Dark Winter

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

They unwired and unbolted the smaller door that led to the dome ramp, breaching their fortress for this one grave duty. Then they filed upward to the plateau like a hooded procession of monks, Lewis bound and hobbled. Everyone was there because Norse insisted that everyone be there, that they make this decision together, that they unify as a group. "When we explain that we did this to save the station, it has to be unanimous," he told them. "Beyond a reasonable doubt."

Several looked sick. But they came along.

The night outside was green and gold and red, a shimmer of auroral light caught by the earth's magnetic field. Lewis was going to die under the colors of Christmas. The stars had added their illumination to the starlit glow of snow, and the plateau was a silver mirror of color, a spangle of galaxies. They glittered above and glittered below, like the spark of Mickey's neutrinos. The survivors marched on a platter of stars.

A long metal tube used for ice coring was solemnly screwed into the snow at the South Pole stake until it was as rigid and strong as a fence post. They would tie Lewis there. The temperature was almost a hundred degrees below zero again, the air still. "It's kinder than what he did to our friends," Pulaski told the others, to help stiffen their resolve. "He'll go quickly and then it will be over."

They wrestled Lewis out of his parka and slit open his windpants, the sting of the invading cold instantaneous. They disregarded his wince. Their souls were as frozen as the Pole now, their mood vengeful. They'd had enough. They were going to extinguish their own fear.

"You're killing an innocent man," Lewis gasped as the cold hit him. "When I'm gone it will all start again and then this will be on your conscience, too."

"Can't we gag him?" Geller asked.

"He's trying to divide us," Mendoza added.

"No, let him talk," Norse said. "Let him predict. So that when it does end, after he's gone, you can all take heart in the knowledge that you did the right thing."

They looked at Lewis, waiting for him to say more, and in the end he didn't know what more to say.

When they lashed him to the coring tube it burned through his thermal undershirt like hot iron. He writhed against it, struggling to think, already in mental shock because the absurdity of his dilemma was overwhelming. He'd come to the bottom of the world for companionship, and his companions were about to kill him. He'd come for purpose, and instead had found death. The sky was the most glorious he'd ever seen and he was about to see nothing ever again.

It was insane.

He wanted to weep, but his tears had frozen, too.

"How long will it take?" Lena Jindrova asked, her voice trembling.

"He'll be lucky to last half an hour," Pulaski replied.

"This doesn't feel right," she whispered.

Norse put his arm around her. "It's right if we do it together."

The coring tube was high enough that it was impossible for Lewis to slip his bonds over the top of it. They stood in a semicircle around him and watched for a moment, sickly fascinated, but he was beginning to shiver and no one wanted to watch this death for very long, the slow freezing that all of them unconsciously feared.

"Do we really all have to be out here?" Gina Brindisi asked.

"It has to be unanimous," Norse said. "So there's no finger-pointing afterward. So we can come together afterward."

"I'm not taking any satisfaction in this," she said.

"I am," Geller muttered. "I hope it fucking hurts."

"When the shivering stops, so will the pain," Pulaski promised. "His brain will shut down pretty fast." He finished his knots and stepped back.

They watched Lewis clench against the cold and then go into a quick spasm of shivering, his stare hollow now and far away. Then he'd shake again, rattling against the stake like a husk in the wind.

"I'm leaving," Gina threatened. A few others nodded.

Norse turned away as well, addressing the others. "This is pretty difficult for some of us. A hard choice, hard to watch. Hard for me. We don't need any more nightmares. Can you stand watch, Cueball? You've been a soldier. I'd like to take the rest of us back to the dome. We've got some healing to do."

The cook looked at the hopeless Lewis. "Go heal."

They turned, a depleted platoon, Lewis hanging from the coring tube as if he were about to be shot. Six dead, a seventh dying. Abby missing, Skinner blinded. And months of isolation to go. It had been a disaster to allow the fingie to come at the last minute. A disaster not to have screened him first, not to have incorporated him from the beginning, not to have learned something about his warped personality.

A disaster to trust.

Their next job was to find Abby, deal with her, and then somehow piece the station back together. Endure the dark winter. Wait again for the first blush of sunlight, and with it their distant rescue.

"Goodbye, Jed," Gina said sorrowfully as they began to move away.

"Good riddance," Calhoun amended.

They started to follow their own boot prints back to the dome.

And then a shout from the crest of the ramp, two figures stumbling toward them. Again they had the anonymous hoods up but the one in the lead was obviously Abby, struggling over the sastrugi drifts of snow because she was bent with some burden on her back. Her left hand was extended to her companion, who could only be Skinner. "Stop!" she shouted again. Her high voice drifted, a crystal note, a bell on the stillness of the plateau. "Let him go!"

