‘Not really. I just followed up a few clues.’
Ned interjects anxiously. ‘I told you: none of us felt good about keeping you in the dark.’ Heavily, he rises from the sofa and begins hanging a white bed-sheet from some nails above the fireplace. It seems he is constructing a makeshift whiteboard.
Kristin says, ‘I can only apologise. Again. When Frazer showed me the drawings and told me about Bethany’s ability, I wanted to talk to you. But he insisted that if we were going to intervene with her, you mustn’t be involved, because you’d be compromised professionally.’
‘When we learned she was being moved to another facility. Where there’d be no access to her. The fact that she was in a public hospital made it easier.’
She looks down at the dark wood floor with delicacy, as though she is considering whether to polish it, and what product she might use to achieve maximal results. She is so patently unaware of the damage she’s wreaked, and so obviously pained by my hostility, that it almost hurts.
Ned steps back and contemplates his handiwork, then shifts the position of the laptop on the coffee table so that the screen is projecting on to the whiteboard, and adjusts the focus. Kristin Jons dottir leans forward on her chair earnestly, hands clasped together. Despite her good skin and fine, intellectual-looking bones, she probably never spends time gazing into mirrors. She doesn’t need to. She doesn’t need to because she knows who she is. Her sediment has settled, I think enviously. While mine is still moiling about. Perhaps that’s why Frazer Melville found her irresistible. Perhaps it isn’t a rejection of my paraplegia after all. Perhaps it’s a hundred thousand times worse.
‘When I saw Bethany’s drawings I was intrigued by the way in which these images occurred. These projections, these…’ Her Icelandic lilt trails off.
‘Visions,’ I finish. ‘Psychotic visions.’ For some reason I want to call a spade a spade. I want to be blunt and charmless and graceless. Despite the gloom, I can see the red of Kristin Jons-dottir’s cheekbones intensifying. Perhaps it has sunk in that my feelings towards her are neither benign nor sisterly. ‘Bethany says visions. Just so you know.’ How empiricists — and I include myself — disdain anything that smacks of the supernatural, of manipulative TV series, of low-budget believe-it-or-not, of strange-but-true.
‘Sorry to interrupt but I’m going to close the blinds now,’ says Ned quietly. ‘So I can project these images for you. And we can move on a bit?’ We both nod at him distractedly and the room darkens.
She says, ‘It’s not my field, so I can’t presume to comment on the genesis of the, er—’ She elegantly replaces the word ‘visions’ with a hand-gesture indicating something ephemeral being flung outward from the temples. ‘But with respect to the actual depictions—’
‘What Kristin’s getting at is, we need more information in order to locate the site of this possible disaster,’ says Ned, clicking his mouse. ‘Take a look at this.’ One of Bethany’s drawings appears on the sheet. He adjusts the contrast. ‘It’s got a lot of detail on it. Not the kind of detail you’d be aware of. Unless you knew the mechanics of rigs.’ He points to the platform, and the line that works its way down beneath the sea. ‘Images like this are what make us concerned that she’s seen the beginnings of a submarine landslide triggered by activity at one of the rigs. But we don’t know which one. They’re all fairly distinctive.’ He shoots me an amused glance. ‘The people who discover the sites are allowed to christen them, so they’ve mostly got quite fanciful names.’
Kristin gets up. ‘I’m going to get Frazer. I think he should be in on this.’ Something has finally got through to her. Good.
‘You were pretty tough on her there,’ says Ned, when she has gone. ‘Tougher than you were with me. And I was the one who kidnapped Bethany.’
I don’t answer. If he’s blind and stupid, then that’s his problem.
As Ned Rappaport scrolls through a list of images, I shift my legs into a new position on the chaise-longue. I will need all my strength to face the physicist again.
