Surviving Antarctica Read online

  “You mean that you were briefed for days and you didn’t get your questions answered?” Although she was smiling, the Secretary’s green eyes flashed with anger.

  Polly could tell that Robert was struggling to invent a tart response. She broke in. “We were in the hospital, then I felt groggy, then we were on television, and now we’re leaving.”

  The Secretary ignored Polly. “What can you possibly want to know, Robert?”

  “Where will the cameras be?” Robert felt relieved that Polly had interrupted, but at the same time resentful. He didn’t need a bookworm’s help.

  “Ah,” the Secretary said. “Survivor’s secret.”

  “How will we know where we need to go? Will there be any maps?” Robert asked.

  “You’ll find out soon enough.” The Secretary crossed her legs.

  Polly choked out her most worrisome question. “If there’s trouble, will the camera crew help us?”

  Robert glared at her. He didn’t want or need anybody’s help.

  “No,” the Secretary said to Polly. “We never intervene.”

  “But we’re kids,” Polly said. “We don’t deserve to die.”

  Robert corrected Polly: “We don’t want special favors.”

  “Our viewers would not allow us to stop the simulation. It would ruin the game,” the Secretary said. “Robert, Polly …” She smiled. “We have found that the less you know, the more exciting the adventure is. So no more questions about the game.”

  That’s okay, Robert told himself. Hot Sauce was unfair, just like the world he lived in. He was used to it.

  Polly wanted to pull out a hunk of the Secretary’s red hair.

  “But if you want to ask me anything about my personal life, I’d be happy to answer,” the Secretary said. “I’d love to get to know you kids.”

  The Secretary only wanted to talk about herself, Grace realized.

  “Do we get points for asking questions?” Robert asked.

  The Secretary threw back her head and laughed as if he had told a great joke.

  “Then I’m not asking any … Hot Sauce,” Robert added under his breath.

  Getting to know somebody before you hurt them is cruel, Polly thought. She wondered why the woman was so mean. “Were you always rich?”

  “No. I wouldn’t have had the money to go to college,” the Secretary said indignantly, “but I won my Toss fair and square. After college, I lucked out and got a job as a TV talk show host. You may be too young, but did you ever see The Grossest Jobs in the World?”

  Polly shook her head.

  “Well, that was my show. I was young and idealistic back then. Now I try to face the facts. Games like the Toss and Survivor are the fairest way that I know to decide who gets a chance.” She looked at Grace and batted her eyelashes. “Don’t you think so, Grace?”

  Grace turned away and stared out the window.

  “Grace?” the Secretary said sharply. “We like our contestants to have some personality.”

  “Sure,” Grace murmured. She wondered what Washington, D.C., would look like dressed all in snow.

  Andrew tried to wiggle his ears.

  “Well, usually my contestants are more talkative. We are able to form a little bond that helps them get through the disappointments of the show. But if you all want to just sit there and stare out the window, fine.”

  Hot Sauce grinned at Robert as if to say, “See, I’m that cool.”

  Robert liked ignoring her.

  Billy snored on.

  “We’re here.” The Secretary shook Billy’s shoulder.

  “What?” Billy mumbled. He smelled her sweet perfume as he opened his eyes.

  “We’re at the dock.”

  Billy gazed at the Secretary’s red lips and red-tinted sunglasses before turning to stare out the smoked-glass window.

  It was dark outside. He noticed a sign that said NORFOLK NAVAL DOCK. He could see that the other kids were already climbing the gangplank to the ship. It had been incredibly stupid of him to fall asleep.

  “Your ship, the Terra Nova.” The Secretary smiled.

  Then again, maybe not. Suddenly Billy was wide-awake. He faked a yawn.

  “Take your time.” The Secretary climbed out of the limo and began walking toward the ship.

  Billy glanced at the watch. The glowing dial said ten o’clock. The limo ride had taken four hours. Without hesitating, he slid out of the limo, opened the front door, and snatched his backpack. He kept his eyes glued to the Secretary, but she didn’t look back.

