Zodiac Station

Ten

I overslept. No one came to wake me, and the light creeping round the wardrobe wasn’t enough to break into my dreams. When I did open my eyes, and found my watch, I stared at the dial almost incapable of understanding time. I’d missed breakfast. If I wasn’t quick, I’d miss the plane.

I threw my clothes into the bag. There wasn’t much to pack. I’d just about finished when there was a rap at the door.

‘Plane’s cancelled,’ said Quam. ‘Bad weather.’

I peered at the crack around the window. The sun was shining; I couldn’t hear any wind.

‘At the other end,’ he elaborated. ‘You live to fight another day.’

I gave up on packing and padded along the corridor to the galley. Danny the cook was there, elbow-deep in washing-up.

‘Any chance of some breakfast?’

He heated oil in a pan, and soon the galley was filled with the smell of bacon and eggs. He was a big man, with the sort of gentleness that comes from total confidence in your own strength. The sort of gentleness that could turn ferocious in the wrong circumstances. I never saw him wear more than a T-shirt; I don’t think he ever left the building.

He handed me the plate, and a steaming mug of coffee. Mid-morning, the mess was empty; I’d have felt ridiculous sitting there on my own. I gestured to the island in the middle of the galley.

‘Do you mind if I …?’

‘Pull up a pew.’

I tucked into my breakfast while he started on the washing-up. The food tasted like heaven. As he pottered around the kitchen, I remembered what Quam had said. Danny knows all the gossip.

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘At dinner last night — when Eastman was making a scene. There were three of them who didn’t put their hands up. Eastman, Fridge and Annabel Kobayashi.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did they have against him?’

Danny took an enormous pot out of the sink and rubbed it with a dishcloth. ‘Fridge and Hagger, they used to be good mates, but then it went wrong. They had some bust-ups. Slanging matches you could hear through the whole station.’

‘What about?’

‘Science stuff. Fridge thought Hagger had nicked some of his work.’

I found that hard to believe. Fridge was an atmospheric scientist, nothing to do with microbiology.

‘As for Eastman,’ Danny continued, ‘well, that’s easy enough. You know he’s CIA.’

I almost laughed — but that would have been a mistake. Danny was deadly serious. ‘How do you know?’

‘In the kitchen all day — you hear things. All those aerials and satellites — says he’s working on astronomy or something, but that’s just cover, innit.’

‘Is it?’

‘They pay three million pounds a year for this dump. You think anyone spends that on polar bears? Look at the map. When Russia launches its nukes, they’re coming straight over our heads on their way to the States. This whole place, it’s one big spook station.’

‘Like an early-warning station?’

‘That’s right. So that when it all kicks off, they’re ready. The old mining tunnels up in the north? They’re kitting them out as some sort of bunker. When the ice caps melt and sea levels rise, this is where they’ll hole up.’

I felt dizzy. ‘The CIA?’

‘The Illuminati. The CIA are the frontmen, but it’s the Illuminati who really call the shots.’

‘You think so?’

‘Logical. The bees are dying out. When society collapses because there’s no more crops, they’ll need a safe place to sit it out. Nowhere’s further off the edge of the planet than Utgard.’

Now I wasn’t sure if we were talking about a nuclear holocaust, or climate change, or some other environmental catastrophe. ‘Next you’ll be telling me there’s a spaceship buried under the ice.’

He gave me a measured look. ‘More likely it’s a meteorite carrying alien DNA. Between you and me, I think Dr Hagger might have been on to it. That’s why they got to him — to shut him up.’

‘Well, he did do work on DNA,’ I allowed, ‘but—’

‘Exactly. You’ve seen the sign on the door — “High infection risk of unknown DNA”. What else could it be?’

There was no point trying to explain that the only risk of contamination in Hagger’s lab was that someone would mix up his samples. ‘I’ll try to avoid any alien DNA,’ I promised.

Danny’s knives gleamed as he snapped them on to a magnetic strip on the wall. ‘Truth to tell, they’ll probably come for you next.’

