South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  She had just opened the door to the trailer, when she heard someone mumbling from what sounded like the far end of the hall. Speak of the devil—there he was, in a crumpled heap, sitting with his back against the wall. He startled at the sound of her boots squeaking across the linoleum.

  “Thank god,” he said. “I wasn’t out of there two minutes before the earth started spinning. I can’t get in my room.”

  “That’s because your room isn’t in this trailer,” she replied, as Calhoun struggled to his feet, using the wall for leverage. “It’s in a much fancier one.”

  “Where am I?”

  “This is the Artist and Writers’ Annex.” She gestured down the long hall. “Behind these doors all of us geniuses spend our days staring at blank walls, contemplating a career change.” The cheap joke raised a laugh, and Calhoun asked her what kind of art she did. When she told him she was a painter, he laughed again.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I’m just thinking about how many times I’ve said something like ‘The federal endowments for the arts are wasteful and elitist, and steal much-needed funds from the hardworking folks of the middle class.’”

  “Might be right about the wasteful part, at least in my case,” Cooper said. “I painted nothing but mittens for the first three months I was here.”

  “Mittens?”

  Cooper pulled her keys from her pocket and opened the door to her studio, careful to keep her right hand in her parka. “And one glove. Do you want to see them?”

  Inside, Calhoun was taken by the mittens. He loved the mittens: he wanted to own them. After Cooper gave him the spiel—It’s a study of both the humility of the simple garment and the hubris of our belief that it protects us from this savage continent—he offered to buy all four of them, including the triptych, on the spot. “I don’t know much about art, but these—they speak to me.” He wandered over to the canvas on the easel, the one covered by a dropcloth. “What else you got?” He pinched the fabric between his fingers. “May I?”

  “Sure, but I warn you—that one’s not a mitten,” Cooper said. Calhoun pulled the cloth from the canvas, revealing her portrait of Bozer. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, his shining face seemed to take on a Wizard of Oz quality, hovering over them like a strange apparition. The bandanna was gone, revealing a long-ago-receded hairline and a broad, veiny forehead; a pair of untidy eyebrows held court over 7Up-clear eyes that looked beyond the viewer. The mustache and beard had been shorn clean, and left behind pink skin in their place. While the underlying structure of his face was built of clean, strong lines—having been painted before Cooper’s injury—the rest of the portrait had a soft, almost tremulous feel to it.

  “That looks like the fella from the bar,” he said. “Except I believe he had a beard.”

  Cooper pulled her right hand from her parka pocket to drape the cloth back over the portrait. “It’s not finished; I didn’t have time to get to some of the details, and I—”

  “So it’s you,” he said. Cooper realized he was staring at her bandaged hand. “You’re the girl from the Divide.” He looked from her face, to her hand, back to her face. “They told us you were a painter.” He furrowed his brow. “Why the hell haven’t you left this place? Don’t you have people?”

  “I have people. My people are here.”

  “You didn’t want to go home?”

  Calhoun’s question took Cooper aback. “Home?”

  “Home,” Calhoun said. “The place where you live? Where you’ve got roots? You got people waiting on you, don’t you?”

  Cooper had not thought of home for weeks. Not of her father, her mother, not even, aside from their e-mails, of Billie. They belonged to another world now—a parallel universe, one of Sal’s branes. And while at some point that world would collide with this one, the long rebound pulling them apart was welcome.

  “I am home,” Cooper said quietly.

  Calhoun shook his head, and moved on to the nearly finished portrait of Pearl, which Cooper had set against the back wall—she had only to strengthen the background and shadow tones. Calhoun snuck another glance at Cooper’s hand. “Did the accident affect your ability to, ah, to do this kind of work?”

  “I lost a finger on my dominant hand,” Cooper said. “So, yeah, it changed things. I’m not able to be as precise as I used to be.” She surveyed Pearl. “But now I know that precision rarely tells the whole story.”

  “Aren’t you angry? I’d be as mad as hell.” When Cooper didn’t respond, he added, “Proverbs says, ‘Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.’”