  His one arm could barely lift the pack, it was so heavy with delicious food.

  Billy didn’t think the Secretary would notice the shape of his backpack in the dim light. But he couldn’t take a chance. He rushed past her and up the gangplank. He didn’t stop until he was facing her from behind the rail.

  The other four had already disappeared.

  Billy was the only one of the five to wave good-bye. The Secretary had said that the show started on the ship. Cameras were probably trained on him.

  The Secretary smiled and then turned back to her dark limousine.

  For the audience, Billy waved once more as the sea wind rushed through his hair.

  7

  BILLY STARTED TO climb belowdecks. He saw Grace and Polly on the stairwell. To hide his fat backpack, he stayed well behind them.

  At the bottom of the stairs he found himself alone in a long, gray hallway. He heard noises to his left and walked through an open door into another corridor. He spotted a plain metal door with the name BILLY painted on it, as if he were a movie star. He opened the door and found a small cabin with a bunk against a wall and one round porthole. He looked inside the closet. Except for a few coat hangers, it was empty. Then he got down on his knees and peered underneath his bunk. This hiding place would have to do. He shoved his backpack against the wall.

  Billy went out to explore the ship. His new tennis shoes slapped against the metal floor. The lonely sound reverberated in the hallway.

  He heard a loud bang. Could they already be at sea?

  Billy passed Grace’s cabin. It was open. Grace’s back was to him, and she appeared to be unpacking her skimpy backpack. He wondered if she was one of those girls who chattered away after you got to know them. So far he hadn’t heard her say more than a few words. He walked past her door.

  Andrew’s door was closed. Billy looked into Robert’s cabin. His backpack lay on the bunk, but the cabin was empty. Billy didn’t usually want company, but right now he felt like talking. Anything to make him forget that he was on a ship sailing to Antarctica. He decided to go look for Robert.

  Robert had already found the engine room. A computerized map hung from the ceiling. It marked the position of the Terra Nova. They had just put out to sea in the Atlantic Ocean, many miles from the South Pole, but riding a cushion of air above the surface of the sea, these compucraft traveled thousands of miles a day.

  A door off the engine room was open. Robert went to it and turned on the light. Maps of Antarctica hung on all the walls. The continent looked like a squashed white ball. On one of the maps, SAFETY HUT was inscribed next to a dot near the shore. Four Xs at various distances marked the depots. In the center, someone had scrawled POLE in large black letters next to a large dot. Underneath the map, Robert found a typed note:

  On the ship and in Safety Hut, you will find enough fuel and food to last you fifty miles. The dogs and ponies are on the ship. The motor sledges are in Safety Hut. The first depot is fifty miles away. Each depot will have sufficient supplies to carry you to the next depot.

  How hard could riding 150 miles be? If this were a river expedition, Robert would have no doubts. Even though there was quirky and violent weather all over the globe, it had never snowed in Houston. Robert didn’t know anything about traveling in ice and snow. But he’d learned everything he knew about rivers by watching, listening, and using his head. He’d figure out Antarctica. He had to. Now Robert needed to survey the ship and decide
on their next steps. For he was the captain of this ship, he was sure about that.

  A metal door on the far wall of the map room caught his attention. The door opened onto a storage room. Shelf upon shelf was filled with boxes. Ropes hung from the walls, and skis from the ceiling. Two giant sleds lay on the floor, next to two smaller ones. He read the label on the end of one of the boxes. PEMMICAN. What was that again? With the pocketknife he carried in his wallet, he slashed open the box. It was brown and crumbly stuff. Maybe dog food. He sniffed it. Strange.

  Robert touched a bag on the next shelf. A sleeping bag, covered in fur. He stroked the long brown and white hairs. Deerskin? Why couldn’t they have Gore-Tex? But of course. Scott must have used deerskin.

