“It’s not their fault this happened,” Cooper said quietly. Sal shook his head. He seemed to know something about Dwight that Cooper didn’t, that this outburst was necessary and that Dwight should be allowed to go on, the way Floyd had been allowed to castigate Marcy that night at the bar when she’d returned from Cheech. And, in fact, letting that drama play out had worked—there Floyd and Marcy were, sitting perpendicular to each other, Marcy with her legs propped up on Floyd’s lap. Cooper looked around the room: Alek was sitting quietly, his demeanor as serene as if he were settling in for movie night. Pearl knit, while next to her, Doc Carla scratched her ankle. Tucker leaned against a bookshelf, carelessly flipping through a James Patterson paperback. Only the admin staff looked mortified.
“She says it’s not their fault. Okay, that’s good.” Dwight nodded at Cooper. “King Beaker’s ice-wife says it’s not his fault, in her completely unbiased opinion. Look, Sal worked overtime being an asshole to Pavano and then he put on that show when Frick and Frack and the rest of the government suits came—don’t you guys see? Don’t you see what’s gonna happen, what they’re already doing?” Dwight was hysterical. “They’re gonna shut us down! They’re gonna stop payments, they’re gonna close up shop. They’re gonna send us home.”
Tucker reshelved the Patterson novel and walked over to Dwight. He rubbed his shoulders, and to Cooper’s surprise, Dwight let him. He turned to look up at Tucker. “I don’t wanna go home.”
Simon sighed, and hauled himself out of his chair. Cooper caught the eye roll he sent over to Warren, who appeared to have gone catatonic. “I’ll address your question about the fuel supply,” Simon said to Bozer, “despite your lack of manners. We expect the Hercs coming in over the next ten days will carry enough fuel to put us where we need to be.”
“Negative,” Floyd said. “Seeing as I’m actually the one who runs the power plant and observes the fuels, and reports back to you, I can say with, yeah, let’s call it total certainty, that that’s not what I reported to you last week.”
“I didn’t see that report,” Simon said.
“According to my calculations, I believe that we would need twenty-seven air tankers ferrying nothing but JP-8 in order to survive the winter. All those ‘delayed shipments’ set us back.”
“Send the Nailheads home,” Sri said. “Stop construction and keep a small crew to keep the station and the labs going. We can live off the fuel we have. I need my data. Sal needs his data. I’m not leaving here without my data.”
Floyd laughed. “You think you’re gonna finish that shit?”
“I know I am.”
Floyd shook his head, and muttered, “Moron.”
Sri looked over at Sal. “What’s he talking about, Sal?”
Everyone turned to look at Sal. Like Warren, he, too, had folded his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. Cooper realized both men were in possession of the same information, and that their demeanors matched because this information had impacted them similarly. “Sal?” Sri said.
“We have bigger problems,” Sal finally said.
“Bigger problems than a fuel shortage heading into winter?”
“They have us—you, me, Lisa, everyone—going home in two days.”
Sri paused for a moment. “Because we didn’t sign the confidentiality agreement,” he said, his voice dead. Lisa dropped her head in her hands.
“Just sign the goddamn thing, guys,” Marcy said. “Everyone else did.”
“They’re research techs,” Sal said. “Early-career scientists, some of them still post-docs. Most of them working on other people’s projects. You expect me to sign away my life’s work, my ideas? I can’t.” He looked over at Sri and Lisa. “We can’t.”
Cooper reached over and rubbed Lisa’s back as she wept.
After leaving the winter-over meeting, Cooper stopped by the station post office to see if she’d received any mail. Along with the fuel shipments, postal delivery had slowed dramatically, further dampening everyone’s spirits. The place was empty when she arrived, as were nearly all of the post office boxes. Halfheartedly, Cooper thrust her hand into her cubby and felt around. To her surprise, there was something there: a package, the size of a pack of cigarettes, lumpy and wrapped inexpertly in brown paper. There was no return address, and Cooper didn’t recognize the handwriting on the mailing label.
She opened it and found something hastily wrapped in a page from a week-old Washington Post. With some difficulty, she was able to tear the paper away with her good hand. As she did so, something metallic fell to the floor. It sparkled under the fluorescent lights like a Fourth of July firework. When Cooper picked it up, she saw it was Calhoun’s lapel pin. Let’s Roll.
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Meet the most influential thinkers in the world of Intelligent Design and Climate Change while cruising through spectacular Alaskan landscapes at the height of summer. This weeklong conference will take place aboard one of Telkhine Cruises’ most luxurious ships, the Fantasy, and will leave Seattle to cruise the Inside Passage. Our ship will call at Ketchikan, Wrangell, Hubbard Glacier, and other breathtaking ports and features, before returning via the Outside Passage. Spend time in the company of some of the world’s foremost scholars, scientists, and design theorists and learn more about the most profound scientific questions facing us today: How did the universe begin? How did complex life develop? What does helioseismology tell us about fluctuating climate patterns? Is climate change real?
