Sal hadn’t been sleeping much. It was Sri, back in Madison, tussling with lawyers and subpoenas. It was Lisa and her team, who’d reluctantly left the joint experiment in his hands. It was his stake in the experiment—cyclic universe or bust—now in its final year, the third. Three. Pythagoras’ “noblest” number—the only number to equal the sum of all the terms below it.
Both experiments rushed forward now, in their waning stages, like binary stars mid-collapse. The e-mails poured into Sal’s in-box, an engorged river of inquiries. From Kavli at Stanford, from Lebedev in Moscow, from Princeton—even from CERN. From the journalist-geeks, from the bloggers, from New Scientist and Scientific American. And then the e-mails from the Russians at Vostok volunteering to provide telescope techs, even to travel overland to do it. Or the Chinese, who offered to send their own team of physicists from Zhongshan via sleds. Sal assumed the U.S. government would see these particular offers as posturing, but he knew better. This went beyond secretariats and embassies and politics—this was science. Everyone who mattered knew what was at stake.
Now Alek was sitting on a folding chair, his hands between his knees, tears trickling down his face. Sal looked around the lab. The fluorescents sounded like cicadas; one bulb flickered, trying to die. The hard drives hummed ceaselessly. And above him, the telescope clicked as it rotated on its plate on the roof, searching the sky, looking for the curls in the polarized cosmic background radiation that the inflationary theorists had been so desperate to find, and which he had, it seemed, found for them.
Sal and Alek had been up for forty-two hours straight. They had not eaten anything besides stale Chex Mix and Mountain Dew, and had ignored all faxes and e-mails, except one. Sal had just hung up after a four-hour phone call with Peter Sokoloff, his boss and mentor at Princeton, going over data Lisa and her team hadn’t yet seen, because they were back in Palo Alto, waiting to hear from Sal. He knew the rumors had been flying for months already—particle physicists, cosmologists, and astronomers all over the world seemed to sense something big was going to happen at the Dark Sector. That the research station was officially shut down—in “caretaking mode” while simultaneously being “occupied”—only made the anticipation more intense.
Dwight had set up the call to Sokoloff, and had kept the satellite clear for the four hours it had taken for Sal to painstakingly read out the data, line by line, to his mentor. When he was done, there had been an excruciatingly long pause.
“It’s five-sigma, Peter.”
There was another long pause. “Does Lisa know yet?”
“No.”
Sokoloff sighed. Sal imagined the sigh leaving Sokoloff’s lips, then bouncing off the pockmarked MARISAT-F2 satellite two hundred miles above the Earth’s atmosphere, before diving into the GOES satellite’s terminal just outside the Dark Sector. “This could just be synchrotron radiation or light scattering from galactic dust,” Sokoloff had finally said. “It’s too early to hand out Nobels.”
But Sal had heard the change in Sokoloff’s voice. Uncertainty. Not of the scientific variety—hell, that was their native language. No, this was uncertainty of the personal kind. Before they got off the phone, Sokoloff had added, “Tell your father before anyone else. Let him be the first to know.”
“You know he won’t understand,” Sal replied.
“No, Sal,” came Sokoloff’s voice from the satellite. “That is the one thing he will understand. I’ll call Lisa and hold her off until this sequester business is resolved. Do this in person.”
* * *
“There is a theory, which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
Sal tossed the Douglas Adams book onto his dorm bed. The man was creative, Sal remembered thinking as he swilled down the dregs of a warm Budweiser, but a scientific illiterate. It was only years later, when Sal had learned to take the long view, that he understood Adams’s genius. And it wasn’t until this season at South Pole Station that Sal realized how prescient Adams’s words were, how they seemed to speak specifically to this experiment, to this shutdown, to the appearance of Frank Pavano. After all, it was Adams who had heralded Pavano’s arrival into Sal’s life, because the moment Sal had tossed The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy onto his bed had also been the precise moment his new roommate had walked into their dorm room at Stanford’s Roble Hall. Gangly and skinny, with eyes wide and penetrating as an owl’s, the kid had stood there, frozen, unsure of what to say. By this time, Sal was familiar with the common anxieties of the nerd, so he reached between his legs and drew another beer from the six-pack. “They’re warm, but who cares, right?” he said, holding it out.
