Monday: July 14th
The Testing Facility staff sent Scott Whitman to officially welcome me to Foxe Five and to invite me to their Bastille Day Fête. When I asked why a Bastille Day Fête, Scott explained that at Foxe Five they celebrated damn near anything that came along. Scott asked if I thought Phyll might like to come.
For a moment I hesitated. “Why don't you ask Phyll? I think she may come if she's in town, but she might be at the dig working. Could you smuggle her onto the base, Scott?”
“No problem. No one is going to stop someone who looks like that. Besides isn't she the daughter of some high class politician or something?”
I nodded, “Does that help?”
He shrugged, “Damn right it does. Let's face it, Naomi, it helps to be connected.”
Later that afternoon I slipped into the only skirt I had brought north, and, with the help of a cane and a very nice marine escort I hobbled down to the Foxe Five Testing Facility. The DEW Line lab was nothing like the Lab on the hill. There were no test tubes or Bunsen burners – not even as part of a still. Bootleg liquor couldn't hope to compete with the quality and the price of liquor at the DEW Line. From what I could see the main room was filled with computers and computer type paraphernalia. There seemed to be dozens of little machines with styluses busily at work in total disregard of the human beings who milled about the room nursing their drinks, making conversation, and listening to Beethoven on one of those near perfect sound systems the government provided.
The party was already in full swing when I arrived although William Schmidt, the official host, had stepped out for a while. I scanned the crowd for a few moments. Beauregard Henderson's friends were conspicuous by their absence. This party was for civilized people. It was nothing like the party Welche and I had attended at the base. The air was less densely filled with smoke, there was only the hint of drugs, and the people handled their mixed drinks with something approaching casual unconcern.
The Testing Facility had sponsored the get together and invited all the whites from the settlement – all the southerners who existed as quasi mentors in the Arctic. There was a natural alliance between the “scientific staff” at the DEW Line and the nurses, teachers, and Nordair personnel from the settlement. All of them were isolated from the other military men at the base by virtue of their education and their pretensions to class; and they were isolated from the Inuit by virtue of their race and their culture. Such isolation bred its own fears among the whites. The people from the base were afraid of what they called cabin-fever. The whites in the settlement were afraid of “being bushed.” Both were diseases of isolation. A man with cabin fever will do anything to “get out” and a man who is bushed has already done everything and opted out. If you found yourself hanging around with the natives, shunning the various light entertainments sponsored by the other whites, and being socially exclusive, you were probably well on your way to being bushed.
As a visiting anthropologist, I didn’t really belong to either group. Not to the DEW Line, and not to the settlement whites. I wouldn't even be in the North long enough to get myself bushed – unless, I was already bushed which was altogether possible. And unlike almost everyone else at the DEW Line, the nursing station, the school, or Nordair, I was not a civil servant. Or, more accurately, I was not perceived to be a civil servant.
Were CIA agents civil servants?
It was a nice distinction.
CIA agent or not, I was a female and literate, and therefore a hot commodity at the Bastille Day Fête.
It was a cocktail party, and I was no good at cocktail parties. I had never developed a taste for either the alcohol or the conversation. What I usually did at cocktail parties was to search out a kindred soul of either sex, find someplace to sit, and talk to that person for the rest of the evening about our work. It's almost always possible to find at least one person equally ill at ease at a cocktail party. But this cocktail party was different. Retreat wasn't an option. I was supposed to be gainfully employed – spying.
After a few minutes, Scott Whitman found me and, claiming some sort of proprietary finder's rights, he led me around the Facility introducing me. Most of the Testing Facility staff were there. There was Hank Miller, a thin balding civilian technical assistant. I remembered what Scott had said about him that first night, but Hank Miller didn't look like the sort of person to have a prize collection of hard core pornography. There were two radio men. A sturdy young freckled-faced uniformed lieutenant called Stephen Brandywine worked the night shift. I liked Stephen on sight. He seemed a simple straight forward likeable guy. The other radio man, Joshua O'Connor, was tall and bony and from Boston. He had cultivated a persona to go with his physique. He was one of those professionally earnest young men – the kind of young man who smokes a pipe with his own highly distinctive blend of tobacco, and who is never seen without that pipe.
