Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
—“Fire and Ice”, Robert Frost
When the coring drill shut down, Dr. Magezi Maartens heard something strange. At first she thought it was just audio persistence in her ears from the drill, but the sound was quite unlike that of the core sampler. Definitely a machine noise, though. She turned around slowly, searching. Whatever was making the sound, there was nowhere for it to hide.
It was a fine summer day in Greenland. The sky was a turquoise dome, the sun a blindingly bright jewel in the south that looked like it should be hot but wasn’t. Downstream, on the coast, the temperature was above freezing. Jakobshavn Glacier was calving icebergs into the fjord, and in some places it was warm enough to go in shirtsleeves, so long as you didn’t step into the shade for very long. Up here on the thickest part of the ice sheet it was a balmy negative ten degrees Celsius. Nothing met Magezi’s gaze but ice, sky, the core sampler, the handful of grad students she’d brought up here with her, and the cluster of prefab huts that made up their camp. Greenland had plenty of wildlife—birds, arctic foxes, polar bears, musk oxen—but those were all on the coastal fringes. Here there was nothing to eat—or drink, for that matter. All the water here had been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years. Central Greenland was a desert, far more lifeless than the arid, hot deserts of her native South Africa.
She’d tracked the sound now to an aircraft of some sort, flying toward them, undoubtedly headed someplace further east.
Except that it wasn’t. As she watched, it slowed and then began to descend. It was shaped like a plane but was behaving like a helicopter. She had never quite seen anything like it.
Her students were looking up now too, distracted from their tasks.
“Hold on,” one of them—Max—said. “What’s that?”
“You’ve got me,” Magezi said. “Wealthy tourists, maybe?” But she didn’t think so. She squinted through the glare off the ice as the vessel settled. It had an emblem of some sort painted on its hull. It looked like a stylized hourglass on its side. It wasn’t Swedish military, or American, or any other nationality she recognized, for that matter. But it did look… military. And expensive.
“You guys stay back here,” she said. “I’ll go check it out.”
She trudged across the frozen surface toward the aircraft, some hundred meters away.
Well before she got there, four figures emerged. She couldn’t tell much about them: like her, they were bundled up in arctic gear. But when she got close enough, one of them pulled down the scarf across his face.
“Doctor Maartens?”
“Yes,” she said. This man knew her name. That was a surprise. What was this? All of her permits were in order, she was sure. He was an older fellow, fifties, maybe early sixties. He spoke English with what she judged to be a Japanese accent. Close up, she guessed the other three might be women.
“My name is Ishirō Serizawa,” he said. He nodded at his companions. “This is Doctor Graham, Doctor Russell and Doctor Andrews. We were hoping to have a word with you.”
“I guess you must have been to come all the way out here,” she said. “Am I in trouble?”
“No, not at all,” he said. “This concerns your research. If you want to step inside, I can offer you some hot coffee, or tea, and we can talk more comfortably.”
That sounded sketchy. Few things had been drilled into her during childhood more persistently than to not get into a vehicle with people she didn’t know. Then again, she was a long way from help, and she was able to make out that there were at least two more people in the plane. If these people meant her harm, there wasn’t much she could do about it.
“That sounds wonderful,” she lied. “Perhaps my crew could be invited in?”
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” Serizawa said. “We need to speak to you in private. But we can have coffee brought to your crew.”
She sighed. “I don’t know who you people are,” she said.
“We work for an organization called Monarch,” he replied. “You may have heard of us.”
That did ring a bell. “The Godzilla chasers?” They had been in the news, lately. A supposedly multinational, government-funded organization that had come to the fore after the startling realization that giant monsters lay sleeping in the earth.
Serizawa smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Godzilla chasers.”
That was alarming. What could they want with her? Unless…
“Wait,” she said. “Do you think something’s buried out here? One of your monsters?”
“No,” Serizawa said. “As I said, this is about your research.”
“I’m a paleontologist,” she said. “I look for very tiny fossils, not gargantuan ones.”
“I’ve read your papers,” the person Serizawa had identified as Graham said. Her accent was soft, something British. “You’re really very brilliant. Please, come have a coffee, and have a look at something. You could really be very helpful.”
Magezi glanced back at her students.
