Zodiac Station

by Tom Harper

  ‘I’ll get that,’ I said. But Greta had already bent down to pick it up. She read the address on the envelope and gave me a funny look.

  ‘Aren’t you too old to believe in Santa?’

  I shrugged. ‘A man’s got to believe in something.’

  I took the letter off her. Father Christmas, The North Pole, the address said.

  ‘Luke gave it to me. I think he expects me to hand-deliver it.’

  ‘We’re five hundred miles from the pole.’

  I pulled a face. ‘Next you’ll be saying Father Christmas doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Of course he does. But the elves drowned because of global warming.’

  ‘Who’s going to make the presents?’

  Greta flicked back one of her braids. ‘That’s what happens when you fuck the planet. No presents.’

  Abruptly, she checked her watch and headed for the door. No apology, no goodbye. That’s Greta.

  ‘Where do I start?’ I asked.

  She didn’t stop, but she said something as she walked out. It sounded like, ‘Trust no one.’

  Thirty-eight

  Anderson’s Journal – Wednesday

  Kennedy came back.

  ‘I’ve got to go up to Vitangelsk with Eastman,’ he said. ‘Can’t be helped.’ He got two pill containers out of a cabinet and put them on the side. ‘Paracetamol. Take two every four hours to keep the pain away. And this one’s diazepam. Memory loss, coming out of a coma, it can all be a bit stressful. If you feel panicky, diazepam will calm you down a treat. And don’t overexert yourself,’ he added.

  ‘Next time, I’m going private,’ I said. But he was out too quick to hear.

  I picked up the pill jar and put it right against my eye. The plastic showed me a fisheyed, amber world. A dangerously distorted place.

  The panic and the pain were almost unbearable. I twisted off the cap and looked down the barrel of the jar. Four white pills, lonely at the bottom. Obviously I wasn’t the only one at Zodiac feeling stressed out.

  Why would anyone want to kill me?

  I hurled the jar away from me. It rolled across the benchtop, spilling a couple of the pills. Kennedy hadn’t said anything about staying in bed. I got up, clenching my teeth against the pain, and went to my room to get dressed. One of the things I’d been happy to forget is how depressing that room is. I didn’t stay longer than I had to. I went to the mess to get a cup of tea.

  Mid-morning, Zodiac’s a quiet place – like a resort hotel on the day the guests change over. I could hear Danny in the kitchen washing up, a stereo playing somewhere. Everyone else was in the field. I settled into a chair by the window with my journal and Hagger’s lab book.

  Someone said, I can’t remember who, that everyone who keeps a journal secretly hopes someone else will read it. Like a murderer wanting the police to catch him – however much you pretend you’re writing for you alone, your most intimate thoughts, you can’t let go the hope that one day, someone will care and know who you were.

  I never thought of my journal that way. I started it when Luke was small, because I was terrified at how much I was already forgetting. If I did think someone else might read it one day, I never imagined that the someone would be me. But there I was, reading through what I’d written, like a technician reloading data on to a computer that’s crashed. It felt strange. Even things I’d written just a couple of days ago didn’t feel like me any more. We put so much faith in words, but they’re flimsy, inadequate things. Even what I’m writing right now, if I read it back next week, it won’t seem the same.

  But this morning, it was enough to jog a few memories. By the time I’d reread it, the only thing missing was an explanation.

  Why did Hagger bring me here? I wrote that on Sunday. And, the question I hadn’t written, but which might as well have been at the top of every page: Why did he die?

  I put down my journal, grabbed myself another cup of tea and opened Hagger’s notebook. Maybe that would have some answers.

  I saw the quote on the inside cover again.

  Some Say The World Began In Fire, Some Say In Ice.

  I was pretty sure the quote was wrong. In the Robert Frost poem, the world’s supposed to end in fire (or ice). His colleagues would say it was typical of Hagger’s ego to rewrite a great poet, but I got the joke.

  It’s never easy reading someone else’s lab book: it’s much more private than a diary. After all, there’s always a chance someone someday might be interested in the diary. Hagger’s lab book was mostly an assortment of graphs and tables, like a PowerPoint presentation with the interesting bits cut out. No context, just lists of numbers that looked like sample labels to me, and probably like a phone directory to anyone else.

