Zodiac Station Read Online Free Page A

staring back at me.
    Anderson, Sieber and Pharaoh.
‘Pfu-87: A Synthetic Variant on the Pfu-polymer Enzyme and its Applications for Synthetic Genomics’.
    It was my
Molecular Biology
article: the first scientific paper I ever published. It was strange to be reminded of it on Utgard. Hagger must have wanted to remind himself I’d once been a decent scientist.
    ‘Ha. The new intruder.’
    A man stood in the doorway. I hadn’t heard him approach – you never did at Zodiac. He was short and, unusually for that place, clean-shaven. He had a round head with not quite enough hair to cover it, and wore one of those drab army-issue jumpers with patches on the elbows and shoulders.
    ‘Tom Anderson,’ I introduced myself. ‘Martin Hagger’s new assistant.’
    ‘I didn’t think you’d come to sell us double glazing. Ha.’ He shook my hand. ‘Quam. Base commander.’
    ‘Pleased to meet you.’
    ‘I hear you rather put the cat among the pigeons in Norwich, coming up like this. Very irregular.’ He squinted at me. ‘Still, you’re here now.’
    ‘I am.’ I meant to add something like ‘Thrilled to be here’ or ‘Glad you could have me’, but somehow the phrases jammed in my head so nothing came out except a sort of hiccup. Quam looked me up and down.
    ‘I suppose I’d better show you around.’
    ‘It seems very quiet,’ I said, as he led me on down the corridor.
    ‘Normal, this time of year. October to February we almost shut down; just a skeleton staff. I only got here myself four weeks ago.’
    I tried to imagine overwintering there: the endless darkness; the stale jokes and stale food; the long, mournful corridor and the empty rooms. You’d go insane.
    ‘The advance party come in March to set up. The rest get here in May. After that, it’s a madhouse.’ He opened a door numbered
19
. ‘This is where you’ll be sleeping.’
    I peered in, though I couldn’t see much because someone had decided to put the wardrobe in front of the window. Four bunks squeezed between four walls, with a leopard-print Claudia Schiffer looking down from a poster.
    ‘Nice to have some female company.’
    ‘That’s to hide the escape tunnel.’ Quam closed the door again. ‘Only you for now, but you’ll have to share when the barbarian hordes invade. You won’t spend much time there, anyway. Hagger will work you pretty hard, I imagine.’
    A dull detonation from up on the glacier made the Platform rock slightly under my feet.
    ‘Is he here?’
    ‘Hagger’s up at Gemini. That’s our camp on the ice dome. He’ll be back in a couple of hours, when the helicopter gets in. Saturday night is movie night,’ he added, moving on down the corridor. ‘The lab, you’ve seen. Toilets, surgery.’ Doors opened, doors closed. ‘My office, if you ever need me. Radio room.’ Another cubbyhole, packed with dials, gauges and cables. Static hissed from a speaker, and an American-accented voice was saying something I couldn’t make out.
    ‘Is that for us?’
    Quam shook his head. ‘The Americans have a ship up north. Coast Guard ice-breaker, crew of scientists. Two hundred miles away, but it’s the nearest thing to civilisation from here. Every so often we pick up their transmissions.’
    He turned a knob and the sound went away. ‘Did you bring a mobile phone?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You can leave it in your suitcase. No reception here. If you go out in the field, we’ll issue you a satellite phone.’
    ‘Internet?’ I looked at the antiquated computer taking up half the space in the radio room. ‘If there’s somewhere to connect my laptop … I promised my son we could Skype.’
    ‘We’ve no wireless because it interferes with the instruments. You can connect to the LAN with a cable, but you’ll need an account. You can use this machine with a guest account until we set you up. I’ll give you a form.’
    I looked doubtfully at the machine. ‘Do I have to know Morse code?’
    The front door banged; footsteps thudded down