South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  Inside the galley, chaos reigned. The Polies ripped open the crates with crowbars and the handles of metal soup ladles. There were thirty-pound bags of yellow onions, tins of instant coffee, canned cheese, and an entire pallet of gold foil–covered military rations, each containing a half-pound of beef, dried biscuits, and dehydrated potatoes. Doc Carla picked through the medical supplies, while Dwight sifted through the various DVDs and produced an old cassette tape of the Red Army Choir’s greatest hits.

  Nothing had been packed especially well, and a box of powdered tomato soup in cups had exploded, covering its crate with a fine red dust. But in the last box, lovingly packed within three layers of bubble wrap and placed in a bed of straw, Alek discovered sixteen bottles of ice-cold Russian vodka—Green Mark. His joy was equaled only by his teary-eyed nostalgia at hearing the strains of the Red Army Choir’s “Song of the Volga Boatmen” trudging out of the speakers.

  * * *

  It took twelve hours for news of the Russian airdrop, and the unexpected Swedish delegation, to hit the news cycle. The Kremlin was quick to trumpet its act of philanthropy, while the Swedish station on Dronning Maud Land sent out a press release praising its countrymen for their hardiness. Soon, offers of help were coming in from the Kiwis at Scott Base, the Uruguayans on King George Island, the Indian scientists at Bharati Station on the Antarctic Peninsula, and the French Polies working through the winter at Dumont d’Urville. The Brits at Halley Research Station were more circumspect, seeing that they were literally floating on an ice shelf in the Weddell Sea.

  The Polies gathered in Comms, save for Sal and Alek, who remained bunkered in the Dark Sector, as Dwight read the statement from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had come in over the wire.

  “‘The world watches as a two-party government stalemate holds international science hostage. The People’s Republic of China offers the scientists currently abandoned at the American research base in Antarctica full logistic and scientific support for its threatened experiments, many of which have global importance.’”

  As everyone exited Comms, murmuring excitedly, Dwight pulled Cooper aside. “An e-mail came in for you,” he said. Dwight’s regular corpse-like pallor had gone ghostlier, and Cooper’s stomach lurched.

  “Is somebody dead?”

  “No,” Dwight replied. “But someone’s charade might be.” He handed her a folded printout.

  To: Amundsen_Scott_Comms@nsf.gov

  From: fpavano@freedom.edu

  Subject: Attn: Cooper Gosling

  Dear Cooper,

  I’ve clung to the root for too long. I refuse to drown. I’ve ceased my activity on behalf of Bayless and Calhoun. I know it’s too late, but I hope it helps.

  Sincerely,

  Frank Pavano

  De Pere Post Gazette

  March 24, 2004

  De Pere Students’ Correspondence with South Pole Scientist Comes to Abrupt End

  Did you know that Antarctica is the largest desert in the world? Did you know that in winter, no planes can fly in or out of South Pole? Do you know how to build a snow trench?

  Every year, the fourth grade students at Marshall Elementary School study Antarctica during their unit on the earth’s polar regions. But this year, their studies had been enhanced with personal correspondence with a scientist living and working at the South Pole.

  Dr. Sal Brennan, a thirty-six-year-old astrophysicist from Princeton, had been communicating with the students via e-mail since September. He sent pictures and answered questions about his life on the cold, desolate continent. However, the students found their Polar unit merging into their U.S. Government and Civics unit when Dr. Brennan told them that, as a federally funded scientist, his experiment would be shut down as a result of the current standoff between Congress and the National Science Foundation.

  “The students were thrilled by Dr. Brennan’s e-mails,” noted their teacher, Carlotta Beardsley. “They were constantly thinking up questions for him, and they’d enjoyed sending him e-mails about what they’ve been learning.”

  When the students learned of the decision made by several scientists, including Dr. Brennan, to remain at South Pole Station in violation of the government’s evacuation order, and federal law, a lively debate ensued in the classroom, Beardsley said. “We are all heartbroken that politics have affected his ability to conduct research, but at the same time, it’s a teachable moment for the students. We debated whether Dr. Brennan had done the right thing by staying and about what would be lost to the global scientific community if he’d left.”

