Dark Winter

by William Dietrich

  And as she died, her eyes bulging, her tongue grotesquely out, her frantic bucks becoming more feeble, her look became an accusatory question.

  Had I become a coward on that mountain?

  If I’m to have any peace, I have to erase them all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “But the hair on his head began to grow again...”

  Norse’s voice crackled over the galley intercom as condescending sermon, the paternal recitation of a school principal. The experiment had been conducted and its meaning was about to be revealed, so his own particular collection of winter-over lab rats had been ordered at gun point to stay in the galley while he announced his intentions from Cameron’s old office in the other module, next to the radios he’d destroyed. Abby was being held as a hostage to ensure their compliance until he completed his preparations to leave. They listened with gloomy apprehension.

  “Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it...”

  “He’s gone balmy,” Dana Andrews whispered.

  “He always was,” Pulaski said grimly, angry at himself for not seeing it. “The more we trusted him, the more over the edge he went. It fed him. We fed him.”

  “What the hell is he talking about?” Geller asked.

  “I think it’s stuff from the Bible,” Lewis said, beginning to revive from his near-execution. He had just enough frostbite to make his nose and fingers sting like fire. His shudders were receding only with the help of some soup Pulaski had microwaved. The pain as his skin warmed kept him from collapsing. “He quoted some to me when I arrived. It’s the story of Samson, destroying the temple of the Philistines.”

  “I ain’t no Philistine. That’s something bad, right?”

  “It is if he pulls down our temple.”

  “My God, is he going to destroy the bloody station?” Dana asked.

  “He might if we let him. He gets off on toying with us.”

  The intercom crackled again. “We’ve finally been stripped of pretense, haven’t we?” Norse broadcast. The disembodied sound had an eerie power and Lewis realized that the psychologist had done what Jed had asked him not to do: Norse had gotten into their heads. It wasn’t just a voice, vibrating in air. His presence reverberated in their minds. “I’m revealed as the great Oz, puppeteer of souls. I’ve been manipulating you since I got here. You’re exposed as a thin biologic film on the petri dish of the Pole, as easy to erase as a smear of mold. You joined a society that can’t protect you. That can’t even recognize its own internal danger. How does that make you feel?”

  There was no way for them to reply.

  “I’ve been giving you an experience similar to that which I faced once,” Norse explained, a teacher to his students. “In the face of group incompetence I had to rely on myself for salvation and have been punished for it ever since. So the question is, was my misfortune simply a fateful tragedy of bad luck? Or is it modern civilization, the Age of the Committee, that is to blame? Are there so many of us now, in so many clubs and consortiums and families and clans and boardrooms and unions and seminars and societies, that we’ve forgotten to think for ourselves? Act for ourselves? Be ourselves? What happens when the lemmings lead us to nuclear Armageddon or a stock market crash or global climate collapse or starvation from over-population or off the edge of a cliff? Will it be the feel-good commune that saves us? Or will it be individual preparation and reliance and free will? When I acted for myself was I exhibiting the worst of human nature? Or the best? I think evolution suggests the latter. I think we’ve been so cushioned by mere numbers that we’ve forgotten what evolution demands.”

  “He is a Nazi is what he is,” Alexi said grimly.

  “Do scientists have even the slightest idea of the human hardness that’s going to be required now to explore the extremes of the universe, or survive among the evolving brilliance of machines? Just how strong is your collective? Not very strong, is it? You panicked. You abandoned your work. Your locked yourself in. You armed yourself. You quarreled. You turned on each other. You were ready to kill each other. The one who saved you was Lewis, the fingie I set up as the outsider.”

  There was noise in the background, a scrape of furniture. “Shut up,” Norse muttered. They assumed he was speaking to Abby.

  “Civilization is a fraud,” he resumed, his pontificating reminded Lewis of Mickey Moss. “Society is a fraud. They always fall, always break down. And when they do it comes down to individual survival. When something new is built in the ruins it’s the strong individual, the visionary, the free-thinker, who points the way. I followed the most fundamental of human instincts: survival. And they hounded me for it! So I came down to their little jewel, their farthest place, the place of night and hypothermia, to test social utopia. And you snapped like a cord in this cold.”

