She smiled. “Hoping for the wost?” She tried to keep it light, without any edge to it. “Shrink nirvana?”
“Sounds awful, doesn’t it?” He shook his head at himself. “I find myself in an awkward position between participant and observer. Victim and beneficiary.”
“Our leader now.”
“No, no. Camp counselor, maybe.”
“Our director.”
His look was sardonic. “No matter how well you plan things, everything comes out differently. You make things up as you go along.”
“And how do you know where you’re trying to go, Bob?” She seemed genuinely interested.
“I’m a psychologist. Inside instead of outside. Soul instead of stars. At some fundamental level I’m not sure they’re all that different. The goal of any life is to justify yourself to yourself. Or at least explain yourself.”
“That sounds like what a shrink would say.”
“That’s what an honest man would say.”
She left and he watched her go with a concealed hunger: her slim back, the nape of her neck, the curve of her hip, that coy primness he wanted to possess and violate. Her presence was tormenting him like a hunger, inflating his desire. The more she put him off, the more he wanted her.
But he couldn’t let that interfere with the experiment. Couldn’t let that interefere with himself! Still, Norse allowed himself the luxury of pondering her for awhile, considering their encounter. She’d been more receptive this time, he thought, as if she was thawing. Ice Cream! Getting Lewis out of the way had helped. Getting rid of him entirely would help more. Too bad there was just one more Spryte, but he needed to reserve that for himself...Norse imagined triumphing with her, he her only hope of survival, getting her to do the things he needed. Too bad she had a damn toothache.
Maybe in the end they could leave together.
He looked at what he had just written. I acted on the best plan I had at the time.
Adaptable, yes. But always a step ahead. Always a step ahead.
It really would be quite the brilliant paper. He took up his pen again.
It wasn’t until later, much later, that another possibility occurred to him and he stood up from his desk, suddenly alarmed.
“Damn her!”
He wrenched open the closet door, threw down the box Abby had pawed through, and flipped frantically to his own folder, cursing as he did so. He opened it.
His dental X-rays were gone.
She was taking them to Nancy Hodge.
*********
There were red doplets on the snow between the gallery and BioMed, a bright disturbing trail that announced more trouble. Abby followed them at a trot, the X-rays in her mitten. The door to the sick bay was locked and she groaned inwardly. She remembered that the increasingly paranoid Nancy Hodge was locking herself in, and the need to knock was maddening. Every second seemed vital. Norse was no fool, and Abby feared he’d come storming out from his office at any moment. She needed Nancy to make the X ray comparison so they could get the others to help.
“Nancy, open up!” She pounded anxiously with the flat of her hand.
There was a pause, then a reply muffled by the door. “I’m busy.”
There wasn’t time to be busy! They had to learn the truth about Norse! Abby hammered on the door again, impatient and irritated. “Hurry up! It’s an emergency!”
“I’ve got an emergency in here!”
“Nancy, please!”
She heard a muffled oath and the bang of something being shut, then the quick clump of footsteps. The door opened and Nancy looked out, her eyes tired and harassed. “You’ll have to come back later. I’m treating Gina.”
“Please, I’ve got to talk to you know.”
“Abby, I’ve got blood all over the place in here.”
Abby stepped up to the level of BioMed and peeked past Nancy to the examining room beyond. Clyde Skinner was lying on the lone bed, his eyes bandaged. Gina Brindisi was sitting on the table, her faced white and scared looking, her pants on the floor. One of her legs was smeared with blood, a slashing wound on her calf looking partly sewn up. “My God, what happened?”
Nancy looked back over her shoulder at Gina. “She tripped over some damn pike or battleax Calhoun made. We’re all going to poke each other’s eyes out with those things. It’s crazy. I’ve got to finish up these stitches to stop the bleeding.”
“Can’t we talk for a second?”
“Abby she’s leaking all over the damn table! Are you hurt or sick?”
“No.”
“Then come back later.” She started to close the door.
“Wait!” Abby thrust her boot inside, preventing its closure. “It’s about everything that’s happening!”
