The Far Arena (2 page)

'I swear to God, Lew, no one'll
know shit from these lips. Like they're sewed closed. Swear to God.' Thanks,' said Lew.

Forty-five minutes late the tool pusher, driller, and second-shift driller were in the lab dome, taking off their outer layers of clothing, asking to see the hand.

"No hand here,' said Lew. He was working on the possibility of electric logging the bore hole if there should be a sufficient heat increase at lower depths. It was a possible back-up measure to core sampling.

'What we picked up at eight metres,' said the tool pusher. 'You know what we're talking about, Lew.'

McCardle went to the sink. The ice had melted away into a small retainer drain, leaving an odd cookie-thick wedge of glistening material. It looked like gun wadding for an old-fashioned musket. It curled.

'That's it ?' said the tool pusher.

'That's all,'said Lew.

'Not much,' said the tool pusher. 'It's from a person ?' 'Probably,' said Lew. The rotary drill had to be working short crew with all the men in the lab. Perhaps the superintendent was out there. He was young and didn't trust anyone anyway, McCardle knew. He also knew that if the superintendent weren't so new and anxious to succeed beyond expectations, the drilling crew wouldn't be in the dome looking for reasons to help him fail. It happened this way on explorations that were cut off from civilization, as much because of distance as for Houghton's not wanting people to know where they explored, if possible. The superintendent of the crew had to be good and seasoned to prevent the sort of flare-up that was coming.

'Are we drilling through bodies nowadays?' said the tool pusher, who three times in Lew's presence had felt forced to tell the crew superintendent how many sites he had worked on and how many came in before the superintendent was born.

'We didn't go through a body. We went alongside. That flesh is not big enough to be through,' said Lew.

'It's wounded. Look, pus,' said the tool pusher.

'That's not pus.'

'What's that pinkish, yellowish straw kind of stuff?' 'Probably blood.'

'Blood's red. I never heard of no blood that weren't red.'

'There are things in the blood that make it red,' said Lew, and he forgot to whom he was talking, because then he went on. 'Red blood cells have to combine with the oxygen in the air to be red. In your body, the blood is pale. But now you take something or someone who's been at low temperatures for a while, the red cells get destroyed and the white cells increase. So what you get is pinkish, and sometimes it could be yellowish. Like straw.'

'What about red-blooded? Ah never heard of pink-blooded. Or yellow-blooded Americans?' said the tool pusher, his flat Texas twang ringing like nasty prairie dust in Lew's face, looking for a fight.

'Red and blood are also symbolic. Red's always been a symbolic colour. In ancient Rome it was called purple, and today we call it royal purple. Although we aren't sure what they meant by purple. It could be grape purple or blood red. You see, words—'

'Blood's always red,' said the pusher.

'When it's got red blood cells. But when red blood cells have been driven out, it is straw-coloured.'

'Looks like pus,' said the tool pusher.

'All right,'said Lew.
'It's pus.'

'How do you know it's blood ?' said the tool pusher.

'I've read. I've also seen some work done in low temperatures. In Oslo there's a Russian doctor doing work in thermal reduction. We've used him for emergencies.'

'What's thermal reduction?' said the tool pusher.

'Really, now,' said Lew.

'You could have said cold,' said the tool pusher. 'The skin's grey. Was he black, white, yellow ?'

'I don't know. I am not sure it's a he. I'm not even sure it's human. Wherever that is, it's been there a long, long time.'

The tool pusher accused Lew of being a suck for the superintendent, and Lew only had to stand up from the stool he had perched his backside on and the men put on their outer gear.

They almost bumped into the crew superintendent entering the lab, ripping off his cold-weather mask. They pushed by him moodily. He stared angrily at Lew, veins throbbing in his forehead.

'Where is it ?' he demanded. Lew pointed to the sink. 'Well ?' said the superintendent.

'That little greyish thing in the yellowish stuff,' said McCardle with flat respect.

That's nothing,' yelled the superintendent, a ferret of a man, his temper always near the surface and now bursting out in the lab.

'That's what I said,' said McCardle.

Then why do I hear we've drilled through someone? Why are you telling that to the crew ?'

'You're not listening to me,' Lew told the superintendent.

'That's a piece of an elk or a whatever down there. That's not human.'

'It probably is human flesh,' said Lew. His voice was even and he was remembering every word he said. It might be needed if this young man tried to blame Lew for whatever happened, if something happened.

Suddenly there was a cave quiet in the dome. Nothing whirred around them. The silence came like doom-trumpets in a nightmare. The drill had stopped.

'Jesus Christ,' said the crew superintendent. 'Your machinery can't afford down time at these temperatures,' said Lew.

'My machinery, right? Not ours, huh? I'll remember that, McCardle.'

He snapped his mask back on and ran skidding out of the lab dome.

Lew shrugged. He would keep his tongue, because if he could keep his tongue for twenty-five years, he could keep it for one more project that would mean his retirement. Whether they drilled in, striking oil, or whether it was a dry hole, he would collect his pension from Houghton ... if he couldn't be blamed for trouble.

But it was as inevitable as it was unwanted that he became involved as mediator between the crew and the superintendent. They chose his lab to fight.

'You've got two minutes before that down machinery needs blowtorches to start it again, and that means you may not get it to start again.' Lew shouted into noise. They turned to him.

