Dark Winter

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Flat gray clouds spoiled the final exit of the sun. There was a week of overcast, as dark and featureless as a pot lid, and when it blew away, the lingering orb was finally gone and the long polar night had begun. The sky was still dusk blue. A couple of stars popped out, tiny and cold, the first outriders of the glory to come. Instead of seeming foreboding, the approaching dark heralded a kind of peace to Lewis. The sun's scheduled disappearance meant it would reappear on schedule, too, and when that happened he would be near release from the Pole. Meanwhile, the ground had lost shadow and definition and the boundary between snow and sky became even more indistinct.

At first he didn't mind his isolation in the Clean Air quadrant. It spared him the necessity of trying to prove his own innocence. He didn't have to act some kind of normal relationship with a group of people half suspicious that he might be a murderer at worst and a bad-luck enzyme at best. Solitary, he called it, except that each day he had four hours in which orbiting satellites lifted high enough above the polar horizon to allow access to the Internet. Lewis monitored world news that seemed increasingly remote, shopped for products he had no use for and couldn't get delivered, and kept his mentor Sparco updated on his weather measurements. He found himself surprisingly intrigued by the accumulating data points of temperature, wind, snow, carbon dioxide, and ozone. Graphing the readings was like painstakingly sculpting a work of art. When winds were calm he watched from the windows as Gerald Follett launched his atmospheric balloons, observing the quiet routine of inflation, rigging, and recording. The man had declined Lewis's help, looking nervous when Lewis even offered, but the regularity of the task was somehow reassuring. Life went on. There was a purity to the science, and a purity to the dry cold that Lewis found bracing. Meteorology itself was a constant dance of interwoven factors, like the twisted glass of a kaleidoscope suggesting different global futures.

He'd found a better purpose.

His exile also spared him fevered group speculation on the deaths of Moss and Adams. No theories, no rumors, no jokes. It made him calmer. People were complicated but science was not. The universe was designed to be understood. Only humans were an enigma.

Yet when his tasks were completed he was increasingly lonely as well. The others brought him a mattress, a bucket, and food as if he were a leper. His basic dilemma was that day after day went by without mishap, according to Cameron. There were no disappearances, no discoveries, and no confessions, and thus nothing to turn suspicion away from him. Lewis comes, and things go wrong. Lewis is banished, and normalcy returns. No G-man parachuted in, no conclusions were drawn.

A week drifted by, empty of real news.

Then Abby came, the first time he'd seen her since Adams's death.

Once more he detected her breath before he noticed her approach. A spike in his carbon measurements that he duly noted in the log. He stepped to a window and watched her walk the flag line, following a path of snow clumpy enough that she occasionally stumbled, a heavy daypack adding to her clumsiness in the dusk. He'd learned to recognize her from a distance: her quick, straightforward walk, the rather tight swing of her arms, her habit of sometimes tucking them around her torso as if to warm herself, bowing her head in thought like a bird at roost- and then popping upright suddenly to peer around like a startled dove. It was funny how much you could tell from posture and movement. Everyone looked alike in their orange parkas and black bib pants and yet they didn't. A tilt of head, a curve of back, an angle of foot: stances as individualistic as fingerprints.

She clanged up the stairs, stamped snow loose in the vestibule, and came inside, swinging the backpack onto the floor with a soft thud. "More food, Enzyme."

Lewis grimaced. He was getting tired of hot-plate leftovers. "Bread and water?"

"Meat loaf and macaroni. A little junk food as well, for morale. Chemical preservatives disguised as cake, salt disguised as chips, sugar dusted with a little flour. Cueball promised he won't put in enough to poison you."

"Not without a group vote, at least." He meant it as a joke, but it came out sounding sour. "I'm sure everyone misses me."

"Forgotten you, actually." She shed her coat. "Too many troubles."

Trouble? He was shamelessly hungry for gossip. "A suspect unmasked?"

"Just bad feeling. It's turning into a pretty grim winter."

"Rod told me nothing's happening."