Down the hall, someone turned his boom box to maximum volume and indistinguishable heavy metal filled the hallways. This seemed to shake the kid out of his catatonia, and he stepped into the room and shut the door behind him.
“No, thanks,” he said, his voice as raspy as a two-string violin.
Sal shrugged and put the beer back. He wiped his hand on the leg of his jeans and stuck out his hand. “Sal Brennan.”
The boy set his duffel down gingerly, as if it contained a hundred Fabergé eggs, and cautiously shook Sal’s hand. “I’ve heard of you.” His gaze was unexpectedly direct, and it lasted too long.
“Everyone has,” Sal replied. “I’ve basically lived here since I was a toddler.”
“You’re Brennan’s son,” Pavano said.
“That’s me. You are?”
“Francis Pavano. You can call me Frank if you want.”
So this was the prodigy from Indiana whom his father had been stalking for the past four years. He had expected a dark-haired Italian kid, not this cut-glass automaton. So this, Sal thought, was what Midwestern genius looked like.
He slapped the bottom bunk he was sitting on. “I took this one. You okay with the top?”
Pavano nodded silently and picked his duffel up again. “Don’t you live in Palo Alto?”
“Born and bred.”
“Why are you living in the dorms?”
“I spend twenty out of twenty-four hours with my father. I need to be able to escape for the other four.”
Pavano nodded again and approached the bunk. Sal watched as he gripped the ladder and shook it, assessing its stability. Convinced it was structurally sound, Pavano set his bag on the desk under the window. He turned and gazed at Sal for a long, awkward minute. Finally, Sal took the hint. “I can come back.”
Pavano seemed greatly relieved by the offer. “Thanks, I’ll only be a minute.”
Sal took longer than necessary to leave. There was something about the kid that held him there. He wasn’t a thief. He wasn’t a pervert. He was a ninety-nine-point-ninety-niner. Behind heavy-rimmed glasses, his round, girlish eyes regarded Sal as if he were a bibelot catching the light. He was a Jehovah’s Witness without Jehovah, only the unsettling gaze of a witness.
Sal spent the afternoon at the physics building on Lomita Mall, where his father and the post-docs were feverishly trying to finish the last draft of a proposal for an independent lab, which had been in the works for a decade—it was going to be called Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, after the major donor, and was tentatively sited in Santa Barbara on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Professor Brennan waved Sal into his office, where the other favored undergrads were going over data from an ongoing joint experiment at South Pole that would, it was hoped, eventually confirm that dark energy had driven the universe apart at accelerating speeds. Sal worked on the outputs for a while, but his mind kept returning to his strange new roommate.
“You’re distracted,” his father said without looking up from his computer, “and now you’re proving a distraction. What is it?” The other physics students looked up at Sal. He hated them—hated the way they quieted down whenever his father walked into the room, the way they guarded their words, the way they answered him with an upswing in their voice, as if they were unwilling, or afraid, to say anything with finality in his presence.
“Nothing,” Sal replied. Simultaneously, the undergrads turned to look at Professor Brennan. The professor kept his eyes on his computer screen. “Speak or leave,” he said. “I cannot have distractions.”
“Met my roommate today.”
At this, the senior Brennan looked over at his son. “Ah, so he’s arrived.”
“You know him?”
“Of course—I arranged it all with the bursar. Francis Pavano. We’re trying to coax him into particle physics. He’s a gifted science mind, Sal. We just need to convince him that inflation is far more interesting than plasma physics.”
“He wants to do heliophysics?” Sal asked, incredulous. “Matthews is a crank.”
“Your influence would be much appreciated.”
