Текст книги "Zodiac Station"

Автор книги: Tom Harper

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

‘And now it’s on Utgard.’

‘I’m wondering …’ I took a deep breath. What I was proposing was so ludicrous, my mind hit the buffers every time I tried to assemble the thought.

‘I’m wondering if the reason Martin brought me here was because of Richie Pharaoh.’

Forty-six

Anderson’s Journal

‘I should probably tell you some things about Pharaoh.’

We were up on the ice dome. A dream landscape of soft peaks and hard snow, and hidden fissures waiting to swallow you. A landscape like the past.

‘At university, Richie Pharaoh was a racing driver in a world of traffic wardens.’ Literally: his red NSX stood out a mile against the grey Volvos and Priuses in the car park. ‘He was American, a New Yorker, smarter than everyone and arrogant as hell, but the arrogance only made you try harder to impress him. All the grad students wanted his attention. You knew if you made it in his lab, you could walk into any job in the country.

‘But before he came, I’d started my PhD with Martin. That was where I met Louise. She was smart, pretty and ambitious. We worked hard, we played hard, we had a lot in common. Soon, we fell in love.’

Like a lot of stories, it sounds easy when you tell it back. I’d had a few girlfriends at university, but I still wasn’t confident. Louise seemed so cool and unattainable. It felt like an eternity – really, it was only a few weeks – before I plucked up my courage and asked her out. Afterwards, she admitted she only said yes because she was so sure I hated her. Apparently, I look ferocious when I’m concentrating.

‘I said we worked hard. Unfortunately, the work in Martin’s lab was tedious as hell. Endless cycles of heating and cooling, freezing and melting, measuring tiny fragments of amino acids to see if they’d grown at all. Martin had a great story to tell about how he was going to upend the scientific consensus, make us famous and answer the greatest mystery of all – the origins of life. That was why we came. The problem was, the science didn’t agree with him. After a year, it looked as if I wouldn’t have a single positive result to write up in my thesis. Which didn’t have to be the end of the world: you can publish a thesis on negative results. But it won’t get you a job afterwards.’

Even now, when I’m just the lab tech and it’s someone else’s career on the line, I still get that black hole in my stomach when an experiment doesn’t turn out.

‘Then Richie hit the department like a minor earthquake. This was 2003. The human genome had been mapped a couple of years earlier, the technology was improving every month, and all over the world scientists were doing things that had never been done before. A real frontier, while our careers were dying in a backwater. And Pharaoh was three steps ahead already. While everyone else was still trying to sequence genes and DNA, he was looking at how you could make it. Synthetic biology – artificial life. Martin wanted to know how life began once upon a time. Richie Pharaoh was going to make it happen here and now. He reasoned that if you stitched enough genes together in a machine, eventually your creation would cough into life. That was the theory, anyway.

‘Louise went first. She was impatient for success, and she was falling out with Martin all the time on how slowly things were going. She looked at Pharaoh and saw everything she wanted for her career. I followed her a bit later. I didn’t get any funding to do the degree – I borrowed the money – so I couldn’t afford not to get a job at the end of it.’

It all happened pretty fast, June to September. By the time the undergrads came back in October, we were both settled in Pharaoh’s lab. But in my memory, those months go on for ever, like the first summer you fall in love or work a job. Long hot afternoons (the fabled summer of 2003!) moping around the lab; long nights, Louise and me sitting out on the back step, drinking rum and Coke, sometimes until the sun came up. Me worrying, her cajoling. So much riding on it, everything at stake. These days, summer just means stressing about childcare.

‘I felt bad for Martin. Losing a PhD student isn’t good for an academic: it counts against you when things like promotion come up. But actually, I think it’s the personal rejection that hurt Martin more. He’d treated us like his children, nurtured us and opened his mind to us – and we’d told him he wasn’t good enough.’

I saw Greta’s mouth tighten, and remembered she was on Martin’s side.

‘The first few months in Pharaoh’s lab were a golden time. He had so much grant money coming in, he could do what he wanted. Hagger’s lab was a scrapyard compared to the shiny new toys in Pharaoh’s. Every time the manufacturers had a new machine, Richie was the first to get it, often before it came on the market. We went to Rome and Avignon and Prague for our lab meetings. And the data flowed so quickly we could hardly write it up fast enough.

‘Of course, it came at a price. We thought we’d been working hard before: Pharaoh worked us twice as hard. The pressure to publish, to get papers into good journals, was immense. I think half the people in his lab ended up leaving with stress illnesses or chronic fatigue. We didn’t play hard any more; we didn’t play much at all. We were tired, we were busy and we got sloppy with a few things. That was how we ended up with Luke.’

