Zodiac Station (36 page)

WHERE IS Pfu-87 COMING FROM?

→ not from snow/ice accumulation – glacier samples negative

• MUST BE PICKED UP IN THE MINE TUNNELS
  

Eastman must know. All those loaded comments this morning about Vitangelsk, Mine 8. He was testing me to see how far I’ve got.

If he reads this, he’ll kill me.

Still not clear why he gave me the paper with those numbers on it. Some sort of test? Connected with Pfu-87 enzymes?

If there were four numbers, it would make sense. Could be DNA sequence, 0 = G, 1 = C, etc. Be interesting to compare with DNA coded by enzymes.

Unless …

Pharaoh String! Is
that
why Hagger brought me here? Impossible.

Noise outside – someone coming.

I have to get to the Helbreen right now.

USCGC
Terra Nova

Franklin put down the journal as Santiago came in to his cabin. Kennedy was with him, leaning on a crutch. His bandages had come off.

‘We took a look at the guys from the tent,’ Santiago said. He looked angry about something. ‘Tell the Captain what you told me.’

Kennedy licked his lips. ‘The man you found out there – it’s Tom Anderson.’

‘I told him it can’t be. Tom Anderson’s got six inches and about eighty pounds on this guy.’

Kennedy looked irritated. ‘I think you can trust me to recognise him.’

Franklin closed the book. ‘Is he going to wake up so he can tell us himself?’

‘Doc says fifty-fifty. He was out there a few days. The woman, Greta, she’s in better shape. Doc thinks she arrived later, probably came to rescue him but ran out of gas. She must have let off the emergency beacon. Had it tucked up with her in the sleeping bag, to keep the batteries warm.’

A wistful look came over him. ‘Be nice to have a chick to curl up in a sleeping bag with me out here.’

‘Mrs Santiago would hate to hear you say that, Ops.’

‘Mrs Santiago hates the cold.’

Franklin reopened the book. Santiago didn’t take the hint.

‘Something on your mind, Ops?’

‘Just wondering, sir. If we do have Anderson, who the hell did we have before?’

Anderson’s Journal – Tuesday (?)

I don’t know where to start. Don’t even know what day it is. After what’s happened … If I can’t make sense of it, how can I write it down?

At least I’ve got the rest of my life to think about it.

But that isn’t long. In this cold, life expectancy’s measured in hours. All that stands between me and the Arctic is a canvas wall. All that’s heating the tent is my own body. I can already feel it failing.

I read a story, before I came, how a nineteenth-century ship sank near the Bering Strait. Months later, wreckage arrived off the coast of Greenland, carried thousands of miles by the ice. Maybe one day this journal will land in Canada or Alaska, and a cruise-ship tourist will pick it up off the beach. They’ll wonder who I was, if this could possibly be true.

More likely, this flimsy piece of ice will spin off into open water and melt, until the ice gives and drowns the journal. Then all that’ll be left of me is a few drops of DNA in the ocean.

I miss Luke. Dying doesn’t frighten me on my own account – I’m not religious – but the thought of leaving him alone, and being without him, is making these last few hours a living hell. The best I can hope for, now, is that the ice holds long enough; that someone finds my body; that Luke can know the truth.

This is what happened.

I was on my bunk, staring at the sheet of paper with those noughts and ones and twos that I finally understood, when Greta came in.

‘Thing Night,’ she said. ‘You’re missing it.’

I swung myself off the bunk. ‘I have to get up to the Helbreen. Right now.’

She tilted her head five degrees to one side. That was about as surprised as she ever gets.

‘I know what Martin found up there.’

‘OK.’

‘We’ll need climbing harnesses and head torches.’

‘OK.’

We dressed for the cold. I could hear film music coming through the mess door, laughter and toasts, but they might as well have been on another planet. Greta fetched the climbing gear while I grabbed Hagger’s lab book and the journal with my notes. Luke’s Father Christmas letter peeked out of it, still undelivered.

I stood in the lab for the last time, and looked around. I had that feeling you get leaving for the airport, convinced there’s some vital thing you’ve forgotten to pack. But I didn’t dare wait any longer.

We left the Platform and headed for the snowmobile park. Just as we got there, a figure rose up from where he’d been crouching behind one of the machines. I was so keyed up, I almost shot him.

