Polar Quest

Dave looked over her shoulder as she studied it. Annja passed it to him. He was as shocked as she had been at its weight. “Wow.”

Annja looked at Zach. “How old is it?”

“That’s the other curious thing.”

Annja leaned forward. “Well?”

“According to the carbon dating we did, it’s over forty thousand years old.”

No one spoke for a moment. Annja was acutely aware of the silence hanging between them all. She heard the clinks of glasses and the low murmurs of conversation at other tables. Even the music that had resumed playing seemed hushed now.

“Forty thousand?”

Zach held up his hand. “I know. It seems crazy.”

“It seems impossible. There’s no way humans could have made this forty thousand years ago. I mean, I’m not a metallurgist, but this is pretty complicated stuff. It would take some seriously skilled people to pull this off given what conditions were like on Earth back then,” Annja said.

Zach didn’t say anything but kept staring at her as if he wanted her to take the next leap on her own. Annja took another sip of her gin and tonic and felt the liquor slide down her throat.

After a moment she set the glass back down. “You’re not, no, there’s absolutely no way…”

Zach’s eyebrows waggled. “Why not?”

Dave handed the necklace back. “Why not what?”

Annja sighed. “Extraterrestrial? You can’t be serious.”

“It’s possible, though, you have to admit,” Zach said, sounding excited.

Annja shook her head. “I’m not admitting anything. You’ve got something curious here, sure, but to think little green men from Mars planted this here is a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?”

Zach frowned. “If you’ve got any better theories, I’d be more than willing to entertain them.”

“I don’t have any theories. I just got off a plane. I can use some good sleep. Maybe a few pleasant dreams. And in the morning, maybe we’ll be able to look at this in a more logical light.”

Dave pointed at the necklace as Zach slid it back on. “Where in the world did you ever find that?”

“I’m on a dig at the base of Horlick Mountain.”

Dave whistled. “You’re out on that one, huh? I heard some whispers that some sort of secret dig site was going on somewhere in the Transantarctic Range, but no one had any idea where it was.”

Zach nodded. “Well, do me a favor and don’t tell anyone now that you know. We don’t need the publicity.”

They took a moment to get their order of wings from the bar. Annja tore into one of them and her mouth watered as the hot sauce hit. She wiped her mouth on a napkin and then glanced around. “Why no publicity? Have there been problems?”

Zach shrugged. “Sort of. Down here, you’ll find a lot of different camps on the whole idea of how Antarctica should be used. The scientists want to study it because it’s a fascinating look back at our own history. We can learn a whole lot from this place. Antarctica used to be warm and lush, connected to Africa, India and Australia through the Gondwana supercontinent. When the continents broke apart, the land started to cool, which is why we don’t have fossil records dating later than twenty-five million years ago.”

“Too cold,” Annja said.

“Exactly. Earlier than that, we’ve got reptiles, plants, all sorts of connections to those continents I just mentioned.”

Dave frowned. “Which is why I’d guess your discovery of this necklace has made such an impact on you, huh? It’s from a time when there was supposed to be nothing much here.”

“Right. Meanwhile, the business folks come down here and see the natural resources this place has—all the coal, copper, chromium—and start seeing dollar signs. If it was up to them, they’d rape this place and leave it for dead.”

Annja sighed. “Wonderful.”

“And then you’ve got the various political machinations at work. No one is supposed to lay claim to any part of this great land, but they do so subtly anyway. Specifically, the U.S. and Russia. They’ve reserved the right to stake claims here. It’s ludicrous.”

“What else?” Annja asked.

Zach sighed. “Then you’ve got the people who have forgotten there’s another world outside this place. They’ve been here far too long. They get snow crazy. Think of themselves as protectors of this frozen paradise. They can be real nuts.”

“Did we just meet a few of them?” she asked.

Zach grinned. “I think they work for another faction.”

“Oh, great.”

“In the meantime,” Dave said, “you’d obviously like to figure out where your necklace came from.”

“You got it, pal. We’ve got a mystery here.”

Annja smiled. “So you called me.”

“I don’t know very many other archaeologists who can drop what they’re doing and fly down here at the last minute.”

“Well, technically, I’m not one of them, either, but your friends in the black suits had a very persuasive way about them.”

“Which brings me to the other part of this whole thing,” Zach said.

“That being?”

Zach leaned closer to her. “The government wants this investigated and kept strictly hush-hush.”

“Why?” Annja asked.

Dave smirked. “Every other country on the planet has basically come out and confirmed that they’ve been buzzed by flying saucers, and our government still tries to con the public with stories about weather balloons.”

Annja frowned. “Well, in some ways, you can’t blame them.”

“Why not?” Zach asked.

“Look at the timing of when we started hearing reports about extraterrestrials—right around the end of World War II. Right after we exploded the first nuclear weapons.”

“You’re saying there’s a connection?”

“I don’t know,” Annja said. “But we’d just finished demolishing Japan and ended the war. Then the Soviet Union entered the Cold War arms race with us, each nation trying to protect itself. And all of a sudden, oh, by the way, there are aliens, too?”