  According to student Griffin Wakefield, Dr. Brennan was putting himself and others in danger. “I just thought, you have to do what the government says. What if he runs out of fuel or food?” Fellow student Diani Soltau, however, thought Dr. Brennan was doing the right thing: “You can’t just restart an experiment. I think I would do the same thing if I’d spent so many years working on something.”

  the riemann hypothesis

  Sal hadn’t been sleeping much. It was Sri, back in Madison, tussling with lawyers and subpoenas. It was Lisa and her team, who’d reluctantly left the joint experiment in his hands. It was his stake in the experiment—cyclic universe or bust—now in its final year, the third. Three. Pythagoras’ “noblest” number—the only number to equal the sum of all the terms below it.

  Both experiments rushed forward now, in their waning stages, like binary stars mid-collapse. The e-mails poured into Sal’s in-box, an engorged river of inquiries. From Kavli at Stanford, from Lebedev in Moscow, from Princeton—even from CERN. From the journalist-geeks, from the bloggers, from New Scientist and Scientific American. And then the e-mails from the Russians at Vostok volunteering to provide telescope techs, even to travel overland to do it. Or the Chinese, who offered to send their own team of physicists from Zhongshan via sleds. Sal assumed the U.S. government would see these particular offers as posturing, but he knew better. This went beyond secretariats and embassies and politics—this was science. Everyone who mattered knew what was at stake.

  Now Alek was sitting on a folding chair, his hands between his knees, tears trickling down his face. Sal looked around the lab. The fluorescents sounded like cicadas; one bulb flickered, trying to die. The hard drives hummed ceaselessly. And above him, the telescope clicked as it rotated on its plate on the roof, searching the sky, looking for the curls in the polarized cosmic background radiation that the inflationary theorists had been so desperate to find, and which he had, it seemed, found for them.

  Sal and Alek had been up for forty-two hours straight. They had not eaten anything besides stale Chex Mix and Mountain Dew, and had ignored all faxes and e-mails, except one. Sal had just hung up after a four-hour phone call with Peter Sokoloff, his boss and mentor at Princeton, going over data Lisa and her team hadn’t yet seen, because they were back in Palo Alto, waiting to hear from Sal. He knew the rumors had been flying for months already—particle physicists, cosmologists, and astronomers all over the world seemed to sense something big was going to happen at the Dark Sector. That the research station was officially shut down—in “caretaking mode” while simultaneously being “occupied”—only made the anticipation more intense.

  Dwight had set up the call to Sokoloff, and had kept the satellite clear for the four hours it had taken for Sal to painstakingly read out the data, line by line, to his mentor. When he was done, there had been an excruciatingly long pause.

  “It’s five-sigma, Peter.”

  There was another long pause. “Does Lisa know yet?”

  “No.”

  Sokoloff sighed. Sal imagined the sigh leaving Sokoloff’s lips, then bouncing off the pockmarked MARISAT-F2 satellite two hundred miles above the Earth’s atmosphere, before diving into the GOES satellite’s terminal just outside the Dark Sector. “This could just be synchrotron radiation or light scattering from galactic dust,” Sokoloff had finally said. “It’s too early to hand out Nobels.”

  But Sal had heard the cha
nge in Sokoloff’s voice. Uncertainty. Not of the scientific variety—hell, that was their native language. No, this was uncertainty of the personal kind. Before they got off the phone, Sokoloff had added, “Tell your father before anyone else. Let him be the first to know.”

  “You know he won’t understand,” Sal replied.

  “No, Sal,” came Sokoloff’s voice from the satellite. “That is the one thing he will understand. I’ll call Lisa and hold her off until this sequester business is resolved. Do this in person.”