  But even the numbers couldn’t completely stifle Hagger’s personality. He hung around in the margins and the blank spaces, shouting from the sidelines even after he was dead.

  Where is it coming from?

  Why Why Why? (Double underlined.)

  Maybe Anderson?

  And, a couple of pages in, the line I’d read in the sickbay. Fridge will kill me.

  ‘Feeling better?’

  You could have predicted who it would be. Fridge, still dressed in his ECW trousers. Not holding a fire axe or pointing a gun at me, just giving me his friendly Viking smile.

  I remembered (or did I?) the man standing over me on the glacier. Fist raised to strike. Could it have been Fridge? He seemed familiar, but all my memories felt like half-truths that morning.

  I snapped the notebook shut. Then I decided to go on the attack.

  ‘There’s something I’m trying to understand.’ I opened the notebook again and spun it around so he could see.

  The smile vanished. I looked him in the eye, trying to squeeze out the truth. Maybe I’m not much of an interrogator.

  ‘I wish he hadn’t written that.’

  ‘It’s awkward,’ I agreed.

  ‘Kennedy already asked me about this. I shared some confidential results with Hagger; he got Quam on my ass saying I couldn’t publish.’

  I spun the notebook back so it faced me. Above the smoking-gun sentence was a table labelled Me Concentrations, Echo Bay.

  ‘Methane,’ I guessed. ‘Something to do with the DAR-X drill site?’

  Fridge didn’t contradict me.

  ‘Methane gets produced by the breakdown of oil in water.’

  He gave me a grudging nod of respect. ‘Can do. Or, hypothetically, if you’re pretending to pump oil, but actually drilling for methane clathrates in the seabed.’

  ‘Hypothetically?’

  ‘Hypothetically unless you want to be sued for violating commercial secrecy.’

  ‘Was Hagger’s work commercially secret?’

  Fridge shook his head wearily. ‘He didn’t even care about the methane. He just found it out by accident.’

  ‘What was he looking for?’

  ‘Bugs,’ said Fridge. ‘Bugs in the water. Something corroding DAR-X’s pipes. Hagger found a bug in the water munching them.’

  ‘What sort of bugs?’

  He shrugged. ‘You should talk to K-Mart.’

  I looked out the windows, confused. ‘Where’s K-Mart?’

  ‘The guy you replaced, Hagger’s old assistant. Kevin Maart, so we called him K-Mart. He must have helped Hagger.’

  The room was filling up with students drifting in for lunch. I could smell lasagne, and I was ravenous.

  Fridge gave an odd laugh. ‘But maybe K-Mart didn’t know anything. If he had, Hagger wouldn’t have brought you.’

  I ate quickly and messily. It’s hard to linger over a meal when you’re staring round the room wondering if someone could really want to kill you. Hard to keep the soup on your spoon if your hand won’t stop trembling.

  Afterwards, I stopped off in Quam’s office and asked him if he knew how I could contact Kevin Maart.

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’ Every time he speaks, he makes you feel you’ve done something wrong. ‘Data p
rotection.’

  I told him I just wanted to check out a couple of things that Hagger had been working on. That seemed to upset him even more. He set his perpetual-motion toy going, staring at it as if he could glimpse something profound in the spaces between the swinging balls.

  ‘You’re supposed to rest. If it weren’t for these …’ click ‘… regrettable …’ clack ‘… circumstances, you wouldn’t even be here.’

  ‘I thought I might make myself useful.’

  ‘Don’t. Just …’ click ‘… keep out of trouble.’

  There were a lot of things I’d have liked to ask him. Like: Who killed Hagger? Or, given how fidgety Hagger’s research made him: What happened to his notebooks? But I didn’t think bringing any of that up would count as keeping out of trouble.

  ‘Did you ever set me up a login account on the network?’ I asked.

  His eyes narrowed, as if I’d asked for his PIN. ‘Didn’t get round to it.’ He was trying to sound casual, though that was a stretch. ‘Now you’re leaving, you don’t need it.’

