vincing me that the best thing for me to do was sign on for his tour and he’d arrange everything. Otherwise I’d be shifted from pillar to post buying and renting necessary equipment from concessionaires and then as like as not be turned back at checkout and not be able to find the concessionaires again while my vacation was ticking away. I signed on and he beamed. He gave me a room in the sector-plenty of luxury. It would have been twelve by eighteen if it hadn’t been slightly wedge-shaped. In five minutes he was dealing out equipment to me. “Power pack-strap it on so. That’s the only thing that can go wrong; if you have a power failure take a sleepy pill and don’t worry. You’ll freeze, but we’ll pick you up before there’s tissue damage. Boots. Plug them in so. Gloves. Plug them in. Coveralls. Hood. Snowglasses. Radio direction finder. Just tell the checkout guard ‘Starrzelius Glacier’ and he’ll set it. Two simple switches plainly labeled ‘Out’ and ‘In.’ Outward bound it goes ‘beep-beep’-ascending. Inward bound it goes ‘beep-beep’-descending. Just remember, going up the glacier, the tone goes up. Going down the glacier, the tone goes down. Distress signal-a big red handle. You just pull and immediately you start broadcasting. The planes will be out in fifteen minutes. You have to pay expenses for the search and rescue, so I wouldn ‘t yank the handle just for a ride back. It’s always possible to rest, have a sip of Coffiest, and keep on going. Route-marked map. Snowshoes. Gyrocompass. And rations. Mr. Courteney, you are equipped. I’ll lead you to checkout.” The outfit wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I’ve been more heavily bundled up against the lakeside winds in a Chicago winter. The lumpy items, like the power pack, the R.D.F., and the rations, were well distributed. The snowshoes folded into a pair of staffs with steel points for ice climbing, and went into a quiver on my back. Checkout was very thorough. They started with my heart and worked through my equipment, with particular emphasis on the power pack. I passed, and they set the R.D.F. for Starrzelius Glacier, with many more warnings not to overdo it. It wasn’t cold, not inside the suit. For a moment only I opened the face flap. Wham! 1 closed it again. Forty below, they had told me -A foolish-sounding figure until my nose felt it for a split second. I didn’t need the snow shoes at the base of the towering plastic doughnut; it was crust ice that my spike-soled shoes bit into. I oriented the map with the little gyrocompass and trudged off into
the vast whiteness along the proper bearing. From time to time I pressed my left sleeve, squeezing the molded R.D.F. switch, and heard inside my hood a cheerful, reassuring “Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Keep-beep.” There were some score people frolicking in one party I passed and waved cheerily at. They seemed to be Chinese or Indians. What an adventure it must be for them! But, like indifferent swimmers hugging a raft, they did their frolicking almost under the shadow of Little America. Farther out there were some people playing a game I didn’t know. They had posts with bottomless baskets set up at either end of a marked-off rectangular field, and the object was to toss a large silicone ball through the baskets. Still farther out there was a large skiing class with instructors in red suits. I looked back after trudging for what seemed only a few minutes and couldn’t see the red suits any more. I couldn’t see details of Little America-just a gray-white shadow. “Beep-beep, ” my R.D.F. said and I kept going. Runstead was going to hear from me. Soon. The aloneness was eerie but not-not unpleasant. Little America was no longer visible behind me, not even as a gray-white blur. And I didn’t care. Was this how Jack O’Shea felt? Was this why he fumbled for words to describe Venus and was never satisfied with the words he found? My feet plunged into a drift, and I unshipped and opened the snowshoes. They snapped on, and after a little stumbling experiment, I fell into an easy, sliding shuffle that was a remarkably pleasant way of covering ground. It wasn’t floating. But neither was it the solid jar of a shoe sole against a paved surface-all the walking I had known for thirty-odd years. I marched the compass course by picking landmarks and going to them: an oddly-recurved ice hummock, a blue shadow on a swale of snow. The R.D.F. continued to confirm me. I was blown up with pride at my mastery of the wild, and after two hours I was wildly hungry all at once. What I had to do was squat and open a silicone-tissue bell into which I fitted. Exposing my nose cautiously from time to time I judged the air warm enough in five minutes. I ravenously gulped self-heated stew and tea and tried to smoke a cigarette. On the second puff the little tent was thoroughly smoked and I was blinded with tears. Regretfully I put it out against my shoe, closed my face mask, stowed the tent, and stretched happily.