Page 17 of Under Story

The anomaly is how the scientists refer to the Arc. Laurel’s attention narrows to a point. She places a biscotti on each saucer with tongs, taking care to keep her hand steady.

“And they say this is the best coffee on station.” The second man pushes his mug toward Laurel with distaste. “Add a shot of amaretto, would you?”

“Of course.”

Laurel hurries to the bar. Before she can redeliver the drink, a couple of carpenters with a cribbage board ask for a pot of decaf. Coffee seems to trickle through the filter more slowly than usual. Finally she delivers the decaf to the carpenters, winds her way around a rowdy group of Scrabble players, and approaches the scientists again.

“Look,” the second man is saying. “IceCube is the best detector on the continent. And we didn’t find a thing.”

“But that’s the point, isn’t it?” says the younger man. “Our detector is embedded in the ice; we wouldn’t catch an upward shower of energy, a neutrino stream originating from the surface of the earth—”

Suddenly, Laurel is in Madison, Eli tracing a line on her arm. Neutrino, he says. Little neutral one. Also known as ghost particles. They can pass through rock, ice, whole planets without stopping. Trillions stream through our bodies every second, like light through a window. Famously difficult to catch, like any ghost, because they almost never interact with matter. But when they do, they produce something we can measure: Heat. Sound. Sparks. They’re born when the nuclei in separate atoms combine, or split apart.

“—and neither would ANITA, if they knew how to do their math. All right,” says the second man, to Laurel.

Ushered forward, she deposits the coffee at his elbow.

The man sips. “Fine.”

“Are you sure?” asks Laurel, eager for the chance to hear more.

“Positive,” he says, taking stock of her for the first time, and lowering his voice afterward.

Laurel suspects that ANITA refers to the next wave of experimenters, the particle physicists Jules described. If word of their findings has reached other research teams on base, a presentation can’t be far behind. Sure enough, when she checks the bulletin board, a new notice is tacked next to the Times article: ANITA—the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna—will report their results on Sunday night.

—

The morning of the presentation brings Laurel’s first Antarctic storm. On the way to breakfast, she stops by the satellite feed. An iceberg the size of San Francisco is spinning like a clock.

In the galley, she joins Louis, Nita, and Charlie.

“Fifty-mile-per-hour winds,” Louis says. “I think we’ll be able to lean.”

Nita hesitates. “We’ll get in trouble.”

In Condition 1 weather—less than one hundred feet of visibility—work is canceled, and residents are only permitted to leave their dormitories for meals. Laurel can barely see the firefighters planting signposts outside.

Louis is watching the firefighters, too. “They’re still a ways off. If we go now, they won’t see us.”

They down their coffees, burrow into their coats. Louis leads them out of an emergency exit, his mittened hand in Laurel’s gloved one. The force of the air is astonishing. Laurel and Charlie cower.

“Face downwind!” Louis shouts. “Lie back! Nita, show them how!”

Nita tips, as in a trust fall, her arms extended toward the sky. Laurel gasps: the wind holds her up. With her feet obscured by blowing snow and her dark hair streaming forward, she seems to be levitating.

—

By seven thirty that night, the galley seems to contain almost everyone on station. The stewards rush to set up a table for the speakers, make as much coffee as they do for breakfast, and let down the heavy blinds: outside, it’s light enough to be morning. The IceCube scientists sit at a front table with their arms crossed. Nita and Sam have saved a row of chairs in the back. When Laurel, Louis, and Charlie arrive, still in their uniforms, Sam hands each of them a hot chocolate.

Two physicists—a man who looks to be in his fifties and a woman perhaps ten years younger—are toying with a projector at the front of the room. They seem anxious as they open PowerPoint and dim the overhead lights. When the audience falls silent, the man selects the first slide, which reads: Anomalous neutrino signal detected from Antarctic ice.

“As you’ve all been aware,” he says, “a highly unusual visual phenomenon was first identified eleven months ago, in January of 2016, fifteen miles north of the station.”

The woman clicks the remote, and two images of the Arc fill the screen. On the left, the pink version appears against a background of apricot light. On the right: the Arc at night, a ghostly bluish-green.

“An initial wave of investigation began in February and concluded in July. That team arrived with a hypothesis: that the anomaly resulted from the interaction between sunlight and the ice shelf. But all atmospheric and solar hypotheses failed to explain why it persisted during winter. If it were a refractive phenomenon, it should have disappeared with the sun,” she says. “We deployed the ANITA instrument to assess the anomaly’s connection to neutrino activity.”

The next slide shows the Standard Model of elementary particles.