When the test came up positive, Louise hit the roof. Left home for three days, wouldn’t answer my calls or my texts. I almost reported her missing to the police. At that stage, I had no doubt she’d terminated the pregnancy. I just hoped she was alive.

I found out afterwards she’d been with Pharaoh. Strangely enough, he was the one who persuaded her to keep the baby. He told her creating life was the most powerful thing people could do. He said it was hypocritical to study life in a test tube but shy away from the real thing. He must have said other things, too; whatever it was, it did the trick. She came home, went straight online and started looking at nurseries and engagement rings. We never spoke about it again.

‘From day one, Louise saw Luke only as an obstacle. Two weeks after he was born, she was back at work. We couldn’t afford childcare, and we didn’t have any relatives on hand. Louise’s parents live in France, my dad lives alone and can hardly make himself a cup of tea, let alone look after a baby. Neither of us was willing to defer our PhDs. So we juggled. I took Luke during the day, while Louise worked, and at night I’d creep into the lab with the cleaning staff to try and eke out a few results.

‘In retrospect, I suppose it was obvious the marriage would fail. We hardly saw each other, and we hadn’t been married long enough to have much credit in the bank. We were exhausted the whole time, both felt we were running on a treadmill and couldn’t keep up. I was failing as a scientist, failing as a husband and failing as a father. And I knew it. I didn’t see Pharaoh any more, except when I dragged myself in for supervision meetings to be told how far behind I’d fallen. In Pharaoh’s lab, there were no prizes for trying. If you were doing well, there was nothing he wouldn’t give you. If you didn’t meet expectations, you were dead meat. Natural selection, he called it, and he wasn’t joking. There was no shortage of young carnivores waiting to take my place.’

I get shortness of breath thinking about it now. Back then, there were afternoons when I almost called 999 I was so sure I was having a heart attack.

‘I said Louise and I were getting sloppy, and it wasn’t just at home. Pharaoh drove us so hard, the only way to get results – publishable results – was by cutting corners. Everybody in the lab did it; the people who flourished were the ones who could do it most plausibly. Without any pangs of conscience.

‘By that stage, I hardly knew what Louise was doing in the lab. One day, she came home at lunchtime. I remember it – she hardly ever got home before Luke’s bedtime, and I was so happy she’d come to see us. We sat outside and I opened a bottle of wine. The moment she’d had a sip, she almost collapsed in tears. And Louise didn’t do tears.

‘She told me there was a problem. She’d forgotten to fill in an ethics form, and now the department had started to ask questions. At first I didn’t see why that mattered: an ethics form is just bureaucracy. Forgetting it means a rap on the knuckles, but if you get a high-impact paper out of the research nobody remembers. As long as there aren’t any complications.

‘There were complications. For a start, it wasn’t that she didn’t have ethics approval for one experiment; they didn’t have approval for any of it. Pharaoh was so paranoid about revealing his work, he simply ignored procedure. And it got worse. Louise had been working on artificially reconstructing a modified version of a coronavirus. If you think you’ve heard of that, it’s because it hit the news about ten years ago as the cause of SARS. Now, we worked in a big building in the science park. One floor down were people working on genetic diseases, treatments for Parkinson’s, leukaemia, you name it. A big building, lots of test tubes shuttling around, lots of expensive trials – and one of her batches had gone missing.

‘She went through forty-eight hours of hell wondering if some kid with cancer had been injected with her virus. She had to report it, of course. She was suspended and the whole building got locked down. The university threatened to cut off funding completely – not just for Pharaoh, but for everyone in the Institute.

‘In the end, they found her samples sitting on a benchtop three doors down from her lab. Dyslexic delivery man misread the room number: no harm done. But I told you Pharaoh was arrogant. He’d made a lot of enemies higher up the totem pole, plenty of people who wanted to take him down a peg. If it came out he’d sanctioned his students synthesising the virus without any kind of approval or oversight, all the grants and publications in the world wouldn’t save him. We both knew the only way he could protect himself was to cut her loose.’

I gazed out the window, staring at the white horizon.

‘I took the blame myself. To protect Louise, of course, and Luke: rationally, I knew her career prospects were better than mine. But also to impress her. I knew, deep down, our marriage was pretty far gone, but I thought the grand gesture might win her back. And I hoped it would buy me some slack with Pharaoh. Louise was always his golden girl. It had to count for something.’

Without looking, I could tell Greta was rolling her eyes at me.