  “I know a better one.”

  “What is it?”

  “‘If you are fearful, you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery.’”

  Calhoun seemed deeply moved. “Ecclesiastes?”

  “Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Of the Scott party. He’s sort of my spirit animal.”

  “Scott. They told us about him on the ride down here. Poor bastard. All that, just to come in second place. Never heard of this Cherry character, though. With that kind of name, he had to be a little—hey, you okay?”

  To Cooper’s surprise, the static of a developing sob was filling her chest; she tried, unsuccessfully, to cough it away.

  “I’m sorry,” Cooper said when she’d recovered. “It’s just that talking about Cherry—” She glanced up at Calhoun and saw incomprehension on his face. “That talking about Scott makes me think of my twin brother. He was big into polar exploration. He died last year.”

  Calhoun’s mouth quivered slightly. “I’m sorry.”

  There it was again—that thing in Calhoun’s face that she had seen in the bar. Cooper had no idea what it was, only that she felt compelled to tell him about David, even if there was nothing that indicated Calhoun would even be interested. “We used to pretend we were members of the Scott party, back when we were kids. He was always Titus, I was always Cherry. Never made sense, because Cherry wasn’t on the final slog—all he did was stand around waiting—but we never cared. Titus was the injured guy who walked into the blizzard in order to save the others—he was the hero.”

  “A true act of selflessness,” Calhoun said. He clasped his hands in front of him and dropped his head, as if preparing to pray. “A true act of selflessness.” Suddenly, he began fumbling with the zipper on his parka. He seemed to have no clue how it worked. “I want to show you something,” he said earnestly. When he saw Cooper’s skeptical face, he guffawed. “Nothing like that.” So Cooper reached over and helped him unzip his parka. He pointed to the lapel of his new North Face thermal. A glittering brooch in masculine red, white, and blue rhinestones had been pinned on the left breast. Cooper noted that it spelled out the words Let’s Roll.

  “Bayless makes me wear this damn pin wherever we go,” he said.

  “United Flight Ninety-three,” Cooper murmured.

  Calhoun nodded. “He says it buys political and social capital. I was nowhere near when it happened. I was in Scottsdale, for god’s sake.”

  By simply listening to him, Cooper had unleashed something in Calhoun. It was as if no one had ever listened to him before. He told her he was a widower, that his wife’s death from ovarian cancer had helped his last reelection campaign, even though it had destroyed him and his kids. His campaign manager had felt it necessary to use his bereavement to his benefit, and it had worked. Still, he told Cooper he was a failure as a legislator. His bills went nowhere, his committee assignments were unimportant. He despised his constituents, didn’t even really believe in his politics anymore, didn’t understand why they cared more about teaching evolution in the schools than the fact that they couldn’t find good-paying jobs. But what else did he have? He was a sixty-three-year-old man with nothing—no job offers from lobbying firms, no universities eager to get him behind a lectern. Then one day, his campaign manager had called him at his home, saying a large donor was interested in making a substantial contribution to
the campaign. “And he says ‘when I say “substantial,” I’m talking seven-figs substantial.’ I get these guys on the phone—they don’t tell me who they are right away—and I say, ‘What’s the catch?’ They tell me they need help protecting the integrity of science. Why would I say no to that?”

  When Cooper looked at the congressman, she realized he desperately wanted her to give him a reason to have said no. “Who was the donor?” she asked.

  Calhoun smiled and walked over to examine another canvas, which was obscured behind Pearl’s. “You know I can’t tell you that,” he said. Calhoun pulled the portrait away from the wall, and suddenly, his smile faded. He studied the gaunt, angular face, framed in a fur-fringed hood. The lucent eyes were gone, and in their place were two black caves.

  Calhoun tore his gaze away from the portrait to look at Cooper. “I know this man,” he said.

  With an ear-shattering scratch, the All-Call system suddenly came to life, and Tucker’s sleepy voice spewed out a host of acronyms and directives.

