Lord of All Things (41 page)

Adrian nodded grudgingly and then looked around at the others. “Okay. First item on the agenda: living quarters.” He looked dubiously at the ramshackle hut that stood a couple of hundred yards away at the foot of the cliff. “The weather station here on Saradkov was in use from 1949 to 1967. Meaning that place has been standing empty for forty years and change. It’s probably just a ruin.”

“We should take a look at it all the same,” Angela said. “It’s the only bit of human history around here.”

Adrian raised his eyebrows. “There’ll be time for all kinds of sightseeing soon enough. We should start off by finding a spot for the tents. As flat as possible, and sheltered from the wind…” He stopped and looked all along the coastline. There was no shelter from the wind here. “Flat anyway.”

“I think we should have a look at the hut first,” Leon said. He raised his hand to show he meant no criticism. “Just a word of advice from someone who’s been around a bit. The great advantage of a hut is that it has solid walls. You very soon learn to appreciate that, especially in a snowstorm.”

Charlotte suddenly saw in her mind’s eye how a raging storm might tear her tent loose and sweep it away. Nonsense, of course; the tents they had chosen were stormproof. Nevertheless, she looked imploringly at Adrian.

He nodded noncommittally. “Okay. Let’s take a look at it. Before this turns into a debate.”

They toiled up the slope over bare rock and patches of snow that crunched beneath their boots. Charlotte decided the place could easily serve as a film set for a story about some other planet. Nothing grew here, not even lichen. The brown rocks and the cliffs above were stark and bare.

The hut was not much more to look at from close up than it had been from a distance: a simple blockhouse built of weathered gray wood with a steeply sloping roof and a tin chimney sticking up from it. It had a door made of planks and a single small window in each wall. And it was tiny, meant to house the one or two people posted out here to perform their desolate tour of duty.

“It’s not exactly the Hilton,” Adrian said once they were standing in front of it.

“But it’s still standing,” Angela pointed out, clearly in favor of solid walls around herself.

“Huts like this are usually built to last, and the cold preserves everything,” Leon declared. “Woodworm and all the rest have no chance. The huts Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott built down in Antarctica more than a hundred years ago are still standing. You could still live in them today. Comfortably, even.”

Angela looked askance at him. “How do you know that? Were you ever there?”

Leon nodded. “I was there, oh, about five years ago doing a photo feature about McMurdo Station, the American research base out on the Ross Ice Shelf. Five weeks in the Antarctic. That’s cold! This is a trip to the beach by comparison.”

There was no lock on the door. It was fastened by a simple wooden bar that could also be opened from the inside with a handle through a slit cut in the door.

“The wind must whistle in through there,” Adrian commented, opening the door.

They stepped into a little lobby, where the Soviet meteorologists had presumably hung up their outer clothing and kept their boots. A door to the right gave onto a storeroom, which still held a stack of firewood and two sacks of coal.

“This is already looking good,” Leon said delightedly.

The door on the left opened onto a narrow closet with a seat and a hole. There was no smell at all; the cold must have simply frozen all the excrement.

“Looks like they simply shook quicklime over it,” Angela pronounced after peering knowledgeably down the hole.

The door across from the entrance led into the actual living quarters. A heavy cast-iron stove in the middle of the room must have been used for cooking as well as heating. Charlotte had expected the room to smell of old clothes, damp wood, and stale air, but there was no such stench. Instead, it smelled of…nothing at all. The obvious reason was that there were no clothes hanging to dry that could have caught the damp—the only textiles in the place were the mattresses on the two beds at a right angle to each other. The wood was dry with cold. And despite the best efforts of whoever had built this place, the wind presumably gusted through strongly enough to keep it well ventilated.

“Cozy,” Angela declared. “We girls get the beds.”

Adrian also seemed to like what he saw. “I have to confess I had expected worse. Food scraps all over the floor and rats dancing around, that sort of thing.” He glanced at a framed portrait of Lenin that hung on the wall. “Okay. Let’s get the kit in here.”

Morley squatted down in front of the stove and opened a hatch. “Pretty basic technology. I wonder how we’ll get on with it.”

