Dark Winter

CHAPTER SIX

Lewis sniffed Abby Dixon's approach before he saw her. Not perfume. Her breath.

His new instruments at Clean Air alerted him. So sensitive was the carbon dioxide sampler at detecting changes in the surrounding atmosphere that the tracking pen jumped from the contribution of her lungs. Other meters logged the dying sunlight, chlorofluorocarbons that could attack the earth's ozone layer, ozone itself, and water vapor. It was like gaining new senses. He'd come back inside after a brisk thirty minutes of collecting snow samples and was still warming up in front of his machines when she stamped her boots in the vestibule by the door.

"Gearloose," he greeted her.

"Rockhead," she replied cheerfully, pulling off her parka.

"I'm thinking of a nickname a little less descriptive," Lewis said. "Vaguely heroic, perhaps. Like Stormwatcher. Skywalker."

"It will never catch on." She hung up her coat. "Too nice."

"Doesn't anyone have a flattering nickname?"

"Neutral is the best you can hope for."

"How did the tradition get started?"

She plopped into a chair, shivering slightly as the tension of being in the cold outside was shed, her cheeks pink, her dark eyes bright. She seemed confident in this environment and he liked that. Her strength. Her energy. "I don't know. The Navy, maybe. Or the parkas. When we're outdoors it's hard to tell who's who: Everyone looks like an orange traffic cone. So they came up with name tags, except people didn't like that- it felt like we were at a convention- so some put them upside down. Names seem part of the world we've left behind. So people got tagged for their occupations. And it evolved, in the perverse way things do around here. You have noticed how perverse this all is?"

"Wade Pulaski told me it's paradise."

She laughed. "Cueball would say that."

"That's his nickname? He called this place Planet Cueball. I thought he was referring to the terrain, not his head."

"Rod says he looks like Queequeg in Moby Dick. I'd go with Jesse Ventura, or an old Yul Brynner movie. He's actually ex-military, which he doesn't talk much about except to hint he was into some extreme stuff. Scuba, climbing, biting the heads off chickens. Whatever. Apparently he didn't fit into ordinary life very well so he came down here."

"Odd alternative."

"Better than winding up a mercenary in Angola. I guess you could say that about all of us."

"The South Pole saved you from Angola?"

Abby smiled. "The South Pole saved me from being ordinary."

There was silence as he considered this. Of course.

"It's interesting I could detect your approach by your CO2," Lewis finally said. He pointed to his sampler. "It's like I have superpowers down here."

"By the end of the winter you'll wonder if the instruments are an extension of you or if you're an extension of your instruments."

The observation seemed to echo what Norse had said about machines. Had he made the same ramblings to her? "To what do I owe this visit?"

"The official reason is that I wanted to check to make sure the broken computer is performing okay."

"Wow. Every technician I've ever spoken to- after forty-five minutes on hold with excruciating music- wanted to get off the line as rapidly as possible. None ever called back to see if things actually worked."

She smiled again. "You're in paradise, like Cueball said."

"And what's the unofficial reason you've come for a breath of Clean Air?"

"I wanted to check how you're getting along. It isn't easy being the fingie, and everyone's curious about you. So…"

"Curious?"

She looked at him wryly. "It's unusual to come down on the last plane like you did. And you're a geologist, not a meteorologist, which is kind of odd. And you quit some oil company, apparently. And…"

"You came for the gossip."

"I came for the truth. It's a small town, Jed. People talk. Speculate. If they don't know about a person, things just get made up."

"Ah. So they send a comely lass to worm my secrets out of me. A spy. A temptress. A- "

She wrinkled her nose. "Please."

"But it's more than your undeniable fascination with me." Lewis grinned disarmingly. He was enjoying this. "You're an emissary of espionage. You were elected. Someone sent you."

She looked disappointed. "It's that obvious?"

"I'm just used to being ignored by women."

"I doubt that." She paused to let him mentally log the compliment. "Actually, Doctor Bob suggested I visit. He said he's trying to write up a sociological profile of the base: who we are, why we're here. Then he'll track our attitudes over the winter. At the end- "

"We're all toast."

"Yes."

"The good doctor already asked me to explain myself, you know," Lewis said.

"He told me that," she admitted.

"And?"

"He said men will tell things to women they won't tell to men."

