Ice Age

by Brian Freemantle

  The entire side of the mountain, for as high up the cliff as they could see and for more than a hundred metres across, had simply split away to create the unstable rock and boulderstrewn scree. In doing so it had exposed, as the facade of a completely furnished and occupied dolls’ house is exposed when its side is opened, at least two cave tunnels and the beginning of a third connecting high-ceilinged, intermittent chambers in each of which there were easily visible perfectly preserved figures in what had once been their cave homes.

  The whispered disbelief of the deeply devout Gregori Lyalin was picked up and relayed over their headset links. ‘It’s a miracle of God that we are being allowed to see such a thing.’

  ‘Let’s hope these can rise again like Lazarus, at least for us to learn what they died from,’ said the more practical and agnostic Peter Reynell.

  The desperation to catch up or draw level in the first twenty-four hours after the American president’s revelation was like a lemming rush in reverse and Henry Partington felt himself close to being obliterated in the dust cloud of the stampede.

  In his own desperation to match the British Foreign Secretary’s assertion of an English medical breakthrough, Partington too quickly had Boddington disclose that Jack Stoddart was among the Siberian group, but it was Darryl Matthews – deciding with a quickly agreeing Harold Norris against their own personal experience becoming known – who just as swiftly leaked through the United Nations environmental division that Stoddart was an Antarctic disaster survivor. The instant media interpretation was that Stoddart – whose White House declaration was re-run – was knowingly risking death for the second time to discover the cause of the ageing illness. The overwhelmed Partington’s knee-jerk reaction was to announce a $500,000 compensation package for the relatives of the dead Americans as well as an airlift of all American personnel from McMurdo after their having been quaratined and medically declared free of infection. He followed that with a demand to Congress for a budgetary allocation of one hundred million dollars.

  Moscow’s overnight response to the exploding furore was to release every available detail – which wasn’t a lot – of the Lake Baikal discovery as well as the Iultin catastrophe, reveal that the Russian science minister as well as the country’s famed virologist were in Siberia and to promise that travel permission to the site for the three hundred television, radio and print applications that were received in the space of four hours would be considered as soon as it had been possible to speak to Gregori Lyalin.

  After he was identified on French television, live from Washington, as a member of the political crisis group, the world media descent upon Gerard Buchemin was so enormous that he was forced to take refuge in the French embassy. It was there that he named Guy Dupuy as one of the Siberian group at a hurriedly convened press conference at which he was panicked and confused by journalists posing questions as intended headlines or sound bites and provided, not just far more medical detail than had so far been given, but in far too hysterically dramatic a manner. People of thirty years old became eighty overnight. Irreversible death occurred in days. Bones melted. Organs died, progressively, unstoppably. It was a pandemic worse than AIDS. A blacker than Black Death.

  It was largely the Domesday pronouncements of Gerard Buchemin, a supposedly responsible minister of the French government, that led to the United Nation’s Secretary-General announcing an emergency General Assembly debate to formulate an international response. Before which he was asking member countries to provide immediate finance and aid agency personnel to work under the co-ordinating aegis of the UN. A belated, half-thought-out hint that armed forces might be necessary to keep civil order was a far too exaggerated suggestion which did nothing to allay the hysteria and everything to feed it.

  The World Health Organization, from its Geneva headquarters, announced within those first twenty-four hours that it was monitoring worldwide the outbreaks of the ageing illness at the same time as estimating, from the information so far and so rapidly accumulated, a death toll of 25,000, with the possibility of it being twice as high as that. Any true figure would be impossible until sufficient diagnostic information was made available for doctors and medical services properly to recognize the illness.

  And Simon Buxton conducted the inquest upon his own political mortality.

  ‘How many are still loyal?’

  ‘I’m guessing at forty but some of those might haemorrhage away in the next few days,’ said William Dempsey, the party chairman.

  Buxton winced. ‘What about the cabinet?’

  ‘No more than four.’

  ‘Bastards!’ exclaimed Buxton. ‘I never expected to get ambushed during Question Time by members of my own party! And Prendergast is the biggest bastard of all.’

