Lincoln Child: Terminal Freeze

Ekberg murmured her thanks. “I still don’t understand why anyone would need a base like this at all,” she said. “I mean, way up here, so far north.”

“It was part of the original early warning system,” Marshall said. “Ever hear of the Pinetree Line, or the DEW Line?”

Ekberg shook her head.

“Back in 1949 the Soviets tested a working atomic bomb. It drove us crazy: we’d thought we had at least five more years to prepare. Instead, our eggheads suddenly predicted that in a few years the Russians would have enough bombs to cripple the United States. So there was a huge ramping up of troops, aircraft, weaponry-including a crash program to develop a perimeter defense system. The Pacific and Atlantic seaboards were well protected, and it became clear that the main threat would come in as bombers, over the pole. But radar then was very primitive: it couldn’t detect low-flying aircraft, couldn’t detect things over the horizon.”

“So they needed to bring their eyes as close to the threat as possible.”

“Exactly. The military put their heads together and came up with the most likely routes the Russian bombers would take in the event of an attack. They built early warning stations as far north as they could along each route. This is one of them.” Marshall shook his head. “The ironic thing is that by the time it was completed in the late fifties, it was already obsolete. Missiles were replacing aircraft as delivery systems for bombs. We needed a centralized network to address that kind of threat. So a new system called SAGE was put in place and these stations were mothballed.”

They had rounded the corner and started down another barrackslike passage. Sully stopped at one of the doors, turned the knob, and pushed it open, revealing a spartan room with a cot, desk, wardrobe, and mirror. The worst of the dust had been cleared away by Chen earlier that morning. “These are your quarters,” Sully said.

Ekberg glanced inside quickly, then nodded her thanks as Sully and Marshall placed her bags on the cot.

“It’s a long ride up from New York,” Sully said, “and if you’re like us you probably didn’t get much sleep on the way. If you’d care to nap or freshen up, go right ahead. The showers and head are just down the corridor.”

“Thanks for the offer, but I’d better get started right away.”

“Get started?” Sully glanced at her in confusion.

Light dawned on Marshall. “You mean, you want to see it.”

“Of course! That’s why I’m here.” She looked around. “That is, if that’s all right with you.”

“I’m afraid it’s not all right,” Sully replied. “There have been several polar bear sightings in recent weeks. And those lava tubes are extremely dangerous. But you’re welcome to observe it from a distance, I suppose.”

Ekberg seemed to consider this. Then she nodded slowly. “Thank you.”

“Evan here will take you up-won’t you, Evan? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some tests I need to complete.” And with that he flashed her a faint smile, nodded to Marshall, then turned and made his way back in the direction of the temporary labs.

“Amazing,” Ekberg said, her words smoking the air. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sky such a clear, intense blue.”

They were making their way up the glacial valley in brilliant sunlight. Despite fretful allusions to the pressing nature of his work, Faraday had elected to come along, and he puffed and wheezed as they climbed. He’d been making this climb at least once a day for a month: the fact he still labored at it betrayed all his sedentary years spent in a laboratory. Ekberg, on the other hand, strode forward with the effortlessness of a committed runner. Her eyes darted everywhere, missing nothing. Now and then she would murmur something into a digital recorder. She was wearing Penny Barbour’s spare parka over her leather jacket.

“I know what you mean,” Marshall replied. “I just wish there was more of it.”

“Sorry?”

“The days are growing shorter, fast. We’ve got two, maybe three weeks of viable daylight left. After that, it’ll be white night around here, twenty hours a day. And we’ll be gone.”

“No wonder you’re in a hurry. In any case, Allan’s going to have a field day with that sky.”

“Allan?”

“Allan Fortnum, our DP. Director of photography.” She glanced ahead at the glacier, deep blue framing the sharp azure of the sky. “How did Mount Fear get its name?”

“After Wilberforce Fear, the explorer who discovered it.”

“Did that make him famous?”

“Actually, it killed him. He died of exposure at the base of the caldera.”

“Oh.” And Ekberg murmured something into the recorder. “Caldera. So it’s a volcano?”

“Extinct volcano. It’s quite a bizarre thing, really-the only geologic feature in a thousand square miles of permafrost. People are still arguing about how it formed.”

“Dr. Sully said it was dangerous. What did he mean by that?”

“ Mount Fear is really just a dead cone of prehistoric lava. Weather, and the glacier, have worn it down, made it fragile.” He pointed at the knife-edged ridges of the valley, then at one of the large caves that riddled the base of the mountain. “Lava tubes like that are created when a crust forms over an active magma stream. Over the years they become very brittle and can easily collapse. As a result, the mountain’s like a vast house of cards. We made the discovery in the back of one of those tubes.”

“And the polar bears he mentioned?”

“Cute to look at, but extremely man-aggressive, especially these days, what with habitat shrinkage. When your people get here, make sure they don’t stray beyond the fenced apron unless they’re armed. There’s a store of high-powered rifles at the base.”

They climbed a minute before Ekberg broke the silence again. “You’re a paleoecologist, right?”

“A Quaternary paleoecologist, yes.”

“And what, exactly, are you doing here?”

“Paleoecologists like me reconstruct vanished ecosystems from fossils and other ancient evidence. We try to determine what kinds of creatures roamed the earth, what they ate, how they lived and died. I’m determining what kind of an ecosystem existed here before the advance of the glacier.”

“And now that the glacier’s retreating, the evidence-the samples-are coming to light again.”

“Exactly.”

She looked at Marshall with penetrating, inquisitive eyes. “What kind of samples?”

“Plant traces. Layered mud. Some macro-organic remains like wood.”

“Mud and wood,” Ekberg said.

Marshall laughed. “Not sexy enough for Terra Prime, is it?”

She laughed in return. “What can you do with those?”

“Well, wood and other organics can be radiocarbon-dated to determine how long ago the glacier buried them. Mud samples are processed for pollen, which in turn indicates what kind of plants and trees were dominant prior to the glaciation. See, modern ecologists are stuck analyzing the world as it exists today, which has been hugely impacted by humans over the last hundred centuries. But with the samples, the readings, the observations I make here, I can reconstruct the world as it existed before humans became the dominant element.”

“You can recreate the past,” Ekberg said.

“In a way, yes.”

“Sounds pretty sexy to me. And I suppose a glacier’s the perfect place to do this because it would have locked everything into a deep freeze, preserving it like a time capsule.”

“Exactly right,” Marshall said. He was impressed by her ability to quickly size up and understand an unfamiliar discipline. “Not to mention the fact that when the ice melts, it simply releases its contents. No muss, no fuss-and no need for a lot of work with shovels and chisels uncovering fossils and subfossils.”