Zodiac Station

Four

By the time I’d struggled out of my layers, the others had already sat down for dinner. The new intruder, Quam had called me, and I certainly felt like it when I opened the mess door. Conversations stopped; a couple of dozen faces looked up from their food. One or two looked friendly.

There were two tables to choose from, and no free seats at either. I looked for Hagger, but didn’t see him. I opted for the table where Quam and Greta were sitting.

‘Room for one more?’ I asked brightly.

No one moved. Fridge, the Viking I’d met in the corridor earlier, gave me a bullish look.

‘Staff and PhDs only on this table. Grads and techs are over there.’

I should have accepted it. I didn’t want to make enemies my first night there. But when you’re as low down the pecking order as I am, you cling to what you’ve got.

‘I’ve got a PhD.’

‘I heard you were Hagger’s lab rat.’

I stood my ground. Fridge tried to stare me down. The others mostly looked at their plates.

Except one. ‘Let’s show the fella a little hospitality.’ An Irishman, older than the rest, stood up and ushered me into his place. ‘There must be space if Martin’s not here.’

Chairs squeaked on the floor as everyone shunted along to make room. Quam, at the head of the table, made the introductions. I gave a plastic smile, forgetting the names almost as quickly as he said them.

‘And Greta you know,’ Quam concluded.

Danny laid a plate of food in front of me.

‘Where’s Martin?’ I said.

‘He didn’t come in.’ This from an athletic, trim-bearded blond with an Australian accent. The helicopter pilot, I seemed to remember.

‘Is he OK?’

No one rushed to answer that one.

‘Has he radioed in or anything?’

‘Radio protocol is for check-ins at oh nine hundred and twenty-one hundred,’ Quam said. ‘He hasn’t missed one yet.’

Twelve hours seemed like plenty of time for things to go wrong. ‘Who’s he with?’

Quam stared down the table. ‘Annabel?’

I remembered Annabel from the introductions. The only other woman besides Greta: tall, Asian and almost painfully slim, in a ribbed black turtleneck and hip-hugging black trousers. Her long black hair was pulled into a glossy ponytail down her back. Among all the beards and the baggy jumpers, she looked as though she’d dropped in from the pages of Vogue.

‘Hagger wanted to get some data up on the Helbreen,’ she said.

‘And?’

‘I didn’t stop him.’

‘You mean he went alone?’

‘It’s a serious breach of procedure,’ Quam scolded.

Annabel’s cheeks flushed under the dark skin. ‘I didn’t go anywhere alone.’

‘It’s not like Hagger ever plays by the rules,’ said one of the scientists, an intense American whose beard didn’t hide the fact he was younger than me. He was obviously sympathetic to Annabel. Most men on that base were.

‘Hagger’s not the only one who has a problem with the rules,’ said Fridge. He and Quam exchanged a look.

‘He’s fine,’ said Annabel. ‘He’s probably fucking a polar bear.’

From the far end of the table, I heard the crash of cutlery going down hard on to a plate. I didn’t see whose it was. It came from Greta’s direction.

I started to wish I hadn’t shotgunned my way in with the scientists. Behind me, the grad students had a party going on; our table was like open day at the Asperger’s clinic. Short, dull conversations that ended as mysteriously as they began; lots of chewing; not much eye contact.

I couldn’t concentrate on my food. I couldn’t stop thinking about Hagger. I was relying on him, my ticket out of the wasteland where my career had stalled for nearly ten years. If anything had happened to him …

‘You settling in OK?’

I looked up. The man opposite — the Irishman who’d taken my side in the table dispute — was waiting for my reply. The patient look on his face said it wasn’t the first time he’d asked.

‘A lot to take in,’ he said. ‘You’ll get used to it. I’m Sean, by the way.’ As if he’d read my mind — or the embarrassment on my face that I couldn’t remember his name. ‘Sean Kennedy, base doctor. Most people call me Doc, which is about as much imagination as you can expect from this lot.’

He smiled collusively. The words ‘genial’ and ‘Irishman’ have an almost magnetic coupling, and they certainly stuck to him. About forty, with salt-and-pepper hair and a squashed-up face that you’d never call handsome, but open and cheerful.

‘Are you used to the cold yet?’

‘I think I’ll need all the jumpers I brought.’

‘You will if you go out in the field.’

‘Most of what I do is in the lab.’

‘And what is it you do?’

‘Molecular biology. I work on the artificial assembly of DNA.’

‘Where do you do that?’ He jerked a thumb out the windows, where the setting sun had turned the mountains across the fjord a peachy pink. ‘In the real world, I mean.’

‘I work in Cambridge.’

‘That’s a coincidence.’ He turned to Torell. ‘Fridge here’s at Cambridge, too.’

Fridge gave me a suspicious look. He hadn’t brushed his hair; it still stuck up like a pair of horns. ‘Which college?’

I could see where this was going — and no way to get out. ‘I’m at the Sanger lab.’

It didn’t put him off. ‘Doesn’t everyone there have to be on the faculty of another institution?’

‘I’m on the science staff.’ My last line of defence, and it wasn’t enough. He leaned forward on his elbows, tilting the table towards him.

‘What exactly do you do there?’

‘I’m a technician.’

