She stepped from the ladder onto the bottom of a rectangular corridor that, as she played her light beam around, reminded her of an abandoned mine shaft. The walls were sheets of thick plywood, now bulging in from the crushing pressure of ice and snow. The ceiling was more plywood, supported every four feet by massive vertical timbers and horizontal crossbeams. Even so, some of the crossbeams had cracked, and seams of ice showed through splits in the plywood sheets.
Because no one had ever lived at the South Pole before 1957, no one had known what the weather would be like. The first crew constructed most of the original station underground, leaving five feet of ice on top. The walls and ceilings had been shored up, mine-style, with timbers. When the place had originally been built, everything must have been plumb and square. Now there was not a plumb line or square angle to be seen, giving the place a tilting, twisting fun-house look. It smelled of old wood and diesel oil and decay.
Cave-in debris blocked half the passage to her left, so she went right, into an open corridor. After a hundred feet that led into a room that must have been the galley — red picnic tables with benches, sagging cabinets, sinks. On the tables sat bowls of cereal as they had been left half a century earlier, no mold growing here, empty beer cans and mugs, some with coffee frozen solid, overflowing ashtrays.
Either they got out of this place in one hell of a hurry, she thought, or they didn’t bother to clean up after their last day. Probably the latter. She was about to continue through a door on the galley’s opposite side when a cracking noise stopped her. She remained absolutely still, not even breathing, listening. No more noises, but she knew that the entire complex was unstable. The beams and timbers were huge, two feet on a side, but a major shift in all that ice above could snap them like twigs. Not a place to linger.
Thirty feet past the galley she came to a T intersection. Turned right, moved on carefully, the floor here littered with rusting cables, lumber, scrap metal. Came to what had been an entrance on her right, the frame all askew now, door hanging from one set of hinges. Painted in black:
Capt. J. R. Lieder, USN
C.O.
South Pole, Antarctica, USA
Like Columbus claiming everything he could see, and all he could not, for the queen, she thought. South Pole, Antarctica, USA. Different times. She wrenched the door back and shone her light into the room. Two gray metal file cabinets, an overturned chair, and a massive old metal desk like the one in Graeter’s office in the station.
Fida lay on top of the desk, naked, curled into a fetal position. His eyes were open, dulled by the gray haze of death. One arm lay underneath him. The other was stretched straight out, fingers spread wide, as if trying to snatch something out of the air. Areas of his skin glistened: body moisture that had frozen and was reflecting her light. Sweat? From a struggle? So thin, she saw, skin over knobs and ridges of bone. His ECW gear, underclothing, and boots lay in a pile on the floor beside the desk.
She ran her light over the room’s ceiling. None of the crossbeams had split, but all had unsettling downward curves. Didn’t matter. She needed to get closer. She walked in, stood beside the body, started to look for wounds or signs of trauma. Saw nothing obvious at first, but then, peeking from beneath Fida’s head, a small, reddish-black circle. Blood? She bent to look.
A sharp noise from the dark passageway behind her, then a sound like giant hands clapping, ice cracking, timbers shattering. One second of dead silence, and the ceiling collapsed. Her last thought was that it sounded like the avalanche on Denali just before it hit.
51
Gerrin pulled into his garage, waited for the automatic door to close, and sat. He turned on the dome light and angled the rearview mirror toward himself so that he could look into his own eyes. It had been a difficult couple of days. First the call from Barnard, later meeting with him. Then the call from Merritt. The videoconference with Kendall and Belleveau. Finally, the sat call back to Merritt. She wasn’t a problem. Merritt was a zealot, driven by resentment that had festered for years. He understood her: damned barren by pure chance, unable to fathom why others should not suffer the same fate, especially if her conscience could be salved by thinking some good thing might result.
So the Pole’s women would fly like sparks to every corner of the world, and Triage would burn like wildfire through the globe’s breeding stock. Or, more properly, like smallpox. There would be the same exponential growth. And there would be pain, but at least it would visit all equally. He took comfort from the fact that Triage had no bias, made no choices, assumed nothing. Only a microbe, it would work just as effectively on the Upper East Side and Rodeo Drive as it would in Lagos and Dhaka and New Delhi.
But did “work” mean sterilize or kill? If he had made the wrong call, millions—tens of millions, a thing barely conceivable — of women might die. He was a man of iron control, but now his mind flooded with red visions. Exsanguinated. Bled to death. Two women died that way, an awful thing to see and worse, no doubt, to suffer. He saw rivers of blood, streets awash in blood, lakes of blood, hosts of women drowning in blood, blood like rain, drenching the earth.
And yet, and yet … What were the options? From the beginning, his scientific, rational, calculating brain had reduced it all to sets of probabilities, clean and simple, rows and columns of data, percentages, projections. Certain global catastrophe later or heroic action now. Heroic in the strictly medical sense: treatment sure to harm but employed as a last resort when no action at all meant sure death. Physicians did it routinely, millions of times every day all over the world. Amputating gangrenous limbs. Excising cancer-riddled eyes, noses, colons, lungs. Killing people slowly with toxic chemicals to keep tumors from killing them quickly.
In the end, he did not really believe that Triage would kill millions of women. Could not believe it. They had planned too carefully, prepared too thoroughly, tested too rigorously. Triage was not designed to kill. Now, a place like Pole, that had been designed by nature to kill if any place on earth had. Surely something down in that otherworldly hell had caused those women’s deaths.
So he had lied. He had lied to Barnard, over and over. He had lied to Kendall and Belleveau when he’d said he agreed with Kendall’s plan. And he had lied when he’d told Merritt that the three Triage leaders had chosen to go forward as planned, when in fact they had agreed to pursue Kendall’s suggested course. He felt remorse over lying to his fellow Triage leaders, but what choice had there been?
In the mudroom, he took off his shoes and left them neatly aligned in one corner, unlocked the inner door, and stepped sock-footed onto the hall’s thick green carpeting. A small thing, but one he had come to expect with pleasure. In the kitchen, he brewed tea and took a cup, thick with sugar, toward his leather recliner in the living room. He said, “Lights.” Said it again, more loudly. Nothing. Five thousand dollars for a voice-activated system, and this. It had worked that morning. He would have to check the security system later. He used the wall switch.
Before he seated himself, someone knocked on the front door, and he answered. Two men. One he had never seen before, very big, with short, straw-colored hair and a remarkable face. “Good evening, Dr. Gerrin,” he said. Another man stepped from behind the first. It was Donald Barnard.
“Hello,” Barnard said.
“We need to talk to you.” Bowman stepped through the doorway and walked straight toward Gerrin, who moved backward step for step, as if retreating from an advancing wall. “You know Dr. Barnard from BARDA,” Bowman said. “I work with another agency.”