"That's because he doesn't know what to do. Tyson has gone nuts. He thinks everyone's against him, which we are. One shower stinks. Yet he won't back down. He's announced that since no one appreciates his contributions to our little society he's going to find the meteorite and make himself rich, and to hell with anyone else. So he's stomping around, ignoring his job, and even threatening to wig out of here on a Spryte or something- fixing those is the one thing he'll work on. Cameron blew up at him in the galley and said he's pulling Buck's bonus, as if he had any chance of getting it anyway, so then they almost got into a fistfight. It scared everybody. Geller fantasizes about putting a contract out on the guy, Pulaski is about to call Buck out, the beakers are bitching about not getting enough work done, and Bob is writing it all up like we're a bunch of lunatics. Which maybe we are. We're toasting at record speed."

"Jesus." Tyson was being pushed toward an explosion. Maybe Norse's plan of removing Lewis from the center of things was working after all: Bad feeling couldn't be blamed on him. Yet the tension sounded risky. "So you came to visit the only sane man on station?"

She looked at him warily. "Just to deliver groceries."

"Even though I might be dangerous. The mysterious fingie. The enzyme." Impulsively, he took a step toward her to see what she'd do.

"Doctor Bob actually suggested I deliver the food this time. Said it's good for you to see other people. And he said that…" She stopped, suddenly flustered.

"And what?"

"Nothing." She looked away.

"What?"

"He said we mesh well together."

He took another step. "I thought I made people nervous, Abby."

She'd stiffened, he noticed, not as sure of him as she pretended. "Not me. I'm not afraid of you, Jed."

Another step, very close now. "If so, you're the only one."

"Stop it. I'm trying to trust. Don't put everything to the test."

He stopped, feeling foolish. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't joke around. It's just that the whole situation is so… absurd. This place, this paranoia…"

"People are spooked. I'm spooked. We all just want to go home."

"And yet we can't."

"Yes." She slumped in a chair. "Stuck with each other." She squinted at him, slightly annoyed at his advance. Her lips were full, her neck high. Her hands were small, good for working with electronics. She was prettier than he remembered. He realized that he'd missed her.

"I like you, Abby." The bold confession surprised himself, and he was pleased at his own sudden boldness. "I like you a lot. I'm attracted to you. And I'm lonely. I'm glad you came out here."

She smiled wanly. "Just don't take an ax to me and make me regret it."

"You trusted me enough to come out here, right?"

"I guess."

"And I have to trust you, right?"

She looked wary. "I guess."

He sat in a chair opposite her. "If we're going to trust each other, we have to talk, I think. Too much has happened. You have to tell me about that photograph in Mickey's pocket."

She squirmed. "I don't know about that picture."

"But you know something, right? I saw it upset you. Abby, I'm a damned murder suspect. I'm in exile. I need help. What in the hell is going on?"

"I don't know." She looked away. "It turns out it's a photo from my personnel file. I checked and it's missing from the stuff NSF sent down."

"Mickey lifted it?"

"That's not what he said. Mickey brought it to me that night not long after the meteorite was stolen. He said he found it in Doctor Bob's room when you searched each other, that there was a wall panel with screws missing and it had been tucked in a slit there. He said that he didn't trust Norse, that he didn't like shrinks. He wanted to know what my photograph was doing there. He said if I was having a problem with Bob, he had authority enough to help me. He said he was prepared to be my friend."

"Jesus. Doctor Bob?"

"That's what I thought. So…" She faltered a moment, summoning courage. "So I went to Norse and told him I had some personal problems I wanted help with and needed to talk to him privately in his room. And then I went there, blabbering away, looking at the walls, and I didn't see anything like what Doctor Moss described. No screws missing, no gap in the panels. So I told Bob what Mickey had showed me and he suddenly got very concerned and agitated and warned me to stay away from the astronomer at all costs. I was just dumbfounded but he said there'd been past complaints from young women on the base about Moss coming on to them and worse, this old guy bullying and pawing them because of his power on station. That he invented excuses to get close to them; that he even researched the next group coming down, picking out the pretty ones. And that one reason Norse was sent down here was to check out those rumors. And that Moss probably suspected that and didn't like him because of it, and that possibly this whole meteorite thing was an attempt to distract attention." She said it in a rush.

Lewis was skeptical. "A geezer like Moss? Boy, I don't know. He was pretty regal. I can't imagine him coming on to anybody."