“Careful,” Leon warned. “We’ll have to take a good look at the chimney before we fire up that stove. It might be rusted shut or have something blocking it. In which case we’d poison ourselves with the carbon monoxide.”

“We’ll set up our own stove to begin with,” Adrian said. They had brought along a liquid-fuel heating stove. “Otherwise, it’s not bad.” He turned and looked around. “You get the feeling they only just left.”

“Making sure they took their radio set with them.” Leon stepped up to the heavy desk that was bolted to one wall and ran his gloved hands over parallel scratches. “Look, that’s where it stood.” Then he pointed to empty clamps running up the wall. “And that could have been the wire up to their antenna.”

“In which case they must have had a generator,” Morley said. He looked up at the ceiling where a bare lightbulb still dangled in its socket. “Yup. For sure.”

“They took that with them too, then.” Leon reached under the desktop and pulled open a drawer. “Hey, look at this.” He brought out a thick old ledger. “It’s the station logbook, isn’t it?” He opened it up at the back cover and leafed through the empty pages until he hit the last entry. “Bingo. Nineteen sixty-seven. Twenty-first of something.” He passed the book to Charlotte. “You know Russian.”

Charlotte glanced down at the page full of neat Cyrillic handwriting and sighed. “Now we get to see that I couldn’t be from Moscow.”

Leon stared at her, baffled. “I beg your pardon?”

She looked back at him. Ah yes. He hadn’t understood any of what she said to the copilot, since they had been talking in Russian. “I can
speak
Russian, but I have trouble reading it. I don’t have much of a memory for other alphabets.”

However, if she deciphered the words letter by letter, and spelled them out loud…she studied the date on the last entry. An
O
, a
k
…well that was easy. “
Oktyabr
. October. Twenty-first October, 1967.”

Leon looked at her in amazement. “How on earth do you learn Russian without being able to read it?”

“By ear. Listen and repeat.” Charlotte shrugged. “I don’t know exactly how it works. Whenever I go to a new country, I simply understand the language.”

“Wow. I wish I could say the same.”

Adrian came up to Charlotte, took the logbook from her, and began to leaf through it. Clearly a daily journal, it contained all sorts of numbers—temperature, air pressure, wind speed, and direction. He whistled softly. “This is a treasure trove. Even if we don’t understand all the text, we can read the numbers. Which are a lot more useful anyway.” He stopped at a page where a faded black-and-white photograph was glued into the book. “Have a look at that.”

They all huddled together and looked. The picture showed the hut, buried in snow almost to the windows; two men in thick fur coats posed in front of it with fierce smiles on their faces.

Adrian pointed at the date written above it. “Nineteen sixty-two. Can you make out the month, Charlotte?”

That was easy, too. The only month with three letters. He could have done that himself. “May.”

“In May?” Morley gasped. “So much snow in May? That’s astonishing.”

“You see?” Adrian said, turning to Leon. “Global warming is already well advanced. One cold winter or rainy summer in Europe doesn’t mean a thing.”

“I never said it did,” Leon said peaceably.

“Okay.” Adrian looked around thoughtfully. “The women get the beds, of course. Do we have enough room on the floor?” He took a good look at the space available to them. “It’ll be a bit of a squeeze, but it’ll have to do.”

Charlotte was suddenly reminded of her first year at Harvard, where she had shared a room in the dorm with a woman called Carrie Walsh. Strange: the layout had been almost exactly the same as here. The way the beds stood, the desk they had constantly squabbled over…all just the same. This room had shelves where they had wardrobes. The only extra piece of furniture here was the stove. Strange indeed. Well, it was only three months. They would be over soon enough.

They fetched the equipment and unrolled the sleeping bags. They piled up the crates of food, numbered by week, along with the fuel cans, in the storeroom, where everything would stay cold. The liquid fuel was specially developed for Arctic use and had a freezing point of minus seventy degrees centigrade. They would never have temperatures like that here. In the summer months it would be between minus ten and minus two, and in July they could hope for peak temperatures of around two degrees. They’d probably be strolling around in T-shirts by then, Charlotte thought, and shivered.

