The snow was blasting down from the sky or up from the ground or across the tundra or all ways: only gravity gave the walking man a sense of any direction in the white. A sudden fissure in the ice had swallowed nearly all his gear, and almost swallowed him. He was looking for ice: ironic in this desolation of nothing but ice that what he needed to save himself was ice. Broken ice, crooked ice, ice forced upward. Ice to make a shelter against the wind that was ice, blinding and slowing and numbing and, most terribly, tempting him. Sit down and curl up: before long you'll be warm.

The time had already passed at which he began discounting what his senses told him: no, the ice was not warm, no, he hadn't been out here for an hour, no, there wasn't a thin red flag whipping crazily on a slim antenna no more than two yards in front of him --- was there? It was gone; a gust restored the purity of the whiteness before him. But now his metal detector, providentially slung over one shoulder and not lost, was cheeping.

He stood still, waiting, and the moment came: another fractional instant in which a red pennant flickered out of the white and now, below it, the smallest of dark spots on the ground. Sliding one foot linearly in front of the other, the walker headed for what he'd seen.

Within minutes he had his hand on it: a pole maybe fifteen feet tall with the banner that signaled supplies. A crate was the dark spot, snow-shrouded but for a handle. There was no way to open the crate, but that didn't matter, because 'binered onto a D-ring at one corner was a line. The man slid the line through both of his gloved hands, holding it in the crook of his thumb and fingers, walking slowly and crouched to be absolutely sure he didn't drop the slim, helpful thread into the whiteout. At moments he couldn't even see his feet.

He'd guessed right: there was shelter. A tiny tent, but big enough to harbor a man in need. He scooped the snow away from the ripstop nylon shell carefully and found his entrance baffled: the irised entry tube was tied off. From inside. So somebody was already in there.

He shook the tent and kicked at the yielding fabric, trying to make a disturbance, but got no response. Maybe the person inside was thinking it was just the wind. He shouted but the storm sucked the sounds out of his throat and into the vast howling of the wind.

In desperation, the man reverted to a memory from childhood. He had a flare gun that he hadn't bothered to fire: unless help was ten feet away, no one would see. He charged the gun and fired, his hands clumsy in the big gloves. Whimsically, he shouted "Hello-o-o the house!" as he shot, because that's what you did in north Texas when you rode onto someone's ranch unannounced and needing hospitality.

The gun made a sharp explosive crack, different from the wind's howling moan -- but would the man inside take it for breaking ice? Was the occupant asleep -- or dead?

No. The tent shifted and the entry tunnel enlarged and filled as the occupant crawled forward to unbind the lacings. The iris opened as a gloved hand pushed outward, then dilated as the hand was followed by an arm, a shoulder, and finally a hooded head. The wind grasped at the fur trim around the hood as the occupant peered upward at the walker, who still had the flare gun in his hand. The hooded head nodded and the occupant crawled backward into the tent with a gesture that meant "come in."

Less than a minute later, Buckaroo Banzai was out of the wind, huddled before the meager but infinitely comforting heat of a tiny Svea. The other man, whose bulk more than half filled the small tent, was pushing his hood back. He had a wind-reddened face framed in reddish hair all around: bushy and curly down his forehead and over his ears, straighter in a short, thick beard.

The man watched soundlessly as Banzai gradually recovered sensation in his fingers, color perception in his eyes, and the nuances of small sounds in his ears. Noticing the way Banzai bent and flexed his fingers, the man made a small gesture at Banzai's booted feet.

Banzai nodded. "They're OK." He rubbed some of the melting ice away from his eyebrows. "Hope you don't mind my just dropping in like this." He looked up, belatedly wondering if he should be speaking French.

A slow smile spread across the other man's features. In a deep, drawling voice he answered, "It's unlawful to discharge firearms in this neighborhood."

A rapid grin flashed across Banzai's face. "If this is a hospital zone, I'm a doctor."

His companion snorted. "Damn, there goes my parking place." They both laughed, then fell to studying each other. Both were sitting crosslegged in what seemed to be a mountaineering bat tent, modified for pegging to the ground. Neither man could sit up straight, and the two of them, plus the bearded man's gear, filled the tent's small interior far beyond its original design.

The other man broke the silence, reaching behind himself for a thermos. "Want some coffee?"

"I could sure go for some espresso," the doctor answered.

His companion looked over at him, all motion arrested. "Espresso, huh?" He cleared his throat.

"What you want is the Hilton. It's right up the road. You just hike due north a couple hundred miles, swim the Ross Sea out to the Southern Ocean, hang a left, and keep on straight as spit to Wellington. It's on McMurdo Street, ya can't miss it."

Laughing again, the doctor stuck out his hand. "Buckaroo Banzai, Columbia P&S."

"Rawhide. Uh, U. C. Berkeley, sorta."

"You sound more Rio Grande than East Bay."

"Mmm-hmm. 'N you don't exactly sound like the Upper West Side yourself."

"El Paso," Banzai answered, to the other man's evident surprise. "And Kyoto and Paris and some other places. For a while there it looked like Antarctica was going to be my permanent address."

"Know what you mean," the other man grunted. "Half a mile from base camp, might as well have been the other side of the moon in this stuff." The storm that had caught them both was a freak, unpredicted. Both men knew they'd been lucky, and they fell silent again, thinking about their friends who might not have been.

Rawhide stirred. "What brings you down here, doc?"

"Penguins. What about you... uh, Rawhide?"

Banzai's fractional hesitation contained the question he was too polite to ask.

The Texan grinned, a gap-toothed flash in the midst of his beard. "Fossils. -- It starts with a saint and ends with a number, and the stuff in between ain't so hot, either -- Buckaroo?"

"My parents admired the virtues of the cowboy code. It could have been Masado, Junior."

"Well, here's to 'em." Rawhide raised the thermos in salute and took a very small swallow of coffee before passing it over.

Twenty hours later, they had discussed penguins' metabolic change from warm- to cold-blooded, the capricious sex-switching of oysters, DDT and the California condor, Tex Ritter, Jimi Hendrix, and W.H. Auden. They'd condemned the overfeeding of tetracycline to beef stock and steroids to Olympic athletes. They'd vigorously debated the relative beauty of LBJ's daughters and Richard Nixon's, and spun out elaborate hypotheses on the relationship between the moon and the infield fly rule. And they'd sung tunes ranging from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to Frank Sinatra. Nursing the thermos of coffee, they saved a few ounces for wake-up, and both men dropped off into a light sleep.

When they woke, it took them both a second to realize that a surprising quiet had restored itself outside the tent's thin shell. Buckaroo stretched forward in the tube, unlaced it, and poked his head out into a brilliant, still Antarctic afternoon. The larger features of the landscape, mountains and plains, had also restored themselves: it would be easy to find his way home.

Out of the tent, they stretched luxuriously. It took only a few seconds to strike the tent, only a minute or two to reattach it to the supply crate, which itself seemed to be incredibly close by.

"Headed east," the bearded man said.

"Going west," answered the doctor. Rawhide nodded and settled his shoulders into his pack. "Don't forget about the ranch."

"I'll be there by mid-June," Buckaroo Banzai answered, putting out his hand again. They shook on it, and the doctor turned back toward the Columbia Biomed team's base camp. When he got about a hundred feet away, he started whistling. The sound carried clearly in the frigid air, and the red-bearded man paused in mid footstep as his mind put words to the tune: On the road again,/ I just can't wait to be on the road again,/ the life I love is makin' music with my friends....

~ 30 ~