Dark Winter

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Pika Taylor always woke first to check the generators and walk the archways, surveying their safety. It was he who discovered the open garage door and the missing Spryte. So much snow had blown into the entryway that he couldn't close the bay and had to fetch help to shovel it clear. His shouts woke the survivors.

A group filed into the garage and gaped at the opening and the tread tracks going up its ramp as if it were as miraculous as Jesus' tomb. The temperature in the vehicle shed had plunged, coating the workbenches and machinery with a flocking of frost. The winter-overs worked rapidly to clear the drifting snow, melt a rim of ice, and shut the bay door against the night. Then they went outside.

The darkness was deepening. The cloudless sky was beginning to spot with stars and the horizon had only the faintest of blushes, the blue there as eerie as the glow of Cherenkov radiation in a nuclear fuel rod pool. The snow glowed silver. There was no wind but it was bitterly cold. The tractor and sled tracks steered for the horizon as straight as the wake of an autopilot boat, the Spryte's message as plain as a telegram. Tyson was pointed toward Vostok station. Their nemesis had fled.

His escape was received as deliverance. The monster was gone. No longer did they have to fear him, hold him, or prepare the runway to export him. Their water crisis was solved in an instant. His blustering hunt for the meteorite became a bad dream. He left behind only the nervous disorientation that follows a nightmare, an emotional tingle as barely contained panic gave way to mutual reassurance. They'd survived! They straddled the tracks in numb relief.

That Norse must have had a role in Tyson's disappearance was quickly assumed. Despite the excitement, the psychologist didn't emerge from his room to follow them out into the snow and he didn't join in the wildfire of announcement. It was as if he already knew what they'd find out there. Rising later, he admitted nothing, nor did anyone pronounce it. Still, he hadn't talked to their bosses at the National Science Foundation and had gone to bed late the night before as if the problem were solved. Norse's equanimity about the mechanic's escape told the rest all they needed to know. He was calm, where Rod Cameron had visibly battled depression. Robert Norse was their rock.

"I wonder if Tyson took the rock," Geller said happily at a late breakfast, working through a celebratory stack of pancakes. "Maybe he found it. Maybe he's the one who took it all along."

"Good riddance if he did," Calhoun opined, forking a sausage.

"Maybe he'll hock it. Maybe we'll meet him years from now on a beach in Hawaii, tanned and retired, still sipping mai tais from Mickey Moss's meteorite. Maybe he's smarter than any of us and got Doctor Bob to help send him to the Russians."

"So?"

"So, it would be ironic if dumb old Buck got exactly what he wanted."

"If I survive this freezer and get back to a beach in Hawaii to see him, do you think I'll give a flying fuck?"

"Alexi," Geller asked with his mouth full, "you think Vostok will take him?"

The Russian shrugged. "Why not? He brings his own car, maybe his own food- even his survival scraps will be better than theirs. They'll radio: Who he is? We'll say a what, a… defector, just so they don't fear him and send him back. He'll work or he'll starve at that base. It will be worse for him than jail here. And he'll find some companions even scarier than he is. Only the hard-core ice-men still survive at Vostok. The real Russians." He grinned. "They chew leather and pound nails with their foreheads."

"The Brits up at Faraday wear leather and paint their nails," Dana said. "And their women are even kinkier." She'd rediscovered her spirit as soon as she blearily woke to find Tyson gone.

"I hear the Kiwis nail their women and leather their foreskins," Geller remarked.

"Well, the Argentines at Esperanza- " Calhoun began.

"Make fun of the Chileans at Bernardo O'Higgins who tell jokes about the Poles at Arctowski who long for the Chinese food at Zhongshan," their psychologist interrupted, sliding into a seat with a cup of coffee. Norse had come into the galley quietly. "It's a wonder any work gets done in Antarctica at all."

"We were just wishing Tyson the worst, Doctor Bob," Geller explained. "We figured the Russians would give it to him."

"He's given it to himself. The plateau at Vostok is a half mile higher than the Pole. The world record low was set there- minus 128.6 degrees." Norse said it as if the precision gave him pleasure. "And traveling seven hundred miles is like driving from Berlin to Moscow. He'll be doing well to get there without losing his fingers and toes."

