Deb frowned. “We’re part of a study on ‘the tough get tougher’?”
“No. It’s not a platitude. It’s the belief that salutogenesis is a core human trait that actually manifests and grows only under extreme physical and emotional duress. It’s not just survival in the midst of a crisis, it’s the ability to transform under it, to bloom and become something better than you were before the crisis took place.”
“What a load of horseshit,” Ayres said. “I could name a hundred marines at Camp Lejeune who fit that description. TransAnt doesn’t need to set up a base in Antarctica for that.”
“TransAnt doesn’t have access to the marines at Camp Lejeune. And, frankly, marines expect to be put under duress. It’s not much of a study when all of your subjects can predict what’s coming or might be faking their reactions in order to conform to a preconceived notion of what it means to be a marine. Having said that, however, I’d be amazed if the government hasn’t run their own salutogenic tests that would make a Marine Corps boot camp look like a walk in the park.”
“But what’s the point?” Deb pressed. “Why bother?”
Keene shrugged. “What’s it worth to a government to groom soldiers who excel under the harshest combat conditions? What’s it worth to an intelligence agency or a space program to know—and really know, not guess—they have operatives or astronauts who never falter? What value would society put on a clutch athlete or a politician or a hostage negotiator who became better on the job, not in spite of the worst possible events unfolding around them, but because of them?”
The room was quiet as they digested what Keene had said.
“It all sounds wonderful,” Ayres said, breaking the silence. “What are the chances the theory is real?”
Keene considered before answering. “It’s an attractive, though not fully credited, concept, I’m afraid. Antonovsky, who pioneered the idea, certainly scratched a popular itch when he proposed it. Who wouldn’t like to think she’s the heroine of her own story and has it in her to win the day, if only the circumstances were right? But in my experience, we’re all better off if we disabuse ourselves of the idea and just work with what we’ve got. On the other hand, I might believe that because I know I don’t have what it takes.”
“How does TransAnt hope to make use of this?” Deb asked. “Are they going to interview those of us who don’t lose our minds?”
Keene looked at her with bleary eyes. “I didn’t say ‘something in our DNA’ by accident. Antonovsky believed that only thirty percent of the human population possesses salutogenic capacity. It’s only a theory, of course, because it’s like making educated guesses about suicides—you can’t prescreen a segment of the population inclined to kill themselves, then study the results afterward. Not to mention, most cases of extreme duress can’t be replicated without, ah, breaking the law. But since most children aren’t trained from birth under extreme conditions of duress—if we take nurture out of the equation, in other words—the assumption is that salutogenesis is, in fact, genetic. That we can actually distill the mythic Hero Gene. So, yes, TransAnt will probably want to take DNA samples at the end of the season.”
“They won’t need to,” Ayres said grimly. “We all underwent blood tests and basic disease screenings stateside when we signed up. I’m sure the waiver for additional testing is in the fine print of our contracts. They simply need to wait and see who hasn’t lost their squash by November.”
“But you said we weren’t the . . . test subjects,” Deb said, glancing between Hanratty and Keene.
“There are twelve Shackleton staff members who were identified to me as test vectors. Four of those were considered prime candidates,” Hanratty said. “All had overcome considerable emotional or physical trauma before arriving at the Pole. The assumption—correct me if I’m wrong, Keene—was that those prior experiences were the first cracks in the shell, so to speak.”
Keene nodded. “It would make sense that people who had survived and even flourished after some kind of crisis had already exhibited a salutogenic start and that those qualities would appear fully upon the application of additional stressors. If this experiment is following normal protocols, the so-called mentally healthy personnel would form the anxiety baseline, then data would be collected from the four prime subjects as well as the other eight at-risk candidates.”
“‘Additional stressors’?” Deb asked.
“Orchestrated events meant to . . . push the subjects’ buttons, so to speak.”
She looked confused for a moment, then her eyes widened. She looked at Hanratty. “The power failure was planned ?”
The station manager’s silence told them all they needed to know.
“What else was there? Is there something around the corner?”
“The psych staff at TransAnt planned only two major events,” Hanratty said calmly. “The power outage was the second. The first I’m not at liberty to reveal, but I can tell you that it has already occurred.”
“‘Not at liberty’? Jack, these are our lives you’re talking about.”
“I know this is all a shock and you have a right to be angry.” Hanratty spoke slowly. “But that’s why I’m filling you in now. It wouldn’t do you any good to know what the other event was; it happened almost four months ago. The effects were recorded, assessed, and the ramifications long gone.”
“Jesus Christ. I can’t believe this.” Ayres pinched the bridge of his nose. “And you and Keene are in charge of this shit show?”
“No. Originally, only Taylor and myself knew about the experiment. Keene figured it out after studying the psych profiles of the crew. He came to me with his suspicions, so I filled him in.”
“But he’s not in charge of the experiment?” Ayres asked. Hanratty shook his head. “Then who is? Just you?”