‘You think so?’ I looked over my shoulder. All I saw was the empty dining room.

‘You’re Hagger’s assistant — who knows what he told you. It’s probably best you’re leaving.’

‘Not until tomorrow.’

‘Then watch your back,’ said Danny darkly. ‘They’re already on to you. Probably gave you some bollocks excuse about the plane needing a part, or the weather or something.’

I scraped up the last few bits of yolk from my plate and licked them off the knife. Clearly, it was nonsense. But I wasn’t able to laugh it off as much as I’d have liked.

I carried my plate over to the sink. ‘And Annabel? What was her beef with Hagger?’

‘He was shagging her.’

I thought of Annabel — aloof, unattainable, slicing up her food like a surgeon with a scalpel. I tried to imagine her falling for Hagger. I’d have been more ready to believe she was part of the Illuminati conspiracy.

‘When?’

‘Last summer. Then she turned up here this season and found someone else had been keeping his bed warm over the winter.’

‘One of the grad students?’

A sly shake of his head. ‘Students only got here last week.’

I was about to ask who — and then I realised I knew. It came down to a shortlist of one.

‘Greta?’

The pan went up on the shelf with a clatter. ‘Well, he wasn’t gay, was he?’

Danny had given me so much to think about I didn’t know where to begin. Eastman and the Illuminati, I discounted. Fridge and the stolen data didn’t make any sense. And Annabel’s affair with Hagger seemed almost as far-fetched — though, on reflection, I could just about believe it. More than one pretty young student had found herself in Hagger’s office after hours; three of them had married him.

But Greta?

I was still thinking about it when I ran into Fridge coming down the corridor in his cold-weather gear.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Gemini. Jensen’s flying me up. Annabel has some samples for me.’

I had a day to kill, and I didn’t want to spend it hanging around the base. And I was suddenly interested in seeing more of Fridge and Annabel.

‘Got room for one more?’

Camp Gemini was a few tents and three of the round red huts on the top of the ice dome. I saw them as we flew in, spread over the ice cap like oversized snooker balls. A rough flag line marked out the boundary; inside were four snowmobiles, a couple of sledges and a lot of equipment boxes. A weather station stood on a steel truss at the edge of the camp. The anemometer rattled around, and the wind made the guy ropes moan. I hoped it wouldn’t be too windy for Jensen to fly us back.

Annabel came and met us. Out here, with the high sun full on the snow, she looked dazzling. Even her ECW kit looked tailored. Her trousers hugged her long legs, stretching when she knelt to examine something. Her red parka was cinched in at the waist, her hair swept under her hat to show a slim neck and elfin face, covered with a chic pair of sunglasses. No wonder Hagger fell for her; no wonder she was furious when he dumped her. I felt aggrieved on her behalf.

She pointed to a pile of plastic cool boxes — the sort of thing you’d use for beer at a barbecue.

‘You need help lifting?’

Fridge nodded at me. ‘Tom’s the muscle.’

The coolers weren’t big, but even with two of us I struggled to carry them. After the first two, I had to stop to catch my breath. Cold air rasped my lungs and made me cough.

‘What’s inside?’

‘Popsicles,’ Fridge said with a grin. He snapped the catches and opened one up. Inside, I saw stacks of long cylinders: ice cores, milky white, about ten centimetres thick and wrapped in plastic. Each one had a reference number scrawled in marker pen.

‘What happens to these at Zodiac?’

‘We’ve got a cold store — a hole, basically — dug into the ice. Better than a freezer. I do some preliminary work at Zodiac, and when the plane comes, we send them back to Norwich for more analysis.’

It didn’t sound as if Hagger’s lab freezer was part of the workflow. I wondered how one of the cores had ended up there, and if that had anything to do with the data Fridge had accused Hagger of stealing — if Danny was right about that.

We loaded the last box. Jensen still had some refuelling to do; Fridge and I retreated out of range of the propellers, watching Annabel’s team take ice cores. Like most science, it involved a lot of waiting. A steel cable spun lazily from a tripod. Somewhere on the end of it, deep inside the ice, it turned a hollow drill bit, cutting out the glacier like coring an apple. I kept expecting something to come out, but it never did.

