Leaving the dome by its single exit/entrance, located beside the larger steel doors for the snow tractors and motorized transport, Michael stepped into a vast, freezing world of snow and ice. All white.

  Everything. At least, everything but the sky, though even that was of a blue so clear and radiant that it merged into a reflective silvery whiteness. The land stretched out to the horizon, where gleaming, untouched snow merged with cloudless blue sky, its uniform flatness marred only by a line of eastward-facing mountain ranges, their peaks covered in ice that reflected the brilliant sunlight, and by the large blocks of pack ice and bizarrely shaped glaciers that drifted in unseen lakes far away. The landscape, in general, looked vast and its features stood out in breathtaking clarity.

  This was what Robert Stanford would have seen when, in 1979, showing tremendous moral and physical courage, he had left Wilson's colony and walked out into the wilderness, fully aware that he was inviting certain death. Stanford was one of Michael's few historical heroes and now he wanted to follow in Stanford's footsteps and imagine how he had died.

  Relieved to have escaped from the research station, the dome, without being stopped by anyone, he headed across the vast white plain. Glancing sideways while on the move, he took in the always stirring

  sight of the many aircraft resting on the landing zones located around the cave mouths at the base of the towering cliff, protected by overhanging ledges. The original aircraft had been flying saucers, but now, though the new aircraft could ascend and descend vertically, make extraordinary turns, and hover in mid-air just like the old flying saucers, they came in all shapes and sizes: disc-shaped, pyramid-shaped, pear-shaped and

  triangular; some, the sensing and anti-radar devices, as small as twelve inches in diameter, others, such as the mother' ships, as large as the commercial airliners that used to fly in 'the World' (the colony's term for the world outside Antarctica) before they had been grounded by the cyborgs. They were more highly advanced than the old flying saucers and, ironically, Freedom Bay had Wilson to thank for that.

  Stopping momentarily to look beyond the many parked discs and other flying machines, Michael saw an immense hallway of unbreakable glass, thrusting out from a deeply shadowed hollow section in the base of the mountain containing Freedom Bay. A stone statue of Robert Stanford had been raised there in #1 on the orders of Dr Brandenberg. Its purpose, Brandenberg had stated, was to keep alive the memory of the man whose noble sacrifice signified what the colony was about: the fight for human freedom and, ultimately, the defeat of the cyborgs. According to Freedom Bay's history books, which had been written and were constantly updated by Dr Brandenberg, it was from that very hallway that Stanford, refusing the offer of life as a robotized slave-worker in John Wilson's vile 'scientific'

  community, had stepped forth to certain death. Now Stanford, carved in stone, looked out over the white wilderness he had died in as a proud, free man.

  Michael, too, was a free man in Freedom Bay. But 'the World' had been stolen from him and he wanted it back. Stanford had refused to give in to Wilson and Michael, born long after Wilson's time, deeply resented the rule of Wilson's obscene offspring, the cyborgs, and was determined somehow to destroy it. Thus, now he was following symbolically in Stanford's footsteps and trying to imagine his final, lonely hours. Michael wanted to get closer to Stanford, to feel his essence, because he thought it would help him.

  Given the layout of the mountain, Stanford could initially have walked out in only one direction, bringing him to where Michael was standing. After glancing down at his own booted feet, imagining them to be Stanford's feet, Michael convinced himself that Stanford would have walked in a straight line, not looking back, determined only to put as much distance as humanly possibly between himself and the colony. So Michael did the same, walking in a straight line, heading for the horizon straight ahead and hoping to come eventually to the body of water where Stanford had clambered onto the pack ice and been carried out to sea, gradually freezing to death.

