Authority (6 page)

Whitby was dressed in a blue blazer with a white shirt and an oddly unobtrusive burgundy
bow tie. He looked much younger than his age, with eternal brown hair and the kind
of tight, pinched face that allows a fifty-something to look a boyish thirty-two from
afar. His wrinkles had come in as tiny hairline fractures. Control had seen him in
the cafeteria at lunch next to a dozen dollar bills fanned out on the table beside
him for no good reason. Counting them? Making art? Designing a monetary biosphere?

Whitby had an uncomfortable laugh and bad breath and teeth that clearly needed some
work. Up close, Whitby also looked as if he hadn’t slept in years: a youth wizened
prematurely, all the moisture leached from his face, so that his watery blue eyes
seemed too large for his head. Beyond this, and his fanciful attitude toward money,
Whitby appeared competent enough, and while he no doubt had the ability to engage
in small talk, he lacked the inclination. This was as good a reason as any, as they
threaded their way through the cafeteria, for Control to question him.

“Did you know the members of the twelfth expedition before they left?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘know,’” Whitby said, clearly uncomfortable with the question.

“But you saw them around.”

“Yes.”

“The biologist?”

“Yes, I saw her.”

They cleared the cafeteria and its high ceiling and stepped into an atrium flooded
with fluorescent light. The crunchy chirp of pop music dripped, distant, out of some
office or another.

“What did you think of her? What were your impressions?”

Whitby concentrated hard, face rendered stern by the effort. “She was distant. Serious,
sir. She outworked all of the others. But she didn’t seem to be working at it, if
you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean, Whitby.”

“Well, it didn’t matter to her. The work didn’t matter. She was looking past it. She
was seeing something else.” Control got the sense that Whitby had subjected the biologist
to quite a bit of scrutiny.

“And the former director? Did you see the former director interact with the biologist?”

“Twice, maybe three times.”

“Did they get along?” Control didn’t know why he asked this question, but fishing
was fishing. Sometimes you just had to cast the line any place at all to start.

“No, sir. But, sir, neither of them got along with anyone.” He said this last bit
in a whisper, as if afraid of being overheard. Then said, as if to provide cover,
“No one but the director wanted that biologist on the twelfth expedition.”

“No one?” Control asked slyly.

“Most people.”

“Did that include the assistant director?”

Whitby gave him a troubled look. But his silence was enough.

The director had been embedded in the Southern Reach for a long time. The director
had cast a long shadow. Even gone, she had a kind of influence. Perhaps not entirely
with Whitby, not really. But Control could sense it anyway. He had already caught
himself having a strange thought: That the director looked out at him through the
assistant director’s eyes.

*   *   *

The elevators weren’t working and wouldn’t be fixed until an expert from the army
base dropped by in a few days, so they took the stairs. To get to the stairs, you
followed the curve of the U to a side door that opened onto a parallel corridor about
fifty feet long, the floor adorned with the same worn green carpet that lowered the
property value of the rest of the building. The stairs awaited them at the corridor’s
end, through wide swinging doors more appropriate for a slaughterhouse or emergency
room. Whitby, out of character, felt compelled to burst through those double doors
as if they were rock stars charging onto a stage—or, perhaps, to warn off whatever
lay on the other side—then stood there sheepishly holding one side open while Control
contemplated that first step.

“It’s through here,” Whitby said.

“I know,” Control said.

Beyond the doors, they were suddenly in a kind of free fall, the green carpet cut
off, the path become a concrete ramp down to a short landing with a staircase at the
end—which then plunged into shadows created by dull white halogens in the walls and
punctuated by blinking red emergency lights. All of it under a high ceiling that framed
what, in the murk, seemed more a human-made grotto or warehouse than the descent to
a basement. The staircase railing, under the shy lights, glittered with luminous rust
spots. The coolness in the air as they descended reminded him of a high-school field
trip to a natural history museum with an artificial cave system meant to mimic the
modern day, the highlight of which had been non sequiturs: mid-lunge reproductions
of a prehistoric giant sloth and giant armadillo, mega fauna that had taken a wrong
turn.

