The Pole of Inaccessibility

***

  The Lieutenant waited for the grad students to go out of the hut to get their gear together for the day before he sat down at the table where Susan Engen was reviewing notations on a topographical map. She looked up over the rim of her glasses at him, allowing an almost imperceptible smile to slip across her lips for an instant.

  “May I?” he asked after he was already seated.

  “Sure.”

  She continued to look at her map while he thought about what he was going to say. She knew he was uncomfortable and was enjoying his discomfort.

  “Dr. Engen,” he began, before stopping.

  “Susan works just fine,” she said. He nodded vehemently, as if he had just absorbed a most pertinent fact.

  “Susan, right,” he began again. “Susan,” he began a third time.

  At his third awkward attempt, she giggled. “Just spit it out, okay?”

  “Right,” he agreed. “Well, what I’m here to do, you know all about that, of course.”

  “I do,” she told him, with only a small degree of disapproval, which he had to consider as nothing less than encouragement.

  “You of all people no doubt recognize that the chances of finding anything in this area are beyond remote.” She nodded. “The chances will be far greater on the coast and on the shelf,” he explained.

  She cleared her throat as a way of informing him that if he was doing what she thought he was, he was going about it in the wrong way - a message that was not altogether lost on him.

  “Be that as it may,” he said hurriedly, “and as we will be here for a little while longer, I was wondering if I could join you while you worked. Maybe help a little, in the meanwhile.”

  “Wouldn’t that be something like going over to the enemy?” she asked him, but in a friendly tone of voice.

  “You aren’t the enemy, Susan,” he told her warmly.

  “No,” she said quietly, looking into his eyes. “You are.”

  He turned his eyes away from her and looking down at the table, nodded.

  “But I would love to have you with us and could really use the help.” He looked up again, brightly. “Just leave the bulldozers behind, okay?” she said.

  “Sure thing.”

  It actually did help, she thought. Having Lieutenant Richards handling the theodolite freed her up to write her notes, which made things a lot easier. Working with tools, then changing to paper and pencil at those temperatures, made what would otherwise seem like simple tasks very difficult. Her shoulder was getting better, but it still slowed her down. He was clearly expert enough with the instrument that she could trust him to take accurate angles on the correct points that she identified. She pointed to a spot on a ridge that had a black line running through it.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “Igneous intrusive,” she said of the rock formation. “The shearing effect of the uplift of this fault has exposed it in relief. It’s like slicing off a chunk of wafer cake. You see each of the layers clearly, where once they were at consistent levels.”

  He nodded. “Good spot for this.”

  She looked up from her notes and smiled. “You think so?”

  He remembered where they were, what they were there for, and the incredible expense and trouble it took to get there.

  “Oh.”

  She smiled again. “It is as good as any place I have ever been,” she agreed. “Including places down here that I’ve heard of, but not seen.”

  “And beautiful, too,” he added.

  “Yes. Too bad that there are some who would like to redecorate it,” she noted.

  He sighed under the thick scarf that he was wearing. There was no getting around it; if he was going to be spending time with Susan Engen, he would just have to take the bull by the horns and have it out.

  “Susan, you know I don’t favor drilling here. At least I would prefer not to,” he said.

  “I know that,” she conceded. “The difference is that you are willing to sacrifice it all for something, a position that could be considered noble except for the fact that it is predicated in naivety. Nothing noble will come of it. Just another place ruined so someone can make some money.”

  “I can argue against that, but what about what you believe? You want to leap directly from what has always been the way to some form of futuristic utopia,” he said. “At least I am offering a solution that makes sense, and is possible.”

  “Theoretically possible,” she corrected him. “The problem with your theory is that it involves getting the people who have the most to gain to go along, and not take advantage. The fact is that people will only change when they have to, either by law, or economics, or force. In the end, it will be less painful for people to make changes rapidly and get it over with.”

  “I know that how we live is going to change - it has to someday. But the potential end results are vastly different.” He tried to sound reasonable and not upset the delicate balance he had achieved. “I suggest a long-term plan that will enhance the quality of life and maintain a stable economy. Your view of the world sounds like you would place severe limits on people’s quality of life and stifle the economy.”