The settlement whites were an even stranger mix. Over half the younger whites in the community seemed to have shown up for the party. In addition to Pat Anderson from the nursing station, I noticed the local station manager for Nordair – who was being required to serve out his year in purgatory before the airline would allow him to pilot one of its aircraft, several school teachers temporarily freed from the frustration of trying to impose their culture on an essentially alien population, and three or four people who worked at the Bay.
After a few minutes the faces became a blur. People drifted in and out of the party. Except for me, Pat Anderson, and one of the teachers they were all men. Only three of the military men were in uniform.
Taken together, these people represented the intellectual elite of the southern contingent on Inungilak, and the conversation was depressingly familiar. Except for the occasional uniform they looked and talked like any group that might gather at the outskirts of a small private college in a Midwestern town. It was as if they had accidentally stumbled onto a military base.
I focused on figuring out the layout of the Testing Facility. Scott explained that the Facility was actually a series of three or four rooms off a central meeting room. We were in the central meeting room. There were three other doors. The other doors were numbered “104,” “105,” and “106.”
I asked Scott about the other rooms.
“There's nothing much in Room 104, Naomi. Room 105 has some equipment for Bill Schmidt, some radios, and some radar type equipment.
“And Room 106?”
“Room 106. That's the room no one knows about. No one goes in there.”
“No one.” I asked.
“Not in living memory.” He answered. “You so much as breathe on that door and the whole DEW Line goes on red alert like it was World War III or something.”
“What's it all for? What’s in there?
Scott shrugged. “Who knows? I've heard that it's a new bacterial growth capable of wiping out humanity. I've also heard that it’s a miniaturized nuclear generating plant used to heat the DEW Line on an experimental basis, and that it's being kept under wraps so that the Canadians won't raise a god awful stink. Josh thinks it's hooked up to the radar installation. Hank, who has been here longer than anyone else, says it's only closed storage like the other rooms, only ten years ago something really hot was going on in there and they haven't gotten around to removing the security locks. Hank's probably right. I mean if something was going on, we'd see some sign of it. But no one ever goes into that room.”
Josh O'Connor had joined us. He was asking Whitman about Phyll. It seemed that Phyll had come into town to visit me at the nursing station, and Scott had found her at the Lab. She had nixed coming onto the base.
“She was real good about it.” Scott said. “She said she'd like to see me again sometimes – but not on the base. She feels very strongly about that. She's opposed to the American Military Establishment and what it stands for. What could I say? I agreed with her.
I turned to him, honestly curious. “So, why did you enlist, Scott?”
“Alice's father.”
“Alice's father?”
“Alice is my fiancée back home in Ohio. Her father has this thing about serving the homeland. I've got to keep on the good side of her old man.”
“Why?” I asked. “I mean I can see how you would try not to offend him, but why would you enlist in the military just to get on the good side of him? You're marrying Alice, not her father.”
“Frank Bentley, that's Alice's father, is the richest man in Plaintree, Ohio.”
Josh nodded. “He owns the town's only industry. An electronics factory.”
“Right. So when old man Bentley told me to serve, I served. And let me tell you it's not doing Alice any damn good me being up here.”
“She misses you?”
“You better believe she does. I have to call her almost every other day. It would be just my luck that while I'm up here freezing my butt off for Mr. Bentley, Alice takes up with someone else. Alice is the sort of girl who needs constant reassurance.”
And I knew that was expensive. Telephone calls out of the North in those years were billed like telephone calls to Australia and telephone calls to Australia were very pricey. In fact, long distance telephone calls from the Arctic were far too expensive for a poor boy from Plaintree Ohio – particularly since his military pay was supporting a drug habit as well. I had made only one telephone call home since my arrival. The CIA sponsored grant was generous enough on documented expenses related to the national interest – it didn't run to financing the elegancies of life like communication with one's family.
I was listening to the long catalogue of Alice's virtues, principal of which seemed to have been her father's electronics factory, when the other radio operator joined our little group.
“Sorry, we were introduced when you came in but you probably don't remember me. My name is Stephen Brandywine. Josh and I run the radios for this outfit.”
