The bridge was like the backstage of a theater: professionals bent to their controls in dim light, headphones on, brows furrowed in concentration, while the captain faced forward, giving hushed orders like a stage manager. In front of him, outside thick windows with frost fringing their corners, searchlights made daylight on the decks. Directly under our feet, the research lab hummed with esoteric equipment that most laymen would struggle to so much as turn on, yet the bridge’s tools were intimidating. As usual, I was the only woman present. I compensated by frowning at everything.
The captain, Trevor Kulak, wore a similar expression. He stood in a wide stance, made a curt nod. “Dr. Philo. You might take a look at the short range.”
“Over here, Doctor,” said a boy at a radar monitor. He may have been a sailor in the reaches of the North Atlantic but he was a boy nonetheless. I crossed to him, peering down at his display. Open waters remained dark green, but when the radar arm scanned in an arc, a mass of light green filled the screen.
“What is the scale here?” I said.
“A thousand meters, Doctor.” The radar swept from bottom to top again, revealing a solid object shaped somewhat like Australia. It looks nearly as large, too.
“We’re approaching lee side,” the captain announced. “We’ll moor in the calm.”
I bent back to the monitor. “So the long dimension on this berg is what?”
“Four hundred twenty-two meters on the side facing us. Preliminary scan indicates three intrusions of hard-ice.”
“Excuse me, is that a lot?”
I turned, and sure enough, the question had come from Dixon. I resisted the impulse to recoil. Daniel Dixon, reporter with Intrepid magazine. It was part of Carthage’s plan, having a media man along. “Think of the ink,” he said. “Press equals money.” It might as well have been his motto.
Dixon was a tolerable guy, to a point. He tended to stay out of the way, asked open-ended questions. On the long haul north from Woods Hole he helped pass countless tedious hours by telling stories from his days on a newspaper’s crime beat: the city’s largest mansion built entirely upon the proceeds of embezzlement, price fixing by funeral homes, a woman held against the wall by her hair while her madman husband stabbed her sixty-six times. Dixon was heavyset, which normally is no problem for me, but he seemed to take up an undue amount of room. I mean, my father was as round as an apple, yet I could never get enough of hugging him. So it wasn’t Dixon’s size, it was his way of infringing on personal space, little that there is on a ship anyway. He made me feel not like a Yale-credentialed biologist, but some hussy in a too-small bikini. No one likes being leered at.
Also Dixon’s inquisitiveness could be tiresome. He refused to let anything go unsaid, but sometimes you just didn’t feel like explaining. Like that moment. “You tell him,” I said.
The radar operator shrugged. “For a candidate berg, this would be about five times larger than any prior find. If it turns out to be the real stuff.”
Dixon pulled out his ever-handy notepad. “How can you tell before you even touch the thing?”
“Size. Weight.”
“Don’t listen to him,” said the technician one seat down. “It’s about buoyancy.”
Dixon sidled closer. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s basic.” The technician kept his eyes on his screen. “Ice has a mass density of 0.917 grams, so 91.7 percent of the berg should be underwater. But if it formed rapidly, in a polar typhoon for example, then salinity and density will be higher. As much as 92.5 percent of the formation could be submerged, which is why we call it a candidate berg. A higher level of density indicates heavy veins of hard-ice.”
Dixon scribbled away. “How much of this one is underwater?”
The first radar operator ran a scan, then a calculation on his keyboard. “I’m getting . . . 93.1 percent?”
“Impossible,” said the second technician. “That would be the highest ever recorded.” He slapped the keys at his device. When the number came up he was silent, so I spied over his shoulder: 93.151.
“Huh,” said Dixon, writing the number down. “And why is that important?”
“Just look.” The radar boy changed the scale on his scanner. As it swept upward, the green arm left behind clear veins of white. They resembled tree roots, capillaries, chambers in a lung. “See?” he continued. “This candidate berg presents an opportunity to find larger specimens for the Carthage Institute’s next steps.”
Dixon jotted on his pad. “You really believe all that bring-it-back-to-life stuff?”
“Are you serious?” scoffed the second technician. Then he glanced my way, saw I was watching, shrugged. “Who knows?”
