Switchers (4 page)

Now there were excited voices in the background, but none of it was picked up clearly by the radio mike apart from the louder exclamations. ‘But it’s massive, man!’ and ‘I swear to God it’s moving.’ Then the young man came back to the mike. ‘Hey, I gotta go for a minute. The guys are kind of worked up. Cabin fever, I guess. I gotta go and take a look. Will you hold on to the line there for a minute?’

‘Sure, Chris. But what’s happening?’

‘I’ll get right back to you. Don’t go away, now.’

There was a long pause, during which nothing could be heard except the hiss and crackle of static. Around the table, the listeners shifted in their seats as the tension mounted. Then there was a second bang, like the first, followed a moment later by a series of loud metallic groaning and grating sounds, and then there was nothing. The radio connection went dead.

Colonel Dunkelburger took the tape out of the machine and slipped it back into his pocket. ‘We don’t know any more than you do, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘and that isn’t much. We have had no radio contact with those guys since. Any kind of air rescue is impossible in those conditions, as General Wolfe will confirm.’ He looked towards Wolfe, who nodded sagely, and then continued. ‘We have gale-force winds out there which are whipping around and back every couple of minutes. Nothing can fly accurately enough in there. And as you know, we sent in land teams, but those have failed as well.’

‘Why don’t you tell everybody why, Colonel?’ said General Snow.

‘Yes, sir. Uh, these were unsuccessful for a number of reasons. The first two teams turned back because the snowmobiles they were using were too light and were just getting thrown about in the winds out there. The third team took specially modified machines which could handle the winds a little better, but we didn’t have our back-up system worked out well enough and we couldn’t keep the fuel supplies up. It gets pretty dangerous to run out of fuel in those conditions as I’m sure you can all appreciate, because no fuel means no heat, and without heat nobody can last long out there, believe me. It’s cold. We got a couple of cases of frostbite, and we were lucky that it wasn’t worse.’

‘And the fourth team?’ asked the presidential advisor.

‘The fourth team was doing pretty well. They had top quality vehicles fitted with special heaters and back-up power supplies in case of emergency. We had teams running well to keep them supplied up front with food and fuel, and a shift system in operation. They had been on the route for three or four days.’ He stood and leaned over the map, pointing to a dotted line which ran a short distance across it. ‘We had our main supply depot here in Barrow, in Northern Alaska, which is about six hundred miles from the drilling station. The pack ice is hard right up to the shore these days, so we could send the expedition right out on to it. The leading members of the team had reached here, which is about four hundred and fifty miles from the rig.’

He reached into his other inside pocket and took out a second tape, exactly like the first, which he slotted into the machine.

‘There were two ’mobiles out ahead,’ he said, ‘each with two men. The rest of the team were on supply runs and the nearest ones would have been a mile or so behind them. We’re tuned into car two, here. Car one was off the air.’ He sighed and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘I’m sorry about this, gentlemen, but I don’t want to hear this any more than you do, believe me. And you had better hang on to your chairs.’ He switched on the tape.

This time the line was a lot clearer. ‘Still moving along,’ said a young man’s voice. ‘Ground’s pretty level. Harry’s taking a nap.’

‘No, sir,’ said Harry. ‘Just resting my eyes as per orders.’

‘Yeah,’ said the first voice. ‘It’s tough on the eyes all right. Got little white worms running across mine. How come I can see white worms when everything else is white?’

‘They got black edges?’

‘Let me see. Yeah. I think they got black edges.’ He laughed. ‘But the little b……s won’t keep still and let me look at them.’ There was a pause, then the same voice continued. ‘Any news your end?’

‘Nope. Everything’s pure white and deadly boring.’

‘Oh, well. At least we’re not missing—Hey! Woah! What the hell is that?’

‘What’s up?’ said Harry. ‘Hey! Stop, Bud.’

Bud’s voice was suddenly full of terror. ‘We are stopped, God damn it. It’s that thing that’s moving!’

