Cold War - Jerome Preisler [51]
Nimec emerged from the rest room. A small group of men and women looked askance at him as they walked past. Puzzled, he turned to where Megan was waiting for him down the hall.
He asked her about the plainly disagreeable glances once the two of them were seated in her office.
“I followed the rules,” he said, making the Scout’s-honor sign with his right hand. “Not that I can see how they’d know if I didn’t.”
She regarded him with amusement from across her desk.
“That bunch was mostly OAEs,” she said.
He pulled a face. “Mostly what?”
“Old Antarctic Explorers . . . longtimers on the ice,” she said. “Sorry. The lingo here gets contagious after a while.”
“And exactly how’s that supposed to have something to do with their attitude?”
“Isolation breeds a clannish mentality. The crew can be prickly toward outsiders. Or perceived outsiders. Their consumption of water is one of the things that raises spines.”
“Gracious,” Nimec said. “I hope they’re better hosts to those politicos who’re due for a visit.”
Megan Breen smiled her smile. It was always real. And always measured. Over the years Nimec had found that people either got the combination or they didn’t. The ones who did were usually charmed to helplessness. The ones who didn’t thought her calculating and manipulative. In the predominantly male world in which she functioned as Roger Gordian’s next-in-line, the split was close to even.
He got the smile completely.
“Our desalinization plant turns out fifteen thousand gallons of usable water on a good day,” she said. “That’s for cooking, cleaning, machine and vehicle use, hydroponics . . . the whole show. I know that may sound like a considerable amount, Pete. But it takes two gallons to wash your hands under a running tap, as opposed to one gallon washing in a filled basin. I could rattle off the comparative stats for high-versus-low-efficiency showers—”
“And toilets, I’m sure,” he said.
“One and a half gallons for ultra-low flush. Three to five for standard models.”
“You had that notice posted, didn’t you?”
“Worded it myself.”
“Then I won’t beat the issue of my lousy reception to death.”
They were both smiling now.
“Just wait till we get you a name patch,” she said. “When those malcontents find out who they offended, they’ll want to go scampering under a rug.”
Nimec sat a moment, glancing around the office. It was a small, well-ordered cubicle with bluish soundproof paneling and recessed overhead fluorescents. No windows. No decorative touches to enliven it. Two big maps covered nearly the entire wall to Megan’s right. One was a satellite image of the Antarctic continent. Shaped like a giant manta ray. The other showed the rugged topography of the Dry Valleys. There were three colored pins—red, yellow, blue—marking different points in the latter.
Nimec turned back to Megan. The last time he’d seen her, she had been the embodiment of corporate chic, letting the world know she was playing to win with a pricey designer suit and a smart wedge-cut hairstyle that just brushed the tops of her shoulders. Now her hair went tumbling loosely down over bib overalls and a maroon twill shirt, framing her face with thick auburn waves, highlighting her large emerald eyes like the deepest of sunsets over a wood of Irish pines. Nimec supposed she could dress herself in sackcloth and still be as lovely as ever.
He sat there a while, looking at her. He could think of a dozen matters they had to discuss, every one of them pressing, every one relating to the incidents that had brought him so far from home. But he was uncertain how to approach the subject he really wanted to talk about first.
“So,” he said. “How’ve you been?”
She shrugged, her hands on the desk.
“Cold,” she said. “And generally busy.”
“How about when you aren’t busy?”
“Cold and lonely.”
Nimec gave her a little nod. There had been photographs in her San Jose office. Vases with fresh flowers from