Dark Winter

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The explosion was so muffled that at first it was more puzzling than alarming, sounding in the galley like a flat, mysterious whump. Then the alarm began ringing. Fire! It was the one deadly threat they constantly drilled for: In the dry air of the Pole, combustibles could flash into fire like gasoline, and liquid water to douse them was in chronic short supply. Reaction was instantaneous and automatic. People jerked to their feet, chairs toppling over, a coffee cup spilled. This was no overcooked pig, it was the real thing! Not bothering to dress, they crashed out the galley door and sprinted for assigned extinguishers and hoses. There was a haze in the air of the dome.

"Where's it coming from!" Pulaski yelled.

Smoke was drifting out of one end of Comms, he saw, its aluminum wall bulging like a blister. The radio room! The cook called for help and then waved their dead run to a halt, feeling the outside of the metal module for heat before cautiously opening a door. A gust of smoky gases rolled out, stinking and ominous. From inside came an agonized screaming.

"Christ," Pulaski muttered, shining a flashlight into the murk. "What more can happen? Was Doctor Bob in there?"

Everyone looked around. Norse was nowhere to be seen.

Gina Brindisi had the presence of mind to run around the end of the building to a crack where the building had split like a swollen can, and then spray fire retardant through the hole into the communications center. Pulaski, Geller, and Calhoun donned fire masks and pushed into the corridor, squirting halon and hunting for survivors. The screaming was horrible. When they reached the radio room it was dark and smoky, illuminated by spurts of sparks. Puffs of chemical from the extinguishers made the last orange flames snuff out and then their flashlights and headlamps swept the wreckage. Pulaski dropped to the floor, groping for Norse, and touched a body. A wounded man was writhing in agony with his hands over his face, his skin burnt off from an explosion of acid. The cook gripped the man and leaned close, peering through his mask. It was Clyde Skinner, their radioman.

"I'm blinded!"

"What happened, what happened?" Pulaski kept shouting the question through his mask but it was obvious Skinner was in no condition to answer. What breath he could suck in was used to scream.

"Oh my God, I can't see!"

The communications center was destroyed. Its bank of lead batteries had exploded, shattering the equipment and spraying the room with acid. The explosion had caught Skinner full force, dissolving his face. It was almost unlucky he was alive.

Nancy Hodge pushed into the room, took in the wreckage at a glance, and knelt beside Skinner. She looked sickened. "Where the hell is Bob?"

"We don't know."

"Well, help me get Skinner to sick bay! We've got to wash him!"

The trio of men lifted the radioman and carried him out to the cold and clear air of the dome. Someone came at them with a bucket to douse Skinner and wash the acid, but Hodge stopped it. "Not here! It will just freeze on his face!"

"I'm blind! Oh, how it hurts!"

Everyone was looking at him in horror. "He'll be begging for more morphine than we have," Nancy said. "More relief than we can give him. Go on, get him into sick bay!"

Skinner's screams faded like a disappearing train as they carried him off.

"Now I'm really getting pissed," Pulaski muttered, glowering for a culprit and finding none. Lewis was already locked up. "Really, really pissed."

"You can't blame Jed for this one," Abby told him.

"Really? Let's figure out what happened first."

"We found Doctor Bob!" someone shouted.

Norse was sitting on the floor of Cameron's old office next to Comms, dazed and coughing in the lingering smoke. He appeared to have been knocked unconscious in the blast. Furniture was awry, papers on the floor like snow. "I was getting ready to make the call!" he choked. "What the hell happened?"

"The worst, near as I can tell," Pulaski told him.

"Clyde said he had to crank up the radios!"

"He cranked them up, all right."

They lifted the psychologist to his feet, Norse blinking from the concussion of the blast. Losing him would cut them from their last anchor. They led him back into the radio room, where everything stank of burnt plastic and rubber. At a glance it was apparent their normal connection to the outside world had been wiped out. "I don't understand what happened," Norse muttered.

"The batteries blew up," said Charles Longfellow, their electrician.

"Yes, but why?"

"They were probably charging. You told us to pull the plug on this place during the communications blackout and the batteries ran down. Clyde had to bring them up again with the generator. Charging always creates hydrogen and oxygen gases, which is the stuff that blew up the Hindenburg. Normally it vents off okay but a spark or a match…"

"Clyde didn't smoke."

