Dark Winter

by William Dietrich

  It was a place to start. By necessity, Hodge knew everybody.

  Lewis wanted to find the meteorite. Not for itself so much as to find who’d caused him this trouble. Any thief must have known the fingie would be suspect. And of all the people on base, he was least equipped to probe because he was the fingie, the outsider. He really knew no one. Which the thief knew, too.

  “You can be more objective because you’re knew,” Cameron had told him.

  Bullshit. It was a sop to Mickey Moss and a thankless job for Krill, low man on the totem pole. But he’d do it to save his winter.

  And if he found the rock, he’d be tempted to keep the dang thing.

  But first he had to find it. Find someone who knew people’s secrets.

  The four men who had met in Comms had searched each others’ rooms in the quiet hours before breakfast and found nothing of interest except Moss’s fondness for a box of scratched vinyl LPs he’d shipped with an old turntable, a fat kit telescope that Doctor Bob was assembling to look at the winter’s stars, and a shelf of pathetic how-to-be-a-boss books next to Cameron’s bedside. Norse had a chess set, Cameron a jigsaw puzzle, Mickey a book of crosswords. Lewis wasn’t surprised by the lack of smoking guns. No one was going to put the rock under his pillow. But it had satisfied him to rifle through their belongings as they had his. Served them right.

  Now he pulled open the door and stepped into BioMed. “Doctor Hodge?”

  The medic looked up with a start. A small pharmacy of pills was scattered on the wool blanket of the sickbay bed. Nancy was bent forward from a chair and going through it, sorting drugs into piles. The doctor jerked at the intrusion and some of the pills went awry.

  Hodge hastily rolled them back. “Don’t you knock?”

  “I didn’t know we were supposed to.”

  She was annoyed. “Sometimes I have patients.”

  “I thought you’d use the lock.”

  She was slightly mollified. Lewis was new, after all. “We never use it because someone might be in a hurry for an emergency. Looking for stuff when I’m not around. Is this an emergency?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then knock next time.” She began scooping pills up and putting them into bottles. “So. You got the crud?”

  “No.” He glanced around. There was an examining table and the single bed. “Just wanted to pick your brain.”

  The doctor straightened and leaned back in her metal chair, looking curious and mildly wary. She got tense and excitable when patients showed up, a lapse in bedside manner that had already made base personnel reluctant to seek her care. Had there been some kind of malpractice back home? Or was she still just adjusting to the Pole? Now she gestured toward the bed as if there was a need to explain. “Look at all this medicine that has accumulated over the years. Antibiotics, aspirin, laxatives, even seasick pills. Some are pretty potent. I’m trying to sort it out.” She held up two pills. “One to make you bigger, and another to make you small.”

  “Your own pharmacy.”

  “I could market on street corners.” She smiled slightly and he realized how rarely Nancy mustered amusement. She wasn’t dour, but she was serious. Tired, maybe. Thin, her face beginning to line, her hair to gray, her eyes to lose their optimism. Late forties and tough as horn. “Not something we’d advertise to NSF.”

  “That’s the odd thing, isn’t it?” Lewis said. “That in theory we could do anything we want down here and nobody would ever know.”

  Hodge shrugged. “That’s the theory. The truth is that everyone is such a blabbermouth that sooner or later the feds in D.C. know everything. Which probably is just as well.” That half-smile again. “Keeps the place from exploding.”

  “This has to be confidential, okay?”

  “I’m wondering if you know everything.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “About the people who come down here. You get their records, and you might have some insight as to what makes them tick.”

  She laughed. “If you mean their organs, yes. If you mean their heads, no. That’s Doctor Bob’s business.”

  “He’s too new. You’ve been with everybody for four months.”

  “As their medic, not their mother.”

  “I just need somedbody who might have insights.”

