Telling Stories

What Wally Woodbine found out in two days of asking around about what happened was this: the cookie company picked up a parcel of land some kilometers in the interior, the detail of the distance didn’t seem to matter, it was deep enough. Wally intended to go a lot deeper.

They were interested in iron or uranium deposits after acquiring the land in a flash sale from the Danish government, which was looking to offload as the prospect of Greenland joining the U.S. was becoming ever more distinct.

It turned out Wally knew the first team the cookie company sent over. It was a couple of young scientists with a robot who was supposed to survey the land parcel. They repurposed the robot for personal use and had gone native, eventually absconding with the robot to Canada. They landed at Grise Fiord, where Wally Woodbine had heard about them on his visit there in the spring. He even met the Montroses and their robot, and they discussed its usefulness in the work being made possible in the interior with the warming weather. He’d asked about the provenance of the robot but they were evasive.

He heard about a team of four that came in the winter. They were apparently heavy drug users. A local, Joseph Nanook, who apparently also worked as a contractor for the cookie company, was their supplier, and had a small lab where he produced some kind of concoction that led them naked into the interior one fine day in the middle of the night.

Then the cookie company sent some strange, miserable European out here in the late spring to figure it all out. He smelled badly and the very few locals who actually talked to him said he must have had some kind of speech impediment or even traumatic brain injury.

He stayed for a couple of weeks making people feel uncomfortable even from a distance, and then went into the interior all geared up to hunt wolves. The gear must have malfunctioned, according to Joseph, who said he found him mangled in the cave next to the one he had been living in when he disappeared into the interior. Joseph went back, so Wally couldn’t talk to him. He had arrived at the police station with the body and dropped it at the door, intending to leave when Elvis opened the door.

The cop, named after some footballer in the Balkans not the country singer, spent a lot of time at the station even when it was closed. He asked Joseph what happened and then let him go. There wasn’t much to do. The police contacted the government, who told the cookie company. The man had no relatives so the body lingered at the morgue, built for one and expanded for two, until an elderly couple died and the issue was forced. The orderlies on shift when the couple came in went and buried him in the cemetery just outside the settlement. It would’ve been easier if the wolves had finished the job.

Wally also learned the cookie company had been allowed to buy a structure in the settlement as part of the land parcel deal, and so had an office there. Apparently they had wanted to open a tourism bureau. A small team arrived one day by boat and emptied it out, leaving the same day they came. The building still belonged to the company, and they were still looking to open a tourism office.

The whole story didn’t add up for Wally. The thing about mineral deposits is that if you want them you have to just dig. What’s there to look for first? Hunting made a lot more sense. People loved hunting. Wealthy adventure seekers had increasingly been booking passage to remote places to shoot at exotic animals disoriented by the deteriorating environment.

As far as Wally could tell it, there wasn’t a way the cookie company didn’t know about the Amarok, but it hadn’t come up in anybody’s story about anyone the cookie company sent. They could be oblique, though.

No one brought up the nuclear runoff either. That matter interested Wally a lot. Everyone knows nuclear runoff is how you get mutants. What would a mutant Amarok look like? Were there Adlets here too?

The team at Eureka had outfitted Wally with quite a bit of gear for his trip, he could certainly head into the interior solo. They even spared a life-support-system-in-a-box, which was a lot like a settlement in a box, with all the things you’d need to run a small settlement away from civilization. But settlement-in-a-box is trademarked.

Getting equipment useful for his radiation theory were a little harder but he managed to get a scintillator and a grapple-mounted monitor flown in from Canadian Forces Station Alert. When he had packed all of it up, he wondered if they’d be able to afford the extra baggage fees. He’d have really liked to have come by boat.

The government also let him know unofficially he’d be able to get some help from Pittufik Space Base. They couldn’t arrange anything in advance, but the base had an “open door” policy for locals as part of the Americans’ bid to bring Greenland into their union. That was part of the reason Wally had e-mailed so often with Dedrick. Wally was naturally friendly, but he kept up the small talk over e-mail largely with a view to ask the man to take advantage of the open door policy and bring him in as a guest, which Wally’s government let him know unofficially the base would permit.

Dedrick was as happy as Sid to see Wally bring the cookies.

-I haven’t had these since I was a kid in France.

-You’re not from Greenland?

-I’ve been here long enough to feel like I am. No, I grew up in Marseilles and joined the merchant marines. I was here for the so-called Arctic war and stayed behind, the whole affair was so disgusting.

The Arctic war deployments were far away from Qaanaaq, but Wally didn’t press the issue. He gathered Dedrick had the same opinion of it as he had. A meaningless dick-waving contest.

-I hear that, eh? Wally said.

He’d had good conversation with Sid on the way from the airport. He didn’t figure Sid for a native, but of course he’d know one he could introduce Wally to. It seemed the surest way. Wally still had asking around to do to piece together what there was to piece together about what had happened so far, but he didn’t want to rely on future encounters to meet someone who would go to the space base with him. He knew he’d be able to, but he felt time and preparation was of the essence. It was something he was working on getting better at.

So he asked Sid if he knew any locals who’d be interested in taking a trip to the space base with him.

-Sure, Sid said, in the thickest Brooklyn accent Wally had ever been exposed to. Me.