Dark Winter

by William Dietrich

  “We’ve got to get back or I’m going to freeze.” Jed’s torso was beginning to tremble. He’d never felt such cold.

  “I know.” Cameron glanced at Lewis speculatively and stayed at a kneel, his hands searching. Moss’s outer pocket held the usual gloves. Then the station manager yanked hard on the parka zipper, breaking a sheen on ice, and reached inside to a polar fleece pullover. There was something flat in a zipper pocket.

  He pulled a photograph out and looked at it in mystification, not showing it to the others. Then he tucked it inside his own clothes and took out his field radio, calling Comms.

  “This is Ice Pick,” he radioed. “Harrison there?”

  Clyde Skinner, their radioman, took a few minutes to fetch the astronomer.

  “Adams here.”

  “You guys traced that e-mail yet?” Cameron asked.

  “Dixon did,” Adams said, his voice crackling. “Is Lewis with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll tell you later.”

  Cameron looked at the fingie. “No. Tell me now.”

  There was a hesitation. “The message came from one of the computers in Clean Air. Jed Lewis’ password.”

  The quartet absorbed this. Then: “Roger that. Out.” The station manager put the radio away.

  Everyone looked at Lewis.

  “If I sent Mickey that message, would I do it from my own machine?” he asked. “My own password?”

  No one replied.

  “Come on!”

  “Did you send Mickey that message?”

  “No! No.” The others looked grim and tired. “Look, this is crazy.”

  “It sure is,” Geller said.

  I’m being set up, Lewis thought, his heart hammering with new paranoia. “So who was that picture of?” he asked, pointing.

  “Nobody.”

  “Hey, if someone’s sending e-mail on my account, I get to see what else is turning up.”

  Cameron considered and then slowly took it out. The others frowned.

  Mickey Moss had been carrying a picture of the one person who knew all their passwords, who could read all their mail. A picture of Abby Dixon, next to his heart.

  FATAL CONFIDENCE

  Going down a new route is always harder than going up. It’s risky to lean out far enough to properly see and gravity conspires to short-circuit your decision making. People bunch up, hesitating and sliding, and inadvertently kick stuff down on each other. If the kids hadn’t been a pack of scared-silly sheep, with implicit trust in our decision making, we’d never have gotten them started down the wall at all. Kressler kept telling everyone it wouldn’t be bad after the first few pitches. They were frightened enough to believe him. Once started, the students gasping in anxiety and their limbs trembling as they clutched to a point in the wall, it seemed even worse to have to go back up. Each step we took, each foot we descended, sank us deeper into the swamp we were mixing for ourselves.

  Fat Boy didn’t exactly help the mood. His pleas and moans and bitchy impatience were enough to put experienced climbers on edge, let alone a bunch of shaky kids. Then he cursed and whined at the rocks and snow that seventeen clumsy people inevitably knocked down towards him, hugging himself to the cliff wall and expressing all varieties of self-pitying sorrow. I wouldn’t have blamed his classmates a bit for pitching the babyish blob off the ledge once we got down to him. But instead there were shouts of greeting and reconciliation and hugs and a hurried half-assed setting of his broken leg, him roaring in pain. For a moment of excited triumph that we were all united again, one for all and all for one, plucky and indomitable: in other words, so thoroughly deluded that I could have written the overblown feature story about our insane little victory all by myself.

  Except we were squeezed onto a ledge that was like an overloaded, open-walled elevator going nowhere, cliffs below and cliffs above, and the clouds were blotting out the surrounding peaks. It was getting colder.

  Kressler and Fleming were hearty as hell, of course. Everyone was doing great, way to go, jolly good, pip pip, and any other kind of bullshit nonsense that popped into their heads. Me myself and I, however, happened to take a tiny peek over the edge of our view terrace and didn’t see Kressler’s easy way down at all. There was, in fact, a several hundred yard drop down a soft-rock cliff before another ledge led sideways to a point where we might sidehill on snow again - assuming we didn’t trigger a damn avalanche. How we were going to get two hundred and twenty pounds of blubber boy and fourteen other amateur climbers down this way, however, was not at all clear to me and, it turned out, not at all clear to the would-be department chairman.