"He brought it on himself."

Norse sipped somberly. "That's the question, isn't it? What was Buck's choice? The central conundrum of psychology. How much of what we do is free will and how much is genes and conditioning? How responsible are we for our actions?"

"One hundred fucking percent," Pulaski said, bringing a bottle of syrup from the pantry to replace what Geller had depleted. "If you don't believe that, then society doesn't work because nobody's responsible for anything. Don't give me the behavioralist song and dance. Tyson was a mean sonofabitch who scared everyone here and deserves every inch of frostbite he gets. The feds are going to have a lot to answer for by not taking him back to begin with, when he started grousing. The Pole is no place for malcontents. Uncle Sam better hope Rod's relatives don't find a good lawyer."

"Lawyers. Now, there's a scary bunch," said Geller.

"I happen to agree with you, Wade," Norse told the cook. "You can't have freedom without accepting free will, and all the risk and responsibility that goes with it. Buck believed that, too. He just wasn't very adept at fitting his philosophy into a group."

"He was damn antisocial," said Calhoun.

"He refused to follow but he also refused to lead," Norse corrected. "He tried to isolate himself in a place where that was a physical impossibility. He had to either change the Pole, change himself, or leave. Rod's death made him realize that, and he left."

That struck Abby, who was listening, as a little too neat. "You're saying he should have tried to take over?"

"I'm saying that just as the natural world is an evolutionary struggle of species against species, society is an intellectual and emotional struggle of ego against ego. You conquer or you submit. You impose your own will or you labor under someone else's. You lead or you follow because life's a dance. Mere rebels, like Buck, simply hang or go into exile." The psychologist sipped his coffee again.

"I thought the whole point was to work together," Abby said. "We're a team. That's what makes the Pole work, our working together."

"Or not work when you have a malcontent. Then it boils down to leadership. I was hoping Rod would come to terms with the need for leadership, or at least I was observing his struggle, and then…"

There was quiet, everyone thinking about the murder.

"You did the right thing to get rid of Buck," Dana finally said. There. It was out in the open. She'd said what everyone knew.

Norse's mouth twisted wryly, not trying to deny it. "He had a knife but… I just gave him a choice and he got rid of himself. It's not a light thing, you know. More like banishment in the Middle Ages. Back then everything was kin and clan. Being forced out was being forced into poverty. No family, no land, no equivalent of social security to take you into whatever old age you could manage. Exile was a kind of death sentence. Down here, with our feudal cluster of bases, maybe it's not so different."

"Don't be so grim, Doc," Pulaski said. "The research stations help each other, they don't besiege each other. Tyson will survive if he can make it. I'm not sure the bastard deserves to survive."

"That is the question, yes?" said Molotov. "Will he make it?"

"No, the real question is how we're going to celebrate his leaving," said Geller. "I propose a thank-God-I'm-still-here dinner and a polar cocktail contest."

"Here, here," Dana said.

"The pig!" Pulaski suggested.

"The what?" Calhoun asked.

"I had one shipped down for our winter solstice party. I'm thinking maybe we need it now. You know, Hawaiian luau? What do you think, Doc? Good for morale?"

"Good for my morale."

"Yes, bring on the mai tais!" Dana said. "And an initiation session into the Three Hundred Degree Club!"

"Is it cold enough?" Geller asked.

"Didn't you feel it this morning?" she asked. "Breathing out there was like drinking Dr no."

"The temperature's getting down there," the cook agreed. "We'll have to get an official reading from Lewis out in Clean Air. Assuming he gives us the time of day. That fingie has been treated pretty rough."

Norse looked at the New Zealander. "You ready to accept Jed, Dana?"

She sighed. "I don't know. When I saw him with that severed cord, and Harrison's hand reaching through the snow… I thought the worst. Unlike Abby, here, I can't warm up to Lewis. He's quiet, hard to read. But yes, we're down to just twenty-two now. Buck's escape points to Lewis's innocence, right?"

"Let's assume so," the psychologist said. "I don't think they were Butch and Sundance. Bonnie and Clyde."

"God, I didn't even consider if the killer had an accomplice!"