  Following actually as well as symbolically now in Stanford's footsteps, Michael gradually left Freedom Bay far behind him. He found himself on a vast white plain whose only guiding features were the thin ribbon of mountains to the north and the glaciers rising out of an unseen lake many miles ahead. There, in that exposed area, a strong wind was blowing and creating great curtains of swirling snow. It looked hellish out there. But that hell was what Stanford had experienced and Michael wanted to walk in his hero's footsteps. Within minutes, however, he was experiencing something else: the bizarre sensation that he was walking upside down and that the ground, with its green and purple vegetation, its glittering lakes and streams, was what he was walking on while the sky changed from azure-blue to pink and magenta. Had he not known of this phenomenon, he would have thought that he was going mad, but experience told him that he was seeing what the great Antarctic explorer, Rear-Admiral Richard E.

  Byrd, had described as the 'Avenue of Frozen Rainbows' — which was, in fact, a fabulous mirage created by the reflection in the sky of ice-free areas located perhaps hundreds of miles away. Stanford might have experienced exactly the same thing just before he died.

  Michael had thought much about that subject and discussed it a lot with Dr Brandenberg, who had investigated the matter twenty years before the cyborgs took over the World. The story, as recounted by Brandenberg, still intrigued Michael.

  While it was not known precisely how Stanford had died, in February 1980, approximately a year after he had stepped out of

  the Antarctic colony, the Coast Guard cutter Amundsen had come across his ice-encased body on a glacier drifting in McMurdo Sound. Subsequent investigations revealed that the ice-clad corpse had almost certainly started its long journey in an exposed water channel in the interior of Queen Maud Land, drifted along that channel to the Queen Alexandra Range, passing the Beard-more Glacier, then continued its journey under the Ross Ice Shelf to surface eventually, a year later, in McMurdo Sound with Stanford's body still frozen solid and perfectly preserved

  Most of the witnesses to that discovery had disappeared when the Amundsen itself either sank or inexplicably disappeared in a UFO-related incident that had occurred a few hours after the sighting. At the same time, in a similar UFO incident, Stanford's body had 'disappeared' from the room in McMurdo Station where it had just been surgically examined. All witnesses to that examination - except one - had also vanished. The sole remaining witness, an American travel photographer, Grant McBain, had left the Amundsen a few hours before it had disappeared without a trace. He had left the cutter in order to make a photo record of the autopsy conducted shortly after on Stanford's thawed-out body, but he had been absent from the operating theatre when Stanford's body and all personnel in the autopsy room had disappeared. Interrogated later by Lee Brandenberg, then a thirty-year old United States Air Force captain, McBain had confirmed that he had been in the toilet of the autopsy room when a UFO had come down over the building and strange beings, later revealed to be cyborgs, had taken away everyone in it, including the dead Stanford. None of them had ever been seen again — and now Stanford was history.

  As he hiked deeper into that immense, snow- and ice-covered wilderness, frequently glancing back over his shoulder to see freedom Bay receding, Michael began to run into the same weather that Stanford would have experienced once out from under the protective shadow of the mountain. Here, in this immense, flat expanse, the wind blew the snow in languid,

  glinting clouds across the plain, obscuring the line of the horizon where white snow met blue sky.

  Aware that his eyes could be damaged by such weather, as well as by the light, Michael put on his goggles. He did so just in time as, shortly after, he began seeing what Stanford might have seen during his fateful final hours: first an arch of light above a horizon that was forever receding, light flashing repeatedly and radiating outwards in arcs of dazzling phosphorescence, then a great balloon of light floating right there in front of him, a giant eggshell of light, transparent and shimmering, framing a sky that had turned a miraculous pink and was streaked with more lines of light.

  I wonder if Stanford saw that, Michael thought. If he did, he had a colourful death and might have died happy.

  The wind moaned louder, whipping up more snow. The swirling snow was now a white sheet that beat violently about Michael and stung his few areas of exposed skin. He ignored it and kept going. His teeth started to ache. The snow settling on his white thermal clothing soon formed a light frost. The beating wind grew stronger by the second and turned into a blizzard.

