Zodiac Station (3 page)

The bureaucrats who run Zodiac fought it – hated it – but Hagger forced it through. No boards, no assessment. Forty-eight hours later, I was at Heathrow.

My sister was late. Ironically, it had snowed – only a centimetre, but the roads had jammed solid. Who expects snow at the end of March? Luke and I waited in the departure hall at Terminal 3, probably the most depressing place on earth, while the crowds tramped slush through the doors and the tannoy ran non-stop with delays and cancellations. Fog steamed off the passengers; the whole place stank of damp.

Just when I thought I might miss my flight, Lorna staggered in. There wasn’t much time for goodbyes. I gave Luke a long, tight hug and we both tried not to cry. When I let go, he gave me the envelope he’d been clutching. I smiled when I saw the address.

‘You can take it to the North Pole,’ he explained.

I tucked it in my pocket and kissed him goodbye.

‘Don’t get eaten by the polar bears,’ said Lorna.

I flew to Oslo, then to Tromsø, where I had a ham and cheese sandwich and transferred on to a small Twin Otter for the last leg to Utgard. There was no one else on the flight, just me and the pilot and a couple of tons of supplies.

I suppose you know about Utgard. It’s the last place in the world, the most northerly scrap of land on the planet. Easy to miss – so easy, in fact, that no one realised it was there until the twentieth century. Most of it’s covered in ice, so much that the weight has actually pushed the land below sea level. Not that there’s much sea, either: for ten months of the year it’s frozen solid. The only notable population is polar bears, and a couple of dozen scientists at Zodiac Station. I wouldn’t like to say who’s hairier.

Even from Tromsø, it took another six hours’ flying. We refuelled at the base at Ny-Ålesund, where the mechanics fitted skis to the plane and the pilot changed into his cold-weather gear. He gave me a dubious look, in my jeans and the jacket I use for walking the Broads with Luke.

‘They said they’ll issue me clothing when I get there,’ I explained.

‘Then hopefully we get there,’ he said. I took it as Norwegian humour.

We carried on north. I stared out the cockpit window, keen for my first sight of Utgard. Behind the clouds, dark patches swam in and out of view, like bruises forming under skin.

‘Will we be able to land?’ I asked. The pilot shrugged. Was that another joke?

My first view of Utgard was a swelling on the horizon, white peaks almost impossible to tell apart from the clouds. As we got closer, they resolved themselves into mountaintops. The clouds parted on a dramatic landscape, a Toblerone rampart guarding the western approach. The island was such a small dot on the map, it was hard to believe so many mountains could fit on it. They seemed to go on for ever.

We descended between the mountains and skimmed over a white fjord. The pilot banked, turned, and suddenly I saw two rows of red flags staking out the runway like drops of blood. The plane thumped down, bounced slightly, and skied to a stop. Considering we’d landed on solid ice, it was pretty controlled. Outside, I saw a limp windsock, a clutch of oil drums and an orange Sno-Cat. Otherwise, just mountains and snow.

‘Welcome to Zodiac,’ said the pilot.

The cold sank its teeth into me the moment I stepped off the plane. At the foot of the ladder, I saw a woman rolling an oil drum towards me. The first thing that struck me was that she wasn’t wearing a coat: just a thick knitted jumper, ski trousers, and a woolly hat with tasselled flaps covering her ears. A long blonde plait hung down her back. Her cheeks were flushed red with the cold, and the eyes that looked up at me were a cool ice-blue.

‘Tom Anderson,’ I introduced myself.

‘You’re in the way,’ she shouted, though I could barely hear her. The pilot had left one of the engines running, and the propeller almost drowned her out. So much for the silence of the Arctic. I scrambled out of her way and stood on the sidelines while she and the pilot ran a hose from the fuel drum to the plane. When that was secure, the pilot climbed in the cabin while the woman reversed the Sno-Cat up to the door. The pilot began sliding out the boxes of supplies we’d brought, which she loaded into the back. They seemed to have forgotten I existed.

I wanted to savour my first sight of the Arctic, but it was hard to concentrate. The cold squeezed my skull; my ears hurt as if they’d been slapped, and the icy wind made my eyes water. The propeller racket beat against me, and every breath I took was heavy with aviation fuel. I had gloves on, but they might as well have been tissue paper.

