South Pole Station

by Ashley Shelby

  Sal gripped the edge of his bunk. Something deep in his brain told him to run, to leave the room as quickly as possible and pretend he hadn’t heard what Pavano had just said. But he was immobilized. “My father is the top theoretical physicist in the world, you idiot.”

  “Yes, of course,” Pavano said quietly. “But Matthews agrees with me. As do other members of the faculty.”

  Sal realized he was now standing. His body ached with rage. He wanted to wrap his hands around Pavano’s skinny throat, crush the protuberant Adam’s apple, hear vertebrae crackle beneath his fingers. Pavano took a step back. When he saw Sal stalking toward him, he retreated even farther until he was up against the cool cinder-block wall.

  Sal’s eyes fell on Pavano’s Riemann hypothesis again, and, without thinking, he grabbed the canvas off the easel and put his foot through it, throwing the ruined painting at Pavano. It landed with a thud. Pavano’s eyes—freakish and clear as glass—merely gazed back at him.

  Sal returned to the physics building that night. It was deserted, but the lab was, as always, open. He spent two hours going over the day’s data coming in from the South Pole Telescope, but found it hard, once again, to concentrate. He hated Frank Pavano with every cell in his body—hated his unnaturally smooth face, his hollow cheeks, his cavernous, simian eyes. He hated how his father had pursued him with a cupidity that was embarrassing, and which stimulated in Sal persistent envy.

  Mostly, he hated that Pavano was right.

  * * *

  Somewhere, melted snow dripped down an exterior wall; Sal could hear the quiet growl of Bozer’s snow mover digging out the construction site. The roar of machines had diminished to occasional animal-like noises as Bozer, Marcy, and Floyd struggled to keep both the station and the site from being buried. Sal missed the din. Hearing the discordant sounds of construction had been a comfort to him over the last seven months. Here, in the lab, the sounds of progress were less straightforward—in fact, they were damn near inaudible. The only proof you were getting closer to the truth, it seemed, was the chatter of an overworked desktop computer with a stuck spindle.

  His laptop pinged, and Sal scooted his chair past Alek to look at his e-mail. It was another message from the NSF. It was, like all of the missives since the occupation had begun, marked URGENT. Sal forwarded it to Dwight without reading it, same as all of the other e-mails he’d received from government agencies. He would deal with the fallout later. Right now, he had to take care of this.

  Alek had fallen asleep sitting up. Sal stepped past him again and lay down on the floor. The inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable. Hence, it’s scientifically meaningless. Sokoloff had said this so many times that Sal had told him it was going to be his next tattoo. As he stared at the ceiling, he tried to convince himself that his mentor was right, that they could play the uncertainty card and keep the cyclic theory on life support. But wasn’t that exactly what Pavano and his ilk were doing? Promoting doubt in the face of uncertainty? Five-sigma, they’d found. Less than one chance in 3.5 million that those b-modes—those curls—were a random occurrence. Less than one chance in 3.5 million that the universe hadn’t unfolded exactly the way the inflationists said.

  God, the fucking inflationists. They hated the name—it was an insult—and although he used it with abandon, Sal knew this was childish. For some reason, he always thought of the inflationists as balloonists—foppish men in top hats gazing down at the rabble as they ascended, their bony hands gripping the side of the basket. Of course, that was ridiculous—most of the men and women who felt the standard model was as close to truth as science could get were just like him. The most passionate among them were his father’s acolytes. And maybe that’s why he hated them—the balloonists—the ones who were able to float away on the winds of a scientifically problematic theory.

  He would stay here, rooted to the ice, and do whatever he could to dismantle it. The inflationary theory was unwieldy, made up of disparate parts, and covered with ugly surgical scars. One of the very first things Sal’s father had taught him was that truth was elegant because it was simple. The universe itself was simple—fundamental physics was simple—and the theory could not be more complex than the universe it described. But the inflationists had fine-tuned their theory until it was a Frankenstein’s monster. It was this half-dead thing that his father had expected him and the other bright young minds in cosmology to elevate to natural law.