“I'm Naomi Solomon. I dig away at old bones.”
“And run away from polar bears.”
“And run away from polar bears.”
“Also from BJ Henderson.”
“Good lord, does everyone at the base know everything about me?”
“Pretty damn near. We haven't much to do except gossip and argue politics. From the complaining you hear around this place, you wouldn't have guessed that all of us are volunteers.”
Josh lifted his pipe. “Only technically volunteers.”
Steve shrugged. “None of us were conscripted into the armed services, were we, Josh?”
Josh grinned. “Steve is our local defender of God, Mother, and country. He says he enlisted to serve his country.”
“Yep, Josh, that's just what I did. And you enlisted for the money and the free training.”
“And to see the world, Steve. Don't forget that. I ‘joined the navy’ to see the world. They were supposed to send us to Paris or to Rome. What are we doing up here at the North Pole?”
Steve grinned, “You can console yourself that you are defending the American way of life.”
“Bullshit, Steve. There is no American way of life. I mean as opposed to any other way of life. We have Arctic military bases and they have Arctic military bases. We have training exercises with legions of helicopters, and they have training exercises with legions of helicopters. We monitor their space satellites, and they monitor our space satellites. The people are just the same, and the governments are not all that different.”
Stephen Brandywine shook his head. “The people may be the same, Josh. The governments sure as hell aren't.”
Josh took another long drag on his pipe and exhaled, liberally scenting the air around him. “What's the difference? They send their dissidents to Siberia and Uncle Sam sends Joshua O'Connor to Inungilak – it's the same damn latitude and there's a hell of a lot more grass in Siberia.”
“The difference is that you enlisted, and those guys in Siberia didn't. Besides the perks are one hell of a lot better here than they are in the Gulag.”
O'Connor settled back, “I don't know about that Steve. Siberia probably has a better class of inmates.” O'Connor lifted his pipe and stared off toward the opposite wall. “Listen,” he said, his voice almost resonating.
“Listen to what?” Steve asked.
“That's Beethoven's Violin Concerto.”
“So what?”
Josh was still staring off into the middle distance as we listened. “Can any of you tell me who is playing the solo? Can you tell if it's a Russian or an American?”
“Sure,” Steve said. “It's a Russian. I put it on myself – an old Angel David Oistrakh recording.”
O'Connor started tapping the bowl of his pipe on the table. “But would you have known, Steve, if you hadn't seen the jacket? I have a Menuhin recording of the same concerto. Would you have known the difference?”
Steve was still confused, “Maybe not right off, but what the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything, Steve, everything. There is no real difference between our cultures. No significant differences. A Russian and an American can play the same music.”
It was meant as a warming thought, and the music was indeed sublime. The soaring violin overwhelmed the senses. But Oistrakh and Menuhin! You would have thought that Josh could have found a better example to prove his point. There was a story going around Brooklyn when I was a little girl. That story was as old as the Oistrakh recording.
Two Jews meet in the street.
Sam says to Harry, “What do you think about these new cultural exchanges with the Russians.”
Harry says, “What cultural exchanges?”
Sam says “They send us Oistrakh. We send them Menuhin.”
Harry shakes his head, “We send them our Jewish violinist from Odessa. They send us their Jewish violinist from Odessa. Oistrakh and Menuhin! This is an exchange of culture?”
I listened as from a distance to Josh explaining “See Steve, it's very significant that they play the same music we do, they do the same engineering problems, the same philosophy.”
“No,” I said, slightly belligerent in spite of the fact that years at Columbia had taught me it was useless to argue with people like Joshua O'Connor.
“No, what?”
“No they can't do the same philosophy, and the people who try it end up in psychiatric hospitals where they don't do the same psychiatry either.”
“We use psychiatry to control deviant behavior, Naomi.”
“I'm not saying it hasn't happened now and then, Josh. But show me the lists of the thousands of poets, philosophers, humanists who have spent years in involuntary psychiatric care in this country.”
Before O'Connor could reply, Scott Whitman steered the conversation into calmer water. “Anything new on the sex lives of the beluga whale, Steve?”
