Free Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson Page A

in classic beaker absent-minded-professor mode; all the ASL folks cherished their various stories of beaker spaciness, the latest going the rounds being the one about a beaker who had decided to end thumb fatigue on snowmobiles by tying the throttle lever tight to the handlebar and then starting the engine with a pull start while standing beside it, so that the snowmobile had taken off solo across the sea ice never to be seen again, no doubt ending up down on the bottom of the bay next to the motor tractor the Scott party had mishandled over the side of their ship, an early example of beaker incompetence—
    Ron appeared in the door, breaking this train of thought with a rude snort. “Still picking this shit up, X? You’ve been at it for three days now!”
    “Yes.” Through clenched teeth.
    “Well now you’re needed elsewhere. Get down to the helo pad real quick, you needed to be there ten minutes ago, and finish this off soon as you get back.
Du musst schon gegangen sein!”
    “Jawohl, Herr Commandant.”
    And suddenly he was down at the helo pad, earplugs in, then wedged in the back of a helo with a bunch of equipment, no view, no headset, feeling the thing chuntering over the Sea ice to somewhere in the Dry Valleys, he didn’t even know where. He was dropped with some equipment in brilliant low sunshine andfrigid cold, in a brown shadow-crossed windy valley like a freeze-dried Nevada.
    After the helo had dragonflied away and the vast windy silence had descended on him, a group of beakers hiked over to the pile of dropped gear and shook gloved hands with him, and introduced themselves: an older man, Geoffrey Michelson, no doubt the principal investigator; and three somewhat younger men, one the group’s mountaineer. X’s boss for the day was a Kiwi named Graham Forbes. A grad student had gotten sick and been medevacked out, and so on this day Forbes needed some help writing down figures he would be reading off the landscape. It would make the work go a lot faster. He looked to the side as he told X about this, almost as if embarrassed, although otherwise he showed no sign of any emotion at all; on the contrary he exhibited what X had come to think of as the pure beaker style, consisting of a Spocklike objectivity and deadened affect so severe that it was an open question whether he would have been able to pass a Turing test.
    So: writing down numbers. “Fine,” X said. It had to beat picking nails off the floor.
    And at first it did. Forbes wandered away from the other beakers, and X followed, and they got right to work. But it was a windy day, the katabatic wind falling off the polar ice cap and whistling down the dry valleys, making all outdoor work miserable indeed, especially if you were just sitting on the ground writing figures in a notebook. Forbes was doing fabric samples, he explained as he wandered around looking at the ground through a box. That meant measuring the compass orientation of fifty random elongated pebbles in a particular area. So he was looking at pebbles through the compass box and calling out “351 … 157 …18 … 42,” and so on endlessly, and X was writing the numbers down in columns of ten. Fine.
    Over and over they did this. As they worked and the day passed it got windier, and the chill factor went plummeting far below zero—down, down, down—into the minus 40s, X reckoned, even perhaps the 50s. Between samples he tried first all the gloves in his daypack, then all the mittens, then all the mittens over the gloves, his cold hands so numbed inside the thick masses of cloth that he could scarcely grip a pencil, much less write legibly—nose and eyes running—his face getting so numb that he could barely answer the group’s mountaineer’s questions when the mountaineer came by, barely even remember to conform to the mountaineer’s protocol, which consisted of answering him by putting both hands on one’s head and exclaiming “I AM FINE SIR!” The mountaineer had