"Don't listen to her!" Norse warned. He'd stiffened.

But they did stop until she stormed up, gasping for breath, her gaiter a white beard of ice. Straightening her back, she rolled something off that looked like a squat mortar and let it fall with a plop on the snow. Skinner stopped beside her, swaying unsteadily, goggles missing but his eyes swathed, his head cocked at an angle toward a sky he couldn't see, so that he could hear better from one ear at the edge of his hood. He looked stricken.

"Are you all insane?" Abby challenged, pointing past them to Lewis. "Get his damn parka back on!"

"It's too late, Dixon," Norse said coldly. "You let your lover out to kill again and he went after our most important member, our doctor. The group has made a decision to put an end to this nightmare. You've got a lot to answer for yourself. Push things now and there'll be serious repercussions."

"Is that a threat, Bob?"

"If you like."

Abby turned from the psychologist. "So now he's got you to do his killing for him?" she asked, her eyes sweeping the group. They huddled like uncertain deer, newly bewildered by her arrival, depleted of their certainty by her own anger. "Get his clothes back on him, Carl!" she told Mendoza. "You're executing the wrong man!"

"You're bewitched by Lewis, Abby," Dana tried.

"I'm an admirer of a man struggling to do the right thing. By God, get some clothes on him! He's going to get frostbite if you don't move! Give some time to hear me out! I've got proof! Proof that you're all being set up! You've got all winter to execute him if I'm wrong!"

"But you let the killer out of the sauna!" Dana accused. "Maybe we should tie you out there, too!"

"I let Jed out of the sauna. And who's killing who, Dana?"

There was an uneasy silence, people shuffling in the cold. The awful irrevocability of what they were doing began to sink in.

"Let's put his clothes back on," Pulaski finally muttered to Mendoza. "She's right, there's time. What if we're wrong? Let's sort this out."

"No!" Norse snapped, suddenly furious. "Carl, don't you dare!"

The astronomer blinked in surprise. The psychologist's loss of cool was unaccustomed, and his implicit threat opened a wedge of doubt. It wasn't like Norse to snap at anybody, especially a beaker. Hesitantly, Mendoza took a step toward the stake.

"Don't you touch those ropes!" It was a hiss.

They all looked at Norse uncertainly now, surprised by his emotion.

"It wasn't Lewis!" Skinner suddenly hollered. "You're freezing the wrong man!"

The winter-overs jerked at this loud pronouncement. And that was enough to suddenly make the astronomer stride to the stake, cursing at everyone and everything, and begin untying Lewis. "Start talking, Abby," he said fiercely as he worked clumsily. "Start talking, and if you don't make your case I'll strangle this bastard with my own hands."

The ropes began to fall on the snow. No one moved to stop what he was doing.

"You're making it worse," Norse warned, his voice trembling slightly. He was tensing, his eyes flickering from the object Abby had dumped in the snow to the others around him. "When you remember the truth, the execution will be worse."

"The killing stops now," Abby countered.

Lewis was mumbling incoherently, uncertain what Mendoza was even doing, his mind already numb from the cold. He was disoriented. Gina began to sniffle.

"Yeah, start talking, Gearloose," Geller said. "What the hell is that?" He pointed toward the mortarlike object.

"It's Doctor Bob's telescope kit," Abby replied. "Fat suckers like this are called Dobsons- hobbyists use 'em, right Bob?"

"You stole that from my room." His voice had a quiet menace.

"I broke into your room because I was looking for evidence to set things straight. Couldn't find a thing. Not even my picture. You're careful, Bob, I give you that. But then it occurred to me to lift up your telescope."

"She's in love with Lewis," Norse told the others. "She's gone crazy herself. She's trying to twist things the same way he does, but she's not dangerous like him. We don't need to kill her. Just get her some help."

Abby ignored this. "Nancy Hodge did leave us a clue, Bob, but not Jed's X rays. Why do his teeth prove anything?"

He looked belligerent. "How do you even know about Jed's X rays?"

"Oh, I was listening to your kangaroo court from above, from behind the bar."

He started at his own failure to check above the galley and frowned, furious with himself for not apprehending her. "We caught him in the act, Abby," he blustered. "Give it up."

"You caught him in the act of discovering the body of a woman you'd already killed," Abby corrected. She glanced past him to where Lewis was slumping forward as the bonds came free. Mendoza began to help the shivering man into his parka. "Your silly recitation of evidence did give me an idea, though. I knew Nancy had no reason to pull Jed's X ray and put it in my folder- you did that- but I did think she might have successfully hidden the ones that really counted. Like you said, Hodge was smart. So while you assembled your lynch mob I went back to talk to Clyde here. You wouldn't let anyone talk to him because you'd been in BioMed just before Lewis and were afraid of what he might say. So I talked to him. And do you know what he was lying on?" She held up the sheet in her mitten, which they now saw was photographic film. "Your dental X ray, Bob. The one I took from Rod's files, the one you brought down to Antarctica with you. The reason you couldn't find it is because Nancy had already hidden it under Clyde's pillow. She'd also hidden the earlier set sent down by NSF. Two dental X rays, supposedly of the same man." She looked past him to the others. "They don't match."

