Topped with fuel, the Herc finally got back under way some three hours after alighting at Williams Field. Its departure commenced with a jarring bounce as its wheels dropped to crack the ice that had melted around its skis from the friction of landing, and then had frozen over again to hold the plane steadily in position. After the wheels were retracted, it was a swift, smooth slide over the ski way to takeoff.

Cold Corners was four hundred odd miles south on the coastline, an aerial sprint of just about an hour. Nimec stuck it out in the webbing of the aft compartment, which he found much less disagreeable now that the bulk of its freight and over half its passengers—including the loud Russians and Australian adrenaline junkies—had gone on to their various destinations. The hold space freed up by their departure also gave Nimec a pretty well unrestricted choice of seating, and he grabbed a spot by a porthole that afforded good bird’s-eye views of both McMurdo and Cold Corners.

The contrast between them was striking. Seen from above, MacTown resembled an industrial park, or maybe a mining town that had sprung up without systematic planning over a span of many decades. Nimec guessed there were probably between a hundred and two hundred separate structures—multistory barracks-style units, rows of arched canvas Jamesway huts, smaller blue-skinned metal Quonsets, warehouse buildings, and upwards of a dozen massive, rust-blighted steel fuel-storage tanks strung out on the surrounding hillsides. Tucked among them were a couple of appreciably more modern complexes that Sergeant Barry identified as NSF headquarters and the Crary Science and Engineering Center, but Nimec’s overall impression of the station was one of rambling, indiscriminate sprawl and exceeding ugliness.

Very much on the other hand, Cold Corners looked like the working model for a future space colony . . . and by no accident. Roger Gordian’s innovative flair and penchant for cost efficiency made him an almost compulsive multitasker. Cold Corners was envisioned as an all-in-one satellite ground station, new space technology center, and human habitability and performance lab for long-term interplanetary settlements, and the heart of the base was configured of six sleek, linked rectangular pods on jack-able stilts that allowed it to be elevated above the rising snow drifts that eventually inundated most Antarctic stations. In his oversight of the installation’s security analysis, Nimec had stayed abreast of its development from conception to construction, and knew the few outlying buildings included a solar-paneled housing for its supplementary electrical generator, a desalinization plant to convert seawater beneath the ice crust into drinkable water, a garage for the vehicles, a trio of side-by-side satcom radomes, and of course the airfield facility that was its lifeline to civilization. The main energy, environmental-control, and waste-disposal systems were in utility corridors—or utilidors—beneath the permanent ice strata.