“Before I let you go, I want to look at your white cell count, okay?” she asked. “I’m going to give you some iodine and some calcium tablets. Take them, understand? I also want the name of Anika’s doctor and the number of the DIAND clinic.”
Victor seemed to think this woman’s sudden interest in Anika and the village was amusing. He chuckled and flashed her his blighted smile.
“Sure, Dr. Junko. I’ll show you where the lewkeemeeah lives. Soon there’s gonna be more lewkeemeeah than Inuit. Soon we’ll all fall down like that bear.”
Soon we’ll all fall down. The words taunted Junko as she swabbed Victor’s arm and drew a syringe of his blood.
“There’s a place west of here, Victor,” she said as she worked. “A town far inland, called Deline. Ever hear of it?”
Victor shook his head.
“It’s a Sahtugot’inc town, on Great Bear Lake,” Junko added.
“Ohhh,” Victor said with a smile of recognition. “I know Sahtugot’inc. I heard them bastards play tough hockey.”
“Near Deline,” Garner said. It was the first time he had spoken during the entire exam.
Junko glanced at him, mildly surprised.
“That’s right, you’ve heard of it?”
“A friend in Washington mentioned it,” Garner said. “Uranium, was it?”
Junko nodded.
“Uranium and radium from the Eldorado mine. They used it for the Manhattan Project in the forties, then left nearly two million tons of radioactive mine tailings at the bottom of the lake. Deline is on the opposite shore and many of the men there worked the mines for years, carrying the radium and uranium dust home to their wives and children.”
“What about long-term effects?” Garner asked.
“That depends who you ask,” Junko said.
“Until recently, the Sahtugot’inc kept an oral history of their people, so much of ‘what was’ was lost. In the past ten years, they have been investigating a reduction in the average life span and various incidents of cancer — lung cancer is almost a certainty with chronic exposure to radon 222, a daughter of radium 226.”
“Lung cancer didn’t hurt their bastard hockey players none,” Victor offered, then laughed until he saw that neither Garner nor Junko was.
“If the tailings are in the lake, the radiation is in the groundwater,” Junko said as she revised the comments in her book. “And if it’s in the groundwater, it’s in everything” she looked at Victor “even the ice on their bastard hockey rink.”
Garner considered this information, then mentally compared the geography Krail had shown him with their current position. Deline and the Eldorado mine were easily nine hundred miles away and could safely be ruled out as a source of the current contamination. But there were other abandoned mines and other ore deposits. There were many-lakes and watersheds connecting them over vast areas.
They waited as Victor pulled his borrowed sweatshirt back on, then asked for another to wear over it.
“Not quite as warm as your own clothes, are they?” Junko said with a smile. “Your wife’s tailoring is very beautiful.” She turned to Garner.
“Did you see his mitts? Polar-bear skin with waterproof stitching.”
Victor smiled proudly at the compliment, which prompted in Garner another thought.
“Victor?” he asked. “What did you mean when you said, ‘the bear was already dead when I found him’?”
At Carol’s insistence, the Phoenix left their temporary station southeast of Igloolik that afternoon, half an hour after the departure of the helicopter carrying those who wanted to leave the ship. Victor’s sled and the landing ramps were the last items to be brought aboard, then the decks rumbled as the massive diesel engines were throttled up.
A quartet of propellers thrashed the water, shattering the grease ice knitted to the hull and releasing the floe’s frosty grasp on the ship.
The icebreaker reversed slightly, then turned into the westerly wind.
Though he rarely used maps for his hunting, Victor was well familiar with the nautical charts used by the Phoenix’s crew. The Inuk said he could follow the landmarks well enough to guide the Phoenix back in the direction he had come, at least over the last twenty miles of his trek, and to the location where he had discovered the polar bear. Picking out familiar land forms along the coast, Victor showed Garner and Carol his approximate path over the past month: a series of elongated loops outward from his settlement like the leaves on a clover. Each loop approached a hundred miles round trip, and Carol was impressed that a single hunter and his dog could cover that much ground.
“That much ground I could never cross,” Victor corrected her. “The drifts and valleys would make it impossible to walk or pull my sled. The sea ice has ridges but it’s a lot flatter.”
“Still, I can’t imagine crossing that much distance on foot with that immense sled, especially out here,” Carol said. The near loss of her technicians at Wichita was still a sharp memory.
Victor considered her perspective.
“Inuit don’t talk about distance for the same reason they don’t talk about the cold or the snow there is too much of it and no amount of worry will make it go away. If you need to get somewhere, you just go.”
“You get there because of the snow, not in spite of it,” Garner observed. “Good advice for all of us.”
Victor had been impressed by much of the ship, but especially the bridge. The greenish, polarized windows drew his attention immediately and he looked out over the Phoenix’s bow with wide-eyed amazement.
Ahead, the massive hull easily cleaved through the broken pack as the ship completed its wide arc to the north.
The view offered by the five-story superstructure was commanding.
“Now this,” Victor said, still grinning, “is how to travel on the sea.”
Garner went below, donned a radiation suit, and stepped outside to assist Zubov with Medusa. The spherical sampler was attached and readied on the ship’s A-frame. Then, on Garner’s order, the device was tilted out over the stern.
“Last chance to leave her uncooked,” Zubov said. “Sure you don’t want to reconsider?”
“I’d say we no longer have a choice,” Garner said.
As Zubov passed commands to the winch operator, the Kevlar-coated fiberoptic cable was paid out. The deployment was accelerated as Medusa approached the surface of the water, shortening as much as possible the time the device would be jostled in the wave wash. The turbulence quickly passed as the sphere dipped to five meters, then ten thirty-three feet or one atmosphere of pressure. Garner called up to the bridge and had the Phoenix’s helmsman hold the ship on its present course.
Retreating inside to the ship’s main lab. Garner faced the small bank of electronics used to monitor Medusa’s “eyes,” “nose,” and “mouth.” For recording purposes, the incoming data were divided into organic and inorganic fractions, the former recording the biological activity in the water and the latter recording the physical and chemical properties of the water itself. A third set of instrumentation had been patched in to the existing controls to remotely record the findings of the new radiation equipment added to the sphere.
Garner performed a series of system tests, flipping through all the recording channels and each of the macro-and micro focus cameras. If there had been any error in the way the device was primed, these preliminary tests would find it.
“Nitrate and phosphate are registering,” he relayed to both Zubov and the winch operator after inspecting the data from a cluster of probes designed to measure the nutrient content of the water.