  ‘I checked. He was on the phone to Washington only five minutes before coming into the chamber. And he says he tried to tell you but you didn’t hear.’

  ‘Conniving liar,’ accused Buxton again. ‘It’s Ranleigh, obviously.’

  ‘Sees himself as the surrogate premier,’ agreed Dempsey.

  ‘When do you think Reynell will openly declare?’

  The other man shrugged. ‘Any time. It’s going to be a hell of a re-emergence, isn’t it: out of the wastes of Siberia, where he’s risked life and limb returning to pre-historic times! Today’s papers are already making the Wellington and Churchill comparisons.’

  ‘I know what today’s papers are saying,’ said Buxton, testily. He was silent for several moments. ‘Have I got anything to fight with?’

  ‘No,’ said Dempsey, honestly.

  ‘I deserve more loyalty than this!’ declared Buxton.

  Dempsey didn’t reply because he didn’t believe Buxton did. He was disappointed he hadn’t already had an approach from Ranleigh.

  ‘I don’t want to be humiliated,’ insisted Buxton. ‘I want to go with some honour intact.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You know what I hope?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Reynell catches whatever the hell this thing is. Catches it and dies.’

  It was an enormous pity, reflected Dempsey, that there were only the two of them in the prime minister’s office, which would make him the too easily identifiable source if he leaked that remark. It was something Ranleigh’s group could have made good use of.

  Lyudmilla Vlasov led, knowing the way from before, followed by the two entomologists carrying slide cases. Raisa Orlov had forced herself next into the line. They kept to the very edge of the scree but it was still unstable, first one of the entomologists and then Raisa stumbling to create a small rock slide. Geraldine was unbalanced by the weight of her case and the flashlight dangling from her other wrist and once almost fell more heavily than the other two. There was no positive entrance to the cave complex – that was obviously still hidden somewhere in the part of the cliff that hadn’t broken away – so Lyudmilla approached the lowest part of the first tunnel in the cut-away facade. One of the entomologists clambered in first, needing to lever himself up and then kneel, to swivel his body in. Obedient to Stoddart’s translated instructions, the man examined the knee and shin part of his suit to ensure it was undamaged and Lyudmilla, at whose eye level the man’s legs were, double checked. With someone inside offering a hand it was easier for the rest to get in.

  Lyudmilla said: ‘We’ve literally stepped back millions of years.’

  Twenty-Seven

  But no one moved, wanting someone else to take that first step.

  Finally Geraldine forced herself, aware of the tremble in her voice as she said: ‘We all of us know what we’re here to find; let’s keep talking to each other. We’ve got to decide whether there’s any point in us being here or whether this comes down to Lyudmilla’s unbelievable lucky break.’

  Without the outside perspective of the dolls’ house facade, she needed to orientate herself to remember the direction of the first corpse-occupied chamber – realizing that to Stoddart and the outside astronaut-suited a
udience they would appear a moving, living tableau against a background of the dead – and set out positively to her right, in her absolute concentration driving from her mind everything but her surroundings and what she hoped to learn from them.

  Her illogical impression was that as living accommodation it was filthy. The height of the open-sided corridor she was traversing was far lower than it had appeared from outside and Geraldine had to bend, which by lowering her head concentrated her vizor-limited vision upon the ground directly in front of her. There was, in rare places, a hard and clean rock floor but more often the surface was littered not just by understandable rock shards and stones but by clean-picked but discarded bones and twigs and plant stems and leaves and what, astonishingly, looked like corn husks and straw stalks. Everything was sheened with ice. At one point she bent even closer to confirm a cluster of fruit stones. She might have missed the faeces if the first and then several turds to follow hadn’t been trodden upon, at least three of which even more astonishingly still held the frozen imprint of the careless or uncaring foot that had made it. There were a lot of fish bones. Following her own suggestion she relayed the finds and asked Vladmimir Bobin or Lyudmilla if the specimen-prepared entomologists had sufficient containers to go beyond their insect gathering to pouch the dropped bones, plant debris and dung. There was a spurt of Russian before Lyudmilla’s translation, that they thought they had. She added that she was following Geraldine. The institute director and one of the entomologists had split from Raisa, the Frenchman and the other insect specialist, although both groups were initially moving off in the opposite direction. At once Raisa reported that they’d found a shaft apparently leading deeper into the mountain and she and the two men were following it.

