Sax said little or nothing in reply to this.
Then one day it was those two, appearing as deadpan and phlegmatic as ever, who went out for night walks at the (carefully offset) same time, and, Michel saw through his goggles, made their way to Lookout Point. They might have been among those Michel had already seen out there. They sat there beside each other for some time.
But when they came back Sax’s colour was high, and he saw nothing of the world inside the compound. Autistic to all. And Ann’s brow was furrowed, her eye distracted. And they did not talk to each other, or even look at each other, for many days after that. Something had happened out there!
But as Michel watched them, fascinated by this turn of events, he came to understand that he would never know what it had been. A wave of – what was it – grief? Or sorrow, at their distance from each other, their isolation – each in his or her own private world, sealed vessels jostling – cut off – the futility of his work – the deathly cold of the black night – the ache of living life so inescapably alone. He fled.
Because he was one of the evaluators, he could flee. He could leave Lake Vanda from time to time on the rare helicopter visits, and though he tried not to, in order to establish better solidarity with the group, still he had done it once before, in the darkest depth of winter before the solstice, after seeing Maya and Frank together. Now, though the midday twilights were returning, he took up an invitation from an acquaintance at McMurdo to visit the Scott and Shackleton huts, just north of McMurdo on Ross Island.
Maya met him in the lock as he left. ‘What – running away?’
‘No, no – no – I’m going to have a look at the Scott and Shackleton huts. A matter of research. I’ll be right back.’
Her look showed that she did not believe it. Also that she cared where he went.
But it was in the nature of research, after all. The little cabins left behind by the first explorers of Antarctica were the remains of some of the very few expeditions in human history that resembled in any way what they were proposing to do on Mars. Though of course all analogy was false and misleading, and dangerous – this was a new thing they were thinking, a new event in history, nothing like it before.
Still, the first decades of Antarctic exploration had been somewhat like their planned expedition, he had to admit as the helicopter landed on the black rock of Cape Evans, and he followed the other distinguished visitors to the small snow-slabbed wooden hut above the beach. This was the nineteenth-century equivalent of their settlement at Lake Vanda, though their compound was ever so much more luxurious. Here at Cape Evans they had had only the necessities, all the necessities except for some vitamins, and the company of the opposite sex. How pale and odd they had become from those lacks, along with the lack of sunlight itself. Monastic malnourished troglodytes, suffering from seasonal affective disorder without knowing what a ferocious psychological problem this was (so that perhaps it hadn’t been). Writing newspapers, acting out sketches, pumping music rolls through player pianos, reading books, doing research, and producing some food, by fishing and killing seals. Yes – they had had their pleasures – deprived as they were, these men had still lived on Mother Earth, in contact with the cold fringe of her bounty. On Mars there would be none of those Inuit raptures to pass the time and ameliorate their confinement.
But the postmodern structure of feeling might already have made them used to disconnection from Earth. Everyone inhabiting their own personal spaceship, carrying it mobile with them like a hermit crab’s shell, moving from one component of it to the next: home, office, car, plane, apartment, hotel room, mall. An indoor life, even a virtual life. How many hours a day did they spend in the wind? So that perhaps Mars would not feel very different.
As he considered these matters Michel wandered the big main room of Scott’s hut, looking at all the artifacts in the grey light. Scott had erected a wall of boxes to separate the officers and scientists from the common seamen. So many different facets; Michel felt his thoughts ricocheting this way and that.
They flew up the coast to Cape Royds, where Shackleton’s hut stood like a rebuke to Scott’s – smaller, neater, more wind-sheltered. Everyone together. Shackleton and Scott had fallen out during the first expedition to Antarctica, in 1902. Similar disagreements were likely to occur in the Martian colony; but there would be no chance to build a new home elsewhere. At least not at first. And no going home. At least that was the plan. But was that wise? Here again the analogy to the first Antarcticans fell apart, for no matter how uncomfortable they had been in these huts (and Shackleton’s looked quite homely, actually) they knew they were only going to be here for a year or three, and then out and back home to England. Almost anything could be endured if there was some release foreseeable at the end of it, coming closer every day. Without that it would be a life sentence – no exit indeed. Exile, to a sur-antarctic wasteland of frigid airless rock.
Surely it made better sense to cycle the scientists and technicians to Mars in a way similar to that of the early Antarcticans. Tours of duty at small scientific stations, the stations built and then manned continuously, but by rotating teams, with individuals out there for three years each. This would be more in keeping with recommended lifetime maximum radiation doses. Boone and the others on the first trip there and back, two years before, had taken about thirty-five rad. Subsequent visiting scientists could stick to something like that.
But the American and Russian space programmers had decided otherwise. They wanted a permanent base, and they had invited scientists to move there for good. They wanted a commitment from people, no doubt hoping for a similar commitment of public interest back home – interest in a permanent cast of characters that could be learned, their lives become a matter of drama for public consumption back on Earth, with its bottomless addiction to narrative – biography as spectacle. Part of the funding effort. It made sense in its way.
But who would want to do such a thing? This was a matter that troubled Michel greatly; it headed the long list of double-binds he felt applicants were put in by the process of selection. In short, they had to be sane to be selected, but crazy to want to go.
Many other double-binds accompanied that basic one. Applicants had to be extroverted enough to socialize, but introverted enough to have studied a discipline to the point of mastering it. They had to be old enough to have learned these primary, secondary and sometimes tertiary professions, and yet be young enough to withstand the rigors of the trip out and the work there. They had to do well in groups, but want to leave everyone they knew behind forever. They were being asked to tell the truth, but clearly had to lie to increase their changes of getting what they wanted. They had to be both ordinary and extraordinary.
Yes, the double-binds were endless. Nevertheless this nearly final group had come from an initial pool of many thousands of applicants. Double-binds? So what! Nothing new to fear there. Everyone on Earth was strung up in vast networks of double-binds. Going to Mars might actually reduce their number, decrease their strain! Perhaps that was part of the appeal of going!
Perhaps that was why these men of the first Antarctic explorations had volunteered to come south. Still, looking around at the bare wooden room, it was amazing to Michel that those who had wintered down here had managed to stay sane. On the wall of Shackleton’s hut there was a photo of them: three men, huddled before a black stove. Michel stared long at this evocative photo. The men were worn-looking, battered, dirty, frostbitten, tired. Also calm, even serene. They could sit and do nothing but watch fire burn in a stove, entirely satisfied. They looked cold but warm. The very structure of the brain had been different then, more inured to hardship and the long slow hours of sheer animal existence. Certainly the structure of feeling had changed; that was culturally determined; and thus the brain must necessarily have changed too. A century