Terminal Freeze (16 page)

“I got your message,” Marshall said as he stepped into Faraday’s lab and closed the door behind him. “You’ve found something?”

Faraday glanced up at Marshall, then at Chen, then back at Marshall. The biologist’s eyes looked wide and anxious behind the round tortoiseshell frames. But this in itself didn’t disturb Marshall -Faraday wore a nervous look on even the best of days.

“It’s more an interesting succession of facts than a hard theory,” Faraday said. He was standing behind-almost hiding behind, it seemed-a bewildering array of test tubes and lab equipment.

“Not a problem.”

“I can’t corroborate any of it. Not from here, anyway.”

Marshall crossed one arm over the other. “I won’t tell the NMU board of regents if you won’t.”

“And I warn you that Sully’s going to-”

Marshall sighed in exasperation. “Just let me hear it.”

One last hesitation. “Okay.” Faraday cleared his throat, straightened the soup-stained tie he insisted on wearing under the lab coat. “I think I understand. About the melting in the vault, I mean.”

Marshall waited.

“I told you we went back up to get more ice samples from the cave. Well, we’ve been examining them with X-ray diffraction. And they’re very unusual.”

“Unusual how?”

“The crystalline structure is all wrong. For normally occurring precipitant ice, I mean.”

Marshall leaned against a lab table. “Go on.”

“You know how there are many different kinds of ice, right? I mean, other varieties beyond the kind we put in our lemonade or chop off our car windows.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “There’s ice-two, ice-three, five, six, seven, and so forth, up to ice-fourteen-each with its own crystalline structure, its own physical properties.”

“I remember something about that in my graduate-level physics course. It takes great pressure or extreme temperatures for the solid-state transformation to take place.”

“That’s right. But the really unusual thing about some of these types of ice is that-once they’ve formed-they can remain solid well above the freezing mark.” He handed Marshall a sheet of paper through the forest of test tubes. “Look. Here’s the structure diagram for ice-seven. Look at its unit cell. Under sufficient pressure, this form of ice can remain in solid form up to two hundred degrees centigrade.”

Marshall whistled. “That hot? We could have used that kind of ice in the vault yesterday.”

“But here’s the thing,” Faraday went on. “I read an article in Nature last month describing another type of ice that could theoretically exist: ice-fifteen. Ice that has just the opposite qualities.”

“You mean…” Marshall paused. “You mean, ice that would melt below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit?”

Faraday nodded.

“The key word is ‘theoretically,’” Chen added.

“And the unusual crystalline structure of this melted cave ice-does it match ice-fifteen?”

“There’s no way to be sure,” Faraday said. “But it may well.”

Marshall pushed away from the lab table, paced back and forth. “So possibly-just possibly-that ice melted on its own.”

“They were slowly raising the temperature overnight,” Faraday said. “And in all the commotion of finding their prize missing, nobody bothered to check the temperature in the vault. To verify it was actually above freezing inside.”

“That’s right.” Marshall stopped. “Nobody would have thought it necessary. They just left the door wide open and went off searching.”

“Allowing the temperature inside the vault to quickly return to the ambient level,” said Chen.

“So there might have been no saboteur at all,” Marshall said. “The thawing process was proceeding properly. It’s the ice itself that was the culprit.”

Faraday nodded.

“How would this unusual ice have formed?” Marshall asked.

“Therein lies the rub,” said Chen.

A brief silence settled over the lab.

“That’s a very interesting speculation,” said Marshall. “But even if you’re right, and there was no thief, no saboteur, the question remains: What happened to the cat?”

No sooner had he asked the question than he saw Faraday’s nervous expression deepen. “No, don’t tell me,” he went on. “Let me guess. It let itself out.”

“You saw my photographs of the vault flooring. Those marks were of something getting out, not in. And they weren’t saw marks, either.”

“True. They didn’t look like saw marks. But they didn’t look like cat claws, either. They were much too powerful for-” Marshall stopped abruptly. “Wait a minute. It’s a very clever theory, ice melting below freezing and all. But there’s an enormous problem. In order for the cat to break free of the remaining ice, to tear its way out of the vault, it would have to be alive. But it’s been dead for thousands of years.”

“That’s the problem we were discussing the last time you came in here,” Faraday said. “I’ve got an answer for that, too-again, a theoretical one.”

Marshall glanced at him. “Ice crystals would have formed in the cells as the animal froze. It would be fatal.”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. At an evolutionary biology conference in Berkeley last year, I listened to a lecture on the Beresovka mammoth.”

