Meanwhile, the promised endowed chair position was arranged for me with the kind of speed I’d thought impossible in academia—perhaps because Freedom University of Northern Virginia wasn’t exactly a principal player. In fact, I had never heard of it, despite its bloated enrollment logs. Nor did it have an established research track record, but the faculty and administration were remarkably enthusiastic about my work. I’d only been living part time at home since the Plan had been implemented, spending much of my time in a corporate apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, but taking the Freedom University position would require a move from my sleepy Midwest college town. Annie and I agreed to put the house up for sale. She had no interest in moving to Virginia, so she rented an apartment a few miles away from our old home, while I drove the U-Haul truck to Fairfax alone. We formally separated a week after I arrived in Virginia.
I was put up in a spacious but sterile campus apartment, and began lecturing on my quickly evolving research. Along the way, I was introduced to the concept of irreducible complexity by a fellow professor at Freedom, an idea that proved useful in my ongoing work with Olive Grove. Twice a month, I delivered lectures via videoconferencing, which were always well attended (Olive Grove was an unusually science-minded congregation). I found my fellow congregants deeply excited by the science of Intelligent Design.
The Client had no objection to my delving into this area—he called it a “side gig”—so I began adding to my public appearances, speaking not only on solar irradiation and climate fluctuations, but also on topics of interest to adherents of Intelligent Design—who were also, I came to understand, very receptive to the idea that climate change was a hoax. I learned from Eric, and sometimes the Client, in our rare phone calls, that there were ways to frame the climate change issue that would appeal to the deepest fears and biases in human nature. I found this fascinating. We began to capitalize on the mistakes of the environmental movement, which seemed unable to effectively raise the alarm about the changing climate. We countered the science that indicated the arctic ice and permafrost were melting, and found more and more people rallying to our cause. Such ideas gave them hope that polar bears had a future. In fact, hope was our top commodity.
It would be going too far to say I began to believe in the research as a whole, but there were elements of the science that I found convincing enough. I spent more and more time with Representatives Bayless and Calhoun, and was eventually hired by both campaigns as a “senior science policy advisor.” I was made to understand that the demographics in Bayless’s district had been changing in ways that could be considered unfavorable to him—the population was younger, “browner,” in the words of one of his aides. The only way to counter this was to “double-down” and “fire up the base.”
My first ever television interview was with Fox News. According to the media consultant hired on behalf of the Group, I played well to my strengths. I had appeared awkward, she said, while also managing to underscore the talking points we had gone over prior to arriving at the studio: the scientific weaknesses of current climate research; the importance of airing a full range of scientific views; the lack of consensus among scientists regarding not just the cause of climate change, but its very existence (consensus was the term favored by climate scientists, a mistake upon which we capitalized—its inherent imprecision allowed us a thousand ways to move); and, most important, the obvious bias demonstrated by the National Science Foundation’s refusal to fund any climate change research that did not take man-made causation as its starting point.
My blond interlocutor was outraged on my behalf. “I find it interesting,” she said, tapping her pen on the desk separating us, “that the very same scientists who bemoan political interference in their own work are so blind to their own biases.” No less than four minutes after the interview concluded, as Eric, the media consultant, and I were sitting in the green room, a CNN producer called.
Over the next week, I became so comfortable giving interviews that Eric warned I was losing my awkward demeanor. The Washington Times invited me to pen an op-ed about political interference in science. I wrote about the National Science Foundation’s rejection of my grant application in detail.
The Client was pleased with our progress.
Soon after my initial media appearances, Representatives Bayless and Calhoun began joining me on camera. Eric warned me that as the story picked up speed, Democratic political operatives, along with enterprising journalists, would begin to dig into my past and reveal the plagiarism charges. This of course made me uncomfortable, but he assured me that it was part of the narrative, and that the mainstream media’s refusal to allow me, a man of faith, to be “born again” would only increase the public’s support. Again and again, the media underestimated the importance of the lost lamb to the churchgoing American.
* * *
I was not entirely surprised to receive Annie’s e-mail asking for a divorce, but it marked one of only two times during my preparations for South Pole when I doubted the wisdom of this entire endeavor—the first being the hours after Fred Zimmer’s unexpected visit. I found myself unable to focus on my papers. The research that had so engaged me now seemed uninteresting. Instead, I thought a great deal about Annie, and naturally dwelled upon our happier years. Again and again, an image of her walking out of the Electricity and Optics building at Stanford, talking to Sal Brennan, came to me. She was beautiful, with a gap between her two front teeth.
Later, I found Sal in his father’s lab, and asked about the girl with whom he’d been talking after class. He told me her name was Annie and that she was a classics major who sometimes took science classes as electives. He said he’d introduce us—“I happen to know she has a weakness for idiot savants,” he’d said. He added: “Too bad I’m not an idiot.” I appreciated the offer very much, but I was wary. Sal and I had only known each other for a year, but we already had a fraught history. He was John Brennan’s son, a beloved professor emeritus at Stanford, and was quite popular on campus himself because of his own extreme erudition, his good looks, and his easy manner. This was not a combination often found in the physics and applied physics departments. To complicate matters, the year prior we’d had a falling out, and although Sal was no longer ignoring me when he saw me on campus, he was uncharacteristically reserved when we spoke. At the time, Sal’s father had spent a great deal of energy trying to convince me to join the astrophysics department. Although John Brennan was one of the world’s foremost scientists, I’d demurred for many reasons, but the most salient had been the fact that Dr. Brennan was clearly suffering from early-onset dementia. I suspected Alzheimer’s, and I had made the mistake of saying so to Sal.
