Lord of All Things

by Andreas Eschbach

  Leon cocked his head. “I don’t know. I’ve spent a lot of time living with nomads—in Mongolia, in Africa. It’s a lifestyle that needs much more land than agrarian or industrial society. It’s hard for people like us to understand. A Himba man driving his herds through northern Namibia feels crowded in if he happens to cross paths with more than one other herdsman in a week. And we’re talking here about Kunene, a region with a population density of one inhabitant for every five hundred acres, the better part of a square mile—just in raw numbers.”

  “Okay. But now think of ten million people scattered all across Earth’s available land surface; that’s almost six square miles per person.” Charlotte stopped and looked at the desolate, lifeless expanse all around her. “I see no reason why anybody would settle in a region like this.”

  “So probably you won’t find any traces to indicate that anyone ever did.”

  “Maybe. But it can’t be all that different in Eastern Siberia, and they’ve found settlement sites there.” She shook her head. “There’s something wrong with our picture of human history. I just don’t know what it is.”

  He looked good with his thick curls of ash-blond hair bursting out from under his hood and his weather-beaten face. Charlotte wondered for a moment what it would be like to live with a man like this who traveled so far and went on so many interesting adventures. Certainly, in a relationship like that you’d have all the freedom you could wish for, and you might experience things that few others did.…Well, she liked the look of him. As did Angela. Only she would never have flat-out said so. However, Angela had still not followed up on her declaration. Unless you counted the way she paraded herself naked before him every morning, but she would doubtless have done that anyway.

  Leon was looking thoughtfully at her in turn. “Is that really why you came here? To see whether you could find spearheads or hand axes? Here, on a flyspeck of an island that’s only twelve square miles, hardly six hundred miles from the North Pole?” He shook his head. “For some reason, I find that hard to believe.”

  “You don’t have to,” Charlotte answered curtly and set off again. “Nobody’s asking you to.”

  But he was right. She wouldn’t find anything. Adrian had told her about the sites in Eastern Siberia to lure her in, and she had told herself he needed an interpreter. But both of those reasons were just pretexts. She was really here because Mikhail Andreievitch Yegorov had told her about a dark dot on Saradkov Island. On Devil’s Island.

  A period of bad weather followed. Sleet fell, and the sky turned almost black. Stormy winds lashed snow all across the island, so that all they could see out the window was a blizzard of white. Gusts of wind hammered the hut like giants demanding entry. So much snow blew in through the narrow slit of the latch that drifts formed on the floor.

  They stayed in the hut for days on end, glad not to have pitched their tents. Adrian was the only one who struggled out into the wind, at regular intervals, to read the instruments. Though the foxhole was only a few yards away, he looked like a snowman every time he came back. He seemed uplifted by this kind of weather. Luckily, they had just cleaned the stovepipe. They fired up the stove with wood and coal from the Soviet supply and made themselves comfortable without having to use the fuel they had brought with them.

  They used the enforced leisure to go over their notes. Angela sat at the microscope and tried to catalog exactly what she had found. Adrian and Morley discussed climatological theories, of which Charlotte understood not a word. Leon looked through all the photos he had taken on his camera display, transferred them to extra memory cards he had brought with him, and wrote a first draft of his story.

  Charlotte didn’t want it to be too obvious she was sitting there empty-handed. That all the striding around outside these past few weeks had only been to order her thoughts. That this expedition was becoming increasingly like a Zen retreat for her. She jotted notes in her excavation logbook, but these consisted of nothing more than her arguments and ideas. There were no finds to log. And at some point she stopped writing.

  The blizzard didn’t let up. They passed the time playing cards. Leon had an inexhaustible repertoire of unusual games and taught them several. Morley was the only one who didn’t want to join in; instead, he took the old station logbook and typed up the weather data into his laptop. “It’s useful comparative material!” he declared.

