“Okay, I’ll bite,” he said, gesturing with the crust of the muffin. “The suspense is killing me.”
For a second, Gillespie pretended to be uncertain of what he was referring to.
“Is that the layout for my Yellowstone story?”
Gillespie looked down at the envelope, pursing his lips, as if still trying to come to some decision. “No, the Yellowstone story ran last month. Looks like you’re not even reading the magazine anymore.”
Michael felt caught out—especially because it was true. For the past few months, he’d hardly ever read his mail, checked his AOL account, called people back. Everybody understood why, but more and more he felt the world was losing patience.
“This is something I think you should see,” Gillespie said, sliding the envelope across the table.
Michael wiped his fingers on his napkin, then opened the packet and took out the papers inside. There were photos—some of them, in black and white, looked like satellite reconnaissance shots—and a sheaf of papers with the National Science Foundation name and logo on top. Many of them were datelined “Point Adélie.”
“What’s Point Adélie?”
“It’s a research station, and pretty minimal at that. They study everything from climate change to the local biosphere.”
“Where is it?” Michael asked, reaching for his coffee cup.
“The South Pole. Or at least as close to it as you can get. The Adélie penguins migrate there.”
Michael’s coffee cup stopped in the air, and despite himself, he felt a quickening in his blood.
“It took me months to set this up,” Gillespie went on, “and get the necessary clearance. You have no idea the kind of paperwork and red tape you have to go through to get somebody onto the base down there. The NSF makes the CIA look friendly. But now we’ve got it—permission to send one reporter to Point Adélie, for a month. I’m planning on getting an eight-to-ten-page spread out of it—four-color photos, maybe three or four thousand words of text, the whole enchilada.”
Michael sipped the coffee, just to give himself a second to think.
“I’ll save you the trouble of asking,” Gillespie said. “We’re paying the usual rate per word, but I’ll bump you up on the photos. Plus, we’ll cover your expenses, within reason of course.”
Michael still didn’t know what to say, or think. Too many things were tumbling around in his head. He hadn’t worked—he hadn’t even thought about working—since the Cascades disaster, and he wasn’t sure he was ready to take up his old life again. But another part of him was vaguely insulted. The project had been in the works for months, and Gillespie was only now mentioning it to him?
“When do you need it by?” he asked, just to buy some time again.
Gillespie sat back, looking just the littlest bit pleased, like a fisherman who’s felt a tug on the line.
“Well, there’s the catch. We’d need you to leave on Friday.”
“This Friday?”
“Yes. It’s not easy getting down there. You’ll have to fly to Chile—Santiago—then on to Puerto Williams. From there you’ll take a Coast Guard cutter as far as the ice allows, then they’ll chopper you in the rest of the way from there. It’s a very narrow window of opportunity, and the weather can close it at any time. Right now, it’s summer down south, so there should be days when it’s actually well above zero.”
Michael finally had to ask. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I knew you weren’t interested in working just now.”
“Who was?”
“Who was what?”
“Come on, Joe. If you’ve been setting this up for months, you must have had somebody else lined up to do it.”
“Crabtree. He was going to do it.”
Crabtree again—the guy was always breathing down Michael’s neck, trying to snag his assignments. “So why isn’t he going?”
Gillespie shrugged. “Root canal.”
“What?”
“He’s got to have a root canal, and no one’s permitted to go down there unless they’ve got a complete bill of health. Most of all, since there isn’t any dentist on call, you’ve got to have a note from your dentist saying everything’s in perfect working order.”
Michael couldn’t believe his ears. Crabtree had lost the assignment because he had a gum problem?
“So, please,” Gillespie said, leaning forward, “tell me you don’t have any cavities and your fillings are all intact?”
Michael instinctively ran his tongue around the interior of his mouth. “As far as I know.”