Days of Night

by Jonathan Stone

  This is what Antarctica is about, Heller suddenly feels. Not the cold, grim task of survival. But reaching beyond us, for knowledge, for understanding, a way to know, to ascend to, aspire to something beyond the muck of ourselves.

  This is what the schedule of ships and planes—what all the supplies, what all the activity, all the systems and organization—are really about.

  They are about Dr. Green sliding into his jump seat to the universe. They are about forgetting Antarctica, forgetting the cold and the complexity, and the national fiefdoms and the treaties and alliances and competing territorial claims, and seeing into the beyond. And only by sitting in this seat, having his breath momentarily sucked away in startled awe, glancing at the universe from a unique vantage, does Heller experience this meaning of Antarctica, of this frozen and otherwise useless continent. Useless to man. Everything to mankind.

  “Your turn, young lady.”

  Heller looks up at Trish. Smiling warmly at him. Waiting patiently, but eagerly.

  He slides out of the seat.

  She touches her hand to his—affectionately, in the magic of the moment—as she slides lithely into the seat.

  Trish. Her sense of wonder. Her eagerness. Her own keen observation of the world. Magnified here, somehow. She belongs here, somehow. Part of this breathtaking moment.

  He watches Trish watching the universe.

  The old cliché, thinks Heller, about feeling your own insignificance, looking at the countless—literally countless—stars. That we, on our planet, are a mere dot, so much smaller and less than even a single star. If anything, sitting in that chair, he felt the opposite—at the center and crux of things, the universe focused, for a moment, down to the pupil and brain and mind of the lucky occupant in the telescope’s jump seat.

  Trish, holding her long black hair behind her, leaning in, transported.

  For a moment, the crusty cop finds he can think nothing but good. He can think of nothing but the poetry of not just what Green has said but of the poetry of what Green is, what he does, what he represents of humanity’s best impulses. As he can think of nothing but the surprising, breathtaking poetry of Trish Wong in that jump seat to the universe.

  He knows better, of course. He knows the elfin, smiling, gentle white-bearded man with the poetic soul must be looked into like anyone else. He knows that there could be a hidden darkness, like some black hole, an explosive supernova violence, hiding behind one of those gloriously glinting star clusters.

  But for just a moment, Heller puts that aside. For just a moment, Dr. Green is everything we hope, everything we dream, everything we can be. All our human possibility. All our sparkling-eyed Dr. Greens. All our eager, coruscating Trish Wongs.

  It’s a moment that will soon seem wildly ironic, immeasurably absurd.

  Another “Catch” for you, Trish.

  This “Catch,” a monster.

  24.

  It begins, on May 7, with a sudden loss of communications.

  The comm system that Pritchard and Dolan are charged with maintaining is fairly reliable, secured with multiple backup systems. But temporary comm failures are hardly unprecedented. Every year sees two or three—it’s Antarctica, after all. Annoying, to be sure. Several hours of frustration. Of rolled eyes, of computer reboots, of calls to McMurdo admin services. Before the communication is restored, as if by spontaneous magic, and the failure is all but forgotten.

  On May 7—two weeks into total darkness, McMurdo’s official “winter-over” period—at precisely 2:44 a.m., the communications system goes down. Across the board. No Internet. No transmission. No detectible signal. Nothing.

  At 2:44 a.m., of course, the loss of communications isn’t creating much annoyance. McMurdo Station is generally asleep.

  But by 6:00 a.m., there have been some questions sent, some complaints to admin, from a few early risers.

  By 7:00 a.m., there is an expanding annoyance—awakening as if with the day.

  As the morning proceeds, as 7:00 a.m. becomes 8:00 a.m. and turns into 9:00 a.m., the frustration spreads. To be cut off like this? Yes, they are always cut off. They are used to being cut off physically, generally—it’s in their wintering-over DNA—but for the past twenty years, they’ve always had some fairly consistent form of communications with the rest of the world, at first extremely glitchy and unreliable compared with the rest of the planet north of them. This has happened before—they’re used to it—but every further minute amplifies the annoyance. They are waiting—waiting for the repairs that have always come. Like all other IT repairs. Out of their hands. But well in hand, they are sure.

