Dark Winter

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

This is completely insane," Lewis said.

"Which is why it just might work in a place like this," Abby replied.

It was past midnight and most of the winter-overs were asleep with whatever dreams plagued them, wrung out from their frenzy to barricade the dome. Only Gage Perlin, their plumber, was making hourly rounds as the designated sentry of the witching-hour watch. In preparation Abby had raided Jerry Follett's crate of atmospheric sampling equipment that was tucked against one wall of the dome, taking a small weather balloon and a gas canister. She'd filched and concealed a 150-foot length of sturdy rope, a lighter tether line half that length, a pack with a flashlight, two ice axes, and a coil of wire. Now she crouched behind the ruptured Comms building to fill the balloon while Lewis used first tape, then wire, and finally rope to bind the two ice ax prongs at right angles to each other. More tape fused the handles. The result was a crude approximation of a grappling hook. Tied to the climbing rope, it would be hoisted aloft by the balloon.

"What if somebody sees us?" Lewis had worried.

"They're worn out. Besides, how much more locked up can we be than we already are?"

In a grave, he thought, but didn't say that. There was a fierceness about Abby now that he found exciting. Infectious. Her own decisive energy had ignited his own. They weren't even sure what they were fighting, but they were at least beginning to fight back.

The pair peered around the corner and heard and saw nothing. "We have to do this quickly," Lewis said. "Maybe twenty minutes before Gage comes through again."

They briskly walked across the snowy floor to the center of the dome, pulling the bobbing balloon behind them. The gas bag was tied to a tether line that in turn was fastened by a slip knot to the makeshift grappling hook. The climbing rope hung from the hook. It was a bizarre plan made necessary by their bizarre entrapment. Norse and Pulaski had sealed every entrance to the structure except the most obvious one: the opening at the top of the dome that Jed had seen on his first day, left permanently open like a smoke hole in a kiva to allow air circulation. Looked at from below it was like the eyepiece of a telescope, giving a glimpse of a few bright stars and the outside world.

Lewis let the medicine-ball-sized balloon go, holding on to its light tether. It shot up faster than he expected and the line writhed like a flagellum until Abby grabbed it and controlled its ascent through her fingers. Then hook lifted off and the two lines uncoiled upward together at a steady pace, swimming in the night.

When the helium orb bumped against the icicles overhead a few broke off and fell, forcing the pair to duck. Fortunately, the frozen spikes plunged noiselessly into the snow in the center of the dome instead of banging against the roof of the modules. They stuck out from the ground like knives.

"Careful!" Abby hissed.

"Help me pull it over."

They gingerly tugged on the lines to lower the balloon slightly and bring it under the hole. Then they let rope out again and the orb popped free. Once the gas bag was above the crest of the dome, the wind took it like a fish after bait, the ropes yanked taut. When their grappling hook was carried to the lee side of the opening they hauled sharply down, letting the ice axes wedge against the outside of the roof. As the pair threw their weight against it the aluminum bent slightly, snugging the ax heads tightly against the rim. Lewis jerked on the tether to free the slip knot and the balloon lurched upward and soared away into the night, the tether snaking up and out of sight. Remaining were the hook and its climbing rope, hanging downward from the vent hole. He sighted up the line's length, trying to judge its bite on the roof. It just might hold.

He gave her a kiss of partnership. "I'll be back before Pika wakes up to check the generators."

"Just get up the rope first."

Scaling a rope five stories high by grip alone required considerable strength and risked a bad fall. Lewis instead used a trick he'd learned years ago while mountaineering. Two loops resembling hangman's nooses and called Prusik loops were tied with light line and hung on the main rope with slip knots, so they could be pulled up or down the main line. He slid one two feet above the snow and slipped his boot into its loop. As he put his weight on it, stepping up off the snow, the slip knot tightened and friction held the loop firmly in place like a foothold, giving him his first short ascent. He pirouetted slowly as he held on, watching the rope turn under the grappling hook and waiting to make sure it wouldn't twist off. "Hold the bottom to help keep me steady," he instructed Abby. Then, balancing on the loop, he stooped and caught the second Prusik loop with his glove. He slid it two feet higher than the first and put his other boot into that. Again, the knot tightened and he stepped upward. He wiggled his first boot out of the first knot, loosening its grip, bent awkwardly to slide it just under the knot he was standing on, and transferred his weight yet again. By keeping his weight on one loop at a time, he could slide the knots steadily up the rope and keep climbing.