"No, something else…" Longfellow was leaning over the wrecked radios and computers, looking for a clue. "There, maybe."

They looked. Two crossing wires, now blackened and bubbled, had frayed down to metal. "When Clyde flipped the radios on, the current could have caused a short," the electrician pointed out. "If the gases weren't venting, then… bang. But I thought the battery compartment had a vent."

They went outside. A sheet of plywood had been shot outward by the explosion. Longfellow kicked it. "This could have been leaning up against the hole," he said, "blocking it."

"Deliberately?" Norse asked.

The electrician just looked at him.

"And the wires. Don't you check them?"

"Twice a year," Longfellow said. "At the beginning and end of summer season. They were fine. There's no reason for them to be abraded like that."

"So what happened?"

He looked at the ruptured building. "Someone wanted this to happen. The bastard didn't just destroy our radios, he shorted out the linkages to the machines and radios on the rest of the station. This place was a hub. Now we're deaf and dumb."

"But why?"

"Someone planned this before Clyde ever threw a switch to recharge the batteries. Someone wanted to destroy our communications. Someone doesn't want us talking about Jed Lewis."

They were panicked now, their vulnerability to accident or sabotage made clear. No one slept for the next twenty-two hours as they fortified their enclosure from a threat they didn't understand. There was no sun anyway, no natural clock, and no place to escape to. Only a suffocating paranoia that seemed to settle on the dome with the weight of the polar night. Pulaski had become transformed by the explosion, a metamorphosis that shed the cook and returned the old soldier. He was Crockett at the Alamo, girding for battle. The garage was ransacked for metal, wood, welding torches, and tools. Brackets were welded in a shower of sparks and beams were placed against the bay doors. Latches were fastened for the smallest doors and fastened with wire, cutters issued to sentries. Their greatest points of vulnerability were the fuel tanks and the generators, and so the fuel arch behind BioMed and the opposite arch leading to Pika Taylor's machines were walled up completely. A frame was built across both half sections of tunnel, and sheets of plywood and metal were nailed across it to prevent any kind of access at all.

"I still know how to get in," Pika said quietly. "No one else has to know. No one else has to get to my machines." He looked from face to face, a slight grin as he regarded them. "You kill me, you die."

The work went in shifts, one group hammering and welding while another warmed up in the galley and gulped down coffee to stay awake. No one was sleeping until they were certain Antarctica was walled off: that Buck Tyson or some malevolent ghost wasn't somehow sneaking into the dome to wreak murder and sabotage, revenge and psychic terror. That some traitor in their midst was not plotting a final catastrophe. The rest of the station was to be abandoned for the time being, the Dark Sector and Clean Air left to slumber in the snow. "We're a turtle," Pulaski explained. "We're drawing into our shell."

The cook insisted that everyone, without exception, be armed. Tyson's old locker was broken into and the knives he'd made were distributed to whoever didn't have one. The recipients regarded them a little dubiously.

"Amundsen-Scott Base," the blade of one read, the legend bracketed by penguins. There wasn't a penguin within eight hundred miles.

"What if we start going after each other with these things?" Gina protested. Like everyone else, she was so cold and sore she could hardly move. The frenzy of getting the dome sealed was holding off their terror but they were also close to a breaking point. Losing Comms had wrung them out. The damage to their communications would take days to repair, especially with Skinner blinded and Abby morose.

"I am a little concerned about arming people to the teeth," Norse admitted. He'd deferred to Pulaski's military expertise in locking up the dome but seemed uneasy with the cook's new martial authority. It had eclipsed his own. "Tempers are short. People are jumpy."

"And so far no more of us are dead," Pulaski answered grimly. "We tried it one way, with all of us wandering around like blind sheep and getting picked off one by one. Now let's try it another way. Strategic deterrence, people. Mutual assured destruction. You take a predator like a mountain lion and they'll back off if you fight back. They don't want to risk injury. They can't risk injury, because if they get hurt they starve. If our murderer is someone other than Lewis, then he or she can't risk injury, either, because they'll be found out. You get jumped, make sure you draw blood. Die if you have to, but scream bloody hell first."

