South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  “Who is it?” Sal called out to the tech.

  “A girl,” she said flatly. This was a rare enough occurrence in El Dorm that Sal came to the door himself. His shirt was off. Cooper tried not to look at his chest, but ended up staring directly at it and quickly took in the details: no hair, some definition, not too much, nipples symmetrical and the color of strawberries. Sal edged past his visitor and closed the door against his shoulder.

  “Don’t tell me you already lost The Crud.”

  Cooper handed him the book. “To the contrary. I’m ready for the sequel.”

  Sal’s demeanor immediately shifted. “Meet me in the library in ten.” He closed the door in her face.

  In the library, Cooper perused the shelves, noting that there were duplicate copies of every Douglas Adams book ever written, as well as the compulsory copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. She was pleased to find that Tucker was wrong—there was a copy of Shackleton’s South. It just had never been opened.

  “This will generate gossip,” Sal said when he walked in. He locked the door behind him. “Now, it goes without saying that you do not read Skua Birds openly. Admin has a bounty pool on both books—winner gets an extra R-and-R off-continent, so motivation is high. Now turn around.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t let you see where I keep it.”

  “Fuck off,” Cooper laughed, but she turned to face the back wall, on which hung every winter-over group portrait in Pole history. She stopped counting at thirty. As Sal shuffled around behind her, she studied the photos. They went from sepia in the 1950s to black-and-white in the ’60s to color in the ’70s and beyond, and yet the composition of each was remarkably similar: beards abounded, one person in a cowboy hat, another eschewing his parka for a flannel shirt, someone caught midsentence.

  Just below these photographs was a lighted display case filled with brass sculptures—the old geographic Pole markers, which were replaced each year on New Year’s Day. The 1999 marker was a gleaming copper bottle cap with the continent etched on top; 2000’s depicted the South Pole under a wavy magnetic field, with the words To Inspire and Explore running the perimeter; another, its year unmentioned, was a rotating sextant.

  “These are beautiful as hell,” Cooper said admiringly.

  “The Pole markers are works of art,” Sal said behind her. “Each year someone gets to design the new one. It’s a huge honor.”

  “Who gets it this year?” Cooper asked, even though she knew. Sal placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her around to face him.

  “Yours truly.”

  “Why you?” Cooper asked. “Oh, right—your super-important experiment.”

  Sal handed her a paperback with a black cover. This one didn’t even bother with the title.

  “Well, this is certainly inconspicuous,” Cooper said.

  Someone pulled on the door of the library, and after a momentary pause, pulled on it again and again. Cooper wasn’t sure why, but she found the length of time that passed before the person’s hand told his brain that the door was locked hilarious, and started laughing. The door rattled in its frame as the angry Polie pulled and pulled on the doorknob, as if the door were only playing games with him and would open eventually. Cooper could not stop laughing.

  “Open the effing door, you ass-joints!” the man shouted. This sent Cooper into fresh hysterics. Sal rubbed his face vigorously and held his hands over his eyes for a moment, trying not to laugh with Cooper. “After finding us here together in a locked room,” he said, “people are gonna think you’re my ice-wife.”

  “But you already have one,” Cooper said with a hiccup. “I saw her in your room.”

  Sal tilted his head. “Beth? She’s just an ice-friend. Who is returning to McMurdo tomorrow.”

  “Finally.”

  Without warning, he leaned down so that his face was an inch from Cooper’s. “Does that ease your mind, Fingy?”

  “I was very upset,” Cooper said, hoping the obvious sarcasm obscured the truth of this statement. “When I saw her, I was afraid the Frosty Boy had gone on the fritz again.”

  Finally, Sal unlocked the door and stepped aside to admit the Star Trek finger-split guys Cooper had seen the first day. They stalked past Cooper, muttering imprecations, Breakout: Normandy in hand.