  “You wouldn’t have survived thirty minutes by yourself, you deluded bastard,” Pulaski muttered. There was no answer, of course.

  “I hope you realize that you’ve made things far more terrible than I intended them to be,” Norse went on. “I wasn’t planning much more than an embarrassing psychological paper on station dysfunction, illustrated by depression and mistrust. But God had more in store for us, it seems: he planted an apple in Eden! Mickey was so greedy to get back his meteorite. And so pathetic at the end that he followed it, and me, right into the pit. He begged to be let out again. Let out? Was Lucifer let out? He fell from grace! He’d chosen his own fate! But the rest of you wouldn’t stop. You wouldn’t stop! First Adams, and then Cameron. It was you who turned on Buck Tyson, not me. You who mistrusted Lewis, not me. You who missed every clue and misplaced every doubt. I used Carl’s candle to make a wax impression of Buck Tyson’s knife locker lock. I didn’t forge Lewis’ name, I got him to write it for me. When I wondered how Lewis had escaped the dome all I had to do was look down at the icicles stabbed into the snow, guess what he’d done, and find the rope to confirm it. I wanted to humiliate your little society, not destroy it. I’d made my point! But you wouldn’t stop.” He took a breath.

  They waited. He didn’t mention Gabriella.

  “So. At last it stops. How to end my little demonstration? Closing down an experiment can be as difficult as starting it. I think the best solution is that I leave, alone. I’m at my best alone. I’ll give Miss Dixon here a final choice on her fate. She can save herself with me, or cast her lot with the morons. I’m indifferent either way.”

  “Let her go now so we can test your little experiment, tough guy,” Pulaski said to the speaker. It was pointless. He was talking to a machine.

  “As you saw, my telescope kit allowed me to smuggle down the necessary components of a gun,” Norse went blandly on. “You might take me, sure, but I’d be sure to take more of you. Frankly, I think there’s been enough violence. So this is what we’re going to do. I need one hour. One hour! One hour to make my preparations. At the end of that time I’ll take the remaining Spryte, with Dixon or without her. I’ll take my chances on the polar plateau, just as Tyson did. And if you telling stories to our Vostok friends, well, let’s just say that I have a story of my own prepared. I can be quite convincing.”

  No one bothered to answer this time. They were depleted, defeated by their own mistakes. Spirit had been sucked out of them. It was difficult for them to even look at Lewis, the innocent man they’d almost executed.

  “I was the serpent, people, and when I came you had no individual strength to resist my temptation. Look around at those so-called friends of yours. You have none. You have none! You’ll all despise each other the rest of your short, miserable lives. Lewis, look at the people who just tried to kill you! And then credit me the path to inner strength I’ve shown you. You came ten thousand miles for a family. Which meant you came ten thousand miles for a mirage.”

  More noise in the background. Then: “Shut up! Shut up!” A long pause.

  And finally he resumed. “One hour. One hour and I’m out of your lives. Remai
n in the galley until I’m on my way. I see that galley door open and the agreement’s off. Don’t forget, I have Abby.”

  The intercom switched off.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  They sat in the galley in sick indecision, listening to the hum of the ventilation system and half-expecting it to go off as the power died. If they hunted down and confronted Norse, they risked Abby. If they didn’t go after him, they might risk themselves: How did they know the psychologist wasn’t sabotaging the station? Yet they were emotionally depleted. After the near-disaster with Lewis, none had the stomach to sacrifice Abby for the group right now by confronting the psychopath. A showdown might prompt Norse to somehow not just shoot her, but damage the fragile machinery that kept them alive. Maybe it was safer to wait. Maybe he would simply keep his word and drive away.

  It was a depressed silence, each of them profoundly alone, a catalogue of misgivings and second guesses and confused doubts. Norse had robbed them of their own self-confidence. He’d drained them of purpose.

