Zodiac Station (12 page)

To tell the truth, I hadn’t got very far. To leak the data, you’d have to understand it, and the climate expert at Zodiac was Fridge Torell. Well, he’s the biggest global-warming fanatic there is: Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF, he carries so many cards they don’t fit in his wallet. Scientists guard their results like a pot of gold at the best of times. It was inconceivable Fridge would give away his own data to undermine the cause.

Then Martin Hagger died – fell in a crevasse. Tragic. I knew, from some private conversations, that he’d been under pressure with work, things not going his way. I thought it had got too much for him. But then I started to wonder.

I know it sounds ridiculous, that someone would be killed for a few numbers on a graph. But there’s a lot of money chasing round the Arctic. Ice caps are melting; places that have been out of bounds for fifty thousand years are suddenly opening up. Just when we thought we had the planet all parcelled out, it turns out there’s a bit more to grab. People get foolish when they think they can have something for nothing. And if fools and money are involved, anything can happen.

Hagger had an assistant, fellow named Tom Anderson. Quiet, gentle and desperately unlucky: he landed at Zodiac the day Hagger died. I spoke to him once or twice, liked him at the time. There was a sorrow in him, but dignified, you know? Life had dealt him a rough hand, and he was trying to play it the best he could. He was supposed to have gone home already, but the plane got delayed – often happens – so he went up to spend the day at Camp Gemini, on the ice dome. Then Annabel Kobayashi and Jensen the pilot carried him into my medical room on a stretcher. He was out cold.

‘He fell in a moulin,’ Dr Kobayashi explained.

Well, you couldn’t make it up. First Hagger, now his assistant. A moulin – perhaps you know this, Captain? – is a hole in the glacier that the meltwater bores out in summer. They tunnel under the ice; some of them go on for miles. Anderson did better than his boss – he was alive, at least – but he’d banged his head hard. I gave him Mannitol to ease the swelling, and put him on halothane to keep him under.

‘Is he going to make it?’ Jensen asked.

There was no point lying. ‘You can’t tell with head injuries. He could be right as rain tomorrow morning – or he might never wake up.’

Of course, I wondered if it could be coincidence. ‘What happened?’

‘Didn’t see,’ Annabel said. ‘I’d gone for a wee behind the moraine. When I came back, he wasn’t there. I found him at the bottom of a moulin.
Stupid
,’ she added fiercely. ‘He shouldn’t have left the safe area. I marked all the moulins at the end of last season. Martin must have taken the pole down.’

The emotion surprised me. Annabel wasn’t what you’d call a demonstrative person. Around Zodiac, they called her the Ice Queen. If she’d been shaken up, I didn’t like to think how the others were taking it.

The doctor at Zodiac has a tricky role. He’s confessor, counsellor, friend – and psychologist. If people start cracking up, it’s his job to nip it in the bud. It happens more often than you’d think. Or perhaps you think it would happen all the time in a place like Zodiac.

Annabel slipped a bag off her shoulder, a standard-issue Zodiac field pack. She unzipped it and took out a green notebook, with a sheet of paper pressed between the pages. It was damp and creased and made no sense at all. Just a page full of numbers – zeros, ones and twos, like some kind of Sudoku for idiots.

‘This was Hagger’s. Anderson found it in a snow pit just before he fell.’

‘Did he say what was so important?’

‘No.’

I glanced through the rest of the notebook. ‘You’d best leave this here.’

‘I think—’

‘Obviously it meant something to Anderson. If I put it where he can see it, it might help him come round.’

Annabel gave me a look – but we doctors are trained to sound convincing. It might even have been true. A head injury’s a funny thing, poorly understood.

I shooed the others out of my office. Once I’d satisfied myself Anderson’s condition was stable, I turned my attention to the notebook. An idea had struck me, and was building nicely into a theory. There hadn’t been a fatal accident at Zodiac in twenty years. Now we’d nearly had two in three days: Hagger and his assistant. It couldn’t be coincidence. I’d seen Anderson poking around Hagger’s lab. I wondered what he’d found. Or been trying to hide.