"That's what I thought. But then Bob had these files. I couldn't read them because of the confidentiality but he showed me a packet of what he said were complaints that had been filed… it was horrible! I didn't know what to think! And then Mickey dies…"

"Suicide."

"Yes." She nodded miserably.

"He was afraid of exposure."

"I think so. I think Norse is some kind of investigator."

"Except Bob Norse told me he thought it could be murder. Or at least that's what NSF thinks, back in D.C. And for my own protection I'm sitting out here."

"Don't you see? NSF wants a murder. Or an accident. Anything but a big sexual scandal like Tailhook that's going to throw a wrench in their plans to get congressional money to rebuild this base. Reconstruction is going to cost a hundred million dollars and they can't afford to have their star scientist exposed as a rogue after Clarence Thomas and Monica Lewinsky and all that. So Norse thinks you're in danger, Jed. You're not one of the fraternity. You're just this oil guy down to make a few bucks over the winter. They might try to pin something on you, to distract from any stories about Mickey. Nothing to file in court, because that would just make matters worse. Just enough suspicion and rumor to muddy the waters. To make you the fall guy, send you away under a cloud. Doctor Bob is trying to help you. That's why he encouraged me to come out here."

"What about Harrison Adams?"

"His death is probably a coincidence, but who knows? Doctor Bob is as confused as we are."

"This is too crazy…"

"Which is exactly why he's here."

Lewis sighed, trying to think. Harrison Adams had been going through Moss's computer. Had he learned too much? Was there something incriminating he needed to discuss with Lewis? And if the deaths weren't back-to-back accidents, or a suicide-accident, then who was responsible? The only one he could see with a stake in the future of base reconstruction was Rod Cameron, who might be angling for a promotion in the NSF bureaucracy. But would Cameron kill to cover up a scandal? It was too far-fetched. You needed someone truly loony, or someone desperate for that meteorite.

He looked at her. "What do you think? Of me?"

"My heart tells me you're just unlucky- in the wrong place at the wrong time. My brain tells me not to trust anyone. But I'm here, aren't I? Maybe all this is nothing. Moss decided to go exploring, slipped, and fell. Harrison got caught in a storm. It happens."

He smiled ruefully. "So you risk bringing me dinner."

She looked away. "I'm attracted to you, too, Jed," she said.

The admission took him as much by surprise as his own.

"It's going to be a long winter. We both need a friend," she amended.

Her words filled him with longing. The tundra had been liberating, when he walked away from his oil job, but the aftermath had been lonely. He'd had no place he belonged, no purpose to his life. And now, suddenly, there was this woman.

"Abby, I think I need to kiss you," he decided.

She looked at him wryly.

"I'm going to go crazy if I can't kiss you right now," he insisted.

"You are crazy. We're all crazy. We just decided that."

"Yes. That's why it's all right to kiss you."

She considered it cautiously. "If we kiss, things change."

"Yes, like an enzyme. I want to change things with you. I know there's that other guy but he's not here and we are. He's not in this and we are."

"Then what happens?"

"I don't know. I just know it's important to do this now."

She looked at him: amused, impatient, uncertain. "I'm afraid I'll like it."

He grinned. "I'm afraid you won't."

She hesitated, as judicious as if reviewing a contract, reviewing her own instincts about him. Then she made up her mind. "Okay."

He knelt next to her and lifted his face to hers, struck by the green hazel of her eyes and the dark curl of her hair on each cheek. She coolly waited as he cupped the nape of her neck, bending her to him, but when his lips gently touched hers she shivered and closed her eyes. He came away and her lips parted slightly, revealing a glimpse of the pearl of her teeth. He kissed her again, more deeply this time, and she started to respond. Then she turned her head, sighing, and his lips brushed her cheek and ear and followed the curve of her neck to the collar of her Thermax underwear…

"That's enough." She stood up.

He remained kneeling, looking up at her. "No, it isn't."

"I like you, Jed, but too much is going on. I've got a lot to think about." Her eyes were darting around the room, betraying her confusion.

"You think too much, you know."

"Let's just leave it there for now."

He stood as well, grinning, savoring his small triumph. He'd tasted her. She'd liked it. "I want to get to know you."

"Yes." She said it in a tone that suggested she wasn't at all sure that was a good idea. Yet she wanted to surrender, he was sure of it.

