by Paul Briggs
The other two-person team was asleep right now. One of the perks of working in the Arctic in the summer was that there was no need for everyone to wake up and go to sleep at the same time. It was much more efficient to do everything in shifts, taking full advantage of the twenty-four-hour daylight.
Isabel had assured everyone that she was perfectly capable of doing the job on her own. What she didn’t say was that she liked it better that way, because (a) the buoy was only barely large enough for one, and (b) Brad seemed to be incapable of being within ten feet of a woman and not trying to hit on her. (That was an odd phrase for it—“hit on”—but at moments like those, when you were close enough to smell a guy’s breath and he just wouldn’t let up and wouldn’t take a hint and his eyes kept drifting all over your erogenous zones, it did start to feel like a kind of violence. Especially when you, unlike him, were trying to concentrate on your work and not let your hands get anywhere they could be damaged.)
Isabel was a good swimmer, and the water right here was over fifty degrees Fahrenheit, nothing her wetsuit couldn’t handle. (And not what anyone thought of as normal for the Arctic, which was part of the reason they were here. Further north it was actually much warmer.) So the Kotick’s pilot had agreed to keep the ship a few yards away so as not to risk any other accidents. Since then the constant wind had pushed the boat a little farther away than they’d intended, but she could still swim it easily.
Nikki Erhardt, the videographer for this little expedition, was supposed to be out on the deck watching Isabel work. But when last seen, she had been going back inside. Possibly she was bored, or had work to do, or unlike Brad took no great pleasure in staring endlessly at Isabel’s neoprene-wrapped body. Or perhaps, like most people, she just trusted Isabel to look after herself.
The salinometer looked like a large syringe on the end of a robot arm. It had to take a small sample of the water to test it. The arm was all right, and the connection to the solar panel was intact, but the salinometer hadn’t sent any data in two weeks. So Isabel had taken it apart and was squatting on her hands and knees, with her back turned to the south to keep the wind out of her face, trying to work out what the problem was without letting any of the important parts fall overboard.
As best Isabel could tell, looking at it under these awkward conditions, the problem was the seal between the pipette and the pump. When the arm stuck the end of the pipette in the water, the pump was supposed to suck the water up the length of the pipette to the electrodes. Then the arm would lift the pipette out of the water, the electrodes would measure the water’s conductivity, and the pump would use a stream of air to squirt the water out so as not to contaminate the next sample. But if the rubber gasket that connected the pipette to the pump was damaged or misaligned, it would be like trying to drink through a straw that had holes in the sides. Nothing would happen.
Isabel had to examine it with a penlight to be sure, but she finally spotted some corrosion on the inside of the gasket. Fortunately, she had a spare in her kit. She took it out, then turned around to reach for the pipette, which had rolled somewhere behind her.
That was when she saw the polar bear. It was a streamlined white shape just under the surface, water rippling over its back and head as it swam toward her, its path straight as the wake of a torpedo. Isabel had no idea what had driven it to swim out this far in the first place, but while she had been concentrating on fixing the salinometer, the bear had been dog-paddling in her direction while staring at her hindquarters with a fixation that even Brad would have said was a little too low-class.
Over the course of the past three years, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the polar bear—like Isabel herself at this particular moment—had gone from “vulnerable” to “endangered.” The northern population, accustomed to having good solid platforms of ice to hunt seals and beluga whales from, was worst off. Many of them had lost whatever fear of humans they’d had—in Barrow, on her way to the dock to join the crew of the Kotick, someone had gotten way too much enjoyment out of telling Isabel the story of a local man who had been cornered in his truck, killed, and partly eaten by a polar bear, three days earlier. “If the strap from the rifle hadn’t got caught on the gearshift, he’d still be alive today.”
For a moment, Isabel froze in place, staring, unable to move or turn away. Then the bear’s head emerged from the water. It reminded her, strangely, of a gigantic white retriever—almost like Major, paddling back to Pop with a fat duck or goose in its jaws. It was looking right at her. There was a tag in its ear—it must have encountered humans before. There was nothing Isabel could read in its expression other than a simple, happy eagerness. (According to Isabel’s friend in Barrow, a polar bear could put away up to one hundred fifty pounds at one sitting. Coincidentally, that was just about how much Isabel weighed minus the bigger chunks of bone.)
Isabel had already dropped everything, launched herself into the water and started doing the front crawl back to the boat by the time she thought to ask herself if this was the best way to escape. Then she decided that it was. Better than calling the pilot and hoping he could get the boat started in time to come back and get her. Especially since she could swim two and a half knots, which was already half the Kotick’s cruising speed. No doubt the bear could swim faster, but she had a head start and it wasn’t that far to the boat.
She didn’t look back. She was already swimming as fast as she knew how, and looking back would have slowed her down. If the bear caught up with her before she reached it, she’d know right away without having to see it.
There was a rope ladder from the deck to the surface. Isabel grabbed the lowest rung and scrambled up it. Once she had her feet on the deck, she turned and started pulling up the ladder.
