The footsteps slowed down and the sound of walkie-talkies became audible. When Denise began pulling on the door, Alek and Sal both leapt up, but Cooper was quicker. She gently took Denise’s arm. “Just a little bit longer,” Cooper whispered. Denise was trembling, but she allowed Cooper to lead her away from the door.
As Cooper tried desperately to think of something to distract Denise, her finger—or the place where her finger had once been—began to itch intensely. “Denise,” she whispered. “I have a question for you. Lately I’ve been having this really strong feeling that my finger is back, like it’s physically there. I can even ‘move’ it—I actually feel it bend. Do you know anything that can explain this?”
It worked. Denise seemed calm in an instant. “Phantom limb syndrome,” she replied quietly. “The perception of pain in an amputated limb or digit. Yes, this is real. One-armed men have been known to utilize their phantom limb to masturbate.”
Sal brought his sleeve to his mouth, his shoulders shaking with laughter. Suddenly, the door began to rattle as someone pulled on the knob. Denise turned her eyes to Cooper—behind her glasses, they looked enormous, and they were full of fear. “I promise, it will be okay,” Cooper whispered.
She knew the plane was idling, burning fuel, and that the temperature was dropping; she imagined the pilot was not exactly happy at the delay. Bozer had told them to expect this search of the station by VIDS and the NSF admins and higher-ups—they just had to wait it out. The door rattled again, more insistently this time. Muffled voices—including Marcy’s—conferred on the other side.
“This is a WC,” she told the others.
“A what?”
“Waste closet. Shit storage. Poo pantry. It’s where we keep the leaky sewage drums. I can unlock it for you if you want to look around, but I warn you: it smells like a shithouse door on a tuna boat.”
The search party hastily moved on. After their footsteps had receded completely, Alek fell back in relief, muttering in Russian.
*
Seventy-two hours in, Pearl and Dwight were already nursing a beef that had started when Pearl whistled for an hour straight during dinner. Now, in the Smoke Bar, her whistling had become defiant.
“If I have to listen to your stupid whistling and stare at your Pollyanna face and your stupid greasy pigtails all winter I’m going to kill myself,” Dwight said, gripping a nosegay of darts in his hand. “You will find me swinging from the rafters in a cold breeze.”
“You know what, Dwight? I try to be smiley and nice to everyone, even if they’re rude. I feel like people don’t need grumps around all winter, especially under the circumstances.”
“Don’t pretend like you’re some kind of angel, Pearl,” Dwight said, sending a dart into the board. “The act gets old real quick.” He turned to Sal. “Look me in the eye, Sal, and tell me that prolonged whistling isn’t a form of torture.”
“Can’t you guys try bonding?” Doc Carla suggested.
“Over what?” Dwight demanded.
“Both of your ice-spouses are gone,” she said. “What about the bond of broken hearts?”
Dwight scoffed, and drifted away to another part of the bar.
Cooper nursed a vodka tonic as she watched them bicker. She hoped Dwight’s tantrum wasn’t a harbinger of things to come. Whistling was a minor crime, and they had several more months of this, at best. Cooper hoped Dwight would just immerse himself in his comms duties, which included keeping track of the federal response to the occupation, via the Web, his ham radio, and satellite phone. It had taken the authorities two full days to understand what had happened at Pole. The U.S. Antarctic Program had operated with military precision for decades. That members of the Program would disobey orders came not only as a shock to VIDS and NSF administrators, it also paralyzed them. The prevailing attitude among those who were in charge was disbelief and utter confusion. Word had not leaked to the media yet, but Dwight was seeing some blogs mentioning rumors of an occupation at Pole.
Once the LC-130 with the tech sergeant, Tucker, and the last VIDS and NSF admins had gone wheels up, Bozer and Marcy cleared the snowdrifts from the perimeter of the Dome before shutting the outer doors. The temperature had dropped dramatically by now, nearing seventy below. Floyd assured everyone that no pilot would try to land at Pole at this point. Not even JP-8 fuel could remain liquid in these temperatures. The only unqualified positive aspect of the occupation so far, at least for Cooper, was that everyone now had a room in El Dorm—she’d taken over the room next to Sal’s, which had previously belonged to a telescope maintenance tech. The convenience of not having to empty a pee can into a pee barrel was almost decadent.
Sal walked over to where Cooper was sketching Doc Carla awkwardly holding knitting needles. Now that Pearl had abandoned her whistling, she was trying to teach people how to knit. “I have to go back to the lab now,” Sal said to Cooper. “Will you walk with me?”
They walked down the entrance tunnel in silence, past the fuel arches, which were now strangely quiet, running on caretaking mode. When they approached the entrance door, Sal performed an intricate routine with the lock, and together they pushed the door open. Then they were outside, in the half darkness of near-winter. Sal scanned the sky before taking Cooper’s arm. “I keep thinking I’m going to hear a C-17 looping back to force us out by gunpoint,” he said.
“Actually, it would be an LC-130,” Cooper said. “A Herc.”
“Oh my god, you’re officially a Polie.”
“What would you do if they did come back?”
“I’ve thought about that a million times,” Sal said, his brow troubled. “I can’t get any farther than suicide.” He gripped her arm harder. “I’m sorry, Cooper, I shouldn’t have said that.”
Cooper said nothing, but noted that the word, even the offhand way it had been mentioned, hadn’t pierced her in the way it used to. In fact, with all the commotion at the station, she hadn’t even thought about David, or the vial, for days. She wondered if that jagged edge had finally broken off.
They were halfway down the road to the Dark Sector before Sal stopped. He pointed to the sky. The aurora australis, roiling ribbon-like sheaves of purple and pink light, filled the sky. They gaped at it in wonder. There was something else there, too, like a fingerprint on glass.
“The Milky Way,” Sal said.
“Jesus, that’s beautiful.”
“It’s cripplingly beautiful,” he said.
Cooper looked over at him. “Even though it has a super-massive black hole in it?”
“Especially because it does.”
As Cooper gazed into its frosty heart, she imagined the black hole, its density equivalent to a billion suns.
*
When the feds finally shook off their incredulity, directives began arriving via e-mail, fax, and satellite phone. It started with the NSF’s assumption that this had all been a misunderstanding. In Comms, Cooper and the other Polies listened in silence as the South Pole NSF rep, Warren, back in Washington, D.C., now, played nice cop with Dwight.