Norse looked at her evenly. "Or if Tyson was the wrong man."

She looked uncertain. "We still don't know for sure, do we?"

"We never know for sure on anything. In a courtroom or down here. All the important things in life remain a mystery. So, your verdict on Jed. Your responsibility. Your choice. Your call."

She glanced at Abby. "Bring him in." She sighed. "It was Buck. Or I'll go crazy."

"Call Lewis up, Cueball," Norse told their cook. "Find out if we're going to get weather severe enough to let we fingies join your club."

Every tribe has its initiation, Lewis thought. This is mine.

The temperature at Clean Air had actually registered only ninety-eight degrees below zero but he'd promised Norse that it would keep on dropping and then altered the thermometer link to the dome to make sure the reading on the galley television screen fell to minus one hundred. The slight subterfuge seemed justified after all he'd gone through. This was his way back into the fold.

Pulaski, who'd done this once before, briefed those who assembled outside the sauna. "First of all, this club- short of having walked on the moon- may be the most exclusive on the planet," he told them. "You've gotta be at the Pole when it's a hundred below, which means you've got to be here in winter, which means you've got to be stupid enough to sign on for eight toasty months of cheerful isolation." There was nervous laughter among the group.

"Accordingly, it may also be the most foolish club on the planet. There's some polar plunges into the Antarctic ocean at Palmer, and dips into the frozen lakes near McMurdo, but for sheer idiocy I think we take the cake. This is a story you can tell your grandchildren about- and if you do, they'll have you institutionalized."

The tittering had an edge to it.

"Exhibit One is this temperature gauge." He pointed to the dial registering the temperature inside the sauna. "As you can see, our cedar box is crawling upward to two hundred degrees above zero, just about enough to let me slow-roast some meat. That's you." He gave his best evil smile, the lights glinting off his bald head. Cueball could look scary when he wanted to.

"Exhibit Two is your appearance. This is the South Pole, people, and you look like you bought tickets to Tahiti." Laughter again. Thirteen of the twenty-two survivors were bunched outside the sauna door, men and women segregating into separate groups. All were wrapped in towels, had tennis shoes on to protect their feet, and clutched balaclavas, scarves, or gaiters to cover their mouths at the critical moment. Still, there was more bare skin on display than they'd seen for months. Their bodies looked pasty in the fluorescent light, like shelled oysters. The clumped flesh was as depersonalizing as a military haircut.

"Exhibit Three is the goal: to endure the heat until it hits the two-hundred-degree mark, to drop your towels, and then to sprint stark-raving naked except for shoes and head covering to the South Pole marker, or as close to it as you care to go, given safety and screaming common sense. A three-hundred-degree-difference shock to the senses. For those of you hoping for an erotic experience, let me disappoint. We dim the lights for privacy, and subzero temperatures have a way of diminishing- and I do mean diminishing- any sexual ardor. Nature attacks any and all appendages. I urge you to listen to your body and retreat prudently: We had a case of genital frostbite one year and it was not a pretty sight. Nipples, noses- anything that sticks out."

"Jesus, they got more encouragement at Omaha Beach," Geller muttered. "You're not exactly getting my spirits up."

"That's just what I'm saying, George. Don't get anything up."

"Or don't get it up around me," Nancy Hodge added.

"I shrivel every time I have to see you, Doc."

"Yeah. I noticed."

"Ooh, that hurts!" the men hooted. "That's more painful than the cold!"

"Who does get it up for you, Nurse Nancy?"

"If this is an issue for you, George, there's some new drugs in BioMed that might help."

More moans and laughter.

"Okay, enough anticipation," Pulaski interrupted. "Doctor Bob can take care of all your Freudian problems while you're packed like Pringles in the sauna. I'll open the door to let you out after it hits two hundred. Move briskly, but not recklessly. Don't fall on the ice and break your leg."

"Or anything else, if you're on Nancy's drugs!" Calhoun called.

Pulaski turned to Lewis, still standing a little apart from the others. "So, fingie. You glad we brought you back to share in our secret society?"

Lewis managed a grin. "Didn't know what I was missing."

