Islands in the Sky Read online

  "Aw, for criminy's sake, the magnetometer is destroyed," he spouted, but the piercing pain from the movement of his arm caused him to bring his attention back into perspective.

  "It could have been worse, that could have been you there instead," Tom nodded towards the smashed gear, "here, let me see your arm," he announced as Tom gingerly inspected Walters left arm. After a few yelps of pain from his patient, Tom confirmed his arm would need to be reset.

  "Look, I need you to do something for me Walter," Tom asked.

  "Yeah, what?" he answered.

  "Here, take my glove, I need you to bite on it," Tom answered as he took off one of his mittens, and coaxed Water to place it in his mouth.

  "Wfff, the fkk do I neefm thsss frrr?" Walter argued with a quizzical look in his confused eyes as he obeyed. Tom pointed up at the additional spears of ice hanging precariously above them as he answered him.

  "Whatever you do, keep quiet, got it?" Tom suggested.

  "Yehhh surmmff," Walt conceded as Tom directed his gaze upward yet again.

  With a single tug, Tom snapped Walt's bone back into place, and he began to immediately bind the broken arm with his scarf. It took a slight moment for Walter to feel the pain course through his numbed arm as he screamed through the fur of the glove stuffed in his mouth. Tom quickly held Walt's mouth shut to muffle noise, as his strangled cry began to echo between the walls of the glacier. The icicles above began to gently sway above them as Tom got Walter to settle down and brought him back to the other team members.

  "We've got to move out from under this canopy," Tom ordered to the three men as small shards of ice began to shower lightly around them once again. Not wishing to temp fate twice, Alex and the Professor made their way to the edge of the ice sheet and out of range from the frozen spears looming overhead.

  "Allen, get down here; you've got the first aid kit in your pack," Tom ordered over the radio.

  I shouldered my rifle in haste and made my way down the side of the drift to circle around to their position just outside the break in the glacier. Catching up with the men I could see that they were all shaken by the ordeal. Logan attempted to keep his wits about him, despite his close call. I unpacked the med kit for Tom, who designed a splint and sling for Walters arm.

  "Allen, I want you to go in there and see what equipment you can salvage. If anything at all survived, we will need those readings," Logan directed me to search the clusters of shattered ice for our instruments.

  "And ah, do try not to make any noise," Tom advised as an afterthought as I made my way back into the cavity.

  The melting ice made the footing slippery here, and the limbs of the tree reached over me like a looming spider. It was an imposing sight to behold; this once living tree that coiled into the bleak sky above me, its branches seeming to weave themselves around my vision as I approached ever closer. Even now, the freshly shattered ice had begun to melt. Whatever forces had exposed this relic from antiquity, were releasing it from its ancient cage of ice.

  The drill was beyond salvage, but Walters meter was worth pocketing as were the few bagged specimens they had gathered thus far. Searching further, I found myself at the base of the giant tree, trying to imagine how its giant trunk had once begun as a sapling which could have once fit in the palm of my hand. Its bark was a meter thick, snaking its intricate design like armor across the heartwood. I was looking for the temperature apparatuses Alex had been using to take measurements, and found it glinting from a darkened crevice at the base of the trunk; having been flung there by the exploding ice.

  Reaching into the crack, I picked the gauge up to wipe it off, only to notice it had been resting on something chiseled into the stone slab beneath where it had lain. Brushing off the slush of ice and snow, I found a figure there; etched deep into the ancient stone. Stepping back, I saw that I was standing upon a much larger design which had been hidden under a layer of frost; encircled by enormous hand-set stones. I stared for a moment in wonder, but hearing the cracking ice threatening to bring another hail upon my head, I hurried to join the others.

  "I grabbed what I could," I answered to the professor when I reached him. Walter was looking better now that his arm was secured in a sling.

  "Good, good, young man; let us get back to the boat and get some proper medical attention for Sir Walter, shall we," Logan advised as the group of us shuffled back through the snow at the lower part of the glacier.

  When we retreated nearly a kilometer from the site, I turned to notice that the colossal tree had been enveloped by the surrounding glacier; entirely hidden from sight. It would be easy to miss by air unless you flown directly over it, and impossible to find from the surrounding glacier walls which hid it below the horizon of the broken tundra.

  It was a long hard haul back to the landing site where we had moored out small boat. The bitter cold started to bite through our winter jackets as the sun began to set while we made our way back to the moored ship out at sea. We got Walt into the infirmary where the onboard doctor got him a proper cast and redressed his wounds. Tom got his hands bandaged while Alex and Logan sought the cure of a 30 year old bottle of scotch. As for me, I was exhausted, having made the hike back carrying twice as much gear as I left with. At least everybody was safe; and we considered ourselves fortunate, knowing that this day could have ended much, much worse.

  It was late into the evening when our crew gathered in the conference quarters to look over the salvaged equipment to see what we could piece together. At least Walter's camera had survived the ordeal, or we wouldn't have had the photos to prove what Logan had found. Alexander began to redraw the charts, but when the professor saw what he was doing over his shoulder, he snatched the graph out from beneath his hands. Taken aback, Alex turned to glare at him in shock.

