Carbide Tipped Pens

by Ben Bova

  In “Snows of Yesteryear” Jean-Louis Trudel shows a gamut of human reactions to this ongoing climate shift, from scholarly curiosity to corporate greed, from the desire to save humankind from the approaching catastrophe to the yearning to use the changes on Earth to help make the planet Mars habitable for humans.

  That is what science fiction does best: examining the present by casting its shadow against the possibilities of the future.

  * * *

  Northern Kujalleq Mountains

  What would they do without the guy from Northern Ontario? Paul’s thoughts were stuck in a loop. The same question was popping up every few seconds, probably because his leg muscles were gobbling up most of his body’s oxygen. His brain just couldn’t phrase a proper answer when the cold September wind was freezing his cheekbones, his breath burned in his throat, and his legs drove him up the snowy slope. The bag with the medikit seemed to grow heavier with every step. Soon, it would drag him all the way back down the mountain.

  What would they do without the guy from Northern Ontario? The others had nominated him on the spot. Sure, send Paul, he’s Canadian, he knows how to ski! Yeah, and he likes to play in the snow too. In the end, Francine had looked at him with those big, dark eyes of hers, and he’d been unable to say no.

  He couldn’t complain, not really. The Martian Underground had had its pick of young bacteriologists, but they wanted the one with actual winter experience. The guy from Northern Ontario. He’d said yes, to the job in Greenland and to the rescue mission.

  Even with lightweight snowshoes, he sank a bit in the fresh snow as he leaned into the climb. Tomorrow, his muscles would ache. They didn’t use to, not when he snowshoed through the woods of Killarney Park or skied cross-country in the hills outside Sudbury. But he was almost thirty and he’d spent more time in the lab lately than in the field.

  He did wonder how the Old Man had fared coming out this way. He must have taken the long way around, down to Narsarsuaq, and then down the coast, skirting the fjord, until he could walk up the valley formerly occupied by the Ikersuaq glacier. Four days at least. A long hike, but not a hard one even for Professor Emeritus Donald B. Hall, who was so old he remembered the twentieth century. Very little of it, actually, but enough to spin unlikely stories that entranced his graduate students.

  Early on, Paul had looked up some history sites and decided Old Man Hall was repeating tales he’d heard from his own teachers. Passing joints at a Beatles concert? Flying to Berlin to help tear down the Wall? His date of birth was confidential, but he couldn’t be that old, even with stem cell therapies.

  Not that he was going to get the chance to beat any records if Paul didn’t reach him in time. Every time Paul looked back, the Sun seemed closer to the horizon. He only stopped once, to catch his breath. If he saved the Old Man’s life, he swore he would get the truth out of him about the one story he’d never managed to disprove or disbelieve.

  His heart pumping, Paul started to climb again. He still found patches of snow to plant his snowshoes in, but he was nearing the windswept summit. Sometimes, the synthetic treads clanked and slipped on the bare rock, and he lost his balance for a second, his arms windmilling.

  He was pondering whether or not to take off the snowshoes and rely on his boots the rest of the way when he saw the sign.

  PRIVATE PROPERTY.

  Paul frowned, worry fighting it out with disgust. The valley floor had been buried under the ice for millennia, and it had remained so well into the twenty-first century. And now, as stunted trees grew among the glacier rubble, it had already been claimed by outside interests. The sign was labeled in English, not in Kalaallisut or Danish. A number in a corner identified one of the companies owned by the Consortium that ran the seaports catering to the trans-Arctic trade.

  Despite the sign, the new owners probably hadn’t bothered with a full surveillance grid. Otherwise, the Old Man would already have been picked up, flown to a hospital, and fined.

  Paul should be safe as well from prying eyes. Beyond the sign, the peak was in sight. After putting away his snowshoes, the bacteriologist clambered up the last few meters and mounted a small repeater on top of a telescopic pole. He wedged the pole into place with a few rocks. The small device hunted around for a few seconds and then locked on the signal of its companion a couple of kilometers away, within sight of the Martian Underground base camp.

