The Curve of the Earth

28




Newcomen had reverted to sullen silence. Perhaps his capacity for self-delusion had finally reached its limit, and he was contemplating just how much of a pizdets his situation looked. Or he could have been sulking because Petrovitch had drawn a gun on him.

From the pilot’s seat, Petrovitch glanced across. He shrugged. Any hope he’d had of turning the agent looked increasingly unlikely. Fine. They’d do it the hard way.

The plane coasted slowly across the North Slope plain: the research station was out of town, but not so far that it required any great speed. Five minutes and they were there, back in the full dark of the Arctic winter.

Petrovitch used satellite maps and night vision to guide the plane down somewhere safe. There were no lights, no power – not since the instant of Lucy’s disconnection. He felt his way, and the moment the wheels touched down on the snow crust was a moment of obscure relief.

Skids would have been better, but there was hard substrate beneath. He was able to cut the power to the suspensors after allowing the undercarriage to settle properly.

“Here we are: seventy degrees ten minutes thirty-two seconds north, one hundred and forty-eight degrees five minutes fiftyseven seconds west.”

Newcomen huffed. “This place will have been picked clean: all your daughter’s effects are in a locker in Seattle, and anything useful will have gone.”

“So: you don’t know why you’re here.” Petrovitch punched his buckle through. “You’d much rather be chowing down on steak or standing under a shower until it runs cold.”

“It’s all I have left. If you don’t kill me, someone else will.” Newcomen made no effort to get ready to face the outside.

“Not quite. The deal still stands. Do your job: help me find Lucy.”

“But you say even my own countrymen won’t let me live.”

“Surprised as I am to find myself saying this: I’ll try to stop them from killing both you and me. I can’t honestly say how much that promise is worth, but, hey.” Petrovitch lowered the steps into the snow and popped the door. He stood up and began to fasten his parka. “I want to take a look around. There are questions your lot haven’t even thought to ask. I’m guessing the answers might still be lying around.”

His bag yielded two tiny, intensely bright torches. He pocketed the gun, too, then stepped outside into the freezing wind.

The biggest building was a prefab whose main doors had been sealed with binding strips of yellow and black tape: police line, do not cross. The tape riffled and fluttered.

Petrovitch stared at it, and considered what it meant. Eventually Newcomen joined him and shone his torch beam around him.

“It’s not much, is it?” He illuminated each of the weatherbeaten huts, then searched further out. There was nothing but snow and ice.

“In summer, it’s home to forty ecologists, botanists and biologists, plus field trips from the university. In winter, it’s closed, except for the auroral physics people.” Petrovitch dragged at the tape until it snapped. “What were you expecting? Some kind of great white-faced facility with a chain-link fence and patrolling security guards? It’s not Stanford, you know. It’s as much as they can do to keep this place from falling down.”

He pushed the handle on the door, and it creaked open. Inside, it was cold and still. He turned his own torch on and swept it down the corridor, across the notice boards, over the recessed doors that led to dormitories and labs. Everything glittered with frost.

Newcomen walked a little way down the bare boards and, out of habit, tried a light switch. It clicked hollowly.

“So this is where Lucy was when she lost contact.”

“Not exactly. There’s a winter lab a hundred metres off, closer to the aerial farm. All her datafeeds were routed there.” Petrovitch looked around again, but didn’t enter. As if he didn’t want to break the spell, as if looking at her empty room would send her spinning off into oblivion, never to return. “She had all her winter gear on her. Sleeping bag. Food and a stove. Rifle.”

“Rifle?”

“Yeah.” He clicked his torch off and let the red light behind his eyes be his guide. “You’re probably wondering how we got that through customs.”

“Her coat, though. We’ve got that. And boots and—”

“Tourist gear,” said Petrovitch. “I ordered her the same sort of stuff we’re wearing. It’s missing, so I assume she’s still got it all.”

“You knew. You knew all along. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you’d have told Buchannan, and he’d have told Ben and Jerry.”

“You didn’t trust me with the information.”

“I still don’t. Get over it. I’m going to see the physics hut. You can poke about here, see if there’s anything left.”

There was no path as such – probably one would emerge once the snow had melted – but Petrovitch could see the squat shape in the distance, lit from above by a tenuous apple-green curtain that swung lazily in the sky.

It would have been a good night for an experiment. Lucy would be crouching down over her instruments, watching the real-time data stream across the screen, and she’d read the peaks and troughs like a composer looking at a stave and hearing the music. She’d have a cup of builder’s tea in her hands, and she’d reach forward to a panel every so often, to change the amplification of a signal or correct a drift in the driving voltage.

When he tore the police tape away and opened the door, she wasn’t there.

Her equipment was, though. Hand-crafted labels in her tiny, spidery handwriting identified each switch and knob. Inside the grey cases, her signature soldering would be plain.

A bare cable was draped over the desk. The computer it had been attached to had gone. That was something that was in the inventory of things taken to Seattle, yet Petrovitch knew it had never arrived.

He settled into the wheeled chair and turned on his torch.

She would have sat right there, rolling from place to place rather than getting up and walking the two steps to where she needed to be. Just like a kid.

“Michael?”

[Sasha.]

“Talk to me. Tell me something I want to hear.”

[You were right.]

“Good. I was beginning to think I was losing my touch.” He shone his torch at the clocks on the wall: old-school analogue clocks, each face as big as a dinner plate. Four of them, each marked with a plaque: GMT, Alaska Time, Pacific Time, Local Time. The last one read twenty-three minutes and a few seconds past twelve.

[We have made a further analysis of the electrical and electronic disruption experienced in the Deadhorse area. While all the events are essentially simultaneous, within a margin of error, it appears that by ignoring the error and relying on the raw timings alone, a pattern emerges from the data.]

Petrovitch leaned back. “Let me guess. Things get fried earlier in the east than the west.”

[It is a matter of tenths of seconds for some of the intervals. And the main explosion that registers on the seismographs destroys less sensitive electronics back up the range, confusing the data.]

“This is insane.”

[The obvious conclusion is—]

“It’s not obvious at all,” he complained. “But it’s the only conclusion left. Svolochi. Someone beat me to it.”

[Just because we can explain the phenomenon does not mean we can then know everything about it.]

“We need to. Someone put a fusion reactor in space. The Americans shot it down.”

[The Chinese have denied it was theirs.]

“So they say.” He got up and started to pace the tiny room. “I’m still up on fusion. I know people in all the top facilities. How the huy could this have gone under the wire, and then ended up in yebani orbit? We’re talking tonnes. Tens, probably hundreds of tonnes of wire, shielding, all sorts of crap.”

[Yet analysis of Vice Premier Zhao’s conversation with you did not reveal any unusual stress patterns. It is likely that he was telling you the truth. Is it possible that he is not party to this secret?]

“What’s not possible is that the Americans knew and we didn’t. But it has to be the Chinese.” He threw himself back into the chair. “Doesn’t it?”

[Their major facility is at Zhejiang. Analysis of their research yields no evidence of a single instance of a sustained fusion reaction.]

“Of course it doesn’t. I’d know about it, along with the rest of the planet.”

[And if they are not ready to reveal their success?]

“There’s a world of difference between everybody knowing you’ve done it but you’re denying it, and so secret that no one knows you’re even capable of it. I mean, fusion. Yobany stos.”

[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.”