Cold War pp-5 Read online

  Later, debate would arise over a suggestion by some scholars that the last comparable episode occurred in the summer of 480 B.C., a year for which Chinese, Korean, Babylonian, Celtic, and Mesoamerican records — including glyph-dated early Mayan stelae — present what has been interpreted as correlative evidence of rapidly changing sunspot patterns, and brilliant, tempestuous displays of the northern and southern lights many thousands of miles from the poles. That is the same summer King Leonidas I and his three hundred Spartan warriors made their heroic resistance against thousands of invading Persians at the Hot Gates, a narrow mountain pass between the Aegean coast and central Greece, only to be undone by a local betrayer, who showed the Persian force a route that led them over the mountains to a rear assault upon the defenders, killing them almost to a man.

  A coincidence? Likely so. Although the oracle Leonidas consulted before deciding to hold the pass is said to have been influenced by his interpretation of some obscure cosmic portent.

  Such speculation aside, it remains doubtful that a magnetic storm of even the greatest severity would have had a consequential impact on affairs in Greece or elsewhere in that ancient era.

  This was, after all, many centuries before civilization became dependent on the telecommunications networks and electrical power grids that would be thrown into utter chaos by its shock waves.

  Cold Corners Base, Antarctica

  In more than one sense, Pete Nimec’s trip to the hallway rest room was another step up the learning curve he’d foreseen at McMurdo.

  Nimec supposed it was partly his own fault. The three or four cups of coffee he’d drunk in Willy’s passenger lounge had worked their way through him soon after the Herc was off-deck, but a peek behind the shower curtain enclosing its cargo section’s makeshift latrine — a fifty-five-gallon steel drum with an attached funnel for a urinal, and a loathsome, sloshing plastic honey bucket — persuaded him to try to hold out until after he reached Cold Corners. And he’d succeeded, asking Megan to show him where he could make a pit stop on the way to her office.

  Inside the unisex rest room’s single stall, Nimec had found tugging himself out from under his boxers, long johns, flannel-lined blue jeans, and various overlapped shirts an uncomfortable exercise in patience and control. But he managed to get his business done without embarrassment.

  Now he filled the sink, soaped his hands under the automatic dispenser, and washed them in the plugged basin, complying with a sign above the sink that said its taps weren’t to be left running while you cleaned up. Nimec was about to splash his face with some fresh, cold water when he read the second item on the extensive list of dos and don’ts, and discovered the limit was one basinful per person. So much for that.

  He dried his hands with a paper towel, tossed it in the trash receptacle, went to the door. A coin-operated condom machine was on the wall beside it. He paused and checked the sign. Unsurprisingly, the machine’s contents weren’t rationed.

  Nimec emerged from the rest room. A small group of men and women looked askance at him as they walked past. Puzzled, he turned to where Megan was waiting for him down the hall.

  He asked her about the plainly disagreeable glances once the two of them were seated in her office.

  “I followed the rules,” he said, making the Scout’s-honor sign with his right hand. “Not that I can see how they’d know if I didn’t.”

  She regarded him with amusement from across her desk.

  “That bunch was mostly OAEs,” she said.

  He pulled a face. “Mostly what?”

  “Old Antarctic Explorers… longtimers on the ice,” she said. “Sorry. The lingo here gets contagious after a while.”

  “And exactly how’s that supposed to have something to do with their attitude?”

  “Isolation breeds a clannish mentality. The crew can be prickly toward outsiders. Or perceived outsiders. Their consumption of water is one of the things that raises spines.”

  “Gracious,” Nimec said. “I hope they’re better hosts to those politicos who’re due for a visit.”

  Megan Breen smiled her smile. It was always real. And always measured. Over the years Nimec had found that people either got the combination or they didn’t. The ones who did were usually charmed to helplessness. The ones who didn’t thought her calculating and manipulative. In the predominantly male world in which she functioned as Roger Gordian’s next-in-line, the split was close to even.

  He got the smile completely.

  “Our desalinization plant turns out fifteen thousand gallons of usable water on a good day,” she said. “That’s for cooking, cleaning, machine and vehicle use, hydroponics… the whole show. I know that may sound like a considerable amount, Pete. But it takes two gallons to wash your hands under a running tap, as opposed to one gallon washing in a filled basin. I could rattle off the comparative stats for high-versus-low-efficiency showers—”

  “And toilets, I’m sure,” he said.

  “One and a half gallons for ultra-low flush. Three to five for standard models.”

  “You had that notice posted, didn’t you?”

  “Worded it myself.”

  “Then I won’t beat the issue of my lousy reception to death.”

  They were both smiling now.

  “Just wait till we get you a name patch,” she said. “When those malcontents find out who they offended, they’ll want to go scampering under a rug.”

  Nimec sat a moment, glancing around the office. It was a small, well-ordered cubicle with bluish soundproof paneling and recessed overhead fluorescents. No windows. No decorative touches to enliven it. Two big maps covered nearly the entire wall to Megan’s right. One was a satellite image of the Antarctic continent. Shaped like a giant manta ray. The other showed the rugged topography of the Dry Valleys. There were three colored pins — red, yellow, blue — marking different points in the latter.

  Nimec turned back to Megan. The last time he’d seen her, she had been the embodiment of corporate chic, letting the world know she was playing to win with a pricey designer suit and a smart wedge-cut hairstyle that just brushed the tops of her shoulders. Now her hair went tumbling loosely down over bib overalls and a maroon twill shirt, framing her face with thick auburn waves, highlighting her large emerald eyes like the deepest of sunsets over a wood of Irish pines. Nimec supposed she could dress herself in sackcloth and still be as lovely as ever.

  He sat there a while, looking at her. He could think of a dozen matters they had to discuss, every one of them pressing, every one relating to the incidents that had brought him so far from home. But he was uncertain how to approach the subject he really wanted to talk about first.

  “So,” he said. “How’ve you been?”

  She shrugged, her hands on the desk.

  “Cold,” she said. “And generally busy.”

  “How about when you aren’t busy?”

  “Cold and lonely.”

  Nimec gave her a little nod. There had been photographs in her San Jose office. Vases with fresh flowers from the shop down the street. And abundant sunlight.

  “I hear people come to Antarctica to find themselves,” he said. “Or reinvent themselves. It’s being away from everything they know. And the emptiness. I suppose they must feel like they’re filling it in. Writing their lives over on a blank page.”

  Megan shrugged again.

  “That may be true for some,” she said.

  “And you?”

  She paused a beat, but otherwise did a good job of seeming unaffected by the question.

  “There’s no place else like this on earth. It’s magnificent. Beautiful in its way. It gives you the room and time to contemplate. But I’m doing this because Gord needed me here to get our operations off the ground.”

  “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, SO
HO’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.