Frozen Landscapes of the Mindby Slawomir Rapala |
Part 1 and Part 3 appear in this issue. |
| part 2 of 3 |
His theory was built on the assumption made by many modern scientists regarding the origins of Earth’s water. For years people had assumed that the water concentrated at the surface was initially locked up underground and had slowly emerged over the billions of years of the planet’s existence.
Although this theory had not yet been completely discarded, scientists of recent decades had been making a new claim: that water may have in fact come from comets striking the Earth’s surface during its early development. These objects were made up mostly of water, therefore they left very little geological evidence and water was all that remained.
Why so much? Well, during Earth’s youth, atmospheric conditions were different from those of today. The air was still developing and thickening, and thinner air than today’s allowed more comets and comet-like objects to bombard the surface of the young and vulnerable planet.
The theory was plausible, the science community agreed, and over the next decades no real argument was raised against it. Instead, scientists built further on the theory and raised another claim, this one stating that since water may have come from outer space, why not other things? Why not life itself?
Caricatures of human beings riding a meteor soon appeared in Nature and the National Geographic. The concept was ridiculed at first by the mainstream scientific community. Still, science allows theories as long as no one disproves them and no one had picked up the gauntlet.
After all, whether simple one-celled organisms or strings of amino acids — why not? Earth’s pre-biotic conditions were hardly optimal to allow for a spontaneous creation of monomers, the building blocks of modern life. That made the theory of the extraterrestrial origin of life as good as any. A thick meteor shower would have sufficed for protein synthesis to become possible and...
Well, welcome to Eden.
The Catholic Church protested almost immediately. Over the years it had already been forced to retract many of its claims because of progress made by natural sciences. Copernicus had halted the Sun, and along with Galileo he had removed the Earth from the centre of the Universe, changing the geocentric outlook on the cosmos and shaking the political foundations of the known world. It was a blow that the Church still suffered from.
Yes, Jerusalem had long been erased from the middle of the Earth’s maps, but this was far worse. The Jerusalem fiasco had in fact worked out well in the end, because who’d want the centre of the world to be in Middle East these days, given its political instability?
Just as the Church was beginning to recover from the blow and once more tightening its strangle-hold, Darwin’s claims forced the world to rethink the Genesis chapters of the Old Testament. Consequently, Earth had suddenly aged from four thousand to five billion years. That was a hard pill to swallow, not to mention the monkey business that came along with it.
Then came the time for an arboreal Eden in Africa and a mitochondrial Eve who mothered us all? This was becoming too much. And now science was running amok again, raising a claim that perhaps people had never actually been designed by God to live on Earth but had appeared here by a fluke, a chance comet that plunged through the atmosphere of a young planet and dug itself into the surface, leaving behind a puddle of water and a teaspoon of primordial soup.
People were supposed to have been crafted into God’s image as part of his grand design aimed to populate the Earth with intelligent beings.
Times were changing, though.
Dr. Clyde Andrews convinced the National Science Foundation, the umbrella organization which administered the United States Antarctic Program and nearly all of the research conducted by Americans in Antarctica, that he could prove the extraterrestrial origin of life and that Earth had never been intended to carry life, not to mention give birth to it.
He had convinced Bement and the rest of the NSF committee that he could find proof of this in the deep ice of Antarctica. I could easily picture Natalicio, Crosby or Washington even, jumping out of their seats excitedly when Clyde proposed the idea. Bloody empiricists.
If we dig deep enough, Clyde had told them, if we tap into the ice at four, five or six kilometers, we’ll find something. Primordial bullion locked in a crystal the size of a refrigerator ice cube? He didn’t know what, but he sounded convincing. They gave him a few million dollars and sent him to me to baby-sit.
Clyde’s ideas about life and God differed from mine, and we clashed often when it came to philosophical or theological discussions. I supported his project only insofar as it was my duty to do so as the chief of maintenance, my position in ARI. Privately, I sneered at it and I made no secret of it.