“How many people in the science division?” he asked when he’d acclimated.

“Twenty-five,” Whitby said. The correct answer was nineteen.

“How many did you have five years ago?”

“About the same, maybe a few more.” The correct answer was thirty-five.

“What’s the turnover like?”

Whitby shrugged. “We have some stalwarts who will always be here. But a lot of new
people come in, too, with their ideas, but they don’t really change anything.” His
tone implied that they either left quickly or came around … but came around to what?

Control let the silence elongate, so that their footsteps were the only sound. As
he’d thought, Whitby didn’t like silences. After a moment, Whitby said, “Sorry, sorry.
I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just sometimes frustrating when new people come
in and want to change things without knowing … our situation. You feel like if they
just read the manual first … if we had a manual, that is.”

Control mulled that, making a noncommittal sound. He felt as if he’d come in on the
middle of an argument Whitby had been having with other people. Had Whitby been a
new voice at some point? Was
he
the new Whitby, applied across the entire Southern Reach rather than just the science
division?

Whitby looked paler than before, almost sick. He was staring off into the middle distance
while his feet listlessly slapped the steps. With each step, he seemed more ill at
ease. He had stopped saying “sir.”

Some form of pity or sympathy came over Control; he didn’t know which. Perhaps a change
of subject would help Whitby.

“When was the last time you had a new sample from Area X?”

“About five or six years ago.” Whitby sounded more confident about this answer, if
no more robust, and he was right. It had been six years since anything new had come
to the Southern Reach from Area X. Except for the forever changed members of the eleventh
expedition. The doctors and scientists had exhaustively tested them and their clothing,
only to find … nothing. Nothing at all out of the ordinary. Just one anomaly: the
cancer.

No light reached the basement except for what the science division created for itself:
They had their own generator, filtration system, and food supply. Vestiges, no doubt,
of some long-ago imperative that boiled down to “in an emergency, save the scientists.”
Control found it hard to imagine those first days, when behind closed doors the government
had been in panic mode, and the people who worked in the Southern Reach believed that
whatever had come into the world along the forgotten coast might soon turn its attentions
inland. But the invasion hadn’t happened, and Control wondered if something in that
thwarting of expectation had started the Southern Reach’s decline.

“Do you like working here, Whitby?”

“Like? Yes. I must admit it’s often fascinating, and definitely challenging.” Whitby
was sweating now, beads breaking on his forehead.

It might indeed be fascinating, but Whitby had, according to the records, undergone
a sustained spasm of transfer requests about three years ago—one every month and then
every two months like an intermittent SOS, until it had trailed off to nothing, like
a flatlined EKG. Control approved of the initiative, if not the sense of desperation
embedded in the number of attempts. Whitby didn’t want to be stuck in a backwater
and just as clearly the director or someone hadn’t wanted him to leave.

Perhaps it was his utility-player versatility, because it was clear to Control that,
just like every department in the Southern Reach, the science division had been “stripped
for parts,” as his mother would have put it, by antiterrorism and Central. According
to the personnel records, there had once been one hundred and fifteen scientists in-house,
representing almost thirty disciplines and several subdepartments. Now there were
only sixty-five people in the whole haunted place. There had even been talk, Control
knew, about relocating, except that the building was too close to the border to be
used for anything else.

The same cheap, rotting scent came to him again just then, as if the janitor had unlimited
access to the entire building.

“Isn’t that cleaning smell a bit strong?”

“The smell?” Whitby’s head whipped around, eyes made huge by the circles around them.

“The rancid honey smell.”

“I don’t smell anything.”

Control frowned, more at Whitby’s vehemence than anything else. Well, of course. They
were used to it. Tiniest of his tasks, but he made a note to authorize changing cleaning
supplies to something organic.