  “I’m at the boundary,” Paul rasped into his mike. “A bit past it, in fact. I’ll be starting the downhill leg now.”

  “We’re here if you need us,” answered the sweet voice of Francine. “You’re running behind schedule, but just be careful.”

  “I intend to.”

  “And, Paul,” cut in the voice of the director, “try and find out why Professor Hall ended up where he did.”

  “I definitely intend to.”

  “I know he left before you announced your latest results, but if this was all a ruse to allow him to rendezvous with outsiders…”

  “I don’t see how he could have known before me, or swiped a DNA sample. But I’ll ask.”

  He strapped on his skis and launched a small drone to act as an extra pair of eyes for him. As he set off, the drone’s-eye view was relayed to his ski goggles and helped him avoid several, literal dead ends. Slopes leading to unseen cliffs, rocks hiding around a curve, and other places where he would have ended up dead. Though his exposed skin stung from the wind chill, he enjoyed the descent along the slope of new powder, its blank whiteness marred only by animal tracks. A slope never skied before.

  Mid-September wasn’t supposed to be this cold in southern Greenland. Yet, temperatures had dipped as they once did in the twentieth century and preserved a couple of recent snowfalls. In Sudbury, Paul had played in snowdrifts that were much thicker when his mother sent him outside because she didn’t want to see him at home. He looked too much like his father and she didn’t care for the constant reminder. So, yeah, he really liked the snow. It had done such a great job of replacing the home he couldn’t have.

  The local forecast wasn’t calling for more, but Paul tracked warily the oncoming cloud banks, massed so thickly over Niviarsiat Mountain that they threatened to blot out the late-afternoon sun.

  The Old Man’s camp was putting out an intermittent signal, just strong enough to reach his drone still circling above the valley. By the time Paul was halfway down the mountain, he knew in which direction he would have to head. Toward the ice dam and the lake.

  It was almost dark when he found the tent. It was white, propped up by a glacial erratic, and set in the middle of an expanse of fresh snow. Perfectly camouflaged.

  “Professor Hall?” Paul called, his voice reduced to a hoarse croak.

  “Don’t bother knocking.”

  Hall was lying on an air mattress, bundled up in a sleeping bag. Prompted by the voice in his earbud, Paul hastened to check the Old Man’s vital signs.

  “His temperature is slightly elevated.”

  “Perfectly normal for a fracture. Carry on. Anything else?”

  The professor endured Paul’s amateurish inspection without a complaint. He unzipped the sleeping bag himself, revealing his bare legs. A large, purplish swelling ran around the middle of his left shin. The skin was mottled and bruised, but unbroken. Paul swept his phone, set for close focus, over most of the injury.

  The base camp’s doctor did not hide her relief.

  “Not an open break, then. This will make things easier. Give him painkiller number four and take a breather. Do not try moving him or putting on the exolegs for another fifteen minutes at least.”

  Paul took out the hypo from the medikit and loaded the designated ampoule. As soon as the painkiller hit the Old Man’s bloodstream, a couple of deeply etched lines on his face relaxed and vanished.

  The bacteriologist settled down on the tent’s only stool. He was breathing more easily, but his shoulders felt like tenderized meat. When he undressed to put on a dry shirt, he found that the skin chafed
by the pack’s shoulder straps had turned an angry red.

  “So, what was so urgent?” he asked. “I thought you were dying.”

  “I may have exaggerated slightly the gravity of my condition.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it wasn’t a secure link. However, I assume you’ve set up a secure line of relays, as I asked.”

  “As secure as we could make it, using the same repeaters we use in our glacier tunnels. Narrow beams once the lock is made.”

  “Good boy.”

  “Well, tell me now, why couldn’t Francine just fly in with the chopper to get you?”