Fridge cleared his throat. ‘Last night. Eastman’s game. It was wrong I didn’t put my hand up. Martin deserved better.’

I made a no-hard-feelings gesture. ‘I heard you were friends.’

‘From way back. We both were at McMurdo in the eighties. In the south.’

Almost everywhere on the planet is south of Utgard. It took me a moment to work out that he meant Antarctica.

‘So what happened here?’

‘It was dumb. We disagreed over an interpretation of the data.’

‘Data?’

‘We detected high methane levels in the first-year sea ice. I thought it was atmospheric; Martin thought it had a bio-logical origin.’ He saw the look on my face and cracked a rueful smile. ‘Stupid, right?’

I didn’t comment. Fridge stared out at the white plateau around us. ‘This place — you think it’s going to be perfect space. Mind-expanding. But actually, it just boxes you in.’

He broke off as Jensen came over from the helicopter. ‘Ready to go?’

‘Problem with the weight,’ said Jensen. ‘Annabel drilled too much bloody ice. I’ve only got room for one.’

‘I’ll stay,’ I volunteered.

I watched the helicopter lift off, whipping up the snow as if someone had shaken a snow globe. When it had disappeared behind the mountains, I wandered over to the drill rig.

‘Anything I can do?’

Annabel looked round. ‘How much do you know about glaciers?’

‘I’m a fast learner.’

‘Then let me give you Glaciology 101. Glaciers are ice, but they’re made of snow. Snow falls, and because it’s so cold here it doesn’t melt. As it piles up, year after year, the weight of the new snow above compresses the old snow and changes its crystal structure to ice. Each year, another layer forms.’

‘OK.’

‘Now, the important thing about glaciers is that although they’re frozen, they don’t stand still. They’re fluid. The ice is actually flowing very slowly, moving outwards under its own weight.’

I looked at my feet. The ground seemed solid enough.

‘Imagine pressing down on a balloon. The more pressure you apply on top, the wider it spreads out at the sides. That spreading is why glaciers move forward.’

‘Got it.’

‘But because it’s spreading, the layers of ice don’t go anywhere. They just stretch out and get thinner — like the balloon. So in the centre, you can drill down and extract cores that sample every snowfall that’s ever happened on this glacier, one on top of the other. You can read them like tree rings. Fridge, for example, can analyse the air trapped inside the ice and tell you what the weather was like four thousand years ago.’

‘Core up,’ called one of the students on the drill. The cable stopped turning and started to reel in. The winch whined like a dentist’s drill; it took a long time to come up.

‘We’re about three hundred metres down right now,’ Annabel said.

A grooved steel pipe emerged on the end of the rope. Two of the students swung it out and laid it on a work table. They wore white clean-room suits; with the ECW clothing bulking them out underneath, they looked like abominable snowmen. They slid a cloudy cylinder of ice out of the tube and on to a sheet of plastic. They handled it delicately, like the fuse of a bomb. But they must have done something wrong: halfway out, the core cracked in two. Chunks of ice splintered off and dropped into the snow.

Annabel swore. ‘Brittle ice. It’s under so much pressure down there, when it comes to the surface it expands too quickly and cracks.’

While the students tried to extract the stump of the core, Annabel picked up the pieces that had fallen in the snow and dropped them into two of the Thermos cups. A small bottle of vodka appeared from inside her jacket.

‘Nothing like a glacier martini.’ The ice hissed and popped as the vodka covered it. ‘What you’re hearing is four-thousand-year-old air. It gets trapped when the snow falls; as the snow compresses into ice, the air gets frozen into it.’

I sniffed the cup. ‘Is it safe?’

‘Probably cleaner than what you’re breathing now.’ She laughed. ‘Fridge would kill me if he knew we were wasting it.’

I downed the vodka and felt the cold spreading through my stomach. ‘I heard he disagreed with Martin over some data.’