  “I don’t get it,” Pulaski finally said. “How can a man hate all of us like that? Hate his own kind?”

  Lewis was in no mood for philosophy. “Easy. By hating himself.”

  “And if he hates himself, why? What the hell did he do?”

  “Who knows? I think he lost it completely when he strangled Gabriella. Before that maybe it’s something he didn’t do once. Something he’s been desperately trying to justify to himself ever since.”

  “Justify by killing people.”

  “By getting us to act like the fools he thinks we are. Maybe we’ll find out someday, if we get through this.”

  “It would have to be something pretty bad, wouldn’t it? Something to really make you feel terrible about life?”

  Lewis looked at the cook for a long time and then let his gaze drift around the room. Geller. Calhoun. Dana Andrews. Alexi. Accusers. Executioners. “Yes,” he finally said. “Like tying an innocent man to a stake at the Pole.” He couldn’t hide the bitterness.

  Everyone looked away.

  He should have bit it back but Norse’s taunting had hit home. Lewis was angry, sore, depleted. He’d lived, yes, but some vital part of him seemed to have gone: He felt that he’d died a little just by being strapped to that stake. He wondered if he could ever get that part of himself back. Basic optimism. Trust.

  He’d come looking for community and they’d been willing to dispose of him. The harder he’d tried, the worse things seemed to get. So here he was, the woman he was falling in love with in the hands of a madman, without a friend and without a future. Welcome to the Three Hundred Degree Club, buddy.

  Sitting in a metal box, waiting like dumb poultry for their fate. That’s what Norse would have predicted, wouldn’t he?

  Predicted that at the end, none of them would be talking to each other.

  He’d played with them.

  What if he was still playing with them?

  It was the first thought to jolt Lewis out of his depressed apathy. What was Norse’s game now? They had nothing but the word of a killer that he’d ever let Abby go. That he wouldn’t damage the station. There were, what? He counted. Seventeen of them. Abby, the eighteenth, and then Norse. Six dead, assuming Tyson had succumbed. And...

  Where the hell was Pika?

  The little man was so quiet he was easy to miss.

  Lewis e HeHe ahjdhdhstood up, suddenly terribly concerned but not certain what he was concerned about. The lethargy! They had to shake it off! Norse was counting on it to give himself time to get away. Get away with Abby. Get away with...what?

  Seventeen against one.

  “Cueball, did you get a look at his gun?”

  Pulaski shrugged. “Barely.”

  “Is it real?”

  The cook looked at Lewis speculatively, his own energy pricked by the geologist’s. “It looked real. We don’t know unless we jump him.”

  “How many shots does he have?”

  “Well, a real gun would have been picked up in the detectors when he came down here so his looked pretty crude, a bunch of homemade parts.” Pulaski thought. “I saw two barrels, which suggests there’s no chamber for extra bullets. Probably just two shots, like a double-barreled shotgun, until he has time to reload. Who knows how many bullets. What are you thinking?”

  “That we’ve been letting him control events since the winter began. And theat we’re still letting him, by sitting here.”

  The cook looked doubtful. “You want to risk Abby, Jed?”

  “You think she’s not already at risk? After all that’s happened? Norse says he’s going to leave, but how?”

  “The Spryte,” Geller spoke up. “Like Tyson tried. Norse was curious about it from the beginning. Load a sled with food and fuel and take off across the plateau. It’s risky, but he knows he’s dead if he stays here. If we’d killed you, maybe he would have gotten away with the whole thing, but not now. His only chance is to go to the Russians and try to bribe his way off the continent with the meteorite.”

  “Norse is a good talker, but it doesn’t make sense. It’s him against eighteen or nineteen witnesses, and he knows we’ll get the radios back up sometime, that we’ll alert NSF and the Russians.”

  “He’s crazy, Jed,” Calhoun offered.

  “Is he? If Norse takes that Spryte, he not only gets away with murder, but he takes away our only emergency exit in case something goes wrong. What if he’s screwing up the base right now, sentencing us all?”

  “He can’t get to the fuel or generators,” Pulaski said. “We sealed those up.”

