South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  As Cooper tried desperately to think of something to distract Denise, her finger—or the place where her finger had once been—began to itch intensely. “Denise,” she whispered. “I have a question for you. Lately I’ve been having this really strong feeling that my finger is back, like it’s physically there. I can even ‘move’ it—I actually feel it bend. Do you know anything that can explain this?”

  It worked. Denise seemed calm in an instant. “Phantom limb syndrome,” she replied quietly. “The perception of pain in an amputated limb or digit. Yes, this is real. One-armed men have been known to utilize their phantom limb to masturbate.”

  Sal brought his sleeve to his mouth, his shoulders shaking with laughter. Suddenly, the door began to rattle as someone pulled on the knob. Denise turned her eyes to Cooper—behind her glasses, they looked enormous, and they were full of fear. “I promise, it will be okay,” Cooper whispered.

  She knew the plane was idling, burning fuel, and that the temperature was dropping; she imagined the pilot was not exactly happy at the delay. Bozer had told them to expect this search of the station by VIDS and the NSF admins and higher-ups—they just had to wait it out. The door rattled again, more insistently this time. Muffled voices—including Marcy’s—conferred on the other side.

  “This is a WC,” she told the others.

  “A what?”

  “Waste closet. Shit storage. Poo pantry. It’s where we keep the leaky sewage drums. I can unlock it for you if you want to look around, but I warn you: it smells like a shithouse door on a tuna boat.”

  The search party hastily moved on. After their footsteps had receded completely, Alek fell back in relief, muttering in Russian.

  * * *

  Seventy-two hours in, Pearl and Dwight were already nursing a beef that had started when Pearl whistled for an hour straight during dinner. Now, in the Smoke Bar, her whistling had become defiant.

  “If I have to listen to your stupid whistling and stare at your Pollyanna face and your stupid greasy pigtails all winter I’m going to kill myself,” Dwight said, gripping a nosegay of darts in his hand. “You will find me swinging from the rafters in a cold breeze.”

  “You know what, Dwight? I try to be smiley and nice to everyone, even if they’re rude. I feel like people don’t need grumps around all winter, especially under the circumstances.”

  “Don’t pretend like you’re some kind of angel, Pearl,” Dwight said, sending a dart into the board. “The act gets old real quick.” He turned to Sal. “Look me in the eye, Sal, and tell me that prolonged whistling isn’t a form of torture.”

  “Can’t you guys try bonding?” Doc Carla suggested.

  “Over what?” Dwight demanded.

  “Both of your ice-spouses are gone,” she said. “What about the bond of broken hearts?”

  Dwight scoffed, and drifted away to another part of the bar.

  Cooper nursed a vodka tonic as she watched them bicker. She hoped Dwight’s tantrum wasn’t a harbinger of things to come. Whistling was a minor crime, and they had several more months of this, at best. Cooper hoped Dwight would just immerse himself in his comms duties, which included keeping track of the federal response to the occupation, via the Web, his ham radio, and satellite phone. It had taken the authorities two full days to understand what had happened at Pole. The U.S. Antarctic Program had operated with military precision for decades. That members of the Program would disobey orders came not only as a shock to VIDS and NSF administrators, it also paralyzed them. The prevailing attitude among those who were in charge was disbelief and utter confusion. Word had not leaked to the media yet, but Dwight was seeing some blogs mentioning rumors of an occupation at Pole.

  Once the LC-130 with the tech sergeant, Tucker, and the last VIDS and NSF admins had gone wheels up, Bozer and Marcy cleared the snowdrifts from the perimeter of the Dome before shutting the outer doors. The temperature had dropped dramatically by now, nearing seventy below. Floyd assured everyone that no pilot would try to land at Pole at this point. Not even JP-8 fuel could remain liquid in these temperatures. The only unqualified positive aspect of the occupation so far, at least for Cooper, was that everyone now had a room in El Dorm—she’d taken over the room next to Sal’s, which had previously belonged to a telescope maintenance tech. The convenience of not having to empty a pee can into a pee barrel was almost decadent.

