I was surprised. The last week’s sailing in Fram had made me view temperatures below zero as normal. But he was right – temperatures below zero weren’t right for an air-conditioned ballroom, even this close to the Pole.
“One of our boys must have left the door open,” I said.
J”rgen shook his head. “There’s a thermostat on the wall. Look at it.”
I looked at it. Someone had set the desired temperature to minus ten below.
“It’s the same below decks, in the cabins – all round the ship,” J”rgen said. “There’s a swimming pool down below with a surface of ice on it. And not a window open in the ship.”
He was bending to check another body as he spoke. This time, I put a hand on his shoulder to stop him.
“No. Stand up, and get away from them. We are leaving J”rgen. That’s an order.”
The Marine Corps woman was back – this time with a white coat on, and a surgical mask that covered only the bottom part of her face rather than an NBC mask that covered all of it. She was obviously coming to trust me more.
“My, what pretty eyes you have, Lieutenant,” I said.
Beside her, the male Navy doctor hovered.
“I’m going to do a deal with you,” said the lieutenant. “Assuming that you really are a doctor, you might be just as much use to us in your professional capacity as you might as an experimental subject. If you can provide us whatever assistance you can, we’ll keep you alive as long as we can.”
“I feel truly honoured,” I said.
“Don’t be. Although we really need doctors right now, there are only three of them on board this boat. Two of them are us, and one of them is you. Top brass won’t let us have more than two M.D.’s on the containment vessel, in case of security leaks. Half of our men stationed south of the 60th Parallel still think they’re protecting baby seals.”
“But they’re not. They’re stopping something getting out. Something you’re scared you might be responsible for.”
She nodded. “Ever hear of Mars at Home?”
I shook my head. Then, I felt a glimmer of recollection.
“Hang on, yes, I do. Big Antarctican research project involving Russian and American scientists, right? Your president and theirs got together and did some public face-saving after you cancelled both your Mars programmes. You couldn’t afford to go to the Red Planet, so you were going to look for ways in which Mars had already come to Earth.”
She winced at the mention of “face-saving,” but nodded. “Essentially, it was a huge Martian meteorite collection project, and huge meteorite collection projects, thankfully for us, tend to happen in Antarctica. Meteorites fall everywhere on Earth, you see, but in Antarctica, they fall into deep ice, which then gets pushed up when the ice sheet flows over a submerged mountain range. All the meteorites come up together. So all you need to do is to find the icefields, and you’ve found the meteorites.”
“A chassignite is a type of meteorite,” added the male doctor. “As I think you probably suspected already.”
I nodded. “The doctor on the Crux had already put it in resin and shoved it on his desk. He was using it as a paperweight. That’s why your guys missed it.”
He looked at her, and she tore off a Post-It from a pad on the desk and began writing a Memo to Self. He looked back at me.
“A chassignite, though, is a very special type of meteorite. One that used to be a piece of Mars. One expelled by a volcanic eruption or minor asteroid collision with Mars maybe millions of years ago. There aren’t many of them, but we reasoned, if we collected a few million meteorites, we might find a few hundred chassignites.”
I was beginning to understand, though understanding was not as pleasant as I’d hoped. “The first evidence of life beyond this planet came from a Martian meteorite.”
He nodded, hesitated, and then said: “Now we think some of that life . . . may be inside you.”
“You mean this skin-eating thing comes from Mars?”
“That’s what we suspect, yes. We had a Mars meteorite preparation facility in the Allan Hills, inland from where the party from the Crux said they found their own chassignite. Maybe the Crux threw their meteorite overboard – we didn’t find any trace of it anywhere on the ship.
“In any case, the South Polar Research Station lost contact with the Allan Hills base around ten weeks ago. They sent out a team to investigate. They lost contact with their rescue team. Then they sent in a third team which got out with three of its complement still alive. They died around 36 hours later, after we had surgically removed around 95 per cent of their body surface.” He frowned apologetically. “We weren’t as good at arresting the spread of infection back then.”
So he had been part of the South Pole Station staff. The Marine Corps doctor bustled out of the room, leaving me alone with him.