It was only Quam. He looked distracted; his hands were sticky, and he stank of petrol. Why he had chosen that moment for a spot of maintenance, I couldn’t think.

‘You’re missing Thing Night.’ He looked down, fiddling with his hands as if he’d spilled something on his glove. He sounded almost drunk.

‘So are you.’

‘Checking the fuel lines,’ he muttered. Greta gave him a sharp look.

‘Is something wrong?’

Quam shook his head. ‘Just checking.’

I could tell she didn’t believe him. I thought it was strange, too, but I had to be away. I grabbed her arm and tugged her towards the mag hut. ‘The
reading
,’ I said loudly.

Greta gave the snowmobiles one more unhappy look. She pointed to the flare pistol holstered on Quam’s hip. ‘Be careful with that thing.’

Quam covered it with his hand. ‘Be careful,’ he repeated.

He sounded dazed, like a zombie. If I’d only taken a moment to think about it, I might have put a few things together: the flare gun, the smell of petrol, the unlikely preoccupation with snowmobile maintenance. But the only exact science is hindsight.

‘What now?’ I asked, as soon as Quam was behind us.

‘The Sno-Cat.’

‘Won’t Quam stop us?’ Officially, we were still confined to base.

Greta shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

The Sno-Cat was parked behind the machine shop. Greta unplugged the umbilical cord that kept the battery warm, and started the engine. The moment it roared into life, I knew we weren’t going to get away unnoticed. The Sno-Cat’s not made for subtlety, or for speed. Sure enough, as we crossed the flag line I looked out the back window and saw Quam running after us, arms and legs flailing like a puppet with a broken string. For a moment, I thought he might even catch us. But you can’t run far in the Arctic. He pulled up suddenly, shouted something I couldn’t hear, then turned away. My last view was of him trudging back towards the Platform, shoulders stooped and head down. I kept watching, waiting for him to reappear with a snowmobile, but he never came.

I pitied Quam, then. I hoped he wouldn’t get into trouble on account of what Greta and I were doing. Of course, if I’d known what he was about to do, I would have turned the Sno-Cat around and put a bullet in his heart myself.

We crunched up the glacier and Zodiac disappeared behind us. In the tiny cab, there wasn’t much between us: every time Greta changed gear, or turned the wheel, I felt the point of her elbow. At least we weren’t cold, with the machine’s heater built from an age before oil shocks and global warming. I unzipped my coat.

‘Aren’t you curious why we’re doing this?’

She swerved the Sno-Cat around some obstacle I didn’t see.

‘Tell me.’

I explained my hypothesis, how the enzymes were running under the glacier and out into the sea through the mines.

‘The mines are sealed with concrete,’ she pointed out.

‘Water can get in through microscopic cracks.’

‘But how do
we
get in?’

‘I think Hagger found a way. He used Annabel’s Rhodamine dye to track the water flow under the glacier; he had it on his hands when he died. He must have followed the dye down one of the tunnels …’

‘Moulins,’ Greta corrected me.

‘… and found where the enzymes were coming from.’

A pause. ‘What’s an enzyme?’

I’d spent the last three days thinking about nothing else; the question threw me. But of course, why should she know? I thought for a moment. The throwaway answer wouldn’t do.

‘How much do you know about DNA?’

‘Some.’

Last year, Luke’s school invited me to give a talk about genetics to his Year 3 class. I fell back on that and hoped I didn’t sound patronising.

‘Imagine the human genome like a tower made of Lego bricks. The bricks can only be one of four colours, and the tower is three billion bricks tall. The bricks are stacked in pairs – so six billion in total – but there are certain rules. A red brick always goes next to a white one, and green always next to blue.’

‘OK.’

‘Each pair of bricks is what we call a “base pair”. In reality, the different coloured blocks are amino acids, four chemicals known by their initials G, C, T and A. To “read” the genome – sequence it – you just have to write down all those letters in the right order.’

I glanced across at her. ‘Still with me?’

‘Keeping up.’