Look around you, I said. You are surrounded by God’s miracles. Out here, at the end of the world, you can see His work in all its glory. How can you doubt His greatness?
Clyde, however, came from overcrowded big-city streets where life was fast paced and no one had the time to worry about God. He came from a world where body and soul were commercialized and sold by Hollywood, supermarkets and corner newsstands, pre-packed and pre-paid. A world where God was a cliché. He came from a world that was decaying, at least from a moral and ethical standpoint.
Coming from a spoiled world like that then, what did Clyde know of God?
Look around you, I repeated. God is all around you. All you have to do is be still and tune in to the world that surrounds you.
He laughed at me. But then he saw diamond dust and the aurora australis. It’s this place, he said. God works in mysterious ways — that was my turn to laugh.
He no longer cared as much about drill time. He checked the specimens conscientiously, but I noticed that he pushed them aside with relief each time they came back empty.
Was he becoming a believer? I really didn’t care. I believed in God, His will, His work and His design. Having spent nearly my entire life in Antarctica, how could I not?
In Antarctica you are closer to God than anywhere else on Earth.
5:15 p.m. March 4th, A.D. 2046
“Doesn’t look good, right?” Clyde surprised me by coming around the corner.
“What?” I mumbled as I quickly put down the X-rays I was holding up to the light. “No, everything’s fine.”
“Even you go pale sometimes, chief,” he chuckled nervously. “Don’t lie to me.”
I sighed and brought the X-rays back up so that he could see as well.
“See this?” I pointed to his upper left lung.
“What is it?”
“It’s a cavity, fairly large by the looks of it,” I replied uneasily and then pointed to the right lung. “Here, here and here you have a few smaller consolidations.”
“TB?” he took a step back.
I noticed that a bead of sweat had appeared on his long forehead and felt pity for him.
“Given your prolonged cough, the chest pains you’ve been complaining about, the fever and weight loss, it’s the most probable diagnosis.”
“But you’re not a medic, chief,” he said as if trying to reassure himself. “You can’t be completely sure, right?”
“Clyde, you know me,” I put the X-rays away and placed my hand on his shoulder in a banal attempt to offer my sympathy. “I wouldn’t be saying this if I wasn’t sure.”
“Okay,” he nodded feverishly. “So what do we do? How do we treat this?”
I looked him over, deciding in my mind whether or not to tell him the whole truth. His eyes stared back at me with hope.
“I’ll put you on rifampicin and isoniazid,” I looked away. “We’ll work out a diet and a less strenuous schedule to keep you in shape. You should be fine in two or three months.”
“Beautiful!” he sighed with relief and slapped my shoulder. “You had that look on your face that had me worried for a second. Like you said yesterday, we’re on our own out here until winter breaks. Good thing ARI keeps a supply of those drugs. Come by the lab later on and we’ll get cracking on it.”
“Right,” I managed a smile and watched him stride away, big smile on his face. We had pulled an ice core this morning from the depth of 5.2 kilometers and Clyde had just put a sample under the microscope. His excitement was that of a child.
I took another look at the X-rays when he disappeared behind the swinging doors of the lab and shook my head, thinking that I should have had persuaded him to have them done earlier. The disease had progressed steadily and he was now in a very serious state.
If I managed to get him the proper treatment and rest, there was a very good chance that he would be fine. But out here, in Antarctica, it was nearly impossible. The two drugs I mentioned were available, but treatment of pulmonary TB required a combination of four: pyrazinamide and ethambutol in addition to the first two. And these were not in our supplies, an oversight on the part of the management, I supposed.
I triple checked the request form I had put through to NSF last year and highlighted the four drugs. Budget cuts, I smiled bitterly. I radioed Amundsen-Scott this morning as soon as I had established a satellite link, but they were of no help. Even if they had the drugs, they couldn’t fly in this weather.
If a proper treatment was followed, TB would not be much of a threat; the number of relapses following a treatment was something like two or three percent. It was possible to treat TB with only two drugs, but so many bacteria were already present in Clyde’s body that some of them would inevitably develop a resistance to the drugs.