“Haven’t heard of it.”

“It was a woolly mammoth, found in Siberia in the early part of the twentieth century. Frozen solid, with fragments of a buttercup between its teeth.”

“And?”

“Well, the question is-how could the mammoth freeze so quickly in a spot warm enough for buttercups to bloom?”

Suddenly, Marshall understood. “A downdraft of cold air. Caused by an inversion layer.”

Faraday nodded. “Super-cold arctic air.”

“I see where you’re going. Because when your mammoth froze, it must have been summer, based on the buttercup. But here-in the dead of winter-” Marshall stopped.

For a moment there was silence. Then Chen continued. “Flash-freezing.”

“Terminal freeze,” added Faraday.

“And the faster it froze-if, say, high winds were involved-the smaller the ice crystals that would form in its cells. If it happened quickly enough, the creature could conceivably be frozen alive.” Marshall looked at them. “Do you suppose this terminal freeze could be reversed?”

Faraday blinked. “Reversed how?”

“If there could be a sudden downdraft of super-cold air in summer-couldn’t there just as easily be a downdraft of super-warm air in winter?”

Faraday nodded slowly. “In theory.”

“So what if the phenomenon was reversed? Sent down remarkably warm air? Don’t you remember how tropical it felt that night before the documentary was to go live?”

Faraday nodded again.

“It must have been close to freezing.” Marshall began to pace again. “The vault freezer would have kicked in-but if your ice-fifteen was involved, it wouldn’t have mattered. It would still have been close enough to freezing to cause a massive thaw.” He hesitated. “When you went back to get those ice samples in the cave, did the ice around the excavation site show any signs of melting?”

“No.”

“But it’s colder up there, by the glacier…” Then Marshall hesitated, shook his head. “I don’t know, Wright. It’s brilliant-but it seems pretty far-fetched.”

Faraday held up the phase diagram. “The crystalline structure doesn’t lie. We performed the X-ray test on the ice ourselves.”

A brief silence settled over the lab. Marshall looked at the diagram, then quietly placed it on the table.

“If you’re right about the reversal,” Faraday said slowly, “about the heated air, then it could explain something else.”

“What?” Marshall said.

“What we saw in the sky that night.”

“You mean, the bizarre aurora borealis? You think it was a side effect?”

“A side effect,” Faraday replied. “Or a causative agent. Or, perhaps, a harbinger.”

Another silence. Faraday thought back to the old shaman’s warning: Their wrath paints the sky with blood. The heavens cry out with the pain.

“What about the blood?” he asked. “That you found caked on the vault splinters?”

“We’ve been too busy analyzing the ice to check it yet.”

Another silence fell over the lab.

“Well, you’ve been busy,” Marshall said after a moment. “But this still begs two questions. If these unusual forms of ice require great pressure, or extreme temperature, how did they form here in the first place?”

Faraday took off his glasses, polished them on his tie, replaced them. “I don’t know,” he replied.

The three of them looked at one another a moment. “You said you had two questions,” said Chen.

“Yes. If your speculations are right, and the creature is still alive-and on the loose-where is it now?”

The question hung in the air. And this time the lab remained silent.

As news of Peters’s death spread through Fear Base, people-almost unconsciously-began leaving their quarters, gathering in the larger spaces of B Level, seeking consolation in the company of others. They sat around the tables of the officers’ mess, speaking in low tones, sharing affectionate anecdotes: outrageous things he’d done or said, dumb technical mistakes he’d made. Others hung out in the Operations Center, drinking tepid coffee, speculating on when the blizzard would lift, promising darkly to assemble a hunting team and seek out the polar bear that mauled the production assistant. The sorrowful atmosphere only exacerbated the sensation of being marooned in an icy wasteland, cut off from all the reassuring comforts of civilization. As the evening lengthened and conversations began to falter, the groups nevertheless remained where they were, reluctant to return to their bunks and the private, unsettling silence of their own thoughts.

Ashleigh Davis did not share these sentiments. She sat disconsolately at a table in the officers’ mess, elegantly coiffed head lolling on her hands, staring at the wall clock in its metal grill. This, she decided, was a living hell. Worse than a living hell. The place stank. The food was beyond vile. It was a million miles from the nearest spa. You couldn’t get a decent cup of bergamot-infused espresso to save your life. And worst of all, it was a prison. Until the storm lifted, she was stuck here, twiddling her thumbs, her glorious career on hold. There was no way out except to walk. And if she had to stay here much longer, she thought morosely, she’d probably be driven to do just that: walk out into the snow and the dark, like that guy on Scott’s antarctic expedition…she’d narrated a documentary on the subject but couldn’t summon the energy to remember the poor chump’s name.

