Perfect communications guys, some have mused, because they seem to communicate practically telepathically, finish each other’s sentences—a level of communication that is especially handy on equipment-inspection tours out in whipping wind and dark, where you can’t see or hear each other.
Heller goes into the bedroom to see Pritchard. Pritchard is sleeping with a pillow over his head. He is moaning slightly. There are multiple pill bottles by his bunkside. Heller takes a moment to look around a little further. Each man has a picture prominently by his bunk. Pritch is standing with a woman and child somewhere in the American West, the Rockies behind them. Wait—a wife and son? Dolan is sitting with a woman in the bend of a palm tree trunk in what looks like Hawaii—a classic honeymoon pose. But both men confessed to casual summer girlfriends here, when he’d interviewed them again. Okay, so both are cads? Still, something doesn’t feel right—feels staged—about the photos. The two have bunked together forever. Heller has of course considered the possibility of a long-standing sexual relationship between them (Pritchard always wakes Dolan, they had laughed, that’s their routine), then had dismissed the idea, but it’s now crossing his mind, vaguely, again. Bisexual? And the photos are here to tell others—or themselves—that they’re not? You have to understand the culture here, both Sorenson and Hobbes had said. A science place. A place to experiment. And what does a relationship between them have to do with anything, anyway?
“Pritchard,” whispers Heller, gently.
“Leave me alone.” Slurred. Shifting the pillow against Heller’s voice. Annoyed to be bothered. A side of Pritchard that Heller has never seen. Usually upbeat, eager beaver, talkative, wanting to please.
“How you feeling?”
“Like shit. Total shit.” But he turns a little, lifts the pillow off his ear. He wants Heller to hear, to know. “Migraine. Pounding. Pulsing. A sledgehammer swinging gleefully on my brain.”
“Anything else?”
“Everything else.”
“Meaning?”
“You name it. Confusion. Depression. Things are all a little unclear. I’m in fog. I’m fogged in.”
“Suicidal?”
“Keep the knives and sharp objects away from me,” mumbles Pritchard. A pretty good sign he’s not actually suicidal, thinks Heller.
“Dolan says it’s an annual thing for you,” says Heller. So why do you do it? Why do you suffer it? Heller wonders.
“Not this bad,” says Pritchard. “I guess the end of the world tends to bring it on,” he says.
Pritchard struggles to sit up. He wants to talk. At some level he welcomes this.
“We don’t know it’s the end of the world,” says Heller.
“Yeah, we do,” says Pritchard. “We’ve been trying to raise someone—anyone—and we haven’t. Dolan’s a genius at this stuff. If there’s a voice loose in the universe, he can find it. So let me tell you, there’s no voice loose in the universe. And I think it’s pretty reasonable to be depressed about that.”
But despite what he’s saying, Heller senses that Pritchard is valuing the human connection. He’s always been the talker, the upbeat, communicative one. They’ve been described more than once as an odd couple, but always affectionately. Always that they’d do anything for each other—and for anyone else, for that matter. The kind of teamwork, of trust in one another, that is a model for Antarctica.
“Dolan needs you.”
Pritchard smiles. “Not really.” He smiles more. “That’s a common misconception.”
“Okay, then we need you. We need you helping him.”
“You mean you need to know I’m out there trying. Trying and not getting anywhere.” Pritchard looks like he’s trying not to tear up. “Let’s be honest, Mr. Heller. We’re doomed.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Yeah, we do.”
“We need you. You’re our chance. You’re our chance to know more, and knowing more, maybe escape doom.”
Pritchard is silent. But he hears him.
“The tower inspection you guys do,” says Heller. “I’d like to come on the next trip.”
Pritchard sits up a little more now, straightening. He frowns. “It’s pretty dangerous going out there this time of year, you know. That’s why we use the cameras. It’s not a good idea. And really not a good idea to have anyone extra go. No need to take on additional risk.”
“In theory, yes. But maybe you guys are missing something.”
Pritchard gets quickly, sharply offended. “Hey, we’re not fucking missing anything!” Then muttering: “Asshole . . .”
Sharp, sudden mood swings. A manifestation of T3. Heller tries to defuse it. “Hey, I’m sure you’re not. It’s just another set of eyes in the cold and dark, that’s all.”
“And another heart and set of lungs to worry about out there.”
“We don’t have much choice here, either of us. Hobbes and Simmons and Bramlett have asked me to go.”
A little white lie. Heller isn’t quite sure why he’s even said it.
“Jesus. They don’t trust us? Why don’t they trust us? What do they think?”
Paranoia—more classic T3.
“They think it’s on this end somehow, don’t they?” says Pritchard. “That’s the only way they can explain it. Well, it’s not. They can’t believe there’s nothing out there at the other end of Comm, so they figure it’s gotta be this end. Typically reductive scientific thinking.”
The hostility. More indication of T3. On the other hand, the anger seems to be lifting, clearing, his T3, defogging and energizing him.
Heller decides to shift the conversation elsewhere. He opens the bunk door, calls Dolan in.
