FROZEN ITCH

By Charles E.J. Moulton

I don't know if the chill made him scratch his cheek more, only that it distracted his
attention from our conversation. Mostly, shop talk kept us going. Had the samples
been contaminated? Were there traces of pollution in the ice? What had the colleagues
over at the Palmer station found out? Were there indications of another ice shelf
breaking off the mainland? And then the biggie: how could we save Antarctica?

Like always, we tried to keep the conversation going just to divert our attention away
from how extremely cold it was. Lucky for us that we were having what we in
Antarctica called the austral summer. Ironically, that warmth of sorts was relative:
only 28 minusdegrees Celcius.

This day, though, gave us both the feeling that something was amiss. Kjell's itch had
grown worse and it seemed what looked like a patch of extra skin had formed on his
cheek. We tried not to speak of the sting that had woke him up yesterday morning. But
eventually the topic arose.

"It felt like a darned wasp, but there are no wasps around here, Ishtaan," he chuckled
in his Swedish lilt, trying to yell over the loud hum of our snow vehicle.
"I know," I answered, really not knowing what to say, recalling fully well how that
strange beam had meandered straight through the room over to where he lay on the
bunk bed. "Don't worry about it. You have that famous Arnström zest. Hey," I joked.
"Your name sounds almost like Armstrong."
Kjell gave me a half-smile. "We're geologists, not astronauts."
"Not Neil," I teased. "Louis. You
play the trumpet in your free time, right? There is nothing as strong as a trumpeter,
you know."
"I play the clarinet, Gupta," Kjell mused. "But thanks anyway."

The awkward silence that followed brought us to try to figure out what to say next.
We only had about five minutes before we reached McMurdo Station, but a strange
silence is awkward whatever its length.

I wanted to tell Kjell some story about how I had studied Indian music in Bombay
before chosing to become a geologist, but I never got the chance. Closer than we cared
to admit, and yet far away enough beyond the approaching snowstorm, shone a light.
It couldn't have been a snow vehicle, because it changed height almost constantly.
My first reaction was to stop the car, at least stop it from moving and leaving the
motor running just to be on the safe side. I just felt better that way. We pretty much
knew the way back to the station, we had electronic machines that showed us the way,
but whatever this was hovered directly above our route. Leaving this route was not an
option. But driving straight through this strange thing could prove to be quite a
perilous enterprise.
Besides, it didn't look like it was part of a larger structure. Even if it was, who would
have built a thing like that in such a short time? This morning, on our way to the other
base camp, nothing had been here. And a helicopter made more noise than this thing
seemed to make. Would a helicopter actually be impossible to fly around here? Yes.
Certainly. Even if this was the only soundless helicopter in the world, it was also the
only helicopter that did not whip up any snow while flying way too close to the
ground for comfort.

"What the hell is that?" Kjell spat.

I shook my head as an answer to Kjell's question. At the side of my vision I noticed
that his itching had stopped. At least he didn't scratch himself.
I thought I knew the answer to that. Deep down I knew that whatever that was out
there was also responsible for the light that had bitten Kjell out of his comfy sleep
yesterday morning. I hadn't told him about what I had seen. Why? I was scared.
Scared to worry him, scared to be wrong. Whatever this was, if this was a government
conspiracy out to get rid of us, these geologists out to save the world would probably
never survive the heat.

I don't know what made Kjell Arnström open the door to the vehicle that day. I asked
him what he was doing. He didn't answer and I can't recall if he looked at me or just
left the car. I only know that he was scratching his cheek when he walked out. I saw
that scar he had always endeavored to hide, but never quite managed to keep a secret.
Everyone asked him about it and he always told them the same story. How he had
gotten into a fight in a bar in Stockholm after college one day, how somebody had
asked him why his skin was dark when he had such a Swedish name. The letter ripped
into his cheek was an insult of the worst kind, and the son of a Nigerian woman and a
Swedish plumber left the country for good, a bad memory inside his heart and a
skinhead's bad memory forever ripped into his cheek.

There was no way in stopping Kjell. When he wandered out into the Antarctic storm,
the patch of extra skin now much bigger than before, me, Ishtaan Gupta, his geologist
colleague, ran after him, asking him for the third time to stay put.

