The Alien Baby in Antarctica

(More alien baby in Antarctica, general alien baby here...and Henry Kaiser's penguin tricked out with critter cam and decomposing amphipod-eaten seal head, for good measure.)A FEW NOTES UPON FINDING A GREEN ALIEN BABY FIGURINE IN A SPECIMEN TRAP AT LONGITUDE ___, LATITUDE ___, ANTARCTICADr. Larry Gilchrist, Ph.D.To be honest, my first thought as research leader was: I’m not prepared for this. Then the relief poured over me as Dave and Sandra pulled the object free of the trap and I understood it was plastic. It could not have been more plastic had “Made in China” been tattooed on its posterior. Still, something about its sightless eyes mocked me. I demanded Dave and Sandra explain its presence in the trap. For several weeks, I had begun to believe they doubted my abilities as research leader, a well-deserved promotion due to my twenty-two years of seniority. I was almost certain Dave resented it—and if Dave, then Sandra.“How did it get in there?” I asked. The trap had been empty when I had sent it down through the hole in the ice, down into that endless dark blue penetrating the seamless white.Dave shrugged, denied culpability. Sandra merely raised her eyebrows. I could feel the heat of their disdain, but decided to ignore it. The walls of our “research station”—shack, hovel, tin-plated survival square, whatever you wish to call it—were more than usually claustrophobic.“Where could it have come from?”Unanswered, thwarted, my question hung in the air like our breath on those rare occasions now when we would venture outside to check the batteries on the snow mobile or to gauge the direction and strength of the Antarctic wind that can scorch the ears with its incessant moaning.Where could it have come from? We manned Research Outpost #25, thirty miles from the main McMurdo Station base, and except for seals and single-celled plant organisms, a few fish burbling in deep thought beneath us, there were no other suspects.“Maybe the last research team left it behind,” Sandra suggested, too sensibly.I thought I saw Dave smirk. I resented the insinuation that I hadn’t checked the trap carefully the day before.Sandra could not meet my gaze and began to check the trap thoroughly for rips and tears, preparing to send it back into the lower depths.The rest of the day was spent in a perfunctory silence and in taking minute measurements from the adjacent ice fields.Dave’s instruments might as well have been of alien construction; I was pure biologist, he technophile, dependent on a wide range of tools for his job. I needed merely the evidence of my eyes and a certain instinctual cunning to intuit and improvise my profession.And yet, I must admit, all day, well into false dusk, I could not shake the feeling of being watched. I would stare over at the plastic figurine and wonder if it analyzed me much as I analyzed seal shit or the mating call of the male royal penguin.I am by nature a solitary person, and even when sharing an apartment with my girl friend a few years ago (a micro-biologist; for some reason, she didn’t like it when I told people “yes—she’s a tiny little person”), before we broke up (an argument about plant cells), I could not accustom myself to the presence of another human being. I had come to Antarctica to get away from people while still pursuing my rather ambitious career goals (startling discovery; Swedish honors). Alas, I had been assigned by a sadistic bureaucrat to be confined to a cramped space with individuals I was not fond of, all of us staring at a hole in the ice for the better part of four months. It was not everything I had thought it would be. . .And now this. The alien baby made me uncomfortable, as if it had unbalanced the, dare I say, human equation. It took up space for all of its small size: the radiant green of its plasticized skin somehow amplified its presence. Its guileless smile, that idiot cleft of a grin, said it all.Welcome to the end of your career, it said. Congratulations—you’re going nowhere, fast.The next day, the situation worsened. The trap did not come back up. I stared at the broken metallic rope in my be-gloved hand in shock.Again, Dave and Sandra were of little help.“It could have frayed against the ice,” Dave suggested.“A narwhal or elephant seal might have been able to damage it,” Sandra said.I looked at them both as I would a couple of apes shitting from the upper branches of a baobab tree, circa 30,000 yearsago.“The ice didn’t fray it,” I said. “An elephant seal didn’t cut it with its teeth. One of you sabotaged it.”David tried to protest.