Dark Winter

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The dying fire lit their way as the tiny tribe trudged wearily back toward the Spryte. They were silent in their weariness, Skinner using the shoulder of an exhausted Hiro to guide him back across the snow. So many had been lost! More than a third of them. The rest alive, staggering like blackened zombies, exhausted, shivering. Left to what kind of fate?

When they got to the snow tractor Geller climbed up on it and caught the corpse of Norse by the boot, dragging him off the cab roof without ceremony. His blood was frozen so there was no trail. His limbs were already stiff. He toppled like Raggedy Ann into the snow, and man and mannequin lay together.

"I'd leave the sonofabitch for the buzzards but there ain't buzzards down here," the maintenance man said bitterly.

"It's just his shell," Lena whispered. "The demon is gone."

Lewis stooped to look at the tractor treads. Gears were bent, a sprocket broken. The track had snapped. Still, the basics were there. "Can we fix it?"

The support personnel clustered around. "Maybe," Calhoun said. He glanced back toward the burning dome. "Maybe the garage escaped the worst of it. With some tools, if we can get the generator at Bedrock running- "

"What the hell for?" Geller interrupted. "Why the hell try?"

Calhoun shrugged.

"I mean, can you fix the Spryte to run a thousand miles?" clarified Lewis. "Towing that sled, and maybe another, with a shelter and some food and tents. Drive to Vostok, like Bob was going to do. Or better yet, drive to the Americans at McMurdo."

Calhoun looked at the rest of them, emptied by the struggle. "It's winter, Jed."

"I know it would be hard."

"More than hard," Mendoza spoke up wearily. "Some of us are banged up pretty good. Clyde's blind. Abby's half dead. We'd have to melt drinking water, ride out storms. Winds can hit two hundred miles per hour on the Beardmore glacier. Windchill is, what, two hundred and fifty below? We'd be dependent on a single engine."

"I know it would be risky."

"But six or eight of us in the cab, in shifts," Dana said, coming to life at the thought of escape. "The rest towed in a covered sled. Better than Scott had."

"Scott died, and that was summer."

"Better than Amundsen had, then. He lived."

Several of the others were nodding at Dana. Escape!

"Yes, but not McMurdo across the mountains. Vostok," Molotov said.

"Suicide," countered Hiro. "We would have no chance."

Lewis looked at the huddled group. They were as haggard as war refugees, spent, fearful. It was calm now, but the next storm would be along soon enough. Yet the emergency Hypertats appeared to be intact, and with them the generator. That meant heat, and some food. Norse was dead. The immediate emergency had passed. They had time to repair the Spryte. Time to try to rig a radio and computer from the outer buildings. Time to make a less exhausted decision.

"We can't agree now," he said. "We can't think straight now. There's no need to decide now. The first thing to do is get warm."

"What are you saying?"

"That we need to get back to Bedrock."

They staggered toward the emergency camp, arm in arm, body leaning on body. Skinner kept his hand on Hiro's shoulder, stumbling after him. Lewis half carried the woozy and nauseous Abby and kept thinking covetously about the wounded Spryte. It hurt to even walk away from it. Maybe they could rig a radio to let everyone know what had happened and to alert potential rescuers of their plan to attempt escape. Maybe the rescuers could arrange some airdrops along the route. It would be wildly desperate, but it was a chance to go home.

Home. It was hard for Lewis to remember what it looked like. Smelled like. The scent of earth, grass, flowers. He ached for it, could hardly remember it. Home! He imagined being in such a place with Abby, not the stricken woman he was dragging but the bright, funny, optimistic woman he'd first met.

What would that be like?

Yet just the quarter mile to Bedrock was endless. Every step was leaden, every footstep sidelighted by the oily flames still burning in the arch. The majority stumbled into the huts while Molotov and Mendoza called on the last of their reserves to help Lewis start the generator again. It was easier this time, having been run by Lewis not that long before, and the generator's cough and rumble was like the restart of a ruptured heart. Their own blood surged at the sound of it. Heat and light were the gift of life.

Then they went inside.

Logistics expert Linda estimated that they probably had enough fuel and food at the camp for a month. Survival after that would require an airdrop. They'd lost their cook, their doctor, their two best mechanics. They'd lost much of their clothing and supplies.

The survivors broke open a cache of emergency clothing and began to shed their oily garments and toss them outdoors for later cremation. Water was heated. People exhaustedly stripped, washed, and redressed without self-consciousness or modesty, helping each other numbly, small kindnesses enough to bring a tear of gratitude. Most were shaking from cold and shock.

Some granola bars were passed out, and hot tea.

Then they slept for twenty hours.

Slept as if dead.

