Dark Winter

CHAPTER TEN

This is what it's like to be dead, Lewis thought.

The searchers had stopped on the polar plateau three miles from the dome, clambering gratefully down from the Spryte to take a break from the snow tractor's ungainly lurch and guttural growl. It was a tiring vehicle to ride in, noisy and slow, with treads like a tank and a cramped, wedge-shaped orange cab. But it could also straddle small crevices, snort its way up forty-degree slopes, and clamber over pack ice. If Mickey Moss was lost on the plateau, the tractor should spot him.

He wasn't.

There was nothing to see. Distant radio towers appearing as fine as spider silk marked Scott-Amundsen base, its dome a bump on the horizon. In all other directions the whiteness was as empty as heaven and as frozen as hell. It was amazing how far they seemed from the station. The effect was strangely dreamlike, Lewis feeling as detached as an astronaut cut from a lifeline. He didn't like being out here, unprotected and cold.

Moss's body could have been covered by drifting snow, of course. But why would the astronomer walk out here? There was nothing to walk to: no hillock, no wrinkle, no vale, no stop. They'd gone first to the tiny solar observatory buried in the snow a mile from the dome, its ramp the place where Lewis had seen Mickey's snowmobile disappear that lonely midnight. It consisted of another metal box sunken in snow, its interior housing a small solar telescope boxed for the winter. No Mickey, no meteorite, no tracks. Beyond that, all destination disappeared once you left the polar station. There was only the wind.

"This is stupid," Tyson said.

The mechanic was their driver, pressed into reluctant service after the three hours that it took him to get their one operable Spryte in running condition and warmed up. If Moss was out here he was already dead, Tyson had reasoned, and if he was dead they'd probably never find him. The blowing snow would bury him. So what was the point?

"Do it anyway," Cameron had said quietly. No one else had said a word. Tyson had hesitated and then finally shrugged and obeyed.

A disappearance was serious.

Pulaski had been picked to accompany Tyson because of his military background. Lewis was drafted because of his unwanted association with the whole mess. Norse had come along on the theory he might guess where Moss had gone and could help manage the volatile Tyson.

Cameron wouldn't get on the same machine with the ostracized mechanic and so he was leading the others in a systematic search of the buildings. If Moss wasn't there he had to be out here. By crackling radio, they were confirming he was neither.

"Didn't he go off by himself all the time anyway?" Lewis asked.

"Just over to the Dark Side with his junk food," Pulaski said. "You could phone him. Never went off like this before."

Snow skittered up to their knees, blowing so fast that any tracks were erased within minutes of being made.

"So what'd they teach you about this in the Army?" Tyson asked Pulaski. It was an honest question, not a mocking one, and a tentative effort toward reopening some kind of communication with the group he'd scorned. Tyson had seen the piece of toast on his door and was quietly reconsidering his defiance. He was tired of the Pole but it was spooky how nobody was talking to him. Maybe he'd gone too far. Besides, the mechanic respected the cook's mysterious military past.

Pulaski let a silence hang for a moment, just to let Buck know where he stood, and then answered. "Have clear objectives. Inform your superiors. Maintain communication. Prepare for the unexpected." The cook squinted into the wind. "Doesn't look like Mickey did any of that to me."

"Anybody ever vanish like this before?" Lewis asked.

"The program's been pretty safe, considering. I mean there's been a lot of American deaths in Antarctica- more than fifty since World War II, if you count all the ship and plane injuries- but mostly industrial accidents. We've never lost a beaker at the Pole. And a guy as experienced as Mickey… it's weird, man."

They shuddered in the wind. The uncomfortable orange cab was beginning to look good again.

"So do we just keep driving around in circles?" Tyson demanded. "I'm about to go snow-blind."

"I'm betting he's not out here," the cook agreed. "Unless he was suicidal or something. And this is a tough way to go. It's like swimming out to sea- all of a sudden the station looks very far away and you turn back. Any sane man would do that."

"Was Mickey sane?" Lewis asked. Suddenly it seemed like a fair question, given the man's long association at Amundsen-Scott.

"This place was his life."

"And why would Big Rodent be suicidal?" Tyson added. He looked pointedly at Lewis. "The way I heard it, he was about to come into big money."

"Maybe that was the problem," Norse said quietly.

The others didn't reply. Everyone on station was contemplating the coincidence of Moss vanishing shortly after the meteorite disappeared. Everyone, Lewis was sure, was thinking about how his own arrival had brought bad luck.

