Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  Morley took charge of the stove, partly because he was exhausted from carrying gear and was beginning to turn pale once more, and partly because he was the undisputed technological wizard of the group. So Adrian gave him the task of preparing the lightweight stove and firing it up, which he tackled with gratitude and determination.

  Amazing the difference when a room was no longer as cold as an ice locker, but full of cheerful, crackling warmth. When everything had finally been stowed away and Charlotte could take off her boots, hang up her down jacket, and walk around their cozy little parlor in her socks, it was almost better than Christmas.

  “I’m dog-tired,” Angela declared.

  Adrian looked at his watch. “No wonder. It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

  Of course. It was deeply unsettling that the sun never set outside. Charlotte felt ready to drop as well, but she had assumed that had to do with the exertions of the journey and carrying all those crates. It felt like late afternoon to her, but that was only because of the light. The sun simply circled the horizon, a bright spot behind the uniform gray cloud cover that blanketed the sky.

  They opened the supply crate labeled WEEK ONE and heated up a goulash, military rations that came with dry crackers so tough that they could probably break a filling. It tasted wonderful. Adrian and Leon went back out to fill a big pot with snow to melt on the stove so that they would have water in the morning for washing and coffee—though nobody would be washing very thoroughly during their stay here. Brushing teeth and the occasional damp washcloth would have to be enough. The next shower they could look forward to would be in September. But Charlotte was so tired she didn’t care. She crept into her sleeping bag and fell asleep at once.

  Charlotte was woken by the chattering of her own teeth. It was hard work even to move. She felt like a joint of beef in a supermarket deep freeze. She fumbled at the zipper on her sleeping bag with stiff fingers. Tiny crystals of ice rustled down—hoarfrost that had formed on the outside of the bag. She looked around, blinking. The others were still asleep. One of the men was snoring; Morley, she figured. Frost flowers had blossomed on the windows. It had to be a nightmare. Of course it was a nightmare. There was no way she would survive this cold all the way through to September. She would develop pneumonia and die, and the others would have to bring her freeze-dried corpse back home.

  She crept farther down into her sleeping bag, pulled the zipper back up, and by some miracle fell asleep again. Then next time she woke up, it was because somebody was shaking her and saying, “Up you get. Coffee’s almost ready.” And it was warm. Angela was strolling around the room stark-naked. They had gotten the stove going again and hung up a curtain in the corner for a little privacy for washing. Charlotte was still so frozen that all she could do was take a damp cloth to her hands and face. She’d never be as cool as Angela about these things anyway.

  “We can’t keep the room heated all the time,” Adrian explained at breakfast. “We don’t have that much fuel. It’ll have to be enough that we heat up once a day to keep ourselves warm.”

  “My toothpaste was frozen solid this morning,” Angela said. She seemed amused.

  “So was my contact-lens fluid,” Morley put in, less happy about it. Which explained why he was blinking and peering around like a mole this morning.

  “You have to take stuff like that inside the sleeping bag with you,” Leon advised them. “That’s what I do with my cameras, because of the batteries. Otherwise, they lose all their charge overnight in the cold.”

  Charlotte warmed her hands on the metal coffee mug and listened while the others talked. They had spread the dossier out in front of them and were discussing the best way to proceed. Angela insisted the first priority was to document the biota well away from the hut and its surroundings. When Leon asked what exactly that meant, she explained. “Everything around here is contaminated. Whatever lives nearby has been brought in by man. But I’m interested in how life reconquers land in such a cold climate once the ice has gone. The first biota will be the algae washed up on the waves, and then lichens will follow, and so on. It’s very exciting.”

  Adrian had his logbook on his lap. He had told Charlotte on the journey here that even in the age of ubiquitous computing, research scientists preferred to keep handwritten records of everything. He and Morley were bent over a large satellite image of the island and talking about how they would map the glacier. With a little luck, Adrian said, they might even witness how it calved in the summer months. Their eyes lit up at the prospect.

  Charlotte didn’t find it quite such a tempting thought, but she told herself that if she understood them right the glacier wasn’t actually going to crack and send blocks of ice tumbling down directly onto the hut. They were well protected here by the rock ridge above, the higher of the two mountain chains. The most likely place for the glacier to calve would be either north-northwest, in the bay between the devil’s horns, or at the opposite end of the island. She plucked one of the satellite pictures from the stack. The satellites that had taken these pictures were equipped with radar as well as cameras, and the images showed the relief down below the ice. Near the center of the island, about two and a half miles from the hut as the crow flies, she made out a tiny, dark point. She pointed at it and asked if anyone knew what that was.

  Adrian glanced briefly at the picture in her hands. “That’s a radar image. So it’s probably iron ore.”

  Charlotte picked up another image that was time-stamped five years later and held it next to the first. “Does iron ore move about?”

  They all looked up. With the two pictures side by side, they could see the dark spot was not in the same place as it had been five years earlier.

  Morley waved his hand dismissively. “Then it’s a meteorite. That’s why the dot’s so small; a normal iron deposit wouldn’t look like that. The thing’s stuck in the ice, and the glacier is carrying it along.”