‘Now, DNA makes RNA, which is like a copy of that Lego tower but only one block wide. RNA makes molecules called proteins, and proteins – among other things – make enzymes. An enzyme is a tiny biological machine, made of proteins, that performs a specific task. Like a little mobile chemical lab. It can be as fundamental as making your muscles move, and as mundane as breaking down stains on your laundry. You probably have them in your washing powder.’

‘I use non-bio.’

‘If DNA is the operating system of life, enzymes are the apps. The enzyme Martin found coming off the Helbreen is one that’s been created in a laboratory, for making DNA. Put it in a solution with the four bases, and it’ll grab them one after the other and stitch them together.’ I thought of Luke’s bedroom at home. ‘Remember my Lego analogy? Imagine you’ve got Lego bricks scattered all over the floor. The enzyme is like a little robot that can grab them one at a time, and snap them together in a preset order.’

Greta drove on. With the clouds low, it was dark enough that I could see the headlights roaming over the snow in front of us.

‘That’s why we’re going to the glacier?’

‘There’s something else.’ I got out the piece of paper covered in numbers. ‘Eastman intercepted these numbers being transmitted somewhere near Vitangelsk.’

She crunched into the next gear as if she was trying to decapitate it.

‘I know what the numbers mean.’

She didn’t look as impressed as I’d hoped. ‘Is it the password to get into the mine?’

‘It comes back to DNA. You see, the biggest problem with sequencing DNA isn’t the technology, or the process. That hasn’t changed much in thirty years, except to get quicker and cheaper. But each individual’s DNA contains three billion base pairs – that’s three billion pieces of information. And if you’re going to make use of it, you have to store it accurately and be able to retrieve it. Even one mistake, out of three billion, could mean the difference between perfect health and an incurable disease.

‘And the actual sequence makes mistakes too easy. In the genome, there are long stretches where the same base pairs, or pattern of bases, repeat themselves. Coming back to the tower, it’s as if you’re told to put 297 red bricks in a row. Very easy to miscount.

‘The man I did my doctorate with – Richie Pharaoh – he was obsessed with this problem. Any time you sequence DNA, you’re working with margins of error. You have to decide what you think’s acceptable. When the original Human Genome Project announced to the world that they’d sequenced the whole human genome – the articles in
Nature
and
Time
, the TV fanfare, the ceremony with Bill Clinton – what they didn’t say is that one in ten thousand of the base pairs was probably wrong. That was the margin of error they’d agreed on.

‘Now, one in ten thousand probably sounds pretty good. But with three billion base pairs, that’s still three hundred thousand mistakes – and it only takes one to ruin someone’s life. And there are two ways errors can creep in. Either when you’re reading the sequence, or when you’re writing it down. Which, practically, means on a computer.

‘So Richie Pharaoh devised a solution. Instead of standard binary code, the noughts and ones, where the same number always stands for the same base letter, he created a more advanced code where there are three numbers – zero, one and two – but each one records a different value depending on what went before it. Sort of like the Enigma machine in the Second World War, where the next letter changed depending on what letter you’d just typed.’

The system was pure Richie. Subtle and slippery, a solution to a problem most people, even leaders in the field, hadn’t realised existed yet.

Greta looked mystified. ‘Is this going to be on the test?’

‘The point is, Pharaoh never published it and it never caught on. Scientists were happy with the fiction that they’d “done it”, the software got better at correcting errors, and every time he tried to explain it to someone, their eyes glazed over. No one used it – except Richie Pharaoh. He always used it for his own experiments.’

‘And now it’s on Utgard.’

‘I’m wondering …’ I took a deep breath. What I was proposing was so ludicrous, my mind hit the buffers every time I tried to assemble the thought.

‘I’m wondering if the reason Martin brought me here was because of Richie Pharaoh.’

Anderson’s Journal

‘I should probably tell you some things about Pharaoh.’

We were up on the ice dome. A dream landscape of soft peaks and hard snow, and hidden fissures waiting to swallow you. A landscape like the past.

‘At university, Richie Pharaoh was a racing driver in a world of traffic wardens.’ Literally: his red NSX stood out a mile against the grey Volvos and Priuses in the car park. ‘He was American, a New Yorker, smarter than everyone and arrogant as hell, but the arrogance only made you try harder to impress him. All the grad students wanted his attention. You knew if you made it in his lab, you could walk into any job in the country.