Zodiac Station (42 page)

‘Why are you doing this?’ I whispered.

‘You are my salvation.’

He poured water into one of the orange meal packs and handed it to me. No spoon. I slurped it down. The pack said it was chicken with pesto, almost the most far-fetched thing I’d heard that day.

I swallowed it all and asked for another.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked. Genuinely curious, like a parent weaning a child.

‘It’s better than nothing.’

He squatted on the floor of the tent, watching me with those brown eyes that looked so much like Luke’s.

He’s fascinated by the idea that he has a biological twin.

I’ll kill him
, I promised myself. If I had to wrestle him into the water myself, drown us both under the ice, I’d find the strength.

‘You keep a diary.’ Not a question. ‘I’ve watched you writing it. Through the windows.’

What else did he know about me? All the time I’d spent at Zodiac, searching everywhere for answers, and really it was me who’d been under the microscope. Writhing like a worm.

‘I left it on the Platform,’ I lied.

‘You have a bulge under your coat, over your left breast.’

I undid the Velcro holding my coat together and extracted my journal. Damp, where I’d fallen in the underground stream, but the Gore-Tex had mostly kept it safe. I handed it over.

Play along, play along.
I told myself my chance would come.

He gave me another meal while he read the first pages of the journal. When I’d swallowed it down, I asked, ‘What’s next?’

‘There is a coastguard ship forty kilometres from here.’

‘That’s a long way without a snowmobile.’

‘I am impassive to cold.’

He had a strange way of speaking, this outsize man-child. Stiff and earnest, like someone attempting a foreign language. With only Pharaoh and Louise to talk to all his life, he must have learned most of his English from books. Old ones, by the sound of it.

He went back to the journal. Inside the bag, I felt my pockets for any sort of weapon. A penknife, a screwdriver. Even a carabiner might do. I had nothing except a Bic pen.

Thomas looked up. ‘Do you know what life is, Thomas? Is it the same as existing?’

‘I’m not a philosopher.’

‘Are you aware of endoliths? Single-celled organisms that inhabit the pores in between individual grains of rock, kilometres underground. They absorb nutrients from the rock itself; they obtain their energy from the heat of the earth. It requires all their resources simply to stay alive. Once every hundred years or so, they divide. One cell becomes two. And science says that is life.’

‘Technically.’

He seemed to want more. ‘You know you are alive. From the day you were born, you never doubted it. I lack that comfort. I feel I am alive, but all I know is what is inside me. How do you feel?’

‘Pretty rubbish, to be honest.’

He didn’t smile. I never saw him smile. Was that one of the untidy genes Pharaoh snipped out of his genome? Can you be human, if you can’t smile?

‘I think,’ he said solemnly, ‘life is taking your chances.’

He read. I lay there, waiting for my chance. But it’s hard to launch yourself out of a sleeping bag. Every time I moved, he was on to me quick as a cat.

I tried to force myself to stay awake. I wondered about Greta. Did she get out, after all? Did she make it back to Zodiac? Did she come down the hill thinking she’d was safe, euphoric with success, only to find a smoking ruin? Would she die of cold or starvation before the rescue party came? If they came. Perhaps it was better to imagine she’d died in the cave, snuffed out in a second by a million tons of ice settling.

I thought about Luke. I imagined the creature escaping, making his way to Cambridge. Looking for his twin. I thought about finding him in my home, and what I would do to him then.

But even the imagination fails in the end. Robert Frost was wrong: desire, hatred, the hot-blooded emotions – they’re no match for the cold. The world will end in ice. I began to drift. Each time my eyes opened, there he was, sitting beside me reading the journal. More than once, I saw him mouthing phrases, repeating them to himself as if studying for an exam. Sometimes he asked me questions. ‘What is the Overlook Hotel? Who is Willard Price? What is a Dalek?’

And then I woke and he was gone. I scrambled out of the bag and crawled outside, just in time to see him clipping himself into the skis he’d taken from the emergency sled. He looked ridiculously large on them, like a circus elephant on a bike.

‘I’m coming back,’ he told me.

I didn’t believe him. I threw myself at him, but he simply pushed off on his sticks and glided away into the fog. I couldn’t chase; I didn’t even have boots on.

I crawled back into the tent. He’d left me the journal, at least, and I had a pen in my pocket. I picked it up and started to write.