  That slight smile again, and a sigh. “Lewis, you’re looking at a woman who realized not long ago that she doesn’t know anything about anybody.” She held up her left hand, displaying that white streak on her ring finger. “A medical marvel who just happened not tot notice that the man she’d lived with for eighteen years had taken up with one of her own nurses, drained her savings, and eloped to Mexico – until he sent a ‘Dear Jane’ letter from a Guadlajara cyber-café. You want medical advice, maybe I can help. You want to understand people? There’s nobody more clueless than me.” She nodded toward the door.

  He stood his ground. “Well, you’re the only person I can think of to start.”

  “Start what?”

  “Getting Mickey Moss off my back.”

  She regarded him speculatively for a moment. Finally she pushed away from the pill-laden bed. “What’s the problem?”

  “Doctor Moss found this meteorite in the ice. Now it’s missing.”

  “So?”

  “It’s been stolen.”

  Nancy looked skeptical. “Stolen? Why?”

  “It’s probably worth some money.”

  The medic barked a laugh. “Not down here it isn’t. Who are you going to hock it to?”

  “But later, outside...”

  “No, that doesn’t make sense.” Hodge’s mind was quick, everyone admitted that, and instantly she was engaged by this mystery. “I mean, steal it now and sit on it all winter? No, no, no. A prank, maybe. A borrowing. When was it missed?”

  “I don’t know. Couple days ago. I took a look at it because I’m a geologist and Mickey hid it out in the solar observatory and now it’s gone.”

  “Not that long after the last of the summer crew?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they took it, don’t you think? It’s gone. Forget about it.”

  “No, I saw it after they left.”

  “Saw it? Or a fake? What if Moss swapped rocks? It’s an alibi, see. Send the real rock out, bring in a fake, have the fingie tentatively authenticate the phony, and then get rid of it before he can really tell...”

  Lewis looked at the doctor in surprise. Hodge seemed to have certainly considered the problem in very short time. “You’ve heard about this before.”

  She smiled a certain grimness to her grin. “About the rock. Everyone has. If I was in charge I’d start with you.”

  “They already did. I was searched last night.”

  “What’d they find?”

  He kept his face straight. “A bag of white powder, a wallet full of prophylactics, and an Aryan Nations membership card.”

  She grinned. “Told ya you didn’t have it.”

  “My Hustlers they simply confiscated.”

  “I would have let you keep them.”

  “So who does have it? Nancy, I need help here. I come down, take a look at a meteorite as a favor, and it disappears.”

  “So you’re questioning me?”

  “I need to know who I should question.”

  “Maybe no one. Maybe you should tell Mickey to go fuck himself. Snooping around isn’t going to make you very popular, you know.”

  “Moss is the station’s eight-hunded-pound gorilla. I can’t have him on my case all winter, either.”

  “True,” she conceded. “I feel your pain.” She thought a moment. “Well. Any number of people need money. Greed is universal. Cameron has no real career except as a polar junkie, Linda Brown has a loser boyfriend back home who might marry her if she came with sufficient dowry, Gabriella Reid would be a gold digger if she could find anyone with gold…” The medic shrugged.

  “See? You do know things.”

  “That’s stuff everyone
knows. Take your pick. I’d swipe it, if I could.”

  “Do you need money too?”

  “I already told you I was pillage by the son of a bitch I was married to. The bottom line, however, is it would be stupid as hell to take it at the start of winter. Why have to hide it for eight months? Hocking something from the Pole wouldn’t be all that easy. The whole thing makes no sense. Why not wait and steal it in the spring? Mickey is smart, and old, and cranky, and I think he’s somehow messing with all of us. Either that or...”

  “Or what?”

  “If it’s one of us?” She thought some more. “I think it was taken not to sell, but to send a message. Make a point. Zing Mickey Moss. Relieve the tedium. Create a joke. Screw him. Screw you.”

  “But why?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows?” She pointed to the door. “But I wouldn’t look for someone greedy. I’d look for someone pissed.”

