“No, whether he comes down will be up to you, Doctor,” Captain Chernov said, turning now, favoring her with his thin cool smile. “Don’t disappoint me.”
The steel rungs of the ladder, dripping with condensed moisture, slipped under Katya’s fingers as she climbed, slipped under the tread of her boots. When she reached the little glass-and-metal box of the operator’s cabin, she clung to the handrail and called out, asking the man if he needed help, trying to sound encouraging, friendly. The man did not respond. He lay prone at the far end of the jib, arms wrapped around a steel beam as if around a long-lost lover. There were only ten meters between them, but he did not even turn his head to look at her.
She swore and swung up the steel framework to the top of the jib, trying to ignore the dizzying plunge to the antlike cluster of people below. She called to the man again, asked him to tell her his name, and now he moved, rolling awkwardly to look at her without letting go of the beam. His eyes, sunk deep in dark hollows, seemed to be all pupil.
“You’re safe now,” Katya said, trying to project a confidence she did not feel. “Come toward me. I’ll help you down.”
The man’s mouth worked, but no words emerged. He was young, younger than Katya, and wore blue coveralls and heavy work boots.
“I’ll come to you, then,” Katya said.
But soon as she started to crab toward him, the jib shivering uneasily beneath her, the man humped backward, like a demented caterpillar. She stopped, told him that everything was all right, that he was safe, and he closed his eyes and shook his head from side to side. He was crouched at the very end of the jib now, beside the cable wheel.
Captain Chernov called out, asking why this was taking so long. The man looked down, then looked back at Katya, and slowly rose to his feet, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker, balancing at the edge of the foggy void.
“Wait!” she said. “Don’t!”
He did.
Katya closed her eyes. A moment later there was a hard wet sound and a shout of dismay below.
When she reached the ground, Captain Chernov said, “Your treatment worked, Doctor, but unfortunately it killed the patient.”
The son of a bitch must have been working on that quip while he watched her climb down. She said, “He was scared to death.”
“Of you?”
“Of his worst nightmare, I think.”
She was staring at the captain because she did not want to look at the splayed body.
“The crane is twenty meters high,” the chief petty officer said. “Whatever he was scared of, it must have been very big.”
“And it’s still here,” Katya said, pointing in the direction of the distant barking that had not, in all this time, let up.
“You are eager to make a famous discovery. But first we must secure the station,” Captain Chernov said, and detailed two seamen to stay by the boat, told the rest to stick together.
“Look after the doctor, lads,” the chief petty officer said. “She isn’t armed, she can’t run as fast as we can, and she’s probably a lot tastier than your salty hides.”
“There were twenty-six people here,” Katya said. “All men?”
“Of course,” the chief petty officer said. “They were here to work. They didn’t need distraction.”
“All men,” Katya said. “And they didn’t do too well, did they?”
They swept through the buildings. Dormitories. A mess hall. Offices. Stores. Two generators purring in a shack constructed from concrete blocks and corrugated iron. An assay lab and a small clinic. A cold store with three bodies wrapped in black plastic sheeting. One had been badly mangled in some accident; the other two looked like suicides—a ligature of electrical cable around the neck, slashed wrists. Five more dead men were sprawled behind one of the dormitory huts, hands bound, chests torn by what appeared to be gunshot wounds, bullet holes in the hut’s plank wall. Another body sprawled at the foot of the radio mast. His neck was broken, and Katya suggested that he had fallen while climbing.
“Climbing to escape from monsters, like your patient on the crane?” Captain Chernov said. “Or perhaps trying to escape from Americans who shot his friends.”
“Perhaps they all went stir-crazy in this damn fog,” the chief petty officer said. “There was a quarrel. It got out of hand …”
“Something drove them mad, perhaps,” Captain Chernov said thoughtfully.
The prefab buildings were empty although there were signs that people had left with some haste. Plates of food rotting on tables in the mess, papers scattered on the floor of the office, a record rotating on a gramophone in one of the dormitory huts, making an eerie scratching click until Captain Chernov lifted the needle. The gun locker was open and empty, but apart from the five men who had been lined up and shot there was no sign of any struggle, no blood spray, no bullet holes anywhere else. And no sign of the sixteen men still unaccounted for.
“They ran off, or they were taken prisoner,” Captain Chernov said. “If they ran off, we will find them. If they were taken prisoner, we will find the Americans who did it.”
“With respect, I don’t think this was anything to do with Americans,” Katya said.
“The so-called libertarians took hostages for ransom when they attacked our trawlers and merchant ships,” Captain Chernov said. “And executed them when no ransom was paid. What happened here, perhaps, was caused by some kind of psychological-war weapon. A gas, a volatile drug. After the men were driven mad by it, the Americans walked in, shot the few still able to resist, and took the rest prisoner. I see you do not like this story, Doctor. Well, if you have a better idea about what happened here, I should like to hear it.”
“I don’t have enough evidence to form a hypothesis,” Katya said, and realized that it sounded stiff and priggish and defensive.
The captain smiled. He was having fun with her. “You hope to find monsters. You hope for fame. Very well. Let’s go look for them.”
Katya trailed after the party of seamen as Captain Chernov and the chief petty officer led them along the quayside, past pyramidal heaps of ore, past a row of articulated dump trucks: powerful machines with six-wheel drive and rugged tires as tall as a person. They moved slowly and cautiously through the fog, checking under the trucks, checking shipping containers and stacks of empty crates. Arkadi Sarantsev hung back with Katya, asking her if she really thought monsters had attacked the station, if they were right now feeding on men they had killed.
“That’s what the captain thinks I think,” Katya said.
“Do you think he is wrong, about something driving the men crazy?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say it was something to do with the isolation,” Katya said. “That, and the fog.”
“But not, you think, Americans,” Arkadi Sarantsev said.
He had a nice smile and a cool attitude, had knotted a red handkerchief at the throat of his telnyashka shirt. He plucked a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket and offered it to Katya; when she refused with a shake of her head, he put the pack to his lips, plucked out a cigarette, and lit it with a heavy petrol lighter fashioned from a .50 cal cartridge case.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think that your captain was looking for an excuse to take on the American research ship,” she said.
“The captain’s father was one of the pioneer settlers,” Arkadi said. “We all resent the capitalists, with their nuclear rockets and supercomputers and frontier mentality, but the pioneer families especially resent them. As far as the captain is concerned, their offer of help is a personal insult.”
Katya had once sort of dated a Navy diver, who one drunken night had told her how a friend of his had come to the surface too quickly because his dive computer had malfunctioned. He had been stricken with the bends, screaming with the pain of nitrogen bubbles in his joints, fed vodka by his mates because they had no way of treating him. Their patrol boat had been making a hopeless dash to the nearest port when an American frigate which had intercepted its call for help had caught up with it and had taken off the stricken man and treated him in its decompression chamber. Katya’s boyfriend had tried to make it into a joke, saying that his friend had not only beaten the bends but had discovered a tremendous hangover cure into the bargain, but it was the usual sad story of crazy Russian machismo combined with a massive inferiority complex.