  “A meteorite?” Leon pricked up his ears. “That’s fascinating. Something like that can get stuck inside a glacier? I can’t even imagine how that would happen. Aren’t they red-hot when they’ve passed through the atmosphere and strike the ice? It would melt its way right through, wouldn’t it?”

  Morley seemed to find the topic anything but fascinating. “Sure, it impacts, smashes a crater in the ice, and then sinks. How deep it sinks is simply a function of the thermal capacity of the meteorite versus that of the ice. After all, water can absorb an awful lot of heat. But even if the meteorite melts its way right through to the bottom of the ice, it’ll be pushed along by the glacier as it moves.”

  “Can’t we go and look at the impact crater?” Charlotte asked.

  Leon nodded and seemed interested, too.

  “Why?” Adrian looked at her, frowning. “We don’t know anything about meteorites. Besides, the thing must be stuck several yards down in the ice. We’d never even be able to get at it.”

  Leon grinned. “But it would make for some great pictures. Research expedition in search of a meteorite in the eternal ice. People love that sort of thing.”

  Adrian turned up his nose. “Then Hollywood can go make a movie about it.” He turned back to the big map and tapped it with his pen. “Okay then, this is what we’re going to do. We’ll set up our recording instruments first thing. Then we’ll unpack the dinghy and explore up and down along the coast, as far as the winds will let us. We’re looking for any signs of life and at the condition of the glacier. This is the really urgent stuff we have to prioritize.”

  They got to work. They found a foxhole the Soviet meteorologists must have used back in the day and installed their own meteorological instruments to measure wind speed, temperature, precipitation, and so on. Morley installed the generator they had brought with them in the storeroom and connected it to the wiring in the hut so that they could switch on the lightbulb and use the sockets that were in place. Unlike Adrian, he wasn’t willin
g to forgo his laptop.

  “I’ll take it into my sleeping bag,” he told Charlotte, who was tidying up, since nobody else would. “They say we geeks sleep with our computers anyway.”

  Charlotte gave him a thin smile. “Just as long as the sockets work fine.”

  “No problem,” Morley declared. “Soviet sockets are more or less the same as the modern European model, whatever that may mean. And I’ve got an adapter that fits those.”

  The wind proved merciless. It blew, strong and unpredictable, whipping the sea into sharp, icy waves, while dark clouds gathered in the light gray sky to the north.

  “I’d put off the boat trip,” said Leon, who was supposed to steer when they did go out. “It doesn’t look good.”

  Adrian nodded. “The air pressure has plummeted. Better to wait until the weather has calmed down again.” He sighed. “Yesterday would have been the time to go.”

  So they changed their plans for the day. Leon set out to take pictures, while the two climatologists climbed the cliffs to have a look at the ice shield. Angela decided to head south along the coast to have a look at the vegetation. Charlotte offered to help her.

  They wouldn’t cover any great distance on their outing. Every few steps Angela squatted down to look at something on the ground. When she squealed with joy, Charlotte had to hand her a fresh plastic bag to stow the scraps of gray-brown vegetation or slimy algae she had found. Along the way Angela gave a lecture about polar flora and fauna; among other things, Charlotte learned the characteristic features of cold deserts, that lichens were not actually plants but classified as fungi, and that there were around some twenty-five thousand kinds of lichen. Angela seemed to know them all.

  It was bitterly cold as they picked their way along the shoreline, treading gingerly over cracks in the rock and slippery stones underfoot, constantly stopping to squat down and unpack the specimen case. There was no point trying to fumble the bags out with her gloves on, and in no time at all Charlotte felt she would lose her fingers to frostbite. And it was only minus ten—that was nothing.

  “It’s the wind,” Angela said. “Adrian explained it to me. The wind-chill factor makes your skin lose heat more quickly, so that minus ten feels more like minus twenty.”

  It was good to know the reason, but it didn’t keep her any warmer. Charlotte was glad when Angela asked her to take the samples they had collected thus far back to the hut and put them in the store room. Though the hut had cooled down again, there was no wind in there, so it was comparatively pleasant. Charlotte didn’t want to go straight back out, so she leafed through the old logbook and painstakingly deciphered a few entries.

  “Damage to the generator. We are using batteries for our radio reports,” it said on October 2, 1963, and then a week later: “We have managed to repair the generator. Light to read by at last!” How had whoever had written these lines managed until then? Was it already Arctic night in October? Charlotte didn’t know. She chose another entry at random. “May 9, 1966. I have started to read Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don. Enthralling. Well deserved the Nobel Prize.”

  Charlotte opened the front cover and looked at the entries there. There was no way this could be the official logbook, which would have contained several data points for every single day. This was more like a diary. When a meteorologist wrote a diary, the state of the weather was just part and parcel of it. Perhaps it would be worth taking the trouble to read it all the way through. Little by little, of course. She had plenty of time after all—more than enough.

  When Adrian and Morley returned from their trip up to the glacier, Morley was snow white and completely exhausted. He collapsed onto his sleeping bag, still wearing all his gear, and fell asleep even before the meal was ready. The next day he complained of a headache, a sore throat, and muscle cramps, and said he was a loser and an idiot. They let him sleep on, and sometime around noon he was back on his feet. He came back from the next trip equally tired out but not quite so downcast.

