Hagger’s big reputation hadn’t won him any favours in the room ballot. His lab was tiny, though at least there was some daylight. Two small windows looked back to the mountains behind the base, a vision of clarity against the clutter inside. Wires and tubes were draped everywhere: you had to step carefully to avoid bringing down the whole show. Somehow, he’d managed to cram a complete laboratory on to the workbenches: a mass balance, a shiny electron microscope fresh out of the box, sample bottles, Erlenmeyer flasks, and a set of green notebooks lined up against the wall. A length of yellow pipe sat in a tray of water in the fumes cupboard. A small refrigerator humming under the bench made me think of the old joke about selling fridges to Eskimos.
A hard-topped table made an island in the centre of the chaos, though you could hardly see the surface for all the stuff piled up on it. Inevitably, I knocked something off when I walked past. A stapled sheaf of paper. I bent down to pick it up, and as I glanced at it — as you do — saw my own name staring back at me.
Anderson, Sieber and Pharaoh. ‘Pfu-87: A Synthetic Variant on the Pfu-polymer Enzyme and its Applications for Synthetic Genomics’.
It was my Molecular Biology article: the first scientific paper I ever published. It was strange to be reminded of it on Utgard. Hagger must have wanted to remind himself I’d once been a decent scientist.
‘Ha. The new intruder.’
A man stood in the doorway. I hadn’t heard him approach — you never did at Zodiac. He was short and, unusually for that place, clean-shaven. He had a round head with not quite enough hair to cover it, and wore one of those drab army-issue jumpers with patches on the elbows and shoulders.
‘Tom Anderson,’ I introduced myself. ‘Martin Hagger’s new assistant.’
‘I didn’t think you’d come to sell us double glazing. Ha.’ He shook my hand. ‘Quam. Base commander.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘I hear you rather put the cat among the pigeons in Norwich, coming up like this. Very irregular.’ He squinted at me. ‘Still, you’re here now.’
‘I am.’ I meant to add something like ‘Thrilled to be here’ or ‘Glad you could have me’, but somehow the phrases jammed in my head so nothing came out except a sort of hiccup. Quam looked me up and down.
‘I suppose I’d better show you around.’
‘It seems very quiet,’ I said, as he led me on down the corridor.
‘Normal, this time of year. October to February we almost shut down; just a skeleton staff. I only got here myself four weeks ago.’
I tried to imagine overwintering there: the endless darkness; the stale jokes and stale food; the long, mournful corridor and the empty rooms. You’d go insane.
‘The advance party come in March to set up. The rest get here in May. After that, it’s a madhouse.’ He opened a door numbered 19. ‘This is where you’ll be sleeping.’
I peered in, though I couldn’t see much because someone had decided to put the wardrobe in front of the window. Four bunks squeezed between four walls, with a leopard-print Claudia Schiffer looking down from a poster.
‘Nice to have some female company.’
‘That’s to hide the escape tunnel.’ Quam closed the door again. ‘Only you for now, but you’ll have to share when the barbarian hordes invade. You won’t spend much time there, anyway. Hagger will work you pretty hard, I imagine.’
A dull detonation from up on the glacier made the Platform rock slightly under my feet.
‘Is he here?’
‘Hagger’s up at Gemini. That’s our camp on the ice dome. He’ll be back in a couple of hours, when the helicopter gets in. Saturday night is movie night,’ he added, moving on down the corridor. ‘The lab, you’ve seen. Toilets, surgery.’ Doors opened, doors closed. ‘My office, if you ever need me. Radio room.’ Another cubbyhole, packed with dials, gauges and cables. Static hissed from a speaker, and an American-accented voice was saying something I couldn’t make out.
‘Is that for us?’
Quam shook his head. ‘The Americans have a ship up north. Coast Guard ice-breaker, crew of scientists. Two hundred miles away, but it’s the nearest thing to civilisation from here. Every so often we pick up their transmissions.’
He turned a knob and the sound went away. ‘Did you bring a mobile phone?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can leave it in your suitcase. No reception here. If you go out in the field, we’ll issue you a satellite phone.’
‘Internet?’ I looked at the antiquated computer taking up half the space in the radio room. ‘If there’s somewhere to connect my laptop … I promised my son we could Skype.’
‘We’ve no wireless because it interferes with the instruments. You can connect to the LAN with a cable, but you’ll need an account. You can use this machine with a guest account until we set you up. I’ll give you a form.’
I looked doubtfully at the machine. ‘Do I have to know Morse code?’
The front door banged; footsteps thudded down the corridor. A stocky man strode towards us. I’d been reading Greek myths to Luke that week: in the dim corridor, something about him made me think of a charging Minotaur.
He stopped in front of us, under one of the fluorescent lights. He had a wide face and blue eyes and a beard he must have been working on for months. On top, his fair hair was cut straight and short, sticking up in a couple of places from his hat. The slogan on the sweatshirt said, ZODIAC STATION — HELL DOES FREEZE OVER.
‘What the fuck’s going on with the supplies?’ His English was Scandinavian-perfect. A Viking, not a Minotaur. He flapped a pink sheet of paper at us. ‘Huh?’
Quam’s chest seemed to grow slightly. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘I ordered nitrogen. For cooling my instruments.’
I laughed. Well, it seemed funny, having to cool instruments in the high Arctic. A black look said there was nothing humorous about it. I started to stammer an explanation, something about Eskimos and fridges, but gave it up. Not a good first impression.
‘And?’ said Quam.
‘Instead of nitrogen, they sent me two hundred litres of this TE buffer solution. Two hundred litres,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t even know what this shit is.’
‘You use it for sequencing DNA,’ I said, trying to be helpful. All I got was a dirty look. ‘Do they think I’m running Jurassic Park here?’
‘Whose name was on the docket?’ Quam asked.
The Viking screwed the flimsy pink paper in his fist. ‘Mine. But I didn’t order it.’
‘You must have made a mistake.’
He threw the paper away. It bounced down the corridor. ‘Last flight, Annabel ordered some glacier drill and got a thermal cycler instead. You need to sort this shit out, Quam, or what the hell are we all doing here?’
He would have left it at that, but Quam blocked his way. He gestured to me.
‘This is Hagger’s new arrival.’
‘Right.’ The big man gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher. I was starting to get a feel for how the crew at Zodiac welcomed newcomers.
‘This is Fridtjof Torell. Known as Fridge.’
I offered a handshake. Torell-known-as-Fridge ignored me.
‘Was there anything else?’
‘No,’ said Quam.
He disappeared into one of the labs.
‘Atmospheric scientist,’ said Quam. He opened the door at the end of the corridor. A handmade poster pinned to it said, Your Daily Horrorscope, decorated with grinning death’s heads and a clear plastic envelope where a slip of paper could drop in.
You are about to make some bad life choices, I read.
‘And this is the mess room.’
The mess reminded me of an old working men’s club: brown carpet and grey walls, long tables with plastic chairs. A few sofas and armchairs, leaking their stuffing, made a sitting area in one corner around an oversized television. Faded photographs hung crookedly around the room, a few of wildlife but most of stiff-backed men with hollow eyes and frost-rimmed beards. No one could have smoked in there for years, but you could still sense the stale nicotine. The only redeeming feature was the windows, which lined three full sides of the room and gave spectacular views of the fjord and the mountains. They made me want to go outside. Perhaps that was the point.