Текст книги "Zodiac Station"

Автор книги: Tom Harper

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Eight

Anderson

The pipette snapped in my hand. Broken glass scattered on the floor. Blood welled out of the cut that had opened on my finger.

‘Shit.’

I grabbed a wad of paper from the roll near the sink and pressed it to the cut. Blood soaked it almost at once.

‘You should see Doc,’ said Greta.

I threw the paper away and got a fresh piece. ‘It’s … insane. There’s no evidence.’

Greta’s look made me forget about the cut for a moment.

‘You’re the scientist,’ she said as she walked out the door.

‘Wait,’ I said. But she didn’t.

I climbed down from the stool and tried to sweep up the broken glass one-handed. I couldn’t find a dustpan: I had to use a piece of cardboard, trying not to step on the tiny fragments in my socks.

I paused to rearrange the tissue on my finger, and a bead of blood spattered on the floor. I stared at the Rorschach blot it made, wondering what it meant.

I didn’t know anything about Greta. She seemed pretty hard-headed, but that didn’t make her infallible. She’d taken a set of facts, from a confused and horrible situation, and made a leap that couldn’t possibly stand up. In the jargon, she’d confused correlation with causality. Probably because she hated Quam.

Though I didn’t have a better explanation. I didn’t even know why Hagger had brought me there. I glanced over at the counter where his notebooks had stood. They hadn’t come back.

The door opened. To my surprise, it was Greta again.

‘I’m going to get the snowmobile you broke,’ she announced.

Somehow, I’d been around her long enough to understand that this was an invitation.

The winds had dropped. Jensen, the pilot, flew us out in the helicopter. Greta rode up front; I sat in the back with a pile of what looked like Titanic-era life preservers wrapped up in a cargo net.

‘Terrible thing about Hagger,’ said Jensen over the intercom in my helmet.

‘Yeah,’ I heard Greta agree.

‘Tragic accident.’

I waited for her to launch into her murder theory. Thankfully, she kept it to herself.

‘What were you doing yesterday?’ I asked, trying not to make it sound like I was implying anything.

‘Chasing bears,’ said Jensen. ‘Ash was tagging.’

It took me a moment to make sense of that. I assumed Ash must be Ashcliffe, the polar-bear man who looked like Father Christmas.

‘How do you tag a polar bear?’

‘You shoot it with a tranquilliser dart,’ said Jensen. ‘If that doesn’t work, you shoot it again. And make sure you’re out of there before it wakes up.’

‘Get many?’ said Greta.

‘Three.’ A gust shook the helicopter; Jensen broke off to concentrate on the controls. Below, I saw the peaks sticking out of the ice cap like the funnels of sunken ships.

‘Any up near the Helbreen?’ Greta asked.

A defensive note came into Jensen’s voice. Maybe I imagined it. ‘Nope.’

‘Tom thinks Martin could have been chased by a bear.’

‘Maybe you saw it,’ I chipped in.

‘We were further over. Not many bears that far north at the moment.’

I found it odd discussing the bears so casually. To me, never having seen one, we might as well have been talking about dinosaurs.

‘That took most of the day?’ said Greta.

‘Pretty much. We kept trying for one more. Ash buys me a beer if we get four.’

Greta peered through the canopy. ‘We’re getting close.’

Jensen left us in a flurry of rotors and whipped cold air. When the snow settled, it was just me and Greta, two snowmobiles and a sledge. Greta had brought some spare parts. I held open the snowmobile’s nose while she knelt over it and performed surgery. As ever, the moment you stopped moving, the cold started to chip away at you. I pulled my neck-warmer up over my nose. The snow and ice stretched towards the horizon, rippled channels like a dried-up seabed. A desolate place.

‘It’s lucky the DAR-X people were around to pick us up,’ I said.

‘Mm.’ Greta pulled out a piece of the engine. Oil stained the snow green. ‘Lucky.’

There was an implication there, but I ignored it. The place was lonely enough without entertaining the nonsense that someone had killed Hagger in cold blood.

‘Martin visited Echo Bay a couple of times,’ Greta said suddenly.

That surprised me. ‘How come?’

‘He didn’t say.’

Another conversation died before it started. But it made me think of something else.

‘How well did you know him?’