  * * *

  “There is a theory, which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

  Sal tossed the Douglas Adams book onto his dorm bed. The man was creative, Sal remembered thinking as he swilled down the dregs of a warm Budweiser, but a scientific illiterate. It was only years later, when Sal had learned to take the long view, that he understood Adams’s genius. And it wasn’t until this season at South Pole Station that Sal realized how prescient Adams’s words were, how they seemed to speak specifically to this experiment, to this shutdown, to the appearance of Frank Pavano. After all, it was Adams who had heralded Pavano’s arrival into Sal’s life, because the moment Sal had tossed The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy onto his bed had also been the precise moment his new roommate had walked into their dorm room at Stanford’s Roble Hall. Gangly and skinny, with eyes wide and penetrating as an owl’s, the kid had stood there, frozen, unsure of what to say. By this time, Sal was familiar with the common anxieties of the nerd, so he reached between his legs and drew another beer from the six-pack. “They’re warm, but who cares, right?” he said, holding it out.

  Down the hall, someone turned his boom box to maximum volume and indistinguishable heavy metal filled the hallways. This seemed to shake the kid out of his catatonia, and he stepped into the room and shut the door behind him.

  “No, thanks,” he said, his voice as raspy as a two-string violin.

  Sal shrugged and put the beer back. He wiped his hand on the leg of his jeans and stuck out his hand. “Sal Brennan.”

  The boy set his duffel down gingerly, as if it contained a hundred Fabergé eggs, and cautiously shook Sal’s hand. “I’ve heard of you.” His gaze was unexpectedly direct, and it lasted too long.

  “Everyone has,” Sal replied. “I’ve basically lived here since I was a toddler.”

  “You’re Brennan’s son,” Pavano said.

  “That’s me. You are?”

  “Francis Pavano. You can call me Frank if you want.”

  So this was the prodigy from Indiana whom his father had been stalking for the past four years. He had expected a dark-haired Italian kid, not this cut-glass automaton. So this, Sal thought, was what Midwestern genius looked like.

  He slapped the bottom bunk he was sitting on. “I took this one. You okay with the top?”

  Pavano nodded silently and picked his duffel up again. “Don’t you live in Palo Alto?”

  “Born and bred.”

  “Why are you living in the dorms?”

  “I spend twenty out of twenty-four hours with my father. I need to be able to escape for the other four.”

  Pavano nodded again and approached the bunk. Sal watched as he gripped the ladder and shook it, assessing its stability. Convinced it was structurally sound, Pavano set his bag on the desk under the window. He turned and gazed at Sal for a long, awkward minute. Finally, Sal took the hint. “I can come back.”

  Pavano seemed greatly relieved by the offer. “Thanks, I’ll only be a minute.”

  Sal took longer than necessary to leave. There was something about the kid that held him there. He wasn’t a thief. He wasn’t a pervert. He was a ninety-nine-point-ninety-niner. Behind heavy-rimmed glasses, his round, girlish eyes regarded Sal as if he were a bibelot catching the light. He was a Jehovah’s Witness without Jehovah, only the unsettling gaze of a witness.

  Sal spent the afternoon at the physics building on Lomita Mall, where his father and the post-docs were feverishly trying to finish the last draft of a proposal for an independent lab, which had been in the works for a decade—it was going to be called Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, after the major donor, and was tentatively sited in Santa Barbara on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Professor Brennan waved Sal into his office, where the other favored undergrads were going over data from an ongoing joint experiment at South Pole that would, it was hoped, eventually confirm that dark energy had driven the universe apart at accelerating speeds. Sal worked on the outputs for a while, but his mind kept returning to his strange new roommate.

  “You’re distracted,” his father said without looking up from his computer, “and now you’re proving a distraction. What is it?” The other physics students looked up at Sal. He hated them—hated the way they quieted down whenever his father walked into the room, the way they guarded their words, the way they answered him with an upswing in their voice, as if they were unwilling, or afraid, to say anything with finality in his presence.

  “Nothing,” Sal replied. Simultaneously, the undergrads turned to look at Professor Brennan. The professor kept his eyes on his computer screen. “Speak or leave,” he said. “I cannot have distractions.”

  “Met my roommate today.”

  At this, the senior Brennan looked over at his son. “Ah, so he’s arrived.”

