Zodiac Station (31 page)

I studied the dates next to the circles. He’d started last October near Zodiac, taking samples along the shore and out in the fjord. All green. November, December, January: he hadn’t gone far, but he’d stuck at it, picking up a couple of samples every week. What drove him? He didn’t have to be here. Why suffer months of darkness and freezing temperatures when he could have been at home in Cambridge sipping port in the SCR? Tracing my finger over the samples, I could almost feel his frustration as January slipped into February and everything stayed green. The samples became less frequent.

Then, in the middle of March, he suddenly turned up in Echo Bay. Nine samples that week alone, all ringed bright red. Nothing the next week; then the samples started marching north along the coast until they reached the tip of the island, where they went green again.

Whatever was in the water, he’d tracked it from Echo Bay to the Helbreen. Overshot, then circled back the next week to take a dozen more samples at the mouth of the glacier. All red. The week after, he carried on up the Helbreen, almost to its head on the big ice dome. Green again. The week before I arrived, said the dates. The week before he died.

‘And what did he find in the water?’ I asked the map.

My head was hurting. I went to the medical room and took two of Kennedy’s paracetamol. Then I stared at the map some more. Inevitably, I found myself focusing on Echo Bay.

The notebook didn’t give any clues to what Hagger had found in the water. The ubiquitous
X
, but he never named it. After my chat with Fridge, methane was an obvious candidate. But I’d read all the way through the lab book: apart from Echo Bay, he’d never tested any of the other samples for methane. And if that was it, he’d have labelled it for what it was.

I had the samples; I could always test them myself. But there are a million ways to test a water sample. Spectral analysis, gas chromatography, chemical analysis, DNA tests … You have to have some idea what you’re looking for. Otherwise, it’s needle-and-haystack territory.

But I did have one idea. Hagger found some bug in the water munching on DAR-X’s pipes, Fridge had said. And bugs aren’t that hard to find. Not if you have an electron microscope sitting on the bench.

I took some water from the Echo Bay sample and strained it through a polycarbonate filter, then stained the residue with fluorescamine dye. The fact that Hagger had all the equipment to hand gave me confidence. Then I popped the sample under the microscope.

A mass of blurry chaos appeared when I put my eye to the microscope, like snow on a television set. I turned the knob and it came into focus. That hardly changed the picture. That single drop was full of life: scores, if not hundreds of tiny organisms, twitching and swarming. Even under magnification, they didn’t look much clearer than grains of rice.

Back home, I could have extracted DNA to find out what they were. Here, I didn’t have that option. From the notebook, it looked as though Hagger had – he must have sent it back to the UK – but the tests hadn’t been conclusive. In his notes, he referred to the organisms as
Gelidibacter incognita
.

A quick lit search confirmed that
Gelidibacter
is a genus of bacteria that grows in ice and cold water; the
incognita
, I presumed, was for this unknown species. Why Hagger should have been so excited about it, I can’t guess. Even if it’s never been described before, it’s not exactly a new flavour of Coke he discovered. Dip a bucket in your local pond and you’ll probably find an uncategorised bacterium if you look hard enough.

I spent a couple of hours working with the microscope, checking each sample. Simple, repetitive work: exactly what I’d come here to escape from. Back home, I’d be checking the clock, looking forward to getting out to collect Luke from school. Now, I was happy to lose myself in it. It distracted me from the thought that someone might want to kill me.

At the end of it, I had some pretty conclusive results. The twelve samples from Echo Bay all contained the bugs. None of the others did, not even the ones from the Helbreensfjord. Whatever red meant, it wasn’t that.

That’s the bit I hate about science. You have a lovely hypothesis, so self-evident you know it must be true. And then it isn’t.

Anderson’s Journal – Wednesday

I filled in Quam’s form for the network account. There was a long section on how to choose a secure password: between nine and fourteen characters, containing two numbers and a capital letter (but no punctuation); not a recognisable word, certainly not a significant date. An acronym for a memorable sentence, suitably jazzed up with said aforementioned capitals and numbers, would be advisable. Writing that must have warmed his bureaucratic heart. Complete with the absurdity that after you’d ticked all those boxes, plus the one that said you would never divulge the password to anyone or write it down anywhere under any circumstances, you wrote it down on a piece of paper and gave it to Quam.