“And you?” he asked the boy.
The crewman smiled. “I’m just a radar operator, sir.”
I’d had enough, so I moved to stand beside Captain Kulak. He observed in silence as men below scampered across the deck. Much of the ship was rimed in white, cables and rails wearing a thick coat of frost. The crewmen, clipped to guy wires, were zipped inside insulated suits that shed water like the skin of a seal. They shouted vowels to each other because consonants were lost in that scathing wind.
“Or, I,” hollered a goggled form at the bow. A port-side crewman standing at a harpoon gun waved his acknowledgment, bent to aim, fired. A twelve-foot steel dart plunged like a giant flying fish into a wave, out the other side, and deep into dark beyond.
“Ar-ar, I,” the man in goggles bellowed. A starboard man fired next, his steel shaft also zipping out of sight. Then he made a little jump, giving two mittened thumbs up, which caused the goggled man to turn to wave his arms in an X and Y up at the bridge.
There was a flash behind me. I turned to see that Dixon had his camera out.
“Not now,” Kulak growled, shaking his head. “Pete’s sake.”
I remember the next part so well. It was the littlest harbinger, a bit of warning, or perhaps a metaphor for the earthquake-incredible thing we were about to find. But there I go, falling prey to superstition, when the facts indicate that it was merely operator error.
Captain Kulak nodded to a helmsman on his right, who toggled a throttle. A cable on the deck drew taut. Suddenly the ship yawed steeply to starboard.
“Whoa,” Dixon yelled. I seized the nearest chair, Billings grabbing my arm.
The men on deck scrambled to keep their feet. One who was unsecured fell sideways. The other crewmen watched helplessly as he slid across the deck. At last he caught a railing, wrapped both arms around it.
“Steady . . .” Kulak cleared his throat. “Even hands, sailor.”
“Aye, sir,” answered the helmsman, tugging another handle. Winches drew up the slack in the cable on the other side, their motors complaining as the vessel righted. Then the winches cranked both cables slowly in, evenly, ice cracking away as the wire coiled on its reel. Kulak frowned but the harpoons held. By inches, the ship snuggled closer to the berg, like a tug docking an aircraft carrier. I could feel Dixon standing near me, Billings on his other side.
“Hold at ten meters,” Kulak called. The winches paused, the ship’s engine idled. Then he turned to his left. “Raise the lights.”
A crewman pressed several buttons. Bright beams revealed a wall of bluish white that extended beyond the lights’ range. It felt like we were tethered to a skyscraper.
“Dear God, Kate,” Billings whispered. “Look what you’ve led us to accomplish. What if this one is full of hard-ice?”
I only pursed my lips, too tense to answer.
“Can those units run any higher?” the captain asked.
“Aye, sir,” said the crewman. The beams opened their focus, tilting upward, spreading light. Still they could not reach either outer edge, nor did the top of the berg come into view. The only sound in the room was Dixon’s pen scratching.
“This thing has to be five stories high,” Captain Kulak said to no one in particular. “Can you give me any more?”
“One moment sir.”
The crewman punched buttons on his console. The starboard light drew back and aimed upward. Finally the top of the berg emerged like some frozen matterhorn, a painfully bright reflection against the blackness above.
Billings let out a low whistle. “God save the queen.”
Kulak crossed his arms. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have the largest candidate berg ever discovered.”
For some reason, everyone looked at me. Dixon stilled his pen, Kulak raised his eyebrows, Billings grinned like a kid. I considered, then gave a scientist’s assessment.
“Maybe,” I said. “Ten million tons of maybe.”
CHAPTER 2
Ice Cream
(Daniel Dixon)
Plain and simple, the nicest ass I have seen in my life. And I have admired my fair share. Bright, too, our Dr. Kate Philo, a quicker study than that brilliant lady propulsion engineer at NASA, who was no tortoise. She’s kind as well, and not in the sugary or shallow beauty-contestant way, but genuinely friendly to everyone from the ice-cold captain to the lowest ship-rat deckhand.