“I’m trying to patch up everything that’s happening! I’ll talk to you later!”
“Please!”
Nancy was annoyed now. “Get your foot out of my door. Damn you and damn this place anyway!”
Abby thought furiously. How much time before Norse figured out what she was up to? She couldn’t wait until later, not if she was going to try to get into Norse’s room for more evidence. She needed to be in two places at once! And now Nancy was distracted.
“Listen to me!” Abby hissed urgently. “Listen, or we’ll all going to die!” Her determination interrupted Nancy’s impatience, piercing the doctor’s anger. For just a moment the medic was listening. “Norse is not Norse,” Abby insisted in a low voice. “Do you understand? Bob is not Bob. He’s someone else, some impostor, and that means he could be behind all this craziness that’s been going on. I can’t come back later, I have to find the one thing that will convince the rest of you, so I’m going to send Jed over here instead, okay? I’m going to send Lewis. He can explain.”
Nancy looked wary, curious, fearful. “He’s locked up.”
“I’m going to let him out. It’s important. Nancy, you have to trust him. You have to trust me. It’s our only chance.”
The doctor shook her head. “I don’t trust anyone anymore.”
Abby thrust the folder of X rays at her. “These are Norse’s dental X rays. You’ve got another set here. I need you to compare the two as soon as you stitch up Gina. Hurry, before Bob comes!”
“Abby…”
“Just do it! You’ll see! I’m going to send Jed to fill you in and then I’m going to come back if I find out what I think I’ll find. Then the three of us will go to the others.”
Nancy took the folder uncertainly. “I don’t understand…”
“Just look at the two sets! See if they match! Please, Nancy, I think you’re our last chance!”
“Last chance?”
“To get away from the Pole alive.”
********
Lewis darted across the snow under the dome like a wraith for what he hoped was the last time, carrying as a crude defense one of the ice axes he’d used as a grappling hook. He’d descended like a spider back into the dome the night before, pausing on the roof to untie the hook from the rope and thrust it in his belt. Then he doubled the rope around one of the framing braces on the dome. It’s ample length allowed him to descend back into his imprisonment on the doubled line and then retrieve the entire rope by pulling on one end, reeling it in until the other end slipped out of the dome brace and fell down on the snow. He hid the rope in the snow behind Comms and tucked the axes in a maintenance closet near the sauna. Then he’d waited in his cedar jail in an agony of impatience, anxious to see if Abby could figure out a way to follow up on the mystery.
She’d finally come to him panting like a sprinter, gasping out the tale of her acquisition of Norse’s X ray and its delivery to Nancy Hodge. The doctor had been too busy to listen, Abby said hurriedly, because she was bandaging up Gina, but now Nancy was waiting for him in BioMed and Abby was about to pursue a hung about what she might find in Norse’s room. It was all hunches now, a gamble that he could save all their lives by uncovering the truth about one. Yet what if he was wrong? Th
en the only alternative might be a desperate escape like Tyson had done, stealing the other Spryte and setting off for McMurdo. Probably dying in the attempt.
Now he looked around carefully to avoid interception but, surprisingly, no one was around. Eating? Moping? Arguing? Maybe Norse had started some kind of bizarre encounter group. He slipped into the archway, surprised at how easy this was, and went to the door of the medic’s module. He reached for the freezerlike door handle and stopped. It was hanging askew, its lock apparently broken. Hadn’t Nancy said they didn’t lock the sick bay? Why was it pried open now? Hesitantly, he knocked.
No reply. The door creaked open a quarter inch.
“Nancy?”
No answer.
He pounded harder. “Hodge? You in there?” Again, silence. “It’s Lewis! We need to talk!”
Then a faint moan. “Help...”
It was Clyde Skinner.
“For God’s sake, help...”
Where was Nancy? He shoved open the broken door and stepped inside, shutting it against the cold. “Clyde?”
“Who is it? Who is it?”
It was Skinner all right, the burned radioman. He was lying in the sickbay bed with his face swathed in bandages, blind and helpless, clutching his sheets.
