Well, this was it then. His nowhere life had come to ground in nowhere.
He began to shiver.
Tyson knew his body would shake only so long. Then it would be out of energy like the batteries, his core temperature dropping, a surrendering drowsiness taking over. How many hours of torture before that sleepy relief? Minutes, if he opened his coat. Which was worse?
Or, he could find a match and try to light the mess outdoors. A quicker, more painful, pyre.
“What’s it to be, Bucky? Fire or ice?”
Norse! Did that fucker have any idea what horror he’d inflicted?
“Yep, Doc, you saved em’ all.”
Tyson considered, trying to think clearly. If he didn’t burn himself up they’d find him someday. Maybe piece together enough to determine what had happened. Maybe even catch that slimy psychologist and make him pay.
Maybe. But then Norse had given him a damn knife like a smoking gun.
He slammed open the door, more cold swirling in, and pitched the incriminating blade away as hard as he could. A week’s work!
Then he closed the cab again and settled deeper into his parka, trying by muscle strength to control his shivering. He couldn’t, of course.
One last peek at the thermometer. Minus twenty-eight and accelerating. Plunging downward to match the ambient temperature outside.
********
Even at the bottom of the world, solitude can be interrupted by the telephone. Lewis’s at Clean Air rang with buzz-saw insistence, as harshly demanding as a baby’s cry, and his guilt over ignoring Cameron’s calls at the onset of the blizzard made him habitually pick it up now. His reverie of isolation, watching the lonely ice cap as fire lookouts had once held vigil on their mountaintops, was shattered “Lewis here.”
“Got a minute?” It was Norse.
“I’m busy, Doc.” The reply was sullen. The psychologist was the last person he wanted to talk to. He’d moved in on Abby. Started this mess, really. And it was beginning to annoy him that Norse carried his air of authority, of leadership, so easily. Annoy him that he’d let the man establish unspoken rank.
“You’ve been hiding out there.”
“I’ve been working.”
“Even the weather takes a break.”
“Data to catch up on.”
There was a pause as Norse thought about what to say. “Look, I called because I figured you might be sore about the other night. Abby, the party. Guilty as charged. Trouble is, she isn’t attracted to me. I guess it caused some trouble. We were all drinking too much.”
Lewis, his pride wounded, thought any apology was condescending. “You can dance with whoever you want. We weren’t a couple. As near as I can tell, she doesn’t like me, either.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, sport.”
Lewis was curious about what had led Norse to say that and was not about to admit it. “And don’t call me sport. Or friend, or son, or buddy, or sweetie. I don’t like the Father Superior act.”
“No offense meant.” Norse’s voice crackled over the phone. “Just trying to repair the damage.”
“Why?”
“Because today’s the first day of the rest of our lives. The post-Buck era. Remainder of the winter. All for one and one for all.”
Lewis inwardly frowned, knowing he’d voiced the same thoughts. Had Abby repeated them to Bob?
“Look, how about a meeting on neutral ground?” Norse went on.
“What do you mean?”
“The Kit Kat Club after dinner tonight. I’ve got an idea to help continue patching things back together under the dome. There’s a bunch of crap out there that people leave behind. Hobbies, toys, eccentric gear. It’s stored there. Might be something good for morale.”
“You’re recreational director now?”
“I’m just trying to keep the station on keel.”
Lewis knew he was sulking. “I’ve never even been out there.”
“That’s the whole point. It’s the station’s start-over place.”
Lewis thought about it, fighting with his pride. “Who said I need to start over?”
“Okay, maybe I do.” Norse waited.
“You’re a manipulator, you know that? You manipulate people.”
“Of course I do. Any effective person does. But that doesn’t mean I’m not your friend. I’m trying to help, dammit.”
“Help what?”
“Help the winter progress. Help make up for my own mistakes.”
Lewis was mad at Norse because he was still mad at himself. “So why did you take her away at the party?”
There was a long silence. “Look, I fucked up, okay? I cut in on you, I came on to Abby, I was feeling cocky that people were turning to me, and high that Tyson had split. I was drunk. Conceded. But it was a game to me and Abby saw through that and she shot me down. She told me she liked you. I should have known better. I did know better. And I woke up hungover like everyone else and not feeling too good about myself. So now I’m trying to move on from there.”
Lewis was silent. He was jealous of this man trying to hold things together. Jealous of Norse’s glib rationalizations. Grow up, he told himself. He’s trying to apologize.
“I’m a shrink and I’ve wound up as temporary, de facto…point man. Okay?”
Boss, Lewis thought.
“That’s not a recipe for popularity, and I feel pressure like anyone else,” Norse continued, “but we need each other and we need to get through the winter. Together. I think Abby really cares about you, Jed. She know that other thing with Gabriella – she knows that was bullshit. So give me a chance to fix things. Manipulate, like you said. That’s not always a bad thing.”
Lewis sighed. “I just feel this whole winter I’ve been jerked around, with the meteorite and everything else. I’m tired of it.”
“This isn’t easy for me, either, you know. If you haven’t guessed yet, I’ve got quite an ego. When push came to shove, she chose you. That stung. But you, me, her – all of us getting back together is the right thing to do.”
