As she retched, he kept his eyes fixed on a Robert Crumb Tommy the Toilet poster taped on the wall above the sink. Tommy Toilet sez: Don’t forget to wipe your ass, folks.
Tommy the Toilet was who Tucker thought of now as he listened to Doc Carla tell him that she’d have to send Marcy home. “NPQ,” she added. He winced. No acronym in the polar lexicon was more feared than this—Not Physically Qualified. He knew sending Marcy off the ice was their only course of action, but he also knew that an NPQ on her record would make it very hard for her to return to the ice. If the cause was recorded as pregnancy, she’d never be back.
“Who have you told?” Tucker asked Doc Carla.
“Who have I told? I’m a vault. I’ve told no one. But she has to go.”
Doc Carla waited for Tucker to reply. When he didn’t, she said, “I’m glad we agree.” She shifted on the metal steps leading to her clinic and craned her neck to look at the frost fronds hanging from the ceiling of the Dome. “Ah.”
“What?”
“I’m just thinking how fun it’ll be telling her she’s going home. The woman has nothing in life except this shithole.” Tucker thought but did not say that this was one thing he and Marcy had in common.
After leaving Doc Carla, Tucker took a walk around the outside perimeter of the station to think. He stopped at the construction site for a while to watch Bozer and his team, which included Marcy, assemble the mezzanine stairs to the A3 module. He wondered what it would be like running the new and improved South Pole Station while watching this one sink under the snow. For a moment, he was overcome by sadness.
Just beyond the site, he saw Cooper and Sal talking out on the road to the Dark Sector. He almost smiled; he liked when the young people got together. Back in Denver, Sal had announced that he was planning on celibacy this time around. Everyone knew how much he had at stake this season, even those Polies who had failed science. Tucker had made a point during training to explain to the support staff that this was an unusually important season for the Dark Sector—one cosmology experiment in particular was in the final stages of long-term research that could possibly confirm or destroy the inflationary theory of the universe. It was, Sal had told Tucker, unprecedented that physicists researching two different models would work on the same experiment: Sal and his team from Princeton were working jointly with the Kavli team from Stanford, both looking for something called b-modes.
The Californians, who moved about the station as a unit, were disciples of Sal’s father, the great physicist John Brennan. They were Big Bangers. Sal, on the other hand, had thrown his fortunes in with another pioneer scientist who fervently felt that the evidence pointed toward something called the cyclic model, in which there was no Big Bang, but rather a series of collisions between membranes—the universe being one of those “branes” and the other being just a hop, skip, and a jump across an invisible dimension. There was more, of course, but Tucker had forbid further discussion when Sal started talking about “pre-Planckian predictions of dust.”
The radio squealed. It was Comms. Dwight shouted something—every other word was lost in static. But Tucker had heard enough to get the gist of things: there was a phone call for him in the office, and, as all phone calls to the station manager typically were, it was urgent.
“I’ve got two unhappy congressmen on my ass,” Karl Martin said when Tucker finally picked up the satellite phone in the communications office. “You need to open the kimono and tell me what the hell is going on with this—what’s his name?” Tucker could hear Karl searching through some papers.
“Pavano. Frank. There have been some minor tensions between the scientists, but nothing out of the ordinary,” Tucker said. “Standard territorial posturing.”
“Well, I don’t know what the hell that means, Tucker, but these guys, they floated the term ‘hostile working environment’—at which point I brought in Legal. What’s going on down there?”
“I’ve received no complaints. The grantee has been assigned a lab and is taking full advantage of the facilities.” Tucker chose not to mention the T-shirts, the petition, and the ruthless ostracism at meals. He heard voices in the background and the moist sound of a sweaty palm squeezing the mouthpiece of the phone. “I’ve gotta run into this meeting,” Karl said, “but get Scaletta on the horn—she’s been getting an earful, too, but she’s not returning my calls. See if you can put this fire out.”
Tucker had tried for months to get Scaletta’s input on the situation with Dr. Frank Pavano, but the NSF had remained silent on the matter. Tucker had thought it wise to add diversity workshops to the mandatory training for research techs who supported the major experiments. Turned out it was far easier for white male scientists to accept colleagues with dark skin or vaginas or both than it was for them to accept the presence of a climate denier in their midst. In fact, all the scientists, regardless of ethnicity or gender identity, hated Pavano, even before meeting him. Meeting him personally, it seemed, was beside the point. As a result, resistance to the training sessions tailored to prepare the support staff for Pavano’s arrival was intense, and buy-in was nonexistent. To make things worse, Pavano had been unable to secure a research tech, which meant he’d be responsible for all aspects of his research project, including operations, repairs, and soul-crushing amounts of paperwork.
Pavano himself had been given extra counseling by one of the senior psychologists, and when Tucker had asked how it’d gone, she’d said, “He’s basically autistic.”
“That,” Tucker had replied, “will work to his benefit.”
It was only when the two congressmen who’d sponsored Pavano’s efforts to get to Pole held a joint news conference that Tucker received a call from Scaletta.
“I dropped the ball on this one.” She sighed. “Bayless and Calhoun promised to keep the grant on the down-low. Now they’re on fucking Fox & Friends talking about methane isotope variability in deep ice cores—a concept I can assure you they don’t understand, much less pronounce correctly.”
“I think we have it under control,” Tucker said.
“I knew you would. But I do need to say this: it’s vitally important to the Program and to the NSF itself that Dr. Pavano’s research is unimpeded, and that all previously agreed-upon resources be made available to him.” She paused. “I know that’s not technically your purview—”
“I understand.”
“I’d also like to minimize media interest in his research. I’m hoping this will die down.”
After handing the sat phone back to Dwight, Tucker stared at the collection of Star Wars figurines that the comms tech had arranged fussily on his desk. He imagined Dwight reverently bubble-wrapping Yoda and Darth Vader before placing them in the corners of his duffel bag for the trip to Pole. The thought cheered him briefly.
“Everything okay?” Dwight asked.