Still, the woman can be as smart as a calculator and as warm as the porch light left on, but as long as I can get a gander at the good doctor’s luscious backside every so often, it’s all jake with me.
I mean, can you imagine a worse gig? Four months in the freaking Arctic Ocean? For a longtime science writer like me, it’s not exactly covering a shuttle launch, or profiling the savior of lowland gorillas, or forecasting when Florida runs out of freshwater—all stories I’ve filed for Intrepid over the years. All the other staff writers were on assignment, my editor insisted, and there was nothing juicy gathering dust in my in-box. I figured, what the hell. Nobody told me that once you pass the Arctic Circle, life is as dull as the middle of a desert.
Plus, all they’re looking for is ice. Yes, they want a “candidate berg” full of “hard-ice,” but that’s just a classic case of new science: create new terminology and overnight it’s all serious and objective, integrity just leaking out the sides. Right. It’s just ice, dammit, which is about as rare in this godforsaken place as oxygen. Look out any porthole in any direction. Meanwhile we’re missing the real sights, motoring right past them like a nuthouse afloat. We could have stopped at Prince Patrick Island, with its stunning escarpments and snaky river oxbows. But no, we’re as determined as salmon in spawning time, gotta get somewhere if it kills us. Ice it is, as if there were something special about that particular chilly form of H2O beyond what you can find back home in your ordinary freezer and float in a nice highball of scotch. And all the way up here, with every pebble of the world’s landmass to your back and nothing in front till you come around the other side? Ice is daylight, ice is breakfast. Stand on deck two minutes and watch what forms on the parka hood from your breath. Ice here is as plentiful as pennies from heaven, gills on fish, Carter’s little pills. Still, every third day this ship comes across some whoop-de-doo find. Except that after we tether up and they spend half a day scanning the damn thing, it turns out to be not the kind of ice they’re hot for, and off we go again, tedious as a tax return.
I am not fooled. Not for one second. This trip is nothing but a giant head fake. It’s all part of the colossal boondoggle Erastus Carthage has built for himself. Obviously the guy has a terminal case of Swede fever, probably already cleared a place on the mantel to put his Nobel. Plus, with the way he never stops rattling his tin cup for grants, I suspect he might be feathering his personal nest a bit, too.
In the humble opinion of yours truly, our respected Professor Carthage is running the greatest snow-job money grab this country has seen since P. T. Barnum. Look, take it from a guy who pulled his parents out of a burning house when he was fourteen—poster people, by the way, for the stupidity of smoking in bed. Here is what that kid discovered when he stopped coughing his lungs out and looked at them there on the lawn, Mom curled into herself like a fifty-year-old fetus, Dad’s teeth wide like he’s biting the air for a decent breath. The lesson: there is nothing deader than dead. Over. Done. Final. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
I don’t care if Carthage can jolt some shrimp into jumping around for half a minute. You can do the same thing with certain rocks, if they contain enough tin. I aim to blow this joker’s cover, plain and simple. Show the world what a sham it is, last week’s headlines be damned.
That is the only reason I took this gig—to tear that arrogant prick down. And may I just say, the trip has had precious few compensating amenities. Dull food. No booze. About two people on board capable of telling a decent joke. The only perk, come to think of it, the only real bonus for a dog like me, is the perfectly shaped, wonderfully toned, and tragically unattainable derriere of one Kate Philo, Ph.D.
Add in the smarts and the kindness and yours truly is a lost cause. The woman is the whole package, plus dessert. Sometimes I don’t know whether to whimper or drool.
This one night on the ship I can’t sleep. Blame the usual stew of loneliness and lust, I’m all but sucking my thumb. Then they find another candidate berg. Excuse me if I hold the confetti. I do my usual lurk and scribble, but no one talks much because the ocean’s heaving like a roller coaster. When we motor into sight of the iceberg, it’s a stunner. Bigger than an aircraft carrier, and brilliantly white. Funny when you grow up knowing the Titanic story, how seeing these things is about as comfortable as strolling up to a rattlesnake. There’s a weight in your gullet. The crew goes mute, which does not exactly make for scintillating copy. Eventually they call Dr. Kate to the bridge, and I’m figuring the least it will do is improve the scenery.