"Jeez, Cueball," Geller said. "Enough drill instructor dramatics, okay?"

"You people are almost asleep on your feet. You need some dramatics."

"I just don't know that we're up to stabbing people," Dana said tiredly.

"Well, someone might be up to stabbing you. That make a difference?"

The New Zealander looked at him gloomily.

"Come here, Dana," Pulaski suddenly said.

"What bloody for?"

"Come here." It was an order and she complied against her own wishes, walking over to the cook. He turned her around to face the others. "You're my Raggedy Ann for a little knife lesson."

"Oh please," she groaned. "I just want to go to my bloody bed."

"Now, listen," he said to the others in the galley. "The whole point of this is that you don't get attacked. That any killer knows that open season is over. But if you are attacked, you don't want to pussy around, right? You want to stop an assailant so they can't stop you, cut them so they can't cut you, make them go down and stay down so you can run for help. Right? Otherwise all you do is piss them off."

They looked at him with exhaustion.

"Stay here a moment," he told Dana. He went to the kitchen and came back with a jar of spaghetti sauce and a basting brush.

"Wade, Jesus Christ, come on- "

"Stand still. This might save your life. Our lives." He dipped in the brush.

"Please…"

He dabbed a splotch of red under her nose and she started. "Hit them here, under the nose. Try to break it. Try to push it upward. It will hurt like hell. If you're lucky, the cartilage will be shoved into the brain and the frontal lobes will bleed and they'll go down permanently." He dipped again and painted her throat. "Hit here. Under the Adam's apple for men is a good pain point. It can chop off air for either sex. With a weapon you can cut an artery, with a blow you can collapse the windpipe. Don't screw around! Don't give your opponent time to do it to you! Not unless you want to get laid out in the snow with Gabriella Reid."

Dana looked at him with distaste.

He dipped again and aimed toward the hollow behind her clavicle. "Next pain point- "

"No." She stepped away, raising her own knife. "Enough. Stay away from me, Cueball. I'm not some damned American killer mercenary."

"Excellent reaction, Dana. Get that knife up. This is exactly my point. I want to make you a damned killer mercenary."

"So I declare my graduation. Enough with the sauce." She walked away and slumped in a chair, throwing her knife with a clatter on the table.

He turned to the others, pointing with the brush. "The solar plexus, right under the rib cage. The abdomen. Breasts if it's a woman, balls if it's a man. The eyes. The ears. Anywhere you can inflict pain. Any way you can get the other guy to hesitate, back off, go down. Listen, I know it's grim, but I'm tired of people dying like rabbits. You gotta look after yourself. I've climbed, I've rafted, I've jumped, I've shot. Look for yourself. Check your own chute. Sharpen your own bayonet. Lock and load, people."

"You're scaring me with all this army stuff," Gina said. "You're going to make us fear every man and woman on this base."

"That's right, Gina. Fear is the one thing that might just keep you alive." He looked at the others. "At the end of the winter, that's all that counts."

"Is that all?" Geller asked wearily.

"No. When we finish boarding things up, I think it would be smart to search each other again as well."

Lewis was dreaming of Arabia. He was on a flat plain, stony and hot, looking for oil. The sky was white, the horizon watery, and he was uneasy because if he didn't find his prize soon he'd lose his job. The oil was under one of the rocks, he knew, but every stone looked alike. Each was the shape of a potato, burnt and glassy, and he was having to turn them over one by one to find what he was looking for. Finally he turned one over and was startled to see a face looking up at him. It was a woman, buried in the sand, her long hair made of strands of quartz and mica. He stepped back in surprise and she rose up out of the desert, robed, her gown made of silicon. It was a gray, shimmering, translucent thing, her body perfect beneath it. The woman was looking at him boldly and he heard himself think, I don't know you, and then the gown turned to sand and slid away, leaving the woman naked except for specks of quartz on her shoulders and thighs and breasts like a scattering of glitter. The merciless glare from the sun turned a cool blue directly above her, a small dark circle giving her a column of shade. Except the woman was now Abby, her hair shorter and her expression shy, and the glitter wasn't sand, it was specks of ice.