"Maybe Mickey has fled or left or escaped the station on purpose, going somewhere else," Norse suggested.

Pulaski barked a laugh. "Where?" He gestured at the blank plateau. "There's no place to go to, Doc."

"Yeah," Tyson muttered. "Except Vostok."

"Where?" Norse turned to the mechanic.

"The closest Russian base," Tyson explained. "It's across the plateau, which means it's basically flat. No glaciers, no crevasses. Nobody in their right mind would want to go there but it's the one place you might actually drive to. People have joked about it."

The psychologist was interested. "You think Moss could have gone there?"

"No. It's seven hundred dick-shriveling miles. You'd need a vehicle, extra fuel, and I'm the guy in charge of the motor pool. Mickey didn't check anything out."

"Is it hard to drive a Spryte?"

Tyson looked at the psychologist dubiously. "It ain't hard on your brain. It's hard on your butt. But I'm telling you, we ain't missing a Spryte."

"But someone could do it."

Tyson contemplated the Spryte. "With that piece of shit? Maybe. You'd have to want to get there very, very bad to risk it. But it could be done, if you were lucky."

"But Moss didn't do it," Pulaski clarified.

The mechanic nodded. "No way. Dollars to donuts he's within five miles of where we're standing. And frozen stiffer than the poker that's up Rod Cameron's ass."

The station manager called another meeting in the galley that night. Lewis came last and sat in the back, depressed by the mood of bad feeling. Abby glanced his way and then turned her head, looking troubled. He'd said hello to her earlier, hoping she'd warmed, but she'd flitted by him in distraction, not wanting to talk. "It's not you, it's Mickey," she had muttered. Something about Moss's disappearance had hit her hard.

Norse sat to one side of the room near the serving counter, again scanning the crowd. They needed a shrink now, didn't they? Yet the psychologist looked somber, no doubt remembering Tyson's blow-up at the last meeting. Lewis bet that slug eating hadn't been in his script. Now Lewis watched Norse catch Abby's eye once and give her a look of reassurance as if to say, I understand. Had their psychologist become her confessor? Lewis found the idea irked him.

His own mood was gloomy. He'd come to the Pole for a fresh start and instead his counseling on the meteorite had dragged him into the middle of a serious crisis. You can't quit down here, Cameron had told him.

Well, hell.

The station manager got up from his chair and stiffly faced the group. His movement left two chairs empty, Lewis noticed. Pulaski without thinking had set out twenty-six, and Moss's was conspicuously vacant. Everyone eyed the extra seat uneasily. It was an accusation, a plea, a warning.

Cameron looked haggard. He hadn't slept in thirty-six hours and the e-mailed heat he was getting from Washington, D.C., was enough to set his terminal on fire. First he'd had to tattle on Tyson's water-rationing violation instead of simply fixing the problem himself. Now the possible death of Michael M. Moss would be shocking the polar establishment. Moss was Mr. South Pole. Worse, the people on station were family and now he'd somehow lost one of them. Cameron had apparently failed in the most fundamental way: at keeping them all alive. He was in no mood to forgive himself. At the sight of his drawn face the group's anxious chatter died away.

"I'm not very religious," the station manager began, his voice hoarse. He stopped, looking confused. Pulaski got up and poured Cameron a glass of water, handing it to him with the gravity of communion. The station manager drank, and the simple act seemed to steady him. He tried again.

"I'm not very religious, but I'd like to start this meeting with a prayer- not mine but our own prayers, each of us individually, from our own hearts. I don't know where Mickey is but let's acknowledge the central truth- that whatever our relationship to him, he was- is- the soul of this station. So I'd like a minute of silence to pray for his soul, which I hope is alive and which I fear is somehow, inexplicably, dead. At least none of us have seen hide nor hair of him for more than twenty-four hours. We've looked and looked and are going to keep on looking, but right now I think we need the help of a higher power. So, for just a minute, please, send our sonofabitch Old Antarctic Explorer your best thoughts."

He bowed his head. Lewis did too, trying to think what Moss might have been thinking, or where he might have gone. It made no sense. Nancy Hodge was looking with sad sympathy at Cameron: She knew a tragedy like this would threaten to erase whatever professional advancement the station manager had hoped to gain by coming down here. Norse was calmly letting his eyes scan the group, as if someone would betray themselves. And Buck Tyson looked uncertain, as if the possibility of Moss's death were making him reconsider his intransigence. Self-sufficiency was one thing, exclusion another. Tonight, everyone had shifted their chairs away from his.