And then it got yanked down hard, so violently that if Isabel hadn’t let go right away, she would have been pulled over the side. The boat tilted, slightly but suddenly.
Isabel turned and ran for the door to the cockpit. She wasn’t a natural sprinter, but she was feeling highly motivated right now. She didn’t know if the bear could climb the ladder, but if it could, she had even less chance of outrunning it than outswimming it.
She almost tripped over her own feet going down the half-dozen stairs to the cockpit door. Just as she reached the door, it opened, and Nikki stepped out. Isabel shoved her back through and slammed the door behind them. She locked it just in time to hear the crash of the bear’s shoulder against the door.
Dr. Vohringer, the head of the expedition, was in the cockpit along with Estebán Basco, the pilot. All of them had gotten up and were staring, paralyzed with fear, at the bear.
Isabel elbowed her way past them. There was a tranquilizer gun stored under the dashboard for just such an emergency. She distinctly remembered putting it there when she’d helped load the boat. She didn’t remember everything she’d brought on board, but weapons had a way of sticking in your mind.
Isabel pulled out the gun. She’d gone hunting with Pop a few times, but she’d never fired a rifle at a living thing. This wasn’t exactly like a hunting rifle, but it was close enough that she could load it. Dr. Vohringer was already opening the trapdoor. Estebán was right behind him. Nikki was just standing there filming everything like a character in a found-footage horror movie. The bear was examining the windows.
With a swipe of its paw, it smashed the window next to the door. Grains of toughened glass flew in all directions. Nikki yelped and ran for the trapdoor.
The bear rested its paws on the windowsill, pushed its head through and tried to get its shoulders in. There was a moment when it was pressing its head against the ceiling. Now, thought Isabel, and opened fire. With two pops of compressed air, darts embedded themselves into the bear’s neck just under the jaw.
And nothing happened. The bear was still trying to get through the window. Isabel looked at the rifle in bewilderment. That was supposed to have worked. They had specifically said two darts was enough for a pol
ar bear.
“I don’t think it kicks in right away,” said Nikki, staring up at her through the trapdoor, holding up her camera.
Oh. That would have been a useful thing to mention when they gave us this. The bear’s shoulders squeezed through the window. Nikki stood aside just in time for Isabel to head down the ladder and slam the door over her head.
“Get me the fire extinguisher,” she said to Ian Jacob and Chris Yuan. She had already dropped the gun. Isabel had no further interest in a weapon that was guaranteed to make a dangerous animal fall asleep ten minutes after it had finished ripping out her liver.
Isabel looked up at the trapdoor. It was fiberglass. So was the deck. Against a bear’s claws, she wouldn’t bet on it.
Chris handed her the fire extinguisher. It was the kind that sprayed liquid CO2. Even for a polar bear, cold like that would have to be uncomfortable. She hoped.
The bear tore the trapdoor aside. Isabel aimed the extinguisher up in the direction of the hole, waiting for it to stick its face in. She wished hopelessly for another gun, one with actual bullets in it. Or a bow and arrow. Or, hell, a really sharp pair of toenail clippers. Just something she could hold in her hands that would make her feel less like a walking sirloin.
And then… nothing happened.
And then more nothing.
And more nothing. Had the tranq darts taken effect? Wouldn’t they have heard it falling down? Isabel almost went up the ladder to see.
Then she had another thought. It’s not unconscious yet. It’s in a place it can’t understand, so it’s doing what it knows how to do—waiting by the hole for the seal to come up. It thinks time is on its side. It’s wrong. Unless of course you stick your head up through the hole like an idiot. Which you were almost about to do.
She looked around the lower deck, where her fellow scientists and engineers were huddled together, staring at her. The front half of it was crowded with the galley, the head, and half a dozen workstations where samples of seawater were under microscopes and fresh-caught fish were being examined against databases of marine life.
“I’ve called for help,” said Dr. Vohringer. “An animal control team is on its way.”
From where exactly? How long will it take them to get here? thought Isabel. But since the bear didn’t seem to be in any great hurry to succumb to the tranquilizers, there wasn’t much point dwelling on the question.
“You know what?” said Chris.
“What?” said Isabel.
“It’s a good thing the bathroom is down here.”
Nervous laughter ran through the group. Isabel thought she could hear the bear lie down on the floor above, but she wasn’t sure.
After ten more minutes, Isabel decided she was done waiting. She borrowed a selfie stick, put her armphone on the end of it, set the camera to record, stuck it up through the trapdoor and slowly rotated it 360 degrees. Nothing took a swipe at it.
Looking at the recording, the bear was lying unconscious in front of the trapdoor. Or possibly just playing possum—did bears do that while waiting for seals? Isabel wasn’t about to go upstairs, but at least the animal control team would be reasonably safe when they came to save the day.
Eventually, of course, the animal control team did show up. They were Greenlanders, but spoke English reasonably well. They put plastic cuffs on the bear’s paws and got a muzzle on it. Then Nikki got a few shots of Isabel next to the bear in something that was as close to a mighty-hunter pose as Isabel was willing to get. In the words of the old meme, you had one job, Nikki, one job—keep an eye out for anything dangerous. Like, say, a polar bear trying to swim up and grab me. Seriously, if I had looked up from my work ten seconds later… on second thought, I think I’m going to try not to think about that. Isabel somehow kept smiling while this was going through her head.
