Zodiac Station

by Tom Harper

  Greta shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  The Sno-Cat was parked behind the machine shop. Greta unplugged the umbilical cord that kept the battery warm, and started the engine. The moment it roared into life, I knew we weren’t going to get away unnoticed. The Sno-Cat’s not made for subtlety, or for speed. Sure enough, as we crossed the flag line I looked out the back window and saw Quam running after us, arms and legs flailing like a puppet with a broken string. For a moment, I thought he might even catch us. But you can’t run far in the Arctic. He pulled up suddenly, shouted something I couldn’t hear, then turned away. My last view was of him trudging back towards the Platform, shoulders stooped and head down. I kept watching, waiting for him to reappear with a snowmobile, but he never came.

  I pitied Quam, then. I hoped he wouldn’t get into trouble on account of what Greta and I were doing. Of course, if I’d known what he was about to do, I would have turned the Sno-Cat around and put a bullet in his heart myself.

  We crunched up the glacier and Zodiac disappeared behind us. In the tiny cab, there wasn’t much between us: every time Greta changed gear, or turned the wheel, I felt the point of her elbow. At least we weren’t cold, with the machine’s heater built from an age before oil shocks and global warming. I unzipped my coat.

  ‘Aren’t you curious why we’re doing this?’

  She swerved the Sno-Cat around some obstacle I didn’t see.

  ‘Tell me.’

  I explained my hypothesis, how the enzymes were running under the glacier and out into the sea through the mines.

  ‘The mines are sealed with concrete,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Water can get in through microscopic cracks.’

  ‘But how do we get in?’

  ‘I think Hagger found a way. He used Annabel’s Rhodamine dye to track the water flow under the glacier; he had it on his hands when he died. He must have followed the dye down one of the tunnels …’

  ‘Moulins,’ Greta corrected me.

  ‘… and found where the enzymes were coming from.’

  A pause. ‘What’s an enzyme?’

  I’d spent the last three days thinking about nothing else; the question threw me. But of course, why should she know? I thought for a moment. The throwaway answer wouldn’t do.

  ‘How much do you know about DNA?’

  ‘Some.’

  Last year, Luke’s school invited me to give a talk about genetics to his Year 3 class. I fell back on that and hoped I didn’t sound patronising.

  ‘Imagine the human genome like a tower made of Lego bricks. The bricks can only be one of four colours, and the tower is three billion bricks tall. The bricks are stacked in pairs – so six billion in total – but there are certain rules. A red brick always goes next to a white one, and green always next to blue.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Each pair of bricks is what we call a “base pair”. In reality, the different coloured blocks are amino acids, four chemicals known by their initials G, C, T and A. To “read” the genome – sequence it – you just have to write down all those letters in the right order.’

  I glanced across at her. ‘Still with me?’

  ‘Keeping up.’

  ‘Now, DNA makes RNA, which is like a copy of that Lego tower but only one block wide. RNA makes molecules called proteins, and proteins – among other things – make enzymes. An enzyme is a tiny biological machine, made of proteins, that performs a specific task. Like a little mobile chemical lab. It can be as fundamental as making your muscles move, and as mundane as breaking down stains on your laundry. You probably have them in your washing powder.’

  ‘I use non-bio.’

  ‘If DNA is the operating system of life, enzymes are the apps. The enzyme Martin found coming off the Helbreen is one that’s been created in a laboratory, for making DNA. Put it in a solution with the four bases, and it’ll grab them one after the other and stitch them together.’ I thought of Luke’s bedroom at home. ‘Remember my Lego analogy? Imagine you’ve got Lego bricks scattered all over the floor. The enzyme is like a little robot that can grab them one at a time, and snap them together in a preset order.’

  Greta drove on. With the clouds low, it was dark enough that I could see the headlights roaming over the snow in front of us.

  ‘That’s why we’re going to the glacier?’

  ‘There’s something else.’ I got out the piece of paper covered in numbers. ‘Eastman intercepted these numbers being transmitted somewhere near Vitangelsk.’

  She crunched into the next gear as if she was trying to decapitate it.

  ‘I know what the numbers mean.’

  She didn’t look as impressed as I’d hoped. ‘Is it the password to get into the mine?’

  ‘It comes back to DNA. You see, the biggest problem with sequencing DNA isn’t the technology, or the process. That hasn’t changed much in thirty years, except to get quicker and cheaper. But each individual’s DNA contains three billion base pairs – that’s three billion pieces of information. And if you’re going to make use of it, you have to store it accurately and be able to retrieve it. Even one mistake, out of three billion, could mean the difference between perfect health and an incurable disease.

  ‘And the actual sequence makes mistakes too easy. In the genome, there are long stretches where the same base pairs, or pattern of bases, repeat themselves. Coming back to the tower, it’s as if you’re told to put 297 red bricks in a row. Very easy to miscount.

  ‘The man I did my doctorate with – Richie Pharaoh – he was obsessed with this problem. Any time you sequence DNA, you’re working with margins of error. You have to decide what you think’s acceptable. When the original Human Genome Project announced to the world that they’d sequenced the whole human genome – the articles in Nature and Time, the TV fanfare, the ceremony with Bill Clinton – what they didn’t say is that one in ten thousand of the base pairs was probably wrong. That was the margin of error they’d agreed on.

  ‘Now, one in ten thousand probably sounds pretty good. But with three billion base pairs, that’s still three hundred thousand mistakes – and it only takes one to ruin someone’s life. And there are two ways errors can creep in. Either when you’re reading the sequence, or when you’re writing it down. Which, practically, means on a computer.

  ‘So Richie Pharaoh devised a solution. Instead of standard binary code, the noughts and ones, where the same number always stands for the same base letter, he created a more advanced code where there are three numbers – zero, one and two – but each one records a different value depending on what went before it. Sort of like the Enigma machine in the Second World War, where the next letter changed depending on what letter you’d just typed.’

  The system was pure Richie. Subtle and slippery, a solution to a problem most people, even leaders in the field, hadn’t realised existed yet.

  Greta looked mystified. ‘Is this going to be on the test?’

  ‘The point is, Pharaoh never published it and it never caught on. Scientists were happy with the fiction that they’d “done it”, the software got better at correcting errors, and every time he tried to explain it to someone, their eyes glazed over. No one used it – except Richie Pharaoh. He always used it for his own experiments.’

  ‘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, lot
s 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.’