Lincoln Child - Terminal Freeze

The morning had seen a steady procession of comings and goings: medevac and morgue choppers, a confusion of military helicopters, and one small plane full of men in dark suits that, for some reason, had made Marshall very uneasy. Now he stood with Faraday, Logan, and Ekberg on the apron before the base entrance. They had gathered to say their farewells to Usuguk, who was about to make the journey back to his empty village.

“You sure you don’t want a ride?” Marshall asked.

The Tunit shook his head. “My people have a saying: the journey is its own destination.”

“A Japanese poet wrote something very similar,” said Logan.

“Thank you again,” Marshall said. “For agreeing to come despite everything. For sharing your knowledge and your insight.” He put out his hand to shake, but instead of taking it Usuguk reached out and clasped Marshall ’s arms.

“May you find the peace which you seek,” he said. Then he nodded to the others, picked up the small duffel of water and supplies they had prepared for him, drew the fur-fringed hood around his face, and turned away.

They watched, not speaking, as the old man made his way north across the snow. Marshall wondered if the women would return to the village, or if Usuguk would live out the rest of his life alone, in monkish solitude. Somehow, he knew the man would accept either outcome with stoic philosophy.

“Are you searching for peace?” Ekberg asked him.

Marshall thought a moment. “Yes. I guess I am.”

“I suppose we all are,” she replied. She hesitated. “Well, I’d better get back. The Blackpool representative and insurance people will be here after lunch. I’ve got a lot to do before then.”

“I’ll look in on you later,” Marshall said.

She smiled. “You do that.” Then she turned and slipped through the doors into the staging area.

Logan glanced after her. “Is that a relationship you plan to pursue?”

“If I can find an excuse,” Marshall replied happily.

“There’s always an excuse.” Logan glanced at his watch. “Well, I guess I’m next to leave. My helicopter is due any minute.”

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Marshall said. “You could have waited a day, saved yourself some money.”

“I got a call from my office. Something’s come up.”

“Another spook hunt?”

“Something like that. Besides, the black-ops types who did all the interrogating this morning know where I live. I doubt I’ve heard the last of them.” He paused. “What did you tell them?”

“Exactly what happened, as best I could remember,” Marshall replied. “But it seemed every answer I gave just spawned more questions, so in the end I basically shut up.”

“Did they believe you?”

“I think so. With all of us as eyewitnesses I don’t see why they wouldn’t.” He looked at Logan. “Don’t you think?”

“I think it would have helped if there was a carcass.”

“Yes, that is strange. Certainly left plenty of blood behind. I’d have sworn up and down it was stone dead, its skull the way it was.”

“It must have crawled off to die,” said Faraday. “Just like the first one.”

“You know what Usuguk would say about that,” Marshall replied. He looked toward the horizon, where the Tunit was already dwindling to a brown speck between the broad smears of white and blue.

“I’m damned glad it died,” Logan said, “but I still don’t understand the mechanics. How the sound waves killed it, I mean.”

“Without a corpse we can’t be sure,” Marshall answered. “But I knew that high frequencies irritated it. A pure sine wave, without harmonics, seemed even more painful.”

“But don’t most sounds produce harmonics?”

“That’s right,” said Faraday. “So-called ‘imperfect’ instruments, like a violin or oboe-or a human voice-all do. It’s ironic, because those harmonics are what make sounds rich and complex.”

“But certain sine waves don’t,” Marshall said. “I had the machine produce a series of waves that would reinforce the fundamental tone. I hoped that if we found a sound sufficiently painful, we could drive it from the base.”

“It had a much greater effect than that,” said Logan.

Marshall nodded. “It’s interesting. Fish and whales have internal air bladders, which can be disrupted by sonar. Some scientists believe dinosaurs had organs in their brains for making incredibly loud, trumpeting noises that could be heard miles away. I wouldn’t be surprised if this creature had some similar organ or cavity in its skull-for mating, or communication, or something else. I believe these high frequencies triggered a sympathetic resonance within that organ, and ultimately caused it to burst.”

“I’m a historian, not a physicist,” said Logan. “I’ve never heard of sympathetic resonance.”

“Think of glass shattering when a soprano sings a high note. There’s a natural frequency at which that glass vibrates. If the soprano keeps singing the same note, it keeps adding energy to the glass. At some point the glass can’t dissipate the energy quickly enough and it breaks.” Marshall glanced back toward the base. “In this case, I guess we’ll never know.”

“A pity.” Logan turned to Faraday. “And what did you tell our uniformed interrogators?”

Faraday looked back with his perpetually startled expression. “I tried to explain it from a purely biological perspective. How the two creatures were frozen separately during a single event: an atmospheric inversion causing a downdraft of super-cooled ice, flash-freezing the animals before ice could form in their bloodstreams, keeping them alive in suspended animation. I explained how the ice melted: its unique composition, ice-fifteen, that melts a few degrees below zero centigrade. I explained the second causal agent: the opposite phenomenon to a terminal freeze, a downdraft of unusually warm air that helped revive the creature-and how both events could have triggered the bizarre crimson northern lights that upset Usuguk. I gave them the example of the Beresovka mammoth as a precedent.”

“What did you say about the creature itself?” Logan asked.

“I told them about the Callisto Effect. How the creature could well have been a genetic mutation, or perhaps something as simple as an unknown species. And I told them about the creature’s hyper-developed white blood cell line, how it would promote healing that was almost instant. How beneath the fur it had a chitinous exoskeleton, but scaled almost like a snake, allowing for rapid and flexible movement-and the deflection of bullets. And its unique neurological makeup: even high doses of electricity didn’t disrupt its nervous system or stop its heart. Yet, ironically, sound-of a certain amplitude and frequency-was lethal: aided, perhaps, by weakness brought on due to starvation.”

“So that explains everything,” said Logan.

“Everything-and nothing,” Faraday added.

Logan frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Because everything I just told you-except for the blood work-is mere theory and speculation. The fact is, strange types of ice, like ice-fifteen, require a great deal of pressure to form. The fact is, the creature survived being frozen in ice-whatever kind of ice-for thousands of years. It was transcendentally strong. It was impervious to even high doses of electricity…” Faraday shrugged.

Marshall looked at him thoughtfully. The biologist had just constructed a plausible explanation to everything-and then, quickly, pulled the rug out from under it. “Maybe Usuguk was right, after all,” he said.

The two men looked at him.

“Are you serious?” asked Faraday.

“Of course-partly, anyway. I’m a scientist, but I’d be the first to admit science can’t explain everything. We’re a long way from civilization. This is the top of the world. A different set of rules is in place here, rules we don’t have the least idea about. This isn’t man’s environment-but the men who are here have seen a lot more than we have, and we should listen to them. If any land could be called the land of the spirits, wouldn’t it be here-this strange, sacred, distant spot? Do you really think the way the northern lights winked out just when the creature died was utter coincidence?”