They had another look at the earth closet. “We won’t use that,” Adrian declared. “We’ll set up the expedition toilet in here instead.” They had brought along a type of toilet that was used on Antarctic expeditions. All the excrement was collected in special plastic bags into which they had to pour a precise dose of chemical fluid. Once the bags were full, they could be burned.

Morley took charge of the stove, partly because he was exhausted from carrying gear and was beginning to turn pale once more, and partly because he was the undisputed technological wizard of the group. So Adrian gave him the task of preparing the lightweight stove and firing it up, which he tackled with gratitude and determination.

Amazing the difference when a room was no longer as cold as an ice locker, but full of cheerful, crackling warmth. When everything had finally been stowed away and Charlotte could take off her boots, hang up her down jacket, and walk around their cozy little parlor in her socks, it was almost better than Christmas.

“I’m dog-tired,” Angela declared.

Adrian looked at his watch. “No wonder. It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

Of course. It was deeply unsettling that the sun never set outside. Charlotte felt ready to drop as well, but she had assumed that had to do with the exertions of the journey and carrying all those crates. It felt like late afternoon to her, but that was only because of the light. The sun simply circled the horizon, a bright spot behind the uniform gray cloud cover that blanketed the sky.

They opened the supply crate labeled
W
EEK
O
NE
and heated up a goulash, military rations that came with dry crackers so tough that they could probably break a filling. It tasted wonderful. Adrian and Leon went back out to fill a big pot with snow to melt on the stove so that they would have water in the morning for washing and coffee—though nobody would be washing very thoroughly during their stay here. Brushing teeth and the occasional damp washcloth would have to be enough. The next shower they could look forward to would be in September. But Charlotte was so tired she didn’t care. She crept into her sleeping bag and fell asleep at once.

Charlotte was woken by the chattering of her own teeth. It was hard work even to move. She felt like a joint of beef in a supermarket deep freeze. She fumbled at the zipper on her sleeping bag with stiff fingers. Tiny crystals of ice rustled down—hoarfrost that had formed on the outside of the bag. She looked around, blinking. The others were still asleep. One of the men was snoring; Morley, she figured. Frost flowers had blossomed on the windows. It had to be a nightmare. Of course it was a nightmare. There was no way she would survive this cold all the way through to September. She would develop pneumonia and die, and the others would have to bring her freeze-dried corpse back home.

She crept farther down into her sleeping bag, pulled the zipper back up, and by some miracle fell asleep again. Then next time she woke up, it was because somebody was shaking her and saying, “Up you get. Coffee’s almost ready.” And it was warm. Angela was strolling around the room stark-naked. They had gotten the stove going again and hung up a curtain in the corner for a little privacy for washing. Charlotte was still so frozen that all she could do was take a damp cloth to her hands and face. She’d never be as cool as Angela about these things anyway.

“We can’t keep the room heated all the time,” Adrian explained at breakfast. “We don’t have that much fuel. It’ll have to be enough that we heat up once a day to keep ourselves warm.”

“My toothpaste was frozen solid this morning,” Angela said. She seemed amused.

“So was my contact-lens fluid,” Morley put in, less happy about it. Which explained why he was blinking and peering around like a mole this morning.

“You have to take stuff like that inside the sleeping bag with you,” Leon advised them. “That’s what I do with my cameras, because of the batteries. Otherwise, they lose all their charge overnight in the cold.”

Charlotte warmed her hands on the metal coffee mug and listened while the others talked. They had spread the dossier out in front of them and were discussing the best way to proceed. Angela insisted the first priority was to document the biota well away from the hut and its surroundings. When Leon asked what exactly that meant, she explained. “Everything around here is contaminated. Whatever lives nearby has been brought in by man. But I’m interested in how life reconquers land in such a cold climate once the ice has gone. The first biota will be the algae washed up on the waves, and then lichens will follow, and so on. It’s very exciting.”

Adrian had his logbook on his lap. He had told Charlotte on the journey here that even in the age of ubiquitous computing, research scientists preferred to keep handwritten records of everything. He and Morley were bent over a large satellite image of the island and talking about how they would map the glacier. With a little luck, Adrian said, they might even witness how it calved in the summer months. Their eyes lit up at the prospect.