  All white. Everything. Definition was lost. The wind moaned and the snow blew all around him and made him part of it. He stopped for a moment, shaken by the fierceness of it. He wanted to take off his gloves and goggles, to share Stanford's hellish experience fully, but he knew that if he dared to do so, he could be blinded and suffer from frostbite, losing his fingers entirely. Nevertheless, he kept going,

  heading into the howling wind. Here the whirling snow was forming immense dark portals that were luring him in. He stepped in and saw a light, moved forward and saw it brighten. The snow hissed and swirled violently and then the brightening light seemed to explode, temporarily blinding him. All white.

  Everything. He let the wilderness embrace him. Glinting glaciers and flashing pack ice and streams of yellow and violet. A great rainbow formed across the horizon to frame a blue sky streaked with silver.

  Then a

  luminous balloon. A mirage: a sun-dog. He saw miracles of blue ice and light, the dazzling wastes of the snowfalls.

  Michael moved on, still determined, knowing that Stanford had come this way, that he could not have come much farther, that soon he, Michael, would reach the penultimate stop in Stanford's final journey.

  And true enough, when the blizzard eventually abated, letting the swirling snow settle down, he saw the glint of nearby water, blocks of drifting pack ice, bizarrely shaped glaciers, and knew immediately, with absolute conviction and a racing heart, that he had come to the place where Stanford had taken his last steps on Earth.

  Approaching that broad expanse of ice-filled water, so deep that it looked black, flowing around towering glaciers and slabs of pack ice, an immense jigsaw of glittering, sun-reflecting black and white, he saw that it narrowed at its far end to become a channel curving away to the north. Studying the area intently, aware of the vast, eternal silence, feeling far too emotional, he realized that Stanford, still alive, would have stepped off from this very spot onto a drifting piece of pack ice, then deliberately stretched out on it and let it carry him away as he slowly, inexorably, froze to death. Gradually, as the block of pack ice drifted on, carried along gently on the waters of that distant channel, Stanford would have died: the snow falling on his dead body turning to frost that, over the weeks, then the months, of his long journey to the sea, would have turned to solid ice, a block of ice, growing thicker every day until, a year later, when it was spotted by the Amundsen, Stanford's body would have been completely encased in what had become a large, drifting iceberg.

  Hiat must have been an eerie, disturbing sight.

  Glancing across the broad jigsaw of black water and snow-

  overed pack ice to where it narrowed down dramatically,

  Michael realized that he was looking at the same channel that

  had carried Stanford all the way from here to the South Atlantic

  :oast. Fascinated by the thought of it, excited to be here, he

  slipped the rucksack off his shoulders, lowered it to the ice, then removed his laptop computer and digital camera. He spent the next hour taking photographs of the location, connecting the camera to his IOOOMB laptop (designed and built in Freedom Bay, using Wilson's original technology) with its built-in full-colour photoprinter, and then examining the photos on his laptop screen for reasons he could not fully comprehend. In truth, while the photos showed little in themselves, he was hoping that they would stir his imagination and, perhaps, add a further dimension to his ongoing study of the history of Freedom Bay. Under Brandenberg's tutelage, he had been studying the history of the colony from its earliest days, when it had been set up by John Wilson as a scientific master-and-slave community, to its takeover by the United States in 1981 and, finally, its isolation from the rest of the world in the year 2000 when Wilson's offspring, the cyborgs, had taken control of most of Earth.

  Michael was studying the subject not only because of his personal fascination with it (it was, after all, his own history too) but also because Brandenberg was determined to rid the world of the cyborgs and he, Michael, was determined to help him do it.

  He had just completed his work by the lake when he heard the buzzing of the radio-telephone system clipped to his belt. Removing it, fully expecting to hear one of his irate parents, he switched it on and said, 'Yes?'

  'Michael?'

  'Dr Brandenberg!'

  'Correct.' Dr Brandenberg did not sound pleased. 'Where are you, Michael?'

  'About five miles south, along the zero meridian,' Michael replied.

  'You sneaked out again,' Dr Brandenberg said.

  'Yes, sir.'

  'If your parents find out, they'll be angry.'

  'Yes, sir. I know that.'

  'I'm angry, Michael.'