  “Any craft big enough to take both of us out of here would have been detected.”

  “I could have died out there on the mountain, professor. Were you that afraid of being busted for trespassing?”

  Hall responded by pointing his phone at the tent wall. A low-resolution video played on the billowing canvas. The first pictures were blurry, but they seemed to show a small, ground-hugging plane, its wings flapping occasionally to detour around a rocky outcrop. It flew above the shadowed southern valley flank, heading straight for the ice dam, and stopped so suddenly that it dropped out of the screen.

  “I thought it had crashed. So, I sent up my emergency drone to see if the flyer needed any help. But you know what they say about good deeds…”

  Wormhole Base, Northern Greenland

  The ice was a creaking, shifting presence. Dylan didn’t like to dwell on the audible reminders that a substance so hard could be so dynamic that it would slowly fill any tunnel bored through it, given time.

  “Was this part of the American base?” Kubota asked.

  The businessman from somewhere in Asia—the name sounded Japanese to Dylan, but he hadn’t inquired—was casting eager looks at the mechanical debris mixed in with the icy rubble left along the foot of the newly carved wall. Dylan hurried him along and opted for enough of an explanation to keep him happy.

  “In a sense, yes. The Americans were thought to have cleaned out all of Project Iceworm’s stuff when they left, back in 1966, but we’re still finding their scraps. Looks like they just didn’t bother dragging out various pieces of broken-down machinery or equipment. We’ve also come across furniture and remnants of the theater. Or perhaps it was the church. Everything got trapped inside the ice sheet when it closed in.”

  “So then, this tunnel isn’t one of the original diggings?”

  “No.”

  “Did you find any missiles?”

  Dylan glanced at Kubota without managing to spot the twinkle in his eye that had to be there.

  “No,” he said curtly. “And the nuclear reactor was decommissioned and removed.”

  “Good. So then, this is a safe place.”

  Maybe he was radiation-shy. Given the effects of the Taiwan nuclear exchange on the entire region he came from, that wouldn’t be surprising.

  “The safest,” Dylan confirmed. “Part of the Consortium’s cover here is the Extragalactic Neutrino Observatory. The deep ice is clean enough for Cerenkov radiation to shine through quite a large volume. Not as good as in Antarctica, but at least we’re looking in the opposite direction. The detectors point down, of course, to use the Earth itself as a gigantic shield and filter, but they’re also protected to some extent by the bulk of the ice over them. We’re not as far down, with only ninety meters of ice above us, but it’s still a nicely rad-free environment.”

  “A one-time creation.”

  “The whole point,” Dylan agreed.

  The Consortium offered visitors with a need for utmost confidentiality the most private facilities ever built. Every meeting room was freshly dug out of millennia-old ice. The only manufactured objects brought in—chairs, tables, infrared lamps—were so basic as to be easily searched for even nanotech bugs. Nobody else had used a given room before and nobody else would afterward.

  This time, the Consortium itself had called the meeting. Secrecy would be absolute. Dylan had heard that all of the furniture would be made of particle board produced on the premises with lumber harvested from a submerged forest in an African lake. The whole idea being that no hidden transmitter or recorder could have been included decades ago within the trunks of a soon-to-be-drowned grove, or would have survived the chipping process … Dylan could think of a few flaws with this assumption, but as long as it served its purpose of setting suspicious minds at ease, he wouldn’t quibble.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  Kubota went in first and Dylan followed, finding his way to the side of Brian McGuire. As head manager of the local Consortium office, McGuire would chair the meeting. As the brightest of the bright young interns, Dylan would supply specifics if required.

  The room was large and freezing cold until one entered the enchanted ring of infrared lamps.

  The tables were set in a hollow square, with enough seating for twenty people: an eclectic mix of owners, executives, and highly trusted assistants.

  “No names,” McGuire announced in a booming voice. “Names are too easy to remember. Faces just slip away. Or change.”