"I'm tired of exile. I think I want to get back to the dome."

"Yes."

Suddenly he was excited. Isolation out in Clean Air was preferable to being ostracized inside the dome. But Abby's confession of attraction made everything different. Here at least was a friend. Ally. He'd work side by side with her. Talk to her. Endure the winter with her.

"Go talk to Rod for me. Tell him to bring me in."

"I don't know if Doctor Bob thinks that's a good idea yet."

"To hell with Doctor Bob."

"He's trying to protect you."

"Isolate me for his observations." He'd seen Norse confer with Abby. Maybe the shrink wanted to put the moves on her himself. His own exile was a convenience. "Screw Norse. I want to be with you."

"Well, then you talk to Cameron. It will be embarrassing if I do it."

"Yes. Absolutely." He felt energized. She was receptive to a partnership. He could talk the station manager into anything.

"You'll have to call him but he's pretty stressed out."

"I will."

"Maybe in the morning. He's a little more rested then."

"Good idea."

"People are still pretty edgy in the dome. Snapping at each other. It's not going to be easy for you if you come back."

"I'll be okay if I can get to talk to you."

"That's all I'm promising."

"I know."

"Rod is pretty jumpy. Be patient."

"I will."

But when she left to do some maintenance work on the computers in astronomy he decided he couldn't wait. To hell with patience. To hell with tomorrow. He was sick of being isolated in Clean Air like some kind of germ. He went to the phone and called Cameron's office. There was no answer, so he dialed the galley. Pulaski told him to try a radio. "Our station manager is making his rounds. Can't it wait?"

"No, it can't." Lewis hung up and picked up the radio. "Enzyme to Ice Pick. Over."

After a few tries, Cameron's raspy, tired voice finally came on. "This is Cameron."

"This is Lewis. Where are you?" Anybody with a radio could listen in but he was too determined to care.

"Checking the fuel arch."

"Rod, can we meet to talk?"

There was a wary silence. Then: "I'm kind of busy."

"I'm going nuts in Clean Air."

"It's for your own good, buddy."

"I've been talking with Abby. Let me come back to the dome. She can keep an eye on me. Lock me in my room at night if you have to."

He stalled. "I'll talk about it to Doctor Bob."

"Doctor Bob has no authority here. You do. I've been exiled without charges. That's unconstitutional, isn't it?"

More uncomfortable silence. "I don't know. It's easier having you out there." The implication was plain.

"Rod, I think it was suicide. Suicide and an accident. You can't blame me and you can't blame yourself."

"Things are kind of messy, Jed."

"You mean Tyson?"

Cameron's voice was cold. "Tyson's a dead man. Don't bring him up to me."

"Don't blame me for him. Let me come over to talk. Let's meet privately, you and me. To talk."

Another long silence. "I have to check out these tanks."

"I'll find you there. We'll talk in private."

"Enzyme…" Cameron sounded besieged, reluctant. "Listen. Stay in Clean Air. When I finish this inspection I'll swing by and see how you're doing, okay?"

"Will we talk?"

"Yes." It was a sigh. "We'll talk."

"Talk about changing things?"

"We'll talk."

It was enough. "Roger that." He put down the radio, impatient and hopeful. Maybe with Abby Dixon he could find a way to live in this place.

I Choose Survival

Every once in a while you arrive at a point in life where you can't afford to make a mistake. Might be a job. Might be a romance. Might be a gamble or the way you choose to answer with a gun pointed to your head. Might be an icy road and oncoming headlights and that drink you had that was one too many. You can't know when or how it's going to come. But when it does, you have to get things right.

If you don't, you're dead, figuratively and literally.

My climbing companions didn't get it right.

For the first two hundred feet I was optimistic. It was difficult climbing but not impossible, even for relative amateurs. There were cracks and toeholds and chimneys enough to squirt our way upward, though the rocks we dislodged banged down and set off a fresh round of squeals and shouts from the kids below. Crash! Sorry about that. Hey, we were making it, inching back up, getting to a point where maybe everyone but Fat Boy could climb back out of purgatory, Chisel Chin and Carrot Top straining up to each piton, breathing hard, eyes wide, limbs trembling, yes- but making it. Our lives were at stake. The two kids were doing what they had to do.