  "What are you doing, Logan?" Alex whined, wondering why the professor was pulling a tantrum when he was only doing his job recording the data at hand.

  "I would appreciate if you left the mapping up to me, Alexander," Logan scoffed back at the bewildered man, "I can keep track of everything just fine," he granted while pointing to his own head.

  "What is going on with you, Professor?" Walter intervened with a suspicious tone, "you invited us to join you on this return expedition and set us ashore a full two days march from the noted GPS coordinates, and sent us off on a wild jaunt in the opposite direction!"

  "Yes, Logan; what is it with all this cloak and dagger misdirection?" Thomas added in to the verbal quarrel. I leaned back at the table and quietly poured myself a shot of that aged scotched behind their backs, to sneak a well earned drink for my hard day's labor. Honestly, I was just as interested as to the explanation due to us for having risked our lives.

  "You need to understand, gentlemen, that what was revealed to you today must not leave this room; agreed?" Logan demanded. Each of the men nodded; then in unison, they turned to me as I sat there sipping my stolen shot of alcohol, which I quickly choked down and nodded back in agreement.

  "This is an incredible find, Logan. Your career will be vaulted into the head of the Academy of Science, and this discovery will be chronicled into the history books," Alex offered with cheer. However, the Professor was less than cordial in his response to the flattery.

  "Alexander, if this discovery was made public at this time, the only vault I would experience would be that of a tomb!" Logan spat back, "I intentionally recorded false coordinates on the log chart in effort to avoid having the artifact fall into the hands of certain unsavory associations far less principled than our own."

  "I don't understand your conjecture, Professor; the scientific council would protect your findings, especially one of this scale," Walter offered in rebuttal. Logan, however, seemed unimpressed with his naive trust of his peers.

  "My friends, I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation dictated by the existence of this relic, and the dilemma we now face," he breathed back at us in an unsettling tone, "there are powers that be in our modern w
orld that would absorb this find into their folds, and it would be erased from history and never be seen again," he finished with a finger pointing at each of us; which we took as his clue that we too could disappear along with this rare archeological discovery.

  "So you are trying to protect this ...this iron tree?" Tom asked.

  "Undoubtedly so, and ourselves from the consequences that could possibly shake the foundation of our social ties between our international constituents," Logan elaborated.

  "What? How does that even come into play?" Walter argued, "I think you're inflating this all a little too much, don't you think?" he finished with a shake of his head.

  "It's just an old petrified tree stuck in a glacier..." Alexander started to contend before Logan cut him off.

  "No! No its not, Alex. The cells of the specimen are active," he related. At that admission, both Alex and Walter shared and astonished stare.

  "It's alive?" Tom bargained to translate Logan's claim for us.

  "The tests I had performed on the samples prove it so," the professor admitted.

  Trying to follow along in the conversation, I too was a bit skeptical that the professor was blowing this situation way out of proportion. I could understand him wanting to protect his find and wanting to get full credit for it; lest an outside agency attempt to seize his discovery, but it was my understanding that no nation could do so under the guidelines of the Antarctic Accord. The articles of the international treaty laid out specific protections for that vast block of ice; essentially labeling it no-mans land. It was an agreement between nations that, in all honestly, seemed a little too good to be true; and could make one wonder if it was truly made in the spirit of peace, or was there a more underhanded and nefarious reason hiding behind its enactment?

  Looking through the photographs Sir Walter had taken that day, Logan clarified that this living tree was more than just an anomaly. His hypothesis was that it wasn't a freak of nature, but one of specific design by nature. He pulled out volume after volume from his briefcase on ancient cultures from across the planet from every timeline of antiquity from the Hebrews to Norse mythology; each mentioning the tale of a similar relic known as the world tree.

  "The tree of life ...from which all creatures sprang," Logan suggested, "whether these tales be true or not, there are those that manipulate the strings from very powerful sects who would do anything to either control or suppress the discovery of such an icon; be it real or not," the professor suggested as he motioned to the piles of books now scattered across the table.

  "But we saw nothing there that would tie its location to any civilization in recent or ancient past," Alex stated as he thumbed through the books; each bearing duplicate drawings of the same image, of the canopy of a tree and its spread roots in balance with one another, like the figure of an hourglass.

  "Well ...not exactly, there was something manmade there alright," I mumbled with a drunken slur from behind the arguing men. They each caught their tongues and turned to me in unison; and I began to regret having said that out loud. I put down the scotch I had helped myself too with a sigh, realizing the liquor had probably done its part to loosen my tongue.

  "What was it Allen, what did you see?" Professor Logan prompted his question towards me as the other men fell into silence.

  I stood up to look and the table and scanned over the open books and saw several familiar images; those of an entwining snake which formed in a binding circle surrounding the figure of the central tree.

  "I saw what looked to be a large carving in the stone of a serpent, twisting upon itself in looped rings along its circumference," I answered; thinking back to the crude etchings I had seen in the black stone under the shattered ice at the site. I grabbed a pen and drew it in the corner of the map chart laying on the table; depicting the image as close as I could remember it. Logan snatched it up when I was done and stared at it in a moment of silence, and then began to flip through several volumes laying about the table in excitement.