“It’s Lewis. I’ve come to help.”
“Lewis?” The voice betrayed dread. “You set the bomb.”
“No I didn’t Clyde. Someone’s setting me up.”
The man lay quietly, looking afraid.
“What happened? BioMed was locked. Where’s Nancy?”
“You’ve come to kill me too, haven’t you?”
“No! No, no. I’m trying to help. What the hell happened?”
“Where’s Abby?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nancy told me to talk only to Abby.”
“Well, where’s Nancy?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. There was a noise, like something breaking, and Nancy yelled, someone inside, and then lots of banging around, and then it went all quiet. I thought you’d all abandoned me. I thought you’d left the station and left me behind.”
Lewis glanced around. BioMed was a mess. There was blood all over the examining table: Gina must have really been cut. More ominously, drawers hung half open, cabinet doors swung wide, and medical supplies had cascaded onto the floor. Notebooks had spilled a glacier of paper. The place had been ransacked. Where the hell was Nancy?
The storage door in back was cracked open.
He went to the entrance and tried to push open the door, but something was blocking it. He shoved enough to get an arm through the opening and turned on the light to see what was in the way.
Legs.
Lewis felt a sick dread. He pushed harder and something heavy skidded aside, allowing him to squeeze through. He stumbled inside and looked down in grim confirmation at Nancy Hodge, her eyes rolled back and mouth open, a hypodermic needle jutting from the back of her neck. A set of X-rays was resting on her body. He knelt and glanced at a manila folder. It read Abby Dixon.
The assailant was still confusing the trail.
He felt vainly for a pulse. Their doctor was dead. There were no obvious cuts and bruises but not even junkies injected themselves in the nape of the neck. It was obvious someone had crept up behind her and injected her. Killed her before she could talk about the X rays. Killed her before she could talk about Norse.
No escape. No radio. And now no doctor.
No proof.
He glanced around. X ray records were upended and the storage cabinet against the rear wall has been shoved aside, exposing a metal panel screwed to the wall, scratched and dirty. Lewis slowly stood. They were doomed. Except…someone had been searching BioMed. And that searching meant Nancy had hidden the two sets of X-rays. What if Norse hadn’t found them yet?
Another faint tremor of hope. The shifted storage cabinet appeared to hold nothing but medical supplies. The panel behind it required a screwdriver. So he moved out into the main sick bay and began his own search.
“What’s going on? What’s happening?” Skinner asked from his bed, his voice fearful. It was agonizing not to see.
“Nancy’s dead, Clyde.”
“Oh my God!” he moaned. “Not her too!”
“It wasn’t me who killed her. You have to believe that.”
Skinner was silent.
“Did you see anything?”
“Is that a joke?”
Lewis grimaced. “Sorry.”
“Dead how?”
“An injection. Maybe murder. Was Norse here?”
“No voice. Just funny noises. Like what you’re doing now.”
“But who was it? Who was here before me, Clyde?”
“I don’t know.” There was a tremor in his voice. He was afraid.
“Think! I might need your help!”
“Please don’t kill me, Lewis. I didn’t see anything.”
“Christ.” He gave up on Skinner and turned to the drawers. The room didn’t take that long to search. Nothing. “He took them,” Lewis muttered.
“Took what?”
“Something Nancy had.”
“Does it matter?”
He stood, despairing. How could he convince the others? “It matters because it means that I’m well and truly screwed.” He looked back at Nancy’s body, frustrated and depressed.
“And that’s the first intelligent observation you’ve made since you came here,” a different voice said.
It was someone at the doorway. Lewis turned.
Norse!
The psychologist stepped inside and turned to address a group of men behind him. “We finally caught him in the act,” he announced.
Pulaski, Geller, Calhoun and Perlin followed, crowding one end of BioMed. A posse rousted from the videos in the library, bleary and belligerent. The open door let in a freezerlike chill, the spilled papers shifting in the draft. Abby’s X rays slid off Nancy’s still chest with a sigh. “It wasn’t me,” Lewis tried.
