Dark Winter (11 page)

"What's rational? Wasn't that our discussion at the bar? When the First World War finally started, with Shackleton's ship trapped and sinking in the ice, the Germans launched a massive attack through Belgium toward France. They did so even though they knew, mathematically, that their attack couldn't succeed. Their own planners had calculated they could not move enough troops on Belgium's dirt roads in the time available to beat the French once they got there. The whole idea was doomed. But they did it anyway, producing a monstrous four-year stalemate that slaughtered millions, and do you know why?"

"Why?"

"Because it was the best plan they had at the time." The psychologist waited, watching Lewis. Did Norse believe a thing he was saying, or was this a calculated game to elicit reaction? He tossed another cup of water on the hot stones, obscuring himself with steam. "That's human motivation for you. The best plan we have, given our tangled past, messy emotions, confused logic, and vain hopes. My issue is, is that good enough? Can we rely on each other, becoming stronger than the sum of our parts? Or does it all fall apart somewhere on the way to Pluto?"

Lewis thought back to the argument in the weight room. "Your conclusion?"

"Would be premature. That's why I'm spending the winter. But corporate and government America worships groups. Teamwork. The committee. Modern historians have abandoned the importance of the individual leader and embraced economics and sociology and biological instinct. They worship the anthill. One of my questions is whether that worship is appropriate in extreme circumstances. When does a team become a herd, and then a mob? How important is the individual and self-reliance? Can a single person, like yourself, or Buck Tyson, change the chemistry of an entire community? Were Pericles and Caesar and Napoleon and Lincoln the product of their times, or the creators?"

"How the hell are you going to tell that down here?"

"By watching what happens to us, when the first real tests come."

Lewis was acclimating to the Pole. His first nights in his "Ice Room" hadn't frozen him to the wall as he'd joked but they'd been uncomfortably restless as his body adjusted to the dryness and altitude. His dreams were turbulent and he'd jerk awake suddenly, gasping for air, alternately parched or prodded by a full bladder. Yet slowly his breathing and pulse slowed. He found himself regularly using lotion on his hands and face for the first time in his life, fighting the dryness. Pulaski told him to smear his nostrils with Vaseline before venturing outdoors to protect the lining of his nose, and he began to associate the smell with the snow. Inside the dome he noticed the rarity of smell. When he took one of the last fresh oranges from the galley to the computer lab and peeled it, Abby was drawn from a machine she was fixing like a moth to a flame. Each strip of skin released a puff of scent, intoxicating and tropical, that drifted on the currents of ventilated air. Hiro Sakura came, too, sniffing, and so did Nancy Hodge. He playfully offered them sections of fruit, juicy and elastic. Together they bit and sucked with wistful glee. Ambrosia.

Abby was becoming a friend. He told her about the drift of the continents, and how Antarctica had once had forests and dinosaurs.

She talked about the history of communication, and how the Internet was like a melding of brains, an accelerator of thought, as potentially revolutionary as the printing press. How machines might outsmart them all.

Once she took him to the garage and they checked out a snowmobile, Abby demonstrating how to use it on a runway that was beginning to drift. In the coming dark it would be too cold to use them. They skittered around the Quonset huts of summer camp, her arms around his waist, shouting directions into his hood, the air cutting so fiercely that they had to give it up after half an hour.

His "nights" had turned deep and dreamless, his body sapped each evening by the toll of cold. He set an alarm to keep on schedule and when it went off he'd jerk awake, disoriented and groggy. The sky didn't help him to tell time.

When his door slammed open in the middle of one sleep then, lights blazing on, his shock and confusion were profound. He jerked in his blankets, panicked at the chance of fire, and then before he could collect himself Cameron and Moss were crowded into his room, jostling his bed, rifling his things.

Lewis sat up in his underwear, dumbfounded. Norse was there, too, he realized, hovering just outside the door.

"What the hell?"

Moss was pawing through his duffel in frustration, and Cameron leaned over his bed, pinning him in place. "Relax, Lewis. We're here to help."

"What?" His heart was hammering in confusion.

"The quickest way to remove suspicion is to do a search. Mickey insisted."

"Get him the hell out of my things!"

"No can do."

"Bob?" He appealed to Norse, who was watching from outside the door. The psychologist reluctantly stepped into the room, glancing around. "It's for your own good, sport."

Moss swore, backed out from under the bed, and stood up, winded. "Nothing." The astrophysicist looked disgusted, at Lewis and at the world.

"What in the hell is going on?"

The three others looked at each other, confirming, and then Norse spoke. "That's what we want to ask you. Mickey's meteorite is missing."

What we have here is a fascinating sociological situation." Robert Norse was enjoying their dilemma.

The others looked at the psychologist sourly. Mickey Moss and Rod Cameron hadn't slept and Lewis was still groggy from having been awakened. The four were crowded into the station manager's office next to Comms, the radio communication center of the base. It was tight, hot, and electric with tension.

"Fucking swell," Cameron muttered.

"What time is it, anyway?" Lewis asked blearily.

"Three-thirty."

"Three-thirty in the morning?"

"Stop whining. The sun's up." It was a sour attempt at levity. The sun was always up, until it went down in a couple of weeks and stayed there. Already the outside was a world of blue shadow.

"Something of uncertain value," Norse went on, "disappears in a tiny community from which there is no possibility of a getaway. Why? Who? How?"

"The why is obvious," Moss rumbled. "Our newest member, Mr. Lewis here, somehow called attention to my find after I sought his expertise. The motive is money."

"Money?"

"He confirmed that I'd discovered a scientifically important meteorite. The right kind can be valuable."