“Listen—Hobbes and company want me to go with you to inspect the towers.” Repeating the little lie to Dolan . . . doubling down, as if to make it true, make it real . . .
Dolan doesn’t look at Heller. He looks at Pritchard. Searchingly. “Boy is that a useless idea,” says Dolan. “You won’t even know what you’re looking at out there.”
Heller shrugs.
“Do you? Do you have any idea?”
Heller shakes his head. No, not really. “But you could tell me. Tell me so I’ll be of some use to you.”
“But we don’t have a choice, do we?” Dolan is a quick study.
“No. Not really.”
“Okay then,” says Pritchard.
And stands up.
In a definite attitude of It’s your funeral.
Which, Heller realizes, it actually could be.
55.
The history and purpose of the two comm towers are straightforward enough: The second is there for backup, in case the electronics fail in the first one. Or if a supply plane clips it on a windy approach.
A backup tower. Cautious, responsible redundancy.
A lot of good that did.
The two tower sites (one just a few hundred yards from McMurdo, the other almost a mile away) were originally chosen in the 1960s for their adequate distance from interference. Equipment was updated in the ’70s and ’80s, but nobody saw any reason to shift the towers closer. At one point, it seemed they would both be artifacts. Wi-Fi and modems base-wide would switch to the Iridium phone satellites in geosynchronous orbit, touted to be a big improvement over their jury-rigged, spotty, and untrustworthy terrestrial system, but the Iridium solution quickly proved not only too expensive but no more reliable, just as spotty. So the Wi-Fi and modems were still served by the original two comm towers, and the fickle phone service was Internet based.
And now, nothing. No signal from anywhere.
Everyone reasonably assumed that any problem, any failure, would be at this end. Here on the harsh, frozen, unforgiving continent.
No one ever imagined the failure would be from the other side. From the north.
Ever since their arrival, Pritchard and Dolan have been charged with maintaining the towers, which they have always been glad to do, old radio hands, tinkerers. Like modern-day mechanic
s asked to keep that old car on the corner running. Just in case. No problem, sir. Kinda fun, sir.
Until now. Until all possible communication, until any further sign of life, hinges on these antiquated structures.
“We go at zero six hundred hours,” says Dolan. “It’s typically a few degrees warmer at that hour. You might say fifty below, fifty-five below, what difference does it make? But at these temperatures, with all our test equipment, that five degrees might be the difference between the equipment functioning or not,” he explains. “Including”—he gestures to his heart and his brain, and wiggles his fingers—“all this equipment.” He continues. “We take two ATVs. For the headlights, first of all. And in a situation—an engine failure, not unheard of at these temperatures—the three of us can fit onto one. Internal combustion engines were never designed for fifty below. But it’s all we got.”
Pritchard piles on. “That five degrees might be the difference between getting it done in ten minutes or in twelve minutes, which might be the difference between getting back into the Quonset hut or ending up a hundred yards from it—permanently.”
Zero six hundred hours.
Bleary, half-awake, Heller watches as they check all their equipment. He watches Pritchard search a shelf, shaking his head—“Come on, where the fuck?”—shifting things around on the crowded shelf and pulling things down until he finds a roll of sealing tape at the back. As they fit their packs, tape their gloves, check their flashlights, he listens to them banter about the two ATVs. “Let’s have the One-Four go first. That’s got a better headlight.” “Nah, I think the Cat’s better. It spreads wider.” “No, let’s have the One-Four.” And then—he is thankful—both check him over carefully too. Check all his clothing seals. Both of them inspecting together, expressions furrowed like concerned spinster aunts. Pritchard slaps Heller on the shoulder—an indication that preparation check is done, he is ready to go.
The single headlight of the front ATV carves a hard, narrow tunnel of light ahead of them, focused and intent, a path of light surrounded by a universe of night. The wind whips snow across the single beam, making the wind visible, like visual proof of its insistent and relentless anger, although the whistle and hum, both high and low in frequency, a sheer scream and low rumble rolled into one, make its anger clear as well. It’s fifty below, and the cold seems to hang in the air visibly too—crystals of shifting air that would sting like an attack of hornets if they were hitting bare skin.
Heller is on the back of the second ATV, driven by Dolan. The roar of the ATV engine is completely swallowed up in the wind. Strange how the normally insistent, arrogantly loud ATVs are rendered mute, as if meek and docile, subsumed in sound and fury much more substantial, much more primal and elemental.
They reach the first tower in under a minute, Heller guesses. They leave the ATVs running—would never risk turning them off and having one or both not start—and they head toward the permanent tower scaffolding. Dolan gestures to Heller: “Follow me.”
The wind whips through the scaffolding so forcefully as they climb the stairs that Heller feels himself lifted a little. It’s a giddy feeling. He holds the handrails with both gloves, as previously instructed. They stay close. Dolan and Pritchard each carry a tool case. The electronics pod they need to reach is about four stories up. They take each scaffold step carefully. The three of them are packed together like a single animal on the move, rising up off the icy terrain, climbing higher into the night. In this wind and cold, there can be no talking. It is, for each of them, about preservation of energy, about paying close attention to the steadiness and solidity of each step, and then making the next. They are conscious of their companions. But their job out here is attention to themselves.
