by Tom Clancy
“So if not for his asking you to stay . . .”
“I’d scoot back to California like a kitten jumping onto a warm lap,” she replied, looking directly at him. No hesitation this time.
Nimec considered asking her what was actually on his mind. Instead he decided to change the topic. He cocked his head toward the map of the Dry Valleys.
“I figure those pins have got something to do with the missing search team,” he said.
“You figure right, Pete.” Meg swiveled in her chair, faced the map, and pointed. “The yellow one shows where they struck camp. It’s where McKelvey Valley crosses the northern mouth of Bull Pass. See?”
He nodded.
“The red pin would be about four miles from the camp-site, straight down into the pass,” she said. “That’s where they were last sighted.”
“By whom?”
“A chopper pilot named Russ Granger. He’s been at McMurdo forever, makes regular air runs to its research bases in the valley system.”
“He have any contact with the team?”
“No,” she said, and then thought a moment. “Well, let me revise that. They did exchange hellos. But it was just a fluke that Russ passed over Scarborough and the others at all.” She paused. “He says they seemed perfectly fine to him.”
“When would that have been? The time of day, I mean.”
“Ordinarily we’d be entering vague territory. But I think I know where you’re heading, so let me put my answer in context,” she said. “Time measurement becomes almost arbitrary when the whole year’s roughly divided into six months of daylight, and six months of darkness. Most stations set their clocks to match up with a time zone in their home countries for ease of communications . . . though that can lead to chaos when they have to make arrangements with other bases. Here at Cold Corners we’ve opted for Greenwich time simply because that’s what they use at MacTown, and there’s considerable interaction between us.”
“Then whatever time it was for Scarborough’s group would’ve corresponded with the pilot’s.”
“Yes,” Megan said. “Russ was heading to Marble Point.” She gestured toward its position on the Dry Valleys map. “That’s a little refueling facility at the foot of the Wilson Piedmont Glacier, about fifty miles northwest of McMurdo. He’d made the first two stops of his shift, and thinks it was about seven A.M. when he saw our party.”
“And your best guess about how long they’d been out on foot . . . ?”
“Two hours at most. The area they covered had some tedious rocky patches, but Scarborough would have left camp early.”
“Old military habit?”
She nodded. “He isn’t the type to waste a minute.”
Nimec contemplated that, peering at the map.
“They were just getting started,” he said.
“Yes.”
“What about after the pilot saw them that morning? They report in to Cold Corners at any point?”
Meg was shaking her head now.
“That would have been largely at their discretion. Of course we’d have expected to hear from them if they located the rover. Obviously if they needed assistance. But we never received a Mayday. It’s the part that drives me crazy, Pete . . . trying to understand why Scar wouldn’t have let us know he was in trouble.”
“Had me and the boss wondering too.” Nimec rubbed his chin. “Any chance I could talk to the pilot myself?”
“It should be easy to arrange. Russ drops by to help us often enough.”
Nimec nodded, pleased. He was still looking at the map.
“I assume the blue pin marks the spot where Scout’s transmissions zilched.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s at the opposite end of the pass from our recovery team’s camp. A span of twelve miles.”
“How come they didn’t pitch their tents closer to it?”
“The only way into the valleys is by chopper, and landing one in Bull Pass is a dangerous proposition. It’s narrow in places, and winds are fickle. That leaves us having to choose between drop zones at McKelvey to the north and Wright to the south. And the approach from Wright Valley on foot is full of obstacles. There are ridges, hills, all kinds of steep elevations.”
Nimec was silent, thinking. Then he turned from the wall map to look at Megan.
“How soon can you have a helicopter ready so I can check out the area for myself?”
She faced him across the desk, a wan smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
“What’s on your mind?” he said.
“Pete, if anybody else had spoken those words, I’d be positive he was kidding. You arrived less than an hour ago. Get some food into your stomach. Rest up. Then we can start to talk about making plans.”
“I caught a few winks on the plane,” he said.
She pursed her lips. The smile did not quite leave them.
“How about we strike a compromise,” she said. “Grab a bite together in the cafeteria.”
“I’m not hungry—”
“Today’s special is a hot turkey breast sandwich on homemade club. You won’t believe our greenhouse tomatoes. And the coffee. We have a selection of lattes and mochas. Cappuccino too. And espresso. Also four or five blends of ordinary roast if your taste leans toward the pedestrian side.”
He looked at her.
“Lattes in Antarctica,” he said.
She nodded. “This is an UpLink base. Moreover, it’s my base. And despite these ghastly earth-mother clothes, I’m still Megan Breen.”
Nimec suddenly couldn’t help but crack a smile of his own.
“Okay, princess,” he said. “Let’s eat.”
One million miles from Earth
The satellite glided through deep space like a solitary night bird, its keen electronic sensors picking up signs of the coming storm as they were swept toward it on the solar wind.