USCGC
Terra Nova

‘Captain?’

Sitting at the chart table in the wheelhouse, Franklin closed the book and looked up. Nearly at the end, only a couple of paragraphs left.

‘Ice is giving out,’ Santiago reported. ‘We should hit open water soon. Longyearbyen in seventeen hours.’

‘Good.’ Franklin pulled off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. ‘How about Anderson?’

‘You mean the real Slim Shady?’

‘The one who got away.’

‘Nada. Pilot says if you want him flying bigger circles, he’ll need more fuel. And overtime.’ Santiago hesitated. ‘He also said you should give him a quarter and take him to Foxwoods. You’ll get better odds.’

Franklin rested his hands on the journal and stared out the window.

What the hell is out there?

‘Call in the helo and wrap it up. No one can survive this place for long.’

‘What about Anderson, sir? The one we do have.’

‘What about him?’

‘Do you think he’ll live?’

A line from an old movie ran through Franklin’s head. He had to smile.

‘Who does?’

Anderson’s Journal – Final Entry

Writing in a hurry, numb fingers clutching pen. All alone. Scribbling.

He’s gone out, he may be some time. Said he’d bring help – rescue – think he lied. Knows that much about being human.

He’s gone to the ship. Thomas Anderson, sole survivor of Zodiac Station. They’ll take him to England. Home. He’ll have a life.

Life means taking your chances.

I thought I would have one. Maybe I did. Missed it.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice …

On the rocks.

We took risks, we knew we took them. Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.

I wish to register a complaint.

I love you, Luke.

Sounds from the ice. Groaning, throbbing, like a living thing. Breaking up? Almost like an engine. Footsteps. A bear?

Here I am. A speck of life adrift on the ocean, huddled for survival on my frozen raft. Clinging to hope, until the ice melts.

The Arctic can be a slippery place. For helping on my travels and keeping me out of crevasses, literal and figurative, my profound thanks go to Nick Cox of the UK Arctic Research Station at Ny-Ålesund, for sharing a fraction of his immense knowledge of Arctic science; Sara Wheeler, for telling me how to get to Svalbard; Doug Benn and Griet Scheldeman, for a crash course in glaciology and glacier caving, and an unforgettable night drinking whisky in Longyearbyen; Tom Foreman, who led the way through ice caves and abandoned mines; Stefano Poli and Yann Rashid of Poli Arctici, for three extraordinary days on the ice; the Kennedy family, for essential provisions; Karoline Baelum at the Svalbard Science Forum, who painted vivid pictures of science in the field; Jon Hawkins and Danny Davies, for lending me warm clothing; Sarah Hawkins, for introducing me to the right people; Miriam Iorwerth for sharing her amazing photographs; and James McIntosh, who miraculously knew everything I needed to know, and was always happy to help. Kevin Anderson gave me sedatives, antidepressants and head injuries whenever I wanted them. And an evening in the pub with Des Roberts-Clark provided me with more understanding of genetics than a month in the library, plus a fistful of plot ideas.

I’m grateful to everyone at Hodder for doing what they always do, which is running the best operation in publishing: Anne Perry, Kerry Hood, Jason Bartholomew and all their colleagues. Oliver Johnson steered the book with his usual ineffable genius; and Caroline Johnson scraped off the barnacles with a razor-sharp copy-edit. Jane Conway-Gordon watched my back and muttered dire warnings about polar bears.

For every day working on this book in the Arctic, I spent twenty at home. For those, and all the time in between, I’d like to thank my wife, Emma, for constantly supporting me despite some of my wilder scientific ideas (she has a professional interest in genetics); and my sons Owen and Matthew, for encouraging and distracting me in equal measure. One day, I promise, we’ll go to the North Pole.

All the science in this book is based on actual research. In some cases I may have exaggerated or misappropriated the facts either to serve the story or to simplify complex ideas, or from sheer ignorance. In every case, those distortions are all mine, and no reflection on the real scientists who told me about their work.

For anyone who’s curious, Utgard is located about halfway between Svalbard and Franz Josef Land, and further north, but you won’t find it on any map. Likewise, Zodiac Station combines details of various Arctic and Antarctic bases, but the base, its personnel and its parent organisation are entirely fictional.