  “That’s for you. They’ll turn this place inside out looking for you,” Cooper said.

  “Of course they will,” he said as he walked to the door. “Their lapdog took a walk.”

  Cooper picked up the antique compass from her desk. She was ready to let it go; though it had failed her in so many ways, something told her it wouldn’t fail Calhoun. “Wait, I have something to give you.” She handed him the compass.

  The wrinkles in the corners of his eyes deepened as he examined it. “You use this for inspiration?”

  Cooper shook her head. “No. It was given to me. Sort of like your pin. Take it,” she said. When he hesitated, she added: “Please.”

  Calhoun accepted it, gazing at it like it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, his face radiant with happiness. For a moment, Cooper felt like she was looking at her father. There’s a whole generation of those kinds of fathers, Birdie had told Cooper back at McMurdo.

  Tucker’s voice came over the loudspeaker again, talking about sectors and annexes.

  “You better go,” Cooper said.

  Calhoun looked at Cooper, his eyes wet. “This means a lot to me, young lady. I take everything said in this room to heart.”

  Later, as she prepared for bed, Cooper got on her chair and gazed out the window at the endless expanse of snow surrounding the station. She reached for her ruler from the bedside table, and set it on the bottom of the window frame. The sun had sunk a half inch since last week. It looked like a burning ship, disappearing into the seam between earth and sky.

  * * *

  The next morning, on the same stage where Coq au Balls had performed on Halloween, Congressmen Sam Bayless and Jack Calhoun sat between the undersecretary for Democracy and Global Affairs and the NSF liaison for the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies. The Beakers considered Alexandra Scaletta’s absence “conspicuous,” but Tucker assured them that she was back in Washington trying to negotiate with the more reasonable members of the House budget committee.

  Bayless was a lean, whippet-faced man, with the kind of facial structure one typically only found in Manga. His hair, heavily gelled, gleamed under the fluorescents. Even seated, he exuded arrogance. But it was Calhoun whom Cooper studied. She’d expected him to look tired, perhaps even exhausted, after last night, but instead he looked wide-awake. He was even smiling.

  As Bayless moved to the podium, Cooper remembered Sal telling her that these DV speeches were usually obsequious paeans to the brutality of polar life, full of admiration for the “unique” individuals who sacrificed all that was familiar to do important work under heinous conditions, and promises to safeguard the funding that made such work possible. All had gone as expected so far, except for that last point. And there had been no grand confrontation, aside from Sal’s conversation with Calhoun in the Smoke Bar. The station population, which had been itching for a fight, had—save for cynical veterans who knew better—depended on the scientists to lead the charge. No matter how passionate the dishwashers and welders were about keeping politics out of science, they were still just support staff, not climate researchers or theoretical physicists on government grants. The former could be dismissed as the partisan harridans and Libertarians they usually were while the latter were recipients of taxpayer funds that were currently under threat. The sense of unrest in the crowd was palpable.

  “I’m told that you folks are not used to the kind of media attention you’ve been getting over the last few weeks,” Bayless began. “I apologize for that, especially if Representative Calhoun and I have been the cause of any disruption to the important work being done down here. We are as surprised as any of you by the way the media has shown such robust interest in what’s happening here. Dissent is the healthiest state of affairs in any democracy, of course. And while the South Pole is technically a continent without country, I do consider it a democracy.” Cooper felt Sal stir next to her. “I think that democracy is under attack. That in a bastion of scientific thought, the covenant of free thought has been broken.”

  “There is no such thing as a scientific covenant,” Sal burst out. “You’re using religious language to describe science.”

  Two NSF admins approached Sal’s row from either end. But the congressman put his hand up. “No, it’s okay.” He gripped the sides of the podium and leaned over it. “Without god, science doesn’t exist.” Half of the room laughed. “Oh, did I make a joke? I guess it must be funny to people who believe time, space, and matter came into existence unassisted. That planets and stars formed from space dust, not the hand of an intelligent force. That matter created life by itself and early life-forms learned to reproduce like Sea-Monkeys.” At this, the room fell silent. “Look, guys—gals—we’re on the same side. I believe in science. I also believe all findings of science will eventually be found to agree with Scripture.”