  The weather has already turned treacherous, making it extremely difficult for Pritchard and Dolan or anyone else to go out to physically trace the problem. Extreme temperatures of fifty below, steady Category 3 and 4 gust equivalents have already set in. One communications tower is a few hundred yards away, and the other one almost a mile. But the observation cameras—installed specifically for just this weather and just this contingency, when onsite observation is problematic—are functioning and show the communications equipment is intact.

  McMurdo veterans know that Dolan and Pritchard are checking everything closely via instrumentation. It is unenviably technical work. But Pritchard is a communications whiz, and Dolan, according to Pritchard, is a genuine communications genius. Could rebuild everything alone by hand, if necessary.

  The internal McMurdo comm system, which runs on batteries and local electricity, works fine. The messages trickle in to admin:

  Hey, Admiral Byrd here. (A reference to the first human to winter over, in a hut with only his cairn terrier for company. Feeling that same isolation.) What gives, gents?

  And Get it up, Dolan. Get it up, Pritchard. What’s wrong, you guys can’t get it up?

  And Anything we can do to help? Bring you cookies? Bourbon? Anything to motivate you guys, say the word.

  Pritchard and Dolan are—as anyone who has observed the process knows—running their diagnostics. As they have every time before—and every time before have brought the system back to life.

  This time, they don’t bring it back to life.

  This time, there seems to be something different to contend with.

  Heller happens to be in Hobbes’s office late that morning, giving his update on the homicide investigation, when Pritchard and Dolan come to report to Hobbes—and to Simmons and Bramlett—after ten straight hours of intensive work.

  Heller can see that Pritchard and Dolan look particularly anxious, shuffling, nervous—and uncharacteristically silent.

  He catches Hobbes’s expression on seeing them. Surprised to have them in his doorway. Heller picks up that this isn’t how it’s been before. That it’s been the two of them at their radio panels, tuning, adjusting, checking, and the systems have always come back, as if magically, without Pritchard or Dolan leaving their eccentric communications lair—the Comm Cave, as it’s known.

  “So?”

  Pritchard looks pale.

  “So here’s the thing,” he says, “and we’re not happy having to say this, because you’re going to think it’s our failing somehow, that we’re missing something, but unfortunately, we’re not.”

  “Go on,” says Hobbes, but he is already feeling it—feeling the weight of what his comm team is about to tell him—whatever it turns out to be.

  Pritchard mumbles it. He’s having a hard time conveying it, processing it—and, Heller will come to feel, even believing it. “It’s, um, not on our end,” Pritchard says.

  “What!”

  “It’s not on our end. Everything is working.”

  “What are you saying?” Hobbes’s elfin features wrinkle in genuine confusion, as if literally struggling to process the thought.

  “There’s . . . no transmission. Nothing.”

  “But that can’t be. The problem has to be on our end.”

  Pritchard shifts uncomfortably. “That’s of course normally what happens. Normally it’s us.
Our equipment. Our somewhat shaky infrastructure, which we’ve always asked you for upgrades on.” He looks up with a flash of accusation but immediately abandons the moment of defiance, of blame. “But we’ve been over it. It’s not rocket science. We know this stuff inside and out, Dolan and me. And”—he twists his hands awkwardly in front of him, an unusual motion of free-floating, generalized discomfort—“it’s not on our end.”

  He looks desperately, sheepishly, at Hobbes. “Believe me, I know how that sounds.”

  “Well, look again. Keep trying.”

  “We will, sir. Of course. We won’t stop working on it, not for a minute. But that’s not the worst part of it.” He glances at Dolan, seemingly for support, but Dolan simply stares at the floor. “Thing is”—and here Pritchard pauses and mumbles again—“as of now, there doesn’t seem to be any transmission from anywhere.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “See, we’ve been trying to ping everywhere. Australia. New Zealand. Argentina. South Africa. And we’re getting nothing.”

  “Well, that just proves it’s on our end, doesn’t it?”