  In one of the boxes he found a folded-up tent and some modern-looking shoes. He felt a stab of relief that the Secretary wasn’t accurate in every detail. He examined pairs of old-fashioned skis and a thermometer. He needed to make an inventory. Then he’d hand out supplies to each of the other kids. If the sea voyage was only five days long, he’d better get busy.

  He heard a sound in the adjoining room and stuck his head out of the storage room.

  Billy Kanalski, the intense guy, stood in front of the maps. He was staring at them as if he were Robert peering through the fence at Motorworld. “Come help with the supplies,” Robert said. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

  Billy nodded, but his gaze lingered before he turned away to join Robert in the supply room.

  From the moment Grace had stepped onto the deck, she’d had the feeling that something alive was on board. Walking down the stairs belowdecks, she took a deep breath and smelled paint and salt and water and … animals? After stowing her stuff, she followed the scent. Halfway down a narrow circular stairway she heard scuffling noises. Then a dog howled. She knew that she had been right, and was glad.

  The room at the base of the stairs was crowded with barrels and harnesses. The sounds came from behind a closed door. She leaned her ear against it and guessed that there were ten or fifteen dogs, maybe more. She opened the door a crack. Gnashing their teeth, the dogs lunged at the door. She slammed it in their faces. They’d looked like huskies, white with brown and black markings. How long had they been down there? Did they have food and water? She cracked open the door again and spotted a barrel of water on the far side of the room, but no food.

  As she slammed the door shut, she thought, Where would the government have put the dog food?

  In the outer room, which seemed to contain most of the supplies, Grace pried a top off the closest barrel and stuck her head in. She couldn’t identify the type of meat. The sides of the barrel were moldy, which worried her, but moldy food was better than none. How would she feed this pack? If she threw the meat to them inside the animals’ room, the dogs would fight one another. A dog might get hurt.

  She’d have to lead each dog into the supply room, harness it, and feed it separately. Which meant that she needed to go into that room of snarling dogs.

  “An Iñupiat can think like any animal,” her grandfather had told her. She thought like a husky as she cracked open the door again. The dogs lunged at her, but this time she braced her foot inside the doorway to keep the door from closing and sidled into the room.

  I bring food, Grace thought. The dogs jumped up on her, but none bit her. Then she noticed the ponies. Two white ones were in a pen at the back. She spotted a bale of hay but couldn’t concentrate on the state of the ponies because the dogs were leaping and jumping all around her. Now that she was close to them, she realized that what she had mistaken for fury seemed to be only a frenzied excitement. What were ponies doing on an Antarctic voyage?

  She grabbed one husky, a large brown one, by the scruff of the neck. The dog twisted and bucked, but she managed to drag it into the supply room. With her free hand she lifted a harness off the wall and slipped it over its head. Although most of her tribe used snowmobiles, her grandfather preferred a sled. He had told her many stories of sled dogs. She wondered if these dogs had worked together before.

  The dog quieted down now that he was in harness. She took a cupful of the food from the barrel and poured it on the floor. The dog devoured it in a few moments and then looked up at her, hopeful that there would be more.

  She stared into the dog’s eyes. Okay. One more scoop. She poured it on the floor and considered where she would put this dog while she fed the next. And what were they going to do with ponies? The Indians on the reservation owned horses. Occasionally one escaped, and once Grace had kept a brown mare for a few days before she found the owner. She had a hard time believing that ponies would do well on ice.

  She finally decided to tie the dog with a rope and fasten it to the stairwell. That done, she opened the door to retrieve her next dog.

  The thought of what the other kids might be doing crossed her mind, but the dogs howled. She was needed here.

  Polly noticed a stack of books on her bedside table. She had read thousands of books on her electronic book card, which she refilled at the computary. But only once had she read a book with an actual cover and pages that turned. It was The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. She could still remember the pleasant hours she had spent with that book one summer on the steps outside her hut, fanning herself because of the heat.