Steve colored up under his tan and turned to me. He really seemed almost too innocent. “It's not really the sex life that we're talking about. We are monitoring some sea mammal studies. A scientific team on the SS Kingorak is studying the effect of ships' noise on sea mammal communications. The Kingorak is anchored in Hudson Strait.”
“Hudson Strait?” I asked.
“Yes, right here.” He turned to one of the wall maps showing Hudson Strait which joined the Atlantic on the east to Hudson Bay on the west. He pointed to where the Kingorak was berthed in the Strait about 500 miles to the south of Inungilak – a mere spitting distance in the Arctic.
“They, the Kingorak team of environmentalists, think that shipping in the North will kill off the whales.” Josh explained.
“Because the ships will cut channels in the ice which the whales will follow, and be trapped in when the water refreezes?” I asked.
“No,” Josh said, “The Kingorak is not studying that problem. Their theory is that the ships' noise in itself disturbs the communications among the whales – particularly among breeding whales.”
“Don't sea mammals coexist with ships' noise in other places?” I asked.
Steve nodded. “Sure they do. The biggest calving ground in the world is probably the Gulf of Oman – also one of the heaviest shipping areas. Hell, with the war between Iraq and Iran the calving whales in the Gulf of Oman have to contend with oil spills, mined harbors, and Exocet missiles. Being hit by a mine or a high speed missile really does interfere with communications.”
Josh cut in. “Anyway the Kingorak radio operator has the dirtiest mind north of the tree line. If this wasn't a government operation, his transmissions would be censored. He provides a graphic running commentary on both the biologists and the whales. And there is a lot to comment on. They must have a dozen people spying on the whales – who happen to be breeding just now – to see what sort of psychosis the whales are developing.”
Steve nodded. “So far it's the environmentalists who may be going psychotic. Yesterday, one of them claims to have seen a whale bigger than any beluga on record. The radio operator claims it's not a single whale but a whale ménage à trois. He spent about half an hour this morning speculating on the sexual practices of a whale menage à trois. He forwarded us the audio of the whales. Hell, between the whale noises and the Kingorak noise, it sounded like something from the Grateful Dead. In any case that much whale is nothing worth messing with, and the captain of the Kingorak is trying his damndest to give it a wide berth. Meanwhile, the environmentalists are trying their damndest to get up closer so that they can work on the communication patterns of the whales.”
While the others continued to discuss the Kingorak, I let my eyes wander around the room again.
From the main room the door to 106 looked no different than the door to either of the other two satellite rooms. I reminded myself that, in all probability, hidden behind the door to Room 106 there was a gizmo which could affect the future of mankind. But, there was nothing I could do just then about securing the future of mankind, so I excused myself, and went over to check the fridge. The Testing Facility was well supplied. They had real milk, real reconstituted frozen orange juice, and real Coca Cola. I filled up on the milk. After three weeks at Kiniktok, I needed real milk not milk powder. Real milk sold for three dollars a quart at the Hudson Bay Store, and more often than not it had begun to go bad.
Nursing my glass of ice cold milk, I looked around at my compatriots. I wondered if any of the rest of them knew how good they had it at the DEW Line. They were warm, they were dry, and they commanded all the elegancies of life. With all that luxury I couldn't see why these DEW Line types were wasting their time on alcohol.
Bill Schmidt found me in the crowd. “I'm sorry about Welche.” he said.
“So am I.”
He stared at the glass in his hands for a moment, before meeting my eyes. He wasn’t drinking milk. “Monday night. Do you think we could have done anything to save him?”
“I don't know, Bill.”
He took another deep draw on his drink. “No, we can't know, can we . . . . Sweet Jesus, are you drinking milk? That is milk isn't it? Don't you need something more fortifying.”
“Why?”
“Because you were damn near eaten by a polar bear not to mention friend Welche. I haven't been sober for days. You should be in a state of nervous collapse.”
“Correction. The bear is in a state of nervous collapse. It's the bear that got the worst of the encounter. And even the best scotch in the world wouldn't do that bear much good – or Welche either for that matter. You and I, Bill, are the survivors.”
“Is that supposed to be an accomplishment, Naomi?”
