Hieroglyph (46 page)

“Twenty-five million dollars a year?”

“Plus profit from selling tourist activities,” she said. “At fifty percent occupancy, figuring a five-month tourist season, we need just over three hundred rooms. There's your baseline plan, Mr. Cerny.”

Zak's head was spinning. “You sure?”

She looked at him. “Of course I'm not sure. If I had a crystal ball, I'd use it. Until then, I work with the numbers I have.”

“Twenty-five million dollars,” Zak repeated. “I should ask for a higher salary.”

Mrs. Binder looked at him over the top of her glasses, a gesture that Zak was beginning to understand meant that he had just said something unbelievably stupid. “That's gross income, Mr. Cerny, not profit. That won't be paying very much of your salary, much less mine. There isn't any local minimum-wage labor to staff the hotel. This will be very expensive to run.

“No, that just buys us into the market. Once we get established, long term, we need to grow that market. And lengthen the tourist season. The profit comes when—and if—we grow to ten times that. We want every skier in Europe to take winters in Antarctica. We do that, and then we'll make some money.”

“A hundred thousand tourists?” Zak said.

“And don't forget the housing for the employees as well.” She looked at him. “You said you wanted a city. Here's your city, if you can build it.”

“I can build it.”

“That,” Mrs. Binder said, “we shall see. There's a lot of work to do first.”

“We should just build the thing,” Zak said. “Doing something is always the best way to learn how to do it.”

Mrs. Binder took off her glasses. “Just build it.”

“Right. You learn from experience, not endless analysis.”

She found a piece of napkin left over from lunch and started polishing her glasses. “You do not ‘just build' a hotel.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You analyze it to death first. Look, let's just do it. You're afraid we'll get things wrong? Fine, we'll probably get some things wrong. We'll fix them. We'll learn as we go.”

“And where, exactly, should we ‘just build it'?”

Zak shrugged. “Anywhere. Find a spot. As long as it's in Antarctica, wherever.”

“Who owns that spot? Who do we buy the property rights from?”

“Nobody owns Antarctica. We build on it, we own it. Right of possession! You think somebody's going to take a bulldozer and knock us down? I don't think there even are any bulldozers in Antarctica.”

“Mr. Cerny, your ignorance of international law is astounding. Saying ‘I call dibs' does not serve as a legal claim in any international court in the world. Before Mr. Mistry puts a billion dollars into constructing a hotel, he will be certain that there is at least one nation in the world recognizing our right to build on that spot. Right now, I believe that Argentina is likely to be that nation; they have claimed a large portion of Antarctica. We will work with them.”

“I haven't thought about that.”

“I expected you hadn't,” Mrs. Binder said. “That's why I hired a team.

“When it's your billion dollars at stake, Mr. Cerny, you are certainly free to ‘just build it.' Meanwhile, I have a business to put together.”

THE NEXT CRISIS HAD
nothing to do with property rights. When Zak came to the hotel the next day, he saw the stucco facade of the building spray painted in bright red with graffiti:
SAVE
THE
PENGUINS
and
DON
'
T
LET
CORPORATE
AMERIKA
RAPE
ANTARTICA
and
KEEP
ANTARTIKA
WHITE
.

“Mr. Mistry has been informed, and he is flying in from Martinique,” Mrs. Binder told him. “He is not happy.”

Mistry was indeed not happy. He entered the offices unaccompanied by the usual staff and slapped a thin magazine down on the conference table, scattering to the side a pile of drawings Zak had been working on with designs for snowmobiles looking like Easter eggs on wheels. “Who the hell leaked to these clowns?” he said.

Zak looked over at Mrs. Binder and then picked up the magazine. It was labeled
Rainbow Earth!
and had a full-color picture of fuzzy penguin chicks on the cover, looking disconcerted at finding themselves staring into a camera. A bright pink Post-it note marked a page in the middle, and Zak flipped to it. The headline, in huge type, was
A
HOTEL
IN
ANTARCTICA
? and under that, in slightly smaller type, “If hotel billionaire Gajadhar Mistry gets his way, the last unspoiled continent on Earth is about to get trashed.” The article was signed “Anjel Earth.” The facing page juxtaposed another penguin with a photograph of a garbage dump with a hotel in the background. The logo on the hotel—
MISTRY
ACAPULCO
—was prominently visible.