She arrives in a yellow T-shirt and one of those blue polypropylene outfits, the supertight kind they wear under the wet suit for diving in frigid water. The crewmen, most of them as young as daffodils, take a good long gawk. One catches my eye and shakes his head, like Can you believe it?
Scientists, sailors, reporters, priests. Say what you like but we are all still male.
Now it’s two hours later. Dawn coming but no one’s going to bed. They’re poring over this latest find, in the research room downstairs of the bridge. Basically they perform a sonar scan of the entire iceberg, a process as exciting as the discovery of vanilla. But David Gerber is seated at the console, which means there may be some laughs yet.
“Come into my palace,” he says, waving to me and Dr. Kate without taking his eyes from the screen. He has crazy curly long gray hair like some drug-addled jazz pianist, held back by a communications headset at an odd angle, and a three-day beard. “Come see what free association has done for our bold expedition this fine day.”
Gerber is not a water guy, nor even biology. He’s all theoretical math, Princeton trained with Stanford computer science thrown in, a legitimate maniac, and I’ve met him before. He led the repair team when the Mars Rover broke down with a few thousand miles left on NASA’s warranty. Goddamn massive problem to solve, with programming, by radio, from 55 million miles away. He did it, though, the Rover restarted, and that is a pretty neat trick. I covered that story for three weeks and never once saw evidence that Gerber had troubled himself to sleep. Getting a guy with that kind of horsepower onto a time-wasting cruise like this one? I cannot imagine what it cost.
The challenge with Gerber is that he is also a heavy toker. Day and night, dinner and breakfast. Used to be, I could never tell when he was straight and when he was high. Then I decided just to assume he was always high, and it worked fine.
Also he streams music constantly, obsessing on one thing only: the Grateful Dead. No other music, no other band. He has albums, bootlegs, a fetish about recordings with guest artists. Gerber once boasted that he’d collected twenty thousand songs by the Dead. He’s memorized more obscure facts than a tour guide at the Baseball Hall of Fame.
I like it. The optimism of the songs, the lightness of attitude, it’s a break from the usual grind. Sometimes Gerber gets lost in one of the band’s long improvisations, staring into space during the endless musical self-indulg
ence, but otherwise his obsession is harmless. One time, because I cranked my share of rock in my day, I made the mistake of pretending. I recognized “Sugar Magnolia” on his computer speakers, and declared that the live Europe ’72 version was superior to the studio original on American Beauty.
Gerber laughed. “The Dead performed that song five hundred and ninety-four times and recorded it forty-nine times. My personal favorite was October of ’73, which came out in 2001 on volume nineteen of Dick’s Picks. Yes, it was ‘sunshine daydream’ in Oklahoma City.”
Then he cackled, scratched his mangy hair, and went back to his computer.
Good thing Gerber’s a genius because anyone else wasting that many brain cells wouldn’t have half a dozen left. Tonight he beckons us closer: “Come, my children, come.”
I stand to his left, Dr. Kate the other side. Five displays arc around his desk. Three show screen savers of fractals branching to infinity. Of the remaining two, the upper one plays a video feed from the ship’s bow. It shows a trio of men in expedition wear, plus thick flotation vests, working the sonar scanner over the surface of the ice. Like rock climbers, they’re linked by ropes, which are anchored to the top of the berg somewhere up out of sight. Everyone moves slowly, as if they’re on the moon. It’s cold enough out there, a body could die of exposure in minutes. An accidental dip in the brink? Don’t even want to imagine it.
The scanner weighs two hundred pounds, and moving it around is complicated by all the clothes. I did one stint with the device, so I could write about it, and ten minutes was all the experience I needed. The cold froze my nostrils, then crept down my throat, and I swear it was headed for the bottom of my lungs. The temperature felt malevolent, like creepy fog in a horror movie. Don’t let anyone feed you that bunk about nature being beautiful and kind. Watching these men struggle on the video feed, I was forever convinced that nature would have been more than happy to see me frozen solid dead.
The Curiosity: A Novel Page 2