  ‘I’ll be around for a few days yet.’

  He acted as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘How’s your head?’

  ‘Better, thanks,’ I said, through gritted teeth. ‘But about the login account …’ I relaxed into the chair with an appreciative sigh. The sound of a man who might be there some time. Quam took the hint. He got a piece of paper from his desk and slid it across to me.

  ‘Fill this in and get it back to me.’

  Quam’s martinet routine annoyed me – especially as data protection’s a rather anachronistic concept these days, given what governments get up to. I went to the radio room, logged in to the guest computer and googled Kevin Maart. I found his home page at Cambridge, his publications record. Rather more impressive than mine, to be honest: if we ever run into each other, I’d be embarrassed to say I took his job. It also gave a phone number, and an email address: kevin.maart@zodiacstation.org.uk.

  He wouldn’t be checking that any time soon. Obviously he hadn’t updated it yet. I wrote an email anyway, just in case. It amused me to think of it travelling halfway around the world, and pinging into the room next door.

  I took one of the Iridium phones from the charging shelf and rang the number on the website. Quam would hit the roof, no doubt, at the cost of it.

  A receptionist answered. ‘Kevin Maart’s away in the field,’ she told me.

  ‘He flew home a week ago.’

  ‘He hasn’t been back in the office.’

  Strike two. I asked if she had a mobile number for him. Perhaps she did, but of course, she couldn’t give that out. Data protection.

  I took the notebook back to Hagger’s lab to see if I could make more sense of it in context. I looked in the fridge and found the samples he’d left there: forty-three of them, clear plastic bags filled with water, each numbered and dated with a white sticky label. Also, I noticed, each one had a round dot coloured in on the label, either red or green.

  I turned through the notebook until I found a list of samples whose reference numbers matched the bags. Beside each one, he’d written down where he’d taken it. Helbreen. Helbreensfjord. Echo Bay. Nansen Bay. Luciafjord. Konigsfjord.

  Some of those places I knew; most of them I didn’t. I went to the bookshelves in the mess and rummaged through the thrillers and potboilers until I found a survey map of Utgard. I spread it out on Hagger’s lab table. It had been made in the sixties, but I didn’t suppose Utgard had changed much. I worked my way over it, marking the location of each of Hagger’s samples with pencil X’s. It reminded me of being home with Luke, drawing treasure maps together.

  As soon as I’d finished, it was easy to see where Hagger had been. A row of X’s ran down the west side of the island, with a cluster in Echo Bay and another up at the Helbreensfjord, where the glacier met the sea. More sporadic samples made a dotted line along the coast, north to the tip of the island, and as far south as Zodiac, where they grouped in another cluster. A single spur branched off up the Helbreen glacier, regularly spaced X’s until they reached more or less the place where Hagger had died, with a couple more on the other side of the mountain, near a place labelled Mine 8.

  I found green and red marker pens in one of Hagger’s drawers. Cross-referencing the samples and the notebook, I circled my X’s on the map red or green, whichever colour Hagger had marked the bags. I also wrote in the dates. Then I stood back and examined my work.

  The red circles made a bone shape, with clusters at Echo Bay and at Helbreensfjord, and a thinner stretch along the stretch of coast connecting them. North of the line, and south down to Zodiac, they turned green.

  He’d been sampling for something in the ice, or the seawater beneath. From the numbers in the lab book, it looked as though red meant positive and green meant negative. Transferred to the map, that meant that the substance appeared in the water either at Echo Bay or at the Helbreen, flowed along the coast, then vanished.

  It might have been flowing in from the glacier’s run-off. But all the circles on the Helbreen were green. Could it be something the oil company was emitting from Echo Bay?

  I studied the dates next to the circles. He’d started last October near Zodiac, taking samples along the shore and out in the fjord. All green. November, December, January: he hadn’t gone far, but he’d stuck at it, picking up a couple of samples every week. What drove him? He didn’t have to be here. Why suffer months of darkness and freezing temperatures when he could have been at home in Cambridge sipping port in the SCR? Tracing my finger over the samples, I could almost feel his frustration as January slipped into February and everything stayed green. The samples became less frequent.