  Kressler, we now learned, had never been here at all. He’d just read that it was climbable.

  Jesus. Oh, what a pack of veritable Einsteins we were.

  Let me tell you something about Cascade volcanoes. You go up the right way, at the right time and season, and most of the way it’s a steady snow slog to the top, exhausting but not terribly technical. Really dumb people have done it, and have the snapshots to prove it. Get fancy about it, however, and you can face some of the most treacherous climbing in the world. The mountains are hot inside, active and full of steam, and the steam leaches out through the lava rock of their cones and turns their geology into a kind of Swiss cheese, crumbling and unreliable. The mountains are weak and have an alarming tendency to break, slump or slide with no warning. The rock is about as firm as hardened snot, in other words, breaking off with pops and bangs with each rise of the spring sun, spitting out pitons and breaking loose handholds for anyone optimistic enough to try it. Skill can very quickly be trumped by bad luck. It was dawning on me that all our luck this day seemed exceedingly bad indeed.

  I suggested we go back up and regain the normal route.

  The kids wouldn’t hear of it. Kressler had scared the shit out of them getting them down this far, and the idea of going back up the mountain when a storm was swirling in struck everybody but me as absolutely insane. I started arguing, me against the other two, and a debate in front of weeping Fat Boy and tired, shivering sophomores was probably not the brightest thing we could have done. Kressler was furious I’d even raised the question. He needed confidence and the group was losing it.

  My two esteemed colleagues finally announced that they would show us the way while I babysat the classroom. Climb down to that beckoning snowfield and scramble back up, setting ropes, driving belay points, and generally building a super freeway for the rest of us doubters so we could get the hell out of here before we found ourselves in whiteout conditions.

  There was long, doubting, silence. Go for it, I finally told them. Oh Pioneers! Yep, you fellows go right ahead. I’ll just bundle up with the co-eds here and you all call when you’re ready. Oh, and hurry it up, will you?

  Didn’t say that, of course. Just gave my in-the-face-of-adversity nod and said I’d try to fashion some kind of sling to lower Fat Boy. What choice did I have, as the lone voice of reason in a group committed to insanity? I was being dragged down with them, doomed by the Original Sin of Fat Boy’s unroping, and if we by some chance actually survived I’d sure as hell demand my share of glory for trailing along.

  Idiots.

  The doughty pair started down off the ledge. It was rock climbing, for which we were neither equipped nor prepared. We had stiff boots for crampons, not rock shoes, and the two instructors were weighted with too many ropes and carabiners and pitons because they wanted to fashion a near-ladder for the class. Even in the best of conditions it would have been difficult to descend that route. Now the sky was spitting snow. Fat Boy was groaning in discomfort, many of the others were snuffling, and when Fleming’s head disappeared below the edge I have to confess that even I felt terribly alone.

  If they’d made it, of course, everything would have been very different.

  I crawled over to watch their progress. The wind was rising and nothing was audible, but I could see them slowly picking their way down. The more they descended the
more they hesitated and I could tell the descent was looking more and more impossible. Once Kressler stopped and looked back up at me for the longest time, as if realizing he was in over his head.

  Come back up, you moron, I thought to him as hard as I could. I really did.

  But he didn’t hear my mental message, or chose to ignore it. A few hundred more yards and his chairmanship might be secure. Can you imagine any goal more pathetic? So they kept going, fixing a line, and for one brief minute I began to concede they just might show me up. Get down, get the kids down, even get Fat Boy down. And they would have, too, if they were descending a wall with any kind of structural integrity.

  But Wallace Wall is as unreliable as a lover’s promise. One minute they were bolted to it, making our route, and the next moment a foothold gave way and Fleming slipped, fell, and bounced, hanging on his rope, suspended in terror, his ice ax sparkling as it whirled away downward, Kressler roaring instructions, and then the pitons popped off the steam-riddled rock like buttons in a Fat Boy squat. Ping, ping, ping! The rope curled out in space in a lazy arc, bright red against the foggy depths beyond, and then Fleming fell past Kressler and plucked him off his perch as neatly as you’d pick a grape.