"Damn right. Last night we all set fire to our hair. Tomorrow is electric shock therapy. Okay, in the sauna! Go, go, go! Get pumped! Get psyched! Get hot! Sweat! Snarl! The night is just beginning!"

They crowded into the dimly lit box with their towels, laughing and cracking jokes. "George, you're poking me!" someone said in a falsetto voice. The door closed and there was only dim red light. It was initially claustrophobic, a mesh of flesh as intimate as a crowded elevator. The box was already one hundred and fifty degrees. For the first minute or so, the heat felt good, like an enveloping blanket. Then it began to seem cloying. Skin scraped unfamiliarly on skin. It was a tangle of bodies, hard to make out who was who, which sex was which. And yet Lewis felt the terrycloth press of a breast against one arm. Long dark hair. Gabriella.

He glanced around, looking for Abby. She was on the lower bench, looking down again as if lost in thought. She'd given him a shy glance in the corridor to acknowledge his return from Clean Air but showed nothing of the flirtatious familiarity he'd expected after their kiss. Cameron's death and Tyson's flight had gotten between them, leaving her troubled and remote. A shadowy, powerfully muscled man, probably Norse, sat behind her.

"This is what sets humans apart from the animals," someone said.

"A reckless thirst for experience?"

"Sweat."

Lewis felt light-headed. There wasn't enough air for this many occupants. His skin tingled as his pores opened, an almost forgotten experience after the dry cold of the Pole. His nose filled with the scent of their bodies, the perspiration and musk. The hot steam of the air heated his lungs. In a way the press of the bodies reassured him. After the fear that had divided it, the community was coming back together. The bizarre initiation implied a certain trust, an implicit friendship.

"I'm toassssssting…" someone wailed like the dissolving witch in The Wizard of Oz.

"I'm riiiisssssing…" Geller rumbled.

"Don't listen to him," Nancy Hodge assured. "You couldn't tell the difference with a surveyor's transit."

Everyone laughed.

"Do you like hot weather, Lewis?" It was Gabriella, whispering in his ear.

She made him nervous. "I'm a moderate."

"No, you're not. I know about you. Working for the oil companies. Always going to extremes."

"That's just where the oil is."

"There's oil in other places, too." Her breath raised the hair on his neck.

"Do you like hot weather?" He was staring at Abby but she wouldn't look up. She was more embarrassed by this intimacy, he guessed.

"I like sensation." Gabriella's lips were brushing his ear. Incongruously, he thought of the load master shouting into it, the day he arrived. The tale of the doomed fly.

"Gawd, I'm going to suffocate before I freeze," someone said.

"Almost there!" Pulaski called through the door.

Lewis leaned back, pressed against someone's body, leaned away. He was roasting, unbearably hot. His concern about dropping his towel was fading; he wanted release! He was looking forward to the cold! Sweat ran in tributaries down his temples, in rivers down his back. His belly was sticky with it. He wanted to make the Pole. He wanted to shed his newcomer status. Gabriella brushed his arm with her own. Both were slick, as if oiled.

Despite himself, his pulse quickened at her touch.

"Once I read that everyone's lonely," Gabriella whispered. "That what we want is to fuse with each other."

Lewis tried to joke. "Well, we're sticky enough." He was feeling dizzy.

"That hell is being scattered apart. Heaven is coming together."

"I thought heaven would have more oxygen." He felt drugged.

"That everybody wants reunion."

She was arousing him. He wished she'd be quiet.

"That all the parts try to become one."

He was saved when the door finally swung open, the light in the hallway killed to give a measure of privacy. There was a gush of cooler air. "And they're off!" Pulaski yelled.

Everyone stood, jostling like passengers anxious to get off an airplane. Towels dropped like shadows. It was so crowded and dark there was nothing to see. People began shoving out the door, breaking into an awkward run. Gabriella moved in front of him, her towel slipping away, and he got only an impression of curved form, lithe and smooth. Then he was carried with the crowd out the door, a jostling of elbows and knees like people squirming through a fire escape. They spread out in the corridor, darting through the exit and out under the dome's interior like a swarm of ghosts. Everyone was whooping and screaming with fear and excitement. Lewis felt like he was running on a beach, his core so hot he didn't yet feel any cold.