Lewis awoke groggily, his dream penetrated by a tapping. The sauna was pitch-black and stuffy, the bench where he lay hard and uncomfortable. He sat up. Someone was knocking at his door. It was the latest in a series of noises that had bewildered him- an explosion, alarms, hammerings, drills, saws. Despite his shouts, no one ever came to explain what was going on. It was like he'd been locked in the sauna and abandoned. It was like being buried in the old base. It was like freezing to death in the pit where they'd found Mickey Moss. His claustrophobia had come back to him.

"Who's there?" His voice was thick, doped from sleep.

"It's Abby. Can I talk to you?"

He was frustrated and embarrassed at his plight. In the end she'd stopped trying to defend him. In the end she hadn't known who to believe. "Go away."

"Jed, please, we're in danger. You've got to let me in."

He didn't answer.

"I'm sorry that I didn't say more in the galley. I was quiet because I had to think things through. I had to trust, first."

"Trust what?"

"Trust who to believe."

He sat there brooding tiredly, feeling angry and frustrated. There was no chance to prove anything to anyone now, locked up in here.

"I decided to believe you," she said.

"Well, hell." He flicked on the sauna light. Pulaski had barred the door from the outside as he'd promised, preventing Lewis from escaping his makeshift prison. But he'd also left the latch working on the inside, preventing anyone from getting in that Lewis didn't want to see.

"We can't afford a guard to protect us from you, and we can't afford a guard to protect you from us," the cook had growled. "I don't want some vigilante coming in here and beating the crap out of you until we know what's going on. So lock the damn door from the inside and don't open it up for anyone but me. Okay?"

Lewis had nodded. He wasn't even going to open it to Pulaski until he was so damn hungry and thirsty that he had to face the cook. Until then he wanted to be alone in his depression, willing himself mentally ten thousand miles from the Pole.

Yet did he? He felt so isolated. And Abby…

He cautiously opened the door, fearing a mob behind her, but it was only the woman. She quickly slipped inside, latching it behind her.

"Jed, I need help," she whispered.

"You need help? What the hell is going on out there, anyway?"

"We're completely cut off from the outside world and we're making prisoners of ourselves. Comms blew up and- "

"What?"

"The batteries exploded. They think it was sabotage. It knocked out the power grid to the outside buildings and everyone's gone nuts. They've barricaded all the entrances with beams and bolts and they're building walls to block off the fuel arch and the generators because that's where we're most vulnerable. We can't get to the fuel and we can't get to the gym and garage anymore. Only Pika knows how to get around them; he's the only one mild enough that everyone trusts him. And he's become some kind of hypochondriac, running off to BioMed all the time like he has a case of the runs. The rest of us are in prison, just like you. They're walling us in against a boogeyman nobody is really sure is out there, until they rebuild the communications hub. It's like a kettle coming to a boil and they've screwed down the lid. I'm worried the whole place is going to explode. I'm worried we're building a firetrap."

"Jesus." He rubbed his head wearily. "What the hell am I supposed to do about it? I'm locked up."

"I've been thinking about things and I think I need to unlock you."

"Escape?"

"Reconnoiter. Get out to a computer that works and try to figure out what's going on. Before it's too late."

"What do you mean?"

"Pulaski has armed everybody. He gave a class and painted poor Dana with glops of spaghetti sauce to show where the lethal parts are. He said we're all warriors, we're all deputies. He said it's like the arms race. People are strutting around like gladiators and someone's going to get hurt. Hiro did get hurt: He was tired and got in a quarrel with Alexi and the Russian cut his hand and now it's all bandaged up and Alexi is in a funk about the whole thing because it's just the kind of craziness he's been accusing you of. Hiro's terrified of him. All the rooms have been searched again, this time throwing everything into the open. There's no privacy left, no dignity. If something more happens, I'm afraid they'll come looking for a scapegoat. Looking for you."

"They can't blame anything on me when I'm in here."

"Some people already have. Someone prepped Comms to explode before it happened. Something to do with the wires and batteries. It was a booby trap, and Clyde had his entire face burnt off. He might even die. So who did that?"

"Not me."

"The same somebody who killed Gabriella."

Lewis shut his eyes in weariness. "Does Norse know you're here?"

"No." She glanced sideways as if he might be watching. "He led the others into sealing you off, and I think it's deliberate. He doesn't want me talking to you. Or you talking to anyone."

"Why?"

