“Well, this is certainly inconspicuous,” Cooper said.
Someone pulled on the door of the library, and after a momentary pause, pulled on it again and again. Cooper wasn’t sure why, but she found the length of time that passed before the person’s hand told his brain that the door was locked hilarious, and started laughing. The door rattled in its frame as the angry Polie pulled and pulled on the doorknob, as if the door were only playing games with him and would open eventually. Cooper could not stop laughing.
“Open the effing door, you ass-joints!” the man shouted. This sent Cooper into fresh hysterics. Sal rubbed his face vigorously and held his hands over his eyes for a moment, trying not to laugh with Cooper. “After finding us here together in a locked room,” he said, “people are gonna think you’re my ice-wife.”
“But you already have one,” Cooper said with a hiccup. “I saw her in your room.”
Sal tilted his head. “Beth? She’s just an ice-friend. Who is returning to McMurdo tomorrow.”
“Finally.”
Without warning, he leaned down so that his face was an inch from Cooper’s. “Does that ease your mind, Fingy?”
“I was very upset,” Cooper said, hoping the obvious sarcasm obscured the truth of this statement. “When I saw her, I was afraid the Frosty Boy had gone on the fritz again.”
Finally, Sal unlocked the door and stepped aside to admit the Star Trek finger-split guys Cooper had seen the first day. They stalked past Cooper, muttering imprecations, Breakout: Normandy in hand.
*
When the rumored journalist from Miami finally arrived at the station, he turned out to be a ginger with a germinating goatee. He arrived cheerful, walking the station with an NSF public relations rep who shadowed him like a junior high hall monitor. As Cooper passed the men on her way from the studio to the galley, she smiled to be friendly. Sensing the possibility for a positive encounter that could result in good press for the Program, the PR rep stopped.
“A and W, right?” the rep asked, assessing Cooper’s paint-stained overalls. “What discipline?”
“I’m a painter,” Cooper replied. The rep scribbled this down, then asked her name, and scribbled that down, too.
“Tim, this is one of our artist Fellows,” the rep said. “The NSF sponsors writers and artists every year to come down and—”
“Right,” Tim said vaguely, looking down the hall toward the exit. “I profiled that paper-clip artist two years ago, remember?” He glanced at Cooper. “But I guess I should cover my bases.”
Tim fished out a reporter’s notebook from his parka. “What do you think artists bring to the conversation about what goes on at the Pole?” He asked the question like a Red Lobster waitress about to go on break.
“Is there a conversation about what goes on at Pole?” Cooper asked. The PR rep shifted his weight.
“Apparently,” Tim said, “or else I wouldn’t be here. What are you painting about while you’re down?”
“The imperative of the explorer.”
“And how do you interpret that?”
“Mittens.”
“Fascinating,” Tim said, tucking the pen into the coil of his notebook.
The rep gave Cooper a withering look.
Cooper continued on to the galley for lunch, and found Tucker and Dwight engaged in a heated discussion.
“But wouldn’t you time travel if you could, Tucker?” Dwight said as Cooper set her tray down next to him. Tucker shook his head silently as he separated the carbs from the protein on his plate. Dwight gave a huff of disapproval. “You’re telling me that if you could go back two hundred years, you wouldn’t?”
“Before or after the Fugitive Slave Act?”
Dwight pounded the table with his fist. “You always make it about slavery!” Cooper watched as Dwight stormed off with his tray.
“Do you want me to slip ex-lax into his coffee?”
“That’s just Dwight doing Dwight,” Tucker said, pinching his eyebrow. “I’m a little on edge.”
“What’s going on?”
“That reporter from the Herald is working an angle about Pavano and his research.”
“I figured. What’s the big deal?”
“The Program was hoping to keep Pavano’s presence on the ice a nonissue. They don’t want it to become political.” He looked up at Cooper. “I once thought that all you needed to get by in this life was a pleasant phone manner. Of course, that was when I was a telemarketer.”
When the Miami Herald published Tim’s story a week later, it had nothing to do with mittens or the construction of the new station. Instead, the headline was “In World’s Last Bastion of Objective Research, Politics Intrudes.” As Tucker had predicted, the article focused on Pavano’s work on climate change, and how two conservative U.S. congressmen had gotten him on the ice. Bush’s approval rates were plunging, and both men were up for reelection in their home states the next year—they hoped the “global-warming hoax” and the federal government’s reluctance to fund “skeptics” would whip their constituents into a lather.
Somehow Tim had lost the PR rep long enough to sit down with Pavano for an interview. Tim portrayed him as the kind of fool who would spend his career trying to make sense of Piltdown Man. There was mention of the remoteness of Pavano’s lab space, an ad hoc office in the Dark Sector. It was, Tim noted, on the very edge of the Sector, far from the labs of the other climate scientists at Pole.
The article also revealed personal information about Pavano, which the Beakers seized upon: he had been an Indiana science prodigy as a youth and had been courted by Stanford and MIT. He’d chosen Stanford and received degrees in astronomy and physics, specializing in heliospherics, but had had difficulty placing his research papers due to a plagiarism charge early in his career. He had rehabilitated his reputation enough to land a position at a private Midwestern college, where he worked for nearly ten years before he was, again, accused of plagiarism.
Tim had tried to get Beakers to comment on Pavano, but they had, at the NSF’s request, remained silent. The piece ended with a quote from one of the congressmen who’d been responsible for getting him to South Pole: