As soon as she stepped into the Maze, though, she realized she was fucked. The place was a carnival funhouse of stairs, dead ends, and walls of fire. It turned out synthetic smoke wasn’t all that different from real smoke—and it obscured everything, so Cooper began crawling. Room by room, she searched for the scientist. Sweat began to dribble down her forehead and into her eyes, steaming up the glass of her fire mask.
“Where are you?” Cooper cried. It sounded as if she were shouting into a pillow. She climbed up the stairs on all fours, and turned into the first room she came to. The ceiling was on fire. Cooper thought she could make out something lying motionless halfway across the room. She got to her feet and scuttled over to the body. It was one of the CPR dummies. Cooper began kicking it mercilessly, her fear and frustration mounting to panic. What if this was a trick? Some kind of test? Maybe there was no one in the Maze awaiting rescue. Maybe the scientist had entered the building and then slipped out the back door, and Cooper’s score was based on how long it would take her to realize this.
But then, through the groans of the generator that was powering the smoke machine, she thought she heard something. Someone was humming. Cooper crawled down the hall and pushed open the second door. There, next to the window, was a man in fire gear, on his haunches, cowering. For a moment they stared at each other through the smudged Plexiglas of their masks. Then Cooper kicked his boot with hers and he slowly got to his feet. She took hold of his arm and forced him down the stairs like Lennie Briscoe on an episode of Law & Order.
By the time they burst through the front door, a crowd had gathered around the Maze, and it exploded into applause. Cooper pushed the man away from her so hard that he fell to the ground. She tore off her fire mask and tried to get a good breath.
“You were never in danger,” the fire chief said, marking something on his clipboard.
As the crowd dispersed, Cooper watched while a medic attended to the scientist, who was now draped in a shock blanket. When he turned his enormous china-doll eyes toward her, she couldn’t stop the scowl that formed on her lips.
“Congratulations,” Sal said, handing Cooper a bottle of water.
“Thanks,” she said. “You think I’ll pass?”
“You’ll pass.”
She looked up into Sal’s face, surprised. “Really?”
He nodded, then tilted his head toward the scientist. “So will he.”
“Isn’t he the one who abandoned the CPR lady-dummy in the bathtub on his first Maze run?”
Sal shrugged. “This is a formality for him. His ticket was punched a long time ago.”
“Who the hell is he?” Cooper asked.
Sal glanced at the man. “He answers to ‘The End of Science.’ See you at Ninety South.”
*
Four months later, Cooper was standing on a slice of sea ice just outside of McMurdo, the American polar station set on the hairy fringes of Antarctica. To the north, the bare volcanic rock of Hut Point Peninsula sloped toward McMurdo Sound in glossy black sheets. Short-stacked dorms, repair barns, and warehouses seemed locked on the basalt as if petrified midslide. Diesel fumes burned her nostrils.
The sun hung low in the sky, an ornament that swung from east to west, never disappearing, until the day it did. On the C-17 that had ferried them from Christchurch, an electrician had told Cooper that when the month-long sunset ended in March and the sun finally hooked around the Earth, leaving South Pole in total darkness for months, she’d forget what it looked like almost at once. “You’ll live for civil twilight,” he said mysteriously.
As she waited for the National Science Foundation rep to finish gossiping with the pilot, Cooper looked around at the raggedy group of artists loitering a few hundred yards from the humorously big-wheeled bus that was waiting to take them into town. Which one, Cooper wondered, was Harold? Back in Denver, the NSF had assigned each grantee a buddy—a “fellow Fellow”—and instructed them to exchange regular e-mails up until the date of their departure. It was important, the grant administrator had impressed upon the artists, to be supplied with an existing friend at Pole. Cooper had been paired with a biographer named Harold. When she’d asked him about the subject of his book, he had been evasive. After four months of correspondence, all Cooper knew about him was that he was a British ex-pat from Sacramento who fancied peach melba and foxhounds, and who suffered from mild eczema. Harold’s knowledge of Cooper was limited to two facts: that she felt hotdish had never received its gastronomic due and that the fake Minnesota accents in Fargo were the blackface of regional phonology. Pictures had not been exchanged, so Cooper had no way of picking Harold out from the collection of fur-lined hoods and balaclavas arrayed before her.
Finally, the NSF administrator, wearing UV goggles and an impossibly large parka, walked toward the group, looking as buoyant as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. “Seventy-seven degrees, fifty-one minutes south,” he boomed, each word accompanied by a steam blossom. “One hundred sixty-six degrees, forty minutes east.” The historical novelist, who’d vomited into his hands on the plane, sighed in recognition, letting everyone know he’d done his homework. “Welcome to McMurdo, everybody,” Stay Puft said. “Welcome to Antarctica.” The sound of heavy mittens clapping followed this pronouncement, and someone attempted a whistle, then quit halfway through, winded. The high altitude and thin air did not offer enough oxygen for carefree whistling.
“All right, guys,” Stay Puft continued, “I know you’re moving on to South Pole Station tomorrow morning, but I think there’s still time for you to enjoy what Mactown has to offer. We always treat the artists to a game of bowling before they head for Pole, mostly because we put a little money on the game and because you guys are notoriously bad bowlers.” Ha-ha-ha, the group laughed. We’re bad bowlers.
“Oh, hey,” Stay Puft said to a tall, stone-faced man who was briskly passing the group on his way to the Terra Bus. “Goggles really aren’t optional down here, brother. I mean, unless you want to light your corneas on fire.”
“Noted,” the man said, his consonants tinged with unmistakable Russian frication. “But I’m not Fingy, and McMurdo is not cold.”
“What’s a Fingy?” someone asked. Cooper felt no need to provide this person with the secret knowledge she’d been given at fire school—she suspected any advantage, no matter how small, could be helpful to her. Stay Puft turned to everyone else and clapped his mittens together: “Terra Bus time! Grab your bags and let the festivities begin!”
Cooper dragged her bag past the other artists, and caught up with the tall Russian, who was carrying his enormous duffel as if it were a lunch box. He’d been seated across from Cooper on the flight from Christchurch, and was imperious and massively bearded. Once or twice during the six-hour flight he had consulted a notebook, but had otherwise barely moved. When he noticed Cooper was keeping pace with him, he looked down at her.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hey,” Cooper said. “Are you a writer or a painter?” When he didn’t immediately reply, Cooper added: “Muralist?”
“You mistake me for artist,” he finally said. “I am not here to paint pretty pictures of penguins.”