The Elder Ice: A Harry Stubbs Adventure (3 page)

The only slightly disagreeable aspect was a pervasive smell of damp earth.

Mr Evans insisted that I have some tea and perhaps something to eat. I attempted to decline—rumour said that Welshmen eat seaweed for a delicacy and I did not wish to give offence —but his great persistence compelled me to accept. The maid was exiled to the scullery while Mr Evans bustled about in the kitchen. His wife sat down to talk with me like a man: no small talk but straight to business.

“This is the item I mentioned in my correspondence.” I produced the parcel.

Dr Evans unwrapped it and extracted the battered volume with a smile of recognition.

“Your name is written inside the cover,” I said. “I believe you loaned this book to Sir Ernest Shackleton, Dr Evans. I am pleased to be able to return it to you.”

“It's Lucetti,” she said. “I had been wondering what had happened to him. Yes, I suppose I did lend it to that explorer—Shackleton?”

“Sir Ernest Shackleton,” I supplied. “The noted Antarctic explorer. Now deceased.”

“He died, did he? There's a pity; he was such a nice man. And it's so nice talking to someone who takes a real interest.”

“I would never ask you to break a confidence, Dr Evans, but it might be useful to my investigation if you could tell me something of the substance of what passed between you.”

At that point, the return of Mr Evans with a tray bearing all the necessaries of teatime, which he distributed about with great skill, interrupted us.  The tea was like English tea, and the tea cakes were excellent. Afterwards he sat down to a book with a title in a language I could not read.

I was explaining Shackleton’s financial embarrassment and the possibility of a reward, but Dr Evans was reminiscing. “He was a gentleman, that Shackleton,” she said. “So polite and very jolly, he was. And he was interested in my work with the tardigrades, as you can imagine.”

I paused in my note taking. “Your work with what?”

“Tardigrades,” she said clearly. “That's my field of study, tardigrades. Some people say I'm a bit of an authority when it comes to tardigrades, though I wouldn't make any claims for myself. All I know is how much I don't know. They're stranger than you can imagine.”

“T-a-r-d-i-g-r-a-d-e-s.” I spelled the word as it sounded.

“Slow walkers. Moss piglets. Water bears. The most indestructible creatures on the planet, found in every corner of earth. Unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.” She reached past me for a book and opened it to a drawing showing a peculiar creature like nothing I had ever seen. It had six legs, and peculiar tendrils sprouted from its head. It looked like something from a fairy-tale, but the book was a perfectly respectable scientific textbook with a Latin name on the drawing.

“They are found on every corner of the planet. Would that include Antarctica?”

“Well yes, of course.”

“I wasn't aware there were animals other than penguins there. Isn't it rather inhospitable?”

“Nothing is too inhospitable for tardigrades.” Evans laughed. “They thrive on it! Heat, cold, even the vacuum of interplanetary space, they can survive anywhere.” She raised her eyebrows. “Perhaps they even came from space. We don't know enough about their taxonomy to say just yet. Fascinating, they are.”

Interplanetary space
, I noted and added a question mark of my own.

“The thing about tardigrades, you see, is that they can suspend their animation. They need water, but when there’s none, they just shut themselves down. If there's no food, or it's too dry or too cold, they withdraw their limbs into a barrel-shaped form with a tough outer layer, called a tun. Their body chemistry changes in all sorts of ways we can’t begin to understand, depending on the conditions. And they stay like that until conditions improve. I thought Sir Ernest might bring me back some Antarctic tardigrades. They're very rare.”

“And valuable?” I asked hopefully.

“No! Who'd pay money for a tardigrade? Shackleton was interested in suspended animation, and I can see why.”

“Why would that be?”

She stopped, as though the question of why anyone would be interested had never occurred to her. “I imagine it would be for these expeditions, do you see? The men can't move in winter and they just stay there, cooped up, eating food and using fuel—and going potty from the cold and the dark, look you. But if they could go into suspended animation, they could just sleep through the winter and wake up in spring.” Evans beamed at me, full of enthusiasm. “And the same for the long sea voyages. You could pack passengers in the hold like sacks of coal.”