Greta unscrewed a Thermos and poured hot water over the engine. Steam hissed off the cold metal. ‘Can you pass me the five-eighths-inch spanner.’

‘You were good friends?’

‘That’s the three-quarter-inch. Read the number on the handle.’

I filed the question under ‘Save for Later’ and found the right spanner. ‘Did he ever say why he brought me here?’

‘He thought you could explain something. “Tom Anderson will know,” he said.’

‘What does that mean? Know what?’

‘He wasn’t talking to me.’

‘Who, then?’

‘Himself.’

She pulled the starter cord and the engine exploded back to life. I dropped the nose cone and she latched it shut.

‘You want to go?’ she asked.

‘Where?’

‘The crevasse. It’s only a few kilometres.’

I hesitated.

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘Bears,’ I said, straight-faced.

The crevasse looked different now. In the twilight that passed for night, it had been a dull grey hole. Today, in the sunshine, it came alive. The walls glowed a cool blue, like a swimming pool sparkling in the light. Greta held me a few metres back.

‘Do you see any bear prints?’

‘I wouldn’t know what to look for.’

She took off her glove and pressed the heel of her hand into the snow, making a rounded kidney shape. Spreading her fingers, she poked five holes just in front of it for the toes.

‘That. But bigger, like a soup plate.’

I didn’t see any. ‘Couldn’t the wind have covered them?’

‘You see your prints?’

I did. Softened by the wind and half filled with blown snow, but still clear enough from the day before.

‘A bear weighs up to a thousand kilos. He makes a deeper print than you.’

I did a slow scan of the snow, right the way around Hagger’s safe area.

‘Point taken.’

Greta advanced to the crevasse. I followed – and almost walked straight into a hole. Not a natural hole: an almost perfect cube cut out of the snow and ice, straight-sided, flat-bottomed, about a metre and a half deep. I’d seen it the day before, with a shovel standing next to it. The shovel had blown over in the night.

‘What’s that?’

Greta barely looked at it. ‘Snow pit. To measure layers in the glacier.’

‘Martin’s work was on sea ice, not glaciers.’ Notwithstanding the glacier core I’d seen in the freezer in his lab.

‘He said he’d come to get samples.’

‘Isn’t there a glaciologist at Zodiac who does that?’

‘Dr Kobayashi.’

I remembered her. Annabel, the only other woman on base. Slimmer, taller and – some would say – more attractive than Greta. Perhaps that explained the sourness that had crept into Greta’s voice.

Greta knelt and scrabbled in the loose snow, about ten feet back from the crevasse. Her hand came up holding a black mitten.

‘He dropped his gloves.’

‘Why?’

‘Stand here,’ Greta told me, pointing at a spot on the ground next to where she’d found the mitten. ‘Now take a step back.’

Feeling silly, I did what she told me.

‘You see your footprints.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the ones next to it?’

Now that she said it, I did. Side by side with mine, softened by the wind and slightly longer.

‘Those are Hagger’s.’

I took her word for it.

‘What do you see?’

Even with the outline eroded, I could make out the heel and the toe. Pointing the opposite way to me.

‘He walked away from the cliff.’

Greta gave an impatient sigh. ‘Really?’

I thought about it for a moment – and reached the obvious conclusion. ‘He was walking backwards.’

‘You think it’s a good idea to walk backwards in a crevasse field?’

‘He would have had to go backwards to climb down into the crevasse.’

‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘Except he wasn’t clipped on to the rope.’

Greta walked to the edge. ‘Martin was roping up. He put the harness on. Then someone came. They threatened him. Martin backed off; he was scared enough to get out his gun. He took off his gloves so he could pull the trigger. But he’d gone too far.’

I came up beside her and looked down into the crevasse. At the bottom, I could just see the impression in the snow where Hagger had landed. The abandoned rifle lay a few feet away.

Had he really been chased to his death by someone from Zodiac?

‘It’s too sick to think about,’ I said out loud.

Greta’s look made me cringe.

‘Is that what they taught you in science school? Don’t ask difficult questions?’

‘I don’t even know what questions I’m supposed to ask.’