  Sal walked over to where Cooper was sketching Doc Carla awkwardly holding knitting needles. Now that Pearl had abandoned her whistling, she was trying to teach people how to knit. “I have to go back to the lab now,” Sal said to Cooper. “Will you walk with me?”

  They walked down the entrance tunnel in silence, past the fuel arches, which were now strangely quiet, running on caretaking mode. When they approached the entrance door, Sal performed an intricate routine with the lock, and together they pushed the door open. Then they were outside, in the half darkness of near-winter. Sal scanned the sky before taking Cooper’s arm. “I keep thinking I’m going to hear a C-17 looping back to force us out by gunpoint,” he said.

  “Actually, it would be an LC-130,” Cooper said. “A Herc.”

  “Oh my god, you’re officially a Polie.”

  “What would you do if they did come back?”

  “I’ve thought about that a million times,” Sal said, his brow troubled. “I can’t get any farther than suicide.” He gripped her arm harder. “I’m sorry, Cooper, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Cooper said nothing, but noted that the word, even the offhand way it had been mentioned, hadn’t pierced her in the way it used to. In fact, with all the commotion at the station, she hadn’t even thought about David, or the vial, for days. She wondered if that jagged edge had finally broken off.

  They were halfway down the road to the Dark Sector before Sal stopped. He pointed to the sky. The aurora australis, roiling ribbon-like sheaves of purple and pink light, filled the sky. They gaped at it in wonder. There was something else there, too, like a fingerprint on glass.

  “The Milky Way,” Sal said.

  “Jesus, that’s beautiful.”

  “It’s cripplingly beautiful,” he said.

  Cooper looked over at him. “Even though it has a super-massive black hole in it?”

  “Especially because it does.”

  As Cooper gazed into its frosty heart, she imagined the black hole, its density equivalent to a billion suns.

  * * *

  When the feds finally shook off their incredulity, directives began arriving via e-mail, fax, and satellite phone. It started with the NSF’s assumption that this had all been a misunderstanding. In Comms, Cooper and the other Polies listened in silence as the South Pole NSF rep, Warren, back in Washington, D.C., now, played nice cop with Dwight.

  “Perhaps we weren’t clear,” Warren said gently. “And I can own that, I can take the fall for that.” He hesitated. “One might even argue that I’ve already taken the fall for that.”

  “There was no misunderstanding,” Dwight replied. “This is intentional.”

  “Tell Karl Martin it’s draconian,” Floyd piped in.

  Warren sighed. “Guys, I have no idea what you’re talking about. All we’re seeking is a peaceful resolution to the situation.”

  “What? We’re not armed, dude,” Floyd replied.

  “Well, the FBI wants in on this.”

  Floyd cackled. “Yeah? Tell ’em to come on down. They can fly Southwest.”

  There was a long silence on Warren’s end of the line. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Just tell me how we can resolve this, guys.”

  Sal stepped past Floyd and leaned over the speakerphone. “The Wisconsin DA is tearing up Sri Niswathin’s lab in Madison. Frank Pavano is doing more interviews than a starlet on a press junket. Bayless and Calhoun are preening in front of cameras and pretending to be the defenders of science—”

  “Sal—”

  “You’re asking us how this will be resolved, and I’m telling you that this is resolved when Bay
less and Calhoun let the budget bill go through committee. This is resolved when the sequester ends. It’s not complicated.”

  “What the hell do you think we’ve been doing, Sal!” Warren shouted. “We’ve been working every angle here. I don’t think you people understand—you are illegally occupying a federal facility. There’s jail time associated with this kind of thing. Not to mention the fact that you’ve put your lives at—”

  The call cut out without warning, reverting to static, and everyone turned to Dwight. “Satellite moved off-grid.” He shrugged and looked at Sal. “Time to start contacting the media?”

  “Permission granted,” Sal replied grimly. Dwight shooed everyone out and got to work.

  * * *

  The next morning Cooper headed back over to Comms, where she was scheduled to relieve Dwight for a few hours. She found him sprawled on his ugly brown sofa, already asleep, so she spent her first ten minutes sorting the papers that had accumulated on the floor beneath the fax machine: there were separate piles for NSF communications, VIDS-related missives and threats, and the media requests, which had been pouring in since Dwight had started contacting reporters.