  Charlotte looked over at him again and again as he sat there at the roughly finished table, carefully going through the book page by page, double-checking every line of figures he entered, utterly absorbed in what he was doing. She felt a twinge of guilt as she watched him, since the sight reminded her she had intended to decipher the entries in the logbook. Even though she really had nothing else to do, she had kept on putting it off.

  “Hey, do you think the meteorite could have struck in 1966?” Morley suddenly asked as they were deep in a game of Last Chance.

  Adrian looked up from his cards, caught off guard. “What?”

  “Here.” Morley held the old journal out to them. He had opened it to a page with a crude sketch in the middle that showed the outline of the island and a cross inside with two lines pointing off at a downward slant. “Doesn’t it look like that?” He looked at the picture again. “Pity it’s such a rough sketch. It would be great if we could use it to determine whether the meteorite really stayed in one place for forty-five years and only started to move in the last five years.”

  Adrian put his cards aside. “I think Charlotte should translate the text next to it.”

  Morley passed her the logbook. Charlotte took it, feeling awkward now that all eyes were on her. How could she have overlooked this sketch? The paper smelled old and dusty.

  “ ‘Monday, June 13,’ ” she read haltingly. “ ‘Temperature -2.8 degrees Celsius. Continuous strong wind from NE for days now, 70 to 90 kmh. Clear skies, no precipitation. Air pressure constant at—’ ”

  “I have all that,” Morley said impatiently. “All the numbers anyway. Anyone can understand those.”

  “Okay.” Charlotte glanced farther down the page. “ ‘Sudden noise in the afternoon. A jet fighter, very low, as if it wanted to land on the island.’ ”

  She stopped and caught her breath. Could this even be…?

  “New paragraph,” she said. The writing was less neat now, the lines hastily written. “ ‘Visit. Lieutenant Pyotr Yegorov had to make an emergency landing up on the ice. Engine trouble. He is very shaken, talking of devil’s fingers that came out of the ice and reached for him and his plane. Old stories of monsters and bogeymen! When will the human race learn to accept reason? Can understand, however, why he is so shaken. He was lucky to have a headwind, or he would have crashed into the sea. He was staggering around with no protective clothing when we found him. Gave him food and vodka and put him to bed, running a fever. Pavlov is trying to raise the authorities, but radio interference much stronger than usual; do not know whether he will manage to connect.’ ”

  “So the cross must show where the jet landed, I suppose,” Morley said. “And the arrows were its angle of approach.” He sounded disappointed.

  “What else does it say?” Leon asked.

  “ ‘Tuesday, June 14, 1966,’ ” Charlotte read out. “ ‘Temperature’—okay, I’ll leave all that out. Basically, it’s the same as the day before, but the wind dropped.” She spelled out the next few words and read them to herself first quietly to be sure she understood. “ ‘Lieutenant Yegorov is better but still feverish. Asked us to go to his plane and fetch some things from the cockpit—a folder with important documents, if I understand him right. Weather stable, so we have decided to set off after lunch.’ ”

  She had to read the next paragraph several times over. She hesitated. Surely she must have misunderstood something? Otherwise, it was impossible…

  “What happened next?” Adrian asked. “This is getting
exciting.”

  Charlotte cleared her throat. “I don’t know…Well, there’s a dash, and then, ‘Back from the ice. Cannot explain what we saw. The plane has vanished.’ ”

  2

  Leon whistled softly through his teeth and put his cards aside. “In other words, the black dot on the satellite image isn’t a meteorite at all. It’s the jet. It sank into the ice.” His eyes were glittering feverishly all of a sudden.

  Adrian looked at him skeptically. “Well, I don’t know. I’ve never heard of an airplane sinking into a glacier.”

  For a moment there was a strange tension in the air. This had to be what it felt like when treasure hunters found the long-lost map, the old parchment with the X that marks the spot.

  Morley lifted one hand and waved it to get their attention. “Not so fast. Okay, you won’t find it in the textbooks. But I once talked to a glaciologist…well, we were drinking, and just before the last beer he really got talking. In any case, there are rumors of a phenomenon that might just fit. It’s something like a quicksand effect, but with ice. It’s a persistent legend, and it would explain a few puzzling accidents, missing polar explorers, that sort of thing. It’s just that there have never been any reliable observations that would meet scientific standards.”