"I think this is going to work," he said, already breathing heavily.

"What if Gage comes?" Abby asked.

"Seduce him."

The first twenty feet were easy enough. It helped that Abby steadied the rope. Once he got high enough that a fall might seriously hurt, however, his worry about the security of the hook increased. He looked upward, trying to see what was happening in the gloom, but could tell nothing. What if the whole contraption unraveled?

Then this damnable winter will be over, he told himself.

He climbed higher. As he ascended he began to feel a slight breeze from the chilly opening and the stars seemed brighter. Progress! It was like climbing to the mouth of a well. Up, up, up. He was panting from the exertion and awkward in his winter clothes, but he'd need them once he was outside. Abby had become very small below. The roofs of the housing modules formed a geometric pattern, their tops dusted with snow.

He paused for breath again, braced on one trembling leg, glancing below to make sure no one was watching. Gage would probably wander around again in about ten minutes. Even with Abby holding on below, the rope twisted slowly, rotating him slowly first one way, then another. It was too bad in a way the others weren't awake: He was putting on quite a show, a damned circus. The dome seemed higher and higher as he climbed toward its apex, his perspective changing.

Then he felt an ominous jerk, the rope vibrating. The hook was shifting! He froze, waiting with dread for it to slide free and cause his own long plummet to the ice below. But no, the movement stopped and he was still hanging in space, sweating, his body tense, the rope trembling like a plucked string. So much for stopping. He began hauling himself upward again as fast as he could manage.

His glove touched the taped ax shafts and he could hear the moan of the wind across the top of the dome. He slipped the top loop as high as it would go, boosted himself up, put out one hand, and grasped the rim. An aluminum tube ran around the four-foot-wide opening, slick and cold and hard to hang on to. He awkwardly leveraged his head upward and a blast of Antarctic wind hit him like a slap. As claustrophobically cold as it was inside the aluminum dome, the windchill outside was twice as bad. Once more its power sucked his breath away. Yet that way promised release. If he could just lever himself up a few more feet…

He leaned against the rim and began twisting his boot, trying to work it out of the final loop. The damn thing worked like a snare. He came loose awkwardly, catching his boot tip on the line and tangling himself. He grunted in fear as his legs and weight abruptly dropped free. His fingers clenched on the aluminum rim and his body snapped straight as he hung on his gloves, swaying back and forth like a pendulum, with the hard white floor five stories below. Abby's upturned face was a white oval, the hook somewhere behind him. Dammit! He dangled a moment, collecting his wits, and then, muscles straining, Lewis worked his way hand over hand around the trim to the grappling hook, grabbed it, and got his feet wrapped around the main climbing rope again, sliding the Prusik loops down out of the way. He pushed upward with his legs, shoving himself back up into the wind and the darkness outside the dome, and worked high enough to get the leverage he needed for a final desperate lunge that would let him belly-flop onto the dome's slick roof. It took a second to catch his breath. Then he squirmed around to a sitting position and looked down through the hole.

Abby was gesturing wildly. Perlin must be coming! She'd already tied the end of the rope to his pack of supplies. The rope was deliberately more than twice the length needed to reach the top of the dome and he hauled the slack up quickly. Finally the pack itself jerked off the snow and began to dance upward as he pulled, while Abby ducked behind Comms. And here came the plumber, cold and hunched, walking again with a crude spear made from a knife lashed onto a sawed-off mop handle, ambling across the point where they'd just been standing, without noticing the fresh scuffle of snow.

Perlin never looked up at the backpack oscillating silently over his head. Striding to check the barricaded entrance by the archways, he disappeared from view.

Lewis pulled the pack up the rest of the way, put it on, reversed the hook, and pitched the climbing rope down the outside of the geodesic structure. Grasping it and walking backward, he gingerly made his way down the face of the dome to the snow, the aluminum making a faint hollow pop as it flexed under his weight.

It became so steep that he had to let go and drop the last few feet, rolling into the drifts that mounded against the dome. Then he bounded up, shaking himself like a dog. He was out! The freedom, after being locked in the sauna, was exhilarating.