She started to walk back to the snowmobile. ‘Who’s got big feet?’ she called over her shoulder.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

She stopped and pointed. In a clean patch of snow, I could see another set of footprints. Bigger than mine; bigger than Hagger’s. They tracked Hagger towards the crevasse – then stopped, a couple of metres back from the edge. Probably about the time Hagger realised there was nothing under him but air.

‘Who’s got big feet?’ I repeated. I traced the tracks in the snow, wondering how far they’d lead me. About ten metres, where a jumble of broken rocks marked the edge of the glacier. Another dead end.

I put my hand in my pocket and felt a lump, the key I’d found by the edge of the crevasse. I took it out for Greta to see and explained where I’d found it.

‘It must have fallen out of Martin’s pocket, I suppose.’

‘I never saw him with a key.’

‘How else—’

She pointed to the large footprints. ‘Maybe his.’

That was a nasty thought. I dangled it away from me, like something picked out of a blocked drain. No clue to say who it might have belonged to. I ♥ NY didn’t mean much. I mean, who hasn’t been to New York?

I put it away and looked back at the footprints.

‘Shouldn’t we take some photographs? Something to show Quam?’

‘You trust Quam?’ Greta had got her backpack off the snowmobile seat and zipped it open. She pulled out a fat coil of rope and a webbing harness, which she tossed to me.

‘What’s this for?’

She shook out the rope and tied it around the snowmobile’s cowling. She handed me the other end and nodded to the crevasse.

I backed away. ‘I’ve never done anything like this.’

‘Then you should learn.’ She snapped a carabiner at me like a crab’s claw. ‘If something happens, you need me up top to get you out.’

The light changed as she lowered me in, like slipping into a lagoon. An intense, sapphire blue that soothed my eyes after the stark white landscape. I couldn’t stop looking at it. The ice walls swam in sinuous shapes, curves and hollows that no human mind could have conceived.

I shuddered as my feet touched down on the snow at the bottom. For a moment, I felt very clearly that I was standing in Hagger’s grave. My senses came alive, fluid roared in my ears and the ice seemed to tremble, as if the walls were colliding to crush me.

Greta’s face appeared above me. Small, a long way off.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Fine.’ I put out my arm and pressed my gloved hand against the wall, just to be sure. The ice was cool and adamant. One day, it would move and close up Hagger’s grave. But not now.

I walked along the crevasse floor, the rope paying out behind me. It wasn’t long, maybe twenty or thirty metres, curving in a shallow crescent so that from one end you couldn’t see the other. The only marks in the snow were my own footprints. Whatever Hagger had planned to find here, he hadn’t had a chance to look.

They call Utgard the last place on earth. For me, buried in ice, freezing cold, at the end of a crevasse where a man had died, I felt like the last man on earth. The blue walls no longer bathed me: they drowned me. There was nothing here.

But as I turned to go back, something caught my eye. A strange formation at the bottom of the cliff, flat grey against the blue-gloss ice. Spindly columns poking out of the snow like the teeth of a comb. Ivory smooth. I reached out to touch them.

And gasped as I realised what they were. The sound echoed off the ice, back and forth, as if I was in the throat of an enormous beast.

A beast who ate bones. That was what they were. Bones. I saw it the moment I touched them. Limbs and a ribcage, so small that for a ghastly moment I thought it might be a child’s. Then I got hold of my senses.

Greta’s face appeared again at the top of the crevasse, dark against the sky.

‘Find something?’

‘There are bones down here. A polar-bear cub.’ I didn’t look too closely, but that was all it could be. Definitely not a bird, and no way a seal could have come this far from the sea. ‘The body’s completely decomposed.’

‘Bodies don’t decompose on Utgard.’

‘They must be ancient, then.’ Perhaps that explained the size, some prehistoric creature that had dropped dead thousands of years ago – millions, maybe – and been swallowed by the ice. Preserved perfectly, museum-fresh; only revealed this year when the crevasse split open.

And Hagger had died here. A gruesome coincidence, I insisted, trying to shut up the superstitious voices in my head. Still terrifying.

‘Is that what Martin came for?’ she asked.

I looked around. Only my footprints.

‘Martin never came down here.’ That wasn’t quite accurate. ‘Not when he was alive.’

‘Anything else?’ She jerked her head towards the snowmobiles. ‘It’s a long drive back.’

I left the bones in their icy grave. And this time, I remembered to free the snowmobile tracks from the ice before I started the engine.

