Surviving Antarctica (11 page)

Except for tonight’s outburst, Robert had always been patient.

Andrew sighed.

Andrew’s sigh sounded sad. Steve looked over his shoulder to check on Chad’s whereabouts. Chad was in the far corner of the room, keyboarding.

“It’s okay,” Steve whispered to Andrew’s
screen. “The two bottles looked a lot alike.”

Robert was still sorting gear.

“He’s trying as hard as he can, man,” Steve said softly to Robert’s screen.

Steve heard footsteps and looked up to see Chad join him. Steve had lain awake today wondering about the conversation between Chad and Jacob that he had overhead. There was something about the dim lights and strange hours of the night shift that made him feel as if he could have imagined the whole thing.

Chad turned up the volume.

On the screen, Steve heard a slap as a wave crashed against the bow of the compucraft. The wind gusted, but not loudly enough to drown out the sound of a human sigh. He and Chad had become part of Andrew’s private world.

“He’s the one,” Chad said.

“What are you talking about?” Steve said.

“The outcast,” Chad said. “There’s always one.”

“I guess you’re right,” Steve said, thinking about the sad Egyptian in the pyramid show and the trigger-happy Texan in the Alamo show.

“If we decide to do an intervention,” Chad said carefully, “it’s safest to talk to the outcast.”

Steve was puzzled. “An intervention?”

“You thought the time was past, didn’t you?” Chad said.

“What time?” Steve asked. “I don’t understand.”

“The time when one person can make a difference.”

Steve didn’t answer. He had spent his life hoping that it wasn’t.

“Remember that I told you we played games here?” Chad smiled.

“Yeah.”

“Well, sometimes we play a game called intervention.”

“You actually talk to the contestants?” Steve said, hardly able to believe his ears.

“Yes, but we have to be very careful.”

Steve squirmed uncomfortably. Why was Chad using the word
we?

“First we choose the contestant carefully. He needs to be someone who would never tell anybody else about the Voice that he hears. Or he needs to be someone who wouldn’t be believed if he did.”

Chad sounded as though he had thought this through, but Steve had a basic question. “How can the contestants hear the production room through the digicamera implants in their eyes?”

“The implants are complete cameras, with audio and video recording capabilities and are audio receivers as well. With these new satellite long-range mikes, we can talk to the contestants thousands of miles away as if they were in the room with us.”

But the long-range mikes didn’t make sense, Steve thought. “Why would the Secretary build digicameras that some rogue DOE employee could use to talk to the contestants?”

“Soon the Secretary plans to use the long-range mikes to dramatically change
Survivor.
She’ll put contestants in desperate situations—say, facing a wild animal in gladiatorial combat—and let them talk to their loved ones in the studio. She thinks the long-range mikes haven’t been activated. But”—Chad chuckled—“Raymond Chiles is as good an engineer as he is a card player.”

Steve tried to imagine how the long-range mikes worked. “It’s got to feel weird to hear a voice coming from your eye.”

“As I understand it, if the long-range mike is used, the auditory receiver in the implant sends electronic signals to the brain. Otherwise the auditory receiver just functions as a recorder that transmits sound to the production studio. You probably saw the Alamo MVP on television
after the series ended. When the reporters asked him how he escaped the Mexican bullets, he said, ‘I heard a voice.’” Chad shrugged. “But everyone dismissed it as a religious experience.”

“So you guys talked to the survivor on the Alamo series?” Steve was shocked.

“That’s my next point. We select only one person in our crew to be the Voice.”

“Why?”

Chad met his gaze. “If we’re caught, that person takes the fall for the whole group. Are you interested?”

“Me?” Steve looked away. This sounded dangerous. He must not have understood. Chad couldn’t be asking him to be the Voice, could he? Steve was new to the night shift. He had no family. No one to take care of him if he lost his job. He decided to change the subject. “What did you talk to the Alamo survivor about?”

“We never told him who we were, but we relayed to him where the Mexican line was weak.”

“So that’s how he cut through. I had wondered. How did you choose the Alamo survivor?”

“He seemed like the strong, silent type who would be so embarrassed by hearing voices that
he would never mention them. Basically we were right.”