Sal groaned. “I have enough eccentrics in my life.”
“Please try to remember that in this world, you’re the outlier.”
Sal got back to work, but found, after a few minutes, that he still couldn’t concentrate. He looked over at his father, who was perusing the latest WMAP results. “Fine, I’ll talk to him, see if I can coax him away from Matthews.”
His father turned slowly from his computer and said, “Who?”
None of the students dared to look up from their work. “Pavano,” Sal said.
After a moment—no more than a second, but a second too long—his father nodded. “Yes, please do talk to him. Tell him more about Kavli. I imagine for someone of his caliber, it would be quite an inducement.”
When Sal returned to the dorm, the halls were quiet—it was dinnertime, and everyone had left for the cafeteria. When he unlocked the door and walked in, he saw that Pavano was standing at the window in front of a desktop easel, shirtless, his glasses atop his head. Pavano seemed unsurprised to see him.
“You okay, man?” Sal asked.
“I’m painting,” Pavano said, gesturing toward the canvas on his easel. “I hope that’s okay.”
Sal dropped his backpack under his bunk. “You paint?”
“Occasionally,” Pavano said. “It’s just a hobby.”
Sal walked over to where Pavano was working and looked at the painting. The canvas was daubed in bright, almost blinding white oil paint. A tidy black line split the painting neatly in half. Sal took a step closer and squinted. The left half of the canvas was blank. The right half of the canvas was filled with tiny equations and mathematical formulas. Sal recognized Euler’s equation, standard-model Lagrangian, an attempt to render infinite pi—the typical doodlings of a mathematics nerd in love with the most elevated equations in the discipline. He was about to walk away from the canvas when he spotted it: unmistakable in its beauty and impenetrability.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. The Riemann hypothesis, which extended Euler’s zeta function to the entire complex plane. Sal had lost interest in the distribution of the primes when he was in junior high, but it remained one of the great unproved theorems—any mathematician recognized it the way others would recognize a stop sign at an intersection. Still, it struck Sal as overly fussy that Pavano had included it in whatever was sitting on the easel. No, it was more than that. It seemed a desecration.
“What do you think?” Pavano asked.
“What do I think? I think it’s the work of a beginner,” Sal said. “A beginner painter and a beginner mathematician.”
Pavano gazed back at Sal, his face a pale lake. Sal sat down at his bunk. The painting haunted the room like a squatter, whose presence was impossible to ignore. He knew he was being a dick, and he wasn’t sure why, but seeing the Riemann on Pavano’s canvas disturbed him. It was like seeing a classmate doing a nude life study of his mother.
“Put on a fucking shirt, man,” Sal said. Pavano complied immediately, retrieving his shirt from the back of his chair. “I hear you want to go into heliophysics.”
“I’m considering it.”
“You know, heliophysics is like one step up from cybernetics,” Sal said, glancing over at the painting again. “And Matthews is a fringe-riding lunatic who is only here because he’s a fossil.” Pavano remained impassive. “My father says you turned him down. Why?”
“I have my reasons.”
Sal scoffed. “You think choosing Matthews over my father is the best course of action?”
Pavano paused uncertainly. “I do.”
“Why?”
Again, Pavano hesitated. “I don’t think Professor Brennan can meet my needs as a scholar.”
Sal laughed. “My father will win the Nobel prize when they find b-modes, and they will.”
“It’s not that. It’s that…” Pavano looked at Sal for a moment before turning away.
“What is it?”
“It’s just that—I’ve spent a great deal of time with your father now, and I believe he’s suffering from some form of dementia. Early stages, of course, but it’s there. I saw it most vividly last spring when I spent that weekend with the department.”
Sal gripped the edge of his bunk. Something deep in his brain told him to run, to leave the room as quickly as possible and pretend he hadn’t heard what Pavano had just said. But he was immobilized. “My father is the top theoretical physicist in the world, you idiot.”