And if you started to think about it, you might ask a few more questions about Anderson. Starting with how he came to be at Zodiac in the first place. Most personnel are selected a year in advance, there’s rigorous screening and months of training. Anderson swanned in on forty-eight hours’ notice, didn’t even bring a proper coat. The story they put about was he’d come to replace Hagger’s old assistant, South African fellow named Kevin, who’d had to go home with a wisdom-tooth infection. But the doctor at Zodiac is also the dentist, and I can tell you that boy’s teeth were sound as a drum. The truth is, Hagger decided he wanted Anderson, and when Quam said he didn’t have funding for two assistants, he packed off the unfortunate Kevin and replaced him. So you could say I was curious to see what Hagger had in his notebook.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Lots of numbers, some equations and pretty graphs, and precious few words to explain what they might be. Lots of cryptic little notes like
Check SO ions
and
Concentration of X
and
Where is X coming from?
A hand-drawn map of Utgard scattered with little x’s like a treasure map.

But there were a few sentences I could read. And one of them made me very anxious to talk to Fridge Torell.

I found him up a mast on the edge of the base, cracking ice off some instruments as he hung on to the steel frame. It’s tricky work: if your skin touches the metal, it bonds like cement. Most scientists would leave it to their students, or the techs, but Fridge is a hands-on sort of fellow.

‘I need to ask you something,’ I called up. ‘About Hagger.’

An icicle, two feet long and sharp as a knife, dropped off the mast and stuck quivering in the snow. I took a step back.

Fridge clambered down and dropped the last few feet on to the snow.

‘Nothing works in this fucking place,’ he complained.

‘Data link down again?’

‘It’s up – but all I’m getting is garbage.’ He made karate-chopping motions with his hands to get the circulation going. ‘Some kind of interference screwing with it.’

I showed him the notebook. ‘Anderson found this. It belonged to Hagger.’

He shouldered the rifle he’d left leaning against the base of the tower. ‘Can’t Anderson help you?’

‘Anderson’s in a coma.’

‘Shit. How did that happen?’

I told him. ‘The last thing he did was find this notebook. I thought there might be something in it that could explain why Hagger died.’

I could tell the kind of look Fridge was giving me from behind his sunglasses. ‘Quam said it was a polar bear.’

‘There are different theories about that,’ I said, non-committally.

‘So what do you want to know?’

‘Can we go somewhere private?’

He thought a minute, then nodded to a hut near the flag line. ‘How about Star Command?’

Star Command was one of those prefab red pods that we used all over the place at Zodiac. This one was fitted with a sliding roof, and a Buzz Lightyear figure nailed above the door. Someone had stretched out his arms so that he approximated a crucifix. In winter, the caboose housed telescopes and aurora cameras – hence the name. With summer coming on, the telescopes had been packed away and the caboose was empty. Or should have been.

Fridge kicked open the door and stuck his head in. ‘Who put these here?’

Three machines sat on a table against the far wall. From a distance, they looked like fancy photocopiers. I went over and wiped a layer of frost off the front of one.

‘“Life Technologies”,’ I read.

Fridge examined them. ‘I think they’re some kind of DNA machines.’

‘Who could they have belonged to?’

‘Hagger was the only guy who could have used this. Unless Quam thought he could sequence penguin DNA.’

We both laughed. I laid the notebook flat on the table.

‘I’m not a biologist,’ Fridge warned. ‘I don’t know how much I can help.’

‘It’s not the science.’ My heartbeat quickened as I turned the pages. Suddenly, I was very conscious that I was at the very edge of the station, and that Fridge had a hunting rifle slung on his back. My cold fingers fumbled the pages as I found the one I wanted.

It was near the front.
Echo Bay – CH4 concentrations
, said the heading. There were some numbers underneath, and a simple graph. And under that, one brief sentence in the margin.

Fridge will kill me.

Kennedy

‘Care to explain that, Fridge?’

I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt. Fridge stepped back, lifted his hand. I watched him like a hawk. I wished I’d brought a flare pistol, even one of those little flash-bang pens we use for scaring the bears.

He lifted his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘CH4 is methane.’

‘That’s not the bit that wants explaining.’

He sat down on a steel box. Without the sunglasses, he looked more wrung out than I did. He hunched over, staring at the page in the book.

