My love affairs were starting to get out of hand. My love affairs, and my drinking. It was no way for a particle physicist to behave. There was nothing for it, they said, but to send me to the South Pole.
“For how long?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about that right now,” they said.
Don’t worry about it? The South Pole?
“Think of it as a chance to... reassess,” they said.
And then
they stuck me on the plane. Three
days later I stood at the end of the ice runway at the Amundsen-Scott Station
watching the last grey Hercules transport fly out for the winter. It was
already minus thirty degrees - and the sun wasn’t due to set for another four
weeks.
Johansen
the engineer put his giant arm around my shoulders.
“For the
next eight months nobody comes in and nobody goes out!” he shouted over the
wind, as the aircraft disappeared into the low cloud. He took a swig from his
hip flask and handed it to me.
“A toast
to the skeleton crew!”
Then he
fell over and passed out in the snow
Welcome
to the South Pole. Population - for the next eight months anyway - forty-seven
over wintering scientists and technicians. On essential maintenance duties
only.
Oh, and
one alien monster, accidentally woken from its million-year-long slumber
beneath the ice.
-----
Dr
Kristina Gjennestad pounded away at the running machine in the gym, like she
did every morning.
In her native Norway she was an Olympic cross country skier, a swimmer,
a runner of marathons and ultra marathons. Snowbound now, her smooth, muscular
thighs still strained to escape the limitations of her thermal underwear and
carry her, stotting like a gazelle, off across the Antarctic plateau.
I was a
little bit obsessed with Dr Kristina Gjennestad. I wanted to make love to her
on a glacier while the Aurora Australis crackled and whooped over our heads.
Unfortunately she knew exactly what I was up to and wanted nothing whatsoever
to do with me.
“You
don’t find the creature fascinating?” she was saying. “From a purely scientific
point of view?”
She was
hardly breaking a sweat. She was magnificent.
It was
the neutrino detector that had disturbed it. Neutrinos are basically the most
useless particles in the universe. They don’t interact with anything. There are
billions of them streaming through your body right now. Doesn’t even tickle,
does it? In fact, just about the only way to detect them is to bury the
instruments so deep in the ice that there’s absolutely nothing else to obscure
the signal - should a random neutrino decide to do everyone a favour and
actually make itself known.
Unfortunately
deep in the ice is where you tend to find the frozen alien monsters too.
To be
honest, I told Dr Kristina Gjennestad, the thing made me nervous. For a start
it looked like an inside-out crocodile doing an impression of an octopus. Plus,
it had a habit of hanging around in the ice tunnels underneath the base and
eating people.
Dr
Kristina Gjennestad made no attempt to hide her disappointment in me.
-----
To our
credit, for the first month or so we all tried to pretend we had work to do. I
was supposed to be analysing some data on high-energy muon-to-tau oscillations
that someone, somewhere was supposed to be interested in. I stared at the
numbers for a couple of hours every day without making any progress whatsoever,
waiting until it was time to get drunk and go snowmobile racing.
The
party to celebrate the sun finally going down lasted for three days.
After
that everyone gave up on the charade that we were going to get anything done.
We spent most of our time sitting around in our pants playing cards and
drinking and telling physics jokes while outside the wind screamed by at one
hundred and fifty miles an hour in the polar night.
Johansen
had left a wife and a six-month-old baby girl at home. They were planning,
eventually, to buy a house back in Sweden. “All I have to do is make it through
the winter without gambling away my earnings,” he told me.
It
wasn’t going well. He already owed me ten grand, and he was in hock to the
Danes for another twenty on top of that.
“Fucking
Danes!” He shouted.
The
Danes had the place stitched up. You couldn’t clean the rime off an anemometer
without asking the Danes first. Don’t let anybody tell you any different: the
South Pole is basically one big Scandinavian turf war.
At least
the Finns mostly kept themselves to themselves.
The
monster, meanwhile, was picking people off one by one. Martinez disappeared
from one of the tractor sheds during a three-day blizzard. Espenson stepped
outside to check the alignment of a satellite dish and was never seen again.
Opinion was divided on whether Antonopolous had been eaten or had just
accidentally locked himself in a cupboard somewhere and starved to death
(apparently he had form).
All
through the dark months of May and June we did battle with the beast. We
tracked it through the ice tunnels. We chased it with flamethrowers. Sometimes
the fuel would run out and it would chase us back, flailing around with its
tentacles and all those teeth.
Then it
got cocky and started ambushing people inside the base. In the shower. On the
toilet. It appeared to have a sense of humour. Not much of a sense of humour,
admittedly, but under the circumstances we took what we could get.
By July
there were less than thirty of us left. Being scientists, we decided to hold a
conference. We needed ideas.
“Maybe
we can reason with it,” said Takegashi, “perhaps using some sort of basic
mathematical language?”
“Maybe
this is a cry for help,” said Nichols, “maybe it’s depressed.”
“Everyone’s
depressed,” said Trofimov, “it’s the modern condition! Try competing for
funding with those bastards running the Large Hadron Collider: that’d give it
something to be depressed about!”
“Could
we blow it up?” said Garcia.
