Terminal Freeze

5

“Amazing,” Ekberg said, her words smoking the air. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sky such a clear, intense blue.”

They were making their way up the glacial valley in brilliant sunlight. Despite fretful allusions to the pressing nature of his work, Faraday had elected to come along, and he puffed and wheezed as they climbed. He’d been making this climb at least once a day for a month: the fact he still labored at it betrayed all his sedentary years spent in a laboratory. Ekberg, on the other hand, strode forward with the effortlessness of a committed runner. Her eyes darted everywhere, missing nothing. Now and then she would murmur something into a digital recorder. She was wearing Penny Barbour’s spare parka over her leather jacket.

“I know what you mean,” Marshall replied. “I just wish there was more of it.”

“Sorry?”

“The days are growing shorter, fast. We’ve got two, maybe three weeks of viable daylight left. After that, it’ll be white night around here, twenty hours a day. And we’ll be gone.”

“No wonder you’re in a hurry. In any case, Allan’s going to have a field day with that sky.”

“Allan?”

“Allan Fortnum, our DP. Director of photography.” She glanced ahead at the glacier, deep blue framing the sharp azure of the sky. “How did Mount Fear get its name?”

“After Wilberforce Fear, the explorer who discovered it.”

“Did that make him famous?”

“Actually, it killed him. He died of exposure at the base of the caldera.”

“Oh.” And Ekberg murmured something into the recorder. “Caldera. So it’s a volcano?”

“Extinct volcano. It’s quite a bizarre thing, really-the only geologic feature in a thousand square miles of permafrost. People are still arguing about how it formed.”

“Dr. Sully said it was dangerous. What did he mean by that?”

“ Mount Fear is really just a dead cone of prehistoric lava. Weather, and the glacier, have worn it down, made it fragile.” He pointed at the knife-edged ridges of the valley, then at one of the large caves that riddled the base of the mountain. “Lava tubes like that are created when a crust forms over an active magma stream. Over the years they become very brittle and can easily collapse. As a result, the mountain’s like a vast house of cards. We made the discovery in the back of one of those tubes.”

“And the polar bears he mentioned?”

“Cute to look at, but extremely man-aggressive, especially these days, what with habitat shrinkage. When your people get here, make sure they don’t stray beyond the fenced apron unless they’re armed. There’s a store of high-powered rifles at the base.”

They climbed a minute before Ekberg broke the silence again. “You’re a paleoecologist, right?”

“A Quaternary paleoecologist, yes.”

“And what, exactly, are you doing here?”

“Paleoecologists like me reconstruct vanished ecosystems from fossils and other ancient evidence. We try to determine what kinds of creatures roamed the earth, what they ate, how they lived and died. I’m determining what kind of an ecosystem existed here before the advance of the glacier.”

“And now that the glacier’s retreating, the evidence-the samples-are coming to light again.”

“Exactly.”

She looked at Marshall with penetrating, inquisitive eyes. “What kind of samples?”

“Plant traces. Layered mud. Some macro-organic remains like wood.”

“Mud and wood,” Ekberg said.

Marshall laughed. “Not sexy enough for Terra Prime, is it?”

She laughed in return. “What can you do with those?”

“Well, wood and other organics can be radiocarbon-dated to determine how long ago the glacier buried them. Mud samples are processed for pollen, which in turn indicates what kind of plants and trees were dominant prior to the glaciation. See, modern ecologists are stuck analyzing the world as it exists today, which has been hugely impacted by humans over the last hundred centuries. But with the samples, the readings, the observations I make here, I can reconstruct the world as it existed before humans became the dominant element.”

“You can recreate the past,” Ekberg said.

“In a way, yes.”

“Sounds pretty sexy to me. And I suppose a glacier’s the perfect place to do this because it would have locked everything into a deep freeze, preserving it like a time capsule.”

“Exactly right,” Marshall said. He was impressed by her ability to quickly size up and understand an unfamiliar discipline. “Not to mention the fact that when the ice melts, it simply releases its contents. No muss, no fuss-and no need for a lot of work with shovels and chisels uncovering fossils and subfossils.”

“A very pragmatic approach. What are subfossils? Really small fossils?”

Marshall had to laugh again. “That’s what paleontologists call fossils less than ten thousand years old.”

“I see.” She turned to the struggling Faraday. “And Dr. Faraday, you’re an evolutionary biologist, right?”

Faraday stopped to catch his breath, and the others halted obligingly. He nodded as he shifted his day pack from one shoulder to the other.

“And that means…?”

“Put simply, I study how species change over time,” Faraday puffed.

“And why are you doing it here, in such an inhospitable place?”

“My research involves the effect of global warming on species development.”