When they hit the chill of the dome their sweat flashed to steam. They ran in a river of fog, so dense they couldn't see each other's nakedness. As they sprinted out past the archways to the exit ramp, Lewis pulled his gaiter over his head and down around his mouth so his lungs wouldn't burn. The lining of his sinuses had already frozen.

When he burst outside he could feel a further temperature drop. It was like hitting a cold pond, his breath jerked away.

He could hardly see. He blindly followed the yells and laughter and howls of the others up the ramp and then across the sastrugi drifts toward the Pole marker. Some were already hurrying back the other way, he realized, stunned by the cold and turning for shelter well before reaching the taxiway. It was an act of self-preservation. He had no sense of who was who anymore, it was just a shuttle of bodies, a scene from a medieval triptych of hell.

His sweat was freezing on his skin. It had crystallized in his hair. His fingers were already numb. His testicles had shriveled. He was grateful it was as dark as it was.

"Come on, fellow fingie!"

It was Norse, loping ahead of him as if on an early-morning jog. He could make out the silhouette of the man's powerfully broad shoulders and slim hips. The psychologist was built like a Greek god, fit and vain. The steam had left them now and the other runners were gone, too. They were the only two loping across the runway for the distant stake. Lewis felt his muscles tightening. What if he cramped up out here?

With the steam gone it was dazzlingly clear. Glancing around, Lewis realized it wasn't as dark as he'd first thought. The structures of the research base were geometric sculptures in sharp starlit relief: the Dark Sector, Clean Air, the snowy hump of the summer Quonset huts that were winterized now. The sky was on fire, he realized: the aurora australis! It shimmered, a spangle of colors, as hallucinatory as a curtain to another world. The Pole had never looked so beautiful and for a revelatory moment he grasped the magnificence of being allowed to be here, of being given this glimpse of astronomical beauty. A rare privilege of time and space! And it was killing him!

Lewis was wheezing. His lungs ached with cold, despite the frost-shrouded gaiter over his mouth. His energy was evaporating. He stumbled, almost fell. He should turn back. He was risking frostbite by staying out so long. But there was the polar stake! Norse had paused at it, watching him. "You can do it, Jed!"

Lewis staggered to the Pole and looked back. Everyone else had disappeared inside. The dome looked impossibly far away and he realized he'd misjudged. This was insane! He was naked at a hundred degrees below zero and his sauna warmth was leaking away like a reservoir from a ruptured dam. "I think I'm dying," he gasped. He was looking up at his own ephemeral existence: the aurora!

"Not yet." Norse reached out and seized Lewis's arm, jerking him back in the direction of the dome. "Double time!" They jogged together, their goal rocking in his vision, the psychologist's hand like a vise. "You can do it!"

"It feels like my shoulders are freezing up. I can hear them cracking."

"You've got to sprint, man! Sprint to save your life!" He seized Lewis's hand and the two began awkwardly running flat out, nude, intimate, two earthlings cast off into space, barely keeping their balance on the skittering of snow. "Go, go!"

They saw Pulaski at the crest of the ramp, waving them in like an orange-clad angel. Stars began dancing in Lewis's eyes. "I… can't… do…"

He fell, skidding on powder, his chest painfully burning on the firmer packed snow just underneath. Then he was being pulled up off the snow by one arm, the stars swinging crazily and his consciousness dazed, Norse dragging him forward like a wounded man. "We're almost back!" The psychologist leaped over the crest of the ramp, howling at the cold, yanking Lewis over its lip with him, and then they fell and slid down it together in a tangle, scraping their skin again. Pulaski ran and hauled them up. Snow stuck to them like flour, their skin flushed red. "We made it, Cueball!" Norse gasped in triumph. "Made it to the Pole!"

"Now you have to make it inside!" The cook pushed the pair through the dome door and slammed it shut and they staggered on, utterly frozen, back under the dome toward the sauna.

Lewis had no memory of the last minute or so across the dusky dome. Just the wooden door, a blast of heat, and then falling into the welcoming arms of the others who'd crowded back into the sauna before him, snatching at towels and coughing and swearing and shouting with victory from the cold that had seared into their lungs.

Three hundred degrees!

Now he was one of them.