I tapped on the glass, an indication for him to move closer. He looked at me nervously, then looked all round at the very large bolts on the glass, then leaned up close enough for me to see his very bad skin.
“Want me to tell you why you don’t have to worry?”
He looked nervously in the direction of the door. “I can’t make any sort of deal with you.”
“Scared she’ll kill you too?”
He twisted his lips. “Somebody would. Believe me. This is the military. Killing is what we do. Why do we not have to worry?”
“Because the rats on the ship are still alive.”
He appeared to absorb this. But it was a hollow sham. He had a neoprene brain. I tried again.
“The disease specifically targets human beings, not rats – not even, apparently, penguins, or I’m sure your expeditions to Fryxell would have noticed. It’s a thing that evolved on Earth. It’s evolved to eat people, and it’s evolved to eat them jolly well. It’s pure coincidence that your meteors happen to land on the icecap. Ancient killer diseases are most likely to come at us out of the icecaps. If this bug is as dangerous as you say it is, it would have wiped out everyone who came into contact with it the last time it was seen by Man, and if it wipes out everyone it can infect, the disease dies, right? Except, of course, that that’s wrong – the disease can simply wait a couple of thousand years in suspended animation in contaminated ice under the polar icecaps, and then – ”
The doctor twisted two ends of a handkerchief halfway up his nostrils to his brain and snorted. “We’re already ahead of you on that one. Some of us also reckon this disease isn’t new. It’s very similar to something the ancient Romans seem to have known of – admittedly in only one word, ‘Mentagram,’ in all their texts – ”
“What’s a Mentagram? A telegram sent by psychics?”
“The actual root word, so I’m told, is ‘Mentagra.’ Literally, ‘Chin Disease.’ They thought it was transmitted by kissing, because it was first noticed on the mouths of victims. Of course, this disease is airborne, but it also tends to infect the outside of the mouth and nose first. Bad air gets inhaled there. From the mouths and noses, Mentagra then worked its way down to the neck, chest and so forth if it wasn’t stopped, just like our bug. It’s all in Pliny’s Natural History, Book 26, first century AD. One of our C.O.s was a Classics major.” He inspected the handkerchief, not appearing to be happy with what he found. “But that means very little. A meteor from Mars could have hit ancient Rome in the first century AD just as easily as, I don’t know, Phoenician traders could have spread a landborne plague from the South Pole.”
“The Phoenicians didn’t get to the South Pole. And they were all wiped out by the time of Christ anyway.”
“According to the C.O., one Phoenician guy called Gisgo of Alexandria set out to sail round Africa. Atishoo! And he probably got at least as far as Cameroon, by modern estimates.”
He fished out his handkerchief again.
“Too damn dusty in here.”
Chassignite. Meteorite. Gelignite. Dyna-mite.
And then I knew. Immediately. But I wasn’t about to tell him, of course.
The only problem was, what was I going to do with the knowledge?
“You can’t make us leave, Scott. There could be dying people here.”
There were four of us standing around in the ballroom in arctic clothing, surrounded by places laid for dinner.
I nodded my head. “Exactly. And they could be us.” J”rgen shook his head. “I understand that you have a responsibility to us, as our doctor. But the danger is like as not very small. When what has happened first happened, the ship was much warmer, everyone was moving about, like as not no one knew a virus or a bacterium was moving with them. We know there is a danger. We can take precautions.”
I pointed to the thermostat on the wall. “Those people did everything they could to stay alive. They lowered the temperature in all the rooms on board to stop the disease spreading. And it still spread. Whatever it is isn’t going to be stopped by room temperature dropping below zero.”
One of the two Danes in the expedition, referred to by everyone as Pedersen-med-D because there was another “Peetherson” in the expedition whose name was spelt differently, broke in angrily. “So we don’t search any more for survivors? Is that because you feel so responsible to us all, I wonder, or is it that you want to save your own skin?”
“Meddy, we found corpses lying dead in the sick bay with charts prescribing them every drug in the modern physician’s arsenal. On Fram, meanwhile, we have proprietary medicines for headaches and the common cold, painkillers for broken limbs and frostbite, antibiotics for infections. That’s it. We cannot afford to take this bug back to the Fram.”
