Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

“Yes.”

“Yeah, I heard you were here. Bum deal. Makes no sense at all.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you…ah…”

Noting her attempt to figure out who he was, he moved his left arm away from his chest, revealing his name tag. DR. JAMES w. SKEHAN, it read. “Folks call me Jim,” he told her. “Emmett and I are at DRI together.”

“Sure, I know who you are,” she said, embarrassed that she had not known who he was when he snagged Cal Hart from her office door before breakfast that morning. “I wrote to you last year to see if you were accepting students.”

“I’m glad you were able to get on with Emmett. You should be proud. Your record looked very good, and he doesn’t take many master’s candidates.”

She wanted to say, Yeah, and it looks like it was my bad luck that he did , but instead she said, “I’m truly glad to meet you.”

Skehan unzipped his parka just enough to produce his dinner, which he opened up and drank, having put in more liquid than Valena had. He chugged it down in two long swills, then folded up the bag and tucked it into one of the four big patch pockets on the front of his big red.

“I hadn’t thought of that technique,” said Valena.

“You can only do it with certain ones,” he said. “They ought to supply a large-diameter straw.”

“What are you doing in Happy Camp? You’ve done tons of work down here.”

“They’ve got a rule about how many years you can go without a refresher. It doesn’t matter that I’ve spent those years working in Greenland. No, back to Happy Camp, my boy!” He did not sound happy at all.

“Perhaps you can help me understand what happened in Emmett’s camp last year,” Valena said. “I knew there had been a death, but—”

“I sat down with you because I was going to ask you what you knew about this whole mess. I just got here Thursday. Emmett was in the field, so I didn’t see him. Then he came back, and… well, I didn’t hear anything until midday Saturday, when Emmett was already on the plane going north. They really kept things quiet.”

Valena pondered this statement. If the rest of McMurdo had the news, why was Skehan ignorant of it? Didn’t the townies talk to the beakers? “What exactly was the gripe between Emmett and the journalist?”

“When the now-famous article appeared in the Financial News calling Emmett’s work on rapid climate change a hoax, he—”

“He called it what?”

“Yeah, imagine that, a newspaper decides to debunk careful scientific research. Last time I checked, scientific findings were juried by peer scientists, people who understand the data and methods; but no, now our findings are to be judged in the newspapers by people who don’t know data from dung, or worse yet, people who are pushing a political or business agenda.”

“Sweeny took it on himself to say Emmett didn’t know how to do science?”

“It wasn’t Sweeny. The article was written by Howard Frink, who’s making quite a name for himself for bashing science. His technique is to quote things out of context and misstate findings by applying them to things they obviously don’t fit, the same way the religious right attacks the Theory of Evolution. It’s like throwing out half the rules so you can change the game into whatever suits you.”

“So Emmett invited him to come to Antarctica so he could educate him?”

“Sure, but did he come? No. No, he sent Sweeny. Frink couldn’t be troubled to come to the source. Can’t risk that, he might learn something contrary to his precious beliefs.”

“Is Frink a fundamentalist?”

“Fundamentalist, neo-con, flat-earther, who knows? He’s in with anything to the right of Attila the Hun. We’re all going to hell. Ironically, he called Emmett’s work ‘the interpretations of an alarmist.’”

“Wow, that’s scary.”

“It’s the fact that he could get that printed in the Financial News that’s scary. Frink’s in with the industrialist camp that doesn’t want to think about all those nasty little correlations between increased atmospheric CO2from the burning of fossil fuels and the rise in global temperatures, reduced water resources, nastier storms, and environmental refugees. Thinks all our data that indicate that climate can change dramatically in just a few years is some wacked-out conspiracy to destabilize the saintly progress of commerce.”

“He said all that? I always thought the Financial News was a conservative paper, as in, not into sensationalism.”

“He made his statements in the kind of terms you have to read twice to spot how scathing they are. All about how liberals who rest on university salaries are undermining marketplace competition with skewed data and conjecture. Sure, let’s just pump even more carbon into the atmosphere in the name of competing with the Chinese. Before that, it was Japan. Next, it’s India. It’s always somebody we’re supposed to be afraid of. I say it’s just the money maggots—excuse me, magnates —wanting to keep on living beyond what’s reasonable, zipping around in private jets and running huge pumps to keep their swimming pools pristine and chill or heat their houses to seventy degrees.” He shifted slightly, working a kink out of his back. “The other problem with printing that kind of nonsense is that the other journalists are lulled into thinking that they are correct in the way they are reporting the story.”

“And what’s that?”

Skehan said, “In journalism school they are taught to always present the ‘other’ viewpoint. Anything less obvious to them than ‘two jets flew into the Twin Towers today’ requires that they give point and counterpoint, as if science is just a matter of opinion and that any opposing ‘opinion’—that the increased rate of warming is caused by alien abductions, say, or by homosexual marriage—should be presented with equal weight.”

Valena felt the stiffening cold of the ice-block wall seeping through her clothing. She pulled her neck gaiter up over her nose and spoke through it. “I guess you’re pretty certain that the climate is warming,” she said, intending irony.

“And you’re not? Whose student is it you said you are?”

“Emmett Vanderzee’s.” Irritation was seeping into her with the cold. She respected her professor, but also wanted to kick him for getting into trouble. “But I’m supposed to keep an open mind, right? Which also has me asking questions, like how come Sweeny got sick and why did he die?”

Skehan said, “He got sick because he went to high elevation too fast. The real question is why Emmett was pulled off the ice.”

“As in, what new evidence points to foul play.”

He turned his goggles toward Valena. “You really don’t get it. Sweeny’s death was gasoline on the fire. Not having the gear that would save him was a terrible accident, but you can’t convince the media of that. Frink has been using it to build his case against Emmett, keeping the story alive. There’s nothing like a dead journalist to get a story on the front page.”

“But was it an accident?”

“Yes, but an accident that happened thirteen thousand miles from New York in a place no New Yorker or Kansan or poodle-walking bridge player from San Diego can possibly imagine. It would have been great if Emmett could have gotten a whole team of media in there immediately to prove what actually happened, but that wasn’t possible. He couldn’t even get back in there to look at the site.”

“Why not? Why did he leave without knowing what happened to the air drop?”

“There were more storms forecast, and everyone was already beat up from the last one. Emmett had to pull the whole camp out as soon as he could. And that was a lucky thing—in fact, the sane and rational thing to do, for everybody’s safety—because another did come in right behind it, and then another. Big ones. When they say ‘high winds’ here, they mean hurricane force. If Emmett hadn’t pulled out when he did, they’d all have been pinned down for at least another three weeks. The cook tent would have been torn to shreds, and then maybe even the Scott tents.