‘A little while ago, we started getting big spikes in the methane readings. Not in the upper atmosphere – right down here on the ground.’ He showed me a hand-drawn graph in the notebook, swooping up like a ski jump. ‘You see? Atmospheric methane concentrations have been rising for a hundred years, but on a gradual slope. This is off the scale.’

He saw the look on my face. ‘How well do you remember high-school chemistry?’

I shook my head. ‘Bad teacher.’

‘Methane is the main ingredient in natural gas, like you probably use for cooking back home. Governments want you to believe it’s a clean fuel – which it is, next to coal or oil. Burning methane produces carbon dioxide – CO2, climate enemy number one – but not as much as the other fuels.’

‘Is this relevant?’

‘But methane is a greenhouse gas in its own right also. It traps heat sixty times more efficiently than CO2. Now, there’s not so much methane in the atmosphere as CO2, and it doesn’t last so long, so it doesn’t get the bad headlines. But if we emit too much of it, we’ll all fry.’

‘And Martin found the level is going up?’

‘
I
found the level is going up,’ he corrected me. ‘I showed the results to Martin to get his opinion. If I was going to publish data that far off the curve, I needed to be sure it was right. And I also needed to make a guess where it was coming from.’

I nodded, to show that I followed.

‘Normally, methane is created by bacteria working in warm dark places. Swamps and intestines are two of the better-known culprits.’ He gestured out the window. ‘Not a lot of swamps on Utgard. And even if the Platform stinks when Danny cooks beans, we don’t fart that much. So what was making the readings go crazy?’

‘Am I supposed to guess?’

‘Have you ever heard of methane clathrate? It’s methane that’s trapped in a lattice of ice crystals – so much that if you get a piece, you can literally set the ice on fire. It needs to be kept cold and under pressure, so the bottom of the Arctic Ocean suits it fine. There’s probably more methane in clathrates in the seabed than all the other fossil fuels on earth put together. And if the sea warms up, then the ice melts and all that methane trapped inside squirts up into the atmosphere.’

‘So that’s what was happening?’

‘That was my hypothesis. Well, the ocean
is
warming, and some of the gas
is
coming up. There are known methane plumes off the west coast of Svalbard, not so far from here. But Svalbard’s atypical – it’s warmed by the Gulf Stream. If I could show it was happening this far north, that would be big news.’

We seemed to have drifted a long way from the point of discussion. ‘What did Martin say?’

The look on Fridge’s face said I’d hit the mark. ‘He told me a secret. He said DAR-X had asked him to examine some water samples. I didn’t know. Some bug was corroding their equipment, they thought a microbiologist could help – and somewhere in the process he found out what’s really going on at Echo Bay.’

‘Aren’t they drilling for oil?’

‘That’s what they tell people. In reality, they’re trying to mine methane clathrate. The methane I detected was coming from their well.’

‘And Hagger told you that?’

‘I wrote it all up. Some of the best work I ever did. If DAR-X pull this off, every oil and gas company in the world is going to come here. They’ve spent twenty years in Alaska trying to get into the ANWR wildlife reserve – here, there’s twice as much gas and nothing to stop them. But if one well can leak enough methane to skew the data, think what a thousand of them will do. I had to tell the world.

‘Then Quam brought me into his office. He’d found out what I was doing; he forbade me from publishing.’

‘
Forbade
you?’

‘What Hagger had told me was commercially sensitive information. When DAR-X brought Hagger in, they insisted on a non-disclosure agreement. Except they didn’t get it from Hagger: Quam signed it on behalf of the whole of Zodiac. If I published, DAR-X could sue and have everything shut down. Not only that, the contract said we’d be personally liable. Maybe that wouldn’t have held up in court – but you can be damn sure it would cost a lot to find out. You think an oil company’s going to run out of money before a bunch of scientists do?’

From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a movement outside the window. Probably someone going to check a reading – but just then I was ready to suspect anything.

‘You know what “clathrate” means? “Cage” – from the Latin. The ice structure forms a cage around the methane molecules. Well, Hagger had me caged up good. I withdrew the paper and I sat on the data.’

‘You must have been pretty furious with Hagger.’

Fridge laughed – a bleak, cold sound in that bleak, cold room.