Despite this, Sal, it must be said, was as good as his word about Annie. A week after I saw her laughing with him on campus, I was sitting across from her at the Student Union, talking about Ovid and Apuleius. She was smiling at me, as if she was glad to be there. Later, she told me I was staring stupidly at her the whole time. I imagine I must have been, because I don’t remember a word she said, only the look on her shining, happy face. After we were married, I asked her why she’d agreed to a second date. Because, she told me, “you were brilliant, and unabashedly weird and yet completely oblivious to it.”
When he heard that Annie had filed for divorce, Eric visited me at my campus apartment. He tried to convince me that these domestic developments only deepened the theme of the misunderstood scientist. He suggested leaking to the media the fact that Annie was a professed atheist. At the look on my face, Eric fell silent. A few minutes later, he suggested another tack—the marriage could be framed as a casualty of a coordinated attack against my professional research interests. I admit that at this point I was beginning to fatigue of the falsity of the endeavor—what had initially appealed to those darker impulses that had pushed me toward plagiarism now seemed too costly. When I mentioned this to Eric, he told me he had the perfect solution: “Begin to believe in it. Stop acting. Buy in.”
; After he left, I sat on the edge of my twin bed for an hour considering his advice. Faith had seemed anathema to every endeavor I had undertaken in my life; I found solace in fact, comfort in evidence. I was patient enough to wait for data. When personal tragedy touched me—as when my parents died within one month of each other when I was seventeen—I turned to probability density to parcel out the likelihood of such an event. That a likelihood could even exist brought me the kind of comfort that the well-meaning words of believers did not.
Still, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I had summarily dismissed the very idea of faith; summary dismissal, I knew, was not something in which a true scientist engaged. I began to grapple with the idea proposed by some of the senior members of Olive Grove that scientific research and “sound reason” consistently supported the truth of a loving, transcendent god. I knew I would never accept the Bible as a work of literal history, and my church mentors accepted this, but the idea of a sovereign “creator”—for so long an idea that had nothing to do with me—became a great comfort.
For the first time in my life, I began to believe in something other than my love for my wife. I wasn’t a true believer yet, but I was on the road to Damascus.
* * *
On January 30, 2003, I received a call from Representatives Bayless and Calhoun. There were sounds of celebration in the background. “I have news, Dr. Pavano,” Bayless said. “We just got out of a closed-door meeting with the head of the National Science Foundation.” The line seemed to pause for a moment, creating a parenthesis in the celebrations, and I pulled the phone away from my ear, only to realize that Eric was calling me on the other line.
“Pavano, you there?” Bayless shouted.
“I’m here,” I called back into the mouthpiece.
“Pack your bags, Doc, you’re going to Antarctica.”
It was only as I heard the hard c in Antarctica, which no one seems ever to notice, that I realized how badly I wanted to go.
The New York Times
March 21, 2004
South Pole Station: No End in Sight for “Occupation”
With the ambush of its personnel in Fallujah and an “illegal occupation” in Antarctica, the defense contractor Veritas Integrated Defense Systems is struggling to contain what could be a substantial blow to its operations. Citing the occupation of Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where Veritas provides support staff, as a “major and unnecessary distraction to global operations,” CEO Daniel Atcheson Johnson has sent a team of lobbyists to Capitol Hill to help end the shutdown of the U.S. research station.
Last week, Republican Sam Bayless of Kansas and his colleague on the Congressional Budget Committee, Representative Jack Calhoun of Tennessee, delivered on a promise to freeze the station’s budget if no agreement could be reached with the head of the National Science Foundation, Alexandra Scaletta, over proposed changes to the agency’s guidelines that would make it easier for scientists skeptical of climate change to gain access to federally sponsored research sites.
At the heart of the shutdown is Frank Pavano, a heliophysicist who has voiced skepticism about global climate change. On a grant from the NSF, Pavano spent four months at Amundsen-Scott Station and the ice-coring camp at West Antarctic Ice Sheet before he was involved in an accident with another NSF grantee that Representative Bayless claims was a result of a consistent pattern of harassment.
It was in response to the alleged harassment, initially reported last fall, that Representative Bayless and Representative Calhoun demanded the NSF adopt formal protocols to ensure that “scientists with minority views” are provided with equal access to federal research sites and grant dollars. Ms. Scaletta, however, has refused to yield, and with the White House unwilling to enter the fray, the standoff has led to a temporary shutdown of operations at America’s most remote research facility, which is currently being illegally occupied by ten individuals, a mix of NSF grantees and Veritas contractors.