When Kjell disappeared into the light and that light rose to the skies, I panicked.
Never before had I lost a colleague to something I didn't understand. I had lost people
to the ice, the water, the chill, a storm or an accident. A mysterious light? Never. My
heart pumped like crazy, my first thought shooting out and grabbing the idea that a
family waited in San Francisco, a wife that loved him, a daughter that had just started
third grade.
Whatever vehicle had been there before was now gone with Kjell inside it.
I did my best to search in every direction just to find Kjell, I even threw myself down
and dug in the snow, but to no avail. When all else failed, I ran back to the snow
vehicle, my hands shaking, my face freezing, the pain in my heart making me shake
even more, and took off into the white chaos.
"Bob," I mumbled to myself, hoping that my boss would still be there in the lab with
his blue notebook and green colored eyeglasses and that he would know what to do in
order to retrieve Kjell Arnström.

The vehicle's hum increased in volume. At least, that is what it seemed like.
Something had been ripped away from my soul. A person had vanished, a colleague I
liked. Who was I kidding? Of all my colleagues, Kjell was my favorite. Two married
men who spent more time in Antarctica with each other than at home. That had to
have an effect. The result of a deeply founded companionship.

I didn't even bother to lock the snow car. Stumbling out, I found myself almost
breaking the glass of the entrance door to the McMurdo Station. Familiar hallways
now screamed proverbially silent words at me that the forever white walls would keep
their cold neutrality throughout my pain and not care if I died. I could scream all I
want. The aliens had abducted Kjell and no one gave a shit.
"Bob," I yelled out, grabbing door handles, throwing down laboratory tables, banging
my fist against the walls.

The creature that met my vision cowered in the corner holding a blue notebook,
wearing green eyeglasses. The extra skin that I had seen on Kjell's cheek covered this
creature's entire body. Bob's clothes were scattered around the lab, save one sock that
still rested half-way on the being's left foot.

I knew it to be true: this being used to be Bob. What it was now was hard to say. A
fish? The creature from the Black Lagoon? A man with fins?

The being looked at me with its large brown eyes, a pain and a longing in there that
knew that something had changed. It nibbled on its fingernails. No, these were now
fins. The silvery brown patches that had replaced the white skin opened and closed
like lids in ventilator shafts. I really did not know what to think. The situation had
gone beyond the fathomable. I looked at the cowering amphibian chewing on his
extremities and found myself too stunned to speak.

"Bob," I whispered. "Is that you?"

The being had no way of responding. Instead, it gestured toward the laboratory table
and the computer, a sign that I took as an invitation to take over his work. Bob was
now amphibian. Was Kjell also a fish?

The blinding light that appeared in the sky was strong enough to have both me and the
Bob-creature lift our hands and protect our eyes. It shone through the protective glass
and penetrated even our hands.
The Bob-creature at once left its corner and scuttered out between a demolished
laboratory table and a wall with a hole in it. Instinctively, I followed the being out
beyond the door and into the light.

Now I saw what was out there. These were no ordinary UFOs. No swirling saucers.
Instead, a whole army of at least a thousand flying triangular vehicles aimed for a
shoreline that suddenly had come closer to our base. In fact, I could see the polar sea
from where I stood in the doorway of the base.

Every one of these spaceships, no bigger than a car, carried a bright light inside it.
This light attracted the beings, who now increased in number by the minute. It was
hard to say how many fishpeople actually now crawled toward the new shoreline, but
I am sure there were just as many beings as there were hovering ships.

My heart sank as I saw one of those creatures crawl past the base, a being with a large
S-formed scar on its left cheek, a being now completely beast and not anymore man.

As I saw them dive into the ocean, blinded by the alien lights, I realized that I was
watching the birth of a new world, created by aliens who probably long before us
realized that we might have more chance surviving tellar cataclysm living in the
water.

As I write this, my eyes are growing weak. I have already been stung by the strange
light. Accordingly, my skin is changing. But I am storing this file on a USB-stick and
printing it out on 22nd century watertight paper. Whoever finds this will have to open
the watertight container and break the seal in order to read what is inside.

I will not be around to witness that. I really do believe I am the last of my kind. Soon
enough, I will be with the beings that used to be Kjell and Bob. I will be swimming in
the ocean, maybe controlled by aliens, maybe
controlled only by my own instincts.

The sun is rising over the austral summer that magnifies Antarctica this February. The
ocean is full of amphibians. I am sad, because soon my ability to speak will be only a
memory. But maybe someone out there that survived this catastrophy will find this
document and find a way to restore what we used to know to be Planet Earth.