He wasn’t in his office, so I left it on his desk. Folded three times, with
CONFIDENTIAL
scrawled over it. I didn’t suppose he’d notice the irony.

It occurred to me he must know Hagger’s password, too. No point asking him: I could imagine the delight he’d take in preaching the gospel of data protection all over again. I thought about rummaging through his desk – surely he’d keep it on file. But footsteps in the hall made me think better of it.

I went to my room and lay on my bunk, more to avoid the pain in my head than because I was tired. It was hard to believe I’d slept for three days. Without Kennedy’s sedative, my mind wouldn’t shut up. Graphs and numbers floated in front of my eyes, even when I closed them. All scientists have a stubborn streak: we have to put the jigsaw together. Louise used to say that on a bad day, we’re all borderline Asperger’s.

Thinking of Louise reminded me how much I missed Luke. I went back to the radio room and tried to Skype him.

‘He’s playing with a friend,’ Lorna said.

‘Is he OK?’

‘Not really. I promised you’d buy him a mountain bike when you get back.’

She asked me how I was, about the fall and the crash, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t have anything to say. It’s hard to explain you’ve been in a plane crash that was a total non-event.

‘Don’t forget to post his letter,’ she said at the end. ‘He keeps asking about it.’

The air in the radio room was stale, and I hadn’t been outside (conscious) in three days. I dressed up in my ECW gear, zipped the letter in the inside pocket and headed for the door. On the way, I ran into Fridge. Apparently, high winds at Vitangelsk meant that Kennedy and Eastman couldn’t get back tonight.

‘Eastman said Doc got chased by a polar bear,’ Fridge told me. I laughed, then realised it was no joke.

‘I’d better take a rifle.’

I’d been desperate to leave the Platform. But as soon as I was outside, all I wanted was to scuttle back in again, like Plato’s prisoner who can’t stand the light outside of the cave. On the Platform, I could hide from the danger I felt around me. Out here, I was a butterfly on a card. Not forgetting the cold. I’d forgotten how bad it is: my eyes watered, my nose pinched tight. The pain in the back of my head spread all over.

My plan was to get on to the fjord and bury the letter, persuade myself that the current might carry it up to the North Pole one day. That’s what I could tell Luke, anyway. Under the snow, I barely noticed the shoreline, but I felt the change underfoot. Hard sea ice, scoured by the wind. Walking across it was like walking across a desert, so wide and flat it makes you dizzy. Mountains framed the fjord on either side, but straight ahead there was nothing except a shimmering line between sky-blue ice and ice-blue sky. And, at the join, a dark figure, a nomad on the horizon.

What if it’s him?
screamed the danger signal in my head. I couldn’t tell who it was, no more detail than a Lowry man, but that didn’t get in the way of a good old-fashioned panic. Whoever pushed Hagger over the crevasse, whoever stole the notebooks, whoever hit me over the head and sabotaged the plane: what if it was him?

I almost ran back. Then I got a grip on myself. I shifted the rifle on my shoulder, angled so it was pointing almost ahead, and carried on.

It seemed to take for ever to reach him. Out there, you lose all sense of distance. He was standing very still, staring across to the far side of the fjord with a pair of binoculars. A neat round hole punctured the ice by his feet. Blood smeared the ice around it.

‘Fishing?’ I asked, pointing at the hole.

Ash turned abruptly. ‘It’s you,’ he said, as if I’d done something wrong. ‘I thought you were blotto.’

‘I’ve woken up.’

‘Hah.’ He turned back to his binoculars. I tried to follow his gaze. All I saw was snow.

‘Is there anything out there?’

‘Bear.’ Manners overtook him; he handed me the binoculars. ‘Just to the right of that big boulder.’

A shiver went through me as I put the binoculars to my eyes, though I still couldn’t see it. All the training, all the warnings and briefings, they’d never sunk in to the point I really believed they were real. Now it was out there, a few hundred yards away.

Ash guided my arm until I was pointing in the right direction. Even with the binoculars, I had to look hard to make out his features: the black nose, the legs with their awkward, lumbering gait.

‘It’s a big one,’ said Ash.

Whether the bear caught my scent, or a movement, or a glint from the binoculars, I don’t know. But he stopped, turned his head and stared straight at me. Another shiver. Suddenly, half a mile didn’t seem nearly far enough.