Now they could hear the wind, like a giant sucking maw, reminding them that the machinery had given up its pitiful temporary life in the long, cold night. If nothing else, Lew wanted to hear the grinding drill move so as not to hear the wind.

The superintendent was appointing blame for the stopped machinery when Lew interrupted to announce it was one minute and thirty seconds.

'What would satisfy you ?' Lew asked the tool pusher.

'Respect,' said the tool pusher, adding, 'for the dead.'

'We'll say prayers over that elk down there, if that will make you happy,' said the superintendent.

'Do you want it dug up ?' asked Lew.

'It might be a good idea - find out what we've got down there and do proper things,' said the tool pusher. 'Never,' said the superintendent.

'All right,' said Lew, standing and using his massive body as a calming influence. 'I just wanted to find out where everyone stood while the machinery froze and your bonuses went. Just wanted to know.'

'All right, on your say-so, we will use a crew and possibly damage the rig to dig up some fossil. But I want you to sign a paper for it,' said the superintendent.

His dark eyes twitched, and his head bobbed. He had just taken a vote in his mind and was announcing the election results that Lew should sign a paper taking responsibility.

'No,' said Lew. 'I am just trying to keep the facts in front of us all.' He nodded to the crew, a glum, hostile group, packed together in their arctic wear like a cramped sports warehouse. Lew noticed one man perspiring now. It could be dangerous outside. Sweat became ice.

'I never heard of a crew digging up a fossil. We're looking for oil, not archaeology,' said the superintendent. He was smaller than the crew, and he glowered as though he had to make up for it. 'Go ahead. But I don't want to stand around and watch something this stupid. I'm going back to the rig and I want help now. Whoever wants to dig in the ice, go ahead on your own time.'

The driller and two roughnecks went with the superintendent through the passage while Lew plotted out where the piece of flesh was, and where, if there was a person, it might be. He took the exact point where the discolouration in the ice core had occurred and drew a theoretical ball around it, seven feet in every direction.

He made a mock-up of the rig. The centre of the ball was in the drill shaft. The tool pusher said they could drive casing down around the hole and keep on drilling.

'It's going to be a job,' said Lew.

'We've got jackhammers. We've got a John Deere. We've got everything. They didn't want us running out of parts,' said the pusher.

'I know,' said Lew.

And what he did not tell the tool pusher was that whatever they found would only have to be buried again, if it were a person. But the tool pusher wouldn't have been interested. There was a fight going on, and whatever was down there was only an issue to fight over. The fight was really between men.

Lew sketched in a rough diagram. The tool pusher asked Lew if he wanted to join the digging, and Lew refused. The superintendent, who had obviously been waiting until the rebellious tool pusher left, came into the l
ab to talk. The talk was out of
Management 304, Harvard Business School. It was problem solving. It was goal-oriented.

Lew McCardle passed gas and went back to the electronic log. They were going to need it now for sure.

'All right, Lew, what have I done wrong?'

'In this sort of exploration in this part of the world, it takes sort of a subtle hand to get the crew calmly working.'

Lew felt banging jabs on the soles of his feet as little cracking coughs came from outside. The jackhammers were going through the ice. They were going after the body.

'What do you mean by that?'

'1 mean you're ambitious.'

'I don't want to end up like you, Lew. I don't want to end up a geologist after twenty-five years.' 'All right.'

'I don't mean to be insulting, but you had everything, McCardle, from a doctorate to being from the same town as the Houghtons and the Lauries, to playing football for that cow college the company supports.'

'That's what you want. I have what I want.'

'You could have been a president of this company.'

'What do you want?' asked Lew McCardle. His voice was soft, somewhat weak, as though something had been punched out of it.

'For me?' asked the superintendent.

'No. From me,' said Lew.

'Support.'

'I'm a geologist. I make less than you. I'm thirty years older than you, and I take orders from you.' 'Then support me.'

Lew was quiet. He had been quiet twenty-five years, and he only had to be quiet for the rest of this project. He was good at being quiet. A person got good at anything he practised.

Four days later, after much repacking of the upper borehole, the John Deere - as the men called the multipurpose cold-weather tractor vehicle - groaned, hauling up something. The whirring of the drill stopped.

McCardle timed it. After forty-five seconds, he felt the whir of the rotary drill come through the thermal-pack floor again and up the soles of his feet. The men had done their digging and hauling in good time. And, more importantly, they had continued drilling while they had got down to where they wanted to go with the jackhammers and picks. The jackhammers had stopped a full day and a half before the drill stopped, which meant they had gone into the final work by hand power.

'Blechhh,' said the tool pusher entering, about half a coffeepot of drinking after the drill had stopped two hours earlier in the day. 'It's awful. We put it in one of the unheated domes, the windbreaker. I don't want that thing melting. It's weird. Did you see it?'

'What you dug up?'

'Yeah. Blech,' said the tool pusher, shaking his head and making sounds as though he were clearing a taste from his mouth.

'No,' said Lew. 'I didn't see it, and I don't want to see it. There are two things I want, tool pusher. I don't want to have anything to do with what you dug up. That's immediate. Long-range, like five weeks maximum, I want to retire with my pension money.'

'It was a body, Lew. It was a man ...' said the pusher. And then pausing. 'Once.'