I was feeling good about saving them. I was pulling us out of the trap.

To understand my choice you have to picture how piss-poor miserable it was on Wallace Wall. At first the light had strengthened as the sun rose, giving a crumb of encouragement, but then the storm blotted out any sight of Old Sol and the morning grew dim and murky. Snow was blowing horizontally, turning the rock slippery, and small puffs of snow broke off from the cornice at the top of the wall and rained down on us like sand into a pit, each of us tensing in case the drizzle heralded a larger avalanche. The gusts were up to forty, I learned later, and the windchill well below zero. Our mittens were off to allow us to grip but the rock was shredding our glove liners and our fingers were turning numb and bloody. The wall angle wasn't vertical but almost so, and it was a strain to stay glued. The farther we ascended, the more anxious I became. I could imagine the fear the two kids were feeling, the exposure, the helplessness. I kept remembering Kressler and Fleming pinwheeling off that cliff.

It was Chisel Chin who made the mistake. The first rule of climbing is to keep at least three of your four limbs in contact with the mountain at any one time. He was impatient and had both a foot and a hand reaching for fresh holds when a rock broke and both legs were suddenly churning in empty space. He hung for a moment on one exhausted arm, kicking in the air for substitute footholds he'd failed to locate first- I'd warned him! — and then with a grunt he dropped, all of this happening in the flash of a second. I had time to jam one forearm in a crack, almost breaking it, and braced against the shock. He fell to the limit of his rope, yelling, and it cinched on my waist so hard that I felt like I was being crushed against a wall by a car bumper, the impact expelling my breath and igniting my adrenaline.

With an experienced team we probably would have recovered. If Chisel Chin had a few seconds to dangle in space until he forced down his panic and found fresh purchase he could have taken the pressure off the line, we could have stabilized, and after a minute's shaky breathing we could have started up again. But when he dropped past Carrot Top the second boy jerked in surprise and panicked, coming off the wall for no reason at all, his wits gone in a blaze of shock. He dropped heavily, a condemned man through a trapdoor, wrenching at me, and then hung like a cow, both of them swinging and screaming and sawing on me with the weight of four hundred pounds.

"Grab something! Get the weight off me!" My own panic erupted and all I could see was that picture of Kressler and Fleming, tumbling lazily through empty gray air. The two kids were going to pull me off with them and we'd spend the last moments of our existence watching each other's sick dread as the glacier rushed up at us.

Or we could act.

"Grab, grab! I'm coming off the cliff!"

They kicked and twirled like the condemned.

When that life moment of split decision comes, you don't think but you react, and you react with instincts formed by all the thinking you've done before. I'm a strong man, but not strong enough to handle two heavily weighted climbers swinging across the face of a cliff, arms and legs flailing, rock peeling off, everyone roaring and cursing together. I can carry myself, but not the rest of the world with me.

So I reached for my knife.

If I'd fallen, every kid in that class would be dead. I knew that. I was their only hope in the world. The choice wasn't really about my survival, but theirs. Yet I had to think for myself, too. Think of myself.

I really did it for them.

I reached with my knife and slashed at the climbing line, even as I felt my other forearm being dragged out of its crack.

In memory there may have been just a moment's slackening of tension as one or both of the boys briefly grabbed back onto the rock. It was a confused experience and I'll never know for sure. Don't you think I've wondered, in the dark sweats of the night? But it was too late because I was already cutting, desperate to get free of them, and finally the rope parted and I slapped back against the cliff, making a woof, and then below me I heard long, terrified screaming.

I knew better than to look down.

From the ledge below there were more shouts, cries, wailing, terror as the students' two companions flashed past them. I ignored it all. That part was past me now, and there was nothing I could do. The surviving kids called to me like a wounded man calls for his mother and I ignored them, knowing that there was no second chance, that destiny had made its irrevocable turn. Instead I waited a couple minutes to catch my breath, my sweat freezing on my collar and hair. I still had presence of mind. I took the end of the cut rope and rubbed it against the rough igneous rock for the longest time, almost frantic, until I had frayed it into ragged string. I reached with my knife and put it into a deep crevice on Wallace Wall where it will never be found, I hope.

Then I resumed climbing.

What else could I do?