  They went screaming.

  The students shrieked too, an anguished wail that signaled their own sudden realization of mortality and doom. The instructors tumbled in a gray dawn light, orbiting each other in an embrace of line, and then hit rocks, ice, glacier, snow, setting off a small avalanche to accompany themselves and then sliding down in their very own slurry of debris, the rope snapping. They settled out individually finally to lay still some infinity of distance below us, their broken profile looking like rag dolls.

  They were dead.

  The keening from my little mob of survivors was as mournful as the bitter wind. Snow was spitting at us, visibility failing, and we were trapped on a shelf of rock with about as much square footage as a king-sized bed. The easy route down had been exposed for the fraud it was, and our leaders for fools.

  So now they clutched, pleaded, wept.

  And turned to me.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The funeral of Michael Mortimer “Mickey” Moss, astrophysicist and Old Antarctic Explorer, took place the following morning at the stake that marked the South Pole. Or at least the clocks said morning. Lewis, still tired and sore from recovering the body, felt a groggy, growing disorientation from time. The sun ran around the base like a coin on a track, refusing to go up or down or acknowledge the normal succession of days. Geller had made a joke about it. “A cowboy riding into the sunset would get mighty dizzy here.”

  Under the dome, in contrast, was perpetual shadow. Brain chemicals that were normally triggered by the rhythm of darkness and dawn were beginning to misfire.

  “It gets worse,” Nancy Hodge had told him when he first complained about the problem. “They’ve found the Pole can mess up your thyroid and a bunch of other stuff. T3 Syndrome. Reports of depression date back a hundred years to the first explorers. A study a decade ago found two thirds of winter-overs had trouble sleeping and half were depressed. It saps your energy, slows your mind. The best thing you can do is be conscious of it and stay focused. Scheduled.”

  “If I feel this toasty now I’m going to be a charcoal briquet by October.”

  “Find a hobby. Gina is teaching Italian. Hiro is trying to learn the harmonica. Bob is building a telescope. Even Tyson is doing something.”

  “Right. Manufacturing knives.”

  But Lewis hadn’t found a hobby yet and was feeling increasingly alone and misplaced. It had taken him two hours in the sauna yesterday to expunge the haunting chill of the old base and he’d left the hot room wrung out and exhausted. His sleep had nonetheless been troubled. Lewis hadn’t told the others that he’d never seen a dead body before. At first the corpse had simply been a frozen weight, a piece of cargo. On the ice cap, however, Mickey Moss had been recognizable as a once-dominant human being. Without wishing to Lewis had caught a glimpse of the skim milk pallor of frozen flesh, the obscenely open mouth, the bulging eyes. Moss had died in pain and horror.

  And who was trying to blame it on Lewis?

  The astrophysicist’s shock was covered now by the plastic garbage bags used as a makeshift shroud for the body. Sealed with duct tape around the dead man’s torso, the plastic rattled in the bitter wind like a playing card in the spokes of a bicycle. Lewis found the others stood a little away from him. He thought the twenty-five mourners looked like a cluster of orange monks, hooded and hunched. Their ski goggles and neck gaiters masked all expression, and the tendrils of their fur ruff waved like the groping cilia of sea anemone. Blowing snow slid across the plateau, caressing the corpse with filmy waves.

  The station manager led the group in an awkward recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, Cameron stumbling haltingly through the words. There were normally no services in winter and no minister. Only Pika and Eleanor Chen, a science technician, sometimes allowed themselves to be seen leafing through the Bible.

  The group needed a priest. What they had was a psychologist.

  Norse, too, stood a little apart from the others, as if to watch both them and the body. Like everyone else, his expression was unreadable under his swaddling of clothes, his goggles giving him that black, blank-eyed stare of cartoon space aliens. Lewis was sure he was trying to figure the tragedy out. Figure them out.

