetic flurry of powdery snow; its thick pontoons sank a few inches into the plateau. The side door slid open and a pair of army-drab-clad men jumped out. Hunched forward under the force of the wind from the blades, they hurried over to where Rick was waiting. The soldier that arrived first drew back his parka hood and pushed his goggles up onto his forehead and shouted above the roar of the helicopter's engines. "Doctor Merk?"

"Yes, that's me!" Rick shouted back.

"We have orders to take you with us back to McMurdo, sir!"

"Orders? Orders from whom?"

"Colonel Christopher, sir!" yelled the man, then added, "He said 'right away'."

Deep inside his own hood, Rick smiled to himself. Orders from Colonel Christopher could only mean one thing. Still, his experiments.... "What about my instruments?" he shouted.

The soldier nodded, expecting that particular objection. He leaned closer to Rick's ear and explained, "Lieutenant Starsky here will pack up your equipment and supplies and see them safely back to McMurdo. Don't worry."

Rick nodded in acknowledgment and gestured toward the waiting helicopter. The soldier pulled his hood back over his head, turned, and trotted back the way he came. Lieutenant Starsky set about the task of cleaning up Rick's camp leaving Rick nothing to do but trot on after his escort. He too involuntarily ducked lower as he ran under the spinning rotors -- whether it was from the actual force of the downblast or just a psychological aversion to decapitation he didn't know. When he arrived at the side of the Huey, he let the soldier climb in first, then took the man's outstretched hand and clambered aboard himself. The door slid shut behind him with a loud clack and he slumped to the floor plates. Underneath him, felt even through the thick parka, the helicopter's engines torqued up and the craft lifted off the plateau. He was airborne.

Rick hoisted himself into one of the metal benches in the rear compartment where he was and looked out the side window. The view was spectacular. Far below, he could still see the tiny specks that had been his camp, with Lieutenant Starsky bustling about in the center of a vast, flat plain of ice, but then the helicopter turned, heading back to its home base, and Rick lost the view.

He dumped his sack of samples on the seat beside him and made himself comfortable. Five years in the SDF had hardened him against all forms of military transport, from noisy hovercraft to posh jumbo jets to insane personal jetpacks, and as far as these things went a Huey was not all that uncomfortable.

The soldier took up a seat on the opposite side of the rear compartment facing Rick. He unzipped his parka -- which Rick now noticed bore the name patch "Hutchinson" -- and retrieved a pack of cigarettes from an inside pocket. He offered one to Rick, who declined with a polite shake of his head. Hutchinson shrugged and took one for himself, tapped the tip against the bulkhead beside him to light it, and took a long drag. His eyes closed in ecstasy and he leaned his head back against the wall behind him. Finally, he blew the smoke out through his nose and sighed, "That's better...."

Now that important matters were taken care of, he turned his attention back to his charge, and noticed the sample container beside Rick. Using the cigarette as a pointer, he indicated the sack and asked, "What's in the bag?"

Rick reached over and undid the slip-knot, then reached in and withdrew a few samples and held them forth for Hutchinson to see.

"Rocks?" snorted the soldier. "You came all the way to the South Pole to collect a bag of rocks?" He took another hit from his cigarette and waited for the crazy scientist sitting in front of him to come up with a good explanation for his actions.

But Rick had heard it all before. He tossed one of the samples to the man, which he caught with his free hand, and explained. "That's not just any rock, Lieutenant." Hutch raised a skeptical eyebrow and set about inspecting the object he now held in his hand. Rick continued, becoming more animated now that he was talking about something that fascinated him. "That very rock, which is now resting so innocently in the palm of your hand, had to travel millions of miles to get there--"

"Oh," snorted Hutch again. "One of those...." He tossed the rock back to Rick. "We get guys all the time down here looking for Martian meteorites. No biggie," he chuckled, and having made this decree, returned his full attention back to his smoking.

"Uhh.... Yeah...," was all Rick could muster to say. He felt suddenly deflated by Hutch's cavalier attitude toward something as potentially belief system-shattering as finding evidence of life on Mars. Or maybe he was just annoyed that his captive audience had managed to wriggle out of letting him give a lecture on the subject. Feeling a little dejected, he stuffed the rocks back in their sack, retied it, then turned his own attention back to staring out the side window at the white Antarctic plain.

Precisely two hours later, Rick found himself strapping into the back seat of an F-22 Raptor that was warming up at the end of the long runway at McMurdo Base. He'd shed his Antarctic gear for a high-altitude flightsuit, but (not being a military man) was having a little trouble figuring out where all the hoses went. The technician assigned to assist him was fussing about, trying to plug things into slots, but was getting frustrated himself at Rick's fidgeting. Finally, at the end of his patience, he just shoved Rick back in his seat and held him there with one hand while he finished plugging him in with the other. Satisfied, he stepped back and surveyed his handiwork, then climbed down the ladder.

Rick, having been thus put in his place by a mere technician, just watched passively as the bobbing tech's head descended below lip of the cockpit. The cockpit canopy lowered over his and the pilot's head and sealed with a little snick. A few moments later, a giant hand slammed him back in his acceleration seat and held him there as the F-22 tore down the runway under full afterburner thrust and into the wild blue yonder.

Several hours and one mid-air refueling later, the F-22 deposited Rick on the last bit of earth he'd tread on for quite a while: San Nicolas Island, sixty miles off the Southern California coast. As he clambered down the ladder, he gazed across the barren top of this small bit of land out here on the ocean. A pair of C-5s were parked at the far end of the runway, and a small cluster of buildings and hangars -- "Nichols Town" -- were at the near end. On the island's western sea-cliffs, rows of radar installations and Tomahawk launchers stood their lonely vigil. All else was dry grass and shrubbery, with patches of yellow and purple wildflowers here and there.