“Yes, of course,” Pavano said quietly. “But Matthews agrees with me. As do other members of the faculty.”
Sal realized he was now standing. His body ached with rage. He wanted to wrap his hands around Pavano’s skinny throat, crush the protuberant Adam’s apple, hear vertebrae crackle beneath his fingers. Pavano took a step back. When he saw Sal stalking toward him, he retreated even farther until he was up against the cool cinder-block wall.
Sal’s eyes fell on Pavano’s Riemann hypothesis again, and, without thinking, he grabbed the canvas off the easel and put his foot through it, throwing the ruined painting at Pavano. It landed with a thud. Pavano’s eyes—freakish and clear as glass—merely gazed back at him.
Sal returned to the physics building that night. It was deserted, but the lab was, as always, open. He spent two hours going over the day’s data coming in from the South Pole Telescope, but found it hard, once again, to concentrate. He hated Frank Pavano with every cell in his body—hated his unnaturally smooth face, his hollow cheeks, his cavernous, simian eyes. He hated how his father had pursued him with a cupidity that was embarrassing, and which stimulated in Sal persistent envy.
Mostly, he hated that Pavano was right.
* * *
Somewhere, melted snow dripped down an exterior wall; Sal could hear the quiet growl of Bozer’s snow mover digging out the construction site. The roar of machines had diminished to occasional animal-like noises as Bozer, Marcy, and Floyd struggled to keep both the station and the site from being buried. Sal missed the din. Hearing the discordant sounds of construction had been a comfort to him over the last seven months. Here, in the lab, the sounds of progress were less straightforward—in fact, they were damn near inaudible. The only proof you were getting closer to the truth, it seemed, was the chatter of an overworked desktop computer with a stuck spindle.
His laptop pinged, and Sal scooted his chair past Alek to look at his e-mail. It was another message from the NSF. It was, like all of the missives since the occupation had begun, marked URGENT. Sal forwarded it to Dwight without reading it, same as all of the other e-mails he’d received from government agencies. He would deal with the fallout later. Right now, he had to take care of this.
Alek had fallen asleep sitting up. Sal stepped past him again and lay down on the floor. The inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable. Hence, it’s scientifically meaningless. Sokoloff had said this so many times that Sal had told him it was going to be his next tattoo. As he stared at the ceiling, he tried to convince himself that his mentor was right, that they could play the uncertainty card and keep the cyclic theory on life support. But wasn’t that exactly what Pavano and his ilk were doing? Promoting doubt in the face of uncertainty? Five-sigma, they’d found. Less than one chance in 3.5 million that those b-modes—those curls—were a random occurrence. Less than one chance in 3.5 million that the universe hadn’t unfolded exactly the way the inflationists said.
God, the fucking inflationists. They hated the name—it was an insult—and although he used it with abandon, Sal knew this was childish. For some reason, he always thought of the inflationists as balloonists—foppish men in top hats gazing down at the rabble as they ascended, their bony hands gripping the side of the basket. Of course, that was ridiculous—most of the men and women who felt the standard model was as close to truth as science could get were just like him. The most passionate among them were his father’s acolytes. And maybe that’s why he hated them—the balloonists—the ones who were able to float away on the winds of a scientifically problematic theory.
He would stay here, rooted to the ice, and do whatever he could to dismantle it. The inflationary theory was unwieldy, made up of disparate parts, and covered with ugly surgical scars. One of the very first things Sal’s father had taught him was that truth was elegant because it was simple. The universe itself was simple—fundamental physics was simple—and the theory could not be more complex than the universe it described. But the inflationists had fine-tuned their theory until it was a Frankenstein’s monster. It was this half-dead thing that his father had expected him and the other bright young minds in cosmology to elevate to natural law.
Sokoloff had taught Sal that the truth does not need fine-tuning. This theory—the Big Bang—was not simple, and so Sal knew it was not true, no matter if they’d found “proof” of the b-modes. His model—the cyclic universe model—was so stunning, so elegant, that when Sal heard Sokoloff and Turner speak about it at the monthly Joint Theoretical Seminar at Princeton, he’d felt woozy. But when he looked around the room at the other physicists, he saw nothing but rolled eyes and open skepticism.