‘If you freeze to death before you sign the paperwork, the insurance doesn’t pay out,’ said the woman. I hadn’t noticed her come over. She grabbed my arm and dragged me towards the Sno-Cat. I couldn’t believe how useless I’d got so quickly: I couldn’t even lift myself into the cab without a shove from behind. But the engine was on, and the heater made the cab decently warm. I didn’t like to think what all those engines running non-stop must be doing to the atmosphere. At that moment, I didn’t care.

The woman climbed in and circled the Sno-Cat round, while the Twin Otter executed a quick turn back down the runway. In an impossibly short distance, it lifted off and disappeared behind the mountains.

‘I hope you didn’t change your mind,’ said the woman. I still hadn’t caught her name.

‘Tom Anderson,’ I introduced myself again.

She nodded, and kept on driving.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Greta.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Two years.’

‘Must be tough,’ I sympathised.

‘I like the silence.’

I took the hint. The Sno-Cat ground and bounced its way over the snow. Round the base of an outcropping mountain, into a low valley – and suddenly there was Zodiac.

It looked like a spaceship landed on an alien planet. The main building was a low, green oblong jacked up on spindly steel legs. A white geodesic dome bulged out of the roof; the rest of it was covered with a mess of masts, aerials, satellite dishes and solar panels. Subsidiary buildings clustered around it: a mix of faded wooden huts in assorted sizes, curved-roofed Nissen huts, and bulbous orange spheres with round portholes, like deep-sea submersibles left behind by a sinking ocean. Flags fluttered from a line of red poles that staked the perimeter, a shallow semicircle down to the frozen edge of the fjord.

We pulled up outside the main building – the Platform. It was bigger than it had looked from the top of the hill, almost a hundred metres long, with a jumble of crates and boxes stored underneath. A flight of steel steps led up to the front door.

A low bang rolled down the valley as I stepped out. I glanced over my shoulder.

‘Is that thunder?’

‘Seismic work,’ said Greta. ‘They’re blasting on the glacier.’

We climbed the steps. On the wall by the door, a scratched and faded plaque said
Zodiac Station
; under it, a much brighter sign added,
British South Polar Agency
. It looked like the newest thing on the base.

‘Did I take a wrong turn somewhere?’ I looked around, half expecting to see penguins.

‘New management.’

Greta kicked a bar on the base of the door and it swung in. All the doors at Zodiac opened inwards – to stop drift snow trapping you. Inside was a small, dark boot room, and a second door opening further in.

‘No shoes in the Platform,’ said Greta. She turned to go.

‘Wait,’ I called. ‘Should I introduce myself somewhere?’

The door slammed behind her.

I left my boots and coat in the vestibule and ventured through the next door. The first thing I saw on the other side was a gun rack bolted to the wall: half a dozen rifles standing upright, more spaces where others were missing. Beyond, a straight corridor ran for what seemed an eternity, dozens of doors but no windows. It reminded me, unpleasantly, of the set of the Overlook Hotel. You know, from the film
The Shining
. Stanley Kubrick directed it.

I padded down the carpeted corridor in my socks. I read the signs on the doors I passed, little squares of card that seemed to have been typed on an honest-to-goodness typewriter.
Laundry Room
;
Dark Room
;
Radio Room
; laboratories, numbered in no particular order I could work out. One said
Pool Room
, and under it someone had taped a holiday-brochure photo of an azure-blue swimming pool. I opened it, out of curiosity, but there was only a half-size pool table crammed in a windowless cupboard.

Further along, I found the door for Hagger’s lab. On a sheet of A4, a red skull and crossbones warned
HIGH INFECTION RISK OF UNKNOWN DNA
. Undeterred, I knocked and when no one answered I went in. None of the doors at Zodiac have locks except the toilet (and that had broken).

Hagger’s big reputation hadn’t won him any favours in the room ballot. His lab was tiny, though at least there was some daylight. Two small windows looked back to the mountains behind the base, a vision of clarity against the clutter inside. Wires and tubes were draped everywhere: you had to step carefully to avoid bringing down the whole show. Somehow, he’d managed to cram a complete laboratory on to the workbenches: a mass balance, a shiny electron microscope fresh out of the box, sample bottles, Erlenmeyer flasks, and a set of green notebooks lined up against the wall. A length of yellow pipe sat in a tray of water in the fumes cupboard. A small refrigerator humming under the bench made me think of the old joke about selling fridges to Eskimos.

