Dark Winter

CHAPTER TWO

Lewis's room was windowless and just ten feet long. He could span its width with lifted arms, his fingertips brushing each wall. It was one of a row of cells on the second floor of the science building, another orange metal box that claimed its grandiose title by virtue of having a small computer lab downstairs. His room looked every day of its quarter-century age: scuffed, faded, and leaking. The insulation had become soaked and frozen on the outer wall and there was another mold of frost inside, a white reminder of how thin their protective shell was. A few inches inside the wall the temperature was kept near seventy degrees by a blowing heater. The air was very dry and smelled faintly of fuel from the base generator. The mechanical drone was like being on a ship.

"The dreaded Ice Room," said Cameron, who'd brought Lewis here after the plane left. The station manager looked tired but was trying hard to be welcoming. "Being on the end of the building sucks, but last come gets last pick."

Lewis put his hand against the wall, the clamminess cold as aquarium glass. "What if my butt freezes to this during the night?"

"We bring a blowtorch every time you're late for breakfast." There was a pause, for timing. "Just don't roll over the other way."

Lewis dutifully smiled. Sometimes you go to prison as a means of escape, he thought. Sometimes the very worst places offer the most possibility.

"Now, we call this floor Upper Berthing, jargon left over from the Navy days. It's perfect for you since you're a beaker. You can crunch your data downstairs."

Beaker was polar slang for scientist. Lewis had already encountered this caste designation in New Zealand, where he was issued a punching-bag-sized duffel of cold weather gear at the American warehouse in Christchurch. "You get the shitty nylon because you're a beaker," the clerk had informed him, handing him insulated bib overalls. "The workers get Carhartt." This alternative looked like tough canvas.

"Scientists are workers," Lewis had protested.

"Scientists don't spend twelve hours fitting pipe. You get the nylon."

Now his place in the hierarchy had dictated assignment of a room. Like a runt piglet jostling for a teat, he was on the outer end. Also growing out of his orange box were appendages that included an electric substation, hydroponic greenhouse, and closet full of fire-fighting gear. Fire was the most feared enemy at the Pole.

"Homey," he offered.

"A leaking derelict," Cameron corrected. "The whole base had a life expectancy that expired five years ago and it's slowly falling apart. A recent inspection turned up two hundred safety deficiencies, which means we really have to stay alert just to stay alive. The National Science Foundation wants to replace everything- in summer they fly in congressmen like a D.C. shuttle- so we're under pressure here to show some results. Practical benefits from basic research. You'll find people are under a little strain. Still, the good news is that the Ice Room is warmer than outside, half private- your one neighbor will still hear more of you than they want to- and the government is past complaining about tape or tacks on the walls. Just don't put up a centerfold: We're politically correct now."

"You admit you weren't?" His question was wry.

"It was so macho that the Navy guys had nudes laminated into the tables. Only way to remember what females looked like. Gone with the wind, man, and better for it. Things are more civilized now that we have women."

"What happened to the tables?"

"They're still in the old base, abandoned in '75 when they built this dome. It's snowed over and slowly being crushed by the ice. Unsafe and strictly verboten, but a fascinating depository of cultural archaeology. Beer cans. Frozen hot dogs. America at her zenith."

"But you've seen it."

"Winter-overs have been known to explore. Big Brother left on the last plane, you know. Except for moi. Which reminds me." Cameron beckoned him down the hall and pointed toward the shared bathroom. "Our biggest shortage is melted water. That means the most onerous rule concerns the showers. No more than two a week, two minutes of running water each. You wet, turn it off, soap, turn it on, rinse off. We're sitting on seventy percent of the world's fresh water but it's so hard to melt we might as well be in the Sahara. It's rationed." He stopped, listening. They could hear the clumping sounds of someone inside.

"No shower for three or four days?" Lewis leaned back in exaggeration.

"It's so cold and dry you don't sweat much here." He was talking to Lewis but his attention was on the door. He sounded distracted. "Or if you do, people get used to it."

"Splendid."

The door opened and a lumbering bear of a man shambled out, naked except for a towel around his waist, his hair wet. He was bearded, hairy, and huge, a veritable Sasquatch. He stopped in surprise at their presence. "What's this, a line to pee?" The voice was deep, the eyes hard and squinty.

"Just rising to join us, Buck?" Cameron's look was of dislike.

The man scowled. "Just cleaning up after trying to make some room for all the crap that came in."

"We had trouble getting the plane off on time."

"It got off."

"We're both stuck here now. I need you on time."

"It got off. And I need you to stop nagging and let me do my job." The two men held their gaze for a moment, a mutual glare, and then the big man's slid away and he looked past the station manager. "Who's this?"

"The new guy, Jed Lewis. Getting the tour."

