Zodiac Station Read Free Page A

but my dreams didn’t. If anything, they were more urgent. The Arctic wasn’t a place to prove myself, but to lose myself. Somewhere to escape to.
    You know what the two most seductive words in the English language are, Captain?
New beginning
. The north’s a blank page,
tabula rasa
, white space on our own private maps we can fill in all over again. Snow gives us hope that the world can be different. A glimpse of perfection.
    I’d applied for a post at Zodiac twice before, but I didn’t make it past the selection boards. I thought I’d missed my chance. I was working as a technician in the Sanger lab at Cambridge – not high-status work, but I was glad to have it. I have an eight-year-old son, Luke; my wife died and I look after him alone. Between him and the job I kept busy enough. But every time it snowed, I felt that familiar tug, my internal compass swinging north again.
    Then I got the email from Martin Hagger. You’ve heard of him? Ask some of your scientists – the biologists. He’s a big gun. Everyone thinks life began in the so-called primordial soup, a warm broth slopping around the tropics. Hagger’s theory was that it actually evolved at the poles: that the freezing and melting of the sea ice every year acted like a giant chemistry set to turbocharge the evolution of DNA. He found some pretty convincing evidence, made the papers and everything.
    I’d studied with Hagger for my master’s, and the first year of my doctorate, before we parted ways. Since then, I’d kept up with his research, but we hadn’t spoken in eight years. Then, one day, there it was: an email from Hagger, inviting me to come to Zodiac as his research assistant. His previous assistant had had a wisdom tooth go wrong and needed to be evacuated. His loss, my gain. I had no idea why he’d chosen me of all people, after all that time, but I didn’t care. There aren’t many thirty-year-old lab technicians with a PhD. This was my shot.
Tabula rasa
.
    The bureaucrats who run Zodiac fought it – hated it – but Hagger forced it through. No boards, no assessment. Forty-eight hours later, I was at Heathrow.
    My sister was late. Ironically, it had snowed – only a centimetre, but the roads had jammed solid. Who expects snow at the end of March? Luke and I waited in the departure hall at Terminal 3, probably the most depressing place on earth, while the crowds tramped slush through the doors and the tannoy ran non-stop with delays and cancellations. Fog steamed off the passengers; the whole place stank of damp.
    Just when I thought I might miss my flight, Lorna staggered in. There wasn’t much time for goodbyes. I gave Luke a long, tight hug and we both tried not to cry. When I let go, he gave me the envelope he’d been clutching. I smiled when I saw the address.
    ‘You can take it to the North Pole,’ he explained.
    I tucked it in my pocket and kissed him goodbye.
    ‘Don’t get eaten by the polar bears,’ said Lorna.
    I flew to Oslo, then to Tromsø, where I had a ham and cheese sandwich and transferred on to a small Twin Otter for the last leg to Utgard. There was no one else on the flight, just me and the pilot and a couple of tons of supplies.
    I suppose you know about Utgard. It’s the last place in the world, the most northerly scrap of land on the planet. Easy to miss – so easy, in fact, that no one realised it was there until the twentieth century. Most of it’s covered in ice, so much that the weight has actually pushed the land below sea level. Not that there’s much sea, either: for ten months of the year it’s frozen solid. The only notable population is polar bears, and a couple of dozen scientists at Zodiac Station. I wouldn’t like to say who’s hairier.
    Even from Tromsø, it took another six hours’ flying. We refuelled at the base at Ny-Ålesund, where the mechanics fitted skis to the plane and the pilot changed into his cold-weather gear. He gave me a dubious look, in my jeans and the jacket I use for