Nine

Anderson

Nobody enjoyed dinner that night. Hagger’s death made for a brittle mood. People shuffled food around their plates and didn’t make eye contact. Across the table, Fridge gnawed the meat off a chicken drumstick. I tried not to think about the bones in the crevasse.

Quam got the evening off to a bad start. As soon as the food was served, he stood up and tapped his glass with a fork. He had to wait, awkwardly, while the conversations grudgingly wound down.

‘I want to say a few words – since you’re all here.’ He wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘Martin Hagger’s death is a tragedy. He was a great scientist, a respected colleague, and a good friend.’

That morning, he’d told me Hagger was a busted flush. Glancing around the table, I didn’t see much evidence of good friends. Most of them looked hostile – or just bored. I couldn’t tell if it was Hagger they didn’t care for, or Quam.

‘The important thing is, we don’t let this get in the way of what we’re all doing. The best tribute to Martin Hagger will be carrying on our valuable science here at Zodiac.’

I think I snorted out loud. Fridge, across the table, gave me a funny look. I could have told him that Quam had forbidden me from carrying on the valuable science that Hagger had been doing – but I refrained.

Quam pulled out a piece of paper. ‘I’d like to read a few words. I’m sure they’ll be familiar to most of you, but I think they capture something. By Captain Robert Scott.’

‘Penguin shagger,’ someone said.

Quam ran the paper between finger and thumb to smooth the crease.

‘“I do not regret this journey. We took risks, we knew we took them.”’ He coughed. It’s fair to say, he wasn’t a natural public speaker.

‘“Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.”’

‘Easy for you to say,’ muttered a voice behind me. But most of the room had settled into a respectful hush. Even on the Platform – heated, insulated, Internetted and well fed – we knew the line between life and death up there was fragile and transparent as a window pane.

Quam raised his glass. ‘To Martin Hagger. We’ll miss him.’

The rest of us shuffled to our feet and mumbled Hagger’s name. ‘We’ll miss him.’

‘And the grant money he brought in.’

Eastman’s voice cut through the toast, loud and meant to be heard. Quam’s face went bright red.

‘That’s in poor taste.’

‘It’s true, isn’t it?’

‘I won’t dignify—’

‘And it wasn’t just the grant money,’ piled in Fridge. ‘Hagger brought in all kinds of extra funding for you.’

‘If you’re insinuating …’

It was fascinating, watching the scientists tear into their base commander like a pack of wolves. Far more than just professional rivalry. I leaned back and watched the sport. The only person who ignored it completely was Annabel. She sat up, finishing-school straight, dismantling her chicken with small, precise cuts.

‘Let’s cut the bullshit,’ said Eastman. ‘We’re all sad Hagger’s dead. But hands up who actually liked the guy.’

It was obscene to play along – but I put up my hand. I owed Hagger that much. Down the table, I saw Greta’s and Jensen’s arms up too. Kennedy, Ashcliffe the polar-bear hunter and Quam followed suit more slowly, reluctant to get drawn in. Fridge’s and Eastman’s hands stayed down. Annabel kept eating.

Someone killed him. Even after our trip to the crevasse, I only half believed it. But that didn’t mean I trusted these people. Was it really possible? Three of them clearly had enough against Hagger they couldn’t even pretend to have liked him. But then if you’d killed him, you’d probably hide your motive a bit better. Or double-bluff. Or …

If I thought like that, I’d tie myself in knots until I doubted everything. Meanwhile, Quam was still standing. ‘I think an apology’s in order.’

Like a lot of Americans, Eastman had a naturally theatrical presence. He looked around the table and gave a small bow. ‘I’m sorry if I embarrassed your British, uh, sensibilities.’ Heavy with sarcasm. ‘But let’s not pretend this was something it’s not. He’s not a martyr to science. He died; it was an accident. Move on.’

‘If it was an accident,’ I said. I thought nobody heard me.

Eastman checked his watch. ‘Isn’t it time to get the mag reading?’

The others suddenly took a keen interest in their half-empty plates. I was too slow; I caught his eye.

‘Anderson’s the rookie – he should go.’

‘He’s going home tomorrow,’ Quam pointed out.

‘Then this is his only chance.’