  “I don’t pay any attention to stories like that,” Adrian declared. “It’s just one small step from there to the Loch Ness Monster and the yeti.”

  Morley nodded. “Sure, but think of the story of freak waves. Seamen had been telling stories about them for centuries but not a single scientist believed them. Then a few years ago we actually caught sight of them on satellite images.” Now he had the same treasure-hunting gleam in his eye. “If that’s really what happened—if there’s a jet plane trapped in a glacier up there—that would be the jackpot for glaciology.”

  “It would be a sensational story no matter what,” Leon added.

  Adrian looked at the two of them, still dubious. Then he nodded to Charlotte. “Keep reading. What else is there?”

  Charlotte looked back at the old logbook, scanned the Cyrillic scrawl on the rough paper, and tried to concentrate. It wasn’t easy. “ ‘Lieutenant Yegorov still has a high fever. We told him his plane is no longer there. He told wild stories about spiders attacking him and is firmly convinced the spiders took his aircraft.’ ” Fever. That was it. All of a sudden Charlotte felt she, too, had a fever. “Next day.” She hurried through the weather report. “ ‘Relatively low wind, sunny, -11 degrees. Finally made contact with command. Received orders to look for any sign indicating where the aircraft may be. Pavlov and I climbed up again this afternoon. Last roll of film unfortunately ruined.’ ” She cleared her throat. “Dash. Then it goes on: ‘Hard to say where plane may have landed. If we assume that a jet fighter needs a very long landing strip on smooth ice, then Lieutenant Yegorov may have landed much farther to the north than he told us. In which case, aircraft fell into the bay. Pavlov has sent our report. Alerted that naval ship is on its way to collect the lieutenant and investigate the matter.’ ”

  She turned the page. “Next day: ‘Snowing, light wind. The lieutenant is coughing hard. Pavlov thinks he may have pneumonia. Our stock of medicines does not contain effective treatments. Hope that the ship comes soon.’ ” She skipped two days with only short entries. “Here: ‘June 20. Cloudy. Minus 14 degrees, light snow. The SOKOL is at anchor. Thirty men arrived by boat. They have taken the lieutenant. Doctor seems concerned. Pavlov and I questioned separately. Helicopter has landed soldiers on the plateau to search everywhere. No sign of aircraft, not even in sea.’ ” The handwriting became a hasty scrawl, as though whoever had written in the diary had done so in secret. “ ‘June 21. An officer asked us directly whether we are working for the imperialists. Ridiculous accusation! Seems they cannot imagine any other explanation for disappearance of the Tupolev. A soldier told me that Lieutenant Yegorov is being questioned on suspicion of espionage.’ ”

  Angela shook her head. “I don’t get it. If we can see the plane from space with radar, then wouldn’t they have been able to find it back then?”

  “No, not at all,” Morley said. He even seemed amused by the suggestion. “They would have needed radar interferometry, and that wasn’t developed until the nineties.”

  Charlotte leafed back and forth through the book to make sure no pages had been torn out. “Then he didn’t make any entries for about a week,” she said. “Here, on June 29, he writes, ‘Have the island to ourselves again. Complaints that we were not punctual with weather reports several times. All seems like a bad dream. How can a plane simply vanish?’ ”

  Leon could hardly sit still. “But we know where it is!” He pointed to the folder of satellite images Morley had at his elbow. “Pass those over. If that’s really the airplane, then it can’t be as far down in the ice as a meteorite. We could find it.”

  “And do what? Dig it up?” Adrian asked.

  “It would be enough if we could dig up the tailfin. Preferably with the Red Star on it.”

  Charlotte shut the book. “Let’s just go take a look.” She lifted her head and looked out the window, where gusts of white still tumbled past. “When the weather improves, I mean.”

