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.
“Okay, Pete,” she said at last, dabbing her upper lip with a napkin. “The chopper aside, what’s on your mind?”
“That line sounds very familiar,” he said.
She nodded. “It does. It also got a straight answer out of me.”
He looked at her without comment.
“Come on,” she said. “I didn’t miss your backpacker’s travel guide remarks about hearing how people find spiritual cleansing, harmony, and oneness among the king penguins. Or your question about whether I’ve joined that righteous crowd. Or most of all your long looks. Something’s bothering you. I think we should get it out in the open.”
Nimec kept looking at her, then finally expelled a breath.
“You told me you came to Antarctica because the boss asked,” he said. “Or at least you implied that. But I hear you volunteered.”
Megan lowered her cup into its saucer, waited as someone came moving past on his way from the service counter to another table.
“It seems you’ve been hearing a lot of things,” she said when he’d gone.
“Not from you,” he said. “That’s the problem. We never consulted about your reassignment.”
“You’re being unfair. I let you know a month beforehand.”
“After the decision was already made.”
“Pete—”
“I’d just like you to tell me why I wasn’t advised sooner,” he said. “All the years we’ve worked together, depended on each other, you never left me hanging. And then you did.”
“Pete, I’m sorry. Honestly. I didn’t realize that was how you felt.”
“Then tell me. Straight answer.”
Their eyes met. And held.
“It’s sort of complicated,” she said. “Gord wanting me here is the truth, but he’s the one to give you his reasons. As for myself, there were personal issues.”
“They involve Bob Lang?”
“Yes,” she said. “I preferred not to share them at the time.”
He nodded. Their eyes remained locked.
“And now?”
“I’d still rather not.”
“You change your mind, I’ll be ready to listen.”
“I know, Pete,” she said. “And thank you.”
He nodded again and sat there quietly finishing his espresso.
She reached out, touched his arm.
“Are we okay, Pete? Settled, I mean.”
“Settled.”
They were silent another minute, her hand still on his arm, squeezing it gently.
“All right,” he said then. “Coffee’s done. We should discuss the helicopter.”
She nodded, reached down into the kangaroo pocket of her bib-alls, and extracted a connected Palm computer.
“All the luxuries of home,” he commented.
Megan slipped the computer’s stylus out of its silo and tapped its “on” button.
“We try to be with it,” she said with a shrug. “Now hush, I need to jot out an e-mail. We’re presently short-handed as far as pilots go, but I’ll explain that later. Meanwhile, I think I’ve figured out how to kill two birds with one electronic stone.”
The men were known as Ketchup and Fries.
These were of course not their given names.
Ketchup was really Jonathan Ketchum, a sixty-year-old project scientist at the Experimenters’ Operations Facility in Goddard’s Building 26, the operational nucleus of the SOHO project. He had been with the EOF’s permanent MDI/SOI team since its establishment in the mid-nineties, and was considered one of its top men by the principal investigator.
Fries was Richard Frye, another member of the MDI/ SOI team. At twenty-six, he was its most recent addition, regarded as a babe in the woods by senior group members. This is the embedded reflex of those with tenure who are protective of their own status. Ketchum saw in Frye an inquisitiveness and joy of discovery that was like a bright reflection of himself as a young man. He knew Frye was already a better scientist than most, and had potential to be the best by far.
Ketchum had taken Frye under his wing from the start of the young man’s NASA employment, but their student-mentor relationship soon grew into an intellectually stimulating bond of equals. Ketchum imparted a maturity of understanding to Frye; Frye helped recharge Ketchum’s sense of wonderment daily.
Together they had become a team within a team.
Ketchup and Fries.
Nobody could say with any certainty who had cooked up the nickname. Because its ingredients included a heaping measure of disparagement, and perhaps a pinch of envy, credit went unclaimed and unassigned.
In the beginning they found the label vexatious. Eventually, however, they came to bear it with a certain defiant fondness. At some point their feelings became almost proprietary. Ketchup. Fries. What would one be without the other?
Besides, just look at the crap the visiting observers regularly threw at them.
The Auslanders, as they’d been tagged (again without attribution), were a group of scientists from institutions in France, Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., and a handful of other European Space Agency nations who had either contributed to the design and construction of SOHO’s gadgetry or were involved in studying its returns. All SOHO’s participants could retrieve this information from an archived, indexed, easily searchable electronic database without ever leaving their respective countries, but guest committees from abroad would sometimes show up at Goddard during research campaigns that engaged several of the observatory’s instruments at once.
Ostensibly their motivation was pure and unselfish, springing from a desire to help foster a spirit of international collaboration and share in the immediacy and excitement of these campaigns. The real, dirty scrub was that the Web curators of “collaborating” institutions often delayed inputting e-base updates about major discoveries, while their employers raced to contact news organizations and grab the glory — and subsequent funding windfalls — for themselves. It was a good bet that every principal investigator had a number that would provide fast access to a local CNN bureau chief programmed into his phone’s memory.
A joint operation to examine the current cyclical peak of sunspot activity had been under way for over two years now without the EOF group’s foreign colleagues showing any inclination whatsoever to pay them a house call. Then, lo and behold, with the recent evidence from SWAN and MDI/SOI that the sun had developed an acute case of the measles on its far side, they had come pouring into Goddard from astrophysics labs around the world, arriving with effervescent camaraderie, bon jour, gutten tag, and cheerio. And though the NASA scientists did acknowledge that both solar observation devices primarily responsible for the new findings were European in origin, they were resentfully convinced their co-investigators — a.k.a. unwanted party crashers, a.k.a. the Auslanders — were pushing and bumping their way through the door for one reason, and one alone: to make sure nobody at NASA beat them to the flash-dial button.