“The right thing? I’m losing my bearings on that one, Doc.”
Norse laughed at himself. “Okay. The best plan I have at the time.” There was a click as he hung up the phone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The KitKat Club was a two-story plywood balloon-launching shack, obsolete and abandoned, that an enterprising station carpenter had remodeled in his spare time and jokingly proclaimed as “a penthouse pad of pleasure.” Actually it was the top floor that had been turned into an unofficial storage attic for base personnel, crammed with cast-off junk, but the bottom had been insulated, carpeted, papered with travel posters, and heated. While it was just three hundred yards from the dome the KitKat, named for the decadent nightclub in Cabaret, had become a place of physical and psychological escape, the one refuge that didn’t have a job attached to it. When its creator left after one season his shack became a place for parties, sexual trysts, verbal showdowns and therapeutic solitude. Station managers like Cameron diplomatically ignored its existence because of its value as a pressure relief valve. Fingies were introduced to it after station and social acceptance. It was a perk, like visiting the abandoned base. Winter-overs thought of the KitKat Club, like the Pole itself, as theirs.
When Lewis arrived, Norse wasn’t there. He flicked on the lights to look around while he waited. Small windows had been shuttered for the winter but smuggled incandesent bulbs behind a screen of colored paper, violating all safety regulations, gave the room a warm glow. There were two surplus single mattresses covered with unzipped nylon sleeping bags, a ratty and torn couch surplused from the dome, crates and a cable spool that had been liberated for tables, and makeshift shelves that held drifts of dog-eared books: Tolkien and Grisham, Shackleton and Byrd. A hot plate, an espresso maker, a small fridge. An old boom box and a shoal of CDs. The walls were a mosaic of posters, clippings, cartoons, and bumper stickers: He who dies with the most toys wins. It seemed unintentio
nally macabre after what had happened.
Maybe the psychologist would put him on the couch. He felt like he needed it about now.
He heard the crunch of snow outside and considered again what he wanted. Some kind of equality, he decided, some kind of mutual respect. An acceptance of who he was and en end to Norse’s incessant observation. The shrink’s real problem was that the didn’t have enough real work to do and so dwelled on everybody else. With so many lost, they needed a reallocation…
“Hello?” It was Abby outside the door, sounding uncertain.
Just her voice was enough to get his heart to slip sideways off its track. Surprised by both her presence and the strength of his own reaction, Lewis opened the latch.
She was startled. “It’s you,” she said, blinking.
“What are you doing here?” he replied.
Great beginning.
She glanced past him to see if someone else was inside. “Bob…”
Of course, it was always Bob, wasn’t it. “Come on in,” he said gruffly. “We’re letting out the heat.”
It was too cold for indecision. She stepped inside and he shut the door. Abby took a deep breath, letting warmth settle back inside her lungs, and then looked at him warily. “I didn’t know you’d be out here.”
“I think we were set up by Norse. He sent us on the same mission.”
“Mission?”
“To find some toys, right? I thought he was coming out, too, but…” Meet me on neutral ground, Norse had suggested. He hadn’t said with whom. Quite the matchmaker. “Look, I didn’t plan this, but I’m glad you came out. Really. I’m surprised but…please don’t go.” Somehow he had to make things right.
She remembered she was angry about Gabriella. “If Bob did this, then I’m mad at him, too.”
“Please.” He lifted his arms to take her parka. “It’s a long winter.” His conciliatory tone softened her. Hesitantly, she let it slip off.
“I thought I was meeting him,” Lewis explained, hanging her coat on a peg. “But maybe not, if he sent you, too. He said it’s all for station morale.”
She looked cautious. “I don’t know whether to believe you.”
“Really, he’s playing with us both. We’re just another experiment.”
“Which I’m fed up with. I don’t need his help. Or yours.”
“That’s what I said. Except…”
“Except what?”
“Except maybe we should start over. Here, on new ground.”
“You thought or Doctor Bob thought?”
“Abby, I got drunk and screwed up the other night. That’s not an excuse but it wasn’t what I wanted to happen. I wanted things to happen with you. I’m frustrated. Frustrated at how things haven’t gone as I planned. Frustrated at myself.”
It was apology enough to get her to reluctantly sit, let him help her shuck off her snowy boots, and, with that, concede that she wasn’t immediately leaving. “We’re all frustrated, Jed,” she admitted. “It’s been a hell of a winter.”
“Yes. So now that the bad stuff is over, let’s have a truce, okay?”
“What about her?” She’d be damned if she’d say the name.
“There is no her! That’s the whole point. I ran after you. Didn’t you hear me?”
She glanced away, letting her eyes roam the room.
“I haven’t even seen her,” Lewis added. “I think she’s embarrassed, too.”
“Well.” Abby was looking for a way to answer without answering. “Welcome to the club, then, if we’ve both been sent here by our group therapist.” Her voice was quiet, resigned.
He smiled. They were going to talk, at least in a general way. “How many clubs does this place have, anyway?”
She considered the light question seriously. “The entire Pole is a club in a way. Antarctica. The science community itself. This is a sub-branch.”
“Half hippie hideaway, half slumber party.”
