But I wasn’t so mad I got dumb. I got to the office, had my hand on the handle, when I heard a noise from inside. Tick, tack, tick, tack. A metallic sound, so regular I could have convinced myself it was a clock or some piece of machinery playing up.

Except I’d seen Quam’s desk, and that executive toy he kept next to his computer monitor. Newton’s cradle: you swing a ball from one end, and the ball at the other end kicks up. The conservation of momentum, Newton’s laws, if you want the technical explanation.

Now, I have a PhD in physics, so I can explain Newton’s laws pretty good. In a closed system, momentum is never gained or lost. In other words, if you set one of those toys off in outer space, it would keep going for ever.

But Utgard’s not outer space. Not quite. Gravity and air resistance mean the balls eventually slow down and stop. Unless there’s someone to keep them going.

I backed away. There was no light coming under the door. Maybe he’d gone to bed right before I got up.

Tick, tack, tick, tack.

I listened in the dark. The balls got slower. Tick … tack … Slower, and stopped.

I counted ten, then reached for the door handle again. But right before I touched it, the noise began again, firm and hard.

Newton’s first law says that if something’s stopped, it stays stopped unless an external force is applied. Quam had to be in there, sitting in the dark, listening to the balls clack just like me. What else was he doing there? Waiting? For what?

Suddenly, I heard another noise. A chair scraping back from a desk. I didn’t have time to get back to my room. I ducked across the corridor and slipped inside Fridge’s lab opposite, leaving the door open a crack so I could see.

Quam stepped out. In the dim light, he looked a hundred years old. Shoulders slumped, face lined. He had a slip of paper in his hand.

He walked up the corridor and stopped outside the mess door. I thought he’d go in — maybe he had the munchies — but he didn’t. He just stood there, doing something with the paper. Then he turned around and went back into his office. The chair squeaked, and a moment later the tick tack of the toy reset again. Just in case the laws of physics had changed while he was away.

I snuck out of Fridge’s lab and headed for the mess. It was a dumb thing to do, with Quam right there. He could have come out again any moment. But I had to know if he’d done what I thought he had.

On the door, the Daily Horrorscope had changed. Guessing who wrote those things was one of our favourite games at Zodiac, but in all those conversations I don’t think anyone ever suspected Quam. Now that I knew, I kind of wished I didn’t.

There wasn’t much light, but I could read what he’d put up.

The storm is just beginning.

Thirty-one

Everyone makes it to breakfast on Saturday. It’s waffle day. Somewhere along the line, someone had too much time on his hands and spent the winter making an old-fashioned, cast-iron waffle maker. Every Saturday, Danny wheels it out with little plastic cups of batter, and everyone stands in line to make their own. It even stamps a little Z for Zodiac in the centre of the waffle.

Now, I like waffles as much as the next guy. But that morning, I hardly tasted it. Knowing someone in that room had tried to get me to walk into the gulch the night before kind of put me off my breakfast. I kept on sliding down in my chair, like my body wanted me to keep my head down. I stared at the others: sticky fingers, syrup dribbling down their chins. Some of them caught me, gave me looks that said I was some kind of freak.

I’m the only one here who has a clue, I said back, in my head.

No one was happy. For some of those people, a season at Zodiac was the high point of their careers. Instead of using it, they were sat there wasting tens of thousands of dollars a day doing squat. But you know what really pissed them off, the one word you heard over and over when you listened in on their conversations? Internet. That’s what was driving them crazy: twenty-some people trapped on the Platform, and no Internet. Do you blame them? Captain Scott took a lot of shit, but he never had his web access cut off.

Kennedy joined me at my table. He always poured his syrup so neatly over the waffle. Mine was drowning in it.

‘Did you find anything last night?’ he asked, looking so guilty he might as well have put it on Facebook.

‘Quam was in there all night.’ He hadn’t showed up at breakfast. I wondered if he was still in there, tick-tacking his Newton toy, or if he’d gone to bed.

I looked out the window. The weather was still ugly. Snow devils whipped across the ice; clouds covered the mountain peaks. From my table, I could see the mag hut, and the flag line leading to it. Or where the flag line had been. The poles lay scattered on the ground like someone had been through with a giant lawnmower.

‘Terrible storm damage,’ I said sarcastically.

‘The Internet’s still down, too,’ Doc said.

‘I know.’ I swabbed up some more syrup with a piece of my waffle. Maybe it was because I was sitting under the tinfoil spaceship Greta’d hung for Thing Night — or maybe because someone had tried to kill me — but I felt kind of paranoid.

‘You look anxious,’ said Doc. ‘Would you like something for it?’

I shook my head. Those pills dull your brain; I had to stay sharp. Keep my wits. I didn’t know when, but I knew for sure they’d come for me again. And I was going to be ready.

I strolled down the corridor and knocked on Hagger’s lab. The red skull smiled at me from the door. HIGH INFECTION RISK OF UNKNOWN DNA. No one answered, so I let myself in. I dropped the key I’d taken back in one of the drawers, and buried it under some pipettes and tubing, the kind of place it might have gotten lost. Then I had a look around.

The yellow pipe Anderson had been looking at sat in the corner in a tray. The pipe looked pretty ragged, peppered with holes like someone had blasted it with a shotgun. Maybe Malick’s story, the bug munching on his drill rig, had something in it. Hard to see what that had to do with Mine 8. Maybe nothing.

Anderson arrives, Hagger dies. Couldn’t be coincidence. I wished I could have had a look at the notebook, but I didn’t find it. Nothing in the fridge except a can of Coke. Nothing on the benchtops except instruments, and a paper printed off from about ten years ago. Anderson, Sieber and Pharaoh, ‘Pfu-87: A Synthetic Variant on the Pfu-polymer Enzyme and …’ blah blah blah …

The door crashed open. There’s only one person who bangs a door that hard at Zodiac. I turned around and saw Greta behind me. All dressed up in her coat and snow pants, and the cutesy hat with the strings down the side.

‘How you doing?’ I asked — mainly because I could see she looked furious.

‘If one more person tells me that the Internet’s down …’

‘The Internet’s down.’

She made a kind of growling noise. Without really thinking about it, I found myself backing off a couple of paces.

‘I was looking for Tom,’ I said.

‘He’s working in Star Command.’

‘I didn’t know he was interested in astronomy?’

She gave me one of those Greta looks that says it’s none of your business and she could care less anyhow.

‘Help me fix the Internet? You’re the radio man.’

‘Sure thing.’

You’re the radio man. What did she mean by that? Maybe nothing. Or maybe she was thinking of that big antenna strung across Vitangelsk, and the cable carrying the signal to Mine 8. Her face, like always, could have meant anything.

I got on my gear and headed for the laundry room. The temperature dropped about fifty degrees the moment I went in. There’s a hatch in the ceiling that opens on to the roof. It stood wide open, with a ladder going up and Greta’s boots on the top rung.