"Another beaker fingie? Great." He didn't offer a hand. "You getting the Ten Commandments from Ice Prick? Learning how to fill out work requests?"

There was an undercurrent of resentment that Lewis felt unsure how to respond to. What was the beef of this guy? "Just looking."

"Well, don't look the fuck at me." The man pushed past them, lurching down the hall, his fist clutching his towel to maintain some dignity.

"Buck, we're on a team," Cameron said after him. "Lewis here is part of the team."

The bear turned. "It ain't a team, it's a caste, and it's beaker glory on G.A. frostbite. If I could have waved goodbye to this zoo I would've been on time for that." He sized up the newcomer, who was wondering what G.A. meant, and pointed a stubby finger. "You watch your ass around here, Lewis, because it's cutthroat island among the beakers whenever someone throws grant crumbs our way. You got any sense, you'll look out for Number One. And don't pay any attention to all the brown-nosing, middle-management, ass-kissing bullshit, either." His finger swung to Cameron. "I'll take a fucking shower when I fucking want to." He went in one of the rooms and the door slammed.

The station manager was looking after the man unhappily, his mouth working as if he were still deciding what to say.

"Who the hell was that?"

"That was Tyson. Our mechanic." It was a mutter.

"The guy they said was sulking?"

"Don't pay any attention to him." Cameron shook his head unhappily. "He fought to get hired down here and has bitched about it ever since. He's a malcontent and a loser." The station manager frowned at his own candor. "He'll come around." Cameron glanced at his watch, suddenly losing interest in the tour. "Listen, I'll finish showing you around tomorrow, including where you work. You'll be up for it then. For now, just take it easy, try to get used to the altitude, get over the jet lag, and unpack. Okay?"

"Is that guy having a bad day, or what?"

"Every day's a bad day for him."

Lewis went back to his room, sat on his bunk, and scratched the frost, watching a strip peel off under his fingernail. Pulled into the path of heat, the crystals began to melt. Welcome, fingie.

He decided to remain philosophical. First of all, he'd volunteered for this. Walked out of his oil patch job and straight into unemployment in a fit of righteous environmentalism and self-doubt. It was a miracle he'd met Jim Sparco and fit his emergency need for a polar research assistant. A miracle he'd been given a purpose again. There was no question he was meant to be here. Expertise, desire, and opportunity had all neatly fit.

And second, he knew, sailors, inmates, and astronauts had certainly endured worse. Despite the spongy outer wall, his room was toasty enough- except that he couldn't use the word toast. That was Antarctic slang for burn-out, that late-season time when the monotonous lack of color and smell and sound and variety left a winter-over with an Antarctic stare, the mood of the condemned, and the social skills of roadkill. They'd warned him about it at the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, the agency that employed him. Toast, toasty, toasted, crouton. Not a nice thing to be. So let's just say warm. Cheery. Anticipatory. Nervous. And someday, even if not toast, perhaps depressed, bored, loopy, horny, hungry, sleepy, and dopey. They'd warned him of all those things, the list sounding like a casting call for Snow White.

At least he had his own room, a polar luxury. The winter-overs had cheered and whooped when that last LC-130 roared away, its engines burning so rich in the cold that they left four black streaks of soot on the snow. The departure meant independence, room, a tiny cell of privacy. Lewis understood the reaction. They were beginning! The plane lifting off left him feeling both trapped and satisfied, newly secure. He'd made it! All the way to the South Pole! Every problem he'd ever had was temporarily gone, lost across a no-man's-land of ice. Every relationship was a fresh start. With just twenty-six souls, every person was important. Vital. Even that grump Tyson. Lewis had an important job with clear parameters, unique opportunity, and no everyday hassles for the next eight months.

No escape, either. No backing out.

He liked the finality of it.

"My fellow fingie!"

Someone new filled the door of his room, smiling. Clean-shaven, but a skull as distinctive as the cook's: close-cropped stubble except for a darker Mohawk streak on top. Despite this bizarre choice he was a handsome man a decade older, Lewis judged, late thirties, with bright blue eyes that flicked curiously around the barren chamber like a detective's. Nothing much to see yet, of course, so they came to rest on Lewis. "Robert Norse." He put out a hand. "Recent arrival and resident shrink."

The two men had to stand at the foot of the bed in the cramped quarters, squeezed too close. "Jed Lewis." He took the offered hand, hard and dry.

Norse pumped vigorously. He looked fit, muscular, his frame erect with an almost military tautness. There was an intense energy to his friendliness. His teeth were perfect, his eyes assessing, his smell of aftershave. The scent made Lewis realize how little there was to smell at the Pole besides what people brought with them. By the end of the winter he'd know everyone's smell, he supposed. Their voice, ticks, expressions, inflections, and flaws. Their past and intended future. It had to be a psychologist's paradise.