“And you’ll bring them some?”
“Of course.”
* * *
The inside of the craft was full of instruments and screens, but there was an area in the back that could only be described as a small meeting room—complete with table and video displays. The coffee was good: far better than the dehydrated stuff they had brought with them to the glacier. A guy in a vaguely military outfit put on a parka with the hourglass insignia on it and took insulated cups out to her people.
She sipped and smiled nervously at her four hosts. Serizawa seemed to be the leader. Graham and Serizawa seemed… close. Not romantically. More like colleagues who had known each other for a long time. Russell was a little intense. Andrews, the youngest, didn’t say much. She looked a little out of her element, like maybe she was wondering why she was even here.
“So, what’s this about?” Magezi asked.
“You have a theory that Greenland froze very quickly at the beginning of the last glaciation,” Russell said.
She nodded. “Seems like you guys are familiar with my paper. I’ve been taking ice cores, trying to establish a chronology for some fossils I’ve been collecting. When I got down to the old surface, I found a layer of ice that was… different from the rest. Laid down very quickly. Like instantaneously.”
“Because of the size of the ice crystals,” Russell said.
“You have read my paper,” she said. “Yes, the quicker water freezes, the smaller the crystals. That’s why you want your frozen shrimp to be flash-frozen, not just iced in a freezer. Bigger crystals turn the shrimp to pulp by exploding their cell membranes from the inside.”
“And when did this happen?” Serizawa said.
“Greenland iced over between two point five and three million years ago,” she said. “But that was just the beginning, you know. The seed of the Ice Age. Ice Ages come in pulses. Things get cold, ice forms at the poles. Ice reflects sunlight—which means it pushes radiation that might become heat back into space. It gets colder, more ice forms. The last big pulse was a little over a hundred thousand years ago. But this event two and a half million years ago—I think this is what started the pulses of glaciation. But since there’s been a more recent thaw, there isn’t much left of that first layer.”
“What might that event have been, do you think?” Serizawa asked. “What explains the instantaneous freezing?”
“What’s this about?” she asked. “Does this have something to do with Godzilla? Or those things he was fighting?”
Serizawa smiled. “Everything is connected,” he said. “Just not always in the way we may think.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “Do you have any ideas on what could have caused it?”
She shook her head. “Sometimes weather patterns just collapse. But even a polar vortex wouldn’t have frozen things this quickly. It’s like everything was hosed down with liquid nitrogen or something. I have no explanation. But I’m looking for one.”
“Was there anything else peculiar about the ice?” he pressed. “Something you didn’t put in your paper?”
She took another sip of coffee. “Look,” she said. “That paper got me pegged as a fringe scientist by half of my community. They say I’m trying to bring back catastrophism as an explanation for geological data. You know—‘Noah’s Flood,’ ‘Maarten’s Icebox.’”
“And yet you keep testing,” Russell said. “You took a crew to Siberia, didn’t you? Tested four more sites. And the Canadian shield. You didn’t publish those results.”
“Yet,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Are your claims corroborated?”
She shrugged. “Yes. Same thin layer of weird ice in each location.”
“Just how weird was it?” Russell pursued. “Not just tiny crystals.”
She looked at each of them, trying to see any sign they were mocking her. But they seemed deadly serious.
“No,” she said. “There was something else. In all of the samples. A sort of pattern in the ice. Frozen compression waves, like some kind of… sound. Like the ice froze so quickly it recorded a sound signature. But there’s also… ah… trace signs of a radiation burst. As if a… I don’t know. A bomb went off. Not like a nuclear bomb, radiating energy that becomes heat. Like… the opposite of that. A radiation that slows atoms down. Makes them stop in their tracks. Not just something cold, but the… the essence of cold.”
Russell looked at Serizawa. “I see it now,” she said. “How did I miss it? It’s a bioacoustic signature.”
“Yes,” Serizawa said. “But more than that.” He looked back at Magezi. “You haven’t published about that.”
“Like I said, I’ve already lost a lot of funding.”
Serizawa nodded and tapped a device in his palm. On the screen in front of her, two pictures popped up. An extremely magnified ice sample, and an electron microscope image of presumably the same sample.
“Does this look familiar?” Serizawa asked.
