Big Dead Place. Nicholas Johnson

everyone around him and lifting his legs and ass in the air to show them his “pussy.” He had a tattoo that said “Tattoo.” He had seizures on the floor of the bar, and no one could tell if he was faking or not, though there were reasons to suspect he wasn’t.

      Tom Yelvington called on him. The DA, with a controlled smirk, told the President of RPSC that there was no First Aid kit in his dorm, and that this was a safety concern. The powerful man with the goatee became excited, like a circus strongman asked to prove himself by crushing a grape.

      “We’ll take care of that right away,” he said. The next day, we received this email:

      All,

      In response to yesterday’s RPSC’s all-hands meeting….First Aid kits have been installed in every dorm’s laundry room.

      Regards,

      Jim Scott

      Raytheon Polar Services Co.

      McMurdo Area Manager

      About mid-December, the buildings from the Ice Runway are moved to Willy Field on the permanent ice shelf. The larger wheeled aircraft can’t land at Willy, so everything arrives on smaller ski-equipped aircraft. Mail slows to a trickle. For most of December, package mail piles up in Christchurch and people temporarily whine about the mail rather than the food.

      Then, sometime just before Christmas weekend, NSF gives a thumbs-up, the planes are stuffed with pallets of mail, and the mailroom stays open late with the help of volunteers to distribute thousands of pounds of packages. People eating barbecued ribs and sipping cans of Canterbury Draft next to a hydraulic lift at the Heavy Shop Christmas party spread the word that the mailroom is still open. Hurry up, the mailroom is full! They need you to get your packages out of the way! It’s about time, because people were almost out of decent coffee, had been making it weaker in the last few weeks, and now there would be new CDs and stylish ski apparel. People lug the boxes to their rooms, then return to the Christmas party, for which the mechanics have degreased the concrete floor with a highpressure sprayer and hung tinsel and cardboard candy canes around the garage to host the eating of meat and the drinking of beer while the bands play classic rock covers.⁷

      On Christmas, Ben and I met after brunch in the lounge of 210. We huddled over a soldering iron that I had checked out from the tool room in Ben’s name, in case it got lost, and we built insectoid solar-powered robots that I had ordered on the Internet. People walked through the lounge all afternoon, and we fed them Bailey’s and good coffee while we tested our robots on the table and Laz expounded on the merits of the gleaming red asses of baboons.

      In 1826, when Antarctica had been poked and prodded around the edges but was still thought to be a smattering of islands, John Cleves Symmes revealed his theory that there was a giant hole at the South Pole through which one could enter the earth and find balmy weather, abundant reindeer, lush gardens, and a race of humanoids eager to open a new trade route to the surface world. Symmes sought funds for an expedition to prove his theory, and enlisted charismatic disciple Jeremiah Reynolds to give lectures, which Symmes hoped would increase the public’s receptiveness to his theory, thereby eventually coaxing official support. Unfortunately for Symmes, Reynolds fluttered away once boosted into the limelight. Reynolds had discovered that more people cheered, and more politicians sniffed about curiously, when he broadened the goals of the expedition. He no longer stirred interest by hypothesizing on the gaping cavities at the Poles, or the subterranean world with its “salubrious climates,” or the deranged troglodytes thus far deprived of humanity’s friendship. Now he promoted a scientific expedition that would benefit the “human family” and “add something to the common stock of general improvement” that would bring the “thanks of the human race.” Eventually, Reynolds broke with Symmes completely and became a key proponent of and lobbyist for the United States Exploring Expedition, commanded by Charles Wilkes, who, according to some, was the first to prove that Antarctica was a continent, not a collection of islands.

      130 years after John Cleves Symmes published Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres: Demonstrating that the Earth is Hollow, Habitable Within, and Widely Open About the Poles, Antarctica had largely been mapped and probed. No vast recesses hiding gardens of earthly delights were likely to be found. No unexpected tribes would emerge with strange spices or new species of meat. Putting an industrial station at the South Pole effectively rolled a boulder over the hole in the Pole, forever entombing hopes of new subterranean frontiers. All the real estate had now been parceled and X-rayed. There were no more remote corners promising vast riches and unmolested virgin lands to keep us marching when we became tired, at least for most of us. In 1969, when Pole had already been inhabited for over a decade, Raymond Bernard published The Hollow Earth: The Greatest Geographical Discovery in History Made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd in the Mysterious Land Beyond the Poles: The True Origin of the Flying Saucers, suggesting that UFOs came from within the earth rather than from the stars, and that Richard Byrd had actually flown into the earth’s interior in 1947. Enthusiasts such as Bernard, against all reason, pursue fantastic frontiers, unsatisfied with the second-rate real ones, such as the muddy ocean depths, where fish don’t have eyes, and the darkest reaches of space, which are very exciting, but where payoffs are small for huge efforts and long waits.

      In 1605, 200 years before Symmes published his hollow earth theory, Bishop Joseph Hall wrote a fictional account of travels in the southern polar lands. Written under a pseudonym to avoid persecution by the grumping magistrates he criticized, the book satirized Hall’s own country and the church that dominated it. No one had seen Antarctica or set foot there; it hid in a great blank space at the bottom of the map. Hall’s book appeared long before the Pole had a hole, and before the hollow Earth was a hive of alien spacecraft. It appeared before Antarctica was the most pristine and dangerous land in the world, and long before it contained the secrets of peace and hope for future generations. His book, written when Antarctica had hardly been invented yet, was Another World Yet the Same