"He called me in after you were locked up, after the explosion, and said he understood my support for you but that Gabriella's death had changed everything, changed his own thinking. Then he showed me the note."

"What note?"

"He said he found it in Rod Cameron's desk drawer. It says Rod can save his career by giving you the meteorite, and it's signed… by you." She was watching him.

"Come on. I didn't write that note."

"It had your name."

"It's a forgery, Abby. It has to be. This is all so crazy! Norse, or Rod, or someone, is screwing me. They're out to turn us against each other."

"He said he hadn't shown it to the others yet but if more bad things continued to happen they might have to ask you some hard questions."

"Hard questions?"

"Jed, I think he wants to interrogate you. Break you, somehow."

"To hell with that."

"I'm just telling you that you can't stay here waiting for things to play out."

Now he was suspicious. The paranoia was infectious. He looked at her narrowly, suddenly wary. "Bob put you up to this, didn't he? He wants me to try to escape. He'll use it against me."

"No! But he wants to turn your head around, just like what's happening now. He twists everything. He objects to Pulaski in public and then confers with him in private. He's playing him. Playing you, playing me. There's something wrong- "

"Wait a minute! I did sign it!" Lewis had remembered.

"What?"

"A piece of paper, the first day I came here. We were joking around about psychology and handwriting analysis and Bob had me sign something…" His eyes were distant, trying to recall what Norse had done with the paper. "I did sign it. What the hell, has this been a setup from the beginning?"

Abby looked intrigued. "You think he planned this?"

"I don't know what to think. That far ahead?"

"What if Mickey was right and it was Bob who took my picture?" she asked. "That's what I've been thinking about. What if he planted it on Moss?"

"But why?"

"To confuse us. Make us think Mickey might have committed suicide. Put pressure on me to see how'd I react."

"You think Norse is responsible for all this?"

"What do we really know about him? He's a fingie just like you. He came down at the last minute just like you."

"To figure us out."

"Or bewilder us."

"But he's been holding things together."

"Has he?"

"Jesus." He thought a minute, trying to go back over events. Norse had admitted he'd heard where Mickey might have hidden the meteorite. Norse had been out in the storm when Adams died. Norse had helped Tyson flee… "But why?"

"That's what you've got to find out. You're the one person who can sneak out of the dome right now and not be missed. The one person with time to wait for the satellites and get on the Internet. The one person who will ask who Robert Norse really is."

"I thought you said the radios and the computers are down."

"The hub at Comms is destroyed. But if you could get to another source of power and shunt some electricity to Clean Air, you could still use the machines out here."

"If I can get to another source of power."

"There's an emergency generator at the Hypertats at Bedrock Village."

"Can I start it?"

"You could try. I think it might work. I think that's why Bob has allowed Pulaski to wall up the dome. He doesn't want us getting out there, calling out. All the doors are locked now. The perimeter is patrolled."

"So how the hell am I going to get out there?"

"That's why I came here. Look, everyone's exhausted. Almost everyone's asleep. They've been up for hours and hours, locking us in. I'm blitzed, too, but I was going crazy, thinking about Bob, thinking about you, so I couldn't sleep and got up and wandered outside and I just sort of collapsed in the snow under the dome, utterly defeated, just lying there, and then a snowflake hit me in the eye. You know how that feels? Between a kiss and a sting. So I stood up and then all these little snowflakes were sticking to me…"

He looked at her in wonder. It was like the image from his dream.

"Then I realized what we had all overlooked."

Error of Judgment

For three days I was a hero. Then the weather cleared, recovery teams ventured out on the ice below Wallace Wall, and the bodies began to be recovered. Some goober of a deputy sheriff, who probably watched too much Columbo and talked like a Mayberry hick, started to yodel about the neatly clipped end of the line still attached to the corpses of Chisel Chin and Carrot Top. I professed shocked innocence- I'd left both fine young men on the ledge with the others. Just why the devil they were roped and how they'd fallen (were they trying to climb out on their own?) was a mystery to me. But then why was my own line broken? There were the beginnings of awkward questions of just who had been roped to whom. I expressed grieving outrage, of course, at any implication of negligence or wrongdoing. I had risked my life to save those kids! To save that whale Fat Boy! But the holier-than-thou crowd wanted to know why I had saved myself. Slow-talking Deputy Goober wouldn't shut up about it, even though he didn't have the balls to go down the cliff himself and look for evidence- like a knife secreted in a convenient crevice. Finally the university had to exert some pressure on the sheriff because of fear of a lawsuit. The matter of exactly just what did happen on the mountain was not-so-quietly dropped, despite the confused bleating of bereaved parents. And that was that. I'd done my best and was prepared to get on with my life.