“You’re so sure it’s a bug?” He gestured wildly at the corpse. “A knife could do that. A knife, or a scalpel.”
“No. I’ve used scalpels. Look at the affected area with a magnifying glass. There’s not a capillary on that girl’s face cut through. You’d need to be the best surgeon who ever lived. It’s got to be an organism. Maybe similar to type-two necrotizing fasciitis. I don’t know.”
“Then we stay here.” Meddy’s eyes were bright. “If it’s that bad, we got to stay here.”
J”rgen cut in angrily. “Are you mad? That’d mean cutting five men from the expedition – we’d never reach the Pole – ”
I exhaled, and looked down at the corpse unhappily.
“No.” I raised a hand, signalling defeat. “Meddy’s right. He’s absolutely right, and I should have had the courage to see it myself. I know the expedition’s important to all of us. But this is more important. If we go back to the Fram now, we could infect everyone else. We have to stay here, and radio for help.”
J”rgen, who was both Captain Amundsen’s First and best Mate, muttered darkly to himself in Norwegian.
At that moment, the door was thrown open, and Haakon burst in.
“Scott – we’ve found the files on the doctor’s PC.”
I nodded and followed, with three Norwegians and a Dane behind me.
One of the disconcerting facts about being an Englishman, and not a large Englishman at that, at sea with a crew of Scandinavians, was an uncomfortable awareness that you were constantly at armpit-sniffing height. Seated at a PC screen with neo-Vikings on all sides peering over each other’s shoulders, the feeling was stronger than usual.
Luckily, the doctor’s notes were in English. If he’d been an Afrikaaner, I might have had to radio north for a translation. They spoke of an infection that had hit both crew and passengers after putting in at an inlet near Lake Fryxell, only a few days’ sail from here.
“All this happened in just a few days?” said J”rgen.
“Unless he’s lying, which he has no reason to do, being dead.”
A voice came over my shoulder. “Some of these people are beginning to smell.”
I didn’t turn my head. “Then turn the thermostats down further. We’re used to it.”
The purpose of the trip, according to the notes, had been ornithological and geological sightseeing. The Transantarctic Mountains are fold mountains, completely devoid of obscuring features like topsoil and, at the Lake Fryxell area even snow and ice – a rock collector’s dream. The sort of person who enjoyed spending their summer vacation in Antarctica might also enjoy a trip out there. And emperor penguins nested all along this coast, having moved here from Ross Island after egg pirates from New Zealand – the sort the Americans and Russians professed to be so mad over – had emptied their nest sites of young. Pet emperors were now all the rage in the very best society in the Russian Federation, so much so that the trade was called the Black-and-White Market. Albino emperors were even being bred by penguin fanciers who had evidently never read Lovecraft.
“We’re going to have to use the radio,” said Meddy, breaking out of a conversation in either Danish or Norwegian – I couldn’t tell the difference – with Haakon. “Amundsen won’t like it.”
“I don’t like it either,” I said. “We’ll alert every US submarine and destroyer for miles. We’re in violation of the hundred-kilometre exclusion zone. They’ll put our whole ship under arrest and tow us back to Ascension Island while some Malagasy bastard cruises up and down the Queen Maud coast netting icefish to his heart’s content. They haven’t the ships to cover the area and they know it.”
“I heard the Brazilian fishing fleet is operating submarine trawlers,” said Haakon.
“I’m not quite sure how that would work,” said Meddy. “How would you haul in the nets?”
I read on. The disease had appeared only hours after the last passenger came ashore from Victoria Land. It killed by “massive and sudden facial necrosis spreading from the nose and mouth, in a manner similar to hospital gangrene.”
“Gangrene,” said Meddy. “Frostbite causes gangrene. They had frostbite.” He clapped Haakon on the back. “All right, see? Frostbite!”