"Well."

Heads came up and Cameron continued. "I've let NSF know our situation and that we're doing everything we can. They send us their best and urge us to keep searching. I'm going to launch another perimeter search around the station tomorrow and go through the buildings again. I don't… I don't know what else to do." He hesitated, looking gloomy. "Maybe he had a heart attack."

"He was strong as an ox," Pulaski said.

There was quiet.

"Strong people die, too," Nancy finally amended.

"In any event," the station manager went on, "we're getting our winter off to a stressful start and it's at times like these that the group has to hang together. Together!" He looked at Tyson worriedly. "It's hard to lose anybody, but especially Mickey. Damned if I know what happened. Could have been illness. Could have been an accident. Could have gotten lost. You probably have your own ideas. I pray to God he'll just show up, but we all know how cold it is outside."

Several faces turned to check the television monitor. The temperature was sixty-one degrees below zero. A rising wind had pushed the chill factor to minus ninety-two.

"Why don't you tell us what this is really about, Rod?" a voice demanded. It was Harrison Adams, the astronomer. "As a scientist, I don't believe in coincidences."

"What does that mean?"

"The rumor is that Mickey found a meteorite in the ice. Someone apparently took it. He demands an investigation. Then he disappears. I mean, come on."

"What are you saying, Harrison?"

"That five million dollars makes this more than a simple missing person."

There was a murmur through the crowd as speculation suddenly became baldly stated fact.

"Five million what?" Pika asked in confusion.

"Take your ear protectors off once in a while, doofus!" Geller chided.

"Now, hold on," Cameron cautioned. "We don't know that."

"Do the arithmetic," Adams said. "That's what it comes out to if this meteorite is really a chunk of Mars or the moon, and our fingie isn't blowing smoke. Right? So that's my question. What do we know? Not that Mickey had a heart attack. Only that we're missing a stone that some people- irresponsibly, I might add- have wildly speculated might be worth a lot of money. Next thing we know, boom. Mickey's gone."

"Jed Lewis just gave a professional opinion."

Adams swung to look at the fingie. "It's an amateur, unscientific, seat-of-the-pants opinion and this problem started when Jed Lewis stepped off the plane."

"That's not fair, Doctor Adams." It was Norse. "Our meteorologist was asked to give a geologic judgment, based on his professional background, by Doctor Moss himself."

"That's right," Cameron said. "There's no evidence that anything's connected."

"And no evidence it isn't," Adams said.

"Jed said he was searched," Nancy Hodge spoke up. "What did you find?"

"Nothing," Cameron replied.

"Several of us were searched," Norse chimed in. "Including Mickey. Nothing was found."

Abby, Lewis noticed, had turned her face to the floor. Something was wrong. Had something been found?

"I want to emphasize here how little we know," the psychologist went on. "We don't know if the meteorite really had value. We don't know if it was lost or stolen. We don't know what happened to Mickey. Any conclusions at this point are premature."

Cameron looked at the psychologist with gratitude. Maybe Norse had his uses. An excited buzzing broke out among the group.

"So now what?" Gabriella finally shouted.

Cameron took a breath. "Now we decide what to do. Together. In trust."

"The only problem being that one of us may be a thief. Or worse." It was Pulaski.

"Exactly," said Norse, and heads turned back to him. "So a more realistic option is to work together in temporary distrust. To scrutinize each other carefully in order to get all bad blood out of the way."

"How do we do that?" Geller asked.

"Our real problem is lack of information," the psychologist said. "We're afraid because we don't know. Accordingly, I have a proposal to make. It's unusual, but this is an unusual situation. It has to be a group decision, not imposed from above. I was skeptical when Mickey himself first proposed it but it might be the quickest way to reinforce our belief in each other." He paused, his eyes polling the group, seeking permission to broach an idea. Physically and in personality, he was a more commanding presence than Cameron. His shower idea hadn't broken Tyson, but the mechanic's defiance was cracking. Norse seemed to have a better idea what to do.

"Go ahead, Doc," Geller prompted.

"I propose a broader search," Norse went on. "Not of the station, where we've been looking for Doctor Moss, but of our rooms, to look for the meteorite. I suspect we'll find nothing, but any discovery that would clarify this situation would help. Finding nothing, in contrast, might reassure each of us about each other."

"Our rooms are the only bloody privacy we have," objected Dana Andrews.