And the time crawled by so slowly! The afternoon had lasted an eternity. She’d bullied the makeup staff into giving her a makeshift facial, doing her fingernails and toenails; she’d had her hair done; she’d run the costume girl half dead, bringing first one, then another, then still another outfit for her to try on while deciding what to wear to dinner. Dinner. That was too kind a word for it. “Slop” was more accurate, or maybe “pig swill.” And the company at dinner, never entertaining to begin with, had tonight been absolutely cadaverous. Just because this idiot Peters was stupid enough to bump into a bear, everybody was acting like it was the end of the world. They’d forgotten they had a star in their midst. It was pathetic, truly pathetic; she was utterly wasted on this bunch.

She sighed with irritation, pulled a cigarette from her Hermès handbag, lit it with a snap of her platinum lighter.

“There’s no smoking on the base, Ashleigh,” came Conti’s voice. “Military rules.”

Davis gave an exasperated snort, plucked the cigarette from her mouth, stared at it, replaced it between her lips, took a deep drag, then stubbed it out in a dish of congealing tapioca. Blowing smoke through her nose, she looked across the table at the producer. She’d spent the better part of the last hour trying to beg, blackmail, or bluster an emergency airlift out of this horrible place and back to New York -all to no avail. It was impossible, he’d said; all flights, public or private, were suspended indefinitely. Nothing she said had budged him. In fact, he’d barely taken notice of her; he seemed to be preoccupied about something. She slumped in her chair, pouting. Even Emilio was taking her for granted. Unbelievable.

She pushed her chair back, stood up. “I’m headed for my trailer,” she announced. “Thanks for a delightful evening.”

Conti-who had looked down again at the notes he’d been scribbling-glanced up once more. “If you run into Ken Toussaint,” he said, “please send him to me. I’ll either be here or in my quarters.”

Davis placed her coat over her shoulders, not deigning to reply. Brianna, her personal assistant, picked up her own coat and rose from the table. She’d been silent throughout dinner, knowing better than to speak when Davis was in a black mood.

“Are you sure you want to return to your trailer?” Conti asked. “I could get accommodations fixed up for you here.”

“Accommodations? As in, share a bathroom, bivouac on some army cot? Emilio, darling, I can only hope you’re joking.” And she turned away with a contemptuous sweep of ermine.

“But-” he began to protest.

“I’ll see you in the morning. And I expect a helicopter ready and waiting by then.”

As she walked briskly toward the doorway, she became aware of someone approaching. It was the man who had trucked her trailer to the site. She glanced at him briefly. He wasn’t bad-looking, with the tanned, lean body of a surfer. But his outrageously pastel Hawaiian shirt was in the worst possible taste. He was chewing, cudlike, on an enormous wad of gum.

“Ma’am.” He smiled at her, nodded at Brianna. “We’ve never been formally introduced.”

I’ve never been formally introduced to my chauffer, either, she thought with a frown.

“The name’s Carradine, in case you hadn’t heard. I’m heading back to my cab, too, so I’ll walk with you ladies-if you don’t object.”

Davis looked toward her assistant, as if to ask: Am I to be spared nothing?

“You know,” the trucker said as they made their way toward the main stairwell, “I’ve been hoping to talk with you, Ms. Davis. When I heard it was your trailer I’d be ferrying up here, when I realized I might just get the opportunity to speak to someone in your position…well, it was like the kind of a happy accident you read about sometimes. Like Orson Welles meeting William Randolph Hearst.”

Davis looked at him. “William Randolph Hearst?”

“Didn’t I get that right? Anyway, I hope you don’t mind if I take just a minute of your time.”

You already have, Davis thought.

“See, I’m not just a trucker. The season’s pretty short, you know-four months, I’m not usually up here this early, the lake ice isn’t thick enough yet-so I have plenty of time to do other things. Oh, not like I’m busy all the time-life moves kind of slowly down in Cape Coral. But I’ve certainly kept busy with something.”

He seemed to want her to ask what it was. Davis climbed the stairwell in resolute silence.

“I’m a screenwriter,” he said.

Davis glanced back at him, unable to conceal her surprise.