  Morley had taken one of the satellite images from the folder and placed it in front of the group. “That wouldn’t be a problem.” He pointed to the coordinate grid that overlay the picture. “All we would need to do it follow the GPS data, then drill a grid pattern at ten-meter intervals all around and—bingo!”

  “Do you think so?” Adrian asked. “That no more than five meters of ice has formed over the past fifty years?” That was all the length of drill bits that they had at hand.

  Morley smiled slyly. “Could be that more than five meters has formed. But then again, in the last ten years a lot of ice has vanished again. A whole lot. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if we got up there and found the plane sticking halfway out.”

  “I don’t know.” Adrian sounded deeply unconvinced. “It seems like a waste of time to me.”

  “Look at it this way,” Leon put in. “I’ll be documenting everything. ‘Climate research expedition finds lost Soviet jet’—that would be the story, with lots of great photos to go with it. Brightly clad research scientists on the eternal ice. Newspaper people love that kind of thing. That’s front-page material.”

  “Eternal ice?” Morley grumbled. “The ice around here is anything but.”

  “You’ll all be famous,” Leon went on, taking no notice. “And just think what a difference it would make next time you apply for a funding grant. Are you just the climatologist Dr. Adrian Cazar, or are you the famous climatologist Dr. Adrian Cazar?”

  Morley spluttered with laughter. “Hey! Great argument!”

  Adrian looked skeptically at the photojournalist. “And you’d earn a lot of money with this as well, wouldn’t you?”

  Leon shrugged. “In your shoes I wouldn’t be too bothered about that.”

  A gust shook the hut for the hundredth time that day. The wind howling through the latch moaned eerily.

  “All right. Fine by me,” Adrian finally conceded. “If the weather ever improves.”

  Two days later the storm stopped as though a switch had been thrown. For the first time since they had arrived on the island, the cloud cover broke and they could see blue sky.

  “That’s ideal,” Morley declared as they began to pack.

  And Leon said, “Perfect weather for photographs. It’s now or never.”

  Angela was the only one who asked whether she should even come along. “I won’t be able to do anything except stand in the way.”

  “You heard the guy,” Adrian answered, nodding toward Leon. “Do you want to stay as the biologist Angela MacMillan, or do you want to be the famous biologist Angela MacMillan?”

  “I’d rather be famous for discovering a species of pl
ant than a jet plane.”

  Leon was checking his cameras for the fourth or fifth time. “Just tell me real quick, then,” he put in. “When was the last time anyone became famous for discovering a plant species?”

  Even Angela couldn’t answer that one. “All the same. What am I supposed to do up there? I mean, the climb is hardly a walk in the park, I can see that. That first part of the ascent is practically a sheer wall. Wouldn’t it be better for me to wait here and make a hot meal for when you come back?”

  “I’d like it if you came along,” the photographer said frankly. “If only for compositional reasons. For one thing, an expedition of only three people looks too darn small, and secondly, that lime-green parka of yours will be a welcome burst of color.”

  That was the kind of language Angela understood: simple and direct. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll come along, then.”

  Charlotte checked her gear. Two and a half miles as the crow flies didn’t sound like much, but the expedition would take all day. The climb up to the plateau was the real challenge; Morley said it had pretty near killed him on the first day. So they packed their backpacks with thermos flasks full of hot tea, and nuts and fruit bars for an energy boost. And their scientific equipment as well, of course—the bore sampler with its drill bits, a samples case, all kinds of hooks and shovels, marker paint, radio beacons, and the like. On top of which, Morley insisted they bring life jackets.

  “Whatever for?” Charlotte protested.

  “We don’t know what kind of glacial phenomena we may run into.”

  “My backpack’s heavy enough.”

  “The life jackets aren’t heavy. They’re bulky.” It was true: they were chunky things, stiff as a board and made from a hard, artificial foam material. They had also been designed by someone with a limited grasp of the female anatomy. Although more modern models existed that inflated automatically upon contact with water and were otherwise just thick rolls of material, they had been beyond Adrian’s budget.