  Not that individual names really mattered. The only names that counted were displayed on yellow cardboard squares and they identified the companies or industrial concerns represented by the people around the table.

  “Notes?” asked a woman with a slight Scandinavian accent.

  “You may use papers or internal electronics. If you managed to sneak in any external electronics, my congratulations to your technical staff, but you’ll still have to sneak them out and their contents will have to survive a low-level electromagnetic pulse.”

  The woman nodded. McGuire added:

  “At the end of the meeting, I will offer a road map, boiled down to six main points. We worded them to be easy to memorize. In many instances, details will come later. We are here to ask and to answer questions. If the answers aren’t satisfactory, we won’t go forward. But I truly believe that we are standing on the ground floor of something big.”

  Heads nodded. The Consortium had already proved it could place big bets when it had built up Qaqortoq from a sleepy fishing village into a major port for container ships coming or going from Asia, Europe, or North America, and needing to swap containers before heading to their ultimate destination. In the broader context, Wormhole Base was a side-project catering to a few thousand people a year though it also served to demonstrate the Consortium’s commitment to Greenland. But McGuire was willing to go slow and build his case first.

  “Global warming is the new industrial frontier. Mitigation and adaptation are already huge, and are going to become even huger. We’ll have to beat back deserts, move cities to higher ground, and re-create whole new species.”

  “I thought the Loaves and Fishes group was cornering the market for new heat-tolerant crops and pollution-resistant fish,” said an older man whose spot at the table bore the name of a well-known Canadian nanotech company.

  “Perhaps, but they’re not turning a profit,” Dylan objected.

  McGuire threw him a menacing look, but his voice remained smooth and practiced as he ignored the double interruption.

  “Everybody here has a finger in the pie, and a stake in the result, but we want more. Greenland is the first new piece of prime real estate completely up for grabs since humans arrived in North America—unless that first wave actually beat the one that went to Australia.”

  “Rather barren real estate.”

  “It’ll get better.”

  “And not entirely deserted.”

  “The current population is just hanging off the edges of the landmass, so it will only be a factor if we let it. Our new facilities have attracted so many immigrants that they’re swamping the locals. One way or another, we don’t expect the Nuuk government to be a worry.”

  The man identified as Toluca nodded, apparently willing to concede the point. His own face bore a distant family resemblance to that of the Greenland Inuit.

  “As part of your inv
itation, we included a topographic map of Greenland without the ice sheet,” McGuire added. “It must have struck you, looking at the map, that there are only a few major glacial outlets. Plug them up and the Greenland ice sheet will no longer contribute anything to sea level rise.”

  There were blank looks all around the table. Preventing sea level rise was not an obvious source of profits. Saving the world would have to yield dividends to catch this group’s attention.

  “Where will the water go?”

  “Nowhere. It’ll stay where it is. Part of Greenland lies below sea level. Up to three hundred meters. The central part of the continent can easily contain a major inland sea.”

  “Isn’t the crust depressed under the weight of all that ice? Won’t it rebound?”

  The woman from Scandinavia probably knew something about post-glacial rebound. Dylan looked expectantly at McGuire, but the Consortium manager did not need to consult his assistant.

  “Come on, think! If the water is contained when the ice melts, it won’t go anywhere. The overburden remains nearly the same. The meltwater will be quite sufficient to prevent isostatic rebound.”

  The woman did not yield as easily as Toluca and probed further.

  “I did look at the map. The central ice sheet is over three kilometers high; most of the surrounding mountains are no more than hills. The peaks reach up to two kilometers on the eastern coast, but most of the western hills are only half a kilometer high. Even if you could turn most of central Greenland into an enclosed basin, something like half the ice is still going to melt and add to sea level rise.”

  “Half is better than none. And the half flowing out can be turned to good use.”

  “Such as?”

  “No mean bonus. If you plug the outlets and water rises behind the walls, we will be able to use some of it to power hydroelectric plants.”