A hard-topped table made an island in the centre of the chaos, though you could hardly see the surface for all the stuff piled up on it. Inevitably, I knocked something off when I walked past. A stapled sheaf of paper. I bent down to pick it up, and as I glanced at it – as you do – saw my own name staring back at me.

Anderson, Sieber and Pharaoh.
‘Pfu-87: A Synthetic Variant on the Pfu-polymer Enzyme and its Applications for Synthetic Genomics’.

It was my
Molecular Biology
article: the first scientific paper I ever published. It was strange to be reminded of it on Utgard. Hagger must have wanted to remind himself I’d once been a decent scientist.

‘Ha. The new intruder.’

A man stood in the doorway. I hadn’t heard him approach – you never did at Zodiac. He was short and, unusually for that place, clean-shaven. He had a round head with not quite enough hair to cover it, and wore one of those drab army-issue jumpers with patches on the elbows and shoulders.

‘Tom Anderson,’ I introduced myself. ‘Martin Hagger’s new assistant.’

‘I didn’t think you’d come to sell us double glazing. Ha.’ He shook my hand. ‘Quam. Base commander.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘I hear you rather put the cat among the pigeons in Norwich, coming up like this. Very irregular.’ He squinted at me. ‘Still, you’re here now.’

‘I am.’ I meant to add something like ‘Thrilled to be here’ or ‘Glad you could have me’, but somehow the phrases jammed in my head so nothing came out except a sort of hiccup. Quam looked me up and down.

‘I suppose I’d better show you around.’

‘It seems very quiet,’ I said, as he led me on down the corridor.

‘Normal, this time of year. October to February we almost shut down; just a skeleton staff. I only got here myself four weeks ago.’

I tried to imagine overwintering there: the endless darkness; the stale jokes and stale food; the long, mournful corridor and the empty rooms. You’d go insane.

‘The advance party come in March to set up. The rest get here in May. After that, it’s a madhouse.’ He opened a door numbered
19
. ‘This is where you’ll be sleeping.’

I peered in, though I couldn’t see much because someone had decided to put the wardrobe in front of the window. Four bunks squeezed between four walls, with a leopard-print Claudia Schiffer looking down from a poster.

‘Nice to have some female company.’

‘That’s to hide the escape tunnel.’ Quam closed the door again. ‘Only you for now, but you’ll have to share when the barbarian hordes invade. You won’t spend much time there, anyway. Hagger will work you pretty hard, I imagine.’

A dull detonation from up on the glacier made the Platform rock slightly under my feet.

‘Is he here?’

‘Hagger’s up at Gemini. That’s our camp on the ice dome. He’ll be back in a couple of hours, when the helicopter gets in. Saturday night is movie night,’ he added, moving on down the corridor. ‘The lab, you’ve seen. Toilets, surgery.’ Doors opened, doors closed. ‘My office, if you ever need me. Radio room.’ Another cubbyhole, packed with dials, gauges and cables. Static hissed from a speaker, and an American-accented voice was saying something I couldn’t make out.

‘Is that for us?’

Quam shook his head. ‘The Americans have a ship up north. Coast Guard ice-breaker, crew of scientists. Two hundred miles away, but it’s the nearest thing to civilisation from here. Every so often we pick up their transmissions.’

He turned a knob and the sound went away. ‘Did you bring a mobile phone?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can leave it in your suitcase. No reception here. If you go out in the field, we’ll issue you a satellite phone.’

‘Internet?’ I looked at the antiquated computer taking up half the space in the radio room. ‘If there’s somewhere to connect my laptop … I promised my son we could Skype.’

‘We’ve no wireless because it interferes with the instruments. You can connect to the LAN with a cable, but you’ll need an account. You can use this machine with a guest account until we set you up. I’ll give you a form.’

I looked doubtfully at the machine. ‘Do I have to know Morse code?’

The front door banged; footsteps thudded down the corridor. A stocky man strode towards us. I’d been reading Greek myths to Luke that week: in the dim corridor, something about him made me think of a charging Minotaur.

He stopped in front of us, under one of the fluorescent lights. He had a wide face and blue eyes and a beard he must have been working on for months. On top, his fair hair was cut straight and short, sticking up in a couple of places from his hat. The slogan on the sweatshirt said,
ZODIAC STATION – HELL DOES FREEZE OVER
.