  “I wish it did.” Pritchard and Dolan, while they’ve been working furiously, intently, have had a chance to absorb the possible meanings. Heller can already see that—in their looks of bewilderment, of desperation, of ambient gloom.

  Dolan speaks up. He’s normally the much quieter one, nearly silent, Heller has noticed, unless addressed directly, but he steps in with his expertise. “Sir, just FYI here, at 2:44 a.m., there was no temperature event, no microburst that registered on our communications equipment. We’re set up to detect that kind of thing.”

  “You mean like a sunburst? A solar event? Could that have disrupted communications worldwide? Could it be that strong?”

  Dolan lights up at the chance to explain. “Well, yes it could, a substantial one, so that’s why I double-checked. But no,” says Dolan, more quietly again, “that didn’t happen.” He looks around the room as if noticing the others in it for the first time. “A nuclear event—a nuclear accident or exchange—would have registered on our equipment too. A nuclear detonation can cause massive signal disruption. What’s called an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse. Especially if the detonation takes place miles up in the atmosphere. Our equipment would capture that kind of disruption too. But there’s nothing nuclear indicated by the data either.”

  “Jesus, Dolan.” Nobody wants to even hear about—contemplate—such a possibility.

  On the other hand, he’s saying these are all the things that didn’t occur.

  There’s silence in the room.

  “Sir—I . . . I feel like something has happened. But if it was geological or nuclear, we’d know about it.”

  “If it was geological or nuclear, it wouldn’t affect everyone, for Chrissake,” Simmons interjects—indignantly, Heller notices. Unable to accept—lashing out at the very notion. The long arms of his lanky frame whipping in the air.

  “No,” concedes Dolan, “but it could—could—affect all communications. At least with us. At least for a time.”

  “But you’re saying you think, based on your seismic equipment and other readouts, that it’s not either of those things,” Hobbes says.

  Heller regards the two radio techs. Dolan’s downcast eyes. Pritchard’s hands shaking. They alone have spent the last ten hours wrestling with the equipment and, while doing so, inhabiting the possibilities. Their information is new to everyone else here. But they’ve been living with it. Focusing on the data, or lack of it. For Dolan, it’s a version of the scientific method—a process of eliminating what it can’t be to leave something it could.

  “Look, whatever the nature of the event or events, if it even is an event, it’s affected communications operations substantially,” says Hobbes. “That’s all we really know at this point. Let’s not speculate on more than that. It would be just that—speculation.”

  Pritchard and Dolan keep checking for the next few hours, for the rest of the day. The backup systems have now all been triple-checked and are technically working. Backup systems that have never even been called into play.

  “Are you sure?” ask Hobbes, Simmons, and Stanford, separately, each in his own way—skeptical, persistent, anxious.

  “Yeah, we’re sure,” says Pritchard. “We’re using every analytic device. We know this stuff. For whatever reason, there is no signal coming, of any kind.”

  “The problem is on the other end,” says Dolan, shaking his head, repeating the mantra gloomily, like a fact that he can’t escape. “I don’t know what it is or why it is, and we know how crazy it sounds, but the problem is at the other end.”

  “I’m sure it’ll get worked out,” says Bramlett.

  A sentence—a sentiment—that is greeted with silence.

  Because they’re starting to think it won’t.

  The next morning, Dolan does report a seismic disturbance to them, and accompanying temperature irregularities consistent with nuclear blasts or an EMP or a geological event at least. But he also explains, gloomily, that this occurred after the communications breakdown, which is why he never noticed it in his data until last night. He was originally checking for data linked to 2:44 a.m., the moment the comm system went down. The seismic disturbance occurred at least some minutes after, he said. Maybe some part of a chain reaction to whatever was the precipitating event? Maybe some horribly miscalculated nuclear overresponse, or full-on series of infrastructure attacks, by some government or other? That could explain the communications blackout. But it is pure conjecture. Conjecture running wild.

  There is silence, before Dolan asks quietly, “Sir, could it . . . could it be some kind of pathogenic event? That we’re insulated from here?”