  ******

  Lewis stood back under the intersection of archways again, more frustrated than ever. Take your pick. Well, hell. This kind of interrogation was really Rod Cameron’s job had been all too eager to palm the job off on Lewis. Nor was Cameron about to tell Mickey Moss to bug off. Harrison Adams had told Jed that Moss had been down too long and was worshipped too much. He pushed everything too far, giving the Pole an importance it had never quite lived up to. It was rash to promise discovery and yet Moss promised incessantly, and bragged on work half-done, creating pressures for performance that became obnoxious. “It’s true he brings in research money and charms when he wishes,” Adams had told him. “I’ve watched him schmooze a whole planeload of government VIPs who fly down for an hour to get their picture taken at the Pole. But he can also be vain and vindictive as hell. Rod’s afraid of him, and probably you should be too. NSF can yank the old scientist’s chain whenever they want to but they never will: Michael M. Moss is their polar god, the eminent graybeard poster boy. Don’t cross him.”

  Yet someone had. Who had the balls to steal Mickey’s rock?

  One beneficiary of the mystery was Norse. He was an outsider, too, and the theft was exactly the kind of thing that played with their heads and gave the psychologist more to write about. Except that a stunt like that, the deliberate introduction of an artificial variable, would discredit the reliability of his entire study. Norse had said himself that he couldn’t build a rat maze. Besides, the shrink had been surprised at the meteorite’s value and was almost as new as Lewis, with no obvious ax to grind against Moss or anyone else.

  A beaker, on the other hand, would recognize that any meteorite had value. A beaker might be jealous of Moss. Beakers were insanely competitive, boasting about hours worked, sleep foregone. They could be jealous, even petty.

  Yet a scientist risked his career and reputation pulling a stunt like that, while support personnel risked...what? There was no law or court or jail at the Pole. Theirs was a job, period, and a hard and thankless one at that. Put in a year and get out. There was little the scientists did that the cooks and mechanics and carpenters and safety specialists didn’t know about. Some, like Buck Tyson, were openly contemptuous of what amounted to a two-tier system: the intellectuals and the grunts. If you wanted to annoy the eggheads you didn’t throw a wrench into the power plant in a place like this, because that hurt everyone. You...created another kind of turmoil. Like this.

  And who was the station sorehead?

  Lewis crossed to the archway on the other side and went down its dim half-cylinder, the corridor’s string of caged lights punctuated by pools of gloom. Pipes and conduit, years past their projected life, extended like rusty ropes on either side, wrapped in fraying, frosted insulation. In two places there were memorial pools of brown frozen water where sewage lines had ruptured before emergency repairs could be made. Sand had been thrown across the puddles until the dirty ice could be chipped out. Someday.

  He went through another door to the generator room, more brightly lit and noisy. There were three generators here, one rumbling like an urgent drum, another in emergency readiness, and a third being overhauled. Pika Taylor, the plant manager, was bent over its black interior with ear protectors on, his head down inside his machine like a rabbit entering its burrow. He didn’t hear the geologist.

  Jed considered the generator mechanic. Sometimes it was the quiet guys who blew. Look for someone pissed. Pike seemed awfully possessive about his machines. Yet he also seemed as mild as the animal he was named for. What did Pika have against Mickey Moss? The two were probably unaware of each other’s existence. Pika’s tuneless whistling hum was the sound of the bubble of preoccupation the man carried with him. He lived in a machine world, Jed guessed, largely oblivious to the gossip, intrigues, friendships, lusts, jealousies and alliances that swirled around him. His myopia was enviable, in a way. Unfortunately, Lewis wasn’t allowed to share it.

  Without interrupting Pika, he went on.

  The gym beyond was the old garage, dark and low with a frayed net that divided the space in two. It was the site of “volleybag” games, so-named because an ordinary ball would bounce off the arched ceiling. A bundle of rags was used instead. Only a single light was on there, in line with the plea for constant energy conservation. There was no fuel resupply until the end of winter and the resulting twilight was spooky. Empty during the work shifts except…He started a moment when he saw a shadowy woman sitting silently in the corner.

