The Curiosity Read Online Free Page A

with that kind of horsepower onto a time-wasting cruise like this one? I cannot imagine what it cost.
    The challenge with Gerber is that he is also a heavy toker. Day and night, dinner and breakfast. Used to be, I could never tell when he was straight and when he was high. Then I decided just to assume he was always high, and it worked fine.
    Also he streams music constantly, obsessing on one thing only: the Grateful Dead. No other music, no other band. He has albums, bootlegs, a fetish about recordings with guest artists. Gerber once boasted that he’d collected twenty thousand songs by the Dead. He’s memorized more obscure facts than a tour guide at the Baseball Hall of Fame.
    I like it. The optimism of the songs, the lightness of attitude, it’s a break from the usual grind. Sometimes Gerber gets lost in one of the band’s long improvisations, staring into space during the endless musical self-indulgence, but otherwise his obsession is harmless. One time, because I cranked my share of rock in my day, I made the mistake of pretending. I recognized “Sugar Magnolia” on his computer speakers, and declared that the live Europe ’72 version was superior to the studio original on American Beauty .
    Gerber laughed. “The Dead performed that song five hundred and ninety-four times and recorded it forty-nine times. My personal favorite was October of ’73, which came out in 2001 on volume nineteen of Dick’s Picks. Yes, it was ‘sunshine daydream’ in Oklahoma City.”
    Then he cackled, scratched his mangy hair, and went back to his computer.
    Good thing Gerber’s a genius because anyone else wasting that many brain cells wouldn’t have half a dozen left. Tonight he beckons us closer: “Come, my children, come.”
    I stand to his left, Dr. Kate the other side. Five displays arc around his desk. Three show screen savers of fractals branching to infinity. Of the remaining two, the upper one plays a video feed from the ship’s bow. It shows a trio of men in expedition wear, plus thick flotation vests, working the sonar scanner over the surface of the ice. Like rock climbers, they’re linked by ropes, which are anchored to the top of the berg somewhere up out of sight. Everyone moves slowly, as if they’re on the moon. It’s cold enough out there, a body could die of exposure in minutes. An accidental dip in the brink? Don’t even want to imagine it.
    The scanner weighs two hundred pounds, and moving it around is complicated by all the clothes. I did one stint with the device, so I could write about it, and ten minutes was all the experience I needed. The cold froze my nostrils, then crept down my throat, and I swear it was headed for the bottom of my lungs. The temperature felt malevolent, like creepy fog in a horror movie. Don’t let anyone feed you that bunk about nature being beautiful and kind. Watching these men struggle on the video feed, I was forever convinced that nature would have been more than happy to see me frozen solid dead.
    â€œForget the movie, campers,” Gerber says. “Here’s the real story.” He taps a pen on the lower screen, which shows what looks like a simple 3-D grid. “This new little trick should save days of scanning.”
    Dr. Kate, bless her sweet bum, leans for a closer look. “What have you got here?”
    â€œA matrix of the iceberg’s interior. I was tinkering online and stole two ideas I found—a parking garage CAD system and a layout scheme for archaeological digs. Now we’ll know more exactly where we find hard-ice, and where there are deposits of our tiny carbon formerly-alives so we can fetch them easier and with fewer samples damaged.”
    â€œSo what does it show us?” she says, still bent forward. Am I supposed to look at the screen with her perched like that? Right.
    Gerber punches keys and clicks his mouse, and the screen changes dramatically enough