  She’d brought along a mini-canvas and was priming it with gesso (Bozer had requested a small portrait of Denise) when the satellite phone began to ring. Its strange, insect-like buzzing woke Dwight immediately. Cooper brought the phone over to him.

  The person on the other end of the line began speaking before Dwight could answer. His face contorted with effort as he tried to understand what he was hearing. Finally, he was able to break in: “Wait—wait, hold on. Hold on! No habla Russian.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and looked at Cooper. “Radio Dark Sector and get Alek in here.”

  Soon the office was crowded with the Polies. Alek had the enormous phone pressed against his right ear, his other hand covering his left. Sal, who had come over from the Dark Sector with him, threw himself on the couch and instantly fell asleep. The plosives of Russian spoken at high volume were making Cooper feel delirious, and she sat down on the couch next to Sal, lifting his legs with effort and sliding beneath them.

  It seemed like ages before Alek got off the phone—enough time for Pearl to go back to the galley, make a batch of instant hot chocolate, and return to Comms with a tray of still-steaming mugs. After hanging up, Alek took a long sip of cocoa and carefully wiped his mouth with his fingers. “They want to come get me,” he said darkly.

  “Who wants to come get you?” Marcy asked.

  “Rossiya,” Alek replied. Marcy stared at him blankly. “Mother Russia. They want to come and get their citizen.”

  “And take you where, exactly?” Doc Carla growled from the other side of the room.

  “Vostok.”

  “That’s halfway across Antarctica,” Cooper said.

  “Twelve hundred kilometers, exact,” Alek snapped.

  “I thought it was too dangerous to fly into Pole at this time of year,” Doc Carla said, growing irritated. “I thought that was the goddamn point of this whole game.”

  “In 1982, Vostok run out of fuel in the middle of winter. They make candle warmers out of asbestos fibers and diesel,” he replied. “Russia doesn’t give shit.”

  “Have they talked to the State Department?” Sal asked, awake again but groggy.

  “No, they say not necessary.”

  “Actually, they’re right; they don’t need to,” Dwight said, flipping through the papers on his desk. “But Russia is a signatory to the Antarctic Treaty, so they’ll have to go through the secretariat.”

  Alek shook his head. “No, I don’t want to go. I gave them better idea: airdrop.”

  Sal sat up suddenly. “You’re a fucking genius, Alek.”

  “Not an evil monk?”

  “No, you’ve achieved sainthood.”

  * * *

  The airdrop, which Bozer had christened Operation Deep Freeze, had everyone giddy with anticipation. Airdrops were not unheard of at Pole—most winters, if the weather cooperated, a C-17 out of New Zealand would make a pass and drop supplies from its cargo hold. That was out of the question this winter: the sequester was still in effect, the station illegally occupied, and the resident population was accused of federal crimes. But Russia, sensing an opportunity to improve its standing in the international community at the expense of the Americans, was ready to help a comrade whose sense of duty to science had left him in dire straits.

  Floyd began building the wooden wicks for the smudge pots, fires burning in fifty-five-gallon drums that would demarcate the drop zone now that the polar night—twenty-four-hour darkness—had fully descended. Bozer and Marcy spent nearly six hours grooming the zone, while Floyd split up the remaining Polies into teams. Marcy tuned up the forklift she’d use to locate the dropped crates and dig them out. Cooper was designated “project manager” since Doc Carla still didn’t think she was ready to do any heavy lifting. Everyone who was working the drop zone pulled on the insulated refrigerator suits that had been hauled out of storage and awaited the transmission from the Russian pilots.

  Finally an announcement came over All-Call. The Russians were ten minutes out. Sal, Marcy, and Bozer hopped on snowmobiles and headed out to ignite the smudge pots. Cooper glanced over at the temperature gauge. Sixty-three below zero. This was, as Floyd had mentioned many times, the kind of cold that could turn hydraulic fluid into pudding if the plane landed for more than two minutes.

