by Tom Harper
I thought of the bear I’d seen with Ash. I wished I’d taken a picture for Luke.
Love u Dad
Love you
The moment we disconnected, I wished I’d persevered, slow connection and all. I missed him terribly. I read over the last few sentences still up on the screen.
DGEBAPB
It made me think of a line from Quam’s ludicrous form.
An acronym for a memorable sentence, suitably modified, would be advisable.
I looked down and saw Hagger’s (mis)quote on the inside cover of the open notebook. Some Say the World Began In Fire …
Under no circumstances should you ever write your password down.
Hagger’s computer took ages to boot, the way computers do when they haven’t been used in a while. As if they’ve got lazy. I paced around the tiny room, staring out the window. The snow was so thick in the air you couldn’t see anything; the closest to night there’d been since I woke up out of the coma.
Some Say the World Began In Fire, Some Say In Ice.
There was still some work to do to fit it to Quam’s rules, and I couldn’t afford too many wrong guesses. If the machine locked me out, I’d have a hell of a job explaining it to Quam. I played around with various combinations of capitals and lower case, possible substitutions of numbers for similar letters. A lot of options, lots of S’s and I’s that might turn into 5’s and 1’s.
I thought I remembered Hagger was born in 1955, so I replaced the two leading S’s with 55. Tried it, heart in mouth, and nearly died when the computer rejected it. Tried it again, this time also replacing the S’s of the second ‘Some Say’.
Logging on …
Forty-two
Anderson’s Journal – Friday
I knew something wasn’t right the moment the main screen appeared. Anyone’s machine, you’d expect to see a clutter of icons, files and folders. Certainly, Hagger wasn’t the sort of person to keep a tidy desktop.
This was empty.
I searched the hard drive. The file structure was still there – directories for experiments, for data, for papers – but each one was empty. Systematically stripped bare.
I could feel my heart accelerating. The wind moaned strange harmonies outside; loose ice rattled the roof so loud I thought it was in the room with me. I looked over my shoulder, but there was nothing there. Nothing there. That was the problem. As fast as I could recreate Hagger’s experiments, someone was tearing them up. How long before they caught up with me?
One of the few programs left on the machine was the email client. I tried it, more in despair than hope, expecting another empty window. Instead – bingo. Whoever had wiped the hard drive – maybe he didn’t have time, maybe he didn’t care – hadn’t deleted the old emails.
I scanned the subject headings, feeling more like a thief with every passing second. At least at Zodiac you don’t get the routine admin stuff that kills so many office hours, and Hagger had kept his account pretty pure, work-wise. Even so, the messages mount up when you’ve been dead for a week.
I could say, for dramatic effect, that I nearly missed it. That wouldn’t be true. It’s hard to miss a message headlined (all capitals) URGENT – NATURE – RETRACTION. I opened it at once.
Dear Martin,
In view of our friendship, I’m writing to you in confidence. Whatever you’ve done, I want to offer you the chance to withdraw the paper voluntarily. If not, I will write to Nature and insist they retract it.
It was from a colleague of Hagger’s, at Cambridge. A scientist of the old school, he didn’t mince his words. He’d reanalysed the samples Hagger had used for his famous experiment. He’d put them through a mass spectrometer.
You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the water was saturated with enzymes (Pfu-87 polymerase, 457ppm), which inevitably created the conditions for the DNA propagation you observed. If this was the result of accidental contamination, then that is lamentably negligent lab work. But the samples have not been touched since they arrived in Cambridge, which leads me to suspect that you must have deliberately tampered with them before you conducted your landmark experiments.
I should have turned on the light. My head hurt from the strain of reading in the dark; my eyes were spotty with tiredness. I felt sick, confused and scared.
If Hagger doped his samples … In a way, I felt the same as the day that Louise told me she was leaving. The world upended, as if gravity itself turned out to be a gigantic hoax that everyone else was in on, and no one had had the guts to tell me. After all, it was Hagger who drilled into me, in the dog days after my first, anticlimactic experiments, that there are no short cuts in science; Hagger who taught Introductory Ethics with missionary fire; Hagger whom I couldn’t look in the eye after the Pharaoh scandal.
