Willy’s operational facilities were identical to those of an ordinary small airfield in so many respects, it almost blunted one’s appreciation of the fact that the whole thing had been constructed on a plate of floating sea ice. It had air-traffic control towers and a considerable number of maintenance and supply buildings with corrugated metal sides. But each of these structures rested on skids, and had been towed from the main field six miles closer to the station, a seven-thousand-foot strip that could be used by aircraft with standard wheeled landing gear until sometime in December, the middle of the polar summer, when the ice runways there began to give in and melt to slush.

Nimec had learned much of this from his files, and seen more with his own eyes upon touchdown. He had adequate time to hear about the rest from Halloran and two other members of the aircrew as they sat together in a heated visitors’ lounge near the apron, sipped passably decent coffee, and watched the Herc being emptied of freight as it took fuel through the lines.

The stop was lasting longer than he’d expected. Almost two hours after the plane’s arrival at McMurdo it remained parked on the ice, the activity around it ongoing without any hint of a letup, its engines running because the minus-50° Fahrenheit temperature was just eight degrees above the danger threshold at which its hydraulics would begin to fail—the rubber hoses, gaskets, and valve seals getting brittle enough to crack, the JP8 fuel that powered the Allisons becoming too viscous to flow freely despite its special cold-weather formulation.

Draining his paper cup, Nimec glanced at his watch, then at the busy airstrip outside the window to his left. He let out a grumbling sound and stretched his arms.

“You have to get in sync,” Halloran said, eyeballing him from across the cafeteria table.

Nimec shook his head, turned his wrist to display the watch’s face.

“I switched to New Zealand time at Christchurch,” he said.

Halloran looked sideways at his fellow Guardsmen. Then all three laughed.

Nimec bristled. “Didn’t realize I said something funny.”

Halloran fought in vain to stifle a chuckle. “Sorry, no offense intended. I meant you should synchronize the clock in here.” He tapped his forehead. “This place, the sun doesn’t rise or set, but kind of crawls around you in a circle like a snail on a basketball hoop for about six months. Then it hibernates for the winter.”

His explanation, such as it was, only made Nimec grumpier.

“I don’t care if the sun balances on the tip of my nose for half the year,” he said. “Things need to get done.”

“Sure. I’m just saying to remember where you are.”

“So your advice is, what, that we check our schedules on arrival?”

Halloran frowned.