As bears went, it wasn’t even that big. Bigger than a black bear, but not much. They said it was female. Isabel could just barely make out its ribs and hipbones… under a heavy layer of wet fur. That was kind of horrifying. No wonder it came after me. No wonder it wouldn’t stop. This thing was just about at the end of its tether. From the tag, the bear had been caught two years ago while chasing a dog in an Inuit village in Quebec, and had been transported here… to what they had thought was the last place on Earth where it could live the way polar bears were meant to live, without interference from Homo sapiens.
The fact that the bear weighed less than four hundred pounds made it a lot easier for the animal control team to load it into their net. Someone said something about trying to find a zoo that would take it. Isabel watched as they flew off to the south with the net hanging under the helicopter—a good twenty feet under, just in case. Nothing personal, she thought.
Up until now, the trip had been informative, but not that exciting. Temperatures in Alaska had been in the high seventies, and hadn’t gotten below fifty until they passed within range of the winds off the Greenland ice cap. That was just wrong. The first thing they’d seen at sea was the surface of the ocean bubbling off the coast of Barrow as bits of undersea clathrate dissolved into methane. (Ian and Chris had turned into regular comedians at this point. “Bubble bubble toil and trouble, something something something bubble.” “Ee-ah, ee-ah, Cthulhu is fartin’.” “Anybody else have the urge to light up a smoke?”)
The most important thing they’d learned was that the Arctic biome was changing as fast as the climate. They’d gone through clouds of plankton thicker and greener than a sick man’s phlegm, and had caught Atlantic herring at the North Pole. Isabel had personally gutted and fried some of them for the crew, and had felt no compunction about doing so. Technically, herring was an invasive species here… if that even meant anything anymore. They’d seen a pod of killer whales further north than the species had ever been seen before. It really was too bad that the first time they encountered an animal that was exactly where it was supposed to be was what happened today.
Before the Kotick left, Isabel went back and finished fixing the salinometer.
* * *
Isabel woke up the next morning—yes, yes, midnight sun and all that, but she’d just slept for eight hours, so it was morning to her—to the news that she had become world-famous. Nikki was supposed to have edited her video clips into a coherent package before uploading them anywhere, but she hadn’t been able to resist the urge to post a compilation of the more dramatic moments of the bear encounter online. By the time Isabel got to the computer to look at it, she was the 16,943,805th viewer of her own adventure. Judging by the comments, most viewers rooted for her rather than the bear. This slightly restored her faith in humanity.
It was with a sense of dread that Isabel checked her inboxes. Sure enough, she now had thousands of phone and email messages to sort through.
“Maybe you should take today off,” said Dr. Vohringer, looking over her shoulder.
Isabel shook her head. “We still have a lot to do. We’re already down one since Brad got hurt.”
“Chris and I can take care of it,” said Ian.
Isabel started with a short public message: I didn’t want to worry anybody. But yeah, things did get a little intense there yesterday. Just to confirm that she still had her sense of humor, she then sent another one—Note to self: stop using Old Bay as deodorant, along with the “this is snark” symbol for the benefit of the thinking impaired.
She sent more personal responses to Hunter, a few close friends, her brothers and sisters, and various aunts, uncles, and cousins from both sides of the family. She also sent a personal note to her old babysitter Sandy, who despite being in the middle of some sort of business battle with the entire diamond industry, had taken time to ask about her.
Finally, she took a deep breath and called her parents. The conversation, if recorded in full, would be six or seven single-spaced pages of Isabel asserting repeatedly that she was doing fine and would be home in a couple of weeks, and her mother asking if she was sure, and wouldn’t she like to come home now, to
which Isabel would reply that that wasn’t really possible under the circumstances. In a desperate attempt to change the subject, Isabel pointed out that right now she was worried about her parents, since there was an Atlantic hurricane headed for the East Coast. “They’re saying it’s going to make landfall somewhere between the Outer Banks and northern New Jersey,” said Isabel. “You’re keeping an eye on it, right?”
“Of course,” said her mother. “Chelsey and Rod are coming over on Saturday to help get the first-floor furniture up the stairs.”
“I hope that’s high enough,” said Isabel.
Some things still happened normally. What happened in the waters off Cape Verde, for example, might have happened in any year. That part of the Atlantic has always been a natural birthplace for hurricanes.
Hurricane Gordon began as an area of high evaporation and low pressure moving from east to west over the ocean. Winds flowing into it were deflected by the Coriolis force into the counterclockwise spiral so familiar to meteorologists. By August 23, it had organized itself into a tropical depression centered around 14°N, 33°W. But it didn’t stay there. It moved roughly west by northwest at a speed of ten to twelve knots.
Near the end of August, when it was north of Puerto Rico and east of the Florida Keys, the storm’s course changed to north by northwest. By now it was a Category 4 hurricane.
* * *