The direct cause of death, I read, might have been heart seizure, or might have been suffocation. It had been impossible for the doctor, whose name had been M. J. Phillips, to determine whether a patient’s heart had stopped due to hypoxia or sheer terrible pain. He had tried to keep some alive by artificial respiration, but had, according to his notes, “just succeeded in breaking the ribcage.” He had first suspected a simple dermal staphylococcus infection, and had tried successively more heavy-duty antibiotics, working his way up to vancomycin on his first patient. Vancomycin was and still is the nuclear weapon of antibiotics, the one you have but shouldn’t use, because its use only exposes bacteria to it and increases the risk that they’ll mutate and we won’t be able to use it next time. It is normally only used to treat MRSA. Our doctor had had only a little vancomycin, and it hadn’t worked. His notes showed that he’d been desperate enough to go through every other disease known to cause skin lesions in his quite well-stocked little medical library, literally ticking each off page by page, until finally coming to the same conclusion as myself. Not common gangrene, and not gas gangrene either. Hospital gangrene, otherwise known as necro-tizing fasciitis, for which the only known cure is removal of the affected tissue. This was not a thing which would have been welcomed by a poorly-paid ship’s doctor in the middle of the South Atlantic with few proper operating facilities and a ship full of passengers, some of whom would have been capable of suing the pants off him, and some of whom would have been capable of having him shot next time he went out of the front door to his car in Durban. He was not, however, any mad scientist experimenting blindly on a group of god-given guinea pigs. When he’d begun to contract the disease himself, he’d began to take off his own facial musculature with rubber gloves and a scalpel in the mirror. He’d got about halfway across his face before he’d died. Of course, the patients he had hardly treated at all had been the ones that had survived longest. So the world rewards a dying man doing his very best.
I heard J”rgen, who had been smoking in the corridor, swear in something Scandiwegian. “Damn ship’s full of rats! I stop you, you bastard – ”
I froze at the keyboard.
“DON’T TOUCH IT.”
He stopped dead, with a steel vacuum cleaner pipe in one hand.
“What? We not allowed to touch rats now?”
“It’s alive,” I said.
He grinned stupidly. “Not for long!” He hefted his cleaner pipe like one of his Viking forebears.
“Ever hear of hantavirus?”
That took the fury of Odin out of him. The pipe went down.
“Hanta-what?”
“Rats carry it. It kills people. It kills people really well. Twenty-odd cases at modern, well-equipped hospitals in the US, i.e., not pissant doctor’s surgeries on board ship, had a 50 per cent death rate. What I’m saying is, the rats might be this organism’s vector. You want your lower gut to slide out of your arse bleeding, go ahead, swat the furry fucker.”
Meddy was wide-eyed. “Rats spread Black Death.” He liked the statement so much he repeated it in a different format. “Black Death, that’s spread by rats.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Norwegian fucking brown rats, maybe. Maybe you ought not to worry, hey. Maybe you guys are immune.”
J”rgen shook his head. “No. No, it’s not bubonic plague. Plague victims have, you know, black sores under their arms?”
“For your information,” I said, still staring into the screen and typing at the same time, “it has never been conclusively established what organism was responsible for the Black Death. Most people think bubonic plague. Some think anthrax. Some even think hantavirus. It might even have been some sort of weird bug no one had never seen before and we’ve not seen since.” I licked my lips. “No one showing any signs of fever yet?”
They examined each other cursorily. Soon, they would be examining each other minutely. “No,” said Meddy.
“Better signal Fram,” I said. “Project Red-White-Blue is finished.”
Project Red-White-Blue was a voyage of Anglo-Norwegian cooperation rising out of the weird vision of only one man – Thor Amundsen. A distant relative of the great polar explorer, he’d narrowly failed an examination to become one of ESA’s first Mars astronauts on medical grounds. Perhaps his failure to qualify for the vanguard of the future had made him retreat back into the past, but Thor, a likeable man from Bergen who spoke Norwegian, English and Russian fluently, had skied at Olympic level, and had a Master’s degree in Engineering from Oslo university, had set himself a task that, for the men who had originally accomplished it, had been as difficult and as dangerous as Armstrong’s first moonshot. He had decided that, on the hundredth anniversary of his distinguished ancestor’s historic conquest of the Pole, he would do likewise, in exactly the same manner. No satellite navigation. No digital radio. No radar. No sonar. No petrol-driven skidoos. Thor was going to the Pole, and he was going to take in every bit of suffering his ancestor had suffered, just as Amundsen himself had been driven to suffer the same agonies his patron, Nansen, had endured.
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