  “There’s not much I can say and it’s too cold to say it,” Cameron began after the prayer, his gaiter pulled down and his beard beading with bits of ice. “We’ll put Mickey’s body out by the cargo berms until it can be evacuated in the spring. As you know, he fell down an old research pit and it’s impossible to say if it was accident, heart attack, the meteorite or what.” He glanced at Doctor Bob, a mute acknowledgment of the possibility of insanity as well. “We’ll probably never know, and maybe that’s how Mickey would prefer it. I think he’d like to be remembered for what he lived for, not how he died. And he lived for this base. He lived for us. We might not be down here, having this unique opportunity, without him.”

  The group shuffled uncomfortably.

  “Mickey was one of a kind, a sort of polar Miles Standish who helped pull this place together. He and I didn’t always get along but I’ll say this now, and I’ll say it honestly - I’ll miss him.”

  “Amen,” Pika concluded.

  Garbiella leaned forward with a plastic flower that had been kept in a Coke bottle placed in one of the bathrooms the women had claimed as theirs. She placed it on the body. The wind caught it and it flew off almost immediately, startling her. Norse stopped it with his boot and brought it back, sticking it upright into the snow. A red waxy rose.

  “Pika?” Cameron asked.

  The power plant mechanic zipped down his parka, reached inside, and pulled out a small portable disk player. “I downloaded this from the Internet,” he announced. He pushed a button and a mournful tune began, tinny, but recognizable: the military ending known as “Taps.” The military dirge played out, its long notes carried away by the wind.

  Then there was quiet, except for the fluttering of the plastic shroud.

  “Well, that’s that then,” Cameron said. “We’ll tow him over to the storage area. Gage has made a cross for him out of black PVC plumbing pipe. The body will be rock solid perfect until we can ship it home and the berms of stored cargo will give him some protection from the wind.”

  “That’s not that,” said Adams. “I said I don’t believe in coincidences.” He looked at Lewis, and then Abby. “I’m not sticking Mickey in the snow and forgetting about him. We need to check his hard drive, his records, his papers, everything we can to find out why the hell he died down there.”

  Geller coughed. Jed couldn’t see past his goggles and the gaiter that covered his mouth, but imagined the maintenance man smirking. Robbing the dead, he had predicted.

  No one said anything until Norse spoke up. “There’s an issue of privacy.”

&
nbsp; “I think group survival is a little more important than individual privacy,” Adams righteously replied.

  “It was probably an accident,” Cameron said. “Probably a coincidence. But yes, of course we’re going to try to figure out what happened.”

  “Who happened,” Adams corrected. “We have to look through his things.”

  “We’ll talk about it.”

  The group began to break up. Lewis heard a sound of snuffling and realized it was Abby, weeping behind her muffler. Any tears that leaked out would freeze.

  Something was going on with her. Something about that picture. Why the hell had a geezer like Moss gone to his death with a picture of her on his chest?

  Lewis watched as Doctor Bob stepped around the body and came to her, whispering something reassuring. Then the psychiatrist put his arm around her shoulder and led her toward the dome.

  Lewis resented the intimacy.

  No one else said a word to him. They’d heard where the e-mail had originated from. Guilty or not, he was bad luck. It wasn’t even dark yet, the long winter still stretching ahead, and already he felt like toast.

  ********

  At midnight, insomnia drove Lewis to the computer lab. Compiling weather numbers for Sparco was the one thing he’d found that was reassuring: if the sun would not finally go down, a necessary first step toward the eventual return of spring, at least his data sheets grew day by day with satisfying progression. Time was passing. He found that entering the readings was relaxing, a precise but mind-quieting task that could ready him for sleep. It was midnight and the station was still except for the ceaseless murmur of machinery and ventilation.

  He was not particularly surprised to find Abby there, her face lit by the glow of a screen. She inhabited the nighttime lab like a specter, appearing at odd hours and taking comfort in nursing her sometimes balky machines. He admired her mastery of them, the self-possession her skill gave her when she burrowed into their innards. He liked her curiosity.