I wasn’t going to be haggled over. I stood. ‘What do I have to do?’

‘There’s a logbook in the mag hut. Write down the number on the readout, and the time. Wait ten minutes, do it again. That’s it.’

I was glad to get out, even with all the fiddle of layering up again. I took a gun from the rack by the door – already second nature – and clomped down the steel steps. The cold air pinched my nose dry; my eyes watered. I’d forgotten my neck-warmer, and by the time I was halfway across the base my chin stung as if I had lockjaw. That was the thing with Zodiac. No slack.

I stopped at the flag line, where the ring that surrounded the magnetometer hut met the base perimeter. A sign warned me, NO METAL OBJECTS BEYOND THIS POINT.

I didn’t see anywhere to put the gun. After a moment’s thought, I laid it down on the snow. Strange to say, I felt incomplete without it, like taking off a wedding ring. Walking across the circle of snow to the hut, the immensity of my surroundings pressed in on me. Twilight had fallen; a few stars were bright enough to show in the sky. I checked the shadows for signs of danger, ready to run back for the gun if I saw anything that looked like a bear.

The hut was a simple, one-room wooden cabin, almost colder than the air outside. A wooden table stood in the centre, two grey boxes on top of it like outmoded stereo components. The logbook lay beside them, a battered exercise book with a pencil hanging off it on a piece of string.

I wiped a layer of frost off the readout and studied it. A thin digital line scribbled up and down the screen, recording infinitesimal oscillations in something I couldn’t even imagine. I looked for an obvious number to write down, and didn’t see it.

In the chill quiet, the steps in the snow sounded as loud as bubblegum popping. I looked at the door; I listened. The steps came closer. Two legs, or four?

There was no lock on the hut, and my gun was back at the flag line. Could a polar bear open a door? Could he fit through? I’d thought the bear warnings were just talk, a fairy tale to frighten new arrivals. But human beings are uniquely bad at judging risk. The longer something doesn’t happen, the more confident we become it won’t. We don’t see the sand running out of the glass.

The door swung in. I almost whimpered with relief when I saw it was Dr Kennedy, bundled up in a snowmobile suit and a loud tartan scarf.

‘I hope I didn’t scare you.’

‘Were you worried I’d screw up the measurements?’

Kennedy shut the door and tipped back his hood. ‘I wanted a word in private. About Hagger.’

‘OK.’

‘I probably shouldn’t tell you this …’ Kennedy rummaged in his suit and produced a bottle. He offered it to me. ‘Medicinal supplies.’

I took a slug and gave it back.

‘Jameson’s,’ said Kennedy. ‘Just the thing.’

‘What did you want to tell me about Martin?’

He screwed the cap back on the bottle. ‘You know he overwintered here?’

I didn’t. Overwintering was a hard assignment, a job for grad students or people who couldn’t get any other foot on the ladder. Darkness, solitude and endless instrument readings. I’d applied for it twice.

‘Why?’

‘To get some work done. There were experiments that hadn’t gone the right way, he wanted time to sort it out.’ He fiddled with the bottle. ‘He was quite down about it, poor fellow.’

‘Four months of night would do that to anyone.’

The cap came off. Kennedy offered me the bottle again. ‘Not just in the usual way. He came to see me. As a patient, I mean.’

‘He was depressed?’

‘Clinically. Mirtazapine helped, but he was very low. Of course, he’s not the first person Zodiac’s brought down. Fridge says most people have to be half mad to come here in the first place. As I say, I probably shouldn’t tell you this. Patient confidentiality. Not that that applies, any more.’

‘And you think …’ I struggled to say the word aloud. ‘Suicide?’

Kennedy nodded. ‘Sad.’

‘Did it seem especially bad these last few days?’

‘That’s a funny thing. The day before he died was the happiest I’d seen him in months. Very excited. But that might have been a sign. You know how it goes with depression, up and down. The higher you go, the further you fall.’

Automatically, he offered me the bottle again. Automatically, I took it. I could feel the whiskey softening my thinking, lowering my defences.

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘What you said at supper, about it not being an accident. I thought you’d guessed.’

I took it he hadn’t heard Greta’s theory. I didn’t put it to him. I didn’t want to be the next one getting happy pills on his couch.

