Simon Morden - The Curve of The Earth

[And sitting here, in this room, Lucy Petrovitch worked it out.]

They were both silent, man and machine.

“Why did she run?”

[I do not know.]

Petrovitch slammed his fist on the desk. It was his right hand. If he’d used his left, he’d have reduced the thing to matchwood. “Every time. Every time it looks like we’re getting close, we find we’re really moving further away.”

[And now Joseph Newcomen is wondering what is delaying you.]

“Bring him down here. I want a second pair of eyes.”

He met the American at the door of the hut. Newcomen’s torch caused the snow to glow.

“Turn it off. I want to try something.”

“Will it involve you putting a gun to my head again?”

“No. I haven’t got an audience out here, and I don’t do it for my own personal pleasure anyway.”

Newcomen laboured at the switch until it clicked. Once again it was just the ground and the sky. The aurora flowed overhead, obscuring the stars as it washed across them.

“We have to think like her,” said Petrovitch. “Do you think you can do that?”

“I can try,” said Newcomen, even though his whole body seemed repelled at the idea of imagining himself a twenty-something foreign-born woman. “I don’t know how good I’ll be at it.”

“You’re sitting in that hut. No windows, no indication of what’s going on outside except what’s on your instruments. Then quickly, without warning, your readings go off the scale. Almost before you can react, everything dies. The lights go off, your computer stops, the screen goes blank. Most importantly, your link dies.” Petrovitch knew what that would do to him. For Lucy it was less immediately catastrophic, but all the same, it would have been a surprising and bewildering experience. “What would you do?”

“The power’s gone. I’d find a torch.”

“Yeah, maybe. You try it, and you get nothing. Candle? Storm lantern?” He couldn’t remember seeing one, but he was forgetting something. “The next moment it sounds like God’s knocking to come in.”

“Then I go for the door. I open it and step outside.”

“It’s not dark any more. There’s a fireball, up in the sky, towards the west. You watch it boil away. The light fades and you’re left in the dark again.” Petrovitch stared at the horizon. Deadhorse was invisible. “Why? Why spend time putting things in a rucksack and then leaving the obvious place of safety?”

“Did she think she was under attack? That a war had started?” Newcomen spun slowly around. “How would she know which way to go?”

“She knew the night sky like the back of her hand. With or without a compass, she’d be able to navigate just fine.” Petrovitch grunted with frustration. “I thought coming here would make all the difference: that by seeing what she’d seen, I’d get some clue about where she’s gone.”

“And it hasn’t?”

“No.” He blew out the stale air from his lungs. “Let’s close up here for now. Go and get some food and some rest. Start early tomorrow and see where that gets us.”

Petrovitch turned his own torch on and trudged back to the main cluster of buildings, and the plane parked behind it.

“Did you find anything in the dormitory?” he asked Newcomen.

“Nothing. Stripped clean. They’ve taken the mattress she slept on. I… didn’t expect that.” He kicked at the snow. “It wasn’t part of our investigation.”

“Of course it wasn’t. Your investigation isn’t the important one.” Petrovitch took one last look around. The wind was picking up further. Ice crystals were starting to blow across the snowscape, eroding the footprints they’d made, and there was a line deeper than black to the south-west. It would have been a night just like this, clear but with a storm coming, when Lucy had set out, alone and in the dark.

That was important. It would have limited her choices, told her how far she could go before she needed to seek shelter.

Except there was no shelter to find. No trees, no rocks, no buildings that weren’t ARCO-owned and thoroughly searched by now. An igloo would have been all but impossible without a saw or shovel. Could she have found one? Did she take it with her?

“It’s twenty k to Deadhorse from here,” he said out loud.

“Sorry?”

“Twenty k. She knew that if she stayed where she was, she’d be trapped by the storm, for days. What if she walked back to Deadhorse?”

Newcomen shivered at the thought. “That’s a long way.”

“This is the girl who walked the entire length of the Shannon, source to sea, just because she could. The distance is nothing; it’s whether she could have made it before the weather closed in.”

“They must have turned Deadhorse upside down looking for her already.”

“Doesn’t mean they would have found her. It’s a demonstrable fact that they haven’t.”

“Because she’s not there.”

“Where else could she be? Seriously, think about it. It’s the only place to go for a hundred k. Even in a place that small, there has to be somewhere to hide.”

“Look, Doctor…”

Petrovitch eyed Newcomen balefully.

“Petrovitch. This just won’t wash. If she was in Deadhorse all this time, someone would have found her — noticed food going missing, stuff like that.”

“So she has an accomplice.” Petrovitch snorted. “She can be very persuasive. I should know.”

Newcomen looked away. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“This: this is the whole reason I’m here. To find her, because I can work out what she would have done. We’re getting somewhere, Newcomen. At last.”

“And then we all die. Swell.”

“Stop your complaining and get up those steps. Dinner’s on me.”

Petrovitch slotted the plane back into the same hangar bay they’d left, and it was like they’d never been away. Everything was as cold and still as before. The only difference was the creaking noises made by the building’s superstructure as it flexed in the wind.

“I’m going to refuel now, save time in the morning. Besides,” he said, peering through the windscreen, “you never know when a quick getaway might be needed.”

“You really do think she’s here, don’t you?”

“Yeah. I do. Someone’s hiding her. Sooner or later they’ll find out I’ve arrived, and that’ll be when the fun and games really start.”

“It’ll have to be someone they’ve not replaced. Can you get a list?”

“Sure, but so can you. We can’t go around just interrogating people — they won’t want to die — but we need to be alert for subtle signs.”

“You. Subtle?” Newcomen raised his eyebrows.

“ Past’ zebej ,” said Petrovitch, but there was no force behind his words. “Whoever it is is risking their life to protect Lucy. They’ll be terrified of discovery, of giving themselves away, of just breathing out of turn. Yet they’ll have to maintain the pretence that nothing is wrong, every second of every day. That’s bravery for you, Newcomen. Yajtza bigger than the Moon.”

Newcomen was very still for a while, then he got up abruptly and went to the door, poking at the release mechanism until it responded.

[Be careful, Sasha.]

“Yeah, well. I’ve tried being nice, I’ve tried indoctrination, I’ve tried appealing to his better instincts. All I’m left with is shame.”

[He is conflicted. He is torn between doing his duty to the country that is actively betraying him, and returning Lucy Petrovitch unharmed to the Freezone.]

“We both know which way he’s going to jump. His instincts will make the mudak side with Uncle Sam, even though they’re going to kill him with no more thought than they’d spend over swatting a fly.”