  Then, in the middle of March, he suddenly turned up in Echo Bay. Nine samples that week alone, all ringed bright red. Nothing the next week; then the samples started marching north along the coast until they reached the tip of the island, where they went green again.

  Whatever was in the water, he’d tracked it from Echo Bay to the Helbreen. Overshot, then circled back the next week to take a dozen more samples at the mouth of the glacier. All red. The week after, he carried on up the Helbreen, almost to its head on the big ice dome. Green again. The week before I arrived, said the dates. The week before he died.

  ‘And what did he find in the water?’ I asked the map.

  My head was hurting. I went to the medical room and took two of Kennedy’s paracetamol. Then I stared at the map some more. Inevitably, I found myself focusing on Echo Bay.

  The notebook didn’t give any clues to what Hagger had found in the water. The ubiquitous X, but he never named it. After my chat with Fridge, methane was an obvious candidate. But I’d read all the way through the lab book: apart from Echo Bay, he’d never tested any of the other samples for methane. And if that was it, he’d have labelled it for what it was.

  I had the samples; I could always test them myself. But there are a million ways to test a water sample. Spectral analysis, gas chromatography, chemical analysis, DNA tests … You have to have some idea what you’re looking for. Otherwise, it’s needle-and-haystack territory.

  But I did have one idea. Hagger found some bug in the water munching on DAR-X’s pipes, Fridge had said. And bugs aren’t that hard to find. Not if you have an electron microscope sitting on the bench.

  I took some water from the Echo Bay sample and strained it through a polycarbonate filter, then stained the residue with fluorescamine dye. The fact that Hagger had all the equipment to hand gave me confidence. Then I popped the sample under the microscope.

  A mass of blurry chaos appeared when I put my eye to the microscope, like snow on a television set. I turned the knob and it came into focus. That hardly changed the picture. That single drop was full of life: scores, if not hundreds of tiny organisms, twitching and swarming. Even under magnification, they didn’t look much clearer than grains of rice.

  Back home, I could have extracted DNA to find out what they were. Here, I didn’t have that option
. From the notebook, it looked as though Hagger had – he must have sent it back to the UK – but the tests hadn’t been conclusive. In his notes, he referred to the organisms as Gelidibacter incognita.

  A quick lit search confirmed that Gelidibacter is a genus of bacteria that grows in ice and cold water; the incognita, I presumed, was for this unknown species. Why Hagger should have been so excited about it, I can’t guess. Even if it’s never been described before, it’s not exactly a new flavour of Coke he discovered. Dip a bucket in your local pond and you’ll probably find an uncategorised bacterium if you look hard enough.

  I spent a couple of hours working with the microscope, checking each sample. Simple, repetitive work: exactly what I’d come here to escape from. Back home, I’d be checking the clock, looking forward to getting out to collect Luke from school. Now, I was happy to lose myself in it. It distracted me from the thought that someone might want to kill me.

  At the end of it, I had some pretty conclusive results. The twelve samples from Echo Bay all contained the bugs. None of the others did, not even the ones from the Helbreensfjord. Whatever red meant, it wasn’t that.

  That’s the bit I hate about science. You have a lovely hypothesis, so self-evident you know it must be true. And then it isn’t.

  Thirty-nine

  Anderson’s Journal – Wednesday

  I filled in Quam’s form for the network account. There was a long section on how to choose a secure password: between nine and fourteen characters, containing two numbers and a capital letter (but no punctuation); not a recognisable word, certainly not a significant date. An acronym for a memorable sentence, suitably jazzed up with said aforementioned capitals and numbers, would be advisable. Writing that must have warmed his bureaucratic heart. Complete with the absurdity that after you’d ticked all those boxes, plus the one that said you would never divulge the password to anyone or write it down anywhere under any circumstances, you wrote it down on a piece of paper and gave it to Quam.

  He wasn’t in his office, so I left it on his desk. Folded three times, with CONFIDENTIAL scrawled over it. I didn’t suppose he’d notice the irony.