"Except everyone calls me Doctor Bob. Nicknames are endemic here, and you'll get one, too. I only arrived a week before you."

Lewis looked pointedly above Norse's brow. "A psychologist? So explain the haircut, Doc."

Norse smiled, running a hand along the crown of his head. "I got this at McMurdo on a dare. Polar plunge sort of thing. Supposed to add to solidarity. I'm hoping it helps me fit in. Be one of the gang."

"Isn't that the kind of thing you do in junior high?"

"People try to fit in from preschool to the mortuary, without exception, instinctually. Basic monkey behavior. Everyone wants to belong without ever asking why. You do want to belong, don't you?"

"I guess." Lewis thought about his answer. "I want my life to stand for something. I'm willing to join a team to do that."

"An idealist!" Norse grinned. "And you think before you talk! A self-examined man!" He nodded. "I'm impressed. Maybe." He pretended to consider the issue. "Or are you simply a joiner? A conformist? A follower? Is the way to self-realization through society? Or inside yourself?"

"I've got a feeling you've got the answer."

"I came down here to get the answer. And being a shrink is like being a cop or a priest or a journalist. Everyone tenses up. So I have to adopt camouflage." He knocked the top of his skull. "A haircut. And, unlike tattoos, this goes away."

"We'll probably tattoo each other, too. The cook said we've volunteered for prison."

Norse nodded. " 'Then the Philistines seized him,' " he suddenly recited, " 'gouged out his eyes and took him down to Gaza. Binding him with bronze shackles, they set him to grinding in the prison. But the hair on his head began to grow again…' "

"Say what?" Norse was quite the gabber.

"Story of Samson. Ever read it?"

"I think I caught the movie."

"Instructive story. Watch out for Delilah." He winked.

"Is there something religious about this place? The cook asked about my name."

"Oh no. Just literate."

Lewis sat on his bunk to get some space. The guy seemed friendly enough, but he didn't know what to make of a psychologist. Especially one who so blandly gave himself away. "I heard about you. I was told you'd want to analyze me."

Norse took half a step back, as if exposed. "Really? Analyze what?"

"That I'm a geologist in a place with no rocks."

"A geologist? On an ice cap?" Norse nodded sagely, considering, and then leaned forward like a mock confidant. "I'm sure the Freudians would have something to say about that. So. Why are you in a place with no rocks?"

"Because it has no rocks." Except it did, of course, but Norse didn't need to know that.

"I see." Norse mulled this over. "Makes perfect sense. Like a shrink in a place with no complications. You're quite sane, aren't you?"

"I'd appreciate a professional opinion."

"Ah. That will cost you. And I didn't bring a couch. So…" He thought. "Do you have a piece of paper?"

Lewis looked around.

"Wait, I think I've got one." Norse pulled out a sheet of folded paper from a pocket inside his sweater. It was blank. "I carry this around to make notes. Dumb idea, because it scares the hell out of people when you do. Anyway, sign your name. Instant handwriting analysis."

Lewis was curious and did so, handing the paper to Norse. The psychologist studied it. "Oh dear. My quick and dirty judgment is that you'll fit in with our group quite well."

Lewis smiled. "So what are you doing here, Doc?"

"Me? I'm using us all as guinea pigs for a future trip to Mars. The Pole is like a spaceship, NASA hopes. Communal. Also confined, hostile, and dark. Months of isolation. How does that make us feel?"

"I feel nauseated."

"That's the altitude. Took me three days to adjust. Some never do- I think it was your predecessor who rotated out a few weeks back. And mentally? I'm still adjusting. Will be for eight months, I suppose. That's why I dropped by. Antarctic veterans have one perspective, newcomers another. I'm hoping you'll share your observations as the winter goes on."

"Observations of what?"

"Whatever goes on."

Lewis shook his head, bemused. "I heard the power went out."

"Somebody goofed, which was great for me because it injected a variable." Norse smiled. "It's like having a lab where I didn't have to build the rat maze. I was planning a briefer visit but I got delayed in New Zealand and then the medic, Nurse Nancy, said she could use some help over the winter. I had a sabbatical leave, an opportunity to observe… The fates conspire, no?"

"So that's what's to blame."

"Yes, destiny." Norse said what Lewis had just thought. "Destiny and free will. A little of both, I think. And we're the two newcomers here, you and me. Right?"

"I guess so."

Norse nodded. "So, Jed. I want to be your first friend."

Lewis met most of the others at dinner, a confusing blur of fresh faces. Twelve scientists and technicians and fourteen support workers to keep them alive. Lena Jindrova, their greenhouse grad student, was the youngest, at twenty-three. The oldest was the man Lewis had been quietly sent by Sparco to meet, sixty-four-year-old Michael Mortimer Moss. The astrophysicist wasn't in the galley and no one seemed surprised.