After the seminar, Sal had rushed down to the podium and grabbed Sokoloff by the sleeve. “Doc, it’s a fucking phoenix.” Sokoloff was amused. He even laughed.
“I’ve never heard it put that way,” he’d said, “but you’re absolutely right. Can we sell it like that?”
What Sokoloff and Turner were saying, and what no one in the room besides Sal was willing to at least consider, was that the universe built its own funeral pyre and stepped into the flames, destroying itself only to be reborn. It was engaged in an endless cycle with endless variations, of which this one—this moment, this life—was nothing more than chance, the result of a hip check with the universe on the other side of a minuscule gap.
At dinner that night, Sokoloff reminded Sal of the weaknesses of the inflationary theory—weaknesses Sal’s father had brushed aside as trivial. The standard model could tell us what had happened between the Big Bang and the universe as we currently know it, but it could not tell us what would happen next. Perhaps more important, it could not explain, and in fact even disdained, the very idea of exploring what had happened before. Sokoloff and Turner’s model could. Sal’s father had, somewhat famously, no patience for questions like this. “Let’s leave that to the preschoolers and the Baptists and focus on finding b-modes,” he’d said when Sal returned from Princeton that summer. “Don’t get seduced by contrarians. They exist in every discipline of science.” But Sokoloff wasn’t a contrarian. He’d actually been an architect of the inflationary theory himself. Sal’s father was right about one thing, though—Sal had been seduced.
By this time, Sal was heir apparent at the Kavli Institute for Particle Physics and Cosmology, which his father had spent the last ten years trying to build. What Frank Pavano had seen five years earlier was now an open secret: the mind of the eminent physicist had slowly been spackled with plaques. Alzheimer’s. Pavano, having chosen another university for his doctorate when Matthews retired, was now publishing on wave oscillations in the Midwest.
Sal opposed his mother’s desire to hide the truth from his father’s colleagues and devoted students, though he also understood the impulse. He allowed her to believe he was in agreement, but he knew better. He had to tell—otherwise the changes his father had undergone would become part of his biography rather than seen as the pathologies they were. Especially because it was no longer heterotic string theory that spoke to his father; it was strange pop culture conspiracy theories that sometimes seemed to share the same DNA. They had the resonance of fairy tales, and the deeper they resonated, the more plausible they became.
This was true: at South Pole an enormous telescopic mouth gaped at the heavens, swallowing invisible particles that tiny scientists then examined in the machine’s underground gut. The particles carried information from a place 13 billion years away. They told, or would tell, of a universe sprung from a singularity, where equations break down and energy is infinite.
This was not true: a system of caves and caverns traversed the earth’s mantle beneath the ice of Antarctica—polar voids where an anti-civilization thrived, where, if our civilization were to encounter it, the two would annihilate each other, like matter and anti-matter. Hitler was a believer of the Hollow Earth theory. In fact, some believe he is there now, having been escorted via U-boat by a German sailor, who located the narrow underwater passageway (wormhole?) on an expedition to South Pole.
Both were fabulist tales. Only one was true. Knowing which was which, Sal realized, was the difference between lucidity and dementia, and his father was now on the wrong side. After the now-infamous evening physics lecture, in which Professor Brennan had deviated from a talk on the Calabi-Yau manifold to consider the role that the Argentine naval base at Mar del Plata had played in Hitler’s escape to the German Antarctic city-base buried deep beneath the ice, the provost had asked Sal to come up with a “plan of action.” The “plan of action” was meant to allow Professor Brennan to retire “with some degree of dignity.”