  Then came the call that the bird was two minutes out, and everyone rushed into the darkness, the team leaders gripping sets of night-vision goggles. Cooper could feel the rumble of the plane’s engines in her chest as its under-wing lights appeared like bright stars on the horizon. Its roar grew louder and louder, until it seemed that Cooper’s eardrums were going to burst, and that’s when the parcels began drifting down from the inky sky. They floated softly on miniature parachutes illuminated by the teams’ searchlights; Cooper thought they looked like jellyfish. The plane made a graceful turn on the far west side of the station, and passed back over them, waggling its wings.

  In the distance, Cooper could see two Polies—probably Sal and Pearl—silhouetted by Marcy’s headlights as she followed along behind them, waiting for cargo with her forklift. Cooper retreated deeper into the entrance tunnel, and her walkie-talkie started to crackle. Sal’s voice broke through the static. “Are the doors open?”

  “Yes!” Cooper shouted.

  “The machines are loaded,” Sal said. “We’re on our way.”

  Floyd arrived on a snowmobile, pulling a pallet, with Pearl sitting behind him.

  “They gave us oranges!” Pearl exclaimed, waving a bag of what looked like frozen suns. “Oranges! Can you believe it? Fresh fruit! Oh, I wish Birdie were here to see this.”

  Over the next fifteen minutes, the teams arrived with the rest of the cargo, which included a box of medical supplies for Doc Carla, DVDs of Russian soap operas, thirteen cases of vodka, and more oranges, which had been a gift from the flight crew. As everyone arrived, Cooper tried raising Sal on the radio again, but got nothing except static. She began asking the others if they’d seen him. Denise claimed he was loading cargo, but when Cooper tried to radio Sal again, she got no response. She mentally checked off every Polie who’d walked by her. Everyone was in, except for Sal.

  “Give me a body count,” Bozer said, suddenly standing next to her.

  “Sal’s missing,” Cooper told him. The words made it real.

  Bozer brought the radio to his mouth and called for Sal. Nothing. He tried again. Cooper was now gripped by panic. She’d been here before. She’d stood in one place, dumb and mute, and waited for someone who hadn’t returned. She refused to wait this time. Cooper made a dash for the entrance tunnel, but Bozer caught up to her easily and roughly yanked her back inside. He pushed her away and jabbed a finger in her parka. “Calm down.”

  “Go get him, Bozer,” Cooper cried. “Go get him.”

  Bozer pulled his mittens back on slowly. “Where is he
on the grid?”

  “He’s supposed to be on the northwest quadrant.” Bozer gestured to Marcy, who pulled her hood back over her head and walked toward the nearest snowmobile. Cooper started pacing.

  Then a figure appeared down at the entrance end of the tunnel, red in the lights, hauling a pallet. Sal. It took a moment for Cooper to notice the two men skiing up the tunnel behind him. They were wearing ECW gear and carrying astoundingly large packs. Each was sporting a headlamp. It took her a minute, but Cooper realized with astonishment that they were the Swedes—the two men she had fed all those months ago. Halfway up the tunnel, they stopped, expertly plucked off their skis, and laid them against their shoulders before continuing.

  Cooper watched as Sal and the Swedes reached the top of the tunnel. Sal’s triumphant smile disappeared when he saw Cooper’s face. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just—I thought you were lost,” she replied, trying to sound calm, trying not to throw herself on him. “You didn’t answer your radio. We called for you over and over. I was worried.”

  “Shit, I’m sorry,” he said. “I lost my radio somewhere between the north and northwest quads. Then I found these guys. When I saw them coming in, I thought I was hallucinating.”

  By this time, a knot of people had gathered around to get a better look at the skiers as they loaded their gear onto Bozer’s snowmobile. One of them had pulled out the familiar Swedish flag that Cooper had last seen draped atop a ski. She and Sal continued toward the galley, where the supplies were being carried for inspection. “Why are they here?” Cooper asked, though she hardly cared.

  “They were camping at the Japanese base when they heard about the shutdown,” Sal replied. “They felt it was their duty as international citizens to show support—they say they’re loaded with goodies from Dome Fuji. I hope they brought mochi.”

  But Cooper barely heard what Sal was saying. She couldn’t stop looking at him. It was as if he had been raised from the dead, as if she had spotted a lone figure waving at her from across the Beardsmore.