“Not exactly. I’m responsible for the stressor events and making sure they don’t get out of hand. The script and action parameters for those events were handed to me by TransAnt.”
“I hear a ‘but’ in there.”
“But I was told that there would be a member of the crew who would be monitoring the tests and gathering data. To help keep the study clean, I assume, that person’s identity was kept hidden from me and I still don’t know who it is. I’ve taken to calling him the Observer.”
The room was quiet as they chewed on the information. Finally, Ayres spoke. “I’ve got a question.”
“Go.”
“Things turned ugly after the power failure, and I can’t say I’m happy with any of this garbage about some kind of experiment, but from your perspective, we have the situation relatively under control. No one’s been killed. Injuries have been moderate, but treatable. Comms going down is not good and has raised anxiety considerably, but we’re handling it and are otherwise stable. This . . . Observer is collecting a bevy of test results, so he should be happy.”
“Correct.”
“So, why are you telling us all of this now? What’s changed?”
“It’s the third event,” Deb said.
Hanratty nodded grimly. “There is nothing in the action protocol calling for external communications to be disabled. We didn’t do this.”
“And you don’t know who it is?”
“No.”
Ayres put his hands in his pockets. “What if the comms failure was an actual systems breakdown? Every season has its share of hiccups.”
“We’ve been over the system with a fine-tooth comb. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t an equipment failure. It was sabotaged thoroughly and effectively and we’ve found out that even satcom and the data streams from the labs like COBRA were affected. We can’t call out or receive communications, nor send an emergency signal to McMurdo for extraction. Hell, we can’t send Morse code over the wire.”
“The Observer?” Deb asked.
Hanratty nodded. “Taylor, Keene, and I think so.”
“But why?” she asked, baffled. “We aren’t part of the experiment.”
; Keene picked at the dirt under a fingernail. “We are now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“What the hell do you mean our communications are out?”
Hanratty swallowed and passed a hand over his throat self-consciously. He’d called for an all-hands meeting in Shackleton’s gym, hoping that the appearance of transparency would keep everyone calm and united behind him. The gym had seemed a strategic choice not only because of its size, but also to stop cliques from forming, as might have happened in a more familiar locale like the galley. By keeping everyone on their feet and mixed as a general population, he’d planned to increase the feeling of isolation among individual crew members.
Unfortunately, herding all the people on base into a single large room seemed to have had the opposite effect, breeding a single, larger organism filled with anger and fear. Perhaps he’d misjudged his audience. His old leadership instructors at Fort Benning would not have been pleased.
“I understand what you must be feeling right now.” State the problem . “Many of you are upset and scared. Communications is the lifeline that connects us to the outside world, and that lifeline has, admittedly, been compromised.”
A murmur of discontent, amplified by the tile floor and hard concrete walls, rippled through the room.
Biddi Newell raised her voice. “Jack, what happened, exactly? How is it possible that all of our comms went down at once?”
“We’re looking into that. It has been suggested that an electrical surge from the recent heat and power outage might’ve caused some damage that began to accumulate and only now resulted in a circuit failure.”
Hanratty swept his eyes over the crowd, trying to gauge the effect of his words. The mutters picked up volume. Control the message.
“In any case,” he hurried on, “we’re working on solutions, not theories or recriminations. What other questions do you have?”
“What about work? I’m worried about data loss,” Anne said, her expression pinched. “Those transmissions are critical to what we’re doing down here.”
“We have on-base backups as a fail-safe,” he said. “None of your work will be lost.”
“What about a satellite phone?” someone asked from the back. “Can’t we just pick up the line and call McMurdo?”
“We can’t find it.”
A swelling growl of disbelief met his statement. “You’ve got to be joking,” Dave Boychuck said from the middle of the pack, his beard bristling. “And what do you mean ‘it’? We only have one?”
“That’s correct,” he said, getting ready for the storm. “I don’t know how the need was overlooked, but we were left with one sat phone on base. And that one is missing.”
Calls of “Bullshit” and “I can’t believe this” rose in the crowd. Hanratty raised his hands over his head. Show common cause .
“Again, I understand you’re upset, you’re scared, and—since much of the science can’t happen without reliable communications—pretty pissed off. Believe me, I am, too. I didn’t sign up for this any more than you did.”
He looked at the two-score people in front of him, their pale faces watching him for comfort and reassurance. He wished he could give it to them. Get them to unite behind you .
“But the most important thing we can do right now is, you guessed it, stay calm. Going ballistic when we have no way of reaching the outside world isn’t going to help matters. Blaming me or the admin staff might feel good in the short term, but it’s not going to restore our satellite uplink. I called all of you in here today so you could see we’re doing our best to solve the problem. We are still in a safe, stable environment”—a snort met his statement, but he bulled on—“and we’re just a short time away from returning everything back to normal.”
