Margaret's Ark

from the pole. Formerly only a weather station and military base, Resolute Bay was now home to an ever-changing population of scientists living amid the two hundred-plus Inuit natives who called this land their own. In past visits, the sense of magnificent isolation the distance marker implied gave Greg a boyish sense of adventure.

Not today. He wasn’t supposed to be here, not for another two years. But MIRP was having a nervous breakdown, and it was Greg’s job to investigate. Over the past week and a half the Magnetic Information Retrieval Program had been trying to keep up with the north magnetic pole’s declination – the amount of shift of magnetic North across the Canadian Arctic and away from true North – what everyone not in his line of business called the North Pole. The magnetic pole always shifted, slowly and invariably, southwest at a steady, predictable pace. It has been doing so since the Earth’s formation, eventually readjusting itself to a more northerly locale only to begin a new, slow trek south. Over and over, ad infinitum.

Why, then, in the past few weeks, had observers begun to report extreme and sudden shifts above the usual one-percent-per-decade declination? If reports were to be trusted, and they have been in the past, the last two weeks revealed a shift of almost nine percent. An anomaly, nothing more, but one that triggered the call from GSC chief Francois Gourmond and Greg’s hastily-made travel plans. An anomaly, yes, but one which happened often enough there was no need for panic.

So here was he was, three years early, at the northernmost point of Canada to which commercial flights still dared travel. Greg needed to take his own measurements, find the pattern, and calm the growing mania that something more was afoot than a simple shifting of the planet’s molten core. The media hadn’t caught on to this newest development, but it was only a matter of time. Every day they searched out new angles and rumors, loose or non-existent, to connect with the Great Flood frenzy around the world. When the Geological Survey of Canada picked him for this trip, it was almost a relief. In a town where the primary objective was simple survival, imaginations rarely got as out-of-control as the rest of civilization.

He walked brusquely down Main Street towards Maheba’s Grille –one of a myriad of clustered pre-built square structures huddled a few hundred yards from the bay’s frozen shoreline. Nothing was pretty here except the landscape, not even the two hotels in town. Everything practical and strong, like the people, built to withstand the harsh, unrelenting winter always swirling around the Cornwallis Islands. Nothing out of place that he could see in the now-constant daylight around him, masked at the moment by the heavy cloud cover of a typical Artic storm blowing in since the weather began warming to a balmy negative ten Celsius. Just another day at the top of the world.

Nothing more.

He pushed through the door into the heat of Maheba’s Grille, and wondered why he was so shaken up.

“Well, look who’s back! It’s Greg, right?”

Dora was a heavy, fleshy woman with the Mongol features of her Inuit tribe. She had the most welcoming smile on the island, and she always remembered his name. She remembered everyone.

“Morning, Dora,” he said, and unzipped the parka, throwing the hood away from his curly, salt and pepper hair. He hadn’t fastened it tight enough and both ears burned in the sudden warmth. “At least, I think it’s morning. Hard to tell these days.”

She laughed politely and tossed a frayed menu on a table across the room. He accepted the implied invitation, shrugged the coat completely off and laid it over the back of the chair before sitting. Dora held a steel carafe and said, “Coffee?”

“Please, thanks.”

She poured. “You up here to fix my satellite TV? Been nothing but fuzz the last couple of days.” He heard, or thought he did, the worry. The one thing he did not want to hear from anyone in this place, this last bastion of sanity.

“Sorry, no. I don’t do televisions. Just up tracking my wandering pole, as usual.” He hesitated. “Reception’s bad here, too?”

She pursed her lips, nodded. “Hmm, mm. Cell phones, you name it. If it needs a satellite, it sucks wind last few days. But I guess you know that already....”

He did. Satellite interference was one of the most irritating side effects of an overactive magnetic field. The coffee was stronger than he liked it, but it was hot. The stinging of his ears slowly faded. “Yep. Declinations a little extreme right now. Jumping all over the place. Not to worry; does this all the time. You should know that, Dora, being around us tech heads all the time.”

She nodded, poked the menu. “Let me know what you’d like, Honey. Things are slow with the weather. You got here just in time for a doozy. I doubt anymore flights will be coming for a while.”

On cue, the wind slammed against the side of the building, picking up intensity as he studied the menu. Nothing new, he reminded himself. By the time he finished his meal, it would have calmed then started back up again at least twice. “Sounds like it,” he said and continued studying the menu, seeing none of it. Seeing the compass hidden away in his pocket, Dora watched him.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?”

He gave up any pretense of reading and sat back in his chair. “I assume you mean the pole, not the weather. It’s just a bit mischievous. This kind of thing has never been a bad omen before. It’s perfectly – “

“Some folks,” she said, interrupting, looking out the window at the storm whipping by like gray-white smoke, “they say there’s some giant, supernatural storm brewing everywhere, all over the world. Like the Great Flood in the Bible, you know?”

He nodded. “Yeah, Dora, I know. The pilot was rambling on about it during the descent. But what we have going on up there,” he pointed to the nicotine-yellowed ceiling, “has nothing to do with that, if that is what’s going on and not just some overblown news reaction to a rainy day. Just a coincidence. How’s the beef today?”

“What?” Her eyes came back into focus. “Oh, fine, fine. Got fresh chuck in day before yesterday.” She raised her pad, grateful for the distraction. So was he.

“A burger then, My Good Lady, with fries if you got ‘em. Just keep the coffee flowing. Anything else will just freeze in my gut on the walk back to the hotel.” He smiled, kept his tone light. She smiled distractedly, wrote the order and was soon the old Dora he remembered before everything in the world went insane. During the plane’s descent to Resolute Bay’s small airport, minutes before the clouds rolled in, he’d scanned the horizon for signs of any arks. He saw none, and wasn’t about to ask now.

Dora walked back to the counter, slid the order through a large rectangular window where a grizzly bear of a man glared at it from over the grill. He nodded silently before moving out of sight. Greg reached behind him, felt the compass in his coat pocket. He wanted to check again, see if anything had changed. Of course, even if magnetic North had moved in the few minutes since he’d taken his initial, baseline reading in the airport’s terminal, he’d have to assume something was wrong with the instrument. His time was booked at the Howison Building’s facilities for nine-thirty tomorrow morning. He’d get his most accurate readings there, before trekking further north when the storm let up. Still, the itch to check one more time was strong.

Dora was back. Greg pulled his hand from the pocket. He wouldn’t check, not with her waiting for him to tell her the end of the world was coming.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Some folks had been saying on the news –” she sighed, “maybe they still are but my satellite’s busted... anyway, they say that we’re due for one of those, you know, pole flips. North becomes South, and vice-versa? They say with things getting all fuzzy lately, and –”

“Dora,” he raised a hand. He hoped he wouldn’t have to repeat this to every local while he was up here. “I promise you one thing, if I can’t promise anything else about what’s happening lately – aside from the fact that we probably have another few thousand years before that ever happens... if it ever happens... the media is going to put more meaning on it than it deserves. The poles are driven by hydrodynamics in the Earth’s core, not the weather. If anything, the weather’s driven by the poles, not the other way around. Even if such an astronomically rare event should happen tomorrow, the most amazing thing you might notice are auroras over Africa. Nothing else.”