Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  At the start of October the plane from the south bought Morgan a confidential letter. It was from a wartime colleague now at Cambridge University. He wrote that their radio telescopes had found a new mystery: beacons of energy, unimaginably powerful, flashing at us from billions of years ago in the deepest regions of space. These strange new objects, so little understood that they hadn’t been announced yet, hadn’t even been named, pulsed with their own internal rhythms, their signals rising and falling with a period of hours or weeks. ‘Time signals from the universe,’ the letter had said. ‘Lighthouses in space’.

  After he finished the letter Morgan went outside and looked up at the twilight. Stars shone in the north. In the south was the thin aquamarine band under which lived his wife and his daughter. The geodesic radar dome, raised fifty feet above the module train, glowed faintly in the dark, as if it could store and release a little of the sun that still showed itself at midday. High on the Doppler tower an unblinking red light shone over the sea. The Jamesway huts in the construction camp, now abandoned for the winter, looked like old boats overturned on a beach. Everything was covered in snow. The supply plane had come and gone, taking with it the last of the construction workers, and the silence had stolen back after it left. A windsock hung limp by the airstrip. The sea was flat and grey and oily, except close by the shore where pancake ice was forming. Morgan thought of the Heat Death: I am close to the edge, to the end of the universe. Yet up there somewhere, among those frozen stars, unspeakable fires were burning. Their frequency was much too high for the short-wave and VHF and UHF gear at Tuktoyaktuk auxiliary radar station. He would have to go south with the next plane.

  That evening, when Morgan was a quarter way into his last bottle of Mackinlay’s, the general alarm went off in crew quarters. Then his telephone rang. Colonel Milner, the US Air Force’s sector controller, was on the radio from the main station at Cape Parry. Would Group Captain Morgan please come to the surveillance room?

  Normally crewed by one or two civilian radicians, the surveillance room was now full. Two American Air Force captains, who had been visiting for an inspection, stood at the back of the darkened room, together with the cook, the mechanics and the off-duty radicians. But no one was looking at the radar, not even the men on the screens. All eyes were on the station chief, Wollaston, who stood adjusting the dials on the short-wave receiver.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Morgan. He dreaded to hear any possible answer.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ hissed a civilian radician. Then he saw who it was. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he whispered. ‘But we’re trying to hear.’

  Wollaston adjusted the volume and the room filled with a familiar sound, the automated male voice on Station WWV in Maryland broadcasting the time signal at 20 megahertz. Wollaston waited for the beep of the time pulse, indicating precisely thirty-five past the hour at Greenwich, then he reached up again and adjusted the knob by a tiny degree. ‘Now,’ he said.

  At first Morgan heard nothing but his own tinnitus, the aural scarring from thousands of hours of unshielded aero engines. Then came the crackle and wash of the short-wave band. It was buzzing and bright tonight: Morgan felt sure there would would be a lovely aurora. Looking around he saw bodies stiffen and faces turn to each other, and then he was able to hear it as well: a bright, fussy little sound, like a telephone left off the hook: beep, beep, beep, three times a second. The men in the room looked about them, faces slack with wonder. The beeping grew louder, then it faded again, fuzzed out, until all that was left was white noise.

  Colonel Milner’s voice filled the room. They must have patched the radio into the PA system.

  ‘It’s in space,’ said Milner. ‘The Soviets have claimed it, and Washington confirms the claim. They say the Reds launched it at around nineteen-thirty Zulu from the central USSR. It’s in elliptical orbit between two hundred and nine hundred kilometres up.’

  ‘What does it do?’ asked an American captain.

  ‘It goes beep.’

  Morgan pushed to the front of the room, keyed the microphone on the main console. ‘Morgan here. Nineteen-thirty Greenwich is three hours ago, Colonel. With that kind of orbit it should have got to us sooner.’

  ‘It did. This is the second time it’s come around on us. We didn’t notice the first time. Bare Mountain had to tell us to listen out for it. We should be warning them.’

  ‘If they can shoot a transmitter into orbit,’ someone said, ‘they can shoot bombs that way too. They won’t need to send planes over the pole.’

  There was a heavy silence in the room.

  ‘Fuck it, boys,’ muttered one of the radicians. ‘I’m on a thousand bucks a month. We only just got here.’

  The American captain spoke to the mic. ‘What does Bare Mountain want us to do, sir?’

  ‘Nothing. They just wanted to know if we could hear it too. Our radar can’t track it. The Brits are still trying with their big new dish at Jodrell Bank.’

  Morgan spoke again. ‘What’s the inclination of its orbit?’

  ‘Bare Mountain reckons about sixty-five degrees. It should reach to just south of us here.’

  Morgan thought of the map he had pinned to the wall of his childhood bedroom, the world map on which he’d later marked up his ham-radio contacts.

  The map had been based on the Mercator maritime projection which, in order to faithfully depict angles of bearing between any two points on the earth’s surface, progressively inflates the apparent size of land masses the closer they are to the poles. There was, mathematically, no end to this inflation: the poles themselves became infinities and could not be shown.