A Humvee arrived and drove him across the island, away from the small town. San Nicolas was less than ten miles across the long way, so the trip was a short, albeit bumpy one. At the island's northwestern end, on the leeward side of a line of small hillocks, the Humvee rumbled down a narrow concrete ramp into a crevice, then a tunnel leading underground. Thick metal doors clanged shut behind the vehicle, and Rick entered a new world -- like nothing he'd ever seen before.

The cavern was truly immense -- he tried to get a scale of things. It reminded him of the time he'd stood on the pitcher's mound at Dodger Stadium looking up at the stands. There hadn't been a game on of course, just workers up in the levels. The scene before him now seemed very similar, except there was a cavern roof above his head instead of blue, open sky. Endless banks of neon light glinted far above, illuminating a maze of criss-crossing catwalks and balconies. The centerpiece of the operation however, took his breath away. "Wow," he muttered. His driver took a quick sidelong glance at him and smiled faintly. Rick imagined that his response to seeing this place for the first time was probably the standard response.

At the center of the cavern, its tapering nosecone reaching almost to the huge metal doors in the roof hundreds of feet overhead was the ship -- the first of her kind -- the DY-100 class. Rick read the name proudly emblazoned on her side:

Enterprise.

Rick smiled in recollection. It hadn't taken him and the rest of the people who had initially encountered the starship from the future a lot to convince the Powers-That-Be to name their first ship 'Enterprise'. After all, NASA had named the Space Shuttle prototype 'Enterprise' a few decades earlier. They were just carrying on the tradition.

While Rick was reminiscing, the Humvee rolled to a stop in front of a huge metal door that led even deeper into the complex. The massive valve swung open on equally massive hinges and Rick saw a man emerge, and it was only then that he realized the true scale of the place -- the man was dwarfed by the door, barely coming up to the quarter-way mark. The overwhelming strangeness of the complex was relieved somewhat however when Rick found he recognized the man. Colonel Shaun Geoffrey Christopher strode forward with the airs of a man who'd been many places and seen many things, and indeed, at the time of his historic Earth-Saturn voyage, no one had ever gone further or seen more. Rick hopped out of the Humvee to greet him.

The two men shook hands, and Christopher spoke first. "Doctor Merk. Welcome to San Nicolas Island Spaceport."

"Thank you, Colonel. I'd seen this place mentioned in a few reports, but I had no idea!"

"Not bad for a bunch of twenty-first century Earthmen, eh? Kind of looks like something out of a James Bond movie, doesn't it?"

"Now that you mention it...," laughed Rick, "it does!"

Christopher released Rick's hand and motioned that he should follow him back through the huge door. "Come on," he said, adopting a more official tone. "We don't have a lot of time left. Took us forever to find you out there on the Antarctic plain. Any luck, by the way?"

"Found a few likely samples," answered Rick as he walked.

"Positive results?"

"Didn't have time to analyze them," said Rick, sounding disappointed. "Say, any chance we could--"

"Ha ha," laughed Christopher jovially. "You want us to delay the countdown just so you can finish checking your rocks for Martian microbes?"

"Well, I.... I wouldn't need all that much time. A few days...," Rick said half-jokingly, half-hopefully.

Christopher chuckled again, then clapped Rick on the back and said, "Don't worry, Doctor Merk. Where you're going, you'll have nothing but time!"

Rick wasn't quite sure how to take that....

Strapped tightly into his acceleration couch, having absolutely nothing to do, Rick waited through the seemingly-eternal last ten minutes of the countdown. On this trip, he was basically just 'cargo'. He felt claustrophobic. His spacesuit rubbed in uncomfortable spots, the seat straps tugged on his shoulders, the astronaut 'Snoopy' cap felt tight on his skull, and his nervous breath fogged his bubble-helmet.

As a kid, he'd always wanted to be an astronaut, and he'd been training for this moment for years now, but now that the moment was actually here, he was nervous. He knew that somewhere above him, on the bridge of the Enterprise, Colonel Christopher was in his command chair, and that the Colonel was an experienced spaceman, but he was still nervous. He knew that the entire flight would be controlled by first-generation duotronic computers -- the most advanced on the planet -- but he was still nervous. Blinding, paralyzing, pee-in-your-pants nervous.

He tried to take his mind off his paralysis, so he watched the small monitor screen in front of him. It showed the view from outside the ship: The ponderous metal doors in the cavern roof slid slowly aside, revealing inch by inch the sunny blue sky above. Powerful hydraulics lifted the launch pad upward, DY-100 and gantry tower and all. Once above the surface, steam began venting from the solid rocket boosters strapped to the tail of the ship. Finally, the voice that was calmly counting down reached zero -- cables detached and fell away, the SRBs roared to life belching fire and smoke like some huge angry dragon, and the Enterprise lifted off.

Faster and faster it rose. Rick felt the familiar hand of acceleration press down on his chest and arms and legs, although he was surprised to find that it was much more gentle than his take-off in the Raptor a day and a half ago. The vibration and noise was much more intense though. Even through the insulated helmet the noise was deafening, and his teeth were set to chattering, and not from nervousness this time.

As the ship left the atmosphere, the shuddering lessened, then stopped. The SRBs separated from the main body of the ship with a loud, sudden bang! and jolt, and the main impulse engines kicked in. Several more minutes of rather heavy acceleration were followed by a sudden silence and the euphoric onset of weightlessness. Rick was just beginning to get over the initial nausea and enjoy the sensation of microgravity, when the artificial gravity was cut in, and he dropped back in his seat once again.

He undid the seal on his helmet and popped it off his head. Looking to the other men and women in the passenger compartment, he beamed from ear to ear, all nervousness forgotten, and said, "What a rush!"