“Photoshop,” Mistry snarled. “I don't build hotels next to garbage dumps. I'll sue those bastards for defamation.”

“You will not,” Mrs. Binder told him calmly. “You know that is exactly what they want.” She picked up the magazine and examined it. “Pretty high production values. I'm impressed.”

“To hell with their production values.” He looked directly at Zak. “Who leaked our plans?”

Zak had just published a technical paper in
Acta Astronautica,
comparing the requirements for a moonbase with the requirements for a hotel in Antarctica, with a detailed analysis of wastewater recycling. He suddenly realized that publishing his plans might not have been a good idea. He stared at the floor and said, sheepishly, “I am afraid that maybe—”

Mrs. Binder cut him off. She tossed the magazine back on the table. “They don't have any details; it's all blue-sky speculation and inspired guesses. They're fishing. They heard rumors, and they're firing a shot across our bows to see if we react.”

“
What
rumors?”

Mrs. Binder shrugged. “Could be anything. We're talking with the Cousteau Society for advice on the scuba diving in Antarctica; they doubtless have contacts with these Rainbow Earth people. Or the IAATO, the Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. Or half a dozen other people.”

“You are telling me that everybody you meet knows that we're looking at Antarctica?”

Mrs. Binder looked at Mistry over the top of her glasses. “We are building you a hotel, Mr. Mistry. If you are under the impression that we are secret agents, I'm afraid you are misinformed.”

“At least
try
to be discreet.”

“Discretion is overrated,” she said. “Right now, we could use a bit of publicity. In the right places. And this”—she tapped the magazine—“is exactly the right place.”

“The hell it is,” Mistry said. “They're saying I plan to strip-mine—hell, look at this. They imply I'm going to rape baby polar bears and skin the fur off the bloody carcasses to keep rich tourists warm.” He paused. “Are there even polar bears
in
Antarctica?”

“I do believe that's a joke,” Mrs. Binder said. “And I believe you're missing the point. This is the audience we want to hit, and they are doing our job for us, better than we could do it ourselves.” She picked up the magazine again and flipped page after page, color spreads of snow-covered mountains and underwater photography of penguins flying gracefully beneath the surface. “This is gold. Who cares what the editorial says? This is a direct hit on our target audience. They're doing our publicity for us.”

“You are crazy,” Mistry said. He picked up the magazine and looked at it again. “Really?”

“The fact that they are protesting,” Mrs. Binder said, “says that these people think we have an idea worth pursuing.”

THEY WERE WORKING ON
the third-floor patio of the hotel. Mrs. Binder had insisted that since they were in Miami they should work outside when it was nice. Her definition of “nice” could be debated, since the weather was hot, even in October. The tourists were mostly gone and the patio was empty. Papers, held down with conch shells, were spread out across a number of tables, each one with its own red-and-white umbrella.

The pool bar's specialty was margaritas—twenty different kinds. But Zak was drinking Pepsi, and Mrs. Binder tonic water. She wore a bright blue-and-yellow floral sundress and had traded her usual owl glasses for sunglasses with equally large round lenses. Zak wore a Hawaiian shirt of garish colors. He was beginning to like Florida. He was even beginning to think that Mrs. Binder was okay, for an accountant. He had never worked up the nerve to ask her about Mr. Binder. It was a subject that she never brought up on her own.

The negotiation for the nuclear reactor had been going poorly. Zak's plan had been built around NASA plans for a reactor called SP-100, designed to power a lunar base, which turned out to be just about the perfect size for the hotel. In the NASA version, waste heat from the reactor was radiated away in space, but in his design it would be circulated through hot-water pipes to keep the habitat warm. Unfortunately, he had run up against rules forbidding the export of nuclear technology. Since the plan was to put the hotel in the part of Antarctica claimed by Argentina, even though nothing in the design was actually classified, they hit a brick wall in trying to get an export permit from the State Department.

