256 40 Rosie started walking away from the station at eight o’clock. She was supposed to get there first, by eight-thirty, and he’d arrive around nine. The stealth was hardly necessary. Everyone would be at the party. No one would notice their absence. Even better, no one would be at the hut. But Larry had wanted the secrecy. He’d appeared in the galley this afternoon, having just come in on the day’s plane. Rosie was doing the lunch dishes, her arms in sudsy water and her hair in a paper hat. The shock of his tall thinness , there in her kitchen, made her literally gasp. He looked skinnier , his hipbones jutting out from just above the waistband of his jeans, the planes of his face hollowed, as if he’d suffered. Even his hair, which had not been shaved recently and stood in tiny bristles around the perimeter of his head, made him look bereft, like a repentant convict. She leaned a hip against the stainless steel lip of the sink and waited for what he’d say. It’d been three weeks since she left McMurdo, since he slid the ambiguous note under her door, claiming honesty and asking her to not contact him and yet saying he’d find a way to come to the Pole. Well, here he was. But a lot had happened in the interim. She’d bought land and contacted her family. Tomorrow morning she was flying to McMurdo, and the next day back to the States. She would never again return to this continent. He said nothing, and finally she couldn’t stand the silence. Her scheduled redeployment. The sad yearning in his eyes. His speechlessness. These things combined, combusted, and she said, “Do you know Hotel South Pole?” He touched her shoulder and shook his head. So she began to describe the hut and the track leading out to it. He glanced around the empty kitchen and cautioned her to speak more quietly. He also suggested that they walk to the hut separately, and he insisted that they forego the mandatory check-out with station officials. All this, and he hadn’t even said hello yet. But he touched her shoulder again, slid his hand down to her soapy wrist and squeezed gently. A series of qualms quaked through her chest. The soles of her feet prickled. But she ignored these sensations. Now, as she walked toward the horizon, Rosie tried to imagine what it would look like inside the hut. In a landscape like this, it was no wonder four plywood walls, painted black and covered with plastic sheeting, could feel like the most erotic of havens. Even more so when she thought of the way it offered shelter from Mikala’s vision of the swirling mass of energy after the Big Bang, time and space exploding into being. Rosie laughed out loud. The sky was a perfect blue. The snow was firm, a single squeak with each boot step. Suddenly, she got it. This whole continent. The reason scientists flocked here. To many, this landscape meant only fear, the way it could extinguish life so swiftly. But to researchers, it meant the door to other universes, an insight to the beyond. They came to strip themselves of ordinariness so they could see the extraordinary. Like the guy who studied bird shit, endlessly digging through piles of guano so that he might one day glimpse the bird’s global journey. Or Alice, who examined the structure of rock, crystal by crystal, so that she might discover a story about earth’s cataclysmic history. Or the cosmologists. Especially the cosmologists. They spent their days staring at computer monitors, examining long lists of numbers, probably unvarying numbers, searching for some spike or aberration—so that they might understand the origin of the universe. 257 [34.204.196.206] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:48 GMT) Antarctic scientists spent not just hours but years, and in some cases decades, examining minute shreds of potential evidence, billions of pieces of data, waiting, waiting, waiting for that one shred or datum that would burst open the mystery package. That took patience in the extreme. It took a tolerance for boredom . Yet—and here was the thing that suddenly awed Rosie— it also took extraordinary hope. A person couldn’t dedicate her entire life, let alone spend huge chunks of it on this heartbreaking continent, looking for one piece of...