White Death

26

THE NEXT MORNING, Austin stopped at the Museum of Natural History on the way to NUMA headquarters. Gleason was in the exhibition hall when Austin arrived, and he didn't look happy. The guests, music and food of the reception had disappeared, but that wasn't the main cause of his concern. The display cases were empty. Not even a placard remained.

Gleason was beside himself. "This is terrible, absolutely terrible," he was saying.

"Looks like you had a fire sale," Austin said.

"Worse. This is a total disaster. The sponsors have pulled the ex- hibition."

"Can they do that?" Austin realized it was a dumb question, even as the words left his mouth.

Gleason waved his arms. "Yes, according to the small print in the contract they insisted we sign. They are allowed to break up the ex- hibition any time they want to and give us a small monetary com- pensation instead."

"Why did they close the show?"

"Damned if I know. The PR firm that set the whole thing up said they're just following orders."

"What about Dr. Barker?"

"I tried to get in touch with him, but he's vanished into thin air."

"You've been closer to Oceanus than most people," Austin said getting to his real reason for stopping by the museum. "What do you know about Dr. Barker?"

"Not much, I'm afraid. I know more about his ancestor."

"The whaling captain he mentioned?"

"Yes, Frederick Barker, Sr. One of the Kiolya knives you saw on display originally belonged to him. It was more than a hundred years old. Dreadful thing, and razor-sharp. Gave me a stomachache just looking at it."

"Where would I look for information on Captain Barker?"

"You can start in my office." Gleason cast a woeful glance at the empty display cases. "C'mon. Not much for me to do here."

The office was in the administrative wing. Gleason gestured for Austin to take a seat, then plucked an old volume from the shelf. The title was Whaling Captains of New Bedford. He opened the book to a page and plopped it in front of Austin.

"I dug this out of our library when the exhibition first came through. That's Captain Barker. The New England whaling skippers were a tough lot. Many became captains in their twenties. Mutinies, destructive storms, hostile natives-all in a day's work to them. The adversity made some men ogres, others humanitarians."

Austin examined the grainy black-and-white photograph in the book. Barker was dressed in native garb, and it was hard to make out his features. A fur parka framed his face, and bone goggles with hor- izontal slits in them covered his eyes. White stubble adorned his chin.

"Interesting eyewear," Austin said. "Those are sunglasses. The Inuit were very aware of the dangers from snow blindness. They would have been particularly important to Barker, whose eyes were probably sensitive to light. There was al- binism in Barker's family. They say that's why he spent so many win- ters in the frozen north, to avoid the direct sunlight."

Gleason explained that in 1871, Barker's ship, the Orient, was wrecked, and the captain was the only survivor. "The natives saved Barker's life, and he spent the winter in an Eskimo settlement. He recounts how the chiefs wife pulled off his boots and thawed his frozen feet out with the warmth of her naked bosom."

"I can think of worse ways to thaw out. Where does the Kiolya tribe come in ?"

"They were the ones who saved him."

"That seems out of character with what you told me of their blood- thirsty ways. I would have expected them to kill a stranger."

"That would have been the normal case, but don't forget that Barker stood out from the ordinary whale hunter. With his pure white hair, pale skin and eyes, he must have looked like some sort of snow god."

"Toonook, perhaps." "Anything is possible. Barker didn't go into detail about some things. Quaker society in New Bedford would not have approved of one of their number posing as a god. The experience transformed him, though."

"In what way?" "He became a staunch conservationist. When he got home, he urged his fellow whale men to stop slaughtering the walrus. The Ki- olya rnuscled in on the walrus hunting grounds like a street gang tak- ing over new drug turf. They even took women and tools from those they conquered. The other Inuit tribes practically starved as a result until they banded together and drove the Kiolya away. Barker saw this conflict over walrus meat and wanted to end it. He was grateful

to the Kiolya and thought if the walrus were saved, they might change their marauding ways." "Was he right?"

"Barker was naive, in my view. I don't think anything would have changed their behavior, short of brute force."

Austin pondered over the answer. As a student of philosophy, he was a great believer in the theory that past is present. The Kiolya might be the key to unraveling the tangled skein that surrounded Oceanus.

"Where could I go to learn more about the tribe?" "Canadian police blotter, for the most part, I'd venture. There isn't much information between their diaspora and the present, but I did find a crazy story that verifies what I said earlier about the god thing." He rummaged around in a filing cabinet and produced a 1935 clip from The New Yor/ Times, encased in a plastic envelope. It was datelined Hudson Bay. Austin took a minute to read the story:

The Arctic north added another mystery to its history of explo- ration when a half-crazed German crawled out of the frozen tun- dra claiming that he was the sole survivor of an airship disaster.

Canadian authorities said the German, who identified himself as Gerhardt Heinz, was brought in by a group of unknown Eskimos who had apparently rescued him. The Times found Mr. Heinz in a hospital ward, where he died a short time later. In the interview, Mr. Heinz said,

"I was on a secret trip to the North Pole for the greater glory of the Fatherland. We landed at the pole, but on the way back, we sighted the wreck of a boat frozen in the ice. The captain insisted on landing on the ice to investigate. It was a boat of great antiquity, probably hundreds of years old. We removed a frozen body, which we placed in the airship cooler, along with some unusual items.

"After rising from the ice and traveling a distance, we experi- enced mechanical problems, and had to land. The survivors de- cided to try to cross the ice, but I stayed to guard the zeppelin. I was near death when the local natives found me, and I was nursed back to health."

Mr. Heinz said that the natives spoke no English, but he learned that their name was 'Kiolya.' He said that they thought he was a god, having come from the skies, and when he requested through sign language that they bring him to the nearest settlement, they complied.

German authorities contacted by the Times said that they had no knowledge of Mr. Heinz nor of any dirigible voyage to the North Pole.

Austin asked Gleason to run off a copy of the article and thanked him for his time and information. "Sorry about your exhibition," he said on the way out.

"Thank you." Gleason shook his head. "It simply astounds me why they pulled up stakes so abruptly. By the way, have you heard about Senator Graham? That's another disaster. One of our strongest supporters."

Austin said, "I think I saw Graham last night at the reception."

"You did. While he was driving home to Virginia, his car was forced off the road by a truck. He's in critical condition. Hit-and- run."

Sorry to hear about that, too.

"Damn," Gleason said. "Hope it's not true about bad things run- ning in threes."

"There may be a simpler explanation for your run of bad luck," Austin said.

"Oh, what's that?" Austin pointed to the sky, and in all seriousness, said: "Toonook."