Lewis smiled as he looked at her, her neck high, ears as fine as shell, eyes large and guileless. He could guess why Norse had recruited this assistant- she could attract any man on base- and wasn't surprised she'd agreed to be recruited. It was indeed a small town. People would make fast friendships, and they'd rupture even faster. He'd noticed the undercurrent of flirting and competition almost immediately. What was it Cameron had said about women? We're more civilized now. Well, maybe.

"For a spy, you're pretty blunt. You might want to work on that."

"The truth is, I'm not very good at the whole human interaction thing."

"Who is?"

"I guess that's what Doctor Bob wants to know."

"So, do you want me on a couch?" he asked. "Should I blame it all on my parents? My unhappy childhood?"

"Did you have an unhappy childhood?"

"Dismayingly, no. Middle class, middle brow, middle life."

"Me neither. Wealthy parents, but nice, too. It's so annoying."

They watched each other for a moment, smiling slightly.

"Damn," Lewis finally said. "I don't know what Doctor Bob is going to find to do all winter."

"Well," she said, "you're not entirely normal. We're all wondering what a geologist is doing on an ice cap."

"Ah. Jim Sparco was desperate for a replacement. He's studying oscillations in polar climates spaced over decades and my predecessor took sick, as you know. Reading the thermometer is not that hard a job."

"What did your family say?"

"My folks are dead, actually. Accident."

"I'm sorry."

"It happened after I left home, quite a while ago. Anyway, I was pretty much alone. Job gone. Friends fleeting. No warm and fuzzy relationships."

"No significant other?"

He took her curiosity as a good sign. "I never stayed in one place, so girls didn't stay, either. There wasn't a lot holding me."

"Still," she persisted, "it's hard to find people to come down here sometimes, especially at the last minute."

"Yes. I was desperate, too."

She looked at him with honest curiosity. "What happened?"

He paused to remember. What had happened? The tumult of emotions he'd experienced was only slowly being sifted by his mind into a coherent story. "I went into geology because I liked explanations," he finally said. "Rocks were a puzzle out of the past, a trip back in time. They were also stationary and organized and understandable, compared to people. I liked mountain climbing, so it meshed with my hobby. But to make a living in geology I had to concentrate on one kind of puzzle: where oil is hidden. That was fine for a while. Exciting, even. Texas, the Gulf, Arabia. But then I wound up on the North Slope of Alaska, puzzling in a place we weren't really supposed to be, just in case Congress changes its mind someday about opening up the wildlife refuges to drilling. We were pretending to be backpacking tourists, but we were setting off shock waves to probe for oil."

"And you began to question what you were doing."

"No…" he said slowly. "It was like there was never any question, and then suddenly there was no question about quitting. The tundra did that to me."

She waited for him to explain.

"It's a place something like this one. Not snow-covered, not in summer, but treeless and stark with this low, everlasting light that seems to reach inside you. And yet it took me a month before I really noticed that. My mind was underground. Finally there was a rainstorm late one afternoon, dark and furious, driving us into camp, and then rainbows, and finally a plume, like smoke, curling over one ridge under that prism of light. At first I thought it was a fire, but how could a fire burn in a place that damp? Then I realized it was caribou. A drift of life in a place so empty that suddenly everything hit me like adrenaline. All my senses suddenly came awake. Do you know the feeling?"

She nodded, cautiously. "Maybe. Like falling in love?"

The analogy hadn't occurred to him, and he cocked his head. "Maybe. Anyway, what I was seeing was the Porcupine River herd. I'd seen animals, of course, but never animals in numbers like you see numbers of people- never animals to make you question everything you thought you knew about whose world this truly is. They came over a ridge and down to the Kavik River. I stood there in that light watching them for hours. And that was it. Suddenly the idea of spending my life looking for a pollutant struck me as profoundly unsatisfactory. Sneaking onto a refuge seemed wrong. People told me my dinner was getting cold, but I ignored them, and then that I would get cold if I stood out there all night, but I ignored that, too. It wasn't even night, of course, the sun never fully set. I didn't feel the cold at all. Everything just got rosy and soft. Finally, when everyone else was asleep, I pulled together some gear and started walking after the herd. I left a note so they wouldn't worry about me."

"What did it say?" she asked. She was looking at him appraisingly, finding herself liking a man who could be affected so profoundly by caribou.

His smile was wry. "I quit."

"I'm sure that did reassure them."