  “A lifestyle based on consumption, you mean.” She, in turn, tried to sound professorial. “We’ve developed a lifestyle that equates quality with quantity consumed. Oil isn’t the only issue. It’s everything. Until we can establish a lifestyle that is consumption neutral, that doesn’t deplete more than we as a whole can regenerate, the problem doesn’t go away.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, earnestly trying to make the point without emotion coming into play. “We take our problems one at a time. When we put our collective will to solving any problem, we always get the job done. Why not take them one at a time?”

  “Because that is the point of our having one ecology,” she said, glad to finally get to the heart of the matter. “This biosphere, in which we live, is a single organism. You can’t just chop off the head one day and then deal with all the problems created by that as you get around to them. Look at your own work with NASA. Say you do establish a station on the moon. You can only have so much resources, can transport so much food, make so much water. Then you get a few people up there who devour three times the amount of food you have budgeted and take half-hour showers when you can only make enough water for a two-minute Navy shower. The rest of the station sees their share of the station’s resources being decimated. Don’t they have the right to demand that the abusers modify their behavior?”

  “That is a different situation.”

  “How?” she demanded to know.

  “Because it is like the military,” he explained. “There are different rules than in civilian life. Fewer individual rights.”

  “That is because an individual who acts outside of a defined mode of behavior has a negative impact on the whole, right?” She had led the discussion many times in her classes. She knew how it went. “Otherwise, who cares?”

  “So you would redefine what constitutes allowable behavior?” he asked stiffly.

  “We do that every day in a free society. ‘Free’ doesn’t mean life is a ‘free for all.’ The very nature of self-governance dictates that government limits what individuals are free to do when one person’s actions impede upon another’s.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head adamantly. “That’s the easy answer, sure. Government can do all kinds of benevolent things for us, can’t it? Just give us the power, they say. You’ll see. Everything will be so much better. But I don’t want to live in that world. Sorry.”

  “You’re being paranoid now,” she said dismissively.

  “And you are the one who is naïve,” he retorted.

  She laughed.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. It seems funny that you are the one who is arguing against giving the government more power. That’s my line. I thought that military people loved government authority.”

  He shook his head negatively. “No. We
go into the military and surrender our rights for one reason only: to defend yours.”

  “Well, I guess we are just going to have to agree to disagree,” she said, thoughtfully.

  “Not true,” he said. “We are in complete agreement on the problem. We just haven’t come to a consensus on the solution.”

  She nodded her head. “I can live with that.”

  As the day was winding down and the researchers who had been working on the mountain began to filter back toward the camp, Susan Engen and Lieutenant Richards lingered. Over the past hours, he had helped her to move the theodolite several times, and when he did, their bulky parkas made contact unexpectedly, surprising each of them, as they were not regularly accustomed to the extra padding that removed the buffer that would normally be there. When it first happened, they each quickly and awkwardly apologized to the other. The second time, they laughed and whispered meaningless comments, like “Oops.” By the third time, they were anticipating the contact and were slow to disengage. Now that the students had gone, they shed all pretense and rubbed mittens over puffy nylon sleeves that made the whirring sound of nylon on nylon.

  After another awkward interval, their heads bent towards each other and their goggles knocked together, eliciting nervous giggles all the way around. Susan gave up on physical intimacy for the moment and pushed him back to arms length.

  “This is going to be complicated,” she said, referring to the nature of their relationship, not the technical aspects of getting around the volumes of clothing.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” he said, with an earnestness with which he appealed to her to believe that what he said could be true. “Why should it be?”

  “A million reasons,” she started to explain. “To be honest, most of them are professional. But there are personal reasons, too. I wasn’t looking for this. Hell, I was doing everything I could to avoid something like this. And then there’s you, of all people.”

  He seemed to accept the “you of all people” comment as inevitable. He was not the sort of man who would normally allow any allusion to stand that would infer that he was in any way inferior. But when he was with Susan, he acknowledged and surrendered to her sensibilities regarding the environment and his supposed role in its demise. It was his “original sin” in their new relationship, and for which he was uncharacteristically willing to atone.

  “And then there’s me,” he repeated. “What are you going to do about that?”

  “You’ll see,” she said, reaching up with her head tilted to one side and avoiding another collision of the goggles. “I know just what to do about that.”