“That’s it,” she said. “That’s my data. How did you get it?”
“We didn’t,” Graham said. “This didn’t come from Greenland, or Siberia, or the Canadian Shield.”
“But it’s the same,” Magezi said. “Right down to the compression waves. Although now that I’ve been looking at it, the resolution is better than mine. You’ve got better equipment.” She looked up. “Where the hell is this from?”
“We can’t tell you that,” Serizawa said. “For now. It’s a site we’re curating. Trying to learn more about.”
“That’s it? You’re just going to walk in here, tease me with this, and walk out? Where is this from? It could go a long way toward vindicating me.”
“Is that why you do this?” Graham asked. “Do you want vindication?”
She had thought she did. But the instant the question was asked, she knew the real answer.
“No,” Magezi said. “What I really want? Is to know. To know what all this means.”
“That,” Serizawa said, “is up to you. I can hire you on a contract basis. I can get you funding. And we can show you this data in context. But you can’t publish it for an audience outside of Monarch. At least not right now.”
Magezi ran her gaze over them. “Is this for real?” she asked.
“It is very real,” Serizawa said.
“You,” Magezi said, lifting her finger to indicate Andrews, who hadn’t said anything during the entire conversation. “What do you do?”
“Me?” Andrews said. She seemed a bit startled. “I’m, well, I’m an anthropologist. And a linguist.”
“That’s interesting. What does that have to do with ice core samples and rapid glaciation?”
“I…” She glanced at Serizawa, clearly unsure if she was supposed to be talking at all. He nodded at her.
“Well,” she said, “I guess there’s a feeling that some of my research into belief systems might have a part to play here.”
“Belief systems? You mean like religion, folklore, mythology?”
“Yes,” Andrews said.
“That has to do with this? Rapid glaciation that happened before our ancestors were even human?”
“Well, but our sample is much more recent,” Andrews said. “It—” She cut herself off.
“More recent? How much more recent? Recent enough for humans to have witnessed it happening?” Magezi sat back, thinking. “So within the last hundred thousand years or so.”
“I probably shouldn’t have said that,” Andrews sighed.
“No, it’s fine,” Serizawa said. “You talked about pulses, Doctor Maartens.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yeah, of course. There are probably multiple layers of this stuff. I was only looking at the earliest possible horizon, the ice right at the old surface level. But maybe the onset of every glaciation expansion in the last three million years has a layer like this.” She looked up sharply at Andrews. “What myths? What legends?”
“I think I’m here more to listen than to talk,” Andrews said.
“You guys aren’t going to tell me anything unless I join your little club, are you?” she said.
“You said you wanted to know,” Serizawa said. “This is how you find out.”
“Is there a dental plan?” she asked.
“An excellent one,” he said, without a trace of a smile.
She glanced outside at her grad students, standing around their little collection of tents. She had funding for another week, and after that, there was nothing in the pipeline. Then it was back to the classroom. And she liked teaching well enough, but she had never fooled herself that it was ever anything more than a way to get funding for her fieldwork. That was all about to go away, though, wasn’t it?
And these guys? They knew that.
“Why me?” she asked. “You already have my data. It’s clear that you have plenty of money and equipment. Any decent paleontologist could do what you’re asking. So why me? Because I’m desperate?”
“No,” Serizawa. “We had this ice profile before your paper was published. We had noticed the fine granularity of the ice crystals. Not one of our scientists noticed the compression wave patterns. Nor did we suspect that there was a greater, worldwide pattern. You saw that. That’s why we want you.”
She finished her coffee and sat silently for a moment.
“That’s very flattering,” she said. “It explains why you want me. But what I want is a reason to work for you. And not money. I can get funding. It won’t be easy, but I can get it.”
Serizawa kept his poker face, but she didn’t miss the flicker of eye contact between him and Graham.
Then Serizawa went to his device again.
“You didn’t see this,” Graham whispered.
A new image came on the monitor. More ice, not magnified this time. Just a regular image, like a part of a glacier. Something in it… She noticed the scale. It was huge.
“Shit!” she swore. “What the hell is that?”
Serizawa smiled, put his device down. The screen went black. They all watched her. No one said a thing.
“You got me,” she said. “I’m in.”