"One of the things I realized is that I didn't truly know a single person in that camp. Had never thought deeply about what I was doing."

"Nothing to hold you, like you said."

"Nothing to care about. Nothing to be proud of. I walked two days before I hit the Haul Road that runs from Fairbanks up to Prudhoe Bay. It was the loneliest two days I've ever had, and two of the best. They turned me inside out. Then some scientists came by in a Bronco and gave me a ride. I stayed at an ecological research camp at a place called Toolik Lake and that's where I met Jim Sparco. He was doing climate measurements in the Arctic and he's one of those rare omnivores interested in all kinds of science. We hit it off, talking about weather, geology. Climate and oceans come from rocks, you know. Volcanoes run the planet. We stayed in touch while I bummed around Idaho. I was running out of money, deciding what to do next, when I got a package from Sparco's lab in Boulder. It had a T-shirt inside that read, 'Ski the South Pole. Two miles of base, half an inch of powder.' Plus his telephone number. I called and the rest, as they say, is history."

"He sent it to a geologist."

"Yes, because he knew me."

"And because of Mickey's rock."

He was surprised. "How'd you know about that?"

"I told you there're no secrets here. It's a small place. Mickey went weird at the drill site one day last fall, evasive, and people have wondered ever since if he found something unusual. He seemed pretty excited for a guy whose project is over budget and behind schedule. Then a geologist? It's not hard to put two and two together. What else could he find in the ice but a meteorite?"

"He told me no one knew."

"People guess. There's always a lot of buzz about everything because there's nothing else to do. The question is, why did you come all this way to see it?"

"It's more like I agreed to see it in return for getting to come all this way."

She leaned forward, looking expectant. "And?"

"And what?"

"Is it significant?"

He stalled, wondering what to say. "Don't I get seduced first?"

"Sorry. Just twenty questions."

"You're the worst spy I've ever seen." He knew she was pumping him and that he should muster some annoyance, but he actually enjoyed the attention. "The fact is, he asked me to keep quiet about it. I'm not supposed to talk."

She nodded, her interest confirmed. "He wouldn't bring you down here if it wasn't important."

Lewis smiled like a sphinx. "Women are so snoopy."

"Women listen."

"Sparco is a friend of Moss's. Our astrophysicist wanted an opinion from a rockhound. I was unemployed. That's all there is to it. I haven't even done any tests yet."

"But what you saw is worth testing."

"We'll see."

"If it's the right kind of meteorite it could be big."

"For Mickey's reputation."

"That's not what I mean. You know that's not what I mean."

"What?" She was too damn smart, and he liked smart women.

"If it's a meteorite, it could be worth a lot."

The wind came up as evening approached. When Lewis walked back to the dome from the Clean Air Facility he felt the first true bite of winter. The temperature still hovered at sixty below but a rising wind pushed the windchill to minus one hundred. Dry snow undulated in ragged sheets across the ice, the flakes rasping at the fluttering nylon of his windpants. They stung the bits of skin that were exposed, his upper cheeks and temples. The wind made a low moaning sound as it blew, a discomfiting change from the earlier quiet, and when he followed the fluttering route flags to the dome he found the big bay doors had been closed against the first drifts. He yanked open a smaller door to one side and the wind pushed him as he stepped in, so that he had to lean back against the door to shut it. As he caught his breath he regarded the gloom of the dome with new gratitude. Inside felt safer. He could still hear the hoarse scratching of Antarctica. The blowing snow made it sound as if the aluminum dome were being sanded.

Lewis didn't see Norse at dinner and so went looking for him afterward, guessing the weight room attached to his berthing module. The psychologist was the kind of guy who would try to stay in shape. Norse wasn't there but Harrison Adams said he'd just left, heading for the sauna. The astronomer was working out in faded trunks and gray, baggy T-shirt, grunting as he lifted with his white, stringy muscles. Adams was a sharply intellectual man, obsessed with the sky, and it was odd to see him like that. "Can you take a minute to spot me, Lewis?"

Lewis wasn't anxious to. He found Adams prickly, the kind of scientist who did not suffer fools gladly and who thought everyone who wasn't interested in what he was interested in was a fool. "I need to find Doctor Bob."

"He'll cook for a while. Come on, spot me first. Tyson certainly won't."