He was pushing sixty, and he hadn’t had a hit in years, said that cruel part of my brain, the cockroach part that could survive a nuclear war. He needed one more big grant to carry him over the line, earn his pension, or they’d have put him out to pasture.
I still wasn’t sure I believed it. In all the time I’d spent with his lab notebook, I hadn’t seen anything that suggested a man with something to hide. More the opposite: a man who knew something was wrong but couldn’t work out what it was.
But that wasn’t the most important thing.
I printed off the message, in case whoever’d wiped the computer came back for the emails. Judging from the time-stamp, it must have been one of the last messages Hagger read. I didn’t want it to be my last, too.
‘Got anything interesting there?’
With the wind so high, I couldn’t hear a thing. Certainly not Kennedy coming through the door. He has a knack, that man, of turning up when you least want him.
‘It’s blowing fit to wake the dead out there.’ He smiled, and picked up the printout before I could grab it.
I would have snatched it out of his hands – but he’d already read it. His eyes widened. ‘Here’s a turn-up for the books.’
I had nothing to do except go along, and tell myself that if Kennedy wanted me out of the way, he could have made sure I never came out of the coma.
‘It arrived the day Martin died,’ I said.
‘How did you get hold of it?’
‘I guessed his password,’ I admitted. ‘I was after his data.’
If Kennedy understood the subtext – if, for instance, he’d been responsible for deleting Hagger’s data – he didn’t show it. He seemed more interested in the time.
‘Eleven o’clock,’ he murmured. ‘And you’re sure Martin saw it?’
‘It was flagged as “read”.’
I put out my hand to take it back. Kennedy ignored me.
‘Let me show this to Eastman.’
‘Don’t do that.’
It came out sounding borderline hysterical. He leaned towards me, staring into my eyes as if checking me for signs of concussion. ‘Are you all right?’
‘It’s private,’ I mumbled.
A charming smile. ‘That may be, but neither of us has a leg to stand on in that department, do we really? Reading a dead man’s emails, I mean.’
And before I could do anything, he ambled off.
I logged off the computer and shut it down. Then I started getting my things together. Hagger’s samples, the microscope and slides, my map with the X’s marked. The beakers from my experiment I covered with cling film (not very scientific), and put in a cardboard box. The fragment of yellow pipe I’d put in the red sample yesterday morning was now almost completely gone, a sludgy residue at the bottom of the jar like old Weetabix.
The equipment filled three boxes and a backpack. No way I could carry all that through the storm in one go. I took it down to the boot room and got suited up. The wind gauge on the monitor said forty-seven knots, the temperature minus forty. The point at which Celsius and Fahrenheit read the same, I remembered from some ancient science lesson. I couldn’t conceive of what it would be like outside, so I threw on prett
y much everything I had.
Even that was hardly enough. Just holding on to the railings going down the steps, the wind nearly tore my arms out of their sockets. By the time I’d found one of the sledges, parked in the gloom under the Platform, I was trembling. Looking up, I could see lights shining from the windows like the portholes of an ocean liner. A shadow moved inside, probably one of the students watching the storm from the comfort of the mess, and I felt a pang as I imagined them there curled up on the sofas, laughing and joking and drinking hot chocolate. What was I doing out there?
I should go back. I staggered to the bottom of the stairs and gripped the rail. The wind was full-frontal now, blasting me back off the slippery steps. I looked up.
The door opened. Yellow light flooded out, only for a second, as two bundled-up figures emerged on to the steps. I shrank back under the stairs.
Sifted snow showered over me as they came down the steps. They stopped at the bottom and looked around. I cowered back into the shadows, though there wasn’t much chance of them seeing me. Nor of me recognising them, but from their relative sizes I guessed Eastman and Kennedy. Were they going to the caboose?