Lewis looked around. All exterior lights had been shorted out in the explosion and the base was dark. A ground fog of blown snow skittered waist-high across the plateau. Yet above this miasma he could see surprisingly well. The stars were a shoal of diamonds, the Milky Way a brilliant white arch. Their galaxy! He'd never seen so many stars, so close and so brilliant. They were a swath of luminous paint. He tilted his head back to drink them- bite them, as Sparco had promised. The glory of it stunned him with the force of belated recognition: Yes, I'm a part of that. He stood for a moment gaping, oblivious to the cold.

"This is why I'm down here," he murmured.

Then he began walking toward the dark blue huts that marked Bedrock, the emergency shelter that housed a small auxiliary generator. He had about three hours.

The Hypertats were modest and modern Quonset-shaped huts that had been installed as an emergency refuge in case the dome somehow failed. Insulated, modern, and cramped, they were designed to keep people alive until rescue could be organized. As winter deepened they were drifting with snow, and no one, so far as Lewis knew, had been inside them this season. Behind them was an emergency generator building. This shed was deliberately unlocked and had clear instructions posted inside so that any survivor would be able to start the machine. Still, it took Lewis fifteen minutes to push aside snow blocking its door. Inside, the machine was brittle and cold, ice crystals glittering as his flashlight played over it, the fuel like jelly, and with the grid down the batteries had lost much of their charge. There was enough to start warming the cylinders but then the batteries petered out and it took another twenty minutes of hard labor for Lewis to hand-crank the diesel to get it going. Each reluctant chug that died increased his sense of desperation. Just as he was thoroughly frustrated by its mulelike reluctance, ready to scream with resentment, it coughed and rumbled and gave him the first real hope he'd had for some time. Energy! A source Norse and Pulaski had overlooked! The roar seemed cacophonous inside the shed but he knew the generator's modest chug couldn't be heard from the distant dome. Yet it was enough to make electricity for the Hypertats, and power was power. This juice was going to let him reach the outside world.

Bedrock's small generator was never designed to power the other outlying buildings. Yet it connected to a substation shack with an electrical panel and, if switched and rerouted as Abby had instructed, it could shunt electricity away from the emergency shelters and out to Clean Air. He trudged to the shack, butted it open, and searched with his flashlight for the right switches. He hesitated only a moment. If he threw the wrong ones he could short out the entire system. But no, they were clearly labeled, and one by one he flipped them over as the woman had instructed. No sparks flew. No circuits shorted. He looked outside. Hallelujah. A deck light had come on at Clean Air.

Abby knew her stuff.

The light would alert anyone watching, but no one should be watching. The others had blinded themselves by barricading the dome.

Lewis set off for his workplace, boots crunching in fresh crust. It was eerie how dead the rest of the station looked. Everything was in silhouette under the stars, the antennas mute, the telescopes blinded. It was like walking a ghostly ruin. The snow was a frozen sea, an undulating series of drifts he strode up and down like a boat, his trail leading from one half-buried flag to the next. He wondered about the distant future. Would humans stay at the Pole forever or retreat someday? Would everything they had built eventually become as ghostly as the abandoned Navy base?

While fairly confident he wouldn't be missed until morning, Lewis flicked off the deck light once he clambered up the metal steps to reach Clean Air. He also didn't take the chance of turning on a light inside his old workplace. Instead he flicked on an auxiliary heater and used his flashlight to pick his way to one of the computers, dragging some furniture over to block its glow from the windows. He didn't want to be interrupted by pursuit. Only then did he turn the machine on. There was the familiar whir and bleep, and a faint crackle as photons danced in the tube.

Lewis checked his watch. The satellites that tied them to the Internet cleared the horizon at intervals of eight hours. The next one was rising now.

The temptation to simply sound a cry for help was powerful but was unlikely to bring any meaningful response. He couldn't stay out here to wait for a reply because he'd be missed in the sauna and a hunt would be on. And even if the National Science Foundation decided to dispatch the Texas Rangers at his strange SOS it would take at least days- and more likely weeks, in winter- to mount the logistics to fly to the Pole. All the military transports were back in the United States, their National Guard crews had dispersed, and their cold weather gear was stored. The Pole was designed to be self-sufficient until October. The winter-overs were facing a danger they'd have to deal with themselves, and before they could deal with it he had to understand what their peril was.