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory—or SOHO—was a joint space probe conceived by NASA and the European Space Agency in the 1990’s for gathering a wealth of scientific information about the sun and its atmospheric emissions. In early March 1996, fourteen months after its liftoff from Cape Canaveral aboard the upper stage of an Atlas IIAS (Atlas/Centaur) launch vehicle, the satellite was injected into a counterclockwise halo orbit around the sun at what is known as the L1 Lagrangian point—named after the eighteenth-century French astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who theorized there were calculable distances at which a small object in space could remain in fixed orbital positions between two larger bodies exerting strong gravitational pulls upon it.
The mathematical formulations must be precise. Should an object in the middle of this interplanetary tug of war wander from its position by more than a few degrees, the delicate equilibrium becomes upset and its orbit will rapidly degrade.
In SOHO’s case the L1 point equaled four times the distance from our world to the moon, with any significant deviation from that point certain to result in an uncontrolled plunge toward either the earth or sun. One complication the observatory’s development team had to address, however, was that their preferred orbital position for SOHO was slightly off the L1 point, since the radio interference that would occur when it was in direct line between the two opposing spheres was bound to corrupt its data transmissions with static. A second problem was that other bodies in the solar system—distant planets, moons, asteroids—had their own weaker attractions that could jiggle SOHO’s path a little bit this way or that to ultimately disastrous effect.
The team’s solution to both these problems was to equip SOHO with an onboard propulsion system for periodic orbital adjustments, knowing this imposed an inherent limitation on its mission life. For once it exhausted the hydrazine fuel that powered its thrusters, SOHO would slip from its desired Lagrangian station and go tumbling off through space beyond recovery.
Original projections were that the billion-dollar spacecraft would be able to conduct its observations and experiments for from two to five years before the propellent
reserves went dry and its mission reached an end.
Six years later and counting, it was still plugging away.
Some things are still built to last, and every so often they last longer than expected.
In March 2002, SOHO’s SWAN and MDI/SOI instruments, two of a dozen scientific devices in its payload module, sniffed the astrophysical equivalent of what American prairie farmers once would have called a locust wind.
An acronym for Solar Wind Anisotropies, SWAN is an ultraviolet survey of the dispersed hydrogen cloud around our planetary system that can detect glowing hot spots in space caused by fluctuations of solar radiation. To the SWAN’s wide-angle eye, which charts the full sky around the sun three times each week, a surge in the emissions striking these areas will cause them to light up like flashes from warning beacons even if the surge originates beyond the sun’s visible face, outside the range of earthbound telescopes.
MDI/SOI—short for Michelson Doppler Imager/Solar Oscillations Investigation—is more direct in its approach, measuring wave motions that vibrate through the convective layer of the sun. Depending on their amplitude, deviations from the wavelengths commonly registered by MDI/ SOI can put scientists on the lookout for helioseismological events that are roughly analogous to earthquakes and may be indicators of impending solar flare activity.
Relayed to earth by its telemetry arrays in near-real time, SOHO’s information about the flurry of concurrent beacon flashes and solar tremors did not take long to create a stir of excitement in its command-and-control center in Maryland.
Two men in particular got the headline-making jump on the rest of the pack.
Cold Corners Base, Antarctica
Nimec ate the last bit of his turkey sandwich and set the empty plate onto a cafeteria tray beside him. Then he lifted his demitasse off the table and sipped.
“Well?” Megan said. “I await your verdict.”
“Mmm-mm,” he said.
“I may be a princess,” she said. “But I’m known for my benevolence, truthfulness, and good taste.”
He grunted. “About arranging for that helicopter . . .”
She made a preemptive gesture. “After we’ve had our coffee.”
He sat with the steaming espresso in his hand, watching her drink from her cup. It contained a double something-or-other with caffeine, flavored syrup, and a light head of froth.
Several minutes passed in silence that way.
“Okay, Pete,” she said at last, dabbing her upper lip with a napkin. “The chopper aside, what’s on your mind?”
“That line sounds very familiar,” he said.
She nodded. “It does. It also got a straight answer out of me.”
He looked at her without comment.
“Come on,” she said. “I didn’t miss your backpacker’s travel guide remarks about hearing how people find spiritual cleansing, harmony, and oneness among the king penguins. Or your question about whether I’ve joined that righteous crowd. Or most of all your long looks. Something’s bothering you. I think we should get it out in the open.”
Nimec kept looking at her, then finally expelled a breath.
“You told me you came to Antarctica because the boss asked,” he said. “Or at least you implied that. But I hear you volunteered.”
Megan lowered her cup into its saucer, waited as someone came moving past on his way from the service counter to another table.
“It seems you’ve been hearing a lot of things,” she said when he’d gone.
“Not from you,” he said. “That’s the problem. We never consulted about your reassignment.”
“You’re being unfair. I let you know a month beforehand.”
“After the decision was already made.”
“Pete—”
“I’d just like you to tell me why I wasn’t advised sooner,” he said. “All the years we’ve worked together, depended on each other, you never left me hanging. And then you did.”
“Pete, I’m sorry. Honestly. I didn’t realize that was how you felt.”
“Then tell me. Straight answer.”
Their eyes met. And held.
“It’s sort of complicated,” she said. “Gord wanting me here is the truth, but he’s the one to give you his reasons. As for myself, there were personal issues.”
“They involve Bob Lang?”