  “Amen,” Calhoun said, dipping his head.

  “But I know you don’t care about my thoughts on science. You want to know about money. I know there’s a great deal of speculation about the status of the NSF’s budget. And it’s true that discussions about NSF’s operating budget, particularly for its polar operations, have been ongoing for the last few weeks—but so have the budgets of a number of federal agencies. This is not a deviation, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s part of the process. That being said, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that the hostile working environment experienced by scientists working on alternative theories of so-called climate change has figured into the discussions as well.”

  Bayless gestured to one of his aides, and the young man sped-walked to the podium and handed him a sheet of paper. “There’s still time to avert an unfortunate situation, so I want to talk about Frank Pavano for a moment. Dr. Pavano has been the victim of a systematic and sustained pattern of harassment based solely on his research.” Bayless consulted the paper. “On November sixth, he was denied a username and password to access the West Antarctic Divide server. This was blamed on a ‘majordomo error.’ The next day, a research paper he posted in the common area was defaced, and then later removed. On November fourteenth, Dr. Pavano found a threatening cartoon taped to the door to his room, which featured a crude drawing of Christ, sitting atop an Earth-like planet engulfed in flames. On December eighteenth, Dr. Pavano was notified by the climate research chief—in writing and on NSF letterhead—that due to budget constraints, he would not be assigned a drill tech on his final research trip to the West Antarctic Divide. This was later found to be a false statement, and Representative Calhoun and I intervened on his behalf. In the days leading up to his final trip to the ice-coring camp, he was removed from the flight manifest—twice. Both instances were blamed on administrative error. Finally, upon arriving at the camp, he was denied use of taxpayer-funded equipment necessary to his research.

  “All of this culminated, as you know, in a tragic accident involving a South Pole citizen. An accident that can be laid s
quarely at the feet of liberal scientists who will stop at nothing to muzzle anyone who dares to challenge them. And now she sits among you.” Bayless peered into the audience. “Cooper Gosling, will you please stand up?”

  Sal grasped Cooper’s hand. Alek, in the seat on her other side, shifted in his chair, but did not turn to look at her. Cooper said nothing, but noticed the NSF reps glancing at one another.

  Calhoun, having been summoned to the podium, now scanned the audience.

  “Cooper, are you here?”

  Climb in the trench.

  No one in the auditorium turned to look at Cooper; their eyes fixed on Calhoun and Bayless, they betrayed nothing. At the side of the stage, Tucker remained unreadable behind his sunglasses. Simon, the VIDS admin, and Warren, the NSF admin, pretended not to see her.

  Kick out the roof.

  Calhoun’s eyes finally found her, and for what felt like an age, he gazed at her.

  Finally, he leaned over and whispered something to Bayless, and returned to his seat.

  “Well, it looks like Cooper is not in the room,” Bayless said. “Which is a shame, because I think it’s important to underscore what needless collateral damage looks like. I understand this young woman is an artist. I imagine the kind of injury she suffered will have an impact on her future work. And it was completely preventable.

  “I mention all this because there are factions in Washington calling for an agency-wide budget freeze because of this situation. Jack and I have smoothed a few ruffled feathers by proposing that some commonsense protocols be integrated into the NSF’s grant-making processes. Rather than quashing scientific dissent, such protocols would ensure that those scientists with a minority view are given access to the same research sites and same taxpayer dollars as majority-view scientists. We’ve also proposed simple, straightforward guidelines aimed at preserving the integrity of the research station. Scientists hostile to open, honest discussions lose their federal funding. More than one violation makes the program ineligible for federal grants for one year. An OSHA rep would be stationed here to ensure compliance. This approach protects the American taxpayer’s investment in science. However, the head of the NSF does not share my commitment to scientific integrity.”