The big mechanic was lifting in a corner, an enormous weight across his back as his knees bent and straightened like thick hairy pistons, his lungs whooshing like a surfacing whale. He looked at them balefully, as if offended by their mere presence. For a man who claimed a crushing workload, he seemed to have plenty of time and energy to lift weights.

"What do I have to do?" Lewis asked Adams.

"Stand over me on the bench here, while I press. Just so I don't pin myself."

"Why can't Buck do it?"

Tyson pushed himself erect, exhaling. "I'm busy."

"He's always busy," Adams said, moving to the bench. "Too busy to grade the trail to the Dark Sector. Too busy to fix the Spryte. Too busy to move the cargo for my scope repair before this wind came up. Too busy to give me any hope of meeting schedule."

"I'm not your servant, Adams." The weight clanged heavily down, Tyson's arms dangling after it like an ape's. "The world doesn't revolve around you."

The astronomer lay down on the stained weight bench. "We're not serving me, are we, Mr. Tyson? We're serving the research. We're justifying our time and expense. The world does revolve around this Pole. Except too many of us have to wait on you."

"Screw you." Tyson stretched. "Shoulda let me go home when I had the chance, if you don't like me. And get in line. Tell Cameron to back off on the other stuff he wants me to do if you're so anxious for my help."

"You use too much water, too. You ignore the rationing. People resent it."

"Let them drink beer."

"I'm talking about the showers."

"Let them shower in beer."

Adams gripped the bar of the weights. "At the end of the winter, Buck, there's going to be a review for bonuses and recommendations for future employment."

Tyson took two fifty-pound weights and began hoisting them like a crane. "Is that a threat, Harry?" He knew Adams hated the common nickname.

Adams began lifting, too, grunting. "Simply a reminder of how things are," he gasped.

"I'm thinking how things ought to be."

Adams was growing red from the exertion. "Maybe you ought to think about where you are right now, Buck. Your future. Your lack of it." His arms were shaking with the final lift.

"Maybe I am thinking about my future. Maybe I'm not the moron you think I am. Maybe errand boy here is starting to think for himself."

The astronomer gasped and put the weight to rest, sitting up. He was sweating, angry, frustrated. "You can't go through the winter like this, Buck. You can't sulk for eight damnable months. You've got to get along."

"Really? And who says?" Tyson racked his own weights with a thud. "Who says I have to get along with anybody? The truth is, Adams, you need me but I don't need you for a single fucking thing. I could care less about the sky. I could care less about you, or the fingie there, or Cameron, or any other moron stupid enough to like it down here. I do my job at my own pace, mind my own business, and count the days until I get out. And if people were honest about it, everyone else does that, too."

"No, they don't."

"Like all you beakers are best buddies? You know Moss pigs out on the grant competition. You know you're in a race with all the beakers to get papers featured in Science or Nature. You know the competition is about as collegial as a convention of Mafia dons. And you know that all you want from me is a broad back and compliant brain. Two weeks after the winter is over you won't remember who I am."

"Dammit, that's not true. This is the one time in your life to contribute to- "

"So you can take that bonus of yours and cram it up your ass. Because down here I don't have to take no shit from nobody." The big man walked out.

Adams shook his head, looking after him. "Now, there's a project for Doctor Bob," he muttered to Lewis.

"Doctor Bob might think Tyson has a legitimate point of view."

Adams snorted. "Shrinks think everything is a legitimate point of view."

Lewis went to the sauna. Cameron had told him the cedar box was both a morale booster and a safety feature, adept at warming people up after too much exposure outside. It was also supposed to relax them, bringing them together in communal contemplation. It worked well enough to be heavily used.

Lewis shed his clothes, wrapped a towel around his middle, and stepped into the red-lit dimness inside. He recognized Norse's muscled form and Mohawk crew cut through a veil of hissing steam and sat down on a cedar bench. The psychologist lazily raised a hand.

"Adams and I were just talking about you," Lewis greeted.

"In flattering terms, I hope."

"About putting Buck Tyson on the couch. Making him into Mr. Rogers."

Norse smiled. "As if therapists could make anyone into anything. The best they can do, I'm afraid, is help people come to grips with who they are."

"I think Buck's already come to grips with himself as a self-centered, shower-hogging, antisocial, dysfunctional, butt-ugly son of a bitch."

"So, good for him." Norse threw some water on the sauna rocks, releasing a hiss of steam. The psychologist leaned back, uncharacteristically quiet.