“No, Bill, not an accomplishment – just the luck of the draw.”
“Right. So, tell me about your bear chase.”
“It wasn't my bear chase. It was the bear's bear chase. I was walking along minding my own business, when I looked up to see this big mean bear loping toward me across the barren tundra. I wasn't carrying a gun, my mace can was empty, and all I had with me was my pack and the clothes on my back – virtually all of which I obligingly left for the bear, hoping he could be distracted long enough for me to reach some shelter. I was doing all right until I tripped and twisted my ankle. Then it looked like checkmate except that my patron saint Enoki Amarok came along and shot the big bad bear. That was the worst of it. The bear fell on top of me. And I fainted.”
“And that was all? What were you thinking?”
“What was I thinking. I was thinking 'what in the hell am I a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn doing trying to outrun a polar bear in the Arctic?' No, don't laugh, Bill. It sounds funny now, but at the time I thought it was a very sobering reflection on the futility of life, on the ultimate irony of fate, and on the absurdity of existence, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
“Right on.”
“So tell me Bill, what is a nice academic type professor like you doing in a place like this? They don't need you to monitor the seismographs, or do they?”
There was just a moment's hesitation. If I hadn't been watching for it, I might have missed it. “They don't really need me at all, but I manage to keep myself occupied. There are some other gizmos around here to keep tabs on, and I'm doing the research on anaerobic bacteria. Once they get all my equipment set up, I'll probably get a few papers out. How is your paper on aggression coming, Naomi?”
It seemed reasonable to suppose that the presence of Bill Schmidt and the biological equipment in room 105 was no coincidence. Directly or indirectly they were probably relevant to ARTHUR work. Clearly, however, Bill wanted to talk about my work and not his. I shrugged, “I've completed an outline of the paper. It's nothing extraordinary, but it's a neat little paper.”
“Not like the breakthrough one of the nurses told me you made the other day. Something about skulls, wasn't it?”
“Yes, skulls. That's really going to be something hot if it turns out we're right. It would mean there were people of non-Asian descent on Inungilak Island at least as early as 900 AD. But if you get me started talking about that, I'll bore you to tears.”
His eyes were laughing again. “You won't bore me. You're the first girl I've met here who can manage whole sentences.”
“Damned with faint praise, Bill.”
“It's a hell of a lot better than being damned straight out, Naomi.”
And for the next half hour we talked about our work. We talked about the skulls at Kiniktok, and the assorted theories to account for them. And we talked about his work at the Facility. We talked about the sun spot observation team, the biologists working on anaerobic organisms on Baffin Island, the procedures for monitoring the Russian satellites in polar orbit, the Rand group that was working on testing ice conditions in Foxe Basin, and the environmental work on sea mammal communications. We talked about a great many different things, but we didn't talk about anything that sounded remotely like Paul Lockely's version of ARTHUR.
And while Bill and I were talking, Michael Sagvik came silently into the Facility.
I watched Sagvik as he slowly wandered around the room dusting the tables and clearing the glasses. I saw him go up to the seismograph, extract the printouts, and reset the paper. And, as I watched, William Schmidt excused himself to tend his other guests. Apparently just a little on the go, he walked carefully across the room, almost colliding with several people – Michael Sagvik among them.
The others treated Sagvik with the sort of overly healthy bonhomie a lot of otherwise sensible people reserve for favored members of downtrodden races. Sagvik remained in the room, but he made no effort to join the group. Once I tried to draw him into a conversation – he shuffled away after exchanging the merest civilities, explaining that he had clean up work to do.
Clean up seemed to consist of unloading trash baskets into a big box like affair – itself loaded down with various sorts of rags and bottles of cleaning solution. The sort of thing you see in hotels. I noted that the box was certainly big enough to carry ARTHUR.
That afternoon Michael Sagvik was back doing the illiterate savage to the hilt. It's amazing how knowledge of the truth improves the clarity of one's perceptions. Now that I knew who Michael Sagvik was – or rather who he was not – his every gesture seemed to betray him. And all the while I watched him, I was wondering what precious little tidbits of vital information he had collected over the last few months while clearing away the glasses at DEW Line parties.