“He’s nerdy enough to fit in,” Cooper said.
Denise shook her head. “No, he’s a walking example of the Black Sheep Effect. In cultural groups, like the one here, people will upgrade certain group members based on culturally desirable traits or likability. Look at Marcy, the heavy machine operator, for instance. Because years on the ice are culturally valuable, Marcy is a high-status individual. Off the ice, that might not be true.” She opened her laptop, and Cooper saw the background photo was set to a photo of Bozer standing on a beach in thermal socks and sandals. “The flip side is that the ‘in-group’ will keep group members who threaten the group’s cohesion on the outside, making them into a separate out-group. A black sheep.”
“Why would this guy be a black sheep?”
Denise looked at Cooper, confused. “A climate-change skeptic working at the world’s foremost climatology and atmospheric science research site is not likely to be warmly welcomed by the existing group.”
So Alarmism and the Climate Change Hoax wasn’t the opposition research material Cooper had assumed it to be. It was actually research material. Pavano. Suddenly all those outraged comments on the “South Pole Pals” message board she’d scanned six months earlier made sense. “Wait, is this the guy who’s trying to prove that the ice under the Pole isn’t all that old and could totally fall in line with the whole Noah’s Flood thing?”
Denise stared back at her blandly. “No, I believe that’s the working hypothesis of a biblical climatologist in Australia whose name I don’t recall. I don’t know much about Pavano’s research yet, only that his findings set him in direct opposition to the vast majority of climate researchers around the world. The rumors surrounding the provenance of his funding only add fuel to the fire.”
Everything was coming together now, and Cooper was cheered by the fact that some of the weird social interactions she’d witnessed were starting to seem a little less puzzling. At breakfast a week earlier, for example, people had been talking about how one of the head climate researchers, a paleoclimatologist from Madison named Sri, kept “forgetting” to get “the Denier” a username and password for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet data server. When Sri and his team had hopped a plane for the research camp—known as the Divide—they had removed the Denier’s name from the manifest. It was treated as a joke, and no one was disciplined. But the Denier—Pavano, Cooper now realized—had contacted his congressional sponsor, a Republican senator Cooper thought she’d heard of named Bayless, who promptly called his contact at the NSF, and Pavano was immediately shuttled out to the camp and given full access to the ice archives, the lab, and, at Bayless’s request, Sri’s research site.
Cooper dropped her brushes in a can of turpentine. “Well, it sounds complicated,” she said as Denise sat down to begin work.
“All social interaction is complicated, of course, but down here it’s even more so, which is what makes my job so fun,” Denise replied. “I’m waiting to see if metaphorical effects are amplified at a place like Pole. You know, the idea that holding a cup of hot tea makes people feel warmly toward others, or that a person in a high place, like a cherry picker, is seen as being situated farther up the hierarchy. Last year, Lee and Schwartz found that when exposed to a fishy smell, people actually grow suspicious.” Denise glanced over at Cooper. “In sociological terms, you might say that Frank Pavano is a just-opened can of tuna.”
A very slight smile was the only indication that Denise had made her first joke.
*
Back at the Jamesways, Cooper found a note under her door from Birdie indicating that there was an artists’ meeting in thirty minutes. Cooper groaned, but she knew Birdie was counting on her to be there. Before leaving her room, she saw her Terra Nova sketch had fallen from the canvas wall, where she’d pinned it. She set it on her desk and studied it for a moment. Her sketches were often the products of procrastination, but Cooper kept coming back to this one—so many times, in fact, that she had completed it. Who knew what it meant? All Cooper knew was that looking at it made her feel better. She pulled on her balaclava and parka for the trek back to the station.
As she hurried out, she accidentally nudged her pee can with her boot. She heard sloshing and realized she’d have to empty it. If she waited another day, she could have a biological disaster on her hands. Pee cans were one of the many secrets veterans kept from Fingys, but after Cooper’s act of civil disobedience with the Swedes, she’d apparently garnered some social capital; Pearl had left an empty #10 can, once filled with industrial-grade cling peaches, outside the door of Cooper’s room, with a note thanking her for not selling her out to Simon. Now Cooper no longer had to venture outside the Jamesway to use the bathroom, which was located in a separate structure a hundred yards east. However, she still had to walk over there to empty the can into the communal pee barrel.
Reluctantly, she picked up the can with her mittens and pushed the door open with her shoulder. She immediately collided with a man dressed in full ECW gear and watched as at least a quarter cup of her urine splashed onto his bunny boots. His woolen face mask and neck gaiter muffled his angry roar, and Cooper hurried past him before he could get a good look at her, grateful for the anonymity provided by the balaclava and the darkness of the hall.
After emptying the can into a barrel and tucking it into a corner to avoid having to return to the Jamesway, she turned to the warped mirror, and cleared a swath through the condensation. It was time to see how she was faring in terms of polar aesthetics. The rule of thumb, she now knew, was that someone who was a “five” off the ice was easily an “Antarctic Ten.” Cooper squinted at her reflection: her infected eye, which had looked like a gelatinous bead for a week, was totally healed. Her hair was so oily it had darkened a few shades—two-minute showers twice a week meant thorough shampooing was now a luxury. Her shaggy bangs fell across her eyes. As she stared at her reflection, she felt she embodied the very definition of the word mediocre. She noticed a waffle crumb in the corner of her mouth, and as she flicked it free, her brother’s face suddenly seemed to inhabit hers, staring back at her through her own eyes. She gripped the sides of the sink to steady her suddenly weak knees and quickly closed her eyes against the image.
“You meditating or something?” Cooper opened her eyes to see Marcy.