Days of Night

by Jonathan Stone

  Manafort has gone back to cooking. The prayer meetings continued for a while but now have dwindled. The faithful, usually five or six of them, still meet in the cafeteria in the mornings. Heller walks through occasionally, exchanges a head nod with Manafort. I’m keeping an eye on you. Manafort is leaving Antarctica at the end of the busy season. Going back to Idaho. I’m keeping an eye on you until you go.

  He would never forget the nature, the sequence of his thinking on the two-minute ATV ride back to McMurdo, Pritchard the genius, the serial killer, slung unconscious in front of him.

  The fuzziness, the fogginess, dropping away suddenly, a crisp clarity with the bracing cold. As if his mind, his brain—in that instant of survival, of victory, of being alive—had suddenly, finally, acclimated to Antarctica. And offered him a sudden clarity about himself:

  How he had always assumed the truth. Had been raised to value it, cherish it, advance it at every opportunity. Truth for him was reflexive. His only real act of faith. Paul had teased him, called him a regular Boy Scout, when he was first on the job. And Paul had shown him how foolish he was, how blind and naive, how the truth, the facts, could be much more malleable, more fluid and shifting, than he would ever have thought.

  And here in Antarctica—land of harsh and irreducible truths, you’d think—Pritchard and Dolan have shown him a malleability within the truth, a massive flexibility in the facts that he never would have suspected. He had learned so slowly from his partner, Paul, and learned so extremely from Pritchard, that truth is not the unbending, supreme, reigning value that he has spent his life believing. So he appropriated it as he saw them do, bent it briefly to his own purposes, pretending he had hypothermia to save his own life. The hypothermia effects that he happened to read about—fascinated, terrified—along with paradoxical undressing and polar T3 syndrome, on that initial flight down to Antarctica.

  He had also packed the paperback of Catch-22, figuring that on the long flight he’d finally get to read it.

  He realizes that if he had read it, if he had gotten absorbed in it instead of immersing himself in the terrors of Antarctica, learning from Wikipedia about all the signs and stages of hypothermia, he wouldn’t have been able to fool Pritchard and Dolan by imitating its symptoms so convincingly there in the shack. Not reading Catch-22 had saved him. Now there was a “Catch” for you.

  Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Dolan and Pritchard. Your lessons in lying saved me. Finally penetrated my thick skull.

  Sometimes the lesson has to hit you over the head.

  Sometimes being hit over the head is the lesson.

  As for the why? The why that barely matters to the wheels of justice, that doesn’t hold a candle to the who, what, where, and when. The why that always fascinates but never satisfies. Pritchard had refused to say much of anything at all. The cleverly, constitutionally, and ingeniously talkative Pritchard went essentially mute.

  Heller knew it was true, knew he was right; the parallels were too perfect: there was some deep, cruel impulse in Pritchard that arranged for the suffering of Sorenson seeing Lazo-Wasum on the table, naked and cold in front of her, as he had been naked and warm with her just hours before. Then Pritchard had orchestrated an identical arrangement—an encore moment, at the same autopsy table—of Heller’s own suffering in seeing Trish lying naked there. Sorenson had desired, needed, perhaps even loved Sandy Lazo-Wasum over that Antarctic winter. Heller had desired, needed, perhaps even loved Trish Wong over the Antarctic winter. Pritchard had desired, needed, perhaps even loved to engineer suffering for all of them.

  As for the poisoning? The methodology? Which had maybe started it, unleashing Pritchard’s original impulse? Hey, if I could get hold of a couple of those specimens . . .

  It was science, thinks Heller gloomily. The spirit of inquiry. The spirit of experimentation. Pritchard had experimented first with Dolan’s T3, after all, getting to know it, over the years. Then, had moved on to another project. Carefully. Quietly. A zoological and then chemical experiment, his own makeshift, off-kilter version of the experiments of Tallent and Blevins, the competing pharmaceutical researchers.

  Pritchard the scientist. Following the scientific impulse. Heller didn’t like the darkness of that answer.