They weren’t heading that way. They seemed to be following the flag line for the mag hut. That would explain why they weren’t carrying rifles. It must be nine o’clock.
I started up the stairs again, hauling myself into the teeth of the wind. Trying not to slip, or get blown away, I hardly looked beyond the next step. So I didn’t see the door open again, or the figure coming out, or even feel the vibration of his footsteps.
It was too dark for shadows, too much chaos in the air to catch any movement. But some deep sense, a survival instinct, made me look up. There he was, bearing down on me out of the blizzard.
With everything that’s happened, I was probably never more vulnerable than in that moment. I began to lift a hand to fight him off, but the moment I loosened my grip on the rail I was almost blown off. I was defenceless. He could tip me down the stairs, break my neck, make it look like an accident. It had worked for Hagger. The only one they’d blame would be me, an idiot out of his depth in an Arctic storm. Someone who should never have come.
My senses were so heightened, I swear I could see each individual snowflake in the air as the figure lifted his arm …
… and beckoned me forward. I couldn’t move. He beckoned again, more urgently, and almost lost his footing.
He wasn’t going to kill me. Adrenalin had mashed my mind so much I could hardly process the thought. I squeezed myself to one side, and we manoeuvred around each other, like two sumo wrestlers trying to get through a door. Arms round each other for stability, close enough that I could see the name sewn on to his jacket. Quam. Close enough he could read the name on mine. We bobbed our heads at each other in a strange, almost ritualistic greeting. Like penguins.
He disappeared into the storm after Eastman and Kennedy, following the flag line. Battling the storm every step, I loaded up the sledge with Hagger’s lab equipment. Last of all, I put a rifle on my shoulder, though I couldn’t imagine how I’d fire it in those conditions.
I put the rope around my chest and just about managed to drag the sledge to Star Command. At least I had the wind at my back. I’d reached the door, when I saw Quam coming out of the storm with a bundle of safety poles in his arms. He passed like a ghost; I don’t know if he saw me. Strange time to be rearranging the flag lines.
I turned on the light and the heater. No problem with the electricity, luckily. It was nearly 10 p.m., but there was no way I’d get to sleep with the wind howling around the caboose, and the adrenalin in my system. The power was still on. I unloaded Hagger’s samples, and got to work.
Forty-three
Anderson’s Journal – Saturday
I feel like I’m living a double life. All around me, Zodiac goes on as normal. Through the mess windows, I can see the students decorating for Thing Night; Fridge tramps around base breaking ice off his instruments; Greta’s on the roof repairing storm damage. No doubt Danny’s cooking in the kitchen, and Quam’s flicking that executive toy on his desk. And me? I’m holed up in the Star Command caboose like a fugitive. I slept here last night, with a packing crate wedged against the door and a loaded rifle beside me. I wonder if anyone’s noticed.
Even with the heater on, the temperature in Star Command is touching zero. I’ve got Hagger’s samples in the fridge to keep them warm; I keep on expecting the thermal cycler and the mass spectrometer to pack up completely. I’ve had to insulate them with my jumpers so that I can get the samples hot enough to incubate. But I’m almost there.
The storm had died down this morning, but the wind was still rattling around the station. Even so, there was no mistaking the firm knock. I scraped frozen condensation off the porthole in the door and peered out. Greta stood there, in her pigtailed hat, holding a plate covered in foil.
‘Waffle day,’ she announced when I opened the door. ‘I brought you one.’
‘How did you know I was here?’
She uncovered the plate and handed me a fork from her pocket.
‘I hope you like syrup.’
Even the short journey from the Platform to the caboose had chilled it down. The waffle was flaccid and rubbery. Even so, I was more grateful to her than I knew how to say.
I poked my fork into the Z stamped into the waffle’s centre. ‘It looks like the mark of Zorro,’ I joked.
‘Yeah.’
Maybe they don’t have Zorro in Norway. She looked at the sleeping bag on the floor. I suppose she noticed the rifle, too.
‘Working hard?’