‘You’re right. Louise and Richie had already started their affair: I still don’t know how they found the time. His marriage was breaking up. As soon as the scandal had died down, and his divorce came through, she told me she was leaving.’

All my memories of that time are darkness: winter afternoons, and endless nights of fights that only ended when Luke woke up in tears and I had to go to settle him. I felt as though my whole life had been fed into a shredder; I didn’t know if I could go on. A cold winter, but it never snowed.

‘I got custody – Louise didn’t contest it – and eventually finished my PhD at the Open University. I tried for a few postdoc jobs, but nobody wanted to hear from me. I ended up as an overqualified lab technician, wondering where my career had gone and doing the best I could by Luke. Just another single parent trying to squeeze through life.’

‘And she died in a plane crash,’ Greta remembered.

‘A few years ago. Pharaoh was a keen pilot. They were working in Alaska, Pharaoh had been given big money, ten million dollars from the National Institutes of Health, to set up a lab there. One day, he and Louise took off for a sightseeing trip in the Brooks Range and never came back. Some people suggested suicide – there was talk the money had gone missing and the NIH were asking questions – but I didn’t buy that. No one loved life more than Richie Pharaoh.’

‘Must have been tough,’ said Greta.

‘To be honest, it was more like finding out some distant cousin had died. Sad, but not traumatic. I hadn’t seen her in years, by then. Nor had Luke. I didn’t think much about her, or Richie Pharaoh. Until Martin emailed me.’

That wasn’t true. It never went away. I couldn’t look at Luke without seeing Louise in him. Every day at work, watching the DNA unspool on our machines – the code of life – I’d think about how my life might have been different.

But I’d already told Greta more than I ever had anyone else. There are parts of that even my sister doesn’t know.

‘It probably sounds pathetic.’

Greta shrugged. ‘Sometimes life is shitty.’

I couldn’t argue with that.

* * *

Nothing had changed on the Helbreen. I got out of the cab, wincing as the cold hit my stiff joints.

‘The crevasse was a dead end.’ Unfortunate phrasing. ‘He never went down there until he was pushed in.’

It wasn’t hard to find the moulin. Since I’d been there, someone – maybe Annabel – had roped it off, to stop anyone else falling in. I removed the barrier, while Greta fastened our climbing lines to the Sno-Cat. There seemed to be an awful lot of rope.

‘How far down are we going?’

‘Maybe twenty metres. Maybe one hundred.’

She handed me a helmet.

‘I wish I’d had this last time,’ I said, though I wasn’t really in the mood for joking. Revisiting the past had unsettled me, like when you wake from a dream just as it’s reaching its climax. Even though you’re awake, it won’t let go of you.

I clipped into the harness and walked carefully to the edge of the hole. Whatever damage they’d done pulling me out, the wind and the snow had smoothed it over so cleanly only a tiny opening remained.

‘I go first.’ Greta kicked away loose snow to widen the hole, then pirouetted around and walked backwards into it.

I flicked on my head torch and followed.

Forty-seven

Anderson’s Journal

You expect ice to be clammy when you touch it. Your body heat goes to work and the surface gets slick. But not in the glacier. As I lowered myself in, bracing myself against the sides of the chute, the ice remained dry as dust. Against the vast cold of a glacier, a human body doesn’t count for much.

The hole dropped a couple of metres, then angled away down a gentle slope. I crawled down after Greta, careful not to tangle myself on the rope. The tunnel was almost a perfect cylinder, as if it had been bored out by machine. Under my hands, the milky white walls swirled like marble.

The slope got steeper. Rather than waste energy, I sat down on my bottom and let myself slide, like being in a water pipe.

‘Stop!’ said Greta. The desperate voice you use to a child who’s about to run into the street. I grabbed my rope and just stopped myself bumping into her.

She leaned to one side so I could see over her shoulder. My torch beam shone into almost perfect darkness, dropping away far beyond where the light could reach.

‘Lucky you stopped where you did.’

I twisted my head to see more. Something flashed: a blade of light cutting the darkness in two. I brought the light back on to it and saw an icicle. Not the kind you get dripping from your gutters during a cold snap; this was taller than me and probably as broad at the top. At the bottom, it was as sharp as a needle. And we were going to be descending right under it.

‘Is that stable?’

Without answering, Greta went over the edge. Gripped the ledge, then became a glow of light slowly dimming. I didn’t look down.

I don’t know how long I waited there, eye to eye with the icicle. Whenever I moved my head, even a twitch, the light twisted so that the icicle seemed to wobble. Then I felt a tug on the rope. With a deep breath, I slipped over the edge. It wasn’t so bad, actually. The hole was narrow enough I could keep one hand on the descender, paying myself out, and the other steadying myself on the wall. I was terrified of knocking that icicle.