  Geraldine couldn’t remember seeing from the outside the first belling out of the tunnel to which she came, although it was still insufficient to be a habitable cave or cavern. Its importance, Geraldine felt, was the few although comparatively orderly arranged straw stalks and seed husk strands, as well as a separate pile of berries which she could not immediately identify. Just beyond, there were more turds and then, abruptly and surprising because again it hadn’t been obvious from outside, the perfectly preserved body of a large animal, most obviously wolf-like but hugely furred, its tangled coat so long it came more than halfway down its legs. It had frozen to fix the grimace with which it had died, exposing extraordinarily long-toothed incisors halfway along its overlapped jaw. Geraldine was sure the black spots in its matted fur were insects and said so, to alert the entomologists.

  Raisa responded at once that the scientist with her had already collected some from an animal they’d discovered with five dead adults and two dead children, in an inhabited chamber. Raisa actually described the animal as a wolf, and also thought a lot of the bones came from fish. The adults were visibly aged, similar to their modern victims. The children, one maybe six, the other younger, perhaps five, were emaciated but unmarked by any sign of premature ageing.

  Bobin’s voice crackled over their communication system, warning of splits and gaps in the rock floor.

  Geraldine moved further along the corridor, jumping at Lyudmilla’s voice that she was directly behind now, but stopping to look at the animal. Geraldine promised to wait at the first chamber. When she reached it she recognized at once that the impression from outside was misleading. At least half the cavern was still hidden by its rock wall and too dark to see by natural light and she needed the flashlight which until now had been an encumbrance. The projecting wall shielded her from the near gale but the coldness of the cave permeated the windproofed protective suit.

  There were five adults, three men and two women, and three children, the youngest little more than a baby of perhaps two, the eldest possibly seven, although she didn’t try to guess an age. The division was virtually the same as Raisa reported, the adults very obviously and visibly old, the children skeletal from starvation. Closer, she saw – briefly revulsed – that the eldest child had died against the body of another long-haired animal; sinews and flesh of its rear left leg were exposed where the children had gnawed at it.

  All the adults – and the children – were heavily haired, even the women with a matted covering over their breasts and all of them with pubic growth that began at their navels and extended down their thighs almost to their knees. At its thickest, around the pubis, their genitalia were virtually concealed. Only the childrens’ retained its brown colour. All the head, beard and body hair of the adults was grey or white and two of the men were bald. One of the women had died and frozen squatted in a remarkably similar position to George Bedall, in the Antarctic station.

  They were all naked and there was no evidence of clothes although two of the men and one of the women had died lying on or beneath skins of a slightly shorter-coated animal than the two so far found inside the colony. There was also a lot of grass stalks and straw around the bodies: the baby appeared to be lying on a bed of dried grasses. Again there were a lot of fish remains.

  Geraldine turned, attracted by the movement of Lyudmilla entering the chamber. When the Russian spoke her voice was thin with disbelief. There hasn’t ever been an anthropological discovery like this. I don’t know where to begin. How to begin.’

  Into their helmets Bobin said: ‘Scientifically, this is phenomenal.’

  Geraldine looked down at her case, which she’d rested on the floor. She had come ill equipped by preconceived expectations and wasn’t sure what she was going to be able to do or achieve on this first visit. Actually kneeling to get closer to one of the dead adult males – for the first time aware of the milky opaqueness of blindness behind half-closed lids – she tested the right arm and found it solidly rigid, quickly stopping to avoid snapping the frozen limb from the body. She’d tested by putting pressure against the claw-fingered hand and noticed at once a thick crust of filth beneath the taloned nails. She took a sharp-pointed probe from her case and tried to prise some of the nail debris into a specimen bag.

