Time passed. In the evenings, he drank, and he broke his vow of chastity with that Frosty Boy tech from McMurdo. These encounters typically meant nothing; now they had the sharp taste of betrayal. Although there was no one to betray, the feeling was unshakable. He couldn’t stop thinking of Cooper.
Then one day, out at the telescopes, as he raved about his cyclic model like a meth-fueled evangelist, she asked why he was the only one who believed it. The question had enraged him, and it was only later—much later, in fact—that he understood why, and then he was even angrier. He was an apostate. So was Sokoloff. And at conferences where he’d seen his old Stanford colleagues, he’d loudly congratulated himself for being one. After all, the fact that a scientist changes his mind is proof that the scientific method works—that they can overcome their affinities for their cherished ideas and thereby protect the integrity of the whole endeavor.
But when Cooper had asked him why he was the only one who seemed to “believe” in the cyclic model, he grew angry, because instead of thinking of the great apostates of science—Darwin changing his mind on pangenesis, Marcelo Gleiser repudiating his hopes of a unified theory, crusty Fred Hoyle and his steady-state universe foolishness, Peter Sokoloff—Sal thought of Frank Pavano. Pavano, who was unworthy of even speaking Sokoloff’s name. No, Pavano was not an apostate; he was a fraud. He was paid for his conclusions. Worse, Sal was convinced that Pavano didn’t even buy into the pseudoscience he was peddling.
But still, a thought began eating away at him. It filled him with shame first, and then with dread. Wasn’t it right, he began to wonder—unquestionably right—that Pavano was on the ice alongside him?
*
It was a week after the accident out on the Divide, after Cooper’s injury and after the media had picked up the story and after Bayless and Calhoun had scheduled their flight down, that Sal approached Sri with his thought about Pavano. Tucker had come out to the Dark Sector the day before to tell Sal that Scaletta had met with the congressmen and had been told that unless NSF formalized a process to grant “minority scientific views” a place at federal research facilities, they would hold up the agency’s polar regions budget in committee, which would quickly prompt a station shutdown. Scaletta had refused, and asked Tucker to begin preparing the scientists for the possibly of a station shutdown.
So Sal went to the climatology lab and put his idea to Sri: let the skeptics come. There weren’t many of them—it was a 90/10 split among climate scientists already—and their research wouldn’t yield anything dangerous. He tried to sound confident—dismissive, even. Let the children have dessert at the adult table—the meal’s almost over, anyway, right?
It didn’t go well. Sri paced the eight-by-eight room over and over again, muttering incoherently (Sal caught words like betrayal and end of science). But it seemed the easiest way to make the threat disappear—and, in some tenuous way, it adhered to the principle of scientific freedom. But Sri felt Sal’s plan was morally reprehensible, that his motives were suspect—“selfish”—and Sal wondered if his friend was right. He let the idea go, and tried to ignore the growing sense of doom in the labs. But, like his constant thoughts of Cooper, he found his mind returning to the question again and again.
“What do you think about my idea?” he asked Alek one day after the congressmen had returned to Washington. Alek only shrugged. “You have no opinion whatsoever on capitulating to the demands of two science-illiterate congressmen? Sri says funding a climate skeptic would be like funding Bigfoot research. Or an archaeological dig for Noah’s ark. He says I’ll do anything to keep my experiment going.”
Alek sighed. “I tell story. In Leningrad, 1987, I am seventeen years old. St. Isaac’s Square is full of people, because the authorities just demolished Angleterre hotel. This place is sacred. The great poet Yesenin end his life here. Understand, for us, this is like destroying Shroud of Turin. So we must protest. But this time, there are no arrests. No one can believe this—glasnost was slow to come to Leningrad. So the protests continue for weeks. I visit and help distribute samizdat. One day someone comes running to tell us dissidents are giving speeches in Mikhailovky Gardens. This is new—such things did not happen. But when we get there, a military band is playing and no one can hear the speakers. We are told the authorities have sent the band to play so the dissidents cannot be heard. The speeches stop and an old man puts half a lemon in my hand. ‘Suck,’ he tells me, and points to the band. ‘Make sure they see you.’ Before I can say, I see everywhere people sucking on lemons. At the front, I see the crazy old dissident Ekaterina Poldotseva handing them out from a basket. When the old man sees I am not sucking on lemon, he slaps my hand, he tells me, ‘Poldotseva says the band will stop playing once when they see everyone sucking on lemons.’ Empathetic saliva, he tells me. ‘They will not be able to play their instruments.’ Ten minutes later, the band packed up and left. They never return.”
Alek turned back to his computer.
As Sal stared at the back of his friend’s head, he wondered if Alek was, in fact, insane.
*
When the subpoena from the Wisconsin attorney general arrived for Sri, Sal had watched his friend’s research techs bag-drag to one of the LC-130s that were evacuating nonessential staff in advance of the shutdown. It was like watching someone toss Darwin’s dead finches off the side of the Beagle.
Once the letters from NSF began circulating, Sal began spending hours away from his own lab in order to get up to speed on the Kavli team’s work—aside from her outburst at the winter-over meeting, Lisa Wu had remained stoic, but as they went over the data together, Sal noticed her fingernails had been chewed to the quick.
As each scientist shut down his or her experiment—from the experiments in the Atmospheric Research Observatory to the seismology labs—Alek’s words began to take hold of Sal. To his consternation, the story about the lemon wedges was beginning to make sense. A week into the shutdown, he already knew what had to be done. He started sending e-mails. He started with the National Academy of Sciences listserv, followed by one to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, proposing the idea he’d pitched to Sri: Let them come. There would be a provision for practical requirements that would seem reasonable, even to backwater congressmen—like a track record of peer-reviewed science—but which would be difficult for a denialist to acquire.
“Science is a mirror that reflects nature,” Sal wrote to Alexandra Scaletta at NSF. “Experiments are attempts to polish that mirror. Not all of them rub off the streaks, but these don’t hinder the experiments that do.” Sal wasn’t sure he believed this last part—he wasn’t sure of a lot of things now—but he sent the e-mail anyway.