“Yes,” she said. “I preferred not to share them at the time.”
He nodded. Their eyes remained locked.
“And now?”
“I’d still rather not.”
“You change your mind, I’ll be ready to listen.”
“I know, Pete,” she said. “And thank you.”
He nodded again and sat there quietly finishing his espresso.
She reached out, touched his arm.
“Are we okay, Pete? Settled, I mean.”
“Settled.”
They were silent another minute, her hand still on his arm, squeezing it gently.
“All right,” he said then. “Coffee’s done. We should discuss the helicopter.”
She nodded, reached down into the kangaroo pocket of her bib-alls, and extracted a connected Palm computer.
“All the luxuries of home,” he commented.
Megan slipped the computer’s stylus out of its silo and tapped its “on” button.
“We try to be with it,” she said with a shrug. “Now hush, I need to jot out an e-mail. We’re presently short-handed as far as pilots go, but I’ll explain that later. Meanwhile, I think I’ve figured out how to kill two birds with one electronic stone.”
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, Maryland
The men were known as Ketchup and Fries.
These were of course not their given names.
Ketchup was really Jonathan Ketchum, a sixty-year-old project scientist at the Experimenters’ Operations Facility in Goddard’s Building 26, the operational nucleus of the SOHO project. He had been with the EOF’s permanent MDI/SOI team since its establishment in the mid-nineties, and was considered one of its top men by the principal investigator.
Fries was Richard Frye, another member of the MDI/ SOI team. At twenty-six, he was its most recent addition, regarded as a babe in the woods by senior group members. This is the embedded reflex of those with tenure who are protective of their own status. Ketchum saw in Frye an inquisitiveness and joy of discovery that was like a bright reflection of himself as a young man. He knew Frye was already a better scientist than most, and had potential to be the best by far.
Ketchum had taken Frye under his wing from the start of the young man’s NASA employment, but their student-mentor relationship soon grew into an intellectually stimulating bond of equals. Ketchum imparted a maturity of understanding to Frye; Frye helped recharge Ketchum’s sense of wonderment daily.
Together they had become a team within a team.
Ketchup and Fries.
Nobody could say with any certainty who had cooked up the nickname. Because its ingredients included a heaping measure of disparagement, and perhaps a pinch of envy, credit went unclaimed and unassigned.
In the beginning they found the label vexatious. Eventually, however, they came to bear it with a certain defiant fondness. At some point their feelings became almost proprietary. Ketchup. Fries. What would one be without the other?
Besides, just look at the crap the visiting observers regularly threw at them.
The Auslanders, as they’d been tagged (again without attribution), were a group of scientists from institutions in France, Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., and a handful of other European Space Agency nations who had either contributed to the design and construction of SOHO’s gadgetry or were involved in studying its returns. All SOHO’s participants could retrieve this information from an archived, indexed, easily searchable electronic database without ever leaving their respective countries, but guest committees from abroad would sometimes show up at Goddard during research campaigns that engaged several of the observatory’s instruments
at once.
Ostensibly their motivation was pure and unselfish, springing from a desire to help foster a spirit of international collaboration and share in the immediacy and excitement of these campaigns. The real, dirty scrub was that the Web curators of “collaborating” institutions often delayed inputting e-base updates about major discoveries, while their employers raced to contact news organizations and grab the glory—and subsequent funding windfalls—for themselves. It was a good bet that every principal investigator had a number that would provide fast access to a local CNN bureau chief programmed into his phone’s memory.
A joint operation to examine the current cyclical peak of sunspot activity had been under way for over two years now without the EOF group’s foreign colleagues showing any inclination whatsoever to pay them a house call. Then, lo and behold, with the recent evidence from SWAN and MDI/SOI that the sun had developed an acute case of the measles on its far side, they had come pouring into Goddard from astrophysics labs around the world, arriving with effervescent camaraderie, bon jour, gutten tag, and cheerio. And though the NASA scientists did acknowledge that both solar observation devices primarily responsible for the new findings were European in origin, they were resentfully convinced their co-investigators—a.k.a. unwanted party crashers, a.k.a. the Auslanders—were pushing and bumping their way through the door for one reason, and one alone: to make sure nobody at NASA beat them to the flash-dial button.
Today Frye had made it his godly mission to get to the EOF well ahead of the polyglot horde, and was probably at his workstation hours before they had begun to yawn, blink, and stretch through their morning wake-up routines. He himself had been unable to catch any sleep after bringing home printouts of the previous evening’s final MDI/ SOI data logs, and using them as the basis for an intricate series of equations prepared with what remained his three favorite computational tools—a #3 pencil, a legal pad, and his own scrupulously logical brain. All the observables told him that the sun’s helioseismologic agitation had increased by tremendous—in fact, nearly exponential—leaps and bounds in the last twenty-four hour period, and he’d been eager to do two things: check the overnight logs for further changes, and see how his data and math jibed with the latest information from SWAN, whose nonresident Auslander monitoring area just happened to be on the other side of a glass partition from his own true-blue resident project scientist area . . . and, well, well, wouldn’t you know, it also just happened to be unoccupied at that early hour.