‘OK. Here are all the offshore rigs that we know are already experimenting with exploiting methane, plus ten that we suspect are converting from oil or gas production.’ With a click, the whiteboard is filled with a patchwork of images of ocean rigs, their platform scaffolds and spire-like derricks rearing from the sea: bleak constructions of iron and concrete, pounded by stormy seas or blanketed with snow or parked in sunlight in the iridescent turquoise of tropical waters, seemingly far from any coast. ‘The derricks are all bare metal but as you can see the lifting cranes come in all colours, just like cranes on land. I gather Bethany says the one we’re after is yellow, so…’ He shrinks the patchwork to several tighter images. On each of them stands a canary-coloured crane, several new- looking, but most with flaking paintwork. ‘Of these eight here, the three off the coasts of China, India and New Zealand are closed for machine refits, and one of the Russian ones hasn’t been operational for the past year. That leaves us with four suspects.’ He clicks again, quartering the whiteboard. ‘Buried Hope Alpha in the North Sea, Mirage in Indonesian waters, Lost World in the Caribbean, and Endgame Beta off the coast of Siberia. For various reasons to do with chronic mismanagement, my hunch is Endgame Beta.’
Frazer Melville and Kristin Jons dottir are talking animatedly as they enter the room.
‘Any luck with Harish?’ asks Ned. They look at one another and make a joint decision.
‘Some. But let’s talk Gabrielle through this first,’ says Frazer Melville.
He and Kristin Jons dottir position themselves on either side of me: he on one edge of the chaise-longue, and she on a chair to my left. Trapped, I give the whiteboard my full attention. Until this moment I have not paid offshore rigs a single thought.
‘They look heroic.’
‘They are,’ responds Frazer Melville, as though my remark is the correct answer to a secret, unuttered question. ‘All that human ingenuity and ambition. All that aspiration.’ It is almost like the beginning of the kind of conversation we used to have, in the days when we talked. ‘Until Bethany can give us more information we have to assume it’s any one of them. Now, if the submarine crack Bethany saw—’
He shifts closer to me on the edge of the chaise-longue. I lean away. But he is still close. I can feel the heat of his body.
‘That’s what she drew?’ I ask. I’m barely able to concentrate but I need to sound normal, for the sake of my own pride. ‘A crack?’
‘A fissure and a flashpoint,’ says Kristin Jons dottir. ‘To free the frozen methane from the ocean floor, they’ll have drilled beneath it horizontally and forced a pressure-change. But if they’ve miscalculated what’s down there, and the interference has widened the gap that’s already there, the pressure will build up. When it reaches a critical point, there’s a risk that huge amounts of this frozen methane — far more than they ever intended — could be unleashed.’
As she speaks, I am aware that Frazer Melville is trying to make further eye contact with me, but I resist. I wonder if Kristin told him about my hostility towards her, or whether other matters — like the phone call to Harish Modak — took precedence.
Ned says, ‘The sediment will destabilise and trigger a submarine avalanche. Possibly leading to the release of the entire methane reserve buried under the explored hydrate field. Thereby removing vast amounts of sediment above and adjacent to the methane. Creating further cascades across the whole area. In the case of any of these rigs, we’re talking about thousands of square kilometres. Followed by a huge tsunami. Which is likely to destabilise more sediment packages, leading to more massive landslides.’
With their scientific knowledge, the three others here can no doubt picture the whole delta-shaped flow chart of the disaster’s repercussions. But I am unable to. Instead, I envisage an oil painting in the style of Turner, a vast and magisterial canvas that depicts a churning miasma of water and wave and cloud: of pale, mother-of-pearl light that transforms into rose, then tangerine, then blood-red as the spume froths and bubbles and explodes into flame; in the foreground, the matchstick scaffold of a rig toppled by the force of colliding elements.
Which is not much use, except as an aesthetic comfort.
No: the information I am getting isn’t sinking in the way it should.
‘Which in turn is highly likely to trigger a further cycle of landslides and more tsunamis,’ says Ned. ‘With more of the hydrate field being dislodged and releasing more methane. Methane is ten times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than C02. If the whole thing spreads and escalates, we get runaway global warming on a scale that’s beyond anyone’s worst nightmare. Everywhere will be radically hotter. It used to be called the clathrate gun hypothesis. Back when it was only a hypothesis.’