Having weighed the options in my mind, I decided that Clyde needn’t to realize the seriousness of his state. He needed to believe that the treatment would lead to a complete recovery.
Unnecessary stress only adds to the burden and may play a significant role in the break-down of the immune system. My hope was that a carefully planned diet, a relaxed work schedule and plenty of rest in addition to the drug treatment available, would enable Clyde to ride out the worst of it and ease into spring. At that time we could request medical evacuation. And of course, there was always a chance that the weather would permit a chopper to land before then. Amundsen-Scott were of no help, but I could to try other stations and hope to get lucky.
A loud commotion reached me from behind the closed door of the lab and a second later I heard Clyde’s raised voice, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. I started for the door with the X-rays still in hand when Clyde suddenly burst through them, his hair in disarray and his eyes burning with a strange light. He met my puzzled stare and gave me a triumphant smile.
“I got it,” his matter-of-fact voice contradicted both the exalted look on his face as well as the calamity of the news which he bore.
“What?” I asked, still puzzled.
“I got it,” he repeated, his eyes fixed on mine. I realized then what he meant and felt my heart sinking under the burden of a terrible fear.
“It can’t be,” I said, my own voice trembling perhaps for the first time, ever.
“Have a look,” he opened the door and gestured for me to enter the lab. He beckoned me into his world of scientific knowledge and fact, and I entered hesitantly and with a heavy heart, somehow already convinced of his discovery. Somehow I already knew that my world of faith and of treasured belief was about to be shaken in its very foundations.
5:45 p.m. March 4th, A.D. 2046
Ice has the power to shape our world like no other thing on this planet. If the ice caps ever melted, an awesome flood of fresh water would shut down the oceans’ currents and bring about a tremendous chill — and another Ice Age. Civilizations would fall. Millions would die. The world would be refashioned and another cycle would be completed. Ice would triumph because its sheer power was unmatched.
Ice, however, may reshape our world in different ways as well.
The ice caps are built from layers of snow and frozen water that have accumulated over centuries, eons even. They are an archive of things that happened in the distant past, a library of information. All you have to do is dig a little deeper. All you have to do is drill for that deepest ice core. All you have to do is take that extra step, and the Holy Grail, the answer to life’s mysteries, is all yours. An ice core in the shape of a cylinder, a piece of the past and a key to understanding it.
Many had tried before, but Clyde dug deeper. He was more stubborn, and he wanted it more. To put his hands on God Himself.
Blasphemy, all of it... Why was Jesus crucified if not for the same reasons?
People wish nothing more than to sever the strings. They fail to see the Architect in the place of their Master. They want God to disappear. And now they finally had in their hands an ultimate weapon. A frozen cylinder so old that it had witnessed the birth of life.
Such were the thoughts that went through my mind as I looked down on the lonely core resting behind the glass door of the lab freezer. It was perfectly cylindrical in shape, beautiful in the exactness. I couldn’t take my eyes of it.
Ice. My beautiful mistress, the love of my life. The definitive feature of Antarctica, where God had in my mind dwelt for the past four decades. Ice was God’s mirror, and I saw His face everywhere I looked.
And now my nemesis. The ice now offered into the shaky and anxious hands of a hard-core empiricist the definitive proof of... of what? An extraterrestrial origin of life? What did that mean? Earth was not the hub of all life? Humans were a freakish accident?
And God? How was any of this a part of His grand plan?
Clyde was rummaging through his notes behind me. I didn’t know what to say to him. He showed me the sample and explained his hypothesis. The pieces fell together. All the long evenings when Clyde and I spoke about God and the origin of life, all those arguments which I brought forth at those times, they all paled now. The proof was here, locked in ice for so many years and now brought forth to see the light of day. Already I saw the headlines in scientific journals and magazines: Mystery of life solved! God who?
They sounded like cheap tabloid news. How could they be true?
Copyright © 2007 by Slawomir Rapala