“Now, Larry, that’s really not fair—”“Fair?!” I shouted, doing a good impression of a killer whale erupting from deep water. “Fair? There are only the three of us here. Are you seriously suggesting one of us didn’t do this?!”My subsequent display of rage might have gone on for some hours if not for the sudden emergence of a small seal from the hole in the middle of our sanctuary. It popped its head up and stared inquisitively, if a little blankly, at me. Then returned whence it came.When it was gone, Sandra said, “Why don’t you test the alien baby? Maybe it cut the rope. Why not accuse it, while you’re at it.”Dave and Sandra exchanged knowing looks. I’m afraid I turned bright red, from the top of my balding head to my neck. It was clear that they knew my past record.How, I do not know, for it had been stricken as part of the settlement.I retreated to the far corner of our pathetic square, too impersonal to be called a house or home, and brooded . . . I began to believe, in those moments, that they coveted the alien baby.That there might be some quality to it that I had missed. I picked it up. I spent more than an hour examining it, Dave and Sandra looking on with (feigned, I’m sure) alarm. It bothered me that Dave—and now Sandra—had immediately referred to it as “the alien baby.” This naming made me suspicious. Yes, it was green. Yes, it was small in stature. Yes, it did not have a terrestrial physiology—nothing on Earth had features so innocent, legs and arms so stubby. But this did not immediately mean it was an “alien baby.” To make such an assertion blended stupidity with an uncanny previous knowledge.I could not solve the riddle, but I did come to a more heightened awareness of the truth that occurs when people live close together with insufficient chances for attending to hygiene. The mess of cans in the sink. The ever-present fish smell. The funk of human sweat. It occurred to me again that everything I had sought to leave behind had followed me, as surely as if itwere a stray dog following a stranger home.For the next two days, I did not move. I sat where I was and I glowered, thinking. They did not know how to combat this sudden tactic on my part. They joked. They cajoled. They threatened. They appealed to my better nature, my worse nature. Dave said, “Maybe the alien baby is a native Antarctic life form.” Sandra said, “Surely, Larry—Dr. Gilchrist—we ought to be continuing with our mission.”Our mission. It had been hanging by a rope, a veritable thread. The thread had snapped. There was no trap, only what had been brought back by the trap. Only our short-wave radio, fizzing and crackling and fizzing some more. It told us of weather and of dim human voices ghosting out of the darkness. And it told us no more.Then I had the epiphany.On the morning of the third day, I told them to leave. They were startled, astonished even. This final move had caught them unawares. I could smell the stench of indecision on them.“But, Larry, I mean. I’m not sure you have the authority . . . ”I waved the rusty edge of an opened can of beans at them.“This is my authority, Dave. This,” and lunged at him a little, just to see if he’d draw back, which he did. “And this is my hole,” I said, pointing to the hole in the ice. “And you’ll do as I say.”Sandra pulled Dave aside then and best as they could they tried, retreating to the farthest opposite corner, a good twenty feet away, to conduct a conversation in whispers. They needn’t have bothered. I wasn’t listening. I was already back to studying the alien baby. For it had become clear to me that Dave and Sandra were just like the voices on that radio—static-filled distractions. How could I be expected to perform proper research with such dead weight babbling into my ears? How could I possibly begin to understand the secrets of the plastic alien baby so long as they huddled around the cold fire of my research hole?It seemed so simple at that point, and yet became so complex a moment later. I waved goodbye to them, the alien baby cradled in my arms. They rode off on the snowmobile with nary a wave back, their faces anonymous darknesses behind their snow goggles, their forms reduced to caricatures of Renaissance nudes by the padded weight of their thick jackets and puffy protective layers. They were welcome to those accoutrements of civilization. Me, I would peel off those layers. I would peel and peel and peel until I got to the truth, even a cold truth.Then it all came undone and went for naught. For, as I watched them metamorphose into a fast-moving dot on the horizon, the alien baby turned its head to look at me and said in a low thin reed of a voice, Now we begin.