  Sokoloff had taught Sal that the truth does not need fine-tuning. This theory—the Big Bang—was not simple, and so Sal knew it was not true, no matter if they’d found “proof” of the b-modes. His model—the cyclic universe model—was so stunning, so elegant, that when Sal heard Sokoloff and Turner speak about it at the monthly Joint Theoretical Seminar at Princeton, he’d felt woozy. But when he looked around the room at the other physicists, he saw nothing but rolled eyes and open skepticism.

  After the seminar, Sal had rushed down to the podium and grabbed Sokoloff by the sleeve. “Doc, it’s a fucking phoenix.” Sokoloff was amused. He even laughed.

  “I’ve never heard it put that way,” he’d said, “but you’re absolutely right. Can we sell it like that?”

  What Sokoloff and Turner were saying, and what no one in the room besides Sal was willing to at least consider, was that the universe built its own funeral pyre and stepped into the flames, destroying itself only to be reborn. It was engaged in an endless cycle with endless variations, of which this one—this moment, this life—was nothing more than chance, the result of a hip check with the universe on the other side of a minuscule gap.

  At dinner that night, Sokoloff reminded Sal of the weaknesses of the inflationary theory—weaknesses Sal’s father had brushed aside as trivial. The standard model could tell us what had happened between the Big Bang and the universe as we currently know it, but it could not tell us what would happen next. Perhaps more important, it could not explain, and in fact even disdained, the very idea of exploring what had happened before. Sokoloff and Turner’s model could. Sal’s father had, somewhat famously, no patience for questions like this. “Let’s leave that to the preschoolers and the Baptists and focus on finding b-modes,” he’d said when Sal returned from Princeton that summer. “Don’t get seduced by contrarians. They exist in every discipline of science.” But Sokoloff wasn’t a contrarian. He’d actually been an architect of the inflationary theory himself. Sal’s father was right about one thing, though—Sal had been seduced.

  By this time, Sal was heir apparent at the Kavli Institute for Particle Physics and Cosmology, which his father had spent the last ten years trying to build. What Frank Pavano had seen five years earlier was now an open secret: the mind of the eminent physicist had slowly been spackled with plaques. Alzheimer’s. Pavano, having chosen another university for his doctorate when Matthews retired, was now publishing on wave oscillations in the Midwest.

  Sal opposed his mother’s desire to hide the truth from his father’s colleagues and devoted students, though he also understood the impulse. He allowed her to believe he was in agreement, but he knew better. He had to tell—otherwise the changes his father had undergone would become part of his biography rather than seen as the pathologies they were. Especially because it was no longer heterotic string theory that spoke to his father; it was strange pop culture conspiracy theories that sometimes seemed to share the same DNA. They had the resonance of fairy tales, and the deeper they resonated, the more plausible they became.

  This was true: at South Pole an enormous telescopic mouth gaped at the heavens, swallowing invisible particles that tiny scientists then examined in the machine’s underground gut. The particles carried information from a place 13 billion years away. They told, or would tell, of a universe sprung from a singularity, where equations break down and energy is infinite.

  This was not true: a system of caves and caverns traversed the earth’s mantle beneath the ice of Antarctica—polar voids where an anti-civilization thrived, where, if our civ
ilization were to encounter it, the two would annihilate each other, like matter and anti-matter. Hitler was a believer of the Hollow Earth theory. In fact, some believe he is there now, having been escorted via U-boat by a German sailor, who located the narrow underwater passageway (wormhole?) on an expedition to South Pole.

  Both were fabulist tales. Only one was true. Knowing which was which, Sal realized, was the difference between lucidity and dementia, and his father was now on the wrong side. After the now-infamous evening physics lecture, in which Professor Brennan had deviated from a talk on the Calabi-Yau manifold to consider the role that the Argentine naval base at Mar del Plata had played in Hitler’s escape to the German Antarctic city-base buried deep beneath the ice, the provost had asked Sal to come up with a “plan of action.” The “plan of action” was meant to allow Professor Brennan to retire “with some degree of dignity.”