"I sympathize," Norse said. "I propose to limit the searchers to two people, myself and Doctor Hodge. I'll check the rooms of male personnel, she the female. As we've said, I've already been searched: I'm not asking anyone to undergo anything I haven't already experienced. We'll do it now, while the rest of you wait. If anything is locked, we ask for your keys. What we discover remains entirely confidential unless it has some bearing on the disappearance of Doctor Moss or the meteorite." He glanced at Cameron. "Agreed?"

"No!" Tyson yelled. "I don't want some self-appointed shrink searching me!"

"That's because you've got more phallic objects in that armory of yours than a nymphomaniac in a nunnery, bathing boy," Geller scoffed. The others laughed.

"Fuck you." Tyson glowered, his belligerence immediately returning in response to mockery. He was always ready for a fight.

"Nobody's afraid of a man who showers more than a teenage girl, Buck."

"Yeah? Try me sometime."

"My creditor friends tell me even the biggest goon can slip in the shower and not get up, if he stays in too long."

The group stirred uneasily at this threat.

"Enough, enough," Cameron said. The station manager was trying to look stern but was fighting the start of a smile at this needling Tyson was getting. The mechanic looked uncomfortable and scowled, avoiding anyone's gaze. It wasn't easy being toast.

"Is this going to work?" Alexi Molotov interjected. "You would have to be stupid to steal a meteorite and hide it in your room, no?"

"Who said people were smart?" Norse replied.

"You would be even more stupid to find the meteorite and not keep it for yourself," said Hiro. "Perhaps we should check the pockets of our two doctors at the end." The others laughed nervously. "Perhaps they hunt for themselves."

"You agree to a strip search, Doc?" Pulaski asked lightly.

"Only if you can hide a meteorite in there," Norse replied. Laughter again, the tension breaking slightly. "Look, everyone can come along but the idea is not to embarrass anyone. Nancy and I are used to handling things in confidence. We're trying to eliminate suspicion, not create it. Trust us, this once, so you can trust each other."

With glances, the group polled itself in uneasy silence. Tyson looked angry but said nothing. Lewis had no sympathy for anybody. I've already been probed, he thought. Now it's your turn.

Adams spoke up. "I agree to this search," the astronomer said. "I have nothing to hide. But I think we also need to start using our heads as well as our feet. Maybe Mickey left other clues. Electronic ones. If I could get his passwords I could examine his hard drive."

Carl Mendoza wryly smiled, as if there were something more behind this idea than Adams was admitting. Geller smirked. Cameron looked questioningly at Abby, their computer technician.

"I have them," she said in a quiet voice. "It's privacy, again."

"I guess I'd draw the line at our hard drives," Norse said uneasily. "That's like reading our thoughts. We do need some privacy."

"I'm not talking about our files, I'm talking about Mickey's," Adams said. "I worked with the guy. Maybe he left a note. This is an emergency, dammit."

"It's for his own good," Mendoza added guilelessly.

Geller rolled his eyes.

"If Mickey's dead, so is his issue of privacy," Adams went on.

The psychologist opened his mouth to disagree again and then closed it, considering all the ramifications. "It's a group decision."

Cameron looked at the group. "Well?"

No one objected.

"Let's do it, then," the station manager said quietly.

Norse and Nancy Hodge left the galley to go through the berthing areas. Abby and Adams departed to open up Moss's hard drive. The mood of the remainder was somber. Cameron tried to lead a desultory discussion about outdoor safety but no one responded. Nobody wanted to talk about rules. The clock seemed to have stopped.

"What if we never even find Mickey?" Dana abruptly wondered aloud.

"We'll find him," Pulaski said. "Ten to one he had a stroke over this meteorite and got covered up by snow. Another good wind and his parka will pop back out."

"I'm not even willing to say he's dead yet," Cameron said. "But if he is, it's a lesson to us all. Sign out, take a radio."

"That's the third time you've said that," Geller groaned. "We learned that stuff way back in Denver and Mickey knew it, too. Look, can we continue this discussion upstairs? I need to clear my sinuses." Upstairs was the bar.

"Yeah," Steve Calhoun, the station carpenter, chimed in. "There are times when life needs to be dealt with through an alcoholic stupor."

"Getting drunk isn't very professional at a time like this," the station manager objected. He was worried how this would all look in the reports. Look back home.

"But it's damned rational," Dana rejoined.

"NSF wants us to keep our wits about us."