"I had some work done," he bluffed.

"You sure did. You gained four molars."

There was a murmur of confusion, and then slow realization of what the X rays might mean. One set sent by NSF of the original Norse, a man perhaps still lost in New Zealand. And a second brought by his replacement, showing a different set of teeth. Lewis was being dressed, Mendoza pulling the clothes onto his trembling limbs as if Lewis were a young child.

"Who are you, Bob?" Abby asked. "You're not the Robert Norse the National Science Foundation selected to come down here. He disappeared in New Zealand. Six days after he went missing, you followed him into the woods. Then you materialized in Christchurch and flew to Antarctica before too many awkward questions could be asked. Are you even a psychologist at all?"

"That's a lie!" he shouted to the others. "She's covering up for Lewis!"

"You're the liar!" Skinner hollered, his ear turned to the debate because his eyes were bandaged. "I heard you in with Nancy before she fell! You blinded me, you sonofabitch, but you didn't kill me, and that was your first big mistake. I smelled you, Doctor Bob! I wasn't sure just who was who but Abby brought your aftershave from your room and I remembered it! When you lose your eyes, your nose starts to remember! I smelled your aftershave! I smelled your fear when Nancy died!"

"That's absurd," Norse snorted. "A couple days of blindness and Clyde is some kind of bloodhound? To a scent Dixon brought him? Come on! What kind of aftershave does Lewis use?"

"Lewis stinks," Calhoun drawled. "He's been in jail." Someone barked a laugh and with that Norse realized he was beginning to lose them. The spell was breaking.

"Nancy mixed up the X rays," Norse tried. "This is all a misunderstanding. Don't let this woman set the killer loose where he can attack you all!"

"I'm going to get him back inside," Mendoza said quietly, the astronomer's manner embarrassed and subdued. "I'm going to get him warm." Putting his arm around the shuddering Lewis, he began walking him back to the dome. Nobody made a move to stop them. The group's righteousness had deflated. A growing dread was replacing it.

"I knew I needed something better to convince the rest of you," Abby went on, ignoring Norse and addressing the others. "Not circumstantial and confusing, like a pair of X rays. Evidence that was absolutely rock-solid, right? So I've been desperately thinking. It was the meteorite that started things. The meteorite that disappeared. Have you stopped wondering where it went?" She kicked the Dobson telescope with her boot and something clunked inside. "When I picked this up it was heavier and noisier than what I expected. So I brought it out here on a bet. Alexi, you're the one who's always accusing Jed. Go ahead and look through it at the sky. Tell us what you see."

"Leave it alone!" Norse yelled, stepping to block the others from it.

"Just give it a try, Alexi."

The Russian hesitated, then stepped forward, brusquely pushing the psychologist aside. Kneeling in the snow, he set the Dobson telescope upright and bent to the eyepiece, cranking its focus first one way, then the other. Finally he looked up. "It is dark. I cannot see from this thing. The telescope of Bob does not work."

"That's because it's not finished yet!" Norse said with exasperation.

"I don't think it's a telescope at all," Abby went on. "I think it's a box, a hiding place, a way to smuggle down things that might otherwise be illegal. Something that can't be opened and thus something where no one would ever look. And I'm betting if we cut it open anyway we'll find a missing meteorite inside it."

The group shuffled curiously forward, making a half circle around the telescope. Skinner unzipped his parka and withdrew a hacksaw he'd carried out.

"Don't you dare destroy my telescope! I've spent a hundred hours on the damn thing!"

"I'll make you a deal, Bob," Abby said. "If I cut into this and I'm wrong, you can tie me to your sacrificial stake out there. Because right now I'm a threat to your life. But if I cut into it and I'm right, then you're the one we strap to the coring tube." She knelt beside the telescope. "Deal?"

"Wait, wait!" He looked at the others with increasing panic and confusion. Mendoza was disappearing down the ramp with the stumbling Lewis. The ropes that had tied Lewis to the stake were in a tangle around its base. The group was extending its own enclosing line, flanking around him. "All right, all right. But let me cut it open. For God's sake, maybe that way I can at least repair it when you see how wrong you are!"

Abby hesitated, holding the hacksaw. Norse reached out and snatched it from her.

"Okay?" he asked the others.

"Hurry up," Geller growled. "It's cold out here!"

Norse began sawing through the fat telescope tube. The Dobson was only two and a half feet long but as rotund as a small keg. Its simple mirror arrangement collected huge amounts of light and was a cost-effective astronomy tool for amateurs. It could also hold a lot inside. As the psychologist cut, the top of the tube sagged down. Finally it split, the front lens falling away, and something the size of a large potato rolled down onto the snow.

It was the meteorite.

"Bloody hell," Dana whispered.

"She planted it in there," Norse tried.

Nobody believed him.

"Why?" Gina breathed. "Why kill so many?"

Norse glared at her then, with a look so contemptuous and malevolent his face was transformed. In an instant he went from reason to unreason, from the solemn light to the hateful dark. He was a man consumed by demons, a deep inner rage. He put his glove into the split shell of the telescope. "You've been killing yourselves," he said ominously. "You've sabotaged your own little commune with fear, mistrust, blind faith, and group delusion. And once again, I'm the one who's going to survive."

Suddenly he sprang to his feet, stiff-armed the unprepared Clyde Skinner to bowl him over, and grabbed Abby, his forearm around her throat. It was fluid, an action that had been mentally rehearsed, with the quick grace of an athlete. She went rigid and yelled.

"Get him!" Pulaski roared.

But before the survivors could rush, Norse lifted his other arm.

He had a pistol, its muzzle gaping like the twin barrels of a shotgun. It was crude and homemade, with no apparent magazine or revolving chamber, but was as black down its twin barrels as the bottom of the world. They presumed the gun held at least two bullets. "Back off or I kill some more," Norse growled.

They stopped, frightened by the weapon.

He grinned at their acquiescence, pinning Abby tighter.

"I told you not to open my telescope."

The Things We Share

Amundsen-Scott base was built by a nation that guarantees the pursuit of happiness. A good psychologist will tell you that all of us chase that elusive and torturous goal by seeking four things.

The first is freedom. Freedom? Mine had been robbed by Fat Boy, whose blundering mistake had bound my destiny to his and left me to drag his disgusting ghost of quivering blubber everywhere I went. With his death, choice collapsed in on me like the dirt of the grave.

Security? The kids and the mountain had robbed me of that, too. When I came down off that glacier I could never rest. Never rest! My career became migratory, my jobs makeshift, and my savings sifted away. I had no home, no institution, no identity, except as the man they whispered about. I'd whirl sometimes to catch them and they'd look at me like a curiosity, pretending that they hadn't been judging, but I knew better. I knew better! I'd been stripped of every certainty except my own moral innocence.

Recognition? All my life I've longed for respect. My ideas are significant. My insights are creative. My mastery at the Pole is a demonstration of ability already displayed a hundred times. Yet I was continually passed over. Snubbed. Outmaneuvered by lesser men and women, the victim of gossip and innuendo and condescension. It worsened after the climb. Every rejected paper was a rebuke. Every missed invitation was an accusation. I'd been shorn of all respect, judged guilty without trial. Damned for my own survival!

So at the very end I longed for the fourth thing the shrinks say we all need, response. For love, and if not love then at least friendship, and if not friendship then at least companionship, and if not companionship then at least acknowledgment, the comfort of knowing your words are listened to, your comments receive response. And at the South Pole I thought I'd found that. In the Three Hundred Degree Club I thought I'd found salvation.

The women shouldn't have betrayed me. They shouldn't have betrayed me!

I was ready to stop. You have to believe that. I was ready to stop. Tyson had fled, and it would be child's play to let all suspicion remain on him. I had a case study to prove my point and a valuable meteorite to give me freedom and security. I was on the very edge of happiness, I'm sure of it.

Yet Dixon couldn't see my possibilities. She'd been blinded by a lesser man, Lewis, and at my moment of triumph she ran to a man of clay.

So when I went to help the weeping Gabriella that night, I expected we could find some kind of solace with each other. Some kind of consolation. What I wasn't counting on was her anger, her fury at herself, her foolish longing for love, and her irrational focusing of her own poison on me.

She turned me down. The slut, after her rejection by Lewis, turned me down! Suddenly she wanted self-respect!

I found myself out of control without understanding why I even cared. Damn her! I was fighting with her, holding her down, my hands somehow around her throat- I'm not that kind of man at all! — but ordained by God, it seems, or doomed by the devil, to finally take the station down with me. I really didn't plan to end it this way. I simply wanted to choke out every hateful thing I ever imagined people saying.

And as she died, her eyes bulging, her frantic bucks becoming more feeble, her look became an accusatory question.

Had I become a coward on that mountain?

If I'm to have any peace, I have to erase them all.