  “So how is he getting to the garage to get to the Spryte? When you sealed off the generator room you sealed off the garage, too, didn’t you?”

  That stopped them.

  “Maybe he’s breaking in or something,” Geller said. “He’d have to. Pika is the only one who knows a way to get in. Who has a key.”

  Lewis let his eyes scan the room. “And where’s Pika?”

  Heads turned, their apathy becoming alarm. Had Norse kidnapped him too?

  “If Bob is planning to bring down the temple like some kind of deranged Samson, we need him alive to tell us how to defuse whatever he’s cooked up. Don’t we? We can’t afford to let him set off for Vostok because then he’s free to pull the plug on this place. Booby-trap it, like the batteries in Comms.”

  “Set a fire,” Pulaski said. “Cut a cable.”

  “We’re sitting like hams in a can, waiting for him to do it.”

  They looked at the galley door. What if Norse had anticipated this very conversation? What if was outside the door, waiting for one of them to test his threat? Or was he already firing up the Spryte, the station generators about to explode?

  “Maybe we need to get out of here and into emergency shelter,” Dana said quietly. “Run the bloody hell to Bedrock Village.”

  “If it comes to that. But I’m not sure I’m willing to write off the rest of the station for this guy. Willing to sit out there, hoping for the best.”

  “I hear you on that,” Mendoza said.

  “If he’s got Pika’s keys, or Pika himself,” Lewis reminded them, “he can go anywhere, do anything. We’re letting a lunatic roam the station.”

  “And if we go charging out there we’re not only going to get some of us killed but Abby too,” Linda Brown warned. “If we just wait maybe it will all be over.”

  “Or not. Maybe his experiment hasn’t stopped. Why should we believe it has?”

  Everyone was looking at Lewis uneasily, suddenly restless, suddenly uncertain again. Every choice seemed risky.

  “I care for Abby more than any of you. But Norse is counting on us to react, not anticipate. That’s been his expectation from the beginning. He’s counting on us to be a step behind him.”

  “He said if we go out that door…” Linda began.

  “That’s my whole point. He said.”

  “But what do you want us to do?”

  Lewis stopped. Wh
at could they do? He thought a moment. “If he sees us coming, he’s got more chance to hurt Abby or hurt the station. We need to take him by surprise. If he’s really fleeing, then he has to already be in the garage gassing up. Right? He’s got to be getting ready. So he can’t see us. There’s only one of him. Let’s go outside, circle around to the garage doors, and jump him when he comes out.”

  “What about the generators?” Mendoza asked. “What if he’s rigged them to blow when he leaves? Blow if we come at him?”

  Lewis paused. “Is that possible?”

  “Who knows? He seemed awfully sure we won’t survive long enough to sic the authorities on him.”

  “Okay, how about this? A few of us should go that way – sneak into the garage the back way in case he tries to retreat. Check for any sabotage. Take him from behind with the rest in front. We’ll surround the bastard.”

  “How do we get in?”

  “The same way Norse did, I hope. I just remembered something. Pika’s been going to BioMed like a horse to a feed bag but there’s no sign he’s sick. When I found Nancy in the storeroom there was a cabinet askew, a panel behind it, and I’m wondering now if there’s some kind of utility access there to the arches. I’d like to take Longfellow through in case there’s some electrical thing Norse has rigged to booby-trap our power. You too, Carl. See if we can find Abby before he takes off in the Spryte, and get her safe. Then the rest of you can block him.”

  “He’s got a gun!” Linda Brown warned.

  “Homemade, we think. With two shots.”

  The others looked queasy, apprehensive, but with a slowly hardening resolve. They’d lost all sense of control. Maybe, following Lewis, they could somehow get it back.

  “If any one of us tries it alone we’ll be killed. Any two of us, maybe. But with all of us, everyone distracting him...” He shrugged. “We win.”

  “With casualties,” Pulaski warned.

  “But not as lame victims.”

  Geller was nodding too. He stood up. “I agree. We’re sitting here like sheep.”