"Your Yank bureaucrats are ten bloody thousand miles away! For God's sake, Rod, we're going to bloody choke each other if we can't lighten up!"

The station manager looked at them gloomily. Tyson had already put everyone on edge, and now this. He was clearly outnumbered. "One drink each, then. That's all."

"Right, Dad." They pushed past Cameron and surged upstairs, crowding the small room like frat boys in a phone booth. All but Tyson, who remained downstairs, determinedly alone. Cameron hesitated, not wanting to wait in the same room with the mechanic. "I'm going to check on Harrison!" he called.

"We won't miss you!" Dana sang back.

Music came on. A few of the winter-overs began tapping to its beat, relieving some of the tension. It was creepy being searched. Creepy having their station manager be so morose. Creepy having Moss disappear.

Lewis got a beer. The elbow-to-elbow jostling made him feel less isolated and he began to cheer up a little. The music was cranked higher. He wished he could talk to Abby but she was off with Adams. He was curious about her now. There was something she wasn't telling.

Molotov came over instead, his water glass half full of vodka. "Now, Lewis," he said, clasping the American on the shoulder. "From you I need to know how to sell this rock. In America, where all the money is. Just in case I ever find it. Yes?"

"Too late, buddy. Secret's out. If we ever find it I'm afraid it's going to stay with Uncle Sam."

"Well then, let's spend the winter looking for another one!" The Russian grinned, showing a steel flash of old Soviet dentistry. "The jewel of Mars, no?"

Everyone was joking about what Norse and Nancy would find in their rooms. Lingerie. Sex toys. Marijuana grow lights. Offshore bank accounts. Jimmy Hoffa.

"It's like going nekkid," said Calhoun.

"Except the docs are the only ones to see us in our birthday suits," his companion woodworker, Hank Anderson, said. "And praise God for that. I see the crack of your ass too much already, every time you bend over to drive a nail."

"Didn't know you were lookin', Henry."

With nothing else to do while they waited, some people began dancing, awkward in the press of bodies. Lewis, still feeling isolated by his own clumsy investigation, maneuvered himself against a wall. He thought the bar was a good idea to break the tension but he wasn't really in a mood to talk. He felt like bad luck himself.

He watched Gabriella Reid slither through the press of people, teasing, taunting, a serial flirt, inviting attention. Eventually she came up to him, grinning at his wallflower stance, a beer in one of her hands. "You're all alone."

"People are learning to avoid me."

"It's unfair that people blame you."

"I guess it's because I'm new."

"I like new people." She rolled a long-neck on her lips, eyes dancing. "Antarctic Ten, I judge."

"I've heard what that is." He was wary.

She smiled mischievously behind the bottle. "Okay. Eleven, maybe. How about me?"

He smiled distractedly, glancing beyond her. Abby still hadn't come back.

"Don't bother with Ice Cream. She's frigid."

Lewis focused on the woman in front of him. "Frigid? Or careful?"

"She holds things in. Not me." Gabriella swayed in time to the music and handed him her beer. Turning a circle, she pulled her waffle-weave long-underwear top over her head. A silk undershirt beneath showed the line of a low bra and the bump of nipples. "Getting hot in here. Hot enough for the Three Hundred Degree Club."

"What is that, anyway?"

She smiled mysteriously. "The place where you learn where you really are."

The music cranked still higher and it became difficult to hear, the beat pounding against the walls. No one was obeying Cameron's admonition of one drink. The winter-overs were sweating. The air was rich and dark and heavy. The mood was tribal. Lewis allowed himself to dance once with Gabriella and then, when Abby didn't return, did it again.

She smiled at him. The invitation was obvious.

"What are you doing down here?" he stalled, raising his voice above the music.

"I like to be at the center of things."

"The Pole?"

"Everything comes together here. All the lines, all the numbers. It's a place of power. I worship natural powers, you know. Nature. Instinct. Emotion."

"What about science?"

"That's for beakers. What about feelings?"

"Beakers have them."

"No, they don't. They have to be drawn out."

She made him nervous. "I'll bet you're good at that."

"I can show you the way."

Christ. It was tempting. "Excuse me. I've got to check on something."

"Don't check too long."

He moved away, maneuvering toward the bar. He ducked behind as if looking for something and Geller sidled over. "Looks like you still have a friend."

"She makes me nervous."

"She'll make more than that, buddy. Until you lay off the meteorite and we figure out what's up with Mickey, she might be about the only friend you have."

Lewis looked at the maintenance man sourly. This place was too damn small. "Why does everyone assume I'm to blame?"