Except my application for tenure was denied.

They wouldn't let it drop.

They wouldn't let it drop!

Barney Fife, deputy dipshit, kept nosing around. The whispering started. The peer reviews of my research papers began to get very much more pointed, very pointed indeed. They started murmuring about me in the campus coffee shop- I could feel the stares! — and plotting against me in the department. They denied it, of course, but I knew what was happening. I knew it! The file cabinets that were locked, the meetings called without notifying me they were being held, the evasive looks, the papers turned upside down on desks so I couldn't read them, the hollow sympathies. God, did I know it! Friends became distant. A woman I thought I felt something for became chillingly remote. No charge was ever brought and no charge was needed- my life had become intolerable. I'd been sentenced without being charged. So one day I just walked away.

Let me be perfectly clear about exactly what happened on that mountain. An act of individual and immature foolishness by a single overweight student led to leadership miscalculation, group panic, and a brutal winnowing based on skill and common sense. The strongest, clearest thinker had survived. It was as pure an experiment in natural selection as one could hope for. So don't call me lucky! I was not blessed! I was realistic. Brutally, coldly, and rationally realistic. No one was going to save me, so I saved myself. Once my companions slipped, I didn't have any chance of saving the others. With their trust in each other they had all doomed themselves. The ropes that bound us together had proved to be gossamer threads long before I brought out my knife. I am merely the surviving witness to the fragility of society. Any society.

Do you see my point? We are alone in life. We can't know another person. We can't join with another person. We are islands, made of either rock… or sand. Anything else is delusion.

I found that out when everyone turned on me.

I acquired another position and began to labor to document this point. I plowed into psychological and sociological research and combed through history. Cooperation comes only through coercion. It's so obvious when you look at the literature! Everything else is a fraud. Progress is achieved by the natural selection of the superior individual, and it is individual vision that drives or destroys the group.

No one would listen, of course. My realization collided with their cozy dreams of group comfort. Social security! The American myth of democracy, teamwork, compromise. The whispers followed, the looks, the suspicions. I saw it everywhere: in the supermarket, at the bank, in my office. Everyone looking at me strangely, thinking the worst of my quite defensible actions, blaming me for having the courage to survive. I saw it!

So. How to prove my point? How to demonstrate that I really had no choice?

Imagine a small society in a harsh environment. Imagine one that could be kept in experimental isolation for eight long, dark months. Imagine applying sufficient stress that group solidarity is tested. Imagine forcing each individual to realize how completely alone he or she really is.

The National Science Foundation ignored me, of course. They dismissed my carefully constructed application. They really had no clue as to the significance of the social experiment they had unwittingly constructed at the Pole. It was all astronomy and climatology to them, instruments and data. No vision of the future, no understanding of our grim evolutionary future in the cold blackness of space.

So. Everyone ignored me. My papers went unpublished. My grant proposals were rejected. My every step dogged by ugly rumor. I was broke, desperate, humiliated.

And then, destiny.

Can you possibly imagine what an arrogant, boorish prick Robert Norse really was? I met him at a professional conference when he was boasting of his assignment to Antarctica. His assignment to the Pole, precisely the place where I wanted to go! He blathered on mindlessly, gloating, stuffed full of himself, not having even the merest pathetic clue of just how unfairly his own good fortune had erased my own. He was going to a place he didn't begin to understand. And along the way, he was trekking in New Zealand.

A few months later, I read about his disappearance.

Do you believe in miracles? I'm a rational man, a man of science, and yet sometimes opportunity presents itself in so deliciously glorious a way that one can't help but wonder at the secret workings of the universe. The dark wood. It occurred to me that if I could not compete with Robert Norse, I had to become Robert Norse. I had to act decisively, just as I had on that cliff. And everything after that just… happened.

I acted on the best plan I had at the time.