Big Dead Place. Nicholas Johnson

devouring seals, and amputating each other’s frozen extremities.

      I was overwhelmed with the sensation that I was merely a ghost compared to old tins of lunch tongue and Savoy sauce and rations of pea flour left behind by Shackleton. I was annoyed by my new boots, my camera, my breath, and the patch on my parka that bore the mark of a government institution. I felt trapped in a cheap knock-off of some original meaty experience. I wandered around the hut with my notebook, cataloguing cans of plain gravy soup and liquid bottled fruit. The ink in my pen had frozen, so I scratched into the paper: curried rabbit, sweet midget gherkins, roasted mutton, and Moir’s Gooseberries. While everyone else went outside to take pictures of penguins I stayed inside documenting dysentery medicine and concentrated egg powder. Hank, a fellow Stamp Collector, noticed this.

      “Are you sure the filming you heard about wasn’t on Sunday night?” I asked him, describing the plot of the movie we had made, and then asking if it sounded familiar.

      He nodded, and explained to me that a low-level administrator in the Chalet was, at this very moment, in tears. She had begged Hank for help. She had given the key to Discovery Hut to someone who reported that there were drunk people dressed like devils inside the hut smearing blood on Robert Scott’s artifacts from 1902.

      The explanation was simple.

      Our movie last Sunday had been called Cape Hades, about two fingee NSF Reps who see a sign-up sheet in the hall for a boondoggle to Cape Evans. They sign up, but when their guide arrives, it is not a certified trip leader from F-Stop, but the Devil, to whom they have unwittingly signed away their souls. The Devil takes them to Hell, played by local landmark Hut Point, and begins torturing them, but they scarcely notice because of their excitement about seeing penguins. NSF hears that two of its reps have been abducted by the Devil and sends a Quality Assurance Representative to rescue them. In the climactic scene the Devil pushes him off a ledge, and then NSF tricks the Devil into signing a contract to work as a GA. The movie ends with the Devil shoveling snow for science and humanity.

      For the torture scene, Jeannie had pricked her finger so we could shoot a formulaic close-up of blood dripping on my pure-white bunny boot.⁶ While our film crew gathered around this, three ANG crewmen came over to see what we were doing.

      We were not inside the hut with Scott’s antiques, but Emily was wearing a devil mask, and Jeannie was smearing her blood on my boot.

      “Of course we were drunk,” I said. “It was Sunday.”

      Hank laughed. Originally Robert Scott and his crew used Discovery Hut only as storage and to perform “amateur theatricals” that historian Roland Huntford notes “were an absolutely essential part of Victorian polar expeditions.” For performances the hut was called the Royal Terror Theater, and the men—many of whom had military backgrounds—brought down wigs, dresses, and makeup for use in the dramatic exercises. The hut’s use as a stage for amateur drama predates its use as a frozen historical shrine.

      Hank knew of my roiling passion for the historic sites, and that the rumor was out of hand. He assured me he would calm the skittish bureaucrat.

      Every year during the holidays, large plywood candy canes and twodimensional gifts are hung along the main roads around station. A paintedplywood Grinch on a utility pole has been authorized. The Galley is decorated with tinsel.

      A week before Christmas we received a holiday greeting from Dan Burnham, the CEO of Raytheon Company. He wanted us to understand how much Raytheon appreciated our “good work” and our “hard work” that year. He said that he and the Leadership Team would like to thank us for our many contributions to Raytheon during the year 2000, including an Integrated Product Development System and an Earned Value Management System, as well as advanced technology for missile defense, new tactical missiles like the AIM-9X, and the AESA radar for advanced fighters. He wished us the happiest of holiday seasons and a healthy New Year.

      A few days after the email, we all shuffled into the Galley for an All-Hands Meeting. Tom Yelvington, RPSC President and Program Manager, had come to town to scope out the operation at the ground level. He had a goatee and wore a baseball cap and jeans.

      I forgot that we had this All-Hands Meeting and otherwise I would have worn my full ECW gear to really look professional. Would that not have been appropriate? Does anybody wear that stuff? I see the red jackets, but other than that there’s some pretty eclectic combination of outfits I see here. I saw a guy that had his big red jacket on, then he had some kind of paisley vest over it. Is this a throwback to the hippie generation, or—what do you do at a rave? Is that what you wear to a rave? To get your groove on?

      Silence flooded the room.

      The former president of Raytheon, and my old boss, was fond of saying that he had two kinds of people working for him. He had the people like the people in this room, that he called “the earners,” and he had the people like me that he called “the burners.” So we are here to support the earners, and that is you guys.

      The juice dispenser hummed.

      Last year there was a party and there were commemorative glasses, and just the people at the party got them. The full-timers who were here didn’t get them. So they complained bitterly about that. So well heck… So what we’ll do is have an end-of-season party and at that party we can celebrate the success supporting science this season… Last year we polled people for our first party and they preferred to dress down so we had a party at this place called “The Stampede” and everybody dressed up in Western gear and some people who had too much to drink made fools of themselves on the mechanical bull.

      The snow melted from our boots.

      Did I say why I was here? I did say why I was here?

      Someone coughed.

      The company has a very altruistic goal… How many people hear about Safety routinely from their Supervisor? Every hand in here ought to be raised. Two hands ought to be raised. You’re going to hear about it until it makes you sick. And if those numbers come down and people quit being injured, then you’re not going to hear about it as often, and then you’ll feel a lot better.

      Tom Yelvington continued to talk, and we continued to listen, trying not to move too much, and hoping that he would say something intentionally funny so that we could laugh.

      “I can be a squeaky wheel,” he said. “I can go to the boss and say, ‘Hey, these people need to know, we need to know, I need to know. If I know I can let ’em know.’”

      He told us, “There’s very little that goes on in this company that we won’t be completely open about,” and that if there was something we wanted to know, then we should consult the management and “ask them, prod them, cajole them into letting you know what’s going on.” He joked that people at home thought he was walking off the face of the earth by coming down here, but that they didn’t realize how accessible phones are and that “it’s easier for them to call in than it is for us to get out.”

      The RPSC New Employee Assimilation Survey reads: “If you are a contract employee (not a full-time Raytheon employee), please disregard this survey.” In other words, we would receive neither commemorative mugs nor incoming calls in Antarctica. We were not supposed to be squeaky wheels. It was ominous to consider what would happen if we “prodded” or “cajoled” management for information. We were contract workers. We did not receive health benefits, matching 401(k) plans, signing bonuses, or holiday bonuses as Denver employees did. We knew what we had signed on for, and no one cared, but it appeared to us that this man running the show did not know the difference between a full-time and a contract worker, a difference plain to all.

      He opened the floor to questions (“Questions are important—I ask a lot of questions”) and eased the strained silence with chatter.

      “Now I’ve been part of the All-Hands Meeting! I like All-Hands Meetings. The term though—there’s got to be a better term—it brings back bad memories for me. My sweetheart in the tenth grade fired me. She ran me off. What