“It’s not Architectural Digest. I think of it as a den, or burrow.” She allowed a slight smile. “I’ve always liked it. If anything ever goes wrong I’ve always thought this is where I’d come to wait for the end.”
She meant the generator but he had to laugh. “If anything ever goes wrong! You should have camped out here weeks ago!”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. It’s cozy.”
“And hot. How high did you crank the heat, anyway?”
“Enough to get the rest of your stuff off.”
She looked at him skeptically and he grinned.
“It’s part of my plan, make it a sauna and watch ‘em strip. Works with all the girls.”
Abby snorted at that joke and shed her nylon bib overalls, keeping on the fleece pants and vest underneath. He enjoyed a glimpse of her stretching and bending even while pretending to politely glance around elsewhere. Men called her Ice Cream because they wanted her to melt. Yet while Abby was attractive, she didn’t make him uncomfortable the way Gabriella did. Somehow her presence made him content, like the beauty of a flower. She hung up the overalls next to her parka, water from her boots pooling on the plywood by the door. “What would it matter where you waited?” he asked her.
“I’d want to die at home.”
“Jesus. Let’s not be morbid.”
“How can we not?”
“It’s been hard, hasn’t it?” he said.
“Nothing like what I hoped.”
“But it’s over, I think. So we should be friends again.”
“We’ve never not been friends. You can be angry at a friend and still be friends.”
“So you’re still mad?”
She sighed,, her look one of exasperation, but exasperation as much at herself as him. “Yes, but I don’t have an excuse for my anger. No claim to you, I mean. I know that. I admit that. I’m trying to be honest about things. I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s going on.”
“And?”
“And I’m not doing very well handling it alone.”
“We do have Doctor Bob.” It was meant as a kind of joke, but his frustration came out in a sarcastic tone before he could control it.
“Are you jealous, Jed?”
It took him a moment to admit the truth. “Yes. He’s…smooth.”
“I pulled away from you because I was afraid about how I felt about you, not Bob. I don’t have the same feeling about Norse. He’s too smooth. And that’s what I’ve been thinking about.”
Now Lewis was curious. “Maybe we’d better sit more comfortably.”
She nodded, pointing him to the torn couch. He sat, sinking in a squeal of springs. Instead of sitting next to him she plopped cross-legged down on one of the mattresses, facing him. “Have you noticed what’s been going on?” she began.
“The dying?”
She shook her head. “The Pole. What it feels like here.”
“Cold.” It was flippant, an attempt to lighten things.
“No, our perspective. We’re so low to the ground that we can’t see very far. It’s almost like treading water. And then as the sun set the horizon kind of shrank in on us. We went from seeing little to seeing almost nothing, on the really dark nights. Step beyond the illumination of one of our lights and you’ve stepped into a void. It’s like we’re floating, which in a sense is true, since we’re on this ice. And at the same time the sky overhead has opened up so when it’s clear we’re not just looking at the atmosphere but beyond it, out to the Universe. It’s exactly as if we’ve blasted into space.”
“Doctor Bob again.”
She shook her head. “His focus is on the compound, the way all us little bits glue together or fall apart. He’s a social scientist studying a spaceship. But to me we’re individual atoms after a Big Bang, flying away from each other. That’s how the station makes me feel, anyway. Maybe it’s that all these people here are too close, physically, and so as the winter closes in it forces you deeper inside yourself just to get away. If you’re not careful the Pole starts
to take you over. Like the monster in The Thing, except it’s the Pole itself. Your sleep cycle, your appetite, your hormones, your periods, your energy, your habits: everything begins to slide out of whack when the sun leaves. And the more you try to run after yourself the more you seem to fall into yourself, leaving everyone else behind. Do you know what I mean?”
“Sort of.”
“It’s isolating. We know each other but we don’t know each other because if we all admitted what we’re feeling it would create this kind of psychic whirlpool which might suck us all down. So we’re wary. But some people reach out: you, Bob, even Gabriella.”
“But not you.”
She took a breath, hesitating, then plunged ahead. “A woman learns to be cautious with men. Guys want to pretend everything doesn’t matter, but it does. This thing with my picture baffles me. You baffle me, that a geologist would really want to go to the Pole. It’s like a biologist going to the moon. So I chickened out. I’m not afraid of relationships but I’m a little afraid of you. I know other guys, too, I told you that, but I came down to think things through, to come to terms with myself.”
“I respect that, Abby.”
“It was escape. But it’s not working out as I planned.”
“These deaths haven’t exactly created a retreat atmosphere.”
“I’m just trying to explain that I haven’t been trying to jerk you around, even if it seems like it. I like you, and because of that I’m afraid of getting hurt. I’m not teasing, I’m just...incompetent.” She looked defeated.
“Abby, everyone’s incompetent. It’s a fact of life.”
She looked at him hopefully. “Do you think so?”
“At that stuff they are. Look at the gossip columns about the rich and famous. It’s one constant litany of incompetence. The more confident they act, the more frightened they feel.”
She smiled. “I don’t know if I believe that. If that’s true, then Norse must be very frightened indeed. I’ve never seen anyone so confident, under such pressure.”
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