“What
about electrocution? Or some sort of man-made virus?” said Chang.
“Maybe
it’s homesick,” said Guttmann.
“Maybe
this is its home,” said Dr Kristina Gjennestad, of course. “Did you ever
think of that? Any of you? Maybe it was here first.”
We were
all quiet then, cowed by her steely Norwegian gaze and spectacular physique.
“I still
think we should blow it up,” whispered Garcia, when he was sure she wasn’t
listening.
-----
Sixty-five million years ago Antarctica still had a tropical climate.
Dinosaurs capered among giant ferns, magnolias and redwood trees. Life was
everywhere. Then continental drift and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current got to work and
buried everything under four miles of ice.
There’s
evidence that some form of life still exists down there underneath the ice cap,
in isolated lakes that haven’t seen daylight since the Cretaceous period.
If so,
it’s likely to be pissed off. Not to say unstable.
Who
wouldn’t be?
After
all, we’d only been cut off from civilisation for a few months, and look
at the state of us.
By the
middle of August we were down to twenty barely-able-bodied men and women. We’d
lost three PhD students and a tenured professor in the explosion that took out
Garcia’s lab. Sunrise was still weeks away, and the first relief flight wasn’t
due until the end of October.
We were
in a bad way.
There
were arguments and fistfights and desperate, ill-advised sexual liaisons.
Johansen had managed to mortgage his daughter’s potential income for the next
eighty-five years and was getting through two bottles of schnapps a day
(actually I tended to help him out with at least one of the bottles).
The
temptation, sometimes, to just step outside and surrender to the elements was
generally acknowledged.
And
every day Dr Kristina Gjennestad put in the same five miles on the running
machine.
“Peter,”
she told me one morning over breakfast, “I think I’m in love.”
She
looked radiant.
“With
me?” I said, hopefully.
“No, you
idiot,” she said, “with it. With the thing. With the monster.”
This was
a blow.
“Is that...
wise?” I asked.
That was
a mistake.
“God,
you’re just like my father!” she shouted. “What’s wrong with all your
boyfriends, Kristina? How do you expect to win if you don’t train every day,
Kristina? If you’d been a better daughter your mother wouldn’t have left us,
Kristina!”
Then she
threw her orange juice in my face, got up and left.
She
didn’t get very far: we’d barricaded most of the base off a couple of weeks
back, so she had to make do with standing at the end of the corridor glowering
at me.
After a
while she gave up and went back to the gym.
-----
October
the fifth. Evening. Or morning. Or night. It doesn’t mean anything any more.
The sun
has been up since the twenty first of September.
If we
thought things were going to get better with the end of the endless night, we
were wrong. Things look much, much worse in the cold light of day.
Under
the midnight sun there’s nowhere left to hide - from the monster or from
ourselves.
Dr
Kristina Gjennestad disappeared a week ago. I like to think that she and the
creature are living happily together in one of the abandoned outbuildings. The
rest of us have moved into tents - Johansen burnt down the only remaining
habitable part of the base trying to set up a moonshine operation to get the
Danes off his back.
The
relief flight is due to arrive in a week, if we survive that long. To be
honest, nobody cares that much any more. There are only seven of us left, and
we keep ourselves to ourselves.
I’ve
taken to going for long walks out on the ice, following the sun as it circles
the horizon. It’s nice and quiet out there. The sound of my frozen breath is
the only thing that reminds me I’m still alive.
That’s
how I met the monster.
I have
no idea what it was doing out there. Maybe the same as me. We recognised each
other from a good mile away.
When I
was close enough it stopped scanning the horizon and turned all of its eyes to
me. Its horrible features rippled for a second, as if it was trying to match my
expression. Somewhere, deep in there, I thought I saw something like empathy.
That
said, I hadn’t slept in days and I was, of course, drunk.
Draw
your own conclusions.
Either
way, the moment gone, the creature went back to watching the skies. It didn’t
follow me when I started back for the camp, and I haven’t seen it since.
But I
think it helped me work out why we all ended up here, at the end of the world.
Ready?
We’re
like neutrinos.
All our
lives we’ve been travelling at the speed of light, never gaining mass, unable
to interact properly with anything. Or with anyone. All our lives we’ve been
waiting for the moment when someone spots our impossibly brief signature as it
lights up the ice.
Yes? No?
Maybe?
Seriously,
that’s the best I can do. If you want anything else you’ll have to ask
Johansen. God knows he could use someone to talk to.
As for
me, I’ve got a plan. I’ve been collecting provisions and scavenging equipment.
The McMurdo station is eight hundred miles away, on the other side of the
Trans-Antarctic Mountains, and I think I can make it on foot.
I think
I can walk out of here.
Wish me
luck.
© Owen Booth, 2012
Owen Booth is a copy-, script-, play- and writer-writer. He once accidentally sold a joke about Stephen Fry to BBC Radio 7. Those were the days!
Paul Clarke trained at the Central School and always got cast as a baddie or a monster. Or, for a bit of variety, a bad monster. Now a photographer, technologist and occasional performer, he finds the League's stories to be islands of relative sanity in his life.
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