Featured speakers include Dr. Patton D. Rodale, New York Times bestselling author of Alarmism and the Climate Change Hoax, renowned Cambridge University mathematician and clergyman Dr. Jeffrey Osterholm, and Dr. Frank Pavano, a widely respected helioseismologist whose nascent research on the effect of global solar variations on climate fluctuations is attracting a great deal of attention. In addition to daily lectures and seminars, opportunities for more intimate conservations with our speakers will be available each night during formal meals and dancing.
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complexity and design
I see now that the cruise was a mistake, the first cause, if you’ll allow the joke, of my current difficulties. But Annie had wanted so badly to go, and I felt this was something kind I could do for her after everything that had happened. It also appeared to be a career opportunity for me.
The cruise would leave from Seattle, dock at Juneau, sail through Glacier Bay, and then return—its only guests the individuals registered for the 2000 Design in Nature Conference, sponsored by the Center for Complexity and Design, an organization with which I had, until this point, been unfamiliar. I had been approached personally by the center’s senior Fellow, who had received my name from a former colleague (I suspected it was Fred Zimmer, but the man on the phone would not confirm this). He showed particular interest in my most recent work, which had to do with solar acoustic pressure waves, and urged me to submit an abstract for the conference. But when I asked him to give me a sense of the conference’s focus, he was evasive. He would say only that the expected audience would be comprised of academics, politicians, policymakers, Fellows of the Center for Complexity and Design, and regular citizens with an interest in the topic of science. He hinted that the organizers had detected in their audience a burgeoning interest in global warming, but offered no further guidance. It is telling to me now that I cannot recall the man’s name.
It would not be inaccurate to say that, by this time, things had grown desperate for me. It had been three years since I’d been forced to resign from my position as the DuPont Professor of Physics at a small private college in the Midwest after the provost discovered I had plagiarized entire paragraphs in several of my research papers. In my area of study—helioseismology, or the study of solar wave oscillations—plagiarism was unheard of, and so when the University Research Integrity Committee began its
investigation, there was great internal interest in the outcome. At its conclusion, I was given the option of resigning or being fired.
Annie was bewildered. I told her I’d been sloppy, that I’d been overextended, that I’d put too much on my graduate assistant’s plate, and that he had cut and pasted from several sources directly into my master documents, intending, of course, to flag those sections so that I might rewrite the material. It had happened to several academics in the last few years, and even some journalists. Contrite, they’d all slunk into the farthest corners of their professions, but had slowly been able to piece their careers back together. Framed in this manner, Annie found it plausible that there had been no intent to deceive on my part, and this made it harder for her to accept that I had been treated so roughly by the university.
I had lost the support of all but one colleague—Fred Zimmer, the chair of the physics department and the man who had hired me. He was a theorist who had spent forty-five years studying quantum chaos, specifically entropy dynamics. He was warm and gregarious in a department known for its austerity, and he wanted to believe there had been a misunderstanding.
But the truth was that it went far beyond a couple of plagiarized paragraphs. It was systematic, a compulsion I could not keep in check for reasons I could not fathom. I began seeing a therapist. I told Annie the therapy was for generalized anxiety resulting from my resignation and the subsequent ostracism, but in reality, I was unspooling a career’s worth of lies. My therapist accepted these lies; in fact she seemed to extract them, winding them back on a distaff from her chair across the room. And the question that hung over every session was why?
I had no answers to this, of course—the therapist had many, but she would pose her answers as yet more questions for me to consider. Could it be that, as a former “child prodigy,” I had a pathological fear of failure that created a tension so unbearable that I had to affect the failure myself in order to relieve it? Could it be I had an inferiority complex because I was a first-generation college student, surrounded by individuals who had “suckled at the breast of the ivory tower”? (When I pointed out the somewhat mixed nature of her metaphor, she indicated this objection was a way of diverting the conversation, but this did not stop me from spending the rest of that session imagining an ivory tower with leaking breasts, sustaining an entire generation of infant-academics.) Could it be that I felt everyone’s work was inherently better than mine, even when mine was yet unwritten, and so the compulsion to integrate the work of others into my own without risking a single change was a manifestation of both primary and secondary inferiority? Perhaps it goes without saying, but my therapist was a devotee of Adler. I found Adler’s approach wanting in many areas, and as a result, I wasn’t, in the words of my therapist, “doing the work.” We terminated our relationship.
Annie encouraged me to mount an attempt to return to the halls of academia. The gap in my résumé would be hard to explain—a plagiarism charge is notoriously difficult to work around. Instead, I continued my work on the solar neutrino problem I’d been working on prior to my resignation, but this time only as a private citizen. Annie went back to work at Pricewaterhouse shortly after I left the university, in order to replace the steady paycheck and health insurance I had lost.
* * *
I wasn’t aware that the man sitting next to me in the cruise terminal was addressing me until Annie nudged me with her elbow. Unlike the majority of the men milling about the waiting area, most of whom were dressed in khakis and polos, this man wore a business suit. He was clean-shaven and well groomed, and the symmetry of his face was pleasing. The gel in his hair gleamed under the harsh terminal lights, giving it a slightly plastic appearance.
“Scientists are prone to herd thinking,” the man said, with the air of someone who was conspicuously repeating himself. Annie nudged me again. I was unsure of how to address his statement. He seemed to sense this, and, to my relief, he offered his hand. “Eric Falleri,” he said.