Mrs. Binder had put her contacts on the problem, though, and had found a workaround: the Ukrainian navy had an old, Soviet-era nuclear-powered corvette. It was heavy and slow by modern naval warfare standards, undergunned, and completely useless in any sort of battle. But it carried a nuclear reactor of Soviet military design: simple, rugged, and nearly maintenance-free. Most important was that, stripped of its weapons, the Ukrainians were happy to sell the ship for little more than the price of the scrap metal, as long as the buyer guaranteed that they would take it far away and never bring it back.

“Not very efficient, by American standards,” Mrs. Binder summarized, “but it solves the problem of how we transport it to Antarctica.”

“The inefficiency is a bonus,” Zak said. “That means more of the energy dissipated as heat, and we can use all the heat it can generate.”

“It's one of a kind, though,” she said. “When we expand, we'll have to solve the problem all over.”

“So, we'll have the same solution,” Zak said. “The Ruskies must have tons of Cold War junk they can't get rid of. Submarines. Aircraft carriers. Who knows?”

“I'll make inquiries,” Mrs. Binder said.

“LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION” WAS
the catchphrase of real estate. “And double that for hotels,” Mrs. Binder said.

Topping their list of required features were penguins—tours to a penguin colony would be one of their main attractions. That part of their search became easier when they found, in an obscure scientific journal, the penguin-poo map. The accumulated droppings from ten thousand penguins spending four months at a winter nesting site made a distinct spectral signature identifiable in satellite images. They made extensive maps showing Antarctica's penguin rookeries.

Additionally, they wanted a site with good skiing possibilities. That meant far enough south that the slopes would be snow-covered even at the peak of summer. The site also needed a good harbor, for both cargo and cruise ships, and for jet-skiing. And finally they needed a flat plain large enough for a nine-thousand-foot runway, so they could bring in jets full of tourists, although that would not happen for some years after the hotel was opened.

Mistry's contacts in Argentina were enthusiastic about sponsoring the hotel as an opportunity to emphasize Argentina's land claims. But, after poring over maps and satellite images, none of their candidate locations fell within the Argentinean claim.

The spot they finally rated number one was in an area claimed by New Zealand, on the Ross Sea south of the Adare Peninsula. Nestled up against the Trans-Antarctic Mountains on one side, it had a natural harbor on the other side.

“A claim staked under New Zealand law may be better for us in any case,” Mrs. Binder said. “It's easier to negotiate when you're speaking the same language.”

“If you call it the same language.”

“We already have three hotels in New Zealand,” she said. “We can navigate the required permits. All in all, I think I like it.” She looked at him. “It's just about summer in Antarctica. You have plans for Christmas?”

In fact, Zak had gotten a letter from Kayla and Saladin. An actual letter! So quaint. But his old e-mail had gone belly-up along with his company and his finances, and they probably had no other way to reach him. They had invited him to visit for the holidays. But if they were happy together, it would only depress him to visit, and if they had broken up—being as Saladin was still, despite everything, his best friend—it would depress him even more. Besides, what would they do? Reminisce about the good old days, when they had maxed every credit card they could apply for and every loan they could scrounge in a doomed attempt to keep his business from going under before launch?

“No,” Zak said. “I'm free.”

PREPARING TO VISIT ANTARCTICA
was, Zak discovered, much like preparing to visit the moon. They moved their base of operations to the Mistry Oreti in Invercargill, New Zealand, the southernmost hotel in Mistry's chain. This would be the hotel that Mistry would use to send tourists to Antarctica. So in a sense their expedition was a dry run for the tourist trade.

The flight from Miami took more than thirty hours on Virgin Australia. The final hop to reach Invercargill was on Air New Zealand, but Mistry had booked them business class, instead of crammed into tiny seats like cattle to slaughter. There were some advantages to working for a billionaire. Zak spent the flight thinking about transportation. Could they send tourists to Antarctica on zeppelins? Back in the day, the
Hindenburg
had flown passengers from Germany to Rio de Janeiro, so Miami to Antarctica should be doable. He made some calculations and sketched designs. Mrs. Binder also spent much of the flight on her laptop, working on what, Zak could not tell.