  “You know him?”

  “Of course—I arranged it all with the bursar. Francis Pavano. We’re trying to coax him into particle physics. He’s a gifted science mind, Sal. We just need to convince him that inflation is far more interesting than plasma physics.”

  “He wants to do heliophysics?” Sal asked, incredulous. “Matthews is a crank.”

  “Your influence would be much appreciated.”

  Sal groaned. “I have enough eccentrics in my life.”

  “Please try to remember that in this world, you’re the outlier.”

  Sal got back to work, but found, after a few minutes, that he still couldn’t concentrate. He looked over at his father, who was perusing the latest WMAP results. “Fine, I’ll talk to him, see if I can coax him away from Matthews.”

  His father turned slowly from his computer and said, “Who?”

  None of the students dared to look up from their work. “Pavano,” Sal said.

  After a moment—no more than a second, but a second too long—his father nodded. “Yes, please do talk to him. Tell him more about Kavli. I imagine for someone of his caliber, it would be quite an inducement.”

  When Sal returned to the dorm, the halls were quiet—it was dinnertime, and everyone had left for the cafeteria. When he unlocked the door and walked in, he saw that Pavano was standing at the window in front of a desktop easel, shirtless, his glasses atop his head. Pavano seemed unsurprised to see him.

  “You okay, man?” Sal asked.

  “I’m painting,” Pavano said, gesturing toward the canvas on his easel. “I hope that’s okay.”

  Sal dropped his backpack under his bunk. “You paint?”

  “Occasionally,” Pavano said. “It’s just a hobby.”

  Sal walked over to where Pavano was working and looked at the painting. The canvas was daubed in bright, almost blinding white oil paint. A tidy black line split the painting neatly in half. Sal took a step closer and squinted. The left half of the canvas was blank. The right half of the canvas was filled with tiny equations and mathematical formulas. Sal recognized Euler’s equation, standard-model Lagrangian, an attempt to render infinite pi—the typical doodlings of a mathematics nerd in love with the most elevated equations in the discipline. He was about to walk away from the canvas when he spotted it: unmistakable in its beauty and impenetrability.

  The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. The Riemann hypothesis, which extended Euler’s zeta function to the entire complex plane. Sa
l had lost interest in the distribution of the primes when he was in junior high, but it remained one of the great unproved theorems—any mathematician recognized it the way others would recognize a stop sign at an intersection. Still, it struck Sal as overly fussy that Pavano had included it in whatever was sitting on the easel. No, it was more than that. It seemed a desecration.

  “What do you think?” Pavano asked.

  “What do I think? I think it’s the work of a beginner,” Sal said. “A beginner painter and a beginner mathematician.”

  Pavano gazed back at Sal, his face a pale lake. Sal sat down at his bunk. The painting haunted the room like a squatter, whose presence was impossible to ignore. He knew he was being a dick, and he wasn’t sure why, but seeing the Riemann on Pavano’s canvas disturbed him. It was like seeing a classmate doing a nude life study of his mother.

  “Put on a fucking shirt, man,” Sal said. Pavano complied immediately, retrieving his shirt from the back of his chair. “I hear you want to go into heliophysics.”

  “I’m considering it.”

  “You know, heliophysics is like one step up from cybernetics,” Sal said, glancing over at the painting again. “And Matthews is a fringe-riding lunatic who is only here because he’s a fossil.” Pavano remained impassive. “My father says you turned him down. Why?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  Sal scoffed. “You think choosing Matthews over my father is the best course of action?”

  Pavano paused uncertainly. “I do.”

  “Why?”

  Again, Pavano hesitated. “I don’t think Professor Brennan can meet my needs as a scholar.”

  Sal laughed. “My father will win the Nobel prize when they find b-modes, and they will.”

  “It’s not that. It’s that…” Pavano looked at Sal for a moment before turning away.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s just that—I’ve spent a great deal of time with your father now, and I believe he’s suffering from some form of dementia. Early stages, of course, but it’s there. I saw it most vividly last spring when I spent that weekend with the department.”