  * * *

  When the rumored journalist from Miami finally arrived at the station, he turned out to be a ginger with a germinating goatee. He arrived cheerful, walking the station with an NSF public relations rep who shadowed him like a junior high hall monitor. As Cooper passed the men on her way from the studio to the galley, she smiled to be friendly. Sensing the possibility for a positive encounter that could result in good press for the Program, the PR rep stopped.

  “A and W, right?” the rep asked, assessing Cooper’s paint-stained overalls. “What discipline?”

  “I’m a painter,” Cooper replied. The rep scribbled this down, then asked her name, and scribbled that down, too.

  “Tim, this is one of our artist Fellows,” the rep said. “The NSF sponsors writers and artists every year to come down and—”

  “Right,” Tim said vaguely, looking down the hall toward the exit. “I profiled that paper-clip artist two years ago, remember?” He glanced at Cooper. “But I guess I should cover my bases.”

  Tim fished out a reporter’s notebook from his parka. “What do you think artists bring to the conversation about what goes on at the Pole?” He asked the question like a Red Lobster waitress about to go on break.

  “Is there a conversation about what goes on at Pole?” Cooper asked. The PR rep shifted his weight.

  “Apparently,” Tim said, “or else I wouldn’t be here. What are you painting about while you’re down?”

  “The imperative of the explorer.”

  “And how do you interpret that?”

  “Mittens.”

  “Fascinating,” Tim said, tucking the pen into the coil of his notebook.

  The rep gave Cooper a withering look.

  Cooper continued on to the galley for lunch, and found Tucker and Dwight engaged in a heated discussion.

  “But wouldn’t you time travel if you could, Tucker?” Dwight said as Cooper set her tray down next to him. Tucker shook his head silently as he separated the carbs from the protein on his plate. Dwight gave a huff of disapproval. “You’re telling me that if you could go back two hundred years, you wouldn’t?”

  “Before or after the Fugitive Slave Act?”

  Dwight pounded the table with his fist. “You always make it about slavery!” Cooper watched as Dwight stormed off with his tray.

  “Do you want me to slip ex-lax into his coffee?”

  “That’s just Dwight doing Dwight,” Tucker said, pinching his eyebrow. “I’m a little on edge.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “That reporter from the Herald is working an angle about Pavano and his research.”

  “I figured. What’s the big deal?”

  “The Program was hoping to keep Pavano’s presence on the ice a nonissue. They don’t want it to become political.” He looked up at Cooper. “I once thought that all you needed to get by in this life was a pleasant phone manner. Of course, that was when I was a telemarketer.”

  When the Miami Herald published Tim’s story a week later, it had nothing to do with mittens or the construction of the new station. Instead, the headline was “In World’s Last Bastion of Objective Research, Politics Intrudes.” As Tucker had predicted, the article focused on Pavano’s work on climate change, and how two conservative U.S. congressmen had gotten him on the ice. Bush’s approval rates were plunging, and both men were up for reelection in their home states the next year—they hoped the “global-warming hoax” and the federal government’s reluctance to fund “skeptics” would whip their constituents into a lather.

  Somehow Tim had lost the PR rep long enough to sit down with Pavano for an interview. Tim portrayed him as the kind of fool who would spen
d his career trying to make sense of Piltdown Man. There was mention of the remoteness of Pavano’s lab space, an ad hoc office in the Dark Sector. It was, Tim noted, on the very edge of the Sector, far from the labs of the other climate scientists at Pole.

  The article also revealed personal information about Pavano, which the Beakers seized upon: he had been an Indiana science prodigy as a youth and had been courted by Stanford and MIT. He’d chosen Stanford and received degrees in astronomy and physics, specializing in heliospherics, but had had difficulty placing his research papers due to a plagiarism charge early in his career. He had rehabilitated his reputation enough to land a position at a private Midwestern college, where he worked for nearly ten years before he was, again, accused of plagiarism.

