‘“Life Technologies”,’ I read.

Fridge examined them. ‘I think they’re some kind of DNA machines.’

‘Who could they have belonged to?’

‘Hagger was the only guy who could have used this. Unless Quam thought he could sequence penguin DNA.’

We both laughed. I laid the notebook flat on the table.

‘I’m not a biologist,’ Fridge warned. ‘I don’t know how much I can help.’

‘It’s not the science.’ My heartbeat quickened as I turned the pages. Suddenly, I was very conscious that I was at the very edge of the station, and that Fridge had a hunting rifle slung on his back. My cold fingers fumbled the pages as I found the one I wanted.

It was near the front. Echo Bay — CH4 concentrations, said the heading. There were some numbers underneath, and a simple graph. And under that, one brief sentence in the margin.

Fridge will kill me.

‘Care to explain that, Fridge?’

I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt. Fridge stepped back, lifted his hand. I watched him like a hawk. I wished I’d brought a flare pistol, even one of those little flash-bang pens we use for scaring the bears.

He lifted his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘CH4 is methane.’

‘That’s not the bit that wants explaining.’

He sat down on a steel box. Without the sunglasses, he looked more wrung out than I did. He hunched over, staring at the page in the book.

‘A little while ago, we started getting big spikes in the methane readings. Not in the upper atmosphere — right down here on the ground.’ He showed me a hand-drawn graph in the notebook, swooping up like a ski jump. ‘You see? Atmospheric methane concentrations have been rising for a hundred years, but on a gradual slope. This is off the scale.’

He saw the look on my face. ‘How well do you remember high-school chemistry?’

I shook my head. ‘Bad teacher.’

‘Methane is the main ingredient in natural gas, like you probably use for cooking back home. Governments want you to believe it’s a clean fuel — which it is, next to coal or oil. Burning methane produces carbon dioxide — CO2, climate enemy number one — but not as much as the other fuels.’

‘Is this relevant?’

‘But methane is a greenhouse gas in its own right also. It traps heat sixty times more efficiently than CO2. Now, there’s not so much methane in the atmosphere as CO2, and it doesn’t last so long, so it doesn’t get the bad headlines. But if we emit too much of it, we’ll all fry.’

‘And Martin found the level is going up?’

‘I found the level is going up,’ he corrected me. ‘I showed the results to Martin to get his opinion. If I was going to publish data that far off the curve, I needed to be sure it was right. And I also needed to make a guess where it was coming from.’

I nodded, to show that I followed.

‘Normally, methane is created by bacteria working in warm dark places. Swamps and intestines are two of the better-known culprits.’ He gestured out the window. ‘Not a lot of swamps on Utgard. And even if the Platform stinks when Danny cooks beans, we don’t fart that much. So what was making the readings go crazy?’

‘Am I supposed to guess?’

‘Have you ever heard of methane clathrate? It’s methane that’s trapped in a lattice of ice crystals — so much that if you get a piece, you can literally set the ice on fire. It needs to be kept cold and under pressure, so the bottom of the Arctic Ocean suits it fine. There’s probably more methane in clathrates in the seabed than all the other fossil fuels on earth put together. And if the sea warms up, then the ice melts and all that methane trapped inside squirts up into the atmosphere.’

‘So that’s what was happening?’

‘That was my hypothesis. Well, the ocean is warming, and some of the gas is coming up. There are known methane plumes off the west coast of Svalbard, not so far from here. But Svalbard’s atypical — it’s warmed by the Gulf Stream. If I could show it was happening this far north, that would be big news.’

We seemed to have drifted a long way from the point of discussion. ‘What did Martin say?’

The look on Fridge’s face said I’d hit the mark. ‘He told me a secret. He said DAR-X had asked him to examine some water samples. I didn’t know. Some bug was corroding their equipment, they thought a microbiologist could help — and somewhere in the process he found out what’s really going on at Echo Bay.’

‘Aren’t they drilling for oil?’

‘That’s what they tell people. In reality, they’re trying to mine methane clathrate. The methane I detected was coming from their well.’

‘And Hagger told you that?’

‘I wrote it all up. Some of the best work I ever did. If DAR-X pull this off, every oil and gas company in the world is going to come here. They’ve spent twenty years in Alaska trying to get into the ANWR wildlife reserve — here, there’s twice as much gas and nothing to stop them. But if one well can leak enough methane to skew the data, think what a thousand of them will do. I had to tell the world.

‘Then Quam brought me into his office. He’d found out what I was doing; he forbade me from publishing.’

‘Forbade you?’

‘What Hagger had told me was commercially sensitive information. When DAR-X brought Hagger in, they insisted on a non-disclosure agreement. Except they didn’t get it from Hagger: Quam signed it on behalf of the whole of Zodiac. If I published, DAR-X could sue and have everything shut down. Not only that, the contract said we’d be personally liable. Maybe that wouldn’t have held up in court — but you can be damn sure it would cost a lot to find out. You think an oil company’s going to run out of money before a bunch of scientists do?’

From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a movement outside the window. Probably someone going to check a reading — but just then I was ready to suspect anything.

‘You know what “clathrate” means? “Cage” — from the Latin. The ice structure forms a cage around the methane molecules. Well, Hagger had me caged up good. I withdrew the paper and I sat on the data.’

‘You must have been pretty furious with Hagger.’

Fridge laughed — a bleak, cold sound in that bleak, cold room.

‘You really don’t get it, do you? We’re operating on a scale people like you and Quam can’t imagine. People talk about how the dinosaurs got toasted by a meteorite. But two hundred and fifty million years ago, before the dinosaurs, ninety per cent of all life on earth was wiped out because an undersea volcano warmed up the sea floor and released several billion tons of methane into the atmosphere. The biggest extinction event of all time.

‘Or, if you want something more recent, take what happened at Storegga, eight thousand years ago. Thirty-three hundred cubic kilometres of seabed collapsed because temperature changes destabilised the clathrates. You know what happens when that much material starts moving underwater? A tsunami that makes what happened to Japan and Indonesia look like a kid in a bathtub.’

He shut the notebook and tossed it back to me.

‘I didn’t kill Hagger. First, because I didn’t; second, because I wouldn’t; and third, even if I would have, I didn’t have to. We’re fucking with this planet so bad, pretty soon we’ll all be history.’

I wanted to get to DAR-X. As luck would have it, my chance came the next morning. Danny had baked them a cake as a thank-you for rescuing Greta and Tom Anderson from the ice cap. Jensen was going to fly it down; I volunteered to go too.

I can see the look on your face. You think we were mad to fly a cake a hundred kilometres, a cake made with liquid eggs and powdered milk at that. But Utgard’s frontier country; it’s the little courtesies that make life bearable. People put a lot of effort into them. Sometimes they might even save your life.