  Lyudmilla, who’d moved further into the darkest part of the chamber, saw what Geraldine was doing and said: ‘We’re going to be here for days … weeks …’ and Geradine wished her group had the luxury of time.

  What she managed to dislodge from beneath fingers that were concretely frozen was scarcely sufficient to be considered a specimen, as it was from a woman and another male. Geraldine took a scalpel from her box and tried to pare away finger and toenail samples but the bone was so frozen it shattered under pressure, although the debris was still worth putting into a glassine envelope. She didn’t bother for skin scrapes. Hair strands deep frozen over hundreds of thousands of years snapped off, like dried twigs, under the slightest pressure.

  Geraldine confronted the fact that there was nothing practical – nothing here, cast back as she was into a prehistoric time warp – she could do to advance her own individual science. Lyudmilla was moving around the cave, gently but meticulously exploring, lifting but not moving, making self-absorbed sounds to herself.

  ‘Incredible!’ said the still awed Russian anthropologist.

  ‘Tell me how,’ encouraged Geraldine. There might be something important to Lyudmilla’s specific expertise that she could pick up on. Touched by the disbelief of the other woman, Geraldine acknowledged the wonderment of being a scientific fact-and-rule realist who disdained miracles, suddenly finding herself in a miraculous situation.

  ‘Definitely not Neanderthal,’ determined the Russian. ‘Early Neolithic’

  So the genetic coding should be the same as the other victims, snatched Geraldine, at once. ‘You’re positive?’

  ‘Sufficiently, from what I can see,’ said Lyudmilla. ‘We’ve got domesticated dogs, which is Neothilic. An established, tribal community. That fits—’ She pointed to a recess that Geraldine couldn’t properly see. ‘There’s more grass and straw and berry pips. That’s positive storage: a prehistoric larder …!’ Lyudmilla reached the furthest edge of the cave, from where a tunnel led deeper into
the mountain. She turned and came back. ‘No fire or evidence of burning: not in this chamber, anyway. That’s consistent. No clothes, as such. Wearing or covering themselves with skins would have been for warmth, not dignity. And there should be … ah …!’ She reached into a fissure in the rock wall. ‘Here we are—’ She offered what appeared to be a handful of thin, much curled and distorted sticks. ‘Pieces of creeper or stalks, malleable enough when they aren’t frozen solid like this to be ties, binding the straw around their legs unprotected by the animal skins.’ She knelt, fingering the partially covered man Geraldine had already tried to examine. ‘There’ll be tools somewhere, for them to have skinned as well as this There was another satisfied exclamation. ‘We’re looking at the head of the family … maybe even the head of the colony. Here’s his authority …’ From beneath the animal skin blanket Lyudmilla produced a wooden spear shaft approximately five foot long, with an instantly recognizable triangular shaped flint tip bound into place by the sort of thong she’d found earlier. Still more in conversation with herself, the Russian woman continued: ‘But that isn’t all there should be, so …? And here it is …!’ Smiling triumphantly she produced from beneath the skin another matching wooden length, this one with a grooved notch where the previous one had the flint tip. For Geraldine’s benefit, Lyudmilla stood and fitted the blunt end of the spear into the notch. ‘This is the very later Palaeolithic, early Neolithic equivalent of the Smart Bomb.’ She used the notch as the fulcrum against which to open and close both pieces like a set of jaws. ‘They held the spear in one hand, to direct it, and the throwing stick in the other to propel it. Using it like that, as a lever, they got at least twice as much velocity and distance as they would throwing it in what’s today regarded as the conventional over-arm, spear hurling way.’ She jerked the notched stick towards the long-haired, partially gnawed dog. ‘And they needed as much force as they could get to penetrate that amount of fur and bring their quarry down … And more!’ she announced, holding up something Geraldine at first couldn’t identify. ‘Hooks, to catch their fish. Fashioned from fish bones themselves. We might even find the hair weave they’d have used for a line …’