  “I’m saving up some of my complaints for later,” he declared. “That’s the only way to make it work.”

  One day soon after that the wind died down and the sea calmed. The two climatologists agreed it would stay like this for a while and that they could risk a boat trip. The three men uncrated the inflatable dinghy, blew it up with the electric pump, and carried it to the shore. Leon was the only one who had any experience with such boats, and he mounted the outboard motor. Morley stowed the gear. Adrian asked Charlotte whether she would like to go in his place; the boat could only hold three people, and he would be out on the boat plenty of times, he said. Charlotte shuddered at the thought of having only that thin sheet of plastic to hold her up above the icy water of the Arctic Ocean. If the worst came to the worst, there was no way her life jacket would save her—how could it?

  “No,” she said decisively. “Thank you, but no.”

  So the three men set out. They vanished behind the ice-covered cliffs to the north, only to reappear two hours later.

  Morley was seasick but excited. “It’s a really unusual formation,” he chattered enthusiastically, his face pale green. “A kind of ice cap anchored in place by the valley structures of the rock below. That means we would never have seen any basal sliding at all if it wasn’t for the general rise in temperature. We absolutely have to make a survey of the escarpment.”

  “In other words,” Adrian translated, “if the temperatures exceed a given value for long enough, we might see the whole ice shield slip off all at once.” He snorted with pleasure. “That would be quite a sight!”

  Leon’s comments were more pragmatic. “I have to get some pictures from onshore while those two sail around the front of the glacier. Those cold colors, white, blue, gray, with the bright red dinghy out front—it’ll look fantastic!”

  Over the next few days Angela joined them so they could put her ashore at otherwise inaccessible spots to take plant samples.

  “That woman’s afraid of nothing,” Leon said when they came back. It wasn’t quite clear from the tone of his voice whether he admired her or was afraid on her behalf.

  Every evening they had to release all the air from the boat, which was more work than blowing it up because of the safety valves. Then they would fold it up and stow it in the store room; otherwise, even a moderate wind would carry it away.

  Little by little they fell into a daily routine. Although it was more or less light the whole time, they tried to stick to the normal clock. After a week they realized that strictly speaking they were in a different time zone here on Saradkov than the last time they had adjusted their watches in St. Petersburg. They had been on Moscow Time ever since, but Saradkov was three time zones farther east. Since they had gotten used to their rhythm by now, they decided it made no difference.

  Eventually, they even got used to the constant cold. They watched wistfully as their breath plumed white in the cold air, sad for the loss of body heat. They crammed in as much food as they could and looked forward to every opportunity to warm themselves, even if it was with just a cup of coffee from the thermos flask. Though everyone told her she couldn’t be as cold as she claimed—her sleeping bag was an Arctic model tested to minus twenty degrees—Charlotte slept in two sweat suits layered one over the other, three pairs of socks, and a cap. She let them talk. All that mattered was that she was finally sleeping well.

  To her own surprise, she liked Saradkov more and more with every passing day—precisely because the island was so inhospitable, so exhilarating, so elemental. There were no centuries of tradition and convention wrapping around life out here. She no longer lived in the cotton-wool padding she had been used to as a child of the upper classes. Everything here was unfeigned, direct, raw in its reality. The cold broke through the armor of civilization, the wind blew away the masks that people habitually wore, and everyday life was stripped down to the bare essentials, making her realize what was really impo
rtant and what was mere ballast. Charlotte felt that for the first time in her life she was truly in contact with reality. How bizarre that the Arctic, so hostile to all life, should teach her how to live. She even began her own research work. She dug out her excavation kit, her hammers and brushes and shovels, her own logbook and little digital camera, and set out looking for any trace of early human settlement.

  Leon asked if he could come along and take some photos and wanted to know how she had gotten the idea that she would find anything of the sort up here. “If anyone ever made a list of the most forsaken corners of the world, wouldn’t this island be up near the top?”

  So she told him everything that was known about the pre-Dorset culture. How the ancestors of today’s Inuit, or Eskimos, had crossed the Bering Strait no later than three thousand years before Christ and had spread all the way from Alaska to Greenland, and how they had done it without boats by walking across the winter ice, without dogsleds, and without shelters ready and waiting along the way. Genetic analysis of a hank of hair excavated from a pre-Dorset site had shown that these early Inuit must have been related to groups in Eastern Siberia and on the Aleutian Islands—but not to the American Indians, who had made their own way to America much earlier.

  “And that’s where the trail goes cold,” Charlotte declared, never lifting her eyes from the ground as they made their way across the black-brown rocks. “All we know is that the remote ancestors of this early culture must have come from Africa in the end. And the question I ask myself is, why did they end up here in this inhospitable environment, in this cold?”

  Leon was stumped. “Yes, it’s strange. I never thought about it.”

  “We estimate that at the end of the last cold period ten thousand years ago there were between five and ten million people alive on Earth. That’s the population of a city like New York spread across the entire surface of the globe. You might think they had enough room.”