‘Mother of Christ. It’s alive!’

There was a single scream that sent a chill of horror through the whole room, and then the radio went as dead as the first one. The silence spread to the listeners. After a long time, Colonel Dunkelburger cleared his throat.

‘We never regained contact with that car or the other one. I called off the mission immediately and brought the team back home as quick as I could. The way the weather is worsening, we can’t maintain the base in Barrow any longer, and we’ve pulled all our men out of the area. I guess I should say here that we have no plans to make any further excursions into the region as long as current weather conditions continue.’

The Secretary of State broke into the silence which followed.

‘If I can just try and clarify things, here,’ he said. ‘Are we to understand that there’s something living out there in the middle of those storms?’

‘I can’t say, sir,’ said Colonel Dunkelburger. ‘We have no more evidence than what you have just heard.’

‘But surely you have all kinds of intelligence at your disposal? You have instruments for detecting heat sources, don’t you?’

‘Nothing that could be accurate enough to pick out a living entity in storms like those. Besides, our experts tell us that no living species within our current spectrum of knowledge could survive on the surface in those temperatures for more than a few minutes.’

‘So what are you suggesting?’

General Wolfe broke in. ‘With due respect, Mr Secretary, we didn’t come here with the purpose of suggesting anything. We came here because we thought that the evidence on those tapes should be made available to the Government.’

‘Well,’ said the Secretary. ‘It goes without saying that you guys have the full backing of this Government to take whatever investigations or action that you think necessary.’

‘That’s much appreciated, of course,’ said the General, ‘but I’m afraid there are no further investigations we can take. This country has three armed forces, but in these conditions, every one of them is blind. We’re overflying the area constantly with all kinds of aircraft, armed and unarmed. We have every kind of surveillance equipment trying to get a look at what’s happening in there, but we’re not getting any information at all.’

‘As I see it,’ said Dunwoody, ‘you’re telling us there’s a possibility that there are some kind of alien creatures inside those storms and there’s not a thing you people can do about it?’

‘We’re not trying to tell you anything, sir,’ said Colonel Dunkelburger, ‘but the conclusion we have reached is pretty close to that, yes.’

There was another thoughtful silence, and then General Snow said, ‘I think perhaps now you will understand the need for absolute secrecy.’

The next morning, Tess slept late and had a leisurely breakfast. The mood in the house was low, and Tess knew that it was not just because of yesterday’s mix-up. Even her father could not raise his customary Sunday spirit.

It was this weather. There was no change, and the radio reports gave no indication that there was likely to be. The meteorologists admitted that they were baffled. Satellite pictures revealed nothing except what everybody already knew. The Arctic storms were as active as ever, and were gradually spreading southwards. There had been no rain since the day it all started, and now the radio gave the first warnings of possible water shortages. It wasn’t yet necessary to introduce rationing, but people were being asked to reduce their consumption as much as possible.

The whole business made Tess gloomy. She was still a bit tired, too, from her wild antics of the previous day. But she wrapped herself up as well as she could and set out across the park with the sunflower seeds under her arm.

The scene was similar to the day before. Only those who refused to be defeated by the weather had made it to the park, and they were few and far between. Tess wound her scarf around her face and breathed through the wool. From time to time she jogged for a while to keep warm.

When she got to the wooded area she opened her bag and wandered through the thickets, scattering sunflower seeds as she went. She listened to the sounds of the birds and small animals, and laughed a little at their mixture of suspicion and delight. When the bag was empty, she checked the surroundings carefully and went quietly into her den.

Tess was completely adept at changing now. It had taken a lot of practice, and when she was younger there had been times when she couldn’t make it work. It required a state of mind that was somehow more, and somehow less than just thinking. First, she would need to know what she wanted to be and have a clear picture in her mind of whatever creature it was. Next, and more difficult, she would have to try and imagine how it felt to be that creature from the inside. Then she had to let go. Letting go was the most difficult part, because the moment of changing was a bit scary. For that moment, brief though it was, it felt as though her mind was dissolving, and everything around her became vague and fluid and insubstantial. Once that moment had passed, everything was fine again. She took on the being of whatever she had become, and they were all as solid in their own way as her customary human existence. But there had been times, in the past, when she had failed to change because she had shied away at the last moment from that frightening instant of dissolution, and clung to what was certain and safe.