‘The point is, we don’t want it taken the wrong way. You know there’s a lot of pressure on Zodiac’s funding. Some people think the reason we were packed off to the South Polar people was so they can shut us down.’

‘Is that Quam’s agenda?’

‘No.’ Emphatic. ‘Quam’s in charge of Zodiac, he wants to see it do well. If it goes, he’ll be out of a job with the rest of us. But he’s under a lot of pressure from Norwich.’

‘What’s that got to do with Hagger?’

‘Quam’s worried there’ll be a witch hunt. It’s no secret he made mistakes. He should never have let Hagger go out on his own – especially in the condition he was in. But if they use that as an excuse to shut down Zodiac, it’s a travesty.’

He put the bottle back in his pocket. I think it was empty.

‘They’ll debrief you when you go home tomorrow. You’ll have first bite. What you say becomes the first draft of history.’

‘You want me to tell them Hagger committed suicide?’

‘It’s the truth. Almost certainly.’

He’d said what he had to say. He pulled up his hood and opened the door, then remembered something. He came back to the table.

‘Don’t forget to take the mag readings.’ He tapped a dial to the right of the main readout. ‘It’s that one you want.’

I wrote down the numbers. Wait ten minutes, do it again, Eastman had said. I waited and shivered. The glow from the whiskey had worn off; I could feel the heat escaping through my pores. I tried a few jumping jacks, but worried I’d knock the instruments off the table.

I stared at the columns of numbers in the book and wondered if anyone ever did anything with them, or if they just accumulated. Everyone took turns: you could read the rota like the strata of an ice core in the different handwriting, the initials scrawled in the margins beside the observations. As much a record of human presence as of the vagaries of the magnetosphere.

MH. Martin Hagger. He’d stood in this frigid hut just like me, swinging his arms to keep warm, watching the clock count ten slow minutes before he could go back inside. He’d probably stood in the exact same spot.

For the first time, I really felt his loss. More than carrying his body, or clearing out his lab, the simple act of occupying the same space, only time between us, brought me closer to him than I’d been in years.

Why did you fall? I asked him.

I liked Kennedy; I wanted to believe him. I didn’t like Quam, but at a stretch I’d have taken his polar-bear theory. I’m a scientist. At science school, as Greta would put it, you’re taught the simplest explanation is the best. Occam’s razor.

But you can’t change the data. Whatever pressure Hagger had been under, whatever black cloud, I didn’t think he’d roped himself up in that harness just to throw himself in. And Greta had convinced me the polar-bear theory didn’t hold up.

What happened to the notebooks?

Why did he have his gun out?

Why did he bring me here?

Questions chased around my head like snow devils blown by the wind, and in the end it all came back to the same place. In twenty-four hours I’d be in the slush and drizzle at Heathrow, and Utgard would be a bad dream. I’d tell the bureaucrats that Hagger’s suicide was an unavoidable tragedy. Perhaps Quam would write me a reference.

Ten minutes were up. I wrote down the number, noted the time and signed my initials. One more layer accumulated in this freezing room.

Outside, my eyes struggled to adjust. Hemmed in by mountains, the twilight was darker here than it had been up on the ice dome. The red eyes on the radio masts blinked their warnings. Slivers of yellow light showed behind the gaps in the blinds on the Platform. I’d read some experiments that had been done here in winter, measuring exposure to artificial light. Apparently, there wasn’t even enough to convince the body’s clock to wake up.

I hurried back towards the flag line. Then stopped. Above the drone of the generator, I’d heard the snap of the snow crust cracking underfoot.

‘Who’s there?’ I called.

No answer.

‘Dr Kennedy?’

I couldn’t tell where the sound had come from. I couldn’t see anything. In the jumble of rocks and buildings there were plenty of places to hide.

I started running, back to where I’d left the gun. I reached the flag line – but the gun wasn’t there. Had I missed it? I’d followed my footprints.

A few yards away, a figure reared up from behind a cache of oil drums. Something flew out of the gloom – I barely saw it – and hit me bang in the face. I screamed and dropped to the ground.

Wet snow trickled down my nose and on to my lips. Eastman advanced from behind the barrels, one arm cocked back holding a snowball. He grinned, and pitched it at me like a baseball. I tried to roll out of the way but it smacked me on my ear.

‘Gotcha.’