Something hit the roof so hard, the whole room shook. I ducked. I heard more thuds, ringing on the steel roof like footsteps. Some monster piece of ice must have broken off of something.

The screen flashed. ERROR — THE CONNECTION WAS LOST.

I hit ‘reload’. After a long wait, the machine flashed up the same message again. I tried my email. Couldn’t connect. That bump must have knocked out the communications antenna.

Fuck.

‘Bad day?’

Kennedy came in and sat down on my spare chair. He was holding a piece of paper.

‘Where have you been all day?’ he said. He sounded pissy. Jesus, it was like being thirteen again.

‘Did something come up?’

‘I should say so. Anderson worked out Hagger’s password. He checked his email.’

That might be something I could use. ‘And …?’

He handed me a printout. ‘We found this.’

The header said it was to Hagger, from some guy at Cambridge University. Not that you can always trust an email address. The subject said, bold letters, URGENT — NATURE — RETRACTION.

‘Read it,’ said Kennedy.

There was a whole lot more, which I scanned. All I saw was science stuff: chemicals, concentrations, shit I haven’t thought about since AP Chem. The point seemed to be that Hagger had faked the data on a big research paper.

‘I don’t get it,’ I told Kennedy. If Hagger was a fraud, that wasn’t irrelevant. But it wasn’t a smoking gun, either.

‘The time-stamp.’ He pointed to the top of the page. ‘This came in at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning.’ He dragged me down the corridor to the front door and flipped open the field log. ‘You see?’

I read what he wanted to show me. ‘Hagger left the base at nine a.m. So, he never saw the email. So what?’

Kennedy hustled me into the pool room. ‘I spoke to Quam two days ago. He knew about all this, Hagger’s problems, the retraction.’

‘Wasn’t it common knowledge?’

‘That Hagger had been having problems with his data, yes. But a wholesale retraction from the world’s most prestigious journal? That’s a whole different kettle of fish. And look at the message. He says he’s writing in confidence.’

‘You know what academics mean when they say “in confidence”. It means they didn’t post it on their blog. Anyhow, Quam has the administrator password for the whole Zodiac network. He can read anyone’s emails.’

‘That’s it!’ Kennedy thumped the side of the pool table, like I’d just answered the million-dollar question.

‘You want to explain?’

‘When I saw Quam on Wednesday, he told me about the retraction. But he also said he’d brought it up with Hagger. “I told him to his face I was sending him home.” Those were his exact words. “I told him to his face.”’

He was looking at me like he expected the light bulb, like he’d given me everything I needed.

‘Tell me in words of one syllable.’

‘The email came in at eleven a.m. Quam read it, using his master password, and was so shocked he confronted Hagger about it.’

I got it. ‘Except Hagger had already gone up to the glacier.’

‘And never came back.’

I stared at him over the pool table, spinning a ball in place. A heavy gust of wind hit the outside wall. The Platform shivered.

But it wasn’t so cut and dried. ‘Quam was around that afternoon. There’s no way he could have gotten up to the Helbreen and back again in time. Not without the helicopter. And Jensen was out all day.’

Our eyes met. Jensen had already lied once about what he did that day, we both knew it. What if he hadn’t come completely clean?

‘We need to talk to Jensen.’

Twenty-nine

First, we checked the logbook again. It had been a busy morning, last Saturday, but not so busy you’d lose track. A few lines down from when Hagger left, there was Quam, signing to go check a seal colony at Nansen Bay. Out: 11:30. In: 14:00.

‘Enough time to get to the Helbreen, if he had the helicopter.’

I found Jensen in the mess, helping the others get ready for Thing Night. With so much time on their hands, they’d really gone to town. Someone had taken a bucket of dry ice from one of the labs to make fog, which they were testing out. They’d even made a cardboard cut-out of the Thing himself and painted it nice and lifelike, seven feet tall and green skin. It looked a lot like a recycled Frankenstein’s monster.

‘You think Quam will make us watch the John Carpenter version?’ I heard Fridge say. Several people laughed like they’d been thinking the same thing.

I guess you’ve seen The Thing, Captain? The John Carpenter one from the early eighties, probably. It’s about a badass alien that crash-lands in Antarctica. It eats the staff at a science station one by one, then takes their shape, so you can never tell who to trust. But it’s a remake. The original was an old Howard Hawks black and white movie, and that one’s set in the Arctic.

There’s also a crappy remake from a few years back, but no one cares about that. To be honest, I prefer the John Carpenter one. It’s in colour, the effects are better, you get Kurt Russell, and snow looks like snow whatever caption they put on the screen. They filmed it in Alaska, for Chrissakes. But saying that at Zodiac is like coming to Fenway Park in a Yankee cap. They take it seriously. Thing Night’s the biggest party of the year, and it’s got to be the Arctic Thing.

I circled the room slowly so I wouldn’t look like I was targeting Jensen. By the fireplace, I found Greta up a ladder hanging a tinfoil spaceship from the ceiling.

‘The Internet’s down,’ I told her.

She nodded. ‘You can go out and fix it.’

I took a look at the weather readout on the monitor in the corner. The wind speed clocked in at a hundred kilometres an hour. Not a good time to go crawling around rooftops.

‘I’m good. I have my emergency porno stash.’

I moved on. Jensen was in the corner, surrounded by the female students. He was an attractive guy: surfer looks, sexy accent and a cool occupation. The closest thing to a rock star we had at Zodiac.

‘Kennedy wants a word,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Something to do with Trond.’

He looked sad to be dragged off, but he didn’t argue. I followed him out, slow enough so I didn’t look like I was following him, and came into the medical room just in time to hear Jensen saying, ‘Bob said something about Trond?’

‘Trond’s fine.’ I stepped in and closed the door. ‘Tell us about Quam.’

Jensen moved for the door. I leaned against it and crossed my arms over my chest.

‘That day Hagger died. You were flying Ash around looking for polar bears.’

Jensen looked from me to Kennedy, like a man who’s heard footsteps in a dark alley. ‘That’d be right.’

‘And you left Ash at Vitangelsk for a couple of hours.’

‘Yeah, I told you. What—’

‘Where’d you go?’

‘Checking fuel caches.’

It was what he’d said last time. I didn’t really think about it then; I should have seen the lie right away.

‘How much does one of those fuel drums weigh? Three hundred and some pounds? Lot of weight for one man to cart around.’

He didn’t say anything. Like all pilots, he was cocky as hell, but not then.

‘You came back here and picked up Quam.’ I didn’t make it a question. ‘You flew him to the Helbreen to speak with Hagger. The only thing I want to know is, did you help him push Hagger in the crevasse, or did he do it himself?’

‘That’s absurd.’

‘Then why don’t you tell us something that makes sense?’

No answer. He looked at me, and he looked at Kennedy. He ran his fingers back through his hair. I just kept staring at him.