Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  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 b
e 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 particleboard 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 invitation, 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.”

  Dylan hid a smile as backs straightened, chair legs scraped along the roughened ice of the floor, and gazes fastened on McGuire.

  “White coal,” Kubota said, his eyes narrowing.

  “Enough to power whole new cities, yes.”

  “The gaps between the hills are huge,” the Scandinavian woman noted.

  “All the more work for us. If this is sold as a way to control water outflow, we can get government money to help with the construction. And we can start with the smallest outlets, the ones that will cost least to plug and will be all the more profitable.”

  “So then, assuming there is money to be made, I think we would like to be a part of it,” Kubota said slowly. “We can talk about the technical issues later. Plenty of time for that. What I would like to know is how you intend to tackle the political side. Sea levels have risen a meter since the beginning of the century, but most governments haven’t budged or tried seriously to slow the warming. So then, why would they act now?”

  “Floods.”

  “As in glacial lake outburst floods?” the Scandinavian woman asked. “Those can be cataclysmic!”

  Dylan had researched the Missoula floods that had devastated eastern Washington State at the end of the last glacial period. The lake had been gigantic. The collapse of an ice dam had unleashed a flood with more water than all of the planet’s rivers put together, flowing with a speed rivaling that of a car on a highway. The flood had scoured riverbanks down to bedrock and carried chunks of glacier for kilometers downstream. He expected to answer questions later, but it was still McGuire’s show for now.

  “Precisely,” the Consortium manager confirmed. “Take Niviarsiat Lake in Kujalleq. Fifty years ago, there was a glacier half a kilometer high in the same spot. Now it’s a meltwater lake dammed by leftover ice. If the dam broke, the water would rush down Ikersuaq Fjord and destroy everything within reach.”

  “Is this w
hat you’re proposing to do?” the Canadian asked.

  Some of the attendees glanced at the icy walls and ceiling, as if to reassure themselves they were as safe from espionage as could be.

  “Does anybody live in Ikersuaq Fjord?” Toluca asked.

  “Most of the valley near the lake actually belongs to a Consortium company and access is forbidden. Once you reach the actual fjord, there’s a small settlement at Niaqornaq and the town of Narssaq is found on the next fjord over, though it is connected to Ikersuaq by a strait. Many buildings have already been moved to higher ground, but the docks would certainly be swamped. Let’s be frank, people. Casualties would help us make our case to the government.”

  “Is this a hypothetical discussion?” the Canadian insisted.

  McGuire held the eyes of the owners and executives around the table. Dylan noticed some of the assistants closer to his own age looked uneasy, but they weren’t involved. McGuire challenged his peers when he answered, his voice dropping to a lower tone.

  “Last winter, one of our best men set off explosives underneath the glaciers feeding the lake. There were no visible effects, and the blasts could be confused with an icequake, but the ice beneath the glaciers was turned into Swiss cheese. Throughout the summer, the glaciers calved several times, shedding huge chunks of ice that melted in the sun. The lake level has risen so far and so fast that pressure near the bottom should have pushed the freezing point below the temperature of the ice. The water should already be eating away at the base of the dam.”

  “When will it break?”

  “Two weeks from now. Mid-September.”

  Nobody asked how he could be so certain of the timing. Faces closed while minds readied to grapple with technical details as a way of forgetting what had just been discussed. Dylan suspected that all they cared about now was that the meeting room be blown up as promised after they left, tons of ice crushing the furniture and burying the very memory of the dangerous words they had heard.

  Niviarsiat Lake, Southern Greenland