The president has so far resisted calls to send in the National Guard to forcibly remove the individuals who refused to board the last scheduled flight out of South Pole. Sources familiar with the situation indicate that, with operations in Iraq intensifying, the president wants to avoid distraction. Others, however, argue that this is precisely the reason why he may be open to intervention.
operation deep freeze
The sky began changing in early February, as the sun began its monthlong descent. Shadows were weirdly elongated, stretching toward a horizon that consumed the sun bite by bite. Once the sun had fallen out of sight, Cooper knew from the handbook, it would lighten the sky for two more weeks of “civil twilight,” when Venus would be visible. Nautical twilight would follow, draining the sky of its pink blush. By the end of March, after the last flights had departed, all would be dark. This process was typically of great interest to the Polies, capped off, as it was, by the annual Equinox Feast, but anxiety over the possible shutdown had cast a pall over everything. Tucker decided to move the feast forward by five weeks in order to boost station morale—and, Cooper suspected, because he knew that in five weeks, there was a very good chance that no one would be here to celebrate the true equinox.
Preparations had been under way for a week when the letters from the NSF arrived in Tucker’s in-box, with instructions to distribute to the grantees immediately. Cooper and Sal, who had been in Tucker’s office when the letters had arrived, were the only other Polies who knew about them. All three agreed it made no sense to ruin the Equinox Feast with news that the station, and all the ongoing experiments, was going to be shut down.
On February 10, the galley transformed into Le Cirque. Pearl, Denise, and Doc Carla had hung strands of ice-blue Christmas lights across the ceiling that twinkled in the wineglasses set on the long table. The support beams were festooned with cheap silver tinsel, and battery-powered votive candles flickered in the corners of the room. The cloth napkins were removed from storage, and Kit had folded them into bishop’s hats before placing them on the plates. Bonnie’s absence—she’d flown to McMurdo the day after the bottle-throwing incident at Sal’s lecture—was noted, and a place was set for her at the table, next to Dwight.
Everyone arrived in the one nice outfit they’d packed—Birdie wore his kilt, Dwight his formal cloak, and even Floyd had donned a polka-dotted tie. In the galley bathroom, Marcy lent Cooper her four-year-old purple metallic eye shadow. After pulling on the floral empire-waist dress she’d rolled into a ball and shoved in the deepest corner of her duffel back in Minneapolis, Cooper pulled her hair into a low, messy bun at the nape of her neck, and impaled it with bobby pins.
When she walked into the galley, the ceremonial equinox haircuts were already under way. Four Beakers sat in chairs, Sal among them, while their research techs lopped off their unruly locks with crafting scissors. Cooper grabbed a glass of Pearl’s hot wassail and watched as Alek roughly shoved his hands into Sal’s nest of tangled hair. He pulled on it mercilessly in order to straighten it for an even cut. Once Alek started cutting, Sal stared at the wall unblinkingly as his auburn hair fell to the floor in clumps.
Denise stepped next to Cooper, blowing on her wassail. She was wearing a rhinestone-encrusted headband, magenta lipstick, and a leather mini-skirt. Cooper nodded at her approvingly. “Ceremonies are so important,” Denise said. “They are the social glue that keeps a community intact—especially one under duress.” She gestured toward the crowd of Polies gathered around Bozer’s portrait, which Pearl had hung the day before. “That’s social glue, too.” She looked over at Cooper. “I hope you don’t underestimate how important you’ve become to the group.”
“I’m important?”
Denise nodded. “There are two things you possess which are valuable to this particular group. One, you are a survivor. Two, at times of extreme anxiety, your paintings will remind the people here that they are not just cogs in the machine.”
Cooper gestured toward the portrait of Bozer. “What did he think, by the way? Bozer, when he sa
w it.”
Denise surprised Cooper by dissolving into giggles. “Oh, he executed the best Goffman-esque display of faux outrage I’d ever witnessed. You should have seen him—he was raging around like King Kong.”
“Oh no,” Cooper said, glancing around.
Denise put her hand on Cooper’s arm. “No, you don’t understand—his response was strictly impression management, basic maintenance of expressive control. He and I came back to the galley late last night, after he was sure everyone else was gone, and he just stood in front of it, staring.”
“How did you know he didn’t hate it?”
“He didn’t put his fist through it.”
A freshly shorn Sal stood up and placed a bowler hat over his head. He did a little dance for Alek as the other winter-overs gathered around him, but Cooper could see it was an effort for him. Denise left to take her seat next to Bozer, so Cooper wandered around the table until she found her place card. Sal sat down beside her and reached across to steal an extra wineglass. He set it next to his and looked at Cooper. “You look pretty tonight,” he said.
Before Cooper could reply, Pearl leaned over her shoulder, bearing wine. “Red or white?” she said.
“Both,” Sal said dully, tapping both of his glasses. “And leave the bottles here.”
From across the table, Doc Carla—dressed in a peasant shift and long feathered earrings—lifted her wineglass to Sal. “Bottoms up to the bottom of the world, Doc,” she said. Next to her, and dressed in a beautiful blue tuxedo, Alek raised a glass of samogon. “To our lady doctor,” he said, “may you heal pain well.” He turned to Cooper. “And to you, artiste, who completed lovely paintings with no penguins.”
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