  Instead, the upper margin of the rectangular map was a wavering white line suggesting the permanent pack ice just north of Greenland. The northern coast of Antarctica, still with a few broken lines to show remaining unknowns, had formed the margin in the south. Beyond these limits, several degrees short of where the poles should have been, there was nothing. Instead, the lines of longitude marched off the map in parallel lockstep, refusing to compromise, much less converge. As if, if only, the world went on for ever.

  The map had been centred on Greenwich, on the zero meridian. If you needed to steady yourself you could grab hold of that.

  Morgan’s parents had given him a globe for his thirteenth birthday but after waiting a decent interval he had put it in his closet where he wouldn’t have to look at it. There was no art to a globe. It was too on the nose. Its poles were merely points of rotation, and it didn’t matter that they were both obscured, for about eight degrees towards the equator, by the spinning brass discs that held the globe on its stand. These brass discs covered the holes that John Cleves Symmes, the prophet of the hollow earth, had predicted would be found at the poles, giving access to a warmer and gentler world within.

  A globe was round and you couldn’t fall off it. But a map was a map, a metaphor, full of judgements and choices and victories and regrets; a map was built on hacks and heuristics and mistakes and lies, cracks though which you might, just maybe, someday slip away.

  From today the world would be merely a globe. There was no escaping from it.

  ‘Does it have a camera?’ asked Morgan. ‘Can it look down at us?’

  ‘Beats me,’ said Milner’s voice on the speaker. ‘If this one doesn’t have a camera it’s a cinch the next one will. Or the one after that.’

  We did our best, thought Morgan. But we knew all along that it couldn’t last for ever. The Magnetic Union. The Great Game. The Polar Council. Room 38. The North Warning. There would be no place to hide from the eyes of the satellites, when even great storms, born far out in the ocean, would be spotted, tagged and sorted before they ever came ashore.

  The meeting, or announcement, whatever it was, was over. Milner would talk to Morgan again after he’d heard from Strategic Air Command at Bare Mountain, Massachusetts.

  Morgan went back to his room and look
ed about him. He had already packed most of his things for the flight south in the morning. His next escape was almost prepared. All that remained for him to pack, apart from the outdoor gear he would wear to the plane, were his sleeping things, his washing kit and his whisky.

  No: there was one more thing of his in the room, half hidden on the desk behind the bottle of Mackinlay’s: his old brass carriage clock, a white circular face on spherical feet, hands set to Greenwich time. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands, watching his fingerprints fade from smooth brass.

  Meares had given it to him at their final meeting twenty years ago, two years before the war. Like their first, it took place at the Angela Hotel. Old Captain Rant had recently sold up and the food and the service weren’t what they had been, but Meares was, in his decline, a man of fixed habit.

  It was Morgan’s first visit to the Angela since his messenger days: walking up that familiar path he asked himself where thirteen years had gone. He still wore a blue uniform, still felt he should use the back door.

  Meares waited in the lobby just where he’d sat when Morgan first saw him. His face was a dull shade of yellow, and so were the whites of his eyes.

  ‘My health was ruined by that blasted trip to the Yukon,’ Meares said. They both knew that he was lying. ‘I should have known I was too old for another winter journey. I should have left that whole business to you.’

  Morgan noticed how Meares’s hand shook as he picked up his whisky.

  ‘You had to go,’ Morgan said. ‘Johansen was your man. It was up to you to bring him in. You never even told me who he was.’

  ‘He was his own man. Bess Magids found him in Alaska. I never knew who he really was either. It was Bess who gave him his false name, Hjalmar Johansen. She made quite a point of it. I’ve no idea why. The police got it wrong anyway.’

  ‘I’d never have managed up there without you. What do I know about sled dogs?’

  ‘We were too late anyway.’

  ‘Too late for poor Johansen. But you got what you sent him to find.’

  Meares drank heavily all through dinner, alternating swigs of Mackinlay’s with sips of wine. When they were done he produced a wooden box and put it on the table.

  ‘I want you to have this. I won’t need it any more. It’s time for me to move on.’

  Morgan picked up the box. ‘Where are you going? Back to England?’

  Meares grinned at him, the savage grin he had first seen the day Meares caught him snooping. ‘Somewhere like that. Perhaps a bit warmer.’

  Morgan opened the box. ‘Is that your old chronometer? The one you lent Johansen so he could hunt down that map reference?’ He held it up to the light. The clock’s mechanism, housed in a metal cylinder as wide as it was deep, had been removed from the square, glass-topped wooden housing in which it used to sit with its dial facing upward. The sides and bezel had been gilded, and four little round feet were screwed to the bottom of the case. A handle was fixed to the top. The name on the dial had been artfully altered from ‘Arnold’ to ‘Reynolds’.

  ‘You’ve changed it,’ Morgan said.

  ‘I had a jeweller in England do it. It’s a carriage clock now. There’s not much call for those old chronometers now that you can wear a small one on your wrist. Plus, that clock is stolen property. It belongs to the Greenwich Observatory. Better it learn to go in disguise.’

  ‘I doubt if anyone is looking for it.’

  ‘Maybe not. But it could be looking for them. I happen to know that it has a strong homing instinct. No matter where you send it, it always finds its way back.’

