Zodiac Station

by Tom Harper

  ‘They’re sending me home,’ I said. I didn’t want to talk to him, and I couldn’t bear to go to my room, so I went back to the lab. Perhaps I’d find something to take with me, some crumb of Hagger’s experiments I could work up into a paper. It was the least he owed me.

  Quam’s warning echoed in my mind. He was a busted flush. But that couldn’t be right. Hagger had been on a roll, at the top of his game. The Nature paper on sea-ice evolution had catapulted him to the head of his field. And he’d been working flat out. There had to be something worth publishing.

  His notebooks would be the place to start. I looked on the workbench next to the fumes cupboard, where I’d seen them all lined up the day before.

  The notebooks had vanished. You could see the place where they’d been – the only clear space in the lab – but the notebooks weren’t there. Instead, just a single Erlenmeyer flask, placed very deliberately, as though the empty space had bothered someone.

  Who could have moved the notebooks so quickly?

  I turned on Hagger’s computer. Another antique: it took almost a minute for the logon window to appear. The cursor winked at me and waited for a password.

  I didn’t know the password. Did anyone?

  Frustrated twice over, I turned to the rest of the lab. I rummaged through the drawers and the cabinets. I even looked in the fridge. It was full of water samples in sealed bags, each labelled with codes I didn’t understand. In the freezer compartment, I found a foot-long tube of ice wrapped in a plastic bag with a reference number scrawled on it in black marker.

  I supposed the lab would have to be cleared out, ready for the next occupant. At least it was something to do. I found some boxes and started to lay them out on the floor.

  ‘This is bullshit.’

  I jumped; I hadn’t heard her come in. Greta shut the door behind her, though there was hardly room for both of us with the boxes. She looked furious.

  ‘I thought … if anyone should do it, it should be me,’ I said weakly.

  ‘Quam wants to cover it up,’ she announced.

  ‘Cover what up?’

  ‘Martin’s death.’

  I didn’t understand. ‘How could he do that?’

  ‘Because he’s scared. He’s base commander, it’s his responsibility. Hagger should have had a buddy with him.’

  It seemed tough to blame Quam because Annabel and Hagger had broken the rules. ‘Hagger’s an internationally renowned scientist,’ I said. ‘Quam can’t pretend it didn’t happen.’

  ‘He’ll say it was an accident.’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  Greta gave me one of her impenetrable looks. ‘Now you sound like Quam.’

  I sat down on Hagger’s stool. I was still short on sleep; my head hurt. ‘Can you … explain?’

  ‘Martin didn’t walk into that crevasse by accident. He knew it was there. He’d rigged the ropes.’

  ‘He could have tripped.’

  ‘He was lying on his back.’

  ‘Maybe the ice broke.’

  ‘And where was his gun?’

  I shook my head. ‘I didn’t see it.’

  ‘At the bottom of the hole. Not slung on his back. He must have been holding it when he fell.’

  Suddenly, everything fell into place. ‘A polar bear. That’s why he had the gun out. The bear advanced, Martin stepped back – and fell into the crevasse.’

  Greta’s face hardened. ‘That’s Quam’s theory.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘There was no bear.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘No tracks.’

  ‘Are you sure? They’d be easy to miss.’ I picked up a glass pipette from the counter and turned it over in my fingers. ‘Everything was such a panic.’ Not, I had to admit, that she’d been panicking.

  ‘The first thing you look for on Utgard is bear tracks. Every time you go out, every time you stop. There were no tracks.’

  ‘So what do you think happened?’

  She looked at me like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  ‘Someone pushed him.’

  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 mo
ment 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 h
ave 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.