“That is to say, I’ve written a screenplay. See, I listen to books on tape while I’m driving-helps keep your mind off the ice-and I sort of got into the plays of William Shakespeare. The tragedies, anyway, with all that blood and fighting. My favorite’s Macbeth. And that’s the screenplay: my version of Macbeth. Only it’s not the story of a king, it’s the story of an ice-road trucker.”

Davis walked quickly across the entrance plaza, trying to distance herself from Carradine. The man hurried to keep up. “The king of ice-road truckers, see. Except there’s this other trucker that’s jealous of him and his fame among the rest. Wants his girl, too. So he sabotages the king’s route, fractures it, fractures the ice, know what I mean?”

They passed through the staging area and out the main entrance. Instantly, the wind and ice slapped them back with a giant, invisible hand. The exterior lights barely penetrated the swirls of snow, and it was hard to see beyond a few feet. Davis hesitated, remembering it was a polar bear that had killed Peters just outside the perimeter fence.

Seeing her hesitate, Carradine smiled. “Don’t you worry,” he said, lifting his shirt and displaying a huge revolver tucked into his waistband. “I never go out on a run without it.”

Davis winced, wrapped her coat more closely around her shoulders, and allowed Brianna to go first and act as a windbreak.

They moved slowly across the apron, the sheds and Quonset huts around them mere specters in the roiling snow. Davis kept her head down, picking her way unhappily over the rivers of electrical and data cables that lay treacherously beneath the coating of white. Carradine walked alongside, oblivious to the cold. He hadn’t even bothered to grab a parka from one of the lockers in the weather chamber. “As I was saying, the king’s rig falls through the ice. And the other trucker, he becomes the new king.”

“Right, right,” Davis muttered. God, only a dozen more steps to the trailer.

“Anyway, it’s a great story, real violent. The ice-road trucker angle is killer. I’ve got a copy of the screenplay in the cab. And I was wondering, with your connections and all, if you’d be willing to have a look and maybe recommend-”

He stopped speaking so abruptly that Davis glanced toward him. Then she heard it, too: a muffled thump, like a heavy, deliberate knock, coming out of the darkness ahead of them.

“What’s that?” Davis breathed. She looked at Brianna, who returned the look nervously.

“Don’t know,” said Carradine. “Some loose piece of equipment, maybe.”

Knock.

“It’s just like the porter scene in Macbeth!” Carradine exclaimed. “The knocking at the gate, after they’ve wasted Duncan! I have that in my screenplay, too, when the new king of truckers is back down in Yellowknife, and he hears the son of the old trucker king at his door-”

Knock.

Carradine laughed. “Wake Duncan with thy knocking!” he quoted. “I would thou couldst.”

Knock.

Davis took another step forward, then hesitated. “I don’t like this.”

“It’s nothing. Let’s take a look.”

They moved forward, more slowly now, through the thick pall of snow. The wind whistled mournfully between the outbuildings, biting Davis ’s bare legs and plucking at the hem of her coat. She tripped over a cable, staggered, righted herself again.

Knock.

“It’s coming from the back of your trailer,” said Carradine.

“Well, tie it down, whatever it is. I’ll never sleep through that racket.”

Now the bulk of the trailer loomed ahead of them, a gray monolith in the snowy murk, its generator purring. Carradine led the way around the back end, shirt flapping and fluttering behind him. It was darker back here, in the shadows between the trailer and the perimeter fence. Davis shivered, licked her lips.

Knock.

And then there it was, directly before them: a body, hanging upside down from a support for one of the window awnings. It was coatless, its clothes torn in several places. The arms stretched limply toward the ground. The head, which was level with their own-too snow-covered to be recognizable-bumped slowly against the metal wall of the trailer at the caprice of the wind.

Knock.

Brianna screamed, took a step back.

“It’s dead!” Davis shrieked.

The trucker stepped forward quickly, brushed the snow from the face that hung before them.

“Oh, God!” cried Davis. “Toussaint!”

Carradine reached up to unhook the body from the support arm. As he did so, Toussaint’s eyes abruptly popped open. He looked at each of them, uncomprehending. Then, quite suddenly, he opened his mouth and screamed.

Brianna crumpled to the ground in a dead faint, her head hitting the trailer with an ugly thump.

As he hung there, Toussaint screamed again-a ragged, ululating scream. “It plays with you!” he shouted. “It plays with you! And when it’s finished playing-it kills. It’s going to kill us all.”