Norse turned to Lewis. "Is that true, Jed?"

Lewis looked at Moss warily, miffed that the scientist had searched him. "I agreed it might be important. I hadn't even started the chemical analysis yet." How much should he say? "Rich people will pay a lot for a piece of outer space. It's a fad."

"What kind of money?"

"Throwing figures around will only encourage thievery," Moss cautioned.

"I'd say the thief's already encouraged," Norse countered.

Lewis looked uncomfortably at Moss. The astrophysicist shrugged gloomily. "One entrepreneur put tiny slices in Lucite cubes and sold them on the Home Shopping Network," Lewis finally said. "Hundred bucks each."

"Nice payday."

"An intact one, from the South Pole, that could come from Mars or the moon… who knows? Thousands per gram."

"Which means…?" Norse prompted.

Moss was looking at the floor. Lewis shrugged. "Five million dollars?"

"You're kidding," Cameron interjected.

"Maybe more."

"No way."

"If there's any microscopic fossil evidence of life, the value becomes… astronomical. Pun intended."

"Jesus." The station manager thought a moment. "But that's not an issue, not down here. By treaty, you can't sell anything found in Antarctica. It's against international law."

Lewis's tone was flat. "That's good to know."

"People down here don't care about money."

"Glad to hear it."

Cameron looked at Moss. "You knew this?"

"In theoretical terms," the astrophysicist said blandly. "The price is irrelevant to the science. When Sparco said he'd be willing to use a geologist who could also give a quick judgment on my discovery, I was delighted. It seemed useful, and Lewis here said he needed a job. But perhaps he concluded he could earn more another way."

"Meaning what?" Lewis asked.

"That you're the thief." Moss looked at him squarely, waiting for denial, and then waiting for any kind of response at all. Lewis refused to give it to him.

"I'm sorry, young man, this may be completely unfair," the astrophysicist finally went on with less certainty, "but I prefer not to be oblique. You have the knowledge to market such a rock, the skill to assess its true value, and possibly the need and bitterness as a fired petroleum engineer to hock it. When the rock disappeared I was forced to think about it from your point of view. To come down to study weather is a detour from your primary career. To come down for a meteorite from Mars or the moon, discovered at the South Pole- that's very good pay for enduring a single winter."

Norse was looking at Moss with amused interest.

"Stealing something when you can't get away makes no sense at all," Lewis said slowly. "And I wasn't fired, I quit."

"That's what you say. My point is, we don't really know what your story is, and its disappearance is coincidental with your arrival."

"The common knowledge that there is a meteorite apparently came with my arrival, but not from anything I said. People were speculating about what you found for months. Inviting down a geologist simply confirmed it."

"And how do you know that?" Moss demanded.

"Because his emissary"-Lewis pointed to Norse- "told me so. Abby Dixon."

"Who?"

"The computer technician," Cameron explained.

Moss thought. "Oh yes. The cute one." He squinted at Lewis. "You're saying she's the thief?"

"No, I'm saying anyone might have known enough to lift it from your file cabinet."

"Aha! But it wasn't in my file cabinet! I'd hidden it!"

Lewis threw up his arms in exasperation. "Then how could I or anyone else have taken it?"

Moss opened his mouth and then closed it, looking troubled. "I thought you'd seen me. And guessed."

"Seen what?"

"That he drove out to the solar observatory on the plateau at midnight when it was closed down for the season and there was no scientific reason to go there," Norse said quietly. "It appears Doctor Moss, in trying to hide his find, betrayed it."

Lewis was surprised. So it had been Moss he'd seen.

Moss turned to Norse. "You saw?"

"I heard about it at breakfast," the psychologist said dryly. "I don't know how many people saw you, but your snowmobile trip so soon after Jed arrived set tongues wagging. You might as well have buried it with ceremony at the Pole stake."

"I thought people were supposed to sleep," Moss groused. "I informed my colleagues I had to double-check the winterization."

"Well, the general consensus is that your excuse was bullshit."

The astrophysicist looked embarrassed for only a moment. "So you told Abby Dixon about its value," Moss suddenly accused Lewis.

"You're not getting the point. It was more like she told me."

"Mickey, did you e-mail colleagues in the States about your find?" Cameron asked.

"Just Sparco."

"Who could have e-mailed who knows who, with word bouncing back down here?"

"I don't think so."

"But it's possible."

Moss frowned. "Yes." He didn't like the suggestion he was somehow at fault. "And irrelevant. Word leaked. The issue now is the theft."

"So what do you want?" Cameron asked slowly.

The astrophysicist took a deep breath. "We know Lewis here didn't hide it in his room, and I'm not surprised. But a thief had to hide it somewhere. I want to search the station. Every bed, every handbag. Anyone who is innocent shouldn't object. If the culprit wishes to confess and give it back, I'm prepared to end the matter for the winter: We all have to live with each other. If not- then I want it found." He waited.

"He doesn't have probable cause to search anybody," Lewis objected.

"Yes, I do. This is a very tiny village, young man, and I have the certainty that my meteorite is in the hands of someone in our colony of twenty-six souls."

"That doesn't make you the Gestapo."

The astrophysicist was miffed at this challenge to his authority. "Nor do you have the right, as a raw newcomer, to call names! Your obstruction is exactly the tactic of a trapped thief!"

"Hey, time out!" Cameron lifted his arms, looking tired. He was irritated with Moss's accusations, but there was a subtle issue of rank here. Rod was station manager but Michael M. Moss was the quintessential Old Antarctic Explorer: an astrophysicist who'