Winter-Over

There's a moment in late April when the sun goes down and doesn't come back up, and the station tradition is that you watch it go, all of you, from the roof, in as many layers as you own, and you don't say anything profound because everyone who's tried has been mocked for it in the logbook. I'm the plant engineer. It's a fancy title for the person who keeps the generators running, and the generators are the station, in the sense that without them the station is a very well-insulated coffin at minus sixty. There are three. Two run. One is the spare. I check them every four hours and I dream about them, which the doctor says is normal for my role and which I've decided not to think about. Week eleven of the dark, Generator B started to surge. It's a small thing to describe. The frequency drifts, the lights flicker, the sound changes from a steady note to one with a wobble in it. I was in the galley when it happened and I saw sixteen people look up at the light fitting at the same time and then look at me. "Fuel," I said, which was a guess, and went. It wasn't fuel. It was the governor, the bit that keeps the engine at a constant speed, and it was doing something I hadn't seen before, hunting, up and down, and every time it hunted the lights in the whole station did the same. I switched B off and brought C, the spare, on line. Clean. Steady. Sixteen people breathed out. Then I sat in the plant room with B and a torch and a manual that was older than some of the crew. Here's the thing about isolation that the briefings don't quite land. It's not that you can't get help. You can. There's a satellite phone, there's email, there's a man in Christchurch who knows these generators better than I do and will answer at any hour. It's that help is words. It's a voice describing a thing while you hold the thing. Nobody is coming with a part. The next flight is in September. Whatever is in the plant room now is what the plant room will contain until the sun comes back.

I found it at two in the morning. A pin, the size of a matchstick, in the governor linkage, worn to an oval where it should have been round. Twenty years of vibration. I had a spare. I had one spare. I fitted it, and I ran B for an hour with nobody watching, and it held, and I went to bed and dreamed about pins. At breakfast, Aoife, who's the doctor, said, "Fixed?" "Fixed." "What was it?" I showed her. I'd kept the old pin in my pocket. She held it up to the light, this tiny worn bit of steel, and said, "That's it? That's what all the lights were about?" "That's it." "And you've got another?" "I had one. Now I've got none." She gave it back to me very carefully. We've got seven weeks left of dark. C is running. B is running. A is still the spare, and I've been through A's governor with a magnifier and its pin is round. I've been through the whole parts inventory again, every drawer, and I've written to Christchurch about what to put on the September flight, and the list is long and the first item is pins. Nobody's said anything about the surge since. It's become one of those things. Last night someone drew a small oval pin in the logbook margin next to my name, and someone else had written "hero" and crossed it out and written "plant engineer", and I'll take that. Sunrise is the seventeenth. We'll watch it from the roof. Nobody will say anything profound.