Pandora's curse

night.” This startled everyone but Erwin Puhl. “I’m afraid I like alcohol a bit too much. One drink becomes ten and laughter becomes tears. Quickly my hands become fists. Is best I leave now. But watch out for Erwin. Turn your back and bottle gone” — he snapped his fingers — “just like that.”

The dour Puhl’s face split into an impish smile. “I’ve never taken that long to finish a bottle of anything.” After Igor left the wardroom, Erwin poured himself a dram. “He’s been sober for about a year. It’s still tough for him to be around alcohol.”

“Known him long?”

Before Puhl answered, his eyes swept the room as if he were afraid of being overheard. “Eighteen years or so. I studied at Moscow University when East Germany was still a Soviet satellite, and I worked at the Soviet Academy of Sciences up until the Wall came down in 1989. We have worked together a few times since then.”

“What’s the goal of your team?” Mercer asked.

“We are at the end of a particular solar cycle that culminates in an event called the solar max, a time of intense sunspot activity and the ejection of tremendous volumes of charged particles. It’ll disrupt communications and power distribution all over the globe. We’re going to measure the intensity of the particles as they follow earth’s magnetic lines. So far north, the activity should be particularly intense.”

“Isn’t there some big religious meeting on a cruise ship coming up this way to take advantage of the aurora borealis?” Ira asked.

“The Universal Convocation,” Erwin answered at once. “The route’s a secret but I heard they’re going to circle Iceland from the north. If they want inspiration from above, they’re going to get it.”

Mercer wasn’t really listening to their conversation. He was thinking about what Koenig had told him and decided to do nothing with the information. He had enough to do without worrying about Geo-Research’s internal squabbles. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see an undercurrent of tension between Greta and Werner. It was actually more a unidirectional thing. Greta seemed secure in her position. It was Werner who was uncomfortable. Mercer felt bad for him, imagining what it must be like to work with a former lover, especially since it appeared Koenig had yet to get over her.

He finally took a sip of the brennivin and nearly choked. “This stuff’s like drinking gravel.” As he spoke, he adjusted his Tag Heuer back an hour to put it on Greenland time. “I’m going to call it a night. We should recheck our equipment before we reach Ammassalik.”

During a severe winter, pack ice extended all the way from Greenland to Iceland, a distance of about three hundred miles. This ice wasn’t the cause of the North Atlantic’s famous icebergs. Those calved from glaciers on Greenland’s west coast. Rather, the pack ice was a frozen surface accumulation that reached only a few yards in thickness. It melted as it broke up and offered little hazard to navigation during summer. The difficulty reaching Greenland came from the fact that the deepwater fjords that ring the island like a necklace were ice choked until early July and refroze again in late September. The three-month window is the only time that ships can call on the few settlements on the eastern coast.

As the Njoerd nosed her way toward the Ammassalik Fjord, thin ice still layered much of the water, which was dotted with huge bergs held immobile like white islands. The ship rammed her way through. None of the expedition members were allowed on the bridge during icebreaking operations, so the best view was from the forward windows in the wardroom.

When Mercer arrived the next morning, he found himself alone except for the cooks preparing breakfast in the galley. He poured a cup of coffee from the continuously refilled urn and took a seat. In moments he realized that the ice was too thin and rotten to make an impression on the Njoerd. Even at a slower speed, she knifed through the pack without check. If it weren’t for the scrape of ice against her hull plates and the occasional slab that showed above her bows before being thrust aside, he wouldn’t have known they had reached the pack.

“Morning,” Ira Lasko called as he entered the wardroom. He went to the coffee urn before joining Mercer.

“Looks like you need to shave.”

Ira ran a hand around the circle of stubble on his otherwise bald head, and chuckled. “I’m thinking about letting it grow in. How’s the show?”

“Icebreaking’s more dramatic on television.”

“If we’d tried this even a month ago, we wouldn’t have made it anywhere near Ammassalik.”

“How do people live up here?”

“Most of the fifty thousand people on Greenland are native Inuits. While they’ve become dependent on Denmark for a lot of their supplies, I think they’d be fine if the Danes left ’em alone too.”

“I was reading a guidebook on the flight from the States that said Greenland’s Inuits can understand the native languages spoken in Alaska. They’re separated by a quarter of the world and fifteen hundred years of isolation and the languages are still recognizable. Remarkable when you consider that we need dictionaries to help us understand the subtleties of Shake-speare and he’s only been dead for five hundred years.”

“Have you listened to a teenager recently? I can barely understand them, and it’s only been a single generation.” They laughed and Lasko added, “Speaking of teenagers, I ran into Marty in the hallway next to the bathroom last night and he reeked of perfume. Looks like he’s going to have some fun even if he doesn’t want to be here.”

The dining room filled slowly as others came awake and went in search of coffee and food. Marty was one of the last to come to breakfast, and all through the meal he kept glancing over at a young German girl who was Geo-Research’s assistant camp cook. When their eyes met, the brunette would blush and look away demurely.

“Get enough sleep, Marty?” Ira teased.

Bishop looked wolfish. “No, and I don’t think I’ll get much tonight either.”

After breakfast, the Society team went back to their cabins for their parkas and then met on the deck. A steady wind blew across the ship, carrying with it the clean smell of ice and sea. The temperature was thirty-five degrees but the sun was warm. As they checked over their gear, layers of clothes were stripped away. While they were working, Werner Koenig approached to talk about the potential dangers they could face on the ice and warn them about not allowing themselves to sweat.

“If you’re away from the camp and your clothes become sweaty, your body heat will leach away so fast you’ll be dead before you know it. That goes especially for your boots. We’ll be wearing moon boots on the ice, and they heat up fast and take forever to dry out. If your boots get wet from your feet sweating, get out of them immediately or you’re going to get frostbite. It takes less time than you think, so just get back to the camp and change.” He moved on to give the same advice to Igor Bulgarin’s team.

Most of the loose equipment had been stored in the four Sno-Cats or their towed trailers. The machines were big boxy vehicles resembling tracked moving vans, painted red with a decal for Geo-Research affixed to their front doors. Their tracks were heavily notched, like a bulldozer’s, and extended beyond the cabins to give them a wide footprint that distributed their weight better over soft snow. Two of the trailers were basically boxes standing ten feet tall and about twenty-five feet long. They were painted a matching shade of red and mounted on spring- cushioned skis. The other two trailers were open and held sections of prefabricated walls for the base-camp buildings. There were also a few preloaded pallets of gear: fuel drums, floors and roofs for the buildings, the Society’s chemical heat, and crates of food that would be carried directly to Camp Decade by the rotor-stat.

“Why the hell don’t they lug all this stuff right to the site with the blimp?” Ira complained as he rooted through a trailer, looking for lengths of hose for their pump.

“Cost and insurance,” Marty said. “The rotor-stat is still experimental and its owners aren’t willing to use it to lift equipment from a ship at sea. Liability issues if something goes wrong, I imagine. That means we have to be tied up to a pier. And I guess it’s only rated to carry one Sno-Cat and trailer at a time. Fully loaded, these rigs weigh about thirty tons. Geo-Research wasn’t willing to pay for that many trips from Ammassalik to the base camp, so they decided to drive the ’Cats overland and have the rotor-stat make only a couple of runs with the fuel and the other heavy stuff. It’s a pain in the ass, but saved about fifty grand.

“And since we’re paying for the right to join their expedition,” he added, “the burden of driving the ’Cats to Camp Decade falls on us.”

“Geo-Research is sending a few of their people with us, aren’t they?” Mercer asked.

“Yeah, in case something goes wrong.”