There was now one person of uncertain past, one person leading them to an even more uncertain future. Lewis launched a web search.

Robert Norse.

He started with the usual string of search engines: Alta Vista, Yahoo, AOL, Google, MSN. The results were frustrating because the name was too common. There were scores of references to Bobs and Norses, but none obviously fitting their psychologist. He turned up Robert's Rules of Order and a reference to Norse mythology, a link to a Warhammer game and a construction company in Minneapolis. "Come on…" There were even puzzling references to New Zealand, referring to outdoor hiking trips there. What the hell was that about? "Damn brainless Internet clutter."

He tried searching professional journals but quickly became lost in a bog of poor indexing and the ceaseless accumulation of academic publication. So much stuff that no one could read it, and so dense no one could understand it. Brilliant people in a cocoon of irrelevance. He didn't have the vaguest idea who Norse might have written for anyway. And what would an academic study prove?

Stymied, he decided to try news media databases instead. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal came up empty, but a Los Angeles Times brief from two years before mentioned Norse as a visiting lecturer at San Diego State University. The sentence came in a story about a psychological conference on human adaptation to extremes. It said Norse was planning polar research. "We're looking at the adaptability of people to stressful conditions," he'd told the reporter. Well, that made sense. Frustratingly, there was nothing more. The university web site had no listing for Norse: no picture, no biography, no vital statistics.

The city's newspaper?

The San Diego Union-Tribune electronic archive turned up "Norse" sixty-two times, in stories that ranged from a football lineman for the Chargers to a feature on Scandinavian cooking. It was near the end of the list that he found a two-paragraph news brief and whispered, "Bingo."

It was dated February 5 and datelined Christchurch.

LOCAL MAN FOUND IN NZ the headline read. The story began:

Robert Norse, a southern California research psychologist affiliated with San Diego State as a guest lecturer, survived two weeks in the southern New Zealand wilderness and walked out under his own power on Friday, New Zealand authorities said today.

Norse was reported missing on January 23, having disappeared from a guided walk in Mount Aspiring National Park. Searchers had given up hope when the American reappeared, hungry but in good shape, more than 30 kilometers from where he'd become lost. Refusing medical help, he left immediately for Christchurch where he is overdue to join an American scientific contingent assigned to Antarctica. Authorities said he gave little information about his ordeal.

There were no follow-up stories and no article in the archives about Norse's original disappearance. Lewis began trying other communities in a widening orbit around San Diego, hunting for their newspapers and trying their electronic databases. It wasn't until he'd broadened his search to the Orange County Register near Los Angeles that he hit pay dirt again.

ORANGE COUNTY MAN MISSING read the headline.

Robert Norse, an American scientist scheduled to conduct sociology studies at the South Pole, has disappeared during a hiking tour of New Zealand, a tour company reported yesterday.

A rare summer snow squall in the high country had obscured a popular trek route and Norse apparently lagged behind during bad weather. A search for him the following morning proved fruitless.

New Zealand authorities are continuing to look in the rugged area.

Norse, who is single, is a self-employed psychologist, writer and social theorist who occasionally teaches at area universities. Authorities said his most recent appointment was at San Diego State University.

So: Norse was what he said he was- a psychologist. And he'd mentioned something about New Zealand. Yet he'd never talked about being lost in New Zealand, even though everyone on station had depleted their life stories by now. It must have been a traumatic experience to be lost for two weeks. That was a hell of a long time in the woods. Yet Norse never referred to it? Odd.

What if his disappearance was intentional?

Lewis felt a rising excitement, that prickling that comes on the edge of discovery.

But why? What could he have wanted in the New Zealand wilderness? Some kind of personal test? Some validation for his theories of individual survival?

Lewis pondered, glancing at the clock at the bottom of the computer screen. It had taken him half an hour to hike to Clean Air from the Hypertats, fifteen minutes to get some heat and fire up the computer, several more to get a connection… Pika would be up soon. In half an hour he needed to race back to the dome if he didn't want to set off an alarm. The satellite was drifting out of range again anyway. Yet he was no closer to an answer than before.