I had to tell someone or I’d go mad. ‘This is going to sound crazy, but I opened Martin’s email last night. I found a message from a colleague in England, someone who’d reviewed his results from the big Nature paper last year. He claimed Martin doped his samples.’ I explained about Pfu-87 polymerase. ‘It’s an enzyme to make the DNA in the water combine and evolve much faster than it would naturally.’
Greta shook her head. ‘Martin wouldn’t.’
‘I don’t think he did. He was as surprised as anyone. He knew there’d been trouble replicating his results. That’s why he came back here to overwinter.’
I unrolled the map where I’d marked his samples. ‘You can see what he was doing. All through the winter, collecting samples around Zodiac, trying and failing to replicate his own results. He didn’t understand why it wouldn’t work. That’s why he was so down.’
I moved my finger up to Echo Bay. ‘Then, in March, Quam sent him to help DAR-X with their leaky gas pipes. That was the breakthrough. Martin analysed the water there, and found it was bursting with these little organisms feeding on DAR-X’s pipes. I’m guessing that made him wonder how they could have evolved so quickly, and reproduced in such numbers. So he reran his original experiment using water from Echo Bay. Bingo.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Martin’s original sample, for the Nature paper, came from a summer trip to Gemini.’ A shadow crossed Greta’s face. She must have been thinking how Hagger had kept warm at Gemini. ‘He went down to the Helbreensfjord and got a sample. Pure chance. When he came back this winter, he stayed close to base.’ She still looked sceptical. I pointed to the machine on the bench. ‘I’ve analysed all his samples. All the ones from between the Helbreensfjord and Echo Bay – the red dots on the map – contain high doses of this enzyme.’
‘OK,’ she said.
‘But that’s not the crazy bit.’
‘OK.’
‘My PhD was on polymerase enzymes – specifically, on Pfu-87.’
‘With Martin?’
‘A guy called Richie Pharaoh. I switched PhD supervisors after my first year.’ That was a story I didn’t want to go into. ‘The point is, Pfu is a naturally occurring enzyme. It was discovered in bacteria that live in volcanic vents on the ocean floor. But Pfu-87 is a synthetic variant, a version that’s been genetically tweaked in a lab to work better. It doesn’t occur i
n nature.’
I realised I’d begun to tremble.
‘And that’s the crazy bit? Because it’s man-made?’
‘The crazy bit’ – the reason I was holed up in the caboose with a gun – ‘is that I invented it. I made the modifications. That was my PhD, and the paper I published. Martin had a copy in his lab.’ And I’d thought he was just checking my credentials. ‘At least now I know why he brought me here.’
Greta thought about that. ‘So one question.’
‘Only one?’
‘Why is the Helbreen pumping out this DNA chemical you invented?’
I wished I had a good answer.
‘I have to go fix the satellite dish,’ she announced. ‘If we don’t get the Internet back, people will start eating each other.’
Her question echoed in my mind a long time after she’d gone. Why is the Helbreen pumping out this DNA chemical you invented?
Answer: It isn’t. I’ve tested all the samples Hagger took from the glacier three times over. No Pfu-87, from the top of the glacier down to the very front edge. Nothing until you get into the seawater below the ice. All green. As if it’s just welling out of the seabed.
I was still thinking about it an hour later when Eastman came through the door. No knock, and I’d forgotten to jam it shut after Greta left. My rifle was on the other side of the room.
He smiled that brilliant smile, though it didn’t have quite the same wattage. As if the bulb was going. His face was red, his eyes were bright and he spoke too quickly.
‘What’s going on?’
He was jumpy. Literally: he couldn’t stay still. If I’d been stood near him on the platform at Cambridge station, I’d have assumed he was a drug addict.
As blandly as possible, I told him I was working on Hagger’s old data.
‘I heard they were bullshit.’ Succinct as ever. I wished Kennedy hadn’t shown him the email.
I explained why I thought Hagger was innocent, leaving out the Pfu-87. Eastman didn’t seem to pay attention. His eyes were always moving, taking things in at a thousand frames a second.