“Frank Pavano,” I replied, as we shook hands.
“Oh, I know who you are. You’re the reason I’m taking this cruise.” He grinned. “I’m very interested in your work.”
Eric did not look like the sort who would typically take an interest in helioseismology—and besides that, I wasn’t even speaking on solar acoustic pressure waves, the work for which I was known. I had proposed a series of talks on this topic, of course, but when the man from the Center for Complexity and Design called me after receiving my proposal, he’d asked if I’d be willing to speak instead about the impact of solar variations on global climate fluctuations. Although I was well versed in solar irradiance, I had very little background in climatology or knowledge of how spectral distribution could possibly affect climate patterns on Earth. However, when I mentioned this to him, he seemed unconcerned, and offered to pair me with another scientist who was preparing to submit a paper on the theory that total solar irradiance was a significant cause of climate change. “Though,” he added, “as an organization we are skeptical that the climate is, in fact, changing.”
I knew both positions ran against prevailing scientific opinion, and yet I was intrigued.
Eric and I spoke a bit about my lecture topic, and I confided that I felt far more comfortable speaking on subjects with which I was more familiar. He, however, seemed very enthusiastic. “Our conference participants are eager to learn more about the global warming hoax,” he said. As I tried to process this, he added, sotto voce, “One of our most prominent sponsors asked us to reach out to you specifically, Dr. Pavano.”
Annie was thrilled to find that we had been booked into a junior suite. There was a large fruit basket on the table, which she found deeply touching—any kindness shown to me during this time she appreciated with great fervor. She walked onto the small balcony overlooking the terminal building—we had not yet left the docks—and remained there for some minutes, gazing at the Seattle skyline. When I gently reminded her that it was time to dress for dinner, she turned and smiled at me, her lovely brown eyes shining with happiness for the first time in months.
“If making small talk with people who believe the earth is six thousand years old is all it takes to cruise to Alaska in a stateroom, sign me up,” she said. My stomach sank. The smile disappeared from her face. “Frank, you’ve got to start somewhere. You can shake these people off when the time is right.” She walked over to where I was standing in my tuxedo, and put her hands on either side of my face. “Brilliance can’t be contained for long,” she said. Her face, as beautiful as the first time I saw it, looked angelic as she said this. And if it hadn’t been for the tears standing in her eyes, I would have thought her beatific.
We saw Eric Falleri at dinner, dressed in a very fine tuxedo with gleaming monogrammed cuff links. Annie asked after his wife—she’d noticed his wedding ring back in the terminal—and he’d said she was “back home in D.C.”
“What is it that you do, Mr. Falleri?” she asked. Something about Annie’s question embarrassed me. Her curiosity, sharp as a blade, was sometimes mistaken as an attempt to injure, when it was merely a reflection of her deep interest in people. I, on the other hand, found people inscrutable, and relied heavily upon my wife’s investigations to provide context for social situations. Eric seemed discomfited by her question, and it was obvious enough that even I noticed it. After taking a too-long sip of wine, he finally said, “I suppose you’d call me a consultant, Mrs. Pavano.”
She asked him to call her Annie, and then asked him about the entities for whom he consulted.
“Various clients,” Eric said, reaching for his wine again. “Mostly energy consortiums.”
“Oh, you’re a lobbyist,” Annie said, and Eric’s face darkened. I could tell Annie noticed this, too, but neither of us were sure of her transgression. (I’ve since come to understand that lobbyists do not like their intentions to be pointed out explicitly any more than does an Amway salesman.) Despite this, Eric’s expression quickly regained its previo
us cheerfulness, and he said that he was on the cruise representing one of the conference sponsors, a private corporation that owned a few refineries, a handful of fertilizer plants, and other “industrial operations.” He then turned to his neighbor, a schoolteacher from Oklahoma City, and Annie and I spent the rest of the evening making small talk with the other people at our table.
As the dinner was coming to a close and many of the conference participants and their spouses were heading to the dance floor, Annie excused herself to return to the stateroom so she could watch Survivor, a small vice of hers. As soon as she’d left, Eric moved around the perimeter of the table and took her seat. He pushed aside the remains of Annie’s dessert and leaned toward me. “I’ve heard about your troubles, Professor.”
As soon as he said this, I felt something in me break free, and I realized it was a tension that had been present since the moment the man from the Center for Design and Complexity had first called—I had been found out. It was the same strange feeling I’d experienced the day Fred Zimmer called me into his office to confront me with the plagiarism charges.
Eric placed a friendly hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Professor,” he said. “I want to share an opportunity with you. I represent a client who is in a position to fund research into global temperature and climate patterns. This is a pressing issue that will likely dominate energy policy discussions in the years to come.”
“Well, as I’ve explained to the organizers of the conference, my research focus is far afield from—”
“What you’ve done in the past is not important.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let me ask you a question: If I were to say that a free society requires open discussion of all sides of an issue, would you agree with that statement?”
“Naturally,” I replied.
“Would you also agree that it has a chilling effect on science when those whose ideas go against the grain are demonized by fellow scientists?”
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