A year later, on the day of the phone call Sal had received from the MacArthur Foundation notifying him that his work at Kavli had earned him a “genius grant,” Sal found his mother bent over the kitchen counter, trying to glue a plate back together. Her hands were shaking. Sal quietly picked up the remaining shards piece by piece and dropped them into the trash, leaving only the one, which his mother still had between her fingers and could not seem to let go.
Upstairs, Sal found his father ensconced in his study, a sun-filled room on the top floor of their California Mission-style home. He was standing at the large window that overlooked the pool, an unintentional infinity symbol filled with sparkling blue water.
“Your mother tells me you have good news,” Professor Brennan said suddenly.
“MacArthur likes the new model for radiatively induced symmetry breaking I introduced last year.” The words were bitter in Sal’s mouth. He tried again. “The model plays,” he said, hoping a joke would remove the taste, but his father didn’t respond. Sal wondered if he could slip away unnoticed. Outside, a car honked, and Professor Brennan leaned into the glass, straining toward the sound. Sal noticed for the first time that the room smelled like old man. He looked around at the bursting bookcases, the crystal awards, the framed degrees; the photo of Sal as a boy in a baseball uniform, his hair a mass of red-blond curls, his smile a series of gaps.
Sal saw, then, that his father had turned from the window and was looking at him. His eyes were clear. They were fixed on Sal’s face. Sal gazed back at the strong jaw, the broad, deeply lined forehead, the prominent but structurally perfect nose. He wanted nothing more at that moment than for his father to embrace him. Then the horn honked again, and the interstice dissolved.
Sal went down to South Pole for Kavli that fall, the fall of 1999, to work on Viper, the telescope run by the guys at the University of Chicago. Sal knew then that this would be the last time he’d look for proof that the standard model of the universe was correct. Later, when the first installment of the MacArthur money was deposited into his account, he wrote a check for the entire amount, made out to the Kavli Foundation. Now he was free.
Two days after writing that check, four months after returning from his first research season at Pole, eight months after Professor Brennan had quietly retired, and sixteen months after talking to Sokoloff that night in Princeton, Sal left Stanford. When his mother asked him where he was going, he told her he was following the phoenix.
* * *
Sal didn’t hear Cooper come into the lab. He must have fallen asleep, because she was squatting down next to him, her fur-lined hood framing her beautiful face. “They’ve been trying to get you over All-Call for the last fifteen minutes. Something’s happened.” She looked over at Alek, who had awakened and resumed his silent weeping. “What’s going on? Why’s Alek crying?”
Sal rolled over on his side and from his back pocket pulled the folded paper Alek had given him ten hours earlier. He handed it to Cooper and watched her scan it, her dark eyes moving from word to word. He knew it would mean nothing to her, and he was envious of her ignorance—Alek’s tears would do more than anything to tell her what was on this piece of paper.
Cooper sat down next to Sal and looked at him questioningly. He pointed to the symbol that Alek had circled three times in brown marker, the color of each ring growing deeper as his fury strengthened his grip. Together, they looked at it.
5
∑
Sal looked again and again and, as before, he couldn’t stop. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life, and it was also the most disappointing. “This is why Alek’s crying and you’re on the floor,” Cooper said.
“Short of finding life on other planets or directly detecting dark matter, it’s the most important discovery in astronomy. It supports a lifetime of theoretical work. And it eliminates my model.”
As she absorbed this, Sal thought of her question that day she came to his lab, the one he’d dismissed because it was inconvenient: No, I mean how it started before it started. He thought, too, of her paintings, which she’d begun photographing for her NSF portfolio before handing them over to everyone: the one of Pearl, how her golden hair—always hidden under that filthy pink bandanna—coiled around her neck; how her eyes laughed, but how they also clearly belonged to a woman with insatiable ambitions. Doc Carla, startling without her Yankees cap, her eyes fixed on a point in the distance, her entire life, somehow, in those eyes. Bozer, stripped to pith. Denise’s unmistakable sadness. Everyone else, even Alek, even Floyd and Dwight. Everyone else but him.