“If the Voice is caught?” Steve answered his own question.
“Court TV
for sure.”

“Or worse,” Chad said.

Steve shuddered. What could be worse than
Court TV
?
Court TV
was the highest-rated show after
Historical Survivor
. After a quick trial, the punishment phase was carried out on television. Viewers voted. Common punishments were near drownings, beatings, occasionally even crucifixions. When critics objected to the inhumanity of the punishment, they were reminded that criminals were all terrorists, and as such had no rights. No one in America wanted to be a defendant on
Court TV
.

“Did you understand my question?” Chad said.

“Not really,” Steve replied. His voice trembled.

“I asked you to be the Voice.”

“But that sounds dangerous,” Steve protested.

“You just need to be careful. I was the Voice for
Alamo Historical Survivor
,” Chad said proudly. He looked Steve in the eye. “Jacob pointed out that you seem attached to these kids. When bad things happen to the contestants, sometimes
it’s easier on the Voice. He feels like he’s doing what he can to help. If you want, you could have this series.”

Steve was silent. He had stared at the screen so long that the waves were starting to make him feel seasick, but he didn’t look away.

Chad looked at his watch. “Well, you don’t have to decide tonight.”

Steve felt relieved. The topic made him uncomfortable. He wanted to help these kids, but not enough to risk his own future.

“Go ahead and cut Andrew from the footage. The Secretary won’t be interested in twenty minutes of a kid standing at the rail.”

Steve’s fingers started flying over the computer keys, but his thoughts were stuck on their strange conversation.

“Andrew, you don’t even have a coat on.” Grace walked up to him.

Grace had on a parka and matching hat. Her face shone with good health, and when she smiled at Andrew, her dark eyes sparkled. Yet from the way she held herself, Steve could tell she didn’t know that she was pretty.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“No.”

“It’s freezing out here.” Grace shivered.
Steve looked at Grace’s screen and saw Andrew hatless, coatless, leaning against the rail, his face to the wind.

“Is something wrong?”

Andrew shook his head.

“Why don’t you go to bed?”

“I will,” Andrew said.

Grace turned to go below, but Andrew lingered on deck for a moment. The spray from a wave splashed his face, and he didn’t bother to dry it.

“Time to view today’s episode,” Chad said. He turned to rouse the crew in the basement.

Before Chad had a chance to order Steve to the screening room, Steve spoke up. “May I stay and watch the cameras until the kids go to bed?” he asked hopefully.

“No, you stayed last night. I’ll stay tonight,” Chad said.

Disappointed, Steve turned away from the screens.

“Let’s go!” Chad called down to the basement.

The rest of the crew began clambering up the stairs.

Steve followed Jacob, John Matthews, Raymond Chiles, and the others down the dark
hallway to the screening room. When he entered, the Secretary had already appeared on the screen. She began every episode by putting her hand on a tall stack of Bibles.

“We abide by the rules in this program,” she said. “There is no outside intervention. You will see real people here make decisions that will cause them to live or die. Lean back in your armchairs and enjoy yourselves. You are watching the best programming in the world.”

Steve settled in to watch the kids’ third day on the ship.

“Hello,” someone said to him.

When Steve turned to see who had spoken, he saw Jacob. Oddly enough, the cleaning woman, Pearl, was sitting next to him. Her eyes drooped as if she were half asleep. Steve realized that he had never seen her before without a broom.

“Did Chad offer you the Voice?” Jacob said.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “He talked to me about it.”

“I intervened seven times in the Egyptian series.”

Steve needed to ask the question that had been gnawing at him. “Do you think that you made a difference?”

“I saved a woman’s life. No question about that. Just to have someone who cares, even a
Voice, means so much to the contestants.”

“I can understand that,” Steve said. On many lonely occasions in his shack, he would have loved to have had a Voice to talk to.

“Of course, Pearl started it all,” Jacob added.

Steve stared at the old woman. A bubble of spit rested on her lip. It was hard to imagine her doing anything but sweeping and sitting. Jacob must have guessed Steve’s disbelief, because he asked, “You haven’t heard Pearl’s story?”

Steve shook his head.