If it hadn’t been for the grad students, you could have heard a snowflake drop in the room.

‘Well, it’s great to have another biologist here,’ said Kennedy brightly, as if he’d completely missed the academic pissing contest going on. Though I caught a shrewd look in his eyes that said he’d missed nothing.

‘Hear hear,’ said one of the men down my side of the table. He was the oldest one there, a pot-bellied man with a white beard. If it had been December, he’d have been a shoo-in for Father Christmas at the station party. ‘More biologists is what we need.’

‘Dr Ashcliffe studies polar bears,’ said Kennedy.

I smiled. ‘I’ve just learned how to shoot them.’

It was supposed to be a joke. Ashcliffe recoiled as if I’d insulted his mother; his knee banged the table, jangling the cutlery.

Don’t make jokes about shooting other people’s research interests, I noted.

‘And not forgetting our dear leader,’ said the American who earlier had leapt to Annabel’s defence. He made a mock bow in Quam’s direction. ‘You’re a biologist too, aren’t you, Francis?’

‘That’s right,’ said Quam.

I watched the others turn on him. There was a subtext here I didn’t understand, but I could feel the hostility. It was like being back at school, the dread that you’d be noticed.

‘Why so coy, Francis? Tell him what you specialise in.’

Quam shook his head, like a man with his neck in a noose.

‘Dr Quam is the world expert on the breeding habits of penguins,’ the American announced. ‘Adélies, isn’t it, Francis?’

Unkind laughter rippled around the table. I thought it had to be a wind-up — but Quam flushed crimson and didn’t deny it.

‘Our new masters at the South Polar Agency thought we needed Francis to take us in hand,’ said Kennedy.

‘I wondered about the sign outside,’ I said.

‘Bonfire of the quangos. New government thought it was an unbearable extravagance having one agency for the North Pole and one for the South, so the decree went out from Caesar Augustus that henceforth and forevermore Utgard is part of Antarctica. Isn’t that right, Francis?’

Quam glowered.

‘There won’t be any Arctic left at all if they don’t change their energy policies.’ That was Torell.

‘Fridge’s upset they haven’t turned Utgard into a wind farm yet,’ said the American. ‘Or was it an organic biomass generator you wanted?’

‘I’m more worried about the methane emissions from the poo barrel at Gemini,’ said Ashcliffe, the polar-bear man.

‘Hey Fridge, how many CFCs do you give off?’

Someone bumped my chair from behind. The students had finished and were taking their plates back to the galley.

‘Movie night,’ said Quam.

We cleared the table. The others settled down to watch the film — that night it was Alien — but I went to the radio room to Skype with Luke. I missed him badly; I wanted to be home. It wasn’t the solitude — I could have handled that perfectly well, I think. It was the people there who were making me lonely.

It wasn’t a great connection. The picture froze; the sound stuttered. Luke was like that, too: eager questions one moment, monosyllables the next. I asked about school, about his friends, about my sister. I tried to describe the beauty of Utgard, but he didn’t look interested.

‘Did you deliver my letter?’ he asked.

‘I will do,’ I promised. I wanted to reach through the screen and hug him tight, like the days he was off school sick and we’d curl up on the sofa watching TV. But of course I couldn’t.

We disconnected. I was still staring at the blank screen when Greta popped her head around the door.

‘Did Hagger check in?’

I stared at the racks of equipment in front of me. They had every communications device known to man, it looked like, but nothing that meant anything to me.

‘I didn’t hear anything.’

She glanced at a couple of the displays, then picked up a handset and dialled a number. I heard the burr of a ringing tone down the line.

I pointed to the handset. It looked like the sort of mobile phone people carried in the mid-90s, complete with rubber aerial and real buttons. ‘I thought there was no reception here.’

‘Iridium,’ she said. ‘Satellite phone. He’s not answering.’ She turned it off and threw it down on the desk. I followed her back to the mess.

‘Hagger didn’t check in,’ she announced.

‘It’ll unravel,’ Quam said, without looking up. ‘It always does.’

‘He’s not answering his phone.’

‘Probably forgot to charge the battery.’

‘He’s missed the check-in.’

‘It’s not twenty-four hours yet.’

‘He must’ve dropped the phone down a moulin,’ said Fridge. ‘Or fallen asleep in his tent.’

Greta turned for the door. ‘I’m going to find him,’ she announced.

That got Quam’s attention. ‘There’s a protocol,’ he said firmly. ‘If Hagger misses his next scheduled check-in, we’ll initiate the search-and-rescue plan.’

‘If he’s in trouble, another twelve hours could kill him.’

He jabbed a finger at her. ‘Do you know what the biggest danger is in a situation like this? People losing their heads, trying to play the hero and getting into far worse trouble than we’ve got already. It’ll unravel.’

Her face blazed. ‘Fuck you, Francis. There’s worse things than penguins out there. Who’s coming with me?’

She looked around the room. Standing behind her, I could see all their faces: Quam, furious; Jensen, the pilot, bored; Annabel, indifferent. Most of the others just seemed embarrassed — or kept watching the film. On the TV, John Hurt didn’t look at all well.

‘I forbid it,’ Quam said.

I’d only been there a few hours, and I was already desperate to leave.

‘I’ll come,’ I said.