There seemed no other obvious avenues to pursue on the Internet and so he considered the station's databases. The hard drives of the victims had been corrupted by a magnet, Abby had reported to him, the killer apparently smart enough to scramble any potential clue there. Even if there was an electronic link to Norse or anyone else, the culprit had squelched it. Lewis tried logging on to the station's uncorrupted astronomy database but found no reference to the psychologist, which was not surprising given the astronomers' attitude toward Norse and his trade.

What else? What else?

There were always the station personnel records. This was mundane stuff, not the more intimate information known only to Rod Cameron, Norse, and Nancy Hodge and available only on paper, not on-line. Still, maybe the routine logging of the logistical comings and goings of base employees would reveal something. Its compiler was Gabriella, whose job had been the arrangement and recording of flights, rooms, counting heads at meals, tracking cargo and luggage.

He scanned quickly, looking for Norse's name. Had the psychologist brought something weird or unusual in his gear? Not really. There was a reference to hby tscp, which Lewis assumed was a reference to the telescope the psychologist had brought down to build. Appropriate project for a six-month night, as Norse had said.

Nothing else, however. No bombs, no meteorites, no knives, no nooses. Everything Gabriella Reid had written down about Norse was utterly tedious. Most of his winter-over gear had been shipped ahead of him, but that was normal: The Guard stockpiled personal gear in Christchurch and tucked it into the transports when there was room for an extra load. The winter-overs themselves arrived with a single duffel and found the rest of their things waiting for them. Much of it never went back home, as the storeroom at the KitKat Club testified. Norse apparently followed the routine.

He was just one more fingie, rotating in on tour.

Lewis sat back, frustrated, rubbing his eyes. He was missing something, something obvious, but he was damned if he could figure out what it was. His time was almost up and except for the New Zealand adventure he knew little more about Robert Norse than when he'd climbed out of the dome. Maybe he was investigating the wrong man. Maybe their paranoia was driving them to convert friends to enemies, enemies to friends. In any event it was time to drop back into imprisonment, since he still had no ammunition to secure his own release: no revelation, no smoking gun. Lewis flipped the computer off and stood up. Now what?

Nothing made much sense.

Norse was a scientist, just like him. Arriving late, just like him…

Then it hit him, the thing that had been staring him in the face and he'd been too blind to recognize. The discrepancy! He abruptly sat back down and fired up the machine again. That whir again, and the laborious chug. Beep, bop, boop. Come on… There was the familiar blue glow and he typed madly, getting back to Gabriella's station lists. Yes, there! 1-29. Auckland. That was the day Norse had checked his telescope and other gear with American authorities in the New Zealand capital, shipping it through to the staging base at Christchurch and then on to Antarctica.

1-29!

Norse had signed the necessary forms. He had allowed inspection of his gear. Which meant, according to the records of Gabriella Reid, that Norse had been at the Auckland airport, dealing with logistics, at the same time the newspapers said he'd already disappeared into the country's wilderness.

Yet Norse hadn't emerged from his ordeal for another week. How could he have been lost at Mount Aspiring and back in Auckland at the same time? How could he have been in two places at once?

Had he gone astray on a vacation hike, popped out to check in his luggage, and then disappeared back into the woods again? Damn unlikely.

What else, then?

Lewis stared at the number. 1-29.

What if there were two Robert Norses, one going missing on January 23, another checking his gear six days later? Odd coincidence. Maybe the newspaper stories he dug up referred then to another man entirely…

Two Robert Norses going to the Pole?

No way.

How did Antarctic authorities know a person was who he said he was? Nobody had asked Lewis for I.D. once he'd cleared customs. He'd shown up in New Zealand, identified himself to warehousing authorities, been checked off a list and issued the necessary paperwork and polar gear. Was the second man really Robert Norse? Or someone claiming to be him? And which Norse had emerged from the New Zealand wilderness two weeks later, too rushed to answer any questions?

What if the man under the dome wasn't the real Robert Norse at all? What if the hiking disappearance had allowed an impostor to take his place, that somehow their Norse had followed the other Norse to New Zealand, cleared customs under his real name and passport, made sure of Norse's disappearance, assumed his role, boarded the plane to the Pole…

Lewis flipped off the computer and stood up, dizzy, excited, and still bewildered. Who, then, was Doctor Bob?

And how to prove that he and the real Norse weren't the same man?