  'I knew you would be, sir, but I couldn't help myself. I asked for permission and you refused. I couldn't take that - I just had to see the place - and I think I found it this time.'

  "The place where Stanford took his last steps on Earth.'

  Yes, sir. Where he stepped off the mainland and onto that iceberg, knowing he was going to die. It had to be the first lake he came to and that's where I am now.'

  'According to the meterological report,' Dr Brandenberg responded, not impressed, 'there was a blizzard in that area an hour ago.'

  Yes, sir. I came through it.'

  'Braving the blizzard was an extremely stupid thing to do, Michael.'

  'I think Stanford did it.'

  'This obsession with Stanford is becoming unhealthy, Michael. Do you still have a sense of direction, or did the blizzard obliterate that as well as your common sense?'

  'I brought a GPS receiver along and I can make my way back with that.'

  Brandenberg took his time in replying, but Michael sensed that he was smiling despite himself. 'How bright you are,' Brandenberg said eventually. 'Still the brightest pupil I have. But what good did it do you to go out there, risking your own life and possibly, if they find out, frightening your parents, just to follow in your hero's footsteps?'

  'It gave me a sense of him,' Michael replied without pause, with confidence, 'and I want a living sense of Freedom Bay's history — not just dry facts. When our day comes, when we take positive action with regard to the World, my sense of Stanford and the others from the World — Dr Frederick Epstein and the like — will help me to understand what I'm returning to.'

  You won't be returning, Michael,' Dr Brandenberg retorted drily. You've never been in the World.'

  Nevertheless, it was stolen from me,' Michael said. 'It was

  stolen from my parents. So when I think of entering the World, I can't help feeling that I'm actually returning home. Freedom Bay isn't my real home, Dr Brandenberg, and it isn't yours, either.'

  He judged, from the ensuing silence, that his words had shaken Dr Brandenberg, making him dwell on

  the realities of their situation in general and of his own situation in particular. Before becoming head of the colony, in the late 1990s, Brandenberg, then still with the USAF, had kept his family in Dayton, Ohio, and had flown regularly back from Antarctica to see them. Unfortunately, the day before New Year's Eve in the year 2000, after spending Christmas with his family, Brandenberg had returned to Antarctica. He had therefore been in Antarctica when the cyborgs took over most of the World, thus cutting him and the others in Freedom Bay off from their families. Brandenberg had not seen his family since and the sadness that Michael sometimes glimpsed in him was almost certainly caused by that fact.

  Now Michael felt guilty for having reminded him of it.

  'I'm sorry,' Michael said. 'I shouldn't have said that.'

  'No,' Brandenberg replied softly, without anger, 'you shouldn't have said it. But then, you were always pretty quick with your tongue; you're too bright for your own good.'

  'That's why you have to let me take part when you finally decide to go against the cyborgs and return to the World.'

  'You'll take part in nothing,' Brandenberg said, 'if you don't learn to work in a team and do as you're told. Right now, you're the most troublesome pupil I have and I'm not sure that you're worth it.'

  'I'm worth it,' Michael retorted. 'You told me so yourself. You said I'm one of the brightest brains of the younger generation and that out in the World I'd be considered a genius for my age. Will you now deny that?'

  'No, I won't, but I don't respect your arrogance. Never confuse intelligence or education with common sense, which is largely to do with experience. You have a remarkably high IQ and very unusual gifts, but your knowledge of life outside

  academia is still extremely limited. Your arrogance is based on vour ignorance and that makes you do foolish things — such as venturing out into the wilderness without telling anyone.'

  'I'm perfectly safe,' Michael retorted, annoyed to be reprimanded even by this man whom he revered, possibly above all others living. 'And I'll be coming back soon.'

  'You'd better come back immediately,' Brandenberg said, 'before your parents discover you're gone.'

  'All right, I will.'

  'Immediately?'

  'I promise.'

  'Good,' Brandenberg said. 'I'll try and protect your rear until you get back. Over and out.'

  When the line went dead, Michael grinned, turned the phone off and clipped it onto his belt.

 

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