“I don’t think he was wearing his video glasses,” Alan reassured her.
Sylvia paged through his file. He was sixty-one years old. “Does it seem to any of you that the Woos have been getting stranger and stranger?”
“Compared to when?” Joyce said.
“Evolution of the arts,” Alan opined.
“Or they’re running out of candidates.”
“Remember the sound artist?”
They smiled. This Woo had come down and learned to do vocal impressions of all the seals, penguins, skuas, and whales in the McMurdo area, also the helicopters, ventilators, generators, and winds, all then mixed together in his compositions. His farewell performance in the galley had been quite amazing, actually, an Antarctic symphony that put Vaughan Williams’s to shame.
“Remember Jerry and Paul?”
“Who could forget,” Sylvia grumbled. Those two had been administrative trouble; a painter and photographer traveling together, with a penchant for taking off in borrowed vehicles. They had also suborned the New York Air Guard into flying two of the Hercs in tandem over the Transantarctics, to get videos of one from the other. Randi had gotten a position fix from Herc 02, then heard 04 on the air and said, “Where are you, 04?” and 04 had given her exactly the same fix as 02, giggling like seven-year-olds.
“What about Leslie, she was just as bad.”
“True,” Sylvia said. Leslie was a photographer with an unerring instinct for the illicit and transgressive; her big coffee-table book had made Antarctica look like 1930s Berlin. A scandal at the NSF home office, and she shuddered to think what it had done at ASL. Heads would certainly have rolled.
Having gotten started, they recounted once more some of the litany of memorable Woos: the painter still working on a single canvas of Cape Royds after four trips down; the modeler who had shaped a working replica of Mount Erebus too heavy to fly out, so that it was still out there in the lumberyard; the novelist whose book had portrayed the NSF as fascist villains, explaining in his acknowledgments that the NSF had been nice to him but mean to his characters; the filmmaker who had slithered around on the sea ice living the life of a Weddell seal pup, including a traumatic unplanned killer whale attack (this movie was still popular at the video rental); the sculptor who had spent all his time making traditional snowmen in the streets of McMurdo; the eminent science writer who had not heard that his flight down had had to turn back just before the Point of Safe Return, so that after eight hours he had climbed out of the Herc back in Christchurch and looked around and said, “Why all the trees?”
Then Paxman came in to announce Sylvia’s next appointment, and they composed themselves a bit guiltily, as for the most part they had liked these Woos they had been laughing at. Compared to the scientists, who were often ambitious, tense, and resentful of NSF’s control over the purse strings, the Woos were great comic relief, an endless string of court jesters. And it looked like Ta Shu was going to fit right in.
Then her next appointment was in the room, a slender good-looking bemused man with black hair. After introducing her colleagues to him, Sylvia excused them; she needed to talk to him alone. Wade Norton, advisor to the Wandering Senator, on an unscheduled visit; this was not good.
Though obviously tired and disoriented, he was friendly in manner, and had focused on each of the others as they were introduced in a way that made Sylvia think he was fixing them in his memory. A man in his position would be greatly helped by a good memory for people. He seemed low-keyed; looked sympathetic; a good listener. Dapper still, despite the obvious hammering of the flight from Christchurch, and from Washington before that.
“How was your trip down?”
“It was interesting.”
Awkward pause.
“Well,” Sylvia said, gesturing out the window at what could be seen of the town. Her window faced across a dry gulch and a pipeline to the blank side of the Crary Lab. “Tell me what exactly you would like to accomplish down here, and we’ll do our best to accommodate you.”
The man smiled and held up a palm: appeal for sympathy. “Senator Chase used to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as you know. Now the current committee majority is blocking the renewal of the Treaty. They’ve also noted that the new South Pole station is finished, at considerable expense, but that NSF has requested the same level of funding for the Antarctic Program for the next five-year budgetary period as for the period of construction. At the same time they’re hearing all kinds of reports from down here, this recent, um, disappearance of a polar traverse freight vehicle? And trouble of various kinds. I think it would be fair to characterize the committee majority as becoming skeptical about the idea of NSF continuing to run the U.S. Antarctic Program, rather than, I don’t know, privatizing things even further than they have been. ASL in combination with a university group or whatever. This is the same majority that advocates privatizing USGS and the EPA, so who knows what they might suggest. Now Senator Chase wants NSF in charge, but he needs to be able to support his support of NSF, so to speak. So he’s sent me down to investigate the situation and make a report, particularly about these recent, um, troubles. I take it there’s been some unusual activity.”
“Yes,” Sylvia said, feeling like she should imitate the geomancer’s knowing nod: more than you know, sir.
He watched her closely. “Well—the senator is curious about that. I think he’s wondering if things happening down here might not be used to advantage to get the Treaty out of committee and back on the table. If he weren’t in the middle of his Asia aid walk he’d be down here himself, because he’s a big believer in the power of face to face. But he can’t come now, so he’s sent me. What he wants is more information to work with.”
Sylvia nodded cautiously. Many people came down claiming to be sympathetic allies, and they usually had their own agendas and were merely hoping to use the Antarctic situation somehow to push those agendas. That’s more or less what this man had just said about Senator Chase. In any case it would be imprudent to reveal anything of a truly confidential nature to an outsider. Which he knew as well as she did. Therefore laying groundwork for later, perhaps.
In the meantime his visit was much like yet another DV outside committee budget review. Why did Antarctica cost so much? Why should American taxpayers pay for it? What was going on down here that was so valuable to ordinary Americans? Review boards and committees came down to ask these questions frequently, and often they were adversarial exchanges, in that they sometimes wanted to look like brilliant cost-cutters, while the Antarctic budget had already been pared to the bone at the same time that NSF had been asked to do more with it, in an environment where safety factors could not be scrimped. Visitors like this man could influence the people in Washington making the money decisions, so to a certain extent they held the purse strings for NSF the way NSF held the purse strings for the scientists down here—a thought which gave Sylvia new insight into the feelings the scientists must occasionally have toward her—an unpleasant mix of caution, hope, and fear.
But still, this one was claiming to be an ally, and she thought it was likely to be true. Like everyone she had heard a fair bit about Senator Chase, and though she did not think he was any longer a serious player in Washington, she admired a lot of what he had done.
“Since this is a continent for science,” Norton said now, “NSF is in effect the government here, isn’t that right?”
“Not exactly,” Sylvia said, though she had often thought of it in just those terms. “There’s SCAR, for instance, the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research. They work under the auspices of the Antarctic Treaty nations, and do a lot to direct what kind of research is done here, and how it’s done as well. In many respects they are as powerful as NSF.”