"Who am I, Doc?"

For a minute he thought Norse wasn't going to answer. Then: "That's what I'm working on, remember?"

"I talked to your spy today."

"Spy?"

"Abby came out to poke into my past. Said she was working for you."

"Oh yes." He sounded unembarrassed. "She's already reported back."

"And?"

"Said you were 'desperate.' I think that was the word. It's in my notes." His tone was amused.

"Is that description accurate, do you think?"

"I suppose it is," the psychologist said. "Of everyone. What's the phrase? Lives of quiet desperation?"

They were quiet again. Then: "What the hell are you really doing down here, Doc?"

"I already told you."

"Trying to get into our brains is just going to piss people off."

"I'm not trying to do that."

"It's one thing to trade life stories. It's another to be pinned like a bug to a wall for some shrink's research project. I don't care for it, and I don't think anyone else is going to, either. I know you've got your job to do, but nobody asked for a psychologist and it's going to be a long winter. Head collecting isn't going to make you popular."

Norse turned and looked at Lewis directly for the first time, his features indistinct in the shadows. He seemed to be considering what to say. "Questions bother you, don't they?" he finally tried.

"I just don't think I have to explain myself."

"Nor do I." Norse thought a moment. "Okay, look. First of all, I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm a psychologist. I'm an observer, not a therapist. I don't change people, I only study them. But your point is well taken. I've got not only the most unpopular job, I've got the most difficult one. So, do you know why I'm really here?"

"That's what I'm asking."

"Because we're about to leave this planet, Jed." He waited for a reaction.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Childhood's end, as Arthur C. Clarke would say. Space travel is inevitable. Maybe we'll eventually find some new Eden, or be able to build one way out there, but the first voyages are going to be in conditions like we have at the Pole: hostile, crowded, uncomfortable. A ship of strangers. Maybe a ship of fools. Who is going to go out there? Why? Can they function when they do?"

"This place does."

"Which is exactly why I'm here. You think your job is important, and it is. All the jobs down here are important. But of equal importance is the mere fact of your existence: that you're here at all, surviving, cooperating, feuding, an unwitting guinea pig at the beginning of the next era. The Pole is at the edge of space: cold, dry, clear, deadly. It doesn't even have normal time. Can we adapt to that? We have to, somehow. Earth isn't going to last forever. The National Science Foundation and NASA are as interested in our simple existence as in our research product. Uncomfortable result: me."

"I don't want to be written up as some misfit."

Norse laughed. "Misfit! I wish it were that simple."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that misfit is a cop-out word: Everyone fits, but each in their own way, from admiral to hermit."

"But you called us guinea pigs, right? Rats in your maze?"

"That's what I'm trying to explain," Norse said. "I'm not allowed to build a maze. Not as an observational psychologist. Sociologist. It's bad enough I'm here at all, an observer who changes things slightly by the simple act of observing. Manipulating events would discredit my entire study. It would ruin my winter. No, my issue is different. What drives people to places like this is one of the greatest mysteries of human history. Why did we ever leave Africa? Why do we risk at all? Do you know that when Shackleton came down to Antarctica just before the First World War to drag his men through several circles of hell, his advertisement to attract fifty-six recruits promised only low pay, abysmal conditions, hardship, and danger? And do you know how many applicants he attracted?"

"Plenty, I'll bet."

"Five thousand."

Lewis didn't want to admit his surprise. "Humans like adventure. They get bored."

"Adventure. Change. Escape. And yet when they get to a place like this they get all the visual stimulation of a cement wall. I mean, come on! It's Amundsen-Scott base that's pinning us like bugs to a wall. We're a little island, with tedious routine. The very people who most want to come to the Pole may be the least qualified to coexist here. At least that's one theory. Do we need commandos in space? Or accountants? That's the question. When the heat went off the other day some reacted smoothly and some had a little panic. Not necessarily the ones you'd expect. I'm in the prediction business, like you. You're trying to forecast the climate, and I'm trying to forecast human nature. We both look at patterns to do it."

"You're going to list twenty-six rational reasons for being here?"