  And shutting down the station’s communications completely? Crazy. Unthinkable. The problem being they had already gotten away with crazy and unthinkable. They had killed and then “found” the body, and no one figured out the cause of death. They had already run the experiment of crazy and unthinkable on Lazo-Wasum, and it was a success.

  Seeing if you could get away with it. Part of the very point of the experiment. Pure research. Crazy and unthinkable became the gateway—the gateway drug—to controlling communications entirely. Why not? They were believed. They were partners. Nobody doubts partners. Did T3 play a role? Antarctic stare? The fugue state? The darkness? The winter? All lubricants. All facilitating their dream. Their dream of invulnerability.

  And the high price of that dream.

  As it got light enough and warm enough to do so, Heller finally made his way out to the water’s edge, at the far side of McMurdo, to stand alone in exactly the spot where he saw the puffy red dot of parka—motionless, mysterious—the day he arrived.

  He stared out at the vast turmoiled sea spreading north in front of him, just as she had. What were you thinking that day? he had asked Trish, when he realized it had been her red parka, when he realized it had been her. Were you happy? Sad? Contemplative? Awestruck? Absorbed in the ocean’s beauty, or in your own thoughts?

  All of the above, she had answered with a shy smile.

  As he stood there himself, looking out, thinking of her, he felt it just as she said—all of the above.

  The second plane is due in a few hours.

  Heller is excited.

  The second plane carries three psychologists, coming to interview him, Hobbes, and others about “group delusion.” Shared psychosis. To try to understand what happened. How it could have happened. What we can learn.

  Picking up where NASA’s T3 research left off, thinks Heller cynically.

  But that’s certainly not what Heller is excited about.

  He’s excited about the one other passenger on the plane.

  The special passenger he’s managed to secure a seat for, thanks to Hobbes and Stanford pulling a few strings.

  Heller is staying on awhile. A few weeks. Enough time to see the spring take hold. To see some fragile shoots of green push up through the ice. Enough time to have a few more sessions with Professor Green at the eye of the telescope.

  Seeing Antarctica come to life beneath the sun. More than just the return of the sun. The return of day itself.

  What a perfect time, what a perfect chance, to visit the exotic continent.

  With your dad still here.

  Yes, Amy’s coming.

  Still minoring in astronomy.

  She’s looking forward to the observatory.

  Antarctica.

  What an unexpected place to start feeling a sense of home.

  Author’s Note

  In reality, the communications satellite dish serving McMurdo Base is located on Black Island, about twenty-five miles from McMurdo. The signal traverses those twenty-five miles by digital microwave. It would have been impossible for Heller, Pritchard, and Dolan to travel twenty-five miles in the brutal cold and wind conditions of Antarctic winter—it was life-threatening enough for them to make it the single mile from McMurdo to the fictional communications tower I built for them. On the other hand, the distance to Black Island shows that if there were a communications issue, the reality could be far more dire than my fiction.

  Also, the US observatory is in reality at Amundsen-Scott Station, but I located it at McMurdo for this account—among many, many other liberties.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my tennis and paddle tennis pals, who lent their names for several of the characters herein. I assure you, my pals have nothing
in common with their namesakes. Their behavior and judgment are never short of exemplary (except for an occasional poor line call), and they are fine fellows to play with me.

  Thanks also to my son, Roger, who first had the notion for a novel about Antarctica. When we first discussed it, we imagined Antarctica as a lush, temperate, post-global-warming paradise. But as you can see, Rog, your pop, as always, went darker with it.

  About the Author

  Jonathan Stone writes his books on the commuter train between his home in Connecticut and his advertising job in midtown Manhattan, where he has honed his writing skills by creating smart and classic campaigns for high-level brands such as Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, and Mitsubishi. Stone’s first mystery-thriller series, the Julian Palmer books, won critical acclaim and was hailed as “stunning” and “risk-taking” in starred reviews by Publishers Weekly. He earned glowing praise for his novel The Cold Truth from the New York Times, who called it “bone-chilling.” He is the recipient of a Claymore Award for best unpublished crime novel and a graduate of Yale University, where he was a Scholar of the House in fiction writing. He is also the author of Two for the Show, The Teller, Moving Day, The Heat of Lies, Breakthrough, and Parting Shot.