And suddenly I was hanging in air. Instinctively, I flung out my arms, flapping and waving, but didn’t touch a thing. With no hands on the rope, I fell backwards, was weightless for a moment, then jerked on the harness and see-sawed back up.

The rope swung and snagged. I heard an enormous crack above me. Whatever was holding the rope suddenly let go; I jerked down another metre, but something was falling faster. I actually felt the frigid air on my cheek as the icicle passed inches from my face.

‘Look out!’

It shattered on the floor, while I hung in space, splayed out flat like a dead man in a swimming pool. Like Hagger at the bottom of the crevasse.

‘Are you OK?’ I called.

The wait almost killed me. Then Greta’s voice came up from the depths.

‘Alive.’

I kicked my legs and strained forward until I got hold of the rope. I almost tore my stomach muscles, and I was sweating like mad. As soon as my hands had stopped trembling, I found the figure-eight descender and started paying out the line again. It was a long time before my feet touched the ground. When I did, I could hardly stand up.

Greta turned on her torch – she’d been saving the battery – and emerged from the darkness. There was blood on her cheek, and water, where an icicle fragment must have hit her.

‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. An apology’s rarely felt so inadequate. Greta’s face made sure I knew it.

I shone my light around. We were at the bottom of a huge shaft, as high as a cathedral, which tapered at the top like a wine bottle. I couldn’t see any way out, except a low crack just above the floor. Not even a tunnel, just a fissure in the ice.

‘There’s no way we can get through there.’

She pointed to scratches on the ice. ‘Martin did.’

We took off our ropes and harnesses. I felt that odd feeling of weightlessness you get driving without a seat belt, but there was no other option. We only had a few metres of rope left.

And miles to go before I sleep.

I’m not claustrophobic, normally, but I nearly didn’t make it. It was the narrowest space I’ve ever been in. My helmet scraped along the ceiling, and my chin almost touched the floor. I couldn’t lift my head to look in front, couldn’t even crawl. I lay on my belly, arms and legs out, squirming forward a few millimetres at a time. Each time I tried to breathe, my back touched the roof and I flinched with panic. All I could think of was a million tons of ice over my head, pushing down. How much would it take to pinch this tiny tunnel shut?

I heard Annabel’s voice in my head. Glaciers don’t stand still. They’re fluid. The ice is actually flowing very slowly, moving outwards under its own weight. Back then, it had seemed academic.

Suddenly, I realised I could breathe again. The tunnel had opened up, not much, but enough that I could get off my stomach and look up.

As I raised my head, the torch beam glinted on a million points of light, a diamond-crusted ceiling like something out of ‘Ali Baba’.

‘Ice crystals,’ said Greta.

Looking closer, I could see how perfect they were. Each was a mathematical miracle, the ice extruded almost paper-thin into a hexagonal spiral. When I touched one with the tip of my glove, it shattered into a hundred pieces. So fragile I wanted to cry.

I crawled on, trying not to hit my head on the crystals. Each time I did, tiny granules of ice shivered down the back of my neck like guilt.

And then they stopped falling, because the roof had taken off high over my head. The walls spread apart and became a round tunnel as wide as a sewer pipe. Grey ice walls rising out of crumbly rock, with a slick of cloudy white ice running down the centre like a stream.

I undid my helmet so I could take off my hat and neck-warmer. After a moment’s thought, I took off one of my jumpers, too, and put my coat back on.

‘Shit,’ I swore.

‘What?’

I showed Greta my dangling zipper. Somewhere, dragging myself over that ice, I’d broken it. Every time I tried to do it up, the coat just peeled apart again.

‘I suppose I won’t freeze.’ To tell the truth, it didn’t feel cold at all. The ice wasn’t so dry here. When I rested my hand on it, I could feel the surface poised to melt.

Ice is an insulator; it sits on top of the rock like a heavy blanket. With a million tons of it over my head, that wasn’t reassuring.

The look on Greta’s face didn’t reassure me either. ‘A broken zipper’s no good when we get out.’

I shrugged. ‘We’ve got a lot of bridges before we have to cross that one.’

The tunnel looked wide enough to walk, after the interminable crawling. But Greta didn’t do it the easy way. She braced her hands and feet against the edges of the passage, straddling the centre, and manoeuvred her way forward like a spider.

‘Isn’t there a faster way?’