  "The nine circles, the nine worlds of legend..." he mumbled aloud with elation.

  "No, no, there were just eight circles that I recall," I corrected as I pointed back to the drawing. In response, the professor marked off each of the loops I had drawn, he then added in the final circle of the entwining serpent itself encasing them.

  "The central circumference makes nine. According to myth, this is the legendary entrance to the well of souls," Logan revealed as he found the page he was looking for and held up a similar picture of an ancient etching in one of the tomes for all of us too see.

  The Door

  While I was recovering from my hangover the next morning, Alex had been busy repairing the smashed magnetometer by salvaging its key internal parts which contained the recorded readings, and swapping them out with their spare device. Luckily the small battery had remained attached, or the information it held would have been lost. After pumping out the data, he showed the results to Walter, who was in the same state as I was; having drank away most of the scotch to help relieve the pain in his broken arm. Logan went over the figures from the device, trying to determine what they meant.

  "This is astounding!" he stated, "It appears this organic specimen is acting as an antenna of sorts, by emanating a tightly woven magnetic field around itself."

  "But how would that account for the melting ice?" Tom inquired.

  "My theory is that the limbs of the tree are creating a stable field around its circumference, and these micro fulgurations in the fields strength are exciting the atoms just enough to warm the area around it ...see these temperature readings here how they vary from within the proximity to its trunk," Logan explained as he showed us the notes he had taken.

  "So you're saying its acting like a microwave?" Walter questioned, as he worried about he health impacts.

  "Well no ...well maybe, in a mild sense," Logan squabbled.

  "Alright, let's say that your harebrained idea is substantiated," Alex cut in, "what exactly is the energy source of this field its creating?"

  That was a question worth investigating, though there was little doubt that a follow up expedition was in order. This time we would have to bring equipment which was up to the task, especially in the case of the drill so we could obtain a core sample from the specimen. Logan was reluctant to make an extensive and time consuming trip all the way back to the mainland and leave the proximity of the site, so he ordered the equipment by radio to be delivered to the ships location. The professor wasn't exactly a rich man, and this little endeavor and the cost of this transport vessel and crew was eating a hole in his limited funds.

  It would take three more days for the new equipment to arrive by air cargo to be dropped at our local, so we took the time to fine tune our next approach. My initial interpretation began to sway as I wondered what I had gotten myself into and if I really wanted to stay onboard, but Logan seemed preoccupied with charting the next step in our expedition rather than answering my questions. I was stuck out here at sea with him until the end of my contract term; and thus far, I couldn't sway myself from the fat paycheck I had been promised at the end of this excursion.

  "Professor Logan, I would have to inquire as to your rationale for returning to the site so soon, especially since Walter would be unable to accompany us because of his injury. Might I suggest that we perhaps attempt another expedition in six months or so when we have the proper equipment..." Alexander began to argue until Logan interrupted his train of thought mid-sentence.

  "Alex, my friend, let me be frank with you," Logan charged while lowering his volume so as not to be overheard by the others, "I have put my entire estate into this trek, and there will be no recovery from this tour unless we return with the evidence I seek," he offered with a wave of exhaustion which seemed to wash over his face, "you must understand that there are others who seek this artifact, and the picture is much larger than you know ...however, for posterities sake, I will say no more until I have verified my findings."

  It w
as clear Alex had more questions lingering on the tip of his tongue, but could see the weariness in Logan's eyes. He instead took his time to help Walter, who was handicapped for the time being, and was struggling to make his data entries in the logs. I had been assigned to help Tom get additional gear packed, since the professor seemed to want us prepped for a full week out in the field. That was a long time to be out in the snow, and I was not looking forward to it.

  The following morning a helicopter arrived with our cargo, and we were all mildly surprised to find that another passenger had been dropped off with our new equipment. A slender framed individual barged into the conference room; dusting the frost from their thick jacket. After removing their furred hood and mask, we were a little startled to see a woman peel her way out of the layers of wool.

  "Ah, gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to my star pupil and understudy from the academy, Mica," Logan stated to the four of us, "Mica, this is Walter and Alexander, whom I've worked with for many long years. This is Tom, my logistics advisor; if you need anything, he will get it for you. Oh, and Allen, my security assistant," Logan finished as he pointed to each of us during the introduction.

  "Hello," was all she said while tearing off her mittens. Mica was an attractive academic type, with long pale red hair tied up in a ponytail and light freckles sprinkled across her nose; though as frail as she appeared on the outside, she held herself with a hard, if not professional manner.

  "Hold on Logan, why is she here?" Tom inquired with a harsh tone. He wasn't the type of man who liked surprises in his line of work.

  "I'm sorry for failing to notify you earlier Tom, but it was a last minute invitation I extended to her, and I wasn't sure that Mica here was even going to be able to make it until she arrived," Logan tried to explain, "in light of Walt's unfortunate injury on our last outing, I thought it prudent to get an able replacement. Mica here will be my personal assistant, who will be taking over Walters duties in the field," the professor acknowledged.