“It’s never you, is it Jed?” Norse replied softly.
Lewis picked his ice ax up in instinctive defense, trying to buy a moment’s time, composing what he had to say. But before he could speak Pulaski shot forward in sudden assault, the cook’s flying tackle by Pulaski hurling Lewis backward against a set of wall shelves, the air whooshing out of him and the ice ax spinning into a corner. The shelves gave way, crashing around his head. Dimly he realized Geller and Calhoun and Perlin were charging, too. “Wait!” he yelled.
Pulaski butted Jed’s face with his bald head, bloodying Lewis’s nose, and one of the others struck him in the stomach. Lewis couldn’t breathe. He feebly tried to resist but the cook gripped him in a wrestling hold, twisted his arm, and expertly flipped him onto his stomach. Other strong hands caught his wrists and ankles and twisted electrical cords around them.
They’d trailed him to BioMed. Waited while he scampered across the snow. Crept up while he was discovering the body.
Geller grunted and stood up, stepping over Lewis into the storeroom. “Nancy’s dead!” he confirmed.
Lewis had been hit so hard he was seeing stars. It was difficult to think. “No,” he wheezed, “I found...”
“Clyde, you all right?” Calhoun asked Skinner.
“What’s going on! What’s going on!”
“It’s Doctor Bob,” Norse said. “We caught Lewis preparing to kill you.”
“Oh my God. Where’s Abby?”
“We’re looking for her, too. You seen her?”
Skinner said nothing. He was shaking with fear.
“She comes here, you notify us, okay?”
The blind man went rigid, as if waiting for a blow.
Norse crouched by Jed’s head, looking disgusted. “Who let you out?”
“X rays...”
“It was Dixon, wasn’t it?”
“Ask Clyde...”
“Jed Lewis,” he said solemnly, “by the emergency powers confirmed to me by the agre
ement of our peers in an emergency situation, I place you under arrest for the murder of Nancy Hodge.”
He was choking, trying to get the words out. “Bastard…”
“And for the murders of Gabriella Reid, Rod Cameron, Harrison Adams, and Mickey Moss. Perhaps manslaughter for the flight of Buck Tyson. For the blinding of Clyde Skinner. For terrorism and emotional assault, for theft and false witness, for stalking and betrayal. You’ve jeopardized the very existence of Amundsen-Scott station.”
Lewis’s lower face was a mask of blood, his throat hacked, his ribs sore. “Lie!”
Norse stood. “You all saw it,” he told the others. “We caught him in the act this time. He broke into BioMed after I’d ordered Nancy to lock it for her own safety. But we’re not savages. We’re going to have a trial.”
“What can we do with him even if he’s guilty?” It was Gage Perlin, looking at the trussed Lewis with frank fear. “He already busted out of the sauna. It’s like he never stays put. He gets out, and something happens.”
“It’s my fault this occurred,” Norse said. “I wouldn’t listen to the rest of you. I wouldn’t act when the rest of you wanted to. I wanted to go slow. But this time I am going to listen to you. This time we’re going to end this nightmare once and for all.”
“No,” Lewis coughed. “He’s not...”
Something in Norse snapped. He kicked Lewis, knocking the wind out of him again. It was as if were furious with himself for having been blinded by the man’s ruses. “Shut up, Lewis! Just shut up!”
He turned to the others. “We need to locate Abby – find out what her role was in all this.”
Lewis closed his eyes and spit out some blood. He writhed helplessly on the floor, his cheek on cold linoleum, his vision a cluster of white polar boots. Abby, he thought, don’t let them do this to you, too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“I think all of you believe in the rule of law,” Norse began to the assembled winterovers in the galley. “All of you believe in unity. All of you believe in fairness. And no one has tried harder than myself to keep a rein on our emotions, to counsel moderation, to avoid irrevocable actions. But in a truly extreme situation then extreme measures become inevitable, and an extreme situation is exactly what Jed Lewis has put us in.”
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