More recently she had discovered that thought, concentration and anxiety were all hindrances to the process of change. For several years now she had dispensed with them and simply plunged, spontaneously, into any shape she fancied. In the dark of previous dens, Tess had experienced the nature of most of the wild and domesticated creatures in Ireland, and most of the more common birds as well. She knew now, beyond all doubt, that she could be anything she wanted to be.

As soon as she was a squirrel again, Tess set out in search of the chipmunk. There was no sign of him in the immediate vicinity, so she scampered in the trees and hunted through the branches. But it soon became hard to keep her mind on what she was doing. All the other squirrels were frantic with activity, gathering the sunflower seeds she had scattered and bringing them home to their nests. For a while she resisted the temptation but in the end it proved too strong for her. She knew that she had brought those seeds and she knew that she had no need to make a winter store, but the instinct of a beast is strong, and soon Tess gave in and joined them.

It filled her squirrel heart with joy to find food so plentiful. She filled her little cheeks until they bulged, and scurried back to her den time after time. All around her the other squirrels and the birds and the fieldmice were delighted by the unexpected windfall and Tess knew that her pocket money had never been better spent.

Still there was no sign of the chipmunk. Every now and then Tess would remember him and take a leap up into the treetops to see if she could see him from up there. Then she would go back to work and forget him again.

The day drew on and Tess had a fine heap of sunflower seeds in her den. She realised that it would soon be time to go home, and it was then that she thought, for the first time, of the silver ring. Hurriedly, she unloaded her cheeks and skipped across to the dark corner where she had left it. The stone was there, big and solid, and she searched around behind it, but there was no sign of the ring. Tess sat down and thought as hard as a squirrel can think, but both squirrel mind and Tess mind were sure that she had left the ring just there, behind the stone. She searched again and, when she still didn’t find it, she searched all the corners of the den, pushing aside the rotten leaves and twigs with her nimble squirrel fingers and feeling around where it was too dark to see. All at once she knew that the chipmunk had taken the ring. She stopped still and tried hard not to believe it but she knew that it was true. He had been such a friend, such a good friend, but now he had let her down, by taking her ring and disappearing. It filled her heart with such sadness that she didn’t want to become Tess again, because she knew that most of the creatures of the earth feel sadness from time to time, but only humans collect it like a store of nuts and feel the need to make it last.

But she had to be herself again. There was homework to be done for tomorrow, and then another week of school before she could be here again, and free. She changed before she had time to think about it. With a human hand she reached behind the stone and felt around carefully, but there was no doubt now that the ring was gone. The little heap of sunflower seeds which had seemed so huge and satisfying to her squirrel self looked small, now, and pathetic. She brushed them into the palm of her hand and scattered them on the floor of the thicket as she set off for home.

M
ONDAY DRAGGED ON, AS
always. Tess had brought her rodent book to school, and read it secretly beneath her desk during maths and religion, but since the disappearance of the ring it had lost its appeal. There were no references to wild chipmunks in Ireland, or any suggestion that chipmunks had any interest in collecting baubles.

The other girls in Tess’s class had come to accept that she preferred to keep herself to herself. She knew that it would be hard to make up all that lost ground if she ever changed her mind and wanted to make friends, but she had created an image for herself in the school and for the moment she was content to leave things as they were. But that evening, when a photocopied letter was handed to each girl to bring home to her parents, she rather wished that she was free to join in the celebrations that followed. The letter read:

‘Dear parent,

Owing to the prevailing weather conditions, the girls will not be required to wear school uniform until further notice.

Yours sincerely,

M.L. Harvey (Principal).’