But he didn’t wonder why his likeness was not among the portraits; it was obvious that he had not allowed Cooper to truly look at him. He had never minded if the others looked—they couldn’t see like she could. Post-docs, research assistants, waitresses, lawyers. Some understood the work, or pretended to. Some didn’t, and some didn’t even feign interest. It was fine. It was all fine. He took what he needed without being a dick about it, and they got whatever they wanted in return. This history made Sal notorious at Kavli for what was regarded as his “charm”—though in the world of cosmology and particle physics, the bar for charm was admittedly low.
It helped that he’d taken after his father, with his strong features and tall build, and that from his mother he had inherited the sort of face that women considered attractive (though one girlfriend had assured him that “beauty is neutral”). But what set Sal apart from other cosmologists, particle physicists, astronomers, and all the others who so desperately wanted the world to understand the implications of their work, was that he was bold. He said nothing until he could say it with authority. He hated hedging—framing ideas with conditionals that annihilated them. Margins of error as wide as crevasses, and therefore too dangerous to attempt a crossing. These were the inviolable commandments of science, but they were also the reason that the public paid science so little attention. Scientists were lame messengers, often handing off their findings to their weakest practitioners to share with the world, celebrity scientists who performed a kind of homeopathy that distilled them to nothing, or nearly nothing. He refused to be like them.
Then Cooper pushed his stupid petition away that day in the cafeteria. Disdainful. Solitary. Like a particle that was also a wave, Sal’s heart was both closed and open. He tried to ignore it, but then she was everywhere. She was in the lab, she was in the equations that Sal still did by hand, she was at the telescope, blotting out the cosmic microwaves. She was outside, walking alone, looking at the sky. Looking. Each day that passed changed something about her, made her more beautiful. A glance in the cafeteria. A very slight smile. A smudge of paint on her cheek. A smart remark. Nothing rational. None of it precise.
First, he laid her out for Alek, like she was a cadaver in a nineteenth-century medical theater, to prod and insult in every way imaginable. Alek soon tired of this; he felt Cooper was ordinary and therefore inoffensive. Still Sal’s heart thundered for her. You’re distracted, he heard his father saying to him, and now you’re proving a distraction. He could not afford a distraction. Not this season.
When the feelings persisted, Sal eventually declared that his intense attraction to Cooper must be evolutionary biology at work. There could be no other explanation. Alek felt strongly that Sal’s vow of chastity for the season was to blame. No, Sal insisted, it had to be biology—millennia ago, he and Cooper must have been part of the same tribe. They would simply have to fuck so he could get back to work. Masturbation would cure this reptilian-brain desire, he thought. But it didn’t.
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.
The initial response from his fellow scientists ranged from disbelief to actual horror. He heard nothing from Scaletta. He waited. He wanted to give the Pole-based scientists, whose experiments had been ruined, enough time to reflect on the idea.
Then came the phone calls, all of them asking for Sal. He was spending twenty hours a day in his lab, analyzing the readouts from his own experiment, so Dwight fielded things as they came and took messages. He brought these scraps of paper to the Smoke Bar each night, so Sal could go through them.
“What are they calling about?” Cooper asked.
“The shutdown. How to end it.”
Alek scoffed at this. “No, he is buying lemons.”
“Lemons?”
“Alek,” Sal said, his voice hoarse.
“This is how shutdown will end,” Alek said.
Floyd made his way over to where Sal was sitting. “And how are you going to go about doing that?”
Sal pinched the bridge of his nose. “I think NSF should agree to fund a climate skeptic on the Divide once a season.”
“Wasn’t that the opposite of what you were railing on about earlier in the season?” Pearl said. “I don’t mean to sound like a jerk, but it sounds like you’re just changing your mind because you don’t want your experiment to be affected.”
