A very few folders could be separated by his last criterion, his personal touch: the number of inky thumb stains on the outer folder and name tab. He’d read and reread the contents of those files so often that the tabs had been worn down to rounded bumps peeking out of the pile.
He’d fought to have physical folders at all. TransAnt’s administrative branch had battled him tooth and nail to digitize the records, reminding him that every scrap of written word on base could be contained on a single hard drive or sent over the network in a burst less than a minute long. Physical objects had volume, space that equaled expense when it came to shipping things to the bottom of the earth.
He’d stood his ground. Being old-fashioned had been part of it, of course, but the real reason was that digital files could be stolen and replicated a million times without anyone knowing. If only a finite number of physical copies—in this case, one—existed, then their theft would be obvious. Sometimes the simplest measures were the best.
The base psychologist possessed his own dossiers on the staff, of course, though in reality, Keene had been given no more than half the contents that existed in Hanratty’s files. Sometimes Keene gave him a look when they spoke about Shackleton’s crew and Hanratty wondered if the man knew he’d been given the Reader’s Digest version.
Hanratty found the folder he’d been looking for and set it aside from the others, though he didn’t open it, not yet. He knew its contents intimately, and he wanted to have it at hand, but he also didn’t want to taint his recent observations with a fresh read. Better to jot down his impressions, add them to the growing pile, and synthesize later.
A single white sheet of paper with no lines or holes was his preferred scribbling pad. He pulled out a red, felt-tipped pen and wrote at the top:
E1. SUB 1. DISCOVERY OF LARKIN BODY
Next to that, he placed the date. It seemed faintly ridiculous to do so—he’d have as much chance forgetting the day Sheryl Larkin had died as his own birthday—but he’d learned over time that any and every bit of information was valuable.
He took out a ruler and marked off an inch of white space with a tiny dot of his pen, then proceeded to write using bullet points and acerbic sentence fragments. He kept at it for the next thirty minutes, sometimes with speed and confidence, but more often with his eyebrows knotted in concentration and tapping the pen’s cap against his teeth, a habit his wife had found infuriating. Ex-wife , he corrected himself, then sealed off that line of thought like he’d closed a tank hatch and spun the wheel.
He frowned when he’d nearly filled the page. The unrelieved red scratches gave a sense of alarm to the whole thing, which hadn’t been his intention. Most of his notes were only observations, with just a few items that deserved special attention. Sighing, he reached into his drawer and pulled out a blue pen, this time to underline only the critical parts, the most significant of which was the last line on the page.
Yesterday, after returning to Shackleton with Larkin’s body and leaving the VMF, he’d acted on a hunch and told Taylor to head back without him. Creeping like a thief, he’d rested his ear against the garage door, then peeked inside to confirm with his eyes what he’d heard with his ears. The intel had been valuable, but he’d slunk away, ashamed of himself. Even now the memory caused him to curl his lip.
He exhaled through his nose, long and slow, consciously purging the thought and the emotions that rode shotgun alongside it. Too much depended on this project, professionally and personally, for him to get squeamish or sentimental about his conduct. If a brief moment of shame was the worst casualty of the winter, it would be a ridiculously small price to pay. He circled the last bullet point and read it once more.
Subject distraught upon return (expressed privately). Seemed to feel personal culpability. Highest—lowest?—emotional point observed to date.
He capped the blue pen and tossed it into the drawer, then blew on the ink to make sure it had dried—an old habit—before the page went into the file to join the others. He let the folder’s leaf fall shut, then tossed the well-thumbed file beside the stack and picked up the next one. Sparing a glance at the name, he slipped another single sheet of unblemished paper from the ream, picked up his red pen, and got back to work.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The two men stared at each other for a pregnant moment until the one behind the desk said, “You just came in on yesterday’s flight with the other fingies, didn’t you?”
“The what?”
A smile. “Sorry. It’s local slang. Fingie stands for ‘fucking new guy.’ It’s just a term we use. No insult intended. Anyway, you just came in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“First time in Antarctica?”
“First time.” He nodded.
“Why don’t you tell me something about yourself?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Like where you grew up.”