  A year later, on the day of the phone call Sal had received from the MacArthur Foundation notifying him that his work at Kavli had earned him a “genius grant,” Sal found his mother bent over the kitchen counter, trying to glue a plate back together. Her hands were shaking. Sal quietly picked up the remaining shards piece by piece and dropped them into the trash, leaving only the one, which his mother still had between her fingers and could not seem to let go.

  Upstairs, Sal found his father ensconced in his study, a sun-filled room on the top floor of their California Mission-style home. He was standing at the large window that overlooked the pool, an unintentional infinity symbol filled with sparkling blue water.

  “Your mother tells me you have good news,” Professor Brennan said suddenly.

  “MacArthur likes the new model for radiatively induced symmetry breaking I introduced last year.” The words were bitter in Sal’s mouth. He tried again. “The model plays,” he said, hoping a joke would remove the taste, but his father didn’t respond. Sal wondered if he could slip away unnoticed. Outside, a car honked, and Professor Brennan leaned into the glass, straining toward the sound. Sal noticed for the first time that the room smelled like old man. He looked around at the bursting bookcases, the crystal awards, the framed degrees; the photo of Sal as a boy in a baseball uniform, his hair a mass of red-blond curls, his smile a series of gaps.

  Sal saw, then, that his father had turned from the window and was looking at him. His eyes were clear. They were fixed on Sal’s face. Sal gazed back at the strong jaw, the broad, deeply lined forehead, the prominent but structurally perfect nose. He wanted nothing more at that moment than for his father to embrace him. Then the horn honked again, and the interstice dissolved.

  Sal went down to South Pole for Kavli that fall, the fall of 1999, to work on Viper, the telescope run by the guys at the University of Chicago. Sal knew then that this would be the last time he’d look for proof that the standard model of the universe was correct. Later, when the first installment of the MacArthur money was deposited into his account, he wrote a check for the entire amount, made out to the Kavli Foundation. Now he was free.

  Two days after writing that check, four months after returning from his first research season at Pole, eight months after Professor Brennan had quietly retired, and sixteen months after talking to Sokoloff that night in Princeton, Sal left Stanford. When his mother asked him where he was going, he told her he was following the phoenix.

  * * *

  Sal didn’t hear Cooper come into the lab. He must have fallen asleep, because she was squatting down next to him, her fur-lined hood framing her beautiful face. “They’ve been trying to get you over All-Call for the last fifteen minutes. Something’s happened.” She looked over at Alek, who had awakened and resumed his silent weeping. “What’s going on? Why’s Alek crying?”

  Sal rolled over on his side and from his back pocket pulled the folded paper Alek had given him ten hours earlier. He handed it to Cooper and watched her scan it, her dark eyes moving from word to word. He knew it would mean nothing to her, and he was envious of her ignorance—Alek’s tears would do more than anything to tell her what was on this piece of paper.

  Cooper sat down next to Sal and looked at him questioningly. He pointed to the symbol that Alek had circled three times in brown marker, the color of each ring growing deeper as his fury strengthened his grip. Together, they looked at it.

  5

  ∑

  Sal looked again and again and, as before, he couldn’t stop. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life, and it was also the most disappointing. “This is why Alek’s crying and you’re on the floor,” Cooper said.

  “Short of finding life on other planets or directly detecting dark matter, it’s the most important discovery in astronomy. It supports a lifetime of theoretical work. And it eliminates my model.”

  As she absorbed this, Sal thought of her question that day she came to his lab, the one he’d dismissed because it was inconvenient: No, I mean how it started before it started. He thought, too, of her paintings, which she’d begun photographing for her NSF portfolio before handing them over to everyone: the one of Pearl, how her golden hair—always hidden under that filthy pink bandanna—coiled around her neck; how her eyes laughed, but how they also clearly belonged to a woman with insatiable ambitions. Doc Carla, startling without her Yankees cap, her eyes fixed on a point in the distance, her entire life, somehow, in those eyes. Bozer, stripped to pith. Denise’s unmistakable sadness. Everyone else, even Alek, even Floyd and Dwight. Everyone else but him.