“You’re right. But I think we should give Pavano the opportunity to fail. I think we should let all of them fail. That’s all they want—the opportunity to be totally, unmistakably wrong. If we don’t give them that opportunity, they’ll just keep stirring up this idea about uncertainty—‘we’re not sure, there’s no consensus, let us show you the science.’ I say, let them try. And in the meantime, we can get back to the real work of science.” This earned him a blank look, so he sat forward in his seat and cleared his throat. “Let me tell you a story about lemons.”
That night, he’d awakened in Cooper’s room to find her out of bed, standing at her desk. The room was dark and she remained frozen in the strange shadows cast by the seam of light under the door. Although her naked back was facing toward him, Sal could see she was looking at something, studying it intently. It took him a minute to see the pile of bandages and gauze on the desk.
“Cooper,” he said softly. “Come here.” He could see her stiffen, and she shook her head without turning around. Sal threw the blankets off and got out of bed. As he approached, she curled into herself, cocooning her injured hand. She shook her head again, as if, for the first time since he’d known her, she was unable to find her voice. When he wrapped his arms around her, she heaved a great sob.
“Let me see,” Sal replied, pulling her closer. She had tucked the injured hand between her rib cage and her left bicep, as if keeping it warm. He gently pulled at her wrist until her hand came free, and in the fading luminescence of the twilit sky that stole through the tiny window, he saw, for the first time, how her right hand looked pale and wrinkled with moisture, and how the place where her finger had been was knobby and scabbed. It struck him as so uncommonly beautiful, so like a tesseract, that he felt tears spring to his eyes. But he could tell from the way Cooper hung her head, and the way her body tried to become small as he cradled her hand, that she considered it ugly, and for once, he knew the kind of incomprehension everyone else experienced when looking at the Riemann hypothesis. They couldn’t see why its uncertainty made it beautiful. He couldn’t understand their blindness. Maybe there was something ugly in Cooper’s disfigurement, but he couldn’t see it, no matter how hard he tried.
In his lab now, where his phoenix had incinerated itself, Sal looked into Cooper’s face as she kneeled over him, her eyes wide and happy. Before he had a chance to speak, the sound of All-Call filled the room. Sal propped himself up on one elbow—there was cheering in the background.
He stood up, and he, Cooper, and Alek crowded around the speaker. The chants grew louder.
“What are they saying?” Sal asked.
Cooper turned to him, her eyes wide. “That’s why I came out here to find you. It’s over.” She kissed his dry lips. “Listen,” she whispered.
Sal, Sal, Sal, went the chant.
The lemon wedges had worked. Sal looked at Cooper and realized that while there was nothing left of his experiment but a pile of ashes, in the cinders the phoenix already stirred.
NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
4201 WILSON BOULEVARD
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA 22230
Cooper Gosling
PO Box 423
Minneapolis, MN 55410
Dear Ms. Gosling:
At the close of every grant period the Antarctic Artists & Writers Program assesses the output of each grantee following his or her return from Antarctica. We have now had a chance to review the portfolio you sent. What follows reflects the comments from our distinguished panel of artists and arts administrators.
While we by no means consider ourselves the arbiter of “good art,” the panelists were confused by the complete lack of landscape in the collection. In fact, its absence suggested, as one panelist put it, “an act of will.” As you know, the United States Antarctic Program is a science-based research program, which takes as its sole directive the interaction with and better understanding of Nature. The Artists & Writers Program was designed specifically to convey this directive to the general public through different media. The panelists felt that your collection of portraits, while quite fine technically, could have been painted, in the words of one panelist, “in any local bar.”
There was one exception. We were particularly moved by the portrait you titled “David.” That the subject’s face was represented only by a smear of white seemed an appropriate homage to the courage and selflessness of the great polar explorers. The mitten cleverly embedded in the background added depth. We hope you build on this strength in your future work so you can provide, for yourself and others, a greater understanding of the heritage of human exploration in Antarctica. We also encourage you to consider applying for another Artists & Writers grant. Enclosed is an application for the upcoming research season, along with a preliminary psychological questionnaire.
Regards,
National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists & Writers Program