“She was a camerawoman on one of the early
Historical Survivor
shows, the one about World War I. She was filming a battle and didn’t notice a soldier crawling toward her. He had been badly injured and was dragging one leg. He begged her for water.

“Pearl stopped filming, bent over, and gave the dying man a sip from her canteen. The problem is a camera picked up her act of kindness, and the Secretary saw it.”

Steve had heard this story before—everybody at the Department seemed to know it. But no one had told him the camerawoman’s name.

“Pearl didn’t make it home that night. She got beaten up, then locked up, and they tried to break her spirit by starving her for a while.”

“How do we know that the Secretary was responsible?”

“I didn’t work here then, but Chad said that the Secretary bragged that bad things would happen to anyone who intervened.”

Steve looked over at the old woman.

“Chad’s taken care of Pearl ever since,” Jacob explained.

“I see,” Steve said. So that’s what Chad had meant when he’d hinted at a fate worse than
Court TV
.

“She’s only twenty-nine.”

Steve stared at Pearl. Although he didn’t have a view of her face, he noticed for the first time that her skin wasn’t wrinkled. It was just her gray hair and hunched posture that made her seem old. To be a young person living inside an old person’s body must be torture.

The Secretary was a truly horrible person. Steve looked up at the screen. She was talking again.

“On board the ship today, we had quite a bit of excitement,” the Secretary was saying. “Billy was bitten by a ferocious dog, but wait and see”—she put her finger to her lips—“I don’t want to give anything else away.”

In the production room, only fifty feet down
the hall, Steve could be watching the kids in real time. He fidgeted in his seat. He was too preoccupied to pay attention to the show.

Steve closed his eyes. When he really concentrated, he could hear Pearl breathing. Her raspy breaths sounded like her straw broom raking the floor. He didn’t even know these kids. But if Steve got caught helping them, he could turn into an old person, like the woman sitting two seats away from him.

“Did you see the ratings for this episode?” Jacob asked him.

Steve looked up and caught the end of a commercial for instant palm trees. “No.”

“Seventy-eight percent,” Jacob said. “Understand why she likes a little blood?”

“Yeah,” Steve said.

“Have you decided?” Jacob’s voice was low.

“Why me?” Steve whispered. “Why not one of the other guys?”

Jacob sighed. “It’s hard to keep watching these shows year after year. If you want to know the truth, it’s only you, me, and Chad who still care.”

“So that’s why the others spend so much time in the basement?”

“Yes.”

“Do I need to decide today?”

“Soon,” Jacob said. “Remember, they’re landing tomorrow.” He turned away.

Steve closed his eyes again and found Pearl on the screen of his eyelids. He quickly opened them.

Another Fair Society commercial was playing on the big screen.

To take his mind off Pearl, Steve watched the dumb commercial. He’d watch anything to try to forget about Pearl.

FROM WHAT STEVE
had seen since he’d arrived at work, day five had been an uneventful blur of activity.

Grace had finally gotten the dogs attached to the dogsled. But they had moved two steps and the traces had knotted.

It had taken Andrew
only
an hour to get all eight snowshoes on the ponies.

As if he were a pro at arctic travel, Robert had finished stowing the gear in bags.

Polly had spent the time in her cabin, fitfully reading and staring out her porthole.

Billy had carefully packed the maps.

In just an hour or so, the kids would be in
bed, and Steve would have to begin editing. Steve dreaded this time of night, when the kids’ day was ending. He liked working with the live footage best, as he felt closer to the kids.

The kids sat around the mess table, eating a late-night snack of chips and juice.

“We should be landing tonight,” Robert said. “Anybody have any comments or questions?”

Nobody said anything.

“How’s your hand, Billy?” Robert said.

“It hurts,” Billy lied.

“The dogs’ food is moldy,” Grace said.

“We need to shoot the dogs,” Billy said.

“Please, don’t let’s start that again,” Polly said sharply. “We haven’t even seen the motor sledges.”

“Maybe we can shoot a seal for the dogs to eat,” Robert said. A friend had told him that there were seals in Antarctica. He hated to admit it to himself, but that was about all he knew about the wildlife there. “Why don’t you brief us on ice and snow?” he asked Billy.