“It's a remarkable proposition,” I said. “Science uncovers new wonders every day.”

“Unfortunately nobody knows how tardigrades do it, so we can’t copy the trick. Not yet, anyhow. But I am pursuing, as you might say, some lines of enquiry. Would you like to see a tardigrade? I have a laboratory of sorts next door.”

“You mean to say you have one in the house? Are they dangerous?”

“No indeed, Mr Stubbs, they're not dangerous. Let me show you.”

After exchanging a few words in a foreign language with her husband, she led me to the garden and into a spacious wooden structure. The interior looked more like a potting shed than a scientific laboratory. I could see no pens or cages, but all became clear when Evans adjusted some apparatus and gestured for me to take a look. It was a scientific microscope.

I had never used a microscope before. It took a minute for me to get the trick; the illuminated circle danced away from me until I found how to look through properly. But when I stood perfectly still, my jaw fell as I saw it. A creature with a clumsy, segmented body was pushing its way through tiny green fronds. It undulated in a most odd fashion. This creature was even more striking than the one in the drawing. It raised its head and seemed to look up at me for a second before carrying on.

“
Echiniscus
,” said Evans. “Collected from my own garden. Shake out any piece of moss anywhere in the world, and you’ll always find a few tardigrades.”

“How big...?”

“One-sixteenth of an inch for an adult specimen. But it depends on the species. Some are bigger than others.”

Perhaps only size makes a monster. The tardigrade had something of the mythical beast about it but shrunk to such a scale it was curious rather than horrible. Perhaps if I were a foot shorter, people would not look at me so.

“It's gone,” I said. The creature had meandered out of view.

Evans shoved me out of the away—something most men hesitate to do—and adjusted the slide. Once more, I watched the little beast pushing through its miniature jungle. It might have been a monster in the rain forests of tropical Venus.

“I have never seen anything like it in my life,” I said. “I'm very grateful to you for the opportunity. What is it the poet says about there being more things in heaven and earth than we dream of?”

“Yes indeed,” said Dr Evans, beaming. “And the more you look at tardigrades, the more you see.”

“But as for the reason for Sir Ernest's interest...”

She paused, one hand on the microscope. “Well, we did talk up and down about suspended animation and how long it might last for. He asked me if a tardigrade might be revived after thousands of years in the ice.”

“Thousands of years?”

She held up her hands. “And of course we don't really know; we haven't been experimenting long enough. But who knows? I wouldn't like to say it was impossible myself. That would be something, a living being older than an oak tree, older than the pyramids, pre-dating all human history.”

I wrinkled my forehead as I wrote down her words. An ancient tardigrade would be a wonder of the scientific world, to be sure, but I doubted somehow that it carried any great value. It wasn’t the sort of thing one could exhibit in a travelling menagerie unless substantially larger than the flea-sized creature I had witnessed.

“I recall now,” she said. “He did ask a most unusual question. He asked me how tardigrades communicated.”

“And how do they communicate?”

“It's a very good question, but I'm afraid science isn't ready for it yet.” She held her finger and thumb about an inch apart. “This is how much we know about tardigrades.” She spread her arms wide to measure out a fathom. “And this is what we don't know about them. But as I said to your Mr Shackleton, I'm working on it.”

I thanked Dr Evans fulsomely for her time. She seemed pleased that she had found another student. My head was buzzing with strange monsters, and animation suspended for thousands of years, and ships full of frozen passengers. I returned to the office to write up my report for Mr Rowe.

I did not feel entirely at ease in the office. It was not just that the narrow doorways and cramped spaces were uncomfortable for my size; it was the atmosphere of the place. Solicitors’ offices are, I suppose, intimidating to anyone not born to the business. I couldn’t help feeling out of place; the brisk young clerks and the indifferent older clerks generally did not have much to say to me. The secretaries were polite, and the errand boys were talkative but sometimes cheeky—I sometimes got calls of “A pound of minced beef and four pork chops!” when I walked in. To the partners themselves, I was of course invisible.

The one unfailingly pleasant person was Mrs Crawford, the Senior Secretary. She was a force to be reckoned with, the great clearinghouse for all communications between the office staff and the solicitors themselves. She had two desks, one with a typewriter and one with a kind of wooden pigeonholing.

