Stories: All-New Tales

After he read End Game and Waiting for Godot at the Chicago Public Library one pleasantly frigid afternoon near the end of December 1959, he wrote a long, elusive fan letter to Samuel Beckett in Paris, describing the two plays as “perhaps the most profound works of literature since Shakespeare.” Discovering them, he gushed, had “made this Christmas one of my merriest ever.” In response he received a curt, generic form letter, mimeographed, which struck him as almost funny. Since the stranding, he has not been an outwardly jovial man, but he’s never lost his sense of humor. By nature and by training, he takes the long view.

And so he was more intrigued than anxious when the little light on the remote beacon had, for the first time ever, started flashing. He wasn’t sure exactly when the flashing began, because he kept the device hidden at the back of a high shelf in his bedroom closet. He’d been checking it only once every month or so, grudgingly, feeling like a chump each time he lifted it down, pushed the test button, for the ten thousandth time heard the beep confirming that it worked and the connection was secure—Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking! Nothing Outlasts the Energizer Bunny!—and then, after waiting ten seconds for the flashing signal that never came, put the thing back up on the shelf.

Until the remarkable evening of September 16, 2007, when he first saw the throb of purple light and shouted so loudly that his young downstairs neighbor called up to see if he was all right. According to the contingency-plan instructions, the light on his box could flash in one or more of nine different colors, each color corresponding to a particular alert condition. Purple means that sensors on the exterior of the station, 2,400 miles away, are now exposed to sunlight.

When the station was set up all those years ago, covered by dozens of feet of ice even at the height of summer, its secrecy seemed guaranteed. Nobody else, not Peary or Amundsen or Byrd or free-ranging Inuits, had traveled so far north. But for the last several decades, more of the Arctic ice had been melting each summer—and in 2007 the summer melt radically spiked, turning a third of the polar ice cap into open sea. The top of the station, a 150-foot oval of tubing and tanks suspended just beneath the water’s surface, must be visible. And now there are permanent research stations scattered all over the high Arctic, and surveillance satellites shooting high-resolution pictures of every rod and furlong of the no-longer-trackless wastes.

What was taking them so long to find it? Seasonal ice may still grow back to hide the base in winter, but for each of the last three summers he has waited for the news bulletins (HIGH-TECH “ATLANTIS” FOUND NEAR NORTHPOLE) and the resulting global hysteria. He does worry that the discovery will discombobulate people en masse—the “unforeseeable cultural and ontological impacts,” as headquarters’ boilerplate put it. But he also has a hopeful hunch that a critical, controlling fraction of humanity had matured, and would, after some initial breathlessness, learn to accommodate the new facts.

Selfishly, he’s also eager to see pictures of the station again after all this time, to compare his hazy memories with fresh digital images. And although it felt vaguely insubordinate (to whom?), or even traitorous (to what?), he was excited by the prospect of everyone on earth learning all at once the truth that he alone had known for so long.

AS HER FLIGHT FROM Oslo approaches O’Hare, Nancy Zuckerman thinks once again of the cliché uttered sooner or later by everyone who spends time in Svalbard, including herself: This is what it must be like to live on another planet. NASA actually runs a research station on the other side of the North Pole, in the Canadian Arctic, where they simulate the conditions of a Martian space colony.

She had always liked spending time outdoors, and when she was seven could stick a live worm on a fishing hook and set up a tent herself. But it was the second Indiana Jones sequel, which came out the summer she turned eight, that decided her on becoming an explorer when she grew up. In earlier generations, adults would have smiled at a little girl who said she wanted to be an explorer. But at the turn of the twenty-first century in Boulder, Colorado, adults smiled and patronized little Nancy Zuckerman not because of her gender but because her cute dream job no longer existed.