He felt the gazes of Taylor, Keene, Ayres, and Deb boring into him, but he refused to look in their direction. They’d all agreed—with dissension on Ayres’s part, but eventual capitulation—that it would be in everyone’s best interests to maintain the fabrication that the communications failure was an accident and that normal comms would be restored soon. They could continue spooling out excuses for weeks if they had to, but the truth, he knew, would start a riot. End with a positive message .
“In the meantime,” he began, but—Jesus Christ —just as he was set to launch into his message the lights in the gym went out, plunging the room into darkness.
For one startled moment, he thought he could still see thanks to the impression burned on his retina. Then someone screamed and he was jostled as people began moving, shouting, gasping.
“Taylor!” he shouted, though he had no idea what his security chief could do in the absolute blackness.
Just as the pitch of the voices began climbing the ramp to hysteria, the lights came back on as suddenly as they’d gone out. The forty-some crew members froze in place, looking around wild-eyed and frightened.
Hanratty dove into the pause as though nothing had happened. “In the meantime , please return to your duties as posted or required. I know it’s a difficult thing to do, but bear in mind that the early South Pole crews went all nine months without contact. Even just a few decades ago, the base passed the winter without a single radio broadcast. We are no less capable than any of those brave explorers. We’ve got technology, the accumulated experience of decades, and our ability to work together, all on our side. As Ernest Shackleton himself said, ‘Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all.’”
But the crowd was unmoved and he soon found himself pressed by a half-dozen scared and angry Polies. At his signal, Taylor, Keene, Deb, and even a reluctant Ayres moved forward to mingle with the crowd and start damage control while he fielded questions from the angriest crew members, willing to be the lightning rod if it meant keeping the crew at large calm.
The worst part, he thought as he nodded sympathetically to a red-faced Dave Boychuck, was that someone in the room—someone he’d be talking to, reassuring, and making empty promises to—knew exactly what had happened, why, and what was coming next.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Do I have to remind you that midwinter comes but once a year? Please don’t make me come dig you out of that filthy garage.”
Cass smiled. “Oh, you won’t have to.”
Biddi looked at her in the mirror above the sink. “You sound so sure of yourself. Are you a social butterfly now?”
“Pete said they’ve been hoarding goodies for months to celebrate. And I, for one, am tired of eating white lettuce and Wonder bread for every meal.”
“I hear you. What was last night’s dinner supposed to be, again? It was disgusting.”
“Beef stroganoff.”
“The hamburger was the color of used bubble gum.”
“Stop right there,” she said, pointing the toilet bowl brush at her friend. After four months of living in a confined space, the crew at Shackleton had become a little lax in their personal hygiene and bathroom habits. It was her turn to clean commodes and she didn’t need any more grotesque thoughts in her head.
“And the noodles were like the insides of a fish’s belly, all wiggly and white.”
She started to laugh. “Oh my God.”
“And the gravy? It was like they had dumped a tub of man juice over the top—”
“Biddi! For Christ’s sake.” Cass leaned against the side of the stall, shoulders shaking with laughter. Clad in rubber gloves, she had to use her forearm to wipe the tears away.
Biddi turned around. “It’s good to see you laugh again, lady. You’ve been as sober as a judge for weeks now, and I don’t mean in a good way. You should get out more.”
The comment was meant as a question, but Cass gently deflected it. “You’re making up for both of us.”
Biddi harrumphed, taking the hint. “What do you think of Hanratty’s little hootenanny in the gym?”
“About the fact that all of our communications are down or the way in which he told us?”
“Both. Either. Whatever suits your
fancy.”
“Comms going down is terrifying in one way, but, as much as I hate to admit it, Hanratty had a point. None of the explorers who came before us had anything like our safety nets.” Cass squirted blue cleaner into the toilet and swirled her magic wand around the bowl. “We’ll have a few nervous days, they’ll fix whatever’s wrong, and in a month we won’t even remember that it happened.”
Biddi grunted. “It doesn’t bother you a tad that half of those explorers died?”
“I think that’s where the technology and living in the twenty-first century come in. We have slightly more advanced gear than reindeer-hide sleeping bags and paraffin stoves.”
“You sound awfully upbeat. What if they don’t get it fixed?”
“They’ll figure something out. I mean, it’s not as if it was broken intentionally, right? If it’s broke, they’ll fix it.” Right after Keene takes his notes and adds them to our psych file . “I’d rather focus on the party, to be honest. At this point, if I got a really good meal, comms could be down for the rest of the winter, for all I care. Speaking of which, is there anything else planned for tomorrow night?”
When there was no answer, Cass leaned out of the stall. Her friend was staring down into the sink. “Biddi?”
“Hmm?”
“I asked, is there anything else planned for tomorrow night after the dinner?”
“Oh. Sorry, love. I got a bit of the T3s there. Activities for tomorrow night, right.” She cleared her throat. “Officially or unofficially?”
“Both?”
Biddi turned to the mirror and sprayed it with a frothy cleaning solution, then set about rubbing the daylights out of it. “Officially, there will be some champagne after the dinner and some disco music, followed by a midnight screening of The Shining .”
The Winter Over Page 19