  She picked up Scott’s Last Expedition: The Journals. It was surely no accident that the book was in her cabin. She knew a few facts about Scott, of course. The World Book had had a short entry on him. She turned to the back cover and read, In November 1910 … It was almost November 2083, so here they were, starting out 173 years later.

  … the vessel Terra Nova …

  Their ship was named the Terra Nova.

  … carried an international team of explorers led by Robert Falcon Scott, an Englishman determined to be the first man to reach the South Pole.

  Why would Scott care about being the first to reach the Pole? She didn’t know about Robert, Grace, and the others, but here she was on the first kid-led expedition to the Pole, and she had no interest in record-setting.

  Scott kept a detailed journal of his adventures until March 29, 1912, when he and the few remaining members of his team met their ends in a brutal blizzard.

  “Brutal blizzard.” She hated the sound of that. Her backpack still unemptied, she settled on her bunk, resting her head against the small pillow. She opened the book to the first page. She was used to reading adventures; she had read them ever since she was little: The Wizard of Oz, Treasure Island, Into Thin Air. She wasn’t used to being in one. By reading, maybe she could forget that she was on this great big ship heading to Antarctica.

  She sighed. Why, oh why, had she been chosen? If a girl had a special gift for running, she should be in a track meet.

  If a girl had a special gift for cooking, she should work in a restaurant.

  But why send Polly Pritchard, whose special gift was the Memory, to Antarctica? She would be more of a freak in Antarctica than she had been on West Ninety-eighth Street in New York City, where her neighbors all hated reading.

  She felt vaguely nauseated and rubbed her stomach. Just in case, she grabbed her book and went into the bathroom.

  Sunlight flooded through his porthole, but Andrew Morton lay inert on his bunk. He had been miserable ever since he had boarded this ship. As far as he could tell, there was no TV anywhere. So last night, after searching for one, he had just gone to sleep.

  “I don’t care! Go!” his dad had screamed over the noise of the TV when Andrew confessed that he didn’t know why they had picked him.

  “They must have made a mistake.” Andrew moaned.

  His mother tightened the sash on the thick bathrobe that she wore all day long. “They probably did, but go anyway.”

  His parents wanted a chance at the contest money. One hundred thousand dollars was a lot. For thirty years, his dad had worked as a shoe salesman, but his mom complained that he didn’t make enough money to keep his own kids in shoes. Andrew didn’t
mind going barefoot, so his parents bought shoes for his little brother, Bart.

  Andrew got up and looked out the porthole at the gusty sea. Boring.

  This was the first time in his life that he would ever be without a television. Before this, he had hardly ever missed an episode of his favorite show in the world, Lives of the Rich.

  His dad had explained that as life grew harder in America, as the rich grew richer and the poor poorer, the poor people rebelled. To protest their hard lives, they waged the Urban Trash Wars. The politicians decided that better programming was the way to make Americans happier. So the Department of Entertainment was created. The Secretary encouraged everyone to enjoy television. Through television, each viewer could be anyone and do anything.

  Andrew totally agreed. Day after day and night after night, Andrew watched reality television, showing on close to one thousand channels. On Lives of the Rich, his favorite character was Craig. Craig had a room of his own much fancier than even this cabin of Andrew’s on the compucraft, and Craig had plenty to eat and drink and a closet full of clothes.

  Sometimes, at home, Andrew would eat his bag of roast-beef chips while he watched Craig eat real roast beef and mashed potatoes, and he would be fooled and think that it was he, Andrew Morton, who ate roast beef off gleaming plates, and not Craig Collins.

  Craig had a go-cart and nice parents. Craig’s parents would never let him enter a kids’ survival contest.

  Andrew idly wondered where the other kids were, but he didn’t really care. As long as he stayed hidden in his cabin, they wouldn’t find out that they had been saddled with a mistake.

  Craig had had some adventures. Once he had gotten locked inside a department store all night and played with the robots. Craig always had a good time. If Craig were on Antarctic Historical Survivor and in this cabin, what would he do now?