  She ignored him.

  “Hey there,” he tried.

  No response.

  Of yeah. The “woman” was the mannequin he’d already been introduced to, the doll dubbed Raggedy Ann that had been brought down to practice CPR on. She was a mascot in the gym the way their slug Hieronymous was in the galley. Now she watched him from the gray twilight, slumped and somehow mocking. Hey yourself.

  He turned left through another corridor that led to a second archway that had been added to replace the old garage. Inside was the station’s motor pool, such as it was: two aging D-6 bulldozers whose rust had been arrested only by the arid polar air, two tracked exploration vehicles called Sprytes, and four beat-up snowmobiles, including the one he’d tried. It was already too cold to use the machines routinely and the main doors had been shut against the growing dimness outside. Blowing snow had made a small drift through the crack where the barn doors joined.

  The garage was more brightly lit than the gym but still had a dungeon feel. Chains hung from overhead tracks used to hoist engine blocks, the red paint of their steel hooks flaked and faded into a semblance of dried blood. Metal racks built against the walls of the arch held a shadowy armory of spare and abandoned metal parts, intricate and mysterious. Pegboard above workbenches held racks of tools, heavy and sharp. A steel mesh floor laid across the garage was slick with dripping oil. The air stank of fuel fumes. A blowing heater keeping its temperature barely above freezing.

  A thousand places to hide a rock.

  There was a screeching rasp and shower of sparks behind one of the parked Sprytes and Lewis made his way in that direction. He had no better plan of approach than with Nancy Hodge. Gee Tyson, you got the meteorite? You being so disliked and all.

  “Hey, Buck!”

  Tyson glanced up from the spinning grinder with impatient annoyance and reluctantly turned, bracing himself against the likelihood of another work request. As he took his foot off the grinder pedal its whir died away.

  “Yeah?” It was a grunt.

  “How’s it going?”

  Tyson squinted. “It’s going.”

  Lewis looked at what the mechanic had in his hand. Flat metal, shiny and sharp. It was an opening. “I heard you made knives.”

  Tyson glanced around. “So?”

  “As a hobby? You sell them back in North Dakota?”

  “So?”

  Maybe this was the wrong time to draw him out. The mechanic was on shift, and obviously not working on whatever he was supposed to be working on. He was probably afraid Jed would tell Cameron. Lewis cast about for something to sa
y. “Where do you get the material?”

  “What?”

  “For the knives? Where do you get the metal?”

  The mechanic looked at him as if he was blind. “They’ve got enough scrap in this room alone to build a fucking battleship. Every bit of useless junk you can think of except what we really need.”

  At least he was answering. And he took things. “What do you use for handles?”

  Tyson considered his visitor. What was this about? He had no illusions about people who came into his garage. They all wanted something, and screw them. Still, he answered. “Metal. Wood. Bone. Hard rubber. Plastic. Why?”

  “I’m thinking of buying one.”

  The mechanic looked wary.

  “For Christmas presents. We’ll be home by then.”

  Tyson waited for more.

  “How much?” Lewis asked.

  “What?”

  “How much for a knife?”

  The mechanic considered. “Hundred bucks.”

  “For a knife!”

  “Hand-made and engraved at the Pole.” He deliberately huffed out a cloud of vapor, like cigarette smoke. “I put up with a lot of shit to make these.”

  “Would you consider fifty?”

  That baleful look again. “No.” Then he reconsidered. “Maybe seventy-five.”

  “I’m on a budget, Buck.”

  “So am I.”

  There was a long silence, both watching the other. Tyson didn’t act like an imminent millionaire. Another dead end. “When will they be finished?”

  “Long before you get home.” He grinned at that.

  Lewis smiled falsely. “You got some I could look at?”

  The persistent interest softened Tyson slightly. He shrugged. “In my locker in my room. Maybe I could show you later.”