"I don't." Geller sipped a scotch. "There's so many people sick of Moss that I won't be surprised if we never find him. Who wants to?"

"I don't believe that."

"You can bet Adams is going to use those passwords later to snare some of Mickey's data. Clues my ass. He's robbing the dead. And you noticed Carl Mendoza? He looks like he won the lottery. With Moss not undercutting him he might actually keep his grants."

"That's cynical."

"You lose money to the wrong people and you get cynical."

"Moss said he made everyone else's research possible."

"As long as they sucked up. Moss was also a Class-A prick."

"What do you think happened to him?"

"That he saved his reputation by dying."

It was after midnight. Then one, two o'clock. Everyone danced with everyone. Stocky Dana Andrews shook like a Maori, and Lena Jindrova turned an erect circle with a drink perched bizarrely on her head. Gabriella moved sinuously among the other men, her body a kind of social lubricant, erasing inhibition. Even Linda Brown, Pulaski's plain and overweight assistant in the kitchen, lost her stiffness and began to gyrate. The steaminess brought a kind of communion that relieved the anxiety over Mickey. For a blessed respite, the chill disappeared.

By the time Norse's head appeared at the foot of the stairs, then, they were drunk. He bounded upward and Nancy was right behind him, her eyes wide and dark, following with a hand on his belt. A ragged chorus of hoots and Bronx cheers erupted at their reappearance. "The underpants police!"

The crowd parted slightly to embrace them and pull them in, like an amoeba swallowing prey. "Who is it?" a drunken Pulaski shouted. "Which of us is the thief?"

Norse grinned reassuringly. "We found not a hint of scandal. You're all the most boring people in the world."

Now the crowd booed, clamoring for salacious detail. Who had the most secrets to hide?

"Our lips are sealed," Nancy said.

"Ply them with alcohol!" Pulaski cried.

A bottle of champagne erupted, fountaining over the two newcomers. Norse and Nancy ducked, but not quickly enough. White foam spewed over them, adding to the heady salt and sweetness of the room's cloying air. It ran down their clothes, making them sticky.

Norse staggered in the press of bodies and gasped, suddenly grabbing the neck of a bottle and taking a swig. He passed it to Nancy and grinned with relief at this enclosure by the crowd. His eyes swept them triumphantly and for just a moment Lewis thought he saw a wistful shadow in the psychologist's survey of the others, the same longing to belong that Lewis himself felt. Then commanding self-assurance replaced it, like a mask. Norse was the king of self-control.

Lewis could learn from him.

"What now?" Geller shouted.

"We've still got a mystery," Norse said, handing back a few keys they had been lent for personal lockers. He drank again. "We tried to put things back, but Carl, I accidentally broke one of your candles. Just clumsiness. I apologize."

"You didn't puncture my sex doll, I hope."

"No, but I had to inflate her to make sure she worked."

"Do we trust?" Dana asked.

Norse grinned. "Personal choice."

"Does that mean we're innocent?"

"It means you can choose to believe in each other."

"And how long do we keep partying, Doc?" Geller asked.

"Until I've drunk enough myself. Or until Harrison- "

As if on cue, though, the music abruptly cut. Everyone groaned. The lights came up and they were blinking, the communal mood shattered. It was Cameron, who'd come up quietly and slipped behind the bar. "Time to pack it in," the station manager said gruffly.

The group protested. "Rod- "

"Shut up. We've got something."

That silenced them. More footsteps, and Abby and Harrison Adams trooped up the stairs. They looked graver than Norse and Nancy and as they pushed into the hot room the crowd split apart from them, squeezing against the walls, as if this news threatened to be unwelcome. Everyone was suddenly uneasy again. It was deathly quiet.

"Did you find anything in the rooms?" Cameron asked Norse and Nancy from the bar.

"Nothing," Norse replied.

"Well, Harrison found something," the station manager said grimly. "Doctor Adams?"

"There's an e-mail on Mickey's drive," the astronomer said. "We're going to trace it if we can. Meanwhile, it points to a place we haven't looked."

"Which means I need a few men to volunteer now, pronto, and the rest of you in bed so I can have you tomorrow, half awake and not too hungover," Cameron said.

"What's going on?" Mendoza asked.

"It's a place I hadn't thought to look, frankly. We're going to go there now."

"Where?" Everyone was curious.

"Where even Mickey Moss had no business being."

"Where?"

"The abandoned base."