When they reach the electronics pod at the top of the first comm tower, Dolan takes out a couple of tools—a long-handled needle-nose pliers, an odd stubby screwdriver, and, last, a sealed plastic envelope, which he opens carefully in the wind to remove a single, oversize key. Now he takes from an inside pocket of his parka a folded-up, heavy-grade piece of clear plastic that he has obviously prefitted to the job at hand. By shifting the clear plastic only slightly in his hand, it opens automatically and forcefully in the wind. He slides the plastic over the pod, as a protective measure against the elements, a temporary barrier against wind and wet. Now, with the stubby screwdriver, sliding it beneath the plastic, he chips the ice off the pod—the whole pod is only a foot and a half square—and then, using both the pliers and the oversize key that Heller can see is fitted to just this pod case, for security and protection, he pries the pod open in the wind. Both Dolan and Pritchard train their helmets’ miner lamps on its interior—shining them through the protective plastic into the inner workings of the pod. Heller can see an array of wires, transponders, chips, and electronics. He has no idea what he’s looking at, of course. A sea of electronic connection. Or of disconnection. Dolan reaches both gloves in. Shifts one wall of electronic connections aside to reveal a second set behind it.
He and Pritchard shift their heads to move their helmet beams around. Covering between them the full interior of the pod. After a minute or so, Dolan carefully reverses the process. Brings the little wall of electronics back into its original position, checking once more, before closing the pod, clipping and sealing it, and locking it with the specially fitted key and, as a last step, rolling up the protective plastic barrier.
There is no acknowledgment or satisfaction that passes between Pritchard and Dolan. Heller has the sense that only if there was a problem would they signal to each other. Proper function doesn’t earn any high fives or acknowledgments out here where every movement must be thought out, measured, conserved. He’s impressed with their professionalism.
They all descend the scaffolding carefully, climb carefully back onto the still-running ATVs, head to the second tower. The one farther off.
It takes two minutes or so to reach this one. Two long minutes. Heller wouldn’t have imagined it could be noticeably colder as they reached the second tower, but it is. And this further comm tower is taller, Heller notices. Maybe an extra story or so. A different scaffolding. A little sparser arrangement of steps and rails to the top, Heller sees.
Same plan. Same toolboxes. Same careful climb. Same tenting and taping of the electronics pod, before Pritchard, this time, deices the pod, opens it, begins his careful helmet-beam inspection.
Heller can’t help but notice again how comfortably they operate together. No words can be spoken, out in the wind; no words should be spoken against the pressures of the cold; all attention is on the efficient but thorough use of time and energy. But still, Heller has the sense that even inspecting a comm tower on a balmy tropical isle, they would do it with wordless satisfaction.
All goes the same in this next inspection, just as smoothly.
Until they start to descend from the scaffolding.
Which is when Joe Heller apparently faints dead away.
Trips and tumbles down a full flight of the scaffolding.
One moment feeling fine, and the next moment collapsing, falling . . .
He remembers cracking his head on something.
Hitting the scaffolding with his head.
His body bouncing down the scaffolding.
The steps, the steel, all blurring around him, scrambling together in his brain.
And then nothing.
Blacking out.
As if the Antarctic cold and night, long held at bay around him, like a wolf impatiently prowling the perimeter, suddenly sees its chance, gets the better of him, finally invades, rushing insistently into his body and his mind.
He comes to in considerable pain hours later.
Lying in a position he has never expected to.
Staring up from the examining table, in the small, all-too-familiar infirmary.
The examining table where Sandy Lazo-Wasum and Trish Wong preceded him.
Pritchard and Dr. Calloway are sitting next to him, looking down at
him. The doctor is searching his eyes with a penlight, as Pritchard catches him up on the last few hours.
“You blacked out in the cold. You went tumbling down the scaffold. You would have kept going all the way down the next three flights, but Dolan grabbed your parka collar to stop you. We managed to drag you down the scaffold. Dolan got you slung over the ATV, steered it from the back with you passed out in front. We figured you had just minutes.”
Dolan enters the room, stands behind Pritchard and the doctor.
“He saved you,” says Pritchard. “Dolan saved you. You were a goner.”
Heller shifts his eyes up to look at Dolan.
Dolan looks back at him expressionlessly.
56.
He recovers quickly. He has to. He doesn’t want to be seen as taking up any extra medical resources. Or seen as weak in any way.
Dr. Calloway checks his vitals for the next few days. Heller gathers that while it was technically a sudden life-and-death, touch-and-go situation, most of the station takes it largely in stride. Close calls—close encounters with the extreme cold—are not uncommon, par for the course. They’re seasonally recurring cautionary tales, like repeated car crashes at a notoriously bad intersection.
“You know, even mild hypothermia causes mental confusion, and muscle mis-coordination, and loss of judgment, and with any repeated incidents of hypothermia, those tendencies become more pronounced,” Calloway tells him. “Plus some people are just more susceptible to extreme cold than others, and your susceptibility increases as you get older. I’d recommend against any more of these little excursions . . .”
Days of Night Page 19