  Tim had tried to get Beakers to comment on Pavano, but they had, at the NSF’s request, remained silent. The piece ended with a quote from one of the congressmen who’d been responsible for getting him to South Pole:

  When reached for comment, Senator Sam Bayless (R-KS) said, “In the real world, outside of the ivory tower, science is a vigorous debate, not a museum piece. Just as there is no scientific agreement about the so-called Big Bang, there is no scientific agreement about the causes of so-called climate change.” Rep. Bayless added, “I’m proud of my role in helping the National Science Foundation understand that diversity in science is a good thing.”

  Cooper found the sidebar accompanying the article more interesting than the political implications of congressmen bickering with the NSF. In coming to South Pole Station for the research season, Tim wrote, Pavano was reuniting with a former college roommate: an astrophysicist named Sal Brennan, the son of a highly respected theoretical physicist from Stanford. Dr. John Brennan had, with Alan Guth, helped introduce the idea of cosmic inflation. He had also plucked Frank Pavano from the cornfields of Indiana and brought him to Stanford, only to have Pavano decline to work on Dr. Brennan’s team.

  Tim reported that, at the same time Pavano was studying heliophysics across campus, Sal had taken up the mantle of his father’s uncompleted work—the search for b-modes, the gravitational waves that would, if found, prove the inflationary theory to be correct. And he’d come close once: in 1999, Sal had been part of a South Pole–based experiment that had discovered that microwave radiation was polarized. (Tim didn’t elaborate on the import of this finding, and Cooper assumed that, to minds more subtle than hers, the discovery spoke for itself.) But then something had changed. Sal lost confidence in the inflationary model and decided to leave Stanford in order to do his post-doc work at Princeton with Peter Sokoloff, a theoretical physicist who had developed a rival theory to the Big Bang. This theory suggested that rather than the explosive genesis that Dr. Brennan and others had posited, the universe had come about as the result of the latest collision with a parallel world.

  “Sal Brennan now believes what his father calls the Big Bang is nothing more than an echo,” Tim wrote. “The two men have not spoken since early 2000, when the younger Brennan left for Princeton.” Tim went on to report that others working in cosmology—particularly adherents to cosmic inflation—viewed Sal’s model, which was a novel refinement of Sokoloff’s, with skepticism. However, Princeton’s joint South Pole–based experiment with Stanford’s Kavli team was without precedent, and could possibly result in the elimination of one of the models by year’s end.

  “None of the cosmologists working on the standard model at Pole this season would go on the record about Sal Brennan’s research,” Tim wrote, “but some indicated that he and Frank Pavano’s research interests had more in common that one might think.”

  Cooper absorbed this information avidly. Her own disagreements with her father ran along the lines of whether oars and paddles really were two different things. In some circles, she now realized, it was possible that a father would disavow his son over a difference of opinion regarding the origins of the universe. Or maybe it was just in Sal’s circle that such a thing could happen. Either way, it was now clear to Cooper that Sal was not just a bro-dude with a taste for tater tots. There was a whole universe behind his laughing eyes.

  * * *

  “Journalists never get science right,” Sal replied when Cooper found him on the climbing wall in the gym that night.

  “What about Pavano? Did he get Pavano right?”

  Sal dropped from the wall and rubbed powder off his hands. “Pavano’s so awkward he makes even theoretical physicists uncomfortable. He was always too much in his own head, so he could never collaborate with anyone on papers. Then he started plagiarizing—and trust me, you have to work really hard to convincingly plagiarize helioseismology research. He couldn’t get tenure and got the boot. With no home institution, he couldn’t get funding. Without funding he was fucked.”

  “But he’s here,” Cooper said, “so clearly he’s not totally fucked.”

  “Well, lucky for him there are people who make a living looking for failed scientists.”

  “But what about the plagiarism? Wouldn’t that tarnish his rep?”

  “You keep forgetting—it’s not about the science. Plagiarizing a couple graphs in an obscure research paper? No, that’s nothing more than a love bite. It’s about the messaging. Did you read the rest of the piece?”