  Insulated from, for now.

  “T3 setting in early, eh, Dolan?” says Hobbes. But he’s just trying to deflect his own incipient anxiety. Heller can see it’s because Hobbes doesn’t know what else to say, how else to answer. Heller pictures Dolan sitting in the Comm Cave, the sparse data points in front of him, trying to figure it out. Do his hours of silent concentration—his anxious focus—lead him to ponder the possibilities too much? Or too clearly?

  Heller thinks again about those screaming newspaper headlines in the seat next to him on the airplane down. The headlines he wanted to escape. The news streaming in to them via Internet until yesterday, counteracting their isolation, connecting them, reminding them. The breathless articles. The alarmed editorials. The sudden acceleration of chest-thumping threats from Russia, the increasingly vocal attacks from China, the heightened readiness of warships and nuclear-equipped air fleets of all three superpowers. The discovery of Russia’s microbial experiments, as long-standing and institutionalized as their computer network hacking—and wouldn’t America be doing it as well? The infrastructure infiltration that every intelligence agency knows its enemies are capable of. The weaponized chemical capabilities that go undiscussed. All the alarmist reports that Heller had previously dismissed as the hyperventilating of the press during past administrations, trying to create news, highlight friction, peddle it for profit. But this administration has proved different from the start. Prided itself on its unpredictability. Thrived on disruption and take-no-prisoners bluster. His instincts told him from the outset that these people were genuinely different. Genuinely dangerous. What if something did happen, thinks Heller. Is happening? Something nuclear, solar, environmental, microbial, meteorological? Some unforeseen interaction between them? But Heller knows enough to know that he knows nothing. That amid any half-valid scientific speculation, his own visions of calamity are the most speculative, the least informed, the least competent of all. He takes Hobbes’s advice. He pushes his personal speculation aside. As much as he can. Because of course you speculate a little. You fill the unnerving radio silence with the noise of your own thoughts. You can’t help it. You’re human.

  But what if something did happen? Is happening?

  A few scientists do begin to speculate, in
the days that follow, more carefully and scientifically than Dolan did, that judging by the speed and thoroughness of the silence, if you provisionally accept as fact such speed and such silence, then it could indeed be a microbe. Maybe unleashed too fast, too complex, or too multiform and mutationally adept for science to get a handle on it to craft a defense. The possibility has always been there, apparently, Heller learns from Hobbes and the others. A prospect far more alive, far more conceivable, and therefore more terrifying to the scientific community than to the general public. Microbiologists and epidemiologists, the CDC, and similar watchdog organizations across the globe have been only too aware of it. The possibilities and scenarios have long troubled science’s sleep.

  Bred in the warming oceans—the warming oceans not yet decimating cities but harboring and spreading with alarming global efficiency something much deadlier, as it turns out—a pandemic.

  What happened? What is happening? Hobbes, Simmons, Bramlett—the leadership—do their best to quash any speculation. Trying to continue to function normally. But, at the same time, starting to process the possibility. Trying to think clearly.

  And unsaid, at the back of all their minds, Heller can sense, by their circumspect silence, by their closed conference room door: beginning to think about survival. Collectively, individually. To cobble it together. Trying to plan for the short term, for the medium term. Too petrified, too undone to think too much beyond that, pushing away the unthinkable idea—momentarily unthinkable—that they might be what’s left of mankind. That their isolation, by a quirk of geographic and meteorological circumstance, is going to save them. Save them in the short term. Save them from instant annihilation. Would it consequently subject them to a slower, more painful annihilation—starvation, say, or some new plague or disease—all the same?

  And the subsequent nuclear or microburst events that Dolan’s equipment indicates—he admits he can’t be sure which it is—either way, the resulting microwaves could wipe out communications and modestly but sufficiently disrupt comm satellite orbits. If it wasn’t winter, if it wasn’t so goddamn windy and extreme, they could set some geological instruments out on the surface that could detect the whiff, the faint fallout, of atomic or hydrogen explosions. But the instruments they have available, or can reasonably assemble, can’t handle the winter conditions.