All feared Mrs Crawford. She was sometimes moved to state, in a voice audible in every corner, that she took no nonsense from anyone. Even the boldest of the clerks hesitated to interrupt her when she was engaged in paperwork. If she conveyed to a supplicant that she would most certainly not pass on any such request to Mr Rowe, she did it with such force that the request was never repeated.

Fortunately, Mrs Crawford was never less than cordial with me.

I took my desk, nodding a few greetings to my colleagues. Then I set about writing an account of my interview with Dr Evans while still fresh in my mind. I consulted a dictionary as needed and wrote a fair copy after I drafted the report. It is a slow but necessary process in the legal world; every five-minute conversation takes two hours to get onto paper. But a verbal report is just empty air that vanishes, whereas a paper report is a lasting thing.

When I had finished, Mrs Crawford took up the papers and glanced through them. My first reports had been clumsy affairs that I had to rewrite many times before I could submit them. I worked late to get them into shape. But after that difficult apprenticeship, I felt I had mastered the written form. I still felt a tinge of apprehension as Mrs Crawford looked through my work, though. Some of the others said she made them feel they were schoolboys in a class over which she was mistress, and there was a grain of truth in that.

“Very good, Mr Stubbs,” she said politely, after paging through it.

“I hope Mr Rowe finds the information useful. Though I can't connect it to the rest of the matter myself.”

“We’ll leave that to Mr Rowe.” She filed it away in one of her pigeonholes, though not the one labelled for Mr Rowe's immediate attention. “And this came for you.”

The envelope was postmarked from Chichester and opened, which was routine. The note inside contained just two lines and was neither signed nor dated.

Another man asked after the same thing as you two years ago. He died violently soon afterwards. Please be careful.

I surmised it came from Sir Ernest’s brother, Frank Mellors. Although I did not have his usual hand to compare it with, the writing seemed unsteady. He may have written it hurriedly, or perhaps he was in some state of agitation. Perhaps Mr Rowe would understand the significance of those two lines and the nature of the threat implied, but to me it was obscure.

Round Three: The Explorer

There is nothing like a London pub for comfort. The Conquering Hero is my local, the warm fug, thick with tobacco and beer, the sawdust and oyster shells underfoot. This is where a man can relax, stretch his legs out, and drink in the company of other men. Where you can laugh as loud as you like, and swear, and spit, and not be looked at. You could sing round the piano and forget your cares. If there is a more comfortable place in all the world, then I haven't found it.

I could not quite believe that Henry Brown, late of the
Endurance
expedition, was really going to come here. It was as though I had issued an invitation to a character from a storybook. Mr Brown said he did not mind where we met, so long as it was convivial, and it seemed only natural to invite him to the Hero.

While I waited for him, I leafed through
South
, Sir Ernest’s magnificent account of the
Endurance
expedition. What a tale it is! On one occasion, when the party was camped on an ice floe, Sir Ernest left his tent late at night, motivated by an almost psychic uneasiness. The ice cracked practically under his feet, in the middle of the tents. He saw a white object floating below and hauled out a sleeping bag with a man in it a second before the ice-edges came back together with tremendous force. The man, Holness, was unhurt, but he must have been frozen to the bone. There is no finer place to read those adventures than the cosy warmth of the public bar, with the February wind howling outside to remind one of the Antarctic gales.

Having studied the photographs from the expedition, I recognised Brown at once when he came in. He was a healthy, handsome man, if not overly clean-shaven. He was not one of the more notable members of the party, having been left on Elephant Island, but nevertheless he had participated in that glorious adventure. We shook hands heartily. Brown shrugged off his greatcoat and explained without embarrassment that he had walked all the way from Clapham Junction due to lack of ready funds. I immediately stood him a brandy to take the chill off, which he accepted gratefully. I ordered two pints of bitter at the same time.

Mr Rowe’s tersely worded assignment instructed me only to interview Brown and ascertain anything relevant to the Shackleton legacy. I would have preferred more to go on. Like the explorers, I was heading out into trackless wastes, with no map to guide me but simply following a bearing.