When they curved down at an angle that seemed unnecessarily precipitous, into a spacious
preamble to the science division, the ceiling seeming higher than ever, Control was
surprised. A tall metal wall greeted them, and a small door within it with a sophisticated
security system blinking red.

Except the door was open.

“Is this door always open, Whitby?” he asked.

Whitby seemed to believe hazarding a guess might be perilous, and hesitated before
saying, “This used to be the back end of the facilities—they only added a door a year
or two ago.”

Which made Control wonder what this space had been used for back then. Dance hall?
Weddings and bar mitzvahs? Impromptu court-martials?

They both had to stoop to enter, only to be greeted by two space-program-quality air
locks, no doubt to protect against contamination. The portal doors had been cantilevered
open and from within glowed an intense white light that, for whatever reason, refused
to peek out beyond the unsecured security door.

Along the walls, at shoulder height, both rooms were lined with flaccid long black
gloves that hung in a way that Control could only think of as dejected. There was
a sense that it had been a long time since they had been brought to life by hands
and arms. It was a kind of mausoleum, entombing curiosity and due diligence.

“What are those for, Whitby? To creep out guests?”

“Oh, we haven’t used those for ages. I don’t know why they’ve left them in here.”

It didn’t really get much better after that.

003: PROCESSING

Later, back in his office, having left Whitby in his world, Control made one more
sweep for bugs. Then he prepared to call the Voice, who required reports at regular
intervals. He had been given a separate cell phone for this purpose, just to make
his satchel bulkier. The dozen times he’d talked to the Voice at Central prior to
coming to the Southern Reach, s/he could have been somewhere nearby. S/he could have
been observing him through hidden cameras the whole time. Or been a thousand miles
away, a remote operative used just to run one agent.

Control didn’t recall much beyond the raw information from those prior times, but
talking to the Voice made him nervous. He was sweating through his undershirt as he
punched the number, after having first checked the hallway and then locked the door.
Neither his mother nor the Voice had told him what might be expected from any report.
His mother had said that the Voice could remove him from his position without consulting
with her. He doubted that was true but had decided to believe it for now.

The Voice was, as ever, gruff and disguised by a filter. Disguised purely for security
or because Control might recognize it? “You’ll likely never know the identity of the
Voice,” his mother had said. “You need to put that question out of your head. Concentrate
on what’s in front of you. Do what you do best.”

But what was that? And how did it translate into the Voice thinking he had done a
good job? He already imagined the Voice as a megalodon or other leviathan, situated
in a think tank filled with salt water in some black-op basement so secret and labyrinthine
that no one now remembered its purpose even as they continued to reenact its rituals.
A sink tank, really. Or a stink tank. Control doubted the Voice or his mother would
find that worth a chuckle.

The Voice used Control’s real name, which confused him at first, as if he had sunk
so deeply into “Control” that this other name belonged to someone else. He couldn’t
stop tapping his left index finger against the blotter on his desk.

“Report,” the Voice said.

“In what way?” was Control’s immediate and admittedly inane response.

“Words would be nice,” the Voice said, sounding like gravel ground under boots.

Control launched into a summary of his experience so far, which started as just a
summary of the summary he had received on the state of things at the Southern Reach.

But somewhere in the middle he started to lose the thread or momentum—had he already
reported the bugs in his office?—and the Voice interrupted him. “Tell me about the
scientists. Tell me about the science division. You met with them today. What’s the
state of things there?”

Interesting. Did that mean the Voice had another pair of eyes inside the Southern
Reach?

So he told the Voice about the visit to the science division, although couching his
opinions in diplomatic language. If his mother had been debriefing him, Control would
have said the scientists were a mess, even for scientists. The head of the department,
Mike Cheney, was a short, burly, fifty-something white guy in a motorcycle jacket,
T-shirt, and jeans, who had close-cropped silver hair and a booming, jovial voice.
An accent that had originated in the north but at times relaxed into an adopted southern
drawl. The lines to the sides of his mouth conspired with plunging eyebrows to make
of his face an X, a fate he perpetually fought against by being the kind of person
who smiled all the time.