A smile formed on her face. “So you really are working on global warming. While Dr. Marshall, here, is simply taking advantage of it.”

Alarm bells rang faintly in Marshall ’s head: Terra Prime had funded their expedition with the understanding it would involve global warming. But Ekberg’s smile was a friendly one, and so he just smiled in return.

They stopped a moment so Ekberg could transcribe a few more notes. Marshall waited, looking out over the horizon. Then he paused. Plucking out his binoculars, he passed them to Ekberg. “Take a look. Out there on the permafrost, to the southwest.”

She peered through the glasses a moment. “Speak of the devil. Two polar bears.” She stared a minute, then passed the binoculars back. “Do we need to turn back?”

“We should be fine up here on the mountain. Normally, one of us would be armed.”

“So why aren’t we?”

“I refuse to carry a weapon. And Wright here is absentminded. Come on, we should get going.”

As they approached the glacier, Marshall looked up a little apprehensively at the glacial wall, but the recent frigid temperatures had arrested its retreat and the ice face looked much the same as it had three days ago when the cave was first exposed.

“That’s the cave,” he said, pointing at the black maw near the base of the glacier.

Ekberg glanced toward it. Although her face betrayed nothing, Marshall knew she must be disappointed not to see inside. He nodded to Faraday. The biologist reached into the pocket of his parka, pulled out a large glossy photograph, and handed it to Ekberg.

“This is what we found,” Marshall said. “A print from our video recording.”

She took the photo eagerly. Staring at it, she caught her breath audibly.

“It died with its eyes open,” she breathed.

Nobody answered; nobody needed to.

“My God. What is it?”

“We can’t be sure,” he replied. “As you can see from the photo, the ice is very opaque, and we can only see the eyes, some surrounding fur. But we believe it may be a Smilodon.”

“A what?”

“Smilodon. Better known as a saber-toothed tiger.”

“Which is technically incorrect,” Faraday said. “Because the Smilodon descends from a completely different line than the tiger.”

But Ekberg didn’t seem to hear. She was staring at the photo, wide-eyed, digital recorder forgotten for once.

“We think that because of the eyes,” Marshall said. “They resemble very closely the eyes of the big cats-of all cats, for that matter. Note they are predator’s eyes: large, forward-facing. There’s the wide area of iris, the vertical pupils. I’d bet that an autopsy will reveal a layer of tapetum lucidum behind the retina.”

“How long has it been frozen?” she asked.

“Smilodons became extinct about ten thousand years ago,” Marshall said. “Whether due to the advancing ice, loss of habitat or food, or a virus that jumped the species barrier, we don’t know. Given the time this ice cave was covered by the glacier, I’d estimate this was one of the last of its kind to die.”

“We’re not yet sure how it came to be frozen,” Faraday added. His habitual blinking, his wide, watery eyes, gave him the appearance of a startled child. “The creature probably retreated into the cave to avoid an ice storm, and froze there. Perhaps it was wounded, or starving. Or perhaps it simply died of old age. More analysis may give us answers.”

Ekberg had quickly regained her professional composure. “What’s this?” she asked, pointing to a clean, vertical hole near the carcass about half an inch wide.

“As you can see, there isn’t a clear view,” Marshall said. “This ice is dirty, occluded, full of prehistoric mud. So we had our intern, Ang, bring up a remote imaging device. It sends out sonar pings and measures the echoes produced.”

“Like a fish-finder,” Ekberg said.

“In a way,” Marshall said, amused. “A very high-tech fish-finder. Anyway, due to the condition of the ice, precise measurements aren’t possible, but the body seems to be approximately eight feet long. We estimate its weight in the thousand-pound range.”

“More appropriate for Smilodon populator than Smilodon fatalis,” Faraday intoned.

Ekberg shook her head slowly, eyes still fixed on the photograph. “Amazing,” she said. “Buried under a glacier for thousands of years.”

A brief silence settled over the group. Standing motionless, Marshall began to feel the cold creeping in around the edges of his hood, biting at his fingertips and toes.

“You’ve asked a lot of questions,” he said quietly. “Any objections to answering one?”

Ekberg glanced over at him. “Shoot.”

“We know Terra Prime is planning to make some kind of documentary, but none of us have any idea what kind. We assume you’re going to explain our work here, maybe end it by describing this unusual find. Record the discovery for posterity. Can you give us more details?”

A wry smile formed on her lips. “Actually, it isn’t posterity the network is concerned with.”

“Go on.”

“I’m afraid the details will have to come from Emilio Conti, the executive producer. But I can promise you one thing, Dr. Marshall: he views this as a real feather in his cap, something he’s been working toward his entire professional career.” Her smile deepened. “Your expedition is about to become more famous than in your wildest dreams.”