  Meares had died two months later. Morgan kept the clock running for the sake of his memory: chronometers were no longer used much in aerial navigation, thanks to all the technologies developed in the war.

  And some day soon, Morgan thought, finding himself back in his room at Tuktoyaktuk, there’ll be satellite navigation too. Even our maps will one day be redundant.

  He put the chronometer down, then looked out the window. He’d been right. The night had brought a spectacular aurora. It trembled and shimmered across half the sky, waves of green and blue and purple streaming past the stars. If those lights ever failed then the planet would die: they showed how the earth’s magnetic lines of force, emanating from the poles, repelled the solar wind, that stream of charged articles which would, if it could, ionize the earth’s atmosphere and lick it off into space.

  Some day, very soon, Morgan thought, man will go into space and see those lights from above. He will drag them down from heaven and pin them to the dirt.

  To the south, the lower camp melted in a creeping layer of ground mist. The flare path at the landing strip was extinguished and the passenger terminal, an old air-force bus on blocks by the apron, was unlit and lifeless. Then it too was swallowed by fog. There would be no arrivals tonight, nothing to disturb the silence except the hum of muffled generators.

  One last round of listening, thought Morgan. If you’re ever going to talk to me, talk to me now.

  The bottle of Mackinlay’s fitted under his parka without showing an outline. He was halfway out the door when he remembered the clock. You should never leave it sitting out like that, he thought. It was like in the war, back in Castle Archdale: some bugger might swipe it.

  He wrapped the old clock in a sweater and shoved it deep inside the bag.

  The main exit was next to the loading bay. Morgan was adjusting his buttons, putting on gloves, when the external door opened and a man came in from the night. Morgan recognized one of the meteorologists. He must have been out checking the Stevenson screen.

  ‘You going out now, sir? There’s a fog coming in off the sea. It’ll soon be a white-out.’

  ‘I know my way around.’

  The man shook off his wolfskin mittens and wiped snot from his nose with the back of a glove-liner. ‘One of the guys from the airstrip said they had to call the bear warden today to come deal with a bear. When he showed up all he had with him was a ­single-shot twenty-two. So now there’s a bear out there with a really sore ass and a deep sense of grievance.’

  ‘I have a gun.’ And he did. It was in the waistband of his flight pants. An old Webley service pistol, pitted with spots of corrosion, which Meares had given him on that flight to Aklavik. Because as Meares had said to its previous owner, you just never knew.

  ‘You want me to tell the comms room you’re outside, sir? So they can look for you if you get turned around out there?’

  ‘Don’t bother. I could be out there for a while.’

  Part Nine

  Cape Flyaway

  Inuvik, North West Territories

  Nelson woke on the couch and remembered that there was no food in the apartment, no milk in the fridge. He made black coffee and knocked on the bedroom door.

  ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘just before I fell asleep. If that letter from the map people was put in the wrong mailbox, then Bert must have a right mailbox. Right?’

  They found it in the hall of the apartment building, just inside the front door. They had walked past it several times without noticing. One of the keys on Bert’s ring fitted the lock. As soon as Nelson turned it the door sprung open, impelled by the weight of the backed-up mail within.

  One letter stood out from the junk mail and bills. It had been sent express and its envelope was marked with the name of a TV company.

  Toronto

  January 3rd

  Dear Mr Nilsson

  Please excuse me for writing to you by mail but I have sent several emails to which you have not replied.

  I regret to tell you that the results have come back from the genetic laboratory and they show that, based on comparisons to your own DNA, there is no realistic possibility that your great-uncle Arthur was the same man as the so-called ‘Mad Trapper of Rat River’.

  I cannot say how sorry we are
to have to tell you this. We know how much work you put in to this cold case. The parallels you drew between the appearance and behaviour of ‘Albert Johnson’ and the photographs and life-story of your missing relative were astonishingly close. If your case hadn’t been so compelling we would not have agreed to arrange for the DNA test: we considered our investigation closed several years ago, after our original documentary could reach no conclusion about the true identity of ‘Albert Johnson’.

  I hope this disappointment is not too upsetting for you. When you get this letter please give me a call or an email and I can answer any further questions you may have.

  Yours sincerely,

  Regina Dawson

  Senior Producer

  ‘So you had a long-lost uncle.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How very romantic of you.’

  ‘He was my granddad’s big brother. He came with them from Norway to Wisconsin. He joined the peacetime US Army but they kicked him out. They say he was a bit crazy – liked to live out in the woods by himself. Last thing they heard, he was prospecting alone up in British Columbia. That was all they ever told me. They didn’t talk about him much.’

  ‘And he was called Arthur Nilsson?’

  ‘Sure. So was I. That’s what they christened me too. Arthur.’ Then he saw that she had something more. ‘Why do you ask?’

  She picked up one of Bert’s books, leafed through it then showed him a page. ‘It says here that when the police tried to identify Albert Johnson after he died they heard of a man who sounded just like him. A loner and backwoodsman who vanished from the Yukon at exactly the same time that Albert Johnson arrived in the North West Territories. No one knows where he came from before that, or where he went after. But he called himself Arthur Nelson.’