  But he didn’t wonder why his likeness was not among the portraits; it was obvious that he had not allowed Cooper to truly look at him. He had never minded if the others looked—they couldn’t see like she could. Post-docs, research assistants, waitresses, lawyers. Some understood the work, or pretended to. Some didn’t, and some didn’t even feign interest. It was fine. It was all fine. He took what he needed without being a dick about it, and they got whatever they wanted in return. This history made Sal notorious at Kavli for what was regarded as his “charm”—though in the world of cosmology and particle physics, the bar for charm was admittedly low.

  It helped that he’d taken after his father, with his strong features and tall build, and that from his mother he had inherited the sort of face that women considered attractive (though one girlfriend had assured him that “beauty is neutral”). But what set Sal apart from other cosmologists, particle physicists, astronomers, and all the others who so desperately wanted the world to understand the implications of their work, was that he was bold. He said nothing until he could say it with authority. He hated hedging—framing ideas with conditionals that annihilated them. Margins of error as wide as crevasses, and therefore too dangerous to attempt a crossing. These were the inviolable commandments of science, but they were also the reason that the public paid science so little attention. Scientists were lame messengers, often handing off their findings to their weakest practitioners to share with the world, celebrity scientists who performed a kind of homeopathy that distilled them to nothing, or nearly nothing. He refused to be like them.

  Then Cooper pushed his stupid petition away that day in the cafeteria. Disdainful. Solitary. Like a particle that was also a wave, Sal’s heart was both closed and open. He tried to ignore it, but then she was everywhere. She was in the lab, she was in the equations that Sal still did by hand, she was at the telescope, blotting out the cosmic microwaves. She was outside, walking alone, looking at the sky. Looking. Each day that passed changed something about her, made her more beautiful. A glance in the cafeteria. A very slight smile. A smudge of paint on her cheek. A smart remark. Nothing rational. None of it precise.

  First, he laid her out for Alek, like she was a cadaver in a nineteenth-century medical theater, to prod and insult in every way imaginable. Alek soon tired of this; he felt Cooper was ordinary and therefore inoffensive. Still Sal’s heart thundered for her. You’re distracted, he heard his father saying to him, and now you’re proving a distraction. He could not afford a distraction. Not this season. />
  When the feelings persisted, Sal eventually declared that his intense attraction to Cooper must be evolutionary biology at work. There could be no other explanation. Alek felt strongly that Sal’s vow of chastity for the season was to blame. No, Sal insisted, it had to be biology—millennia ago, he and Cooper must have been part of the same tribe. They would simply have to fuck so he could get back to work. Masturbation would cure this reptilian-brain desire, he thought. But it didn’t.

  Time passed. In the evenings, he drank, and he broke his vow of chastity with that Frosty Boy tech from McMurdo. These encounters typically meant nothing; now they had the sharp taste of betrayal. Although there was no one to betray, the feeling was unshakable. He couldn’t stop thinking of Cooper.

  Then one day, out at the telescopes, as he raved about his cyclic model like a meth-fueled evangelist, she asked why he was the only one who believed it. The question had enraged him, and it was only later—much later, in fact—that he understood why, and then he was even angrier. He was an apostate. So was Sokoloff. And at conferences where he’d seen his old Stanford colleagues, he’d loudly congratulated himself for being one. After all, the fact that a scientist changes his mind is proof that the scientific method works—that they can overcome their affinities for their cherished ideas and thereby protect the integrity of the whole endeavor.

  But when Cooper had asked him why he was the only one who seemed to “believe” in the cyclic model, he grew angry, because instead of thinking of the great apostates of science—Darwin changing his mind on pangenesis, Marcelo Gleiser repudiating his hopes of a unified theory, crusty Fred Hoyle and his steady-state universe foolishness, Peter Sokoloff—Sal thought of Frank Pavano. Pavano, who was unworthy of even speaking Sokoloff’s name. No, Pavano was not an apostate; he was a fraud. He was paid for his conclusions. Worse, Sal was convinced that Pavano didn’t even buy into the pseudoscience he was peddling.