Revelation

10 Hot Air

'I believe you!'

It was a moment before he recognized Stefi: a velvet pill-box hat, glistening wet, was pulled down almost to her eyes, a Doctor Who scarf was wrapped around her neck and she was wearing a knee-length coat and leather boots. She was holding two large suitcases, and her eyes were shining with enthusiasm. 'I knew there was something about you.'

'Come in, Stefi.' Findhorn looked quickly up and down the street but could see nothing out of the ordinary.

'I won't be a problem. I'll keep totally out of your way.'

'Okay. Maybe I'll get to sample those shish kebabs.'

Beyond the marble Eve, on a landing as large as the Dundee Street flat, a hippopotamus peered at them through reeds. A zebra was drinking on the other wall. Unseen by it, a crocodile watched quietly, its eyes just above the water. The crocodiles on the ceiling, however, had wings and were flying in formation. The African watering-hole motif surrounding them was broken by six pastel-coloured doors. 'I'll take Dougie's room,' said Findhorn, opening a blue door. He heard Stefi Stefanova give a squeal of delight as she opened the pink door next to him. Romella took the green room across the landing.

Findhorn had a shower in a vast blue bathroom and wondered if Stefi's helpfulness would extend to buying him some underwear. When he emerged, wrapped in a bath towel, Romella was sitting on his bed with the papers in front of her, neatly sorted by years.

'Stefi's nipped out for some late-night shopping. I've left the front door unlocked if that's okay. I thought we might carry on.'

'Excellent.'

She riffled through a sheaf of the papers. 'I can't make out forty-one. It's hopeless.' Romella dropped the photocopy of the water-stained diary onto the floor. 'Before we start, what are you looking for?'

'I wish I knew. Maybe some new scientific process.' Side by side on the single bed, leaning against the ornate Mexican-imported headboard, Findhorn was enjoying the warmth of her forearm.

She picked up 1942. 'Why all this macho Arctic explorer stuff? What do you actually do?'

Findhorn looked at his new companion, and decided she was genuinely curious.

'I go out to my ice station and measure things. Cloud cover, wind patterns near the ground, most of all the way the pack ice moves.'

'Why? For weather forecasting?'

'I just do stuff like that to finance my research. What I'm really about is testing a theory.'

'So what's the great theory?'

'I think we're heading for a catastrophe.'

'A catastrophe,' she repeated tonelessly.

'Romella, I have a confession to make. I'm not a polar explorer, I'm a mathematician. My field is instability in complicated systems.'

She laughed in surprise. 'Well, I'm gobsmacked. What's a mathematician doing at the north pole?'

'Because of something I discovered. On paper.'

'Tell me about it,' she encouraged him.

'Did you know that sea level has risen by ten centimetres in the last century? Half of that comes from melting icebergs, the other half from warming oceans.'

'Fred, I know lots of things, but not that.'

'Ten centimetres isn't a catastrophe, but fifteen metres is and I think that's where we're headed. I think that big hunks of Antarctica are about to break off. Especially the West Antarctic ice shelf, which reaches hundreds of kilometres out to sea. It's sitting on the ocean bed, barely holding onto the continent. Now a little warming to lubricate its contact with the rock and off it goes, an iceberg half the size of Britain drifting into the Pacific and melting.'

She was looking at him thoughtfully. He continued, 'Every city round the ocean rims would end up like Venice. Los Angeles would disappear, New York City would be reduced to a handful of islands and London would turn into a big lake with buildings sticking out of it. All the major financial centres except Zurich would go, and every harbour in the world would be flooded. And the map-makers would have to redraw their atlases. Can you imagine the economic chaos?'

'So why aren't you in the Antarctic drilling holes?' 'Because I think the first signs will appear around the north pole, not the south.' 'How come?'

'The way I think it will go is this. When pack ice cracks it opens up a lead — a long channel of open water. This sea water is at about minus two degrees as against minus thirty-five for the air. So heat pours out from the lead, warming the ice around it. Okay, as things are at the moment the lead will slowly freeze over again. But with global warming under way there will come a point where the leads which open up are too big to be closed again by refreezing. They'll melt more ice, creating more leads and so melting even more ice — et cetera. The ocean will suddenly dump its heat into the ice. The Arctic ice cap will just crack up and disappear.'