‘That was a different project — sea ice, over on the west side. Fridge was getting some anomalous readings so he asked Hagger what he thought.’

‘And didn’t like the answer.’

‘Hagger was a shit,’ she said suddenly. She tossed back the last of her drink. ‘He used people, and then he forgot them.’

The vodka had made me less cautious than usual. ‘Why did you let him go off on his own that day?’

‘I had work to do here.’

‘Couldn’t you have sent one of your grad students?’

‘He wanted to go on his own.’

‘Didn’t you care about the risks?’

A blush rose in Annabel’s cheeks. Behind her sunglasses, I felt her gaze harden.

‘I’ve got eight weeks on Utgard, and it’s costing my funding body two hundred pounds every hour I’m here. We work eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, freezing our arses off. And if you think that makes me sound like a workaholic bitch, Martin was just the same. He wanted to get the work done. I respected that.’

I backed off. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand.’

‘There’s nothing to understand.’ She pointed to the drill rig. ‘I can tell you how much snow fell four thousand years ago, and Fridge can tell you if it was barbecue weather that year. But why Martin broke his neck on the Helbreen …’ She shook her head. ‘The data isn’t there.’

I remembered the sample I’d seen in Hagger’s freezer. ‘Did you do any ice coring on the Helbreen?’

‘Last summer. Nothing this year.’

‘But his work was on sea ice. Didn’t you think it was odd he wanted to go to a glacier?’

‘If I thought about every odd thing that people do at Zodiac, I’d never even get dressed in the morning.’ A gust of wind blew the cups off the packing crate. She pulled up her hood.

‘Would you like to be useful?’

I couldn’t very well say no. She handed me a spade and pointed me to one of her students, knee-deep in a hole.

‘Help Pierre dig out the snow pit.’

It was hot work, but I didn’t mind. Soon, I took off my coat and worked in my jumper, hat and gloves. I remembered how I’d seen Greta doing the same thing when I arrived at Zodiac, and how I’d thought she must be some kind of Inuit. Perhaps I was evolving.

We dug adjacent holes, separated by a thin snow wall that got taller as the holes got deeper. We talked as we worked. Pierre was a master’s student from Quebec, a lanky young man with a wide grin and a bandana tied over his head. He’d been here two weeks, had one more to go.

‘Looks like Annabel keeps you busy,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Two days ago, when Martin Hagger—’

‘That was too bad. He was a nice guy.’

‘Did anyone from here go and check up on him?’

‘Like, down to the Helbreen?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t think so. We were all busy coring. Dr Kobayashi was away for a few hours checking the ablation poles, but that was it.’

He checked my side of the pit. ‘That’s deep enough.’

We squared off the two holes until the sides and floor were flat, taking extra care around the thin wall that divided them. Pierre put down his spade.

‘You wanna see something neat?’

He went off and came back with a square sheet of plywood. He laid it so that it half covered the hole I’d dug.

‘Get in.’

I slid in the gap between the snow and the board. Pierre wriggled in beside me — there was just enough room for both of us. He reached up and slid the board back until it completely covered the top of the hole.

‘You see?’

It was breathtaking. Sunlight shone through the thin wall that divided the two pits and lit up the snow, making it glow a perfect holy blue, like a Chagall window. Like the crevasse, only more concentrated in the tiny space. The different snow layers made stripes of light: pale powder blue where it hadn’t compacted, vivid neon where it had.

‘It’s a time machine,’ said Pierre. ‘The darker bands are summer snowfall. The lighter ones are winter. Wind blows more air into them so they’re less dense.’

I sat there and traced the layers, winter and summer, year after year. I counted back: the summer Luke was born; my winter wedding with Louise; the September I started my PhD. I’d gone back as far as the summer I finished primary school before the layers got too thin for me to tell them apart. My life didn’t feel like much compared with the vastness of the snow quietly piling up here.

A rap on the wooden board told me someone else wanted to admire the view. We lifted it up and scrambled out of the hole, being careful not to touch the thin wall. The sun outside dazzled me; I fumbled with my sunglasses before I went blind. The wind cut through my jumper like a razor.

