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.”