'The polar cap will disappear? Suddenly?' Findhorn nodded. 'Suddenly. But that's just the trigger. The rise in sea level will add buoyancy to the West Antarctic shelf which will just lift off and float away, adding to the mayhem. Cities, islands, countries will be submerged all around the world's ocean rims. And with all that water vapour in the air, even the Greenland ice cap will start to melt. Big hunks of the planet will become hotter than the Sahara. That's why, even if you live in Jamaica or Tokyo, you should still care about the Arctic. We're all wired up together.'

'And you're out there, a lone pioneer trying to save the world. Can't you get government support or something?'

'Unfortunately my funding application was sent to Mickey Mouse, alias Sir David Milton, and that was that.'

Somebody was running up the stairs. Findhorn started.

Romella said, 'Relax, it's just Stefi. You're serious about being hunted, aren't you? Do you think this mad theory of yours has anything to do with Norsk asking you to collect the diaries?'

'I don't see any connection. Petrosian was a different sort of mad scientist.'

Stefi appeared at the bedroom door, holding a plastic bag. She looked at them and grinned slyly. Romella gave her a look and said, 'But what's it actually like, working out there? Disappearing into Arctic wastes with no TV, no fish and chips?'

'And no girls?' Stefi added.

'Imagine being inside a deep freeze day after day, sometimes with a howling wind. It can be so cold you want to weep. But there are compensations. When you fly in you see this tiny cluster of huts next to a ship and all around it is this huge expanse of ice, with long open cracks of sea water. You see these big blocks of ice, all weird sculptures and aquamarine blue. You feel as if you're on solid ground but you know you're on a skin of ice only a metre thick and the water under it goes down for two miles. Sometimes in the night you can hear the ice cracking. I've seen a hut disappear overnight. I've walked two hundred yards to starboard from an icebreaker, worked in a hut for a couple of hours, and come out to see the ship fifty yards away, aimed right at me. There's nothing like it. It's like being an explorer on another planet.'

'It sounds dangerous. All those blizzards and cracks in the ice.'

'The polar bears are the big problem. They're wonderful killing machines. They're clever, and they're especially dangerous when they're hungry.'

'Talking of which,' Stefi said. She waved the plastic bag and disappeared.

Romella flicked through the copy of the 1942 diary. 'There's some gobbledegook in here. Maybe you can make sense of it.'

'What do you make of that?' Romella asked, rubbing her forearm. 'I'm freezing.'

'An irate girlfriend, and a near-miss on vaporizing the planet. Just another weekend.'

'This formula…' Romella asked.

'I haven't a clue.'

'If you say so.'

'If the sums had gone the other way…' Findhorn said. 'What's that?' He pointed to a smudged scribble.

She tilted the page and screwed up her nose in concentration. 'It says HMS Daring.'

'What has that got to do with anything?'

Romella shrugged. 'How would I know? It's probably nothing.'

'I agree. Probably nothing. Forget it.'

'Standard stuff, Freddie. Teller was discovering what's called the carbon-nitrogen cycle. It's what fuels hot stars, hotter than the Sun. But nothing on Earth can approach that sort of temperature.'

It was three o'clock in the morning and they were using oblique language. Archie had said it didn't matter as he was working anyway, and Findhorn didn't believe him even slightly.

Just a chat between friends.

About nuclear physics.

At three o'clock in the morning.

Nothing unusual about that. No eavesdropper would even notice.

Could Petrosian have discovered some way of getting the necessary temperature, of locking into this cycle to create a powerful new bomb? The question came out as: 'Not even, say, a nuclear fireball?'

'Not even a nuke.'

'It's another red herring, then?'

'Extremely red. But keep digging, laddie. This gets more intriguing by the minute.'

Findhorn switched off the bedside lamp and flaked out.