I put on my coat and went to join the others. They were taking a break over by a folding table. Pierre snapped me off a piece of chocolate and gave me a hot cup of tea. It went stone cold in the time I took to drink it.

‘At fifty below, you can throw boiling water in the air and it freezes before it lands,’ said one of the students.

‘We should try it,’ said Pierre. ‘It’s supposed to get cold by the weekend. Big storm coming in.’

‘Send me a link to the video,’ I said. ‘I’ll be gone by then.’

Hard to imagine I’d be watching Dr Who with Luke in the living room. I looked over at our snow pit and thought of the light inside, the blue cathedral of the crevasse. I’d miss that. Other things, not so much.

There’d been a snow pit where Hagger died, I remembered. Except—

The idea hit me so hard I started to tremble. I grabbed Pierre’s arm.

‘Is that how you always dig snow pits? One covered, one open?’

‘Pretty much. Why?’

Some of the others had started to drift back to work. I ran to the coring rig and found Annabel. ‘The place where Hagger died — the Helbreen. How far is it from here?’

‘About thirty kilometres.’

‘I need to go there. Now.’

‘You don’t know the way.’

I could see she didn’t think I was serious. I ran over to a snowmobile and yanked on the starter cord. It was harder than it looked.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘I’m going to the Helbreen.’

‘You’ll kill yourself.’

‘Then you’d better come with me.’ Or else … ‘You don’t want someone else going off there without a buddy.’

The glacier was exactly as we’d left it: the jerrycans marking out the safe area, the yawning blue crevasse beyond. And the snow pit, half filled now with drifting snow. I jumped in and kicked against the walls. One stubbed my toe, so did the next, but the third disintegrated in a blizzard of collapsing snow. A ceiling appeared, a wooden board that had been covered by the drifts, making a small square cave. A red backpack lay on the ground.

I pulled off my mittens and unzipped the bag. There wasn’t much inside: a bar of chocolate, a Thermos (frozen solid), a topographic map, a pen and a green notebook.

I opened the notebook. My hands were already going numb — the thin liners were no match for the icy wind — but this was too important. I turned the pages, searching for any clue to what Hagger had been doing.

It looked like any other lab notebook. Neat columns of figures, measurements, interspersed with scrawled calculations and cryptic half-sentences. Sulphite calibration (double underlined); Ratkowsky growth rate profile; Concentration of X. Without careful reading, I couldn’t guess what it all meant. I could barely read the handwriting.

‘I need a wee,’ said Annabel. She went off behind a pile of moraine boulders at the edge of the glacier. I turned my back and kept reading.

A loose sheet of paper stuck out between the pages. I pulled it out and smoothed it against the notebook’s cover. It was a printout. Easier to read, but that was no help understanding it. Just a string of numbers, no spaces, zeros and ones and twos in an apparently random order: 1100121101012 … Some sort of data set, I supposed.

A gust of wind lifted the paper. I snatched for it, but my fingers were clumsy with cold. It blew out of the notebook and fluttered across the glacier, white against white. In a split second, I could hardly see it.

I wasn’t going to lose it before I knew what it meant. I scrambled out of the pit and ran after it, floundering through the snow, skidding where the wind had scoured out patches of ice. Behind me, Annabel was shouting something, but with my hood up and the wind roaring around me, I didn’t make out the words.

The paper blew up against a rocky outcrop and stopped. I grabbed it, but my fingers wouldn’t move. I clapped it between my hands to lift it, then just about managed to stuff it into my coat pocket. I had to get my mittens back on.

Annabel was still shouting. I looked around to see what she wanted, and realised how far I’d come. Well beyond the safe area. Perhaps that’s what she was trying to tell me.

‘I’m coming,’ I called, and stepped forward.

Something cracked. The ground gave way under me. I felt a sickening emptiness as I fell. I remember thinking, This is how a snowflake feels.

Snow lands soft as a feather. I didn’t. I hit my head, and the white world went black.