  “You mean where they talk about you and your research? I stopped reading after the part about the branes and the parallel universes. It got too science-y and I lost interest.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Of course that’s the part that is going to change the world, but sure, god forbid it get too ‘science-y.’” He picked Cooper’s parka off the floor and threw it at her. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

  Minutes later, they were careening across the ice on a snowmobile, flying over sastrugi and hitting every frozen crest so hard Cooper could feel her fillings clattering. The wind was ferociously cold; Cooper thought her face was going to peel off. She looked over her shoulder at the Dome growing smaller and smaller as they sped toward the metal city where so much science was done at South Pole: the Dark Sector.

  She pulled her face out of the back of Sal’s parka in time to see two enormous funnels, open to the sky and surrounded by scaffolding, and a couple of large, blue prefab buildings embraced by metal staircases. She was amazed at how impermanent the structures of the Dark Sector looked, like a mutated, multilevel trailer park. The place seemed deserted. Once inside, Sal led her into a large room filled with humming supercomputers and servers and endless coils of cables, all feeding into a large enclosed cable tray. He showed her the calibration station, and his face flushed with geek joy when he took out the blueprints for the Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver (ACBAR, he called it) that would be installed on the telescope next year.

  Cooper began to lose track of the number of flickering computer screens and exactly what was supposed to be happening, but that was okay. She was almost getting it. This was what the Beakers were always yammering about. This was, in fact, Sal’s world, and she was weirdly drawn to it.

  Sal brought her to a small, cluttered cubicle. Her brain immediately filled in the gaps of time when she didn’t see Sal during the day. He was here, going over readings with Alek and the other research techs. Sal flipped through some papers on his desk and started to say something, then stopped. He flipped through more papers, and Cooper cast about for something to say but came up empty. Finally, Sal cleared his throat. “Yesterday, I was looking over measurements of CMB anisotropies, and I thought—where will she be sitting at dinner tonight? Will she be wearing that ratty Vikings T-shirt again? Will she come to my table or will I have to go to her?”

  If not for the description of the Vikings shirt, Cooper wouldn’t have known Sal was referring to her. He looked at her expectantly. Here again came that weird seizing feeling in her chest of being on a precipice, and she could not immediately figure out how to respond. Sal laughed, and looked away. “I’m sorry. Usually when I make women uncomfortable, it’s on purpose.”

  �
��No, I’m sorry. I’m not uncomfortable. I’m—I’m surprised. One minute we’re talking about telescopes and words I can’t pronounce, and the next minute—you said that. Sorry.”

  “Okay, now we’ve both apologized for nothing.” He pinched the bridge of his nose like an exhausted teacher. “Look, I’m not used to subtlety in polar courtship. This is me telling you I like you. This is me telling you that sometimes I wonder where you’ll be sitting at dinner or if you’ll come into the Smoke Bar afterward. And that, after finding out from a Florida newspaper that I’m a total disappointment to a world-class scientific institution, not to mention my own father, if you still want to talk to me, I can usually be found here.” As Cooper struggled to take all this in, Sal gestured toward yet another door. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The ’scopes. That’s why I brought you out here.”

  After inching along a metal scaffold bridge, dusted with fine ice particles, they arrived at a wooden frame—not a window, not a door, just a portal. Cooper peered through it and saw yet another incomprehensible scene of metal, wires, and mirrors. But as Cooper looked at it, it seemed to take a shape. “It looks like a metal coffee filter,” she said.

  Sal blinked at her. “That’s actually a completely accurate way of describing what this telescope does. Except instead of coffee grounds, it catches neutrinos and maybe b-modes, if I’m really unlucky.”

  “Unlucky?”

  “The Kavli team from Stanford is looking for b-modes, which, if found, will confirm the inflationary theory—the Big Bang. Lisa Wu would lay down her life to get a five-sigma on the presence of b-modes worming their way toward us from thirteen billion years ago. Of course, if she does, then my model is eliminated.”

  “The one where the universe is just a bouncing ball?”

  Sal considered the telescope for a moment. “Do you believe in the Big Bang?”