"Mickey Mouse is determining the fate of the universe," an astronomer named Harrison Adams told Lewis when he asked. "Far too important to eat with we mortals. So he takes Twinkie-type crap out to the Dark Side and broods, the god on Olympus. It will all sound ennobling in his autobiography."

"Mickey Mouse?"

"Nickname." Adams chewed. "We call him that behind his back because he's pretentious. Not a bad guy, really, but the Saint Michael stuff gets a little old when you have to work with him. Although I will concede, he's the quintessential OAE."

"OAE?"

"Old Antarctic Explorer. Decades of Ice Time."

"Jim Sparco knows him," Lewis said. "Seems to admire him. Told me I should meet him."

"Yes, you should. Mickey Moss built this base. He made it all possible, as he'll remind you at every opportunity. But Jim Sparco doesn't have to hear those tiresome reminders, like I do. Or compete with him for grant money, like Carl Mendoza does. Or put up with his bullying, like our dear ineffectual station manager Rod Cameron does. Or jump to his orders, like our G.A. s do."

"Someone else used that. G.A., I mean."

"General Assignment. Assistant. Grunt. Serf. Supporter. Except you never find one when you need one. They're the people who really run this place. It's like officers and noncoms. We outrank them in everything except what really counts."

"I detect some worldly cynicism."

"You detect polar realism. You've joined a family, Jed, and like all families ours has some history."

"Am I going to regret it?"

"Not if you fit in."

Lewis got some food, taking a tray and nodding at the cook. Pulaski was being helped by a plain but friendly woman named Linda Brown. She looked at the tiny helpings on his plate and laughed. "First-night fast." She patted her ample hips. "Even I remember. Dimly."

He took his meager meal and sat down. If Adams seemed a bit sour, the rest seemed to be laughing and joking. Everyone was exclaiming about the shipment of fresh food. Lettuce! Tangerines! There was a vigor to the group, a buzz of energy and camaraderie that Lewis found appealing. They were excited at the departure of the last plane, which marked the true start of winter. Yet there was also a social sorting as they ate, he noticed: four of the women together in apparent defense against male attention, other females mixed casually with the men; scientists tended to congregate at one table, maintenance personnel at another. Those at Lewis's table made jokes about his pallor. They remembered what arrival was like.

"When do I stop being the fingie?" he asked, knowing full well that no one newer was coming until October.

"When you're so cold that your face is beginning to frostbite, your balls have shriveled to peas, and your hands feel like shovels," Carl Mendoza, an astronomer, told him.

"I think I've got an inside job."

"I know what you do. Wait until you commute to work."

"But you get acclimated, right?"

"You get frozen so many times you're incapable of thaw." Mendoza pointed with his head. "Like our Russian aurora expert."

"What cold?" Alexi Molotov said, reaching for the butter.

"Or when you join the Three Hundred Degree Club," said the medic, Nancy Hodge. She was in her late forties, a thin and once-pretty woman with the kind of lines that suggested she'd seen a little too much of life. Her welcoming smile had a twist to it. No ring, but a white mark where one had been.

"What's that?"

"You'll see."

The others were excited about the fresh food, loud about their plans for the winter, and excited by the new responsibility of being cut off. Lewis picked at his own food but as he tired he realized he couldn't fully share the mood. He was exhausted from his journey, and in his weariness the crowd became cloying and the galley air hot and steamy. His appetite had deserted him and he couldn't concentrate. The plan after the meal, he was told, was to watch The Thing, a perennial Polar ritual.

"It is this American movie about an outer space being infecting the bodies of Polar scientists and killing them, one by one," Molotov summarized with relish. "It is very funny. They fight back with guns and flame throwers. Boom! Boom! Yet this"-he held up a butter knife- "is as wicked as it gets at real Pole." He laughed. "Everywhere else in life your body is taken over, by bosses, by advertisers, by government, by nagging wife. Here, no."

"Yet you watch it anyway."

"It is, what you call it…" He made a squeezing motion on his arm with his fingers.

"Inoculation," Nancy Hodge said.

"Yes! Yes! Inoculation against the fear. The scare of being left here, for the winter. You know? The veterans know all the lines by heart. You will see. It is lots of fun."

But Lewis was so weary he felt in danger of falling into his plate of food. The thought of enduring a movie appalled him. After embarrassing himself twice with dull responses that made him sound like a half-wit, he finally excused himself to bed.

The others nodded without surprise. It took time.

"If you wake up and you are the last one left," Molotov called after him, "don't be surprised. Then you know the outer space being, the creature- it is you."