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twelve miles to camp. It had no radio, no headlights and no door-handle on the passenger side (a
handle is useful for a quick exit when poised on the edge of a crack), and it complained vigorously
if jammed into reverse. But it got us there, and Lucia and I whooped as the two red huts hoved into
view. They had already been christened Wooville.
The fuel line had cracked on one hut, incapacitating the Preway, so confining us in the other,
smaller hut. The temperature took the opportunity to plummet to minus forty-two degrees Celsius.
We watched the flashlights dying almost as soon as we turned them on. Having breathed life into
the remaining Preway, Buck, whose role was to ensure that Lucia and I were capable of maintain-
ing a camp on our own, sat in front of it to watch us struggling to set up the Coleman stove.
'Fuck this thing,' I said in exasperation. I had set up hundreds of camp stoves in my time, but
this one was making a fool of me.
'The metal's cold,' purred Buck from his position by the heater. 'You need to warm up the fuel
rod.'
Once this task had been accomplished and we were fortified by hot cocoa, Lucia and I went out-
side to rig up the antenna. This involved splitting the top of eight bamboo poles to make a resting
place for the wire, and then drilling the poles into the ice. At least Buck didn't come out to watch.
When the antenna was up, to palpable relief all round the high-frequency radio behaved perfectly.
Then we battened down the hatches and made some soup.
I awoke to find massive snowdrifts inside the hut. McMurdo reported the news that, with wind-
chill, the air was a sprightly minus eighty-one Celsius.
'Yikes!' said Lucia when this information was relayed. It was her favourite expression.
The generator, which we had been obliged to bring if there was to be any hope of starting the
Antispryte, had frozen, despite the fact that it had spent the night on the floor of the hut between
us. Buck burnt his new hat on the Preway. We thawed the generator, and to squeals of surprise
and delight the Antispryte started. As I nudged it out of its snowdrift, I noticed that the huts kept
reappearing through the front window. The others had come out, and they were screwing up their
eyes to look at me. Buck approached the vehicle and started mouthing.
'The hydraulics must have gone,' he said when I opened the door. 'You're going round and
round in a circle.'
Visibility shrank to thirty feet. All hope of returning was abandoned and, once again, the hatches
were battened down.
'Just doesn't get any better than this,' said Buck.
The following morning a tracked vehicle came to our rescue. We returned to McMurdo, and left
the Antispryte to gather snow.
The fiasco of the shakedown did not deter us, and within twenty-four hours Lucia and I had ob-
tained all the equipment we had forgotten the first time and prevailed upon Ron, the glowering
figure who presided over the Mechanical Equipment Center like a malign deity, to part with anoth-
er of his Sprytes. Why it was, with virtually no scientists on station and enough Sprytes to invade
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