‘Not if you want to stay dry.’ She nodded at the carpet of white ice in the middle of the floor. ‘It’s a stream. The top freezes, but the water flows under it.’

Curious, I smashed the ice with the heel of my boot. She was right. A small, steady stream ran underneath, unhindered by the ice. I took off my glove and dipped my hand in. The water was so cold it burned. When I wiped my hand on the lining of my hood, the water left a pink smear on the fur.

‘We’re on the right track.’

I copied Greta’s awkward stance, straddling the stream and crabbing my way forward. It reminded me of one of those playground games, two logs set in a V and the goal is to walk forward with one foot on each until it gets too wide and you fall off. I remember doing it with Luke in the park near our house, dangling him over the gap (he was smaller, then) while my legs splayed further and further apart, until I looked like a gymnast or an eighties rocker. And then we collapsed in a heap of giggles and—

I should have concentrated. My foot hit a rock; my arms scrabbled on the glassy walls. I lost my balance and fell – straight through the ice.

The shock hit me like the electric chair. I went under and took a mouthful of water that almost stopped my heart. I touched bottom – not deep – pushed up, and felt resistance. Something pushing me back down. I was under the ice, I was going to die, and the only thing crowding out the panic was wishing I could be with Luke one more time.

Then something caught me a glancing blow on the cheek. The ice cracked and my head popped up. Greta hauled me, dripping and screaming, from the stream. I leaned against the wall. I was soaked through. I could feel the cold crawling deep into me, worming into my bones so I’d freeze from the inside out. I coughed out a big gulp of water. I could taste it: filthy with sediment and chemicals from the rock. And who knows what else?

‘You have to go back.’

‘No.’ I imagined myself squeezing through that fissure in my wet clothes. I’d freeze right into the ice, become part of the glacier. I couldn’t go that way.

She didn’t argue. Perhaps she saw the logic; more likely, she didn’t want to waste time talking me out of my own funeral. ‘Then you have to keep moving.’

Cold, miserable, I followed as fast as I could. I was shivering so violently, I struggled to keep myself upright. When I slipped, which was often, I didn’t have the strength to brace myself; I just crashed through the ice again, back into the water, and had to wait for Greta to haul me out. I didn’t feel it so much after the first time.

I thought of Martin. I remembered how his clothes had been frozen when we found them, and how I’d wondered about it then. He’d done this alone.

Was it worth it? I asked him through chattering teeth.

At that level of survival, the mind collapses and there’s nothing but your body. I could feel every hair pricking up, every breath condensing in my lungs. The warmth in my blood and the cold in my bones battling for my soul.

 
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
 

* * *

Once the lines had come into my head, I couldn’t shake them. They repeated themselves again and again, the way snatches of music sometimes do when I’m lying in bed and can’t sleep. White noise – oblivion.

The passage ended in a jumble of ice and black rocks. I was almost too far gone to notice, but I did hear a noise. The trickle of invisible water, running down under the rocks into the stream.

‘The mine,’ said Greta, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

We crawled through the hole, over rocks and ice still filthy with coal dust, into another world. More tunnels, nothing like what we’d been through. Straight and even, with cross-tunnels at right angles making a regular grid. More like being in the crawl space under a floor than how I ever imagined a mine.

It would have been easy to get lost in there. In places, wooden splints shored up the roof, chalked with still-legible Cyrillic letters. They must have meant something to someone, but not to me. Luckily, there was the stream to follow, running through a channel it had carved out of the rock floor. And I could hear a noise, a mechanical hum that got louder as we crawled on up the stream.

Ahead, something glowed ethereal white among the shadows and soot. I thought it was a trick, the torch beam blurring or burning my eyes, but no amount of blinking and shaking my head would move it.

It was a concrete wall. Water from a drainpipe splashed at its base, the source of the stream. Above it bulged a round door, about three feet across, with a locking wheel like something salvaged from a submarine.

I tried the door. No joy, but I was so weak that didn’t mean much. Greta added her hands to mine, and we heaved together.

The wheel turned. A seal hissed. The door moved inwards. Soft yellow light spilled through the crack.

‘No locks on Utgard.’ Certainly not here. A glacier, a mountain and an abandoned mine would be enough to deter most visitors. Not to mention the fact they’d killed the last man who found it.

Greta must have had the same thought. She got out her pistol and loaded a flare cartridge. In any normal world, that would have been my cue to leave: back to the Sno-Cat, back to Zodiac, all the way back to Cambridge and Luke.

But this was a long way from normal, and I was one degree off hypothermia. If I didn’t keep moving, I’d freeze solid right there.

I pushed open the door and clambered through.