"What's rational? Wasn't that our discussion at the bar? When the First World War finally started, with Shackleton's ship trapped and sinking in the ice, the Germans launched a massive attack through Belgium toward France. They did so even though they knew, mathematically, that their attack couldn't succeed. Their own planners had calculated they could not move enough troops on Belgium's dirt roads in the time available to beat the French once they got there. The whole idea was doomed. But they did it anyway, producing a monstrous four-year stalemate that slaughtered millions, and do you know why?"

"Why?"

"Because it was the best plan they had at the time." The psychologist waited, watching Lewis. Did Norse believe a thing he was saying, or was this a calculated game to elicit reaction? He tossed another cup of water on the hot stones, obscuring himself with steam. "That's human motivation for you. The best plan we have, given our tangled past, messy emotions, confused logic, and vain hopes. My issue is, is that good enough? Can we rely on each other, becoming stronger than the sum of our parts? Or does it all fall apart somewhere on the way to Pluto?"

Lewis thought back to the argument in the weight room. "Your conclusion?"

"Would be premature. That's why I'm spending the winter. But corporate and government America worships groups. Teamwork. The committee. Modern historians have abandoned the importance of the individual leader and embraced economics and sociology and biological instinct. They worship the anthill. One of my questions is whether that worship is appropriate in extreme circumstances. When does a team become a herd, and then a mob? How important is the individual and self-reliance? Can a single person, like yourself, or Buck Tyson, change the chemistry of an entire community? Were Pericles and Caesar and Napoleon and Lincoln the product of their times, or the creators?"

"How the hell are you going to tell that down here?"

"By watching what happens to us, when the first real tests come."

Lewis was acclimating to the Pole. His first nights in his "Ice Room" hadn't frozen him to the wall as he'd joked but they'd been uncomfortably restless as his body adjusted to the dryness and altitude. His dreams were turbulent and he'd jerk awake suddenly, gasping for air, alternately parched or prodded by a full bladder. Yet slowly his breathing and pulse slowed. He found himself regularly using lotion on his hands and face for the first time in his life, fighting the dryness. Pulaski told him to smear his nostrils with Vaseline before venturing outdoors to protect the lining of his nose, and he began to associate the smell with the snow. Inside the dome he noticed the rarity of smell. When he took one of the last fresh oranges from the galley to the computer lab and peeled it, Abby was drawn from a machine she was fixing like a moth to a flame. Each strip of skin released a puff of scent, intoxicating and tropical, that drifted on the currents of ventilated air. Hiro Sakura came, too, sniffing, and so did Nancy Hodge. He playfully offered them sections of fruit, juicy and elastic. Together they bit and sucked with wistful glee. Ambrosia.

Abby was becoming a friend. He told her about the drift of the continents, and how Antarctica had once had forests and dinosaurs.

She talked about the history of communication, and how the Internet was like a melding of brains, an accelerator of thought, as potentially revolutionary as the printing press. How machines might outsmart them all.

Once she took him to the garage and they checked out a snowmobile, Abby demonstrating how to use it on a runway that was beginning to drift. In the coming dark it would be too cold to use them. They skittered around the Quonset huts of summer camp, her arms around his waist, shouting directions into his hood, the air cutting so fiercely that they had to give it up after half an hour.

His "nights" had turned deep and dreamless, his body sapped each evening by the toll of cold. He set an alarm to keep on schedule and when it went off he'd jerk awake, disoriented and groggy. The sky didn't help him to tell time.

When his door slammed open in the middle of one sleep then, lights blazing on, his shock and confusion were profound. He jerked in his blankets, panicked at the chance of fire, and then before he could collect himself Cameron and Moss were crowded into his room, jostling his bed, rifling his things.

Lewis sat up in his underwear, dumbfounded. Norse was there, too, he realized, hovering just outside the door.

"What the hell?"

Moss was pawing through his duffel in frustration, and Cameron leaned over his bed, pinning him in place. "Relax, Lewis. We're here to help."

"What?" His heart was hammering in confusion.

"The quickest way to remove suspicion is to do a search. Mickey insisted."

"Get him the hell out of my things!"

"No can do."

"Bob?" He appealed to Norse, who was watching from outside the door. The psychologist reluctantly stepped into the room, glancing around. "It's for your own good, sport."

Moss swore, backed out from under the bed, and stood up, winded. "Nothing." The astrophysicist looked disgusted, at Lewis and at the world.

"What in the hell is going on?"

The three others looked at each other, confirming, and then Norse spoke. "That's what we want to ask you. Mickey's meteorite is missing."