The doctor said, "It looks like a melon with a spider on it."
They paddled until they were a few feet from the object. The melon disappeared, and in its place were eyes, a nose and a gaping mouth. The lawyer raised his paddle and prepared to bring it down on the floating head. Spider Barrett looked up at the two astonished faces. His mouth opened.
"Help me," he pleaded.
13
With a hull displacement of twenty-three thousand tons and seventy-five thousand horsepower produced by its powerful engines, the Yamal-class Russian icebreaker Kotelny was capable of continuously breaking through seven feet of ice. Its sharply angled bow sliced through the slushy spring ice pack like a warm knife through sherbet. As Karla Janos stood in the bow and surveyed the fog-shrouded island that was her destination, she felt as if someone had walked across her grave.
The involuntary shudder that passed through her willowy body had nothing to do with the rawness of the weather in the East Siberian Sea. Karla was bundled in a down parka, and she had become inured to biting cold after two winters with the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where temperatures routinely dropped to forty degrees below zero. She was well enough acquainted with the territory around the Arctic Circle to know that there was little chance Ivory Island would live up to the image of warm whiteness evoked by its name, but she was totally unprepared for the total bleakness of the isolated place.
As a scientist, Karla knew that her reaction was emotional rather than objective, but the island had a forbidding aspect that she couldn't easily shrug off. The most prominent feature of the island was a dead volcano that still had patches of snow around its truncated summit. The overcast skies drained all traces of color from the sunlight so that the sea and land appeared to be bathed in a depressing gray light. As the ship moved closer to the island, she saw that the low rolling hills and tundra around the volcano were broken by a network of ravines whose twisting cliffs, combined with a trick of the slanting sunlight, created an optical illusion, as if the surface of the island were writhing in pain.
"Excuse me, Miss Janos. We'll be dropping anchor in fifteen minutes."
She turned and saw the ship's commander. Captain Ivanov was a sturdily built man in his sixties. His broad face was weathered from the arctic elements, and a white sailor's beard fringed his chin.
The captain was a kindly man who had spent much of his life sailing the frigid waters around the archipelago. Karla and the avuncular Ivanov had forged a strong friendship since she had boarded the icebreaker at its home base on Wrangel Island. She had enjoyed their wide-ranging chats over dinner. The captain had impressed her with a scope of knowledge of history, biology and meteorology that went beyond the tools necessary to command a large ship on unfriendly seas. She had made him blush when she called him a Renaissance man.
Karla reminded the captain of his daughter, a dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet. She was tall, slim and long of leg, and she moved with the easy grace of someone who is confident in her body. Her long blond hair was tied tight at the back of her head in dancer style. She had inherited the best features of her Magyar and Slavic ancestry: a wide forehead, high cheeks, wide, sensuous mouth, a creamy complexion and smoky gray eyes whose almond shape hinted at an Asian forebear. Although Karla had studied dance briefly, she tended more toward athletic pursuits. She had been a track standout at the University of Michigan, where she earned a degree in paleontology with a minor in vertebrate biology.
"Thank you, Captain Ivanov," she said. "My bags are packed. I'll collect them from the cabin right away."
"Take your time." He gazed at her with kindly blue eyes. "You seem distracted. Are you all right?"
"Yes, I'm fine, thank you. I've been watching the island, and, well, it's rather sinister-looking. My imagination, obviously."
He followed her gaze. "Not entirely. I've sailed these waters for years. Ivory Island has always seemed different. Do you know much about its history?"
"Only that it was found by a fur trader."
"That's right. He established the settlement on the river. He killed some of the other traders in a fight over furs, so they couldn't name it after a murderer."
"I've heard that story. I'm not so sure, even if I were a murderer, that I'd like my name attached to such a lonely and unattractive site. Besides, Ivory Island seems more poetic. And from what I know about the island as a source of ivory, accurate as well." She paused. "You said the island was different. In what way?"
The captain shrugged. "Sometimes, when I've passed the island in the dark, I have seen lights movi
ng about near the old fur trapper settlement on the river. What they call Ivorytown."
"That's the expedition's headquarters, where I'll be staying."
"They were probably pockets of gas luminescence."
"Gas? You said the lights were moving."
"You're very observant," the captain said. "I apologize. I haven't been trying to frighten you."
"On the contrary, you're interesting me."
Karla was so much like his daughter. Intelligent. Headstrong. Fearless. "In any event, we'll be back in two weeks to pick you up," he said. "Good luck with your research."
"Thank you. I'm optimistic that I'll find something on the island to bolster my theory about the cause of the woolly mammoth's extinction."
The captain's lips curled into a wry smile. "If your colleagues on the island are successful, we may be seeing mammoths in the Moscow zoo."
Karla heaved a heavy sigh. "Maybe not in our lifetime. Even if the expedition manages to find mammoth DNA from an ancient specimen and it can be used to artificially impregnate an Indian elephant, it could take more than fifty years to develop a creature that is mostly mammoth."
"I hope it never happens," the captain said. "I don't think it's wise to tamper with nature. It's like the sailors say about whistling on board a ship. You might whistle up a wind."