I was glad I’d remembered to bring a rifle, and said so. Ash shuddered as if I’d stepped on his grave. Having devoted his life to the bears, I suppose the thought of shooting one was abhorrent.

‘My first bear,’ I said.

‘You’re lucky. Don’t get many down here these days.’

I wasn’t surprised. I’d seen the pictures in the
Guardian
, bear cubs marooned on shrinking ice floes waiting to drown.

‘I wonder if there’ll be any left at all by the time my son grows up.’

‘That’s the paradox,’ said Ash. ‘Sea ice is melting faster than ever, earth’s boiling like a kettle, but here on Utgard the bears are thriving.’

‘I thought you said you don’t see them much any more.’

‘We don’t see them
here
– because they’ve all gone north. The seal population up in the north-west has exploded in the last couple of years. I haven’t seen them this healthy in twenty years. And where the seals go, the bears follow.’

‘Why would that be?’ I wondered aloud.

Ash shrugged. ‘My theory? There’s a current that comes down the west coast. I think that’s warming, so everything in the food chain, from krill to seals, is thriving. Eventually, it’ll kill them if they can’t adapt. But for the moment, they’re in clover.’

I thought of the micro-organisms teeming in the samples from Echo Bay. I thought of the neat row of red-ringed X’s flowing along the west coast on my map, until they stopped in Echo Bay.

‘We’re on the west coast,’ I pointed out. ‘Shouldn’t the current bring them here, too?’

With the toe of his boot, Ash scraped a rough egg shape in the snow. ‘That’s Utgard.’ He made a mark in the bottom, and another halfway up the left-hand side. ‘Zodiac. Echo Bay.’ Digging in his heel, he drew a line that started just above the top of the egg, ran along the left side as far as Echo Bay, then spun away at a right angle.

‘The Stokke current. It—’ He broke off as he realised I was laughing. I couldn’t help it. ‘What?’

‘Stokke’s a make of pram.’ I remembered the yummy mummies at the baby groups when Luke was small, swapping notes on their state-of-the-art baby kit. Space-age designs that looked nothing like Luke’s third-hand relic. I’d hung around on the fringes, the only father there, like the shy boy at a school disco.

‘This Stokke was a polar explorer. Anyway, the current brings cold water down from the far north. But at Echo Bay, it meets the very tail end of the Gulf Stream coming up from the south and gets deflected out west, towards Greenland. That’s why it doesn’t reach here.’

I stared at the diagram he’d drawn. It was crude, but I’d spent so long looking at the map in Hagger’s lab I could visualise it easily.

‘So this current goes past the Helbreensfjord.’

‘That’s right. In summer, ice from the Helbreen calves off and floats down to Echo Bay. Played havoc with the rig there last year, I heard.’

He took the binoculars back off me and scanned the horizon.

‘He’s gone. Let’s go in.’

We trudged back over the flat, frozen fjord. Across the ice, Zodiac looked a long way away, a Matchbox model dwarfed by the mountains.

Two Englishmen, even in a frozen wilderness at the end of the earth, will always end up talking about the weather.

‘Nice day,’ said Ash. And it was. White snow, blue sky and pure light crystallising everything.

‘Hard to believe Eastman and Kennedy are trapped in Vitangelsk by the wind,’ I said.

Ash gave me a look. ‘I didn’t know they’d gone up there.’

He sounded unhappy about it.

‘They radioed in. Apparently, they found a bear.’

I couldn’t see his face, between the hood and the beard and the icicles hanging off his eyebrows, but he seemed to tighten up at the news.

‘A bear? At Vitangelsk?’

‘I thought you’d be interested.’

We carried on, two lone figures on a crystal plain. I glanced back one more time, in case the bear had decided to follow us, but of course I couldn’t see him.

When I got back to the Platform, I realised I’d forgotten to post Luke’s letter.

Anderson’s Journal – Thursday

Woken at 4 a.m. by footsteps in the corridor. I lay in bed, wishing there were locks on the doors. Wishing I’d borrowed one of the rifles from the rack. Being trapped at Zodiac with someone who might want to kill me is bad enough. The fact that he’s got full access to a well-stocked gun cabinet at the end of the hall terrifies me.