Lewis came awake first, nestled next to a drowsy Abby. He couldn't remember their falling asleep next to each other. He couldn't remember much of anything. His life had become a blur. Around the pair the others were jammed onto the floor of just one of the huts, clustered in their need for human proximity. Cave dwellers must have been like this, he thought, huddling together against the cold of the night. Prehistoric! That's how far they'd fallen.

Abby shifted, too, nuzzling against him, her body warm, promising a future that still seemed tenuous and remote. "Did you dream?" she whispered sleepily.

He shook his head, still groggy. "Of home, I think."

She was silent for a long time, clutching to him, their chests rising and falling in unison. "Where's home, Jed?" she said softly.

He lay there, listening to the breathing and snoring of the others, and thought about her question. Where indeed? He had no family, no house, no address, no sense of place. He lay there in darkness, thinking first about her and then about himself. Where could they make a home?

She fell asleep again, resting against him.

He gently got up, swaying a bit from lingering exhaustion, and carefully stepped over the prone forms of the others. Some were half awake now, some exhaustedly asleep, but all were quiet, lost in their own thoughts or dreams, waiting to see what was decided next. A head or two rose up at his passing but no one spoke. At the end of the hut he dressed. The ritual that Cameron had taught him at a simpler time, which seemed eons ago: the layers of clothing, the boots, the hat, the mittens. He stepped into the Hypertat air lock, closed the inner door behind him, and, taking a breath, opened the outer one. He stepped outside into the midnight cold of the Pole.

The temperature hit him again like a slap, little different than when he'd first walked off that airplane. And yet it wasn't alien anymore. Just a new edge. He'd come to a place where people didn't belong and now, perversely, was used to it.

Lewis filtered cold air through his gaiter, filled his lungs, and looked around. The fire was out, the plateau lit by galactic milk. The station was a ruin of silvers and grays, as soundless as the moon.

What had he hoped for? A place uncomplicated. Pure.

Lewis slowly turned, taking in the geography of the battered station. They had no thermometer registering temperature anymore and so the cold was simply cold: embracing, leaching, and yet not as savage as that night when they'd all run from the sauna. He was surprised once more by the light: how the night could repeal itself and become less threatening. The galaxy was a banner of illumination, the snow fluorescent in its gleam. The base was wounded, unlit, stark, and yet even now the Pole was one of the most lovely places he'd ever seen, astonishing in its cleanliness. Spangled, ethereal, crystalline. As long as they lived there it was still a spaceship, drifting through space.

The aluminum dome still looked whole in the pale starlight and of course it mostly was. Perhaps the worst breaches could be patched, or the galley module stripped of food and parts. Like Crusoe, they had a wreckage of supplies to pillage. There were the cargo berms, the mothballed Quonsets of summer camp, the science buildings. It would be hard, but there was an enormous residue of equipment and dozens of structures with which to eke out a winter. Perhaps they could stick it out if enough food and fuel were parachuted in. Aid, as distant as it seemed, was over the horizon.

People had endured worse.

They could also freeze, he knew. Just one generator now, their last Spryte crippled, their two best mechanics dead, their quarters claustrophobic, their unity far from certain. Norse had mocked a group that had never really congealed.

Had they finally become a club?

The bigger question was where he belonged. Lewis had come to the Pole looking for some kind of fulfillment: escape, and an end to escape. Bizarrely, he may have finally found it in the station's near-destruction. In the heart of a nightmare he'd found a woman to love, tentative acceptance, life-changing experience, meaningful work. He actually cared about the damn place. He still cared about his weather readings.

He looked at the sky. Was the world warming? Hard to imagine, down here.

Still, he wanted to know. Wanted to help others know.

If they stayed, maybe he could record more readings. Send them to Sparco when the winter was done. And someday toast poor old Mickey Moss, the things that had made the astrophysicist human and the things that had made him special enough to push for this base.

Lewis looked across at the Spryte he'd recaptured with a certain melancholy. It would have been more fitting, perhaps, if the psychologist had finally made it to Vostok and eventually faced a realization that would have tormented him for the rest of his life: that the others had stayed, and lived, and come out of everything Robert Norse had thrown at them stronger than before.

That the Three Hundred Degree Club really worked.

"Maybe I busted up a five-million-dollar rock for nothing," he whispered to himself, half smiling at the bitter thought.

But then maybe Norse had come to the same dread realization, just before he'd pointed the barrel of his pistol into his own mouth. That the flaw wasn't in society, but in himself.

It was a gamble to continue the winter, Lewis knew. Their position was precarious.

It was a bigger gamble not to.

He came back inside, slowly undressed, stepped over the drowsy forms of the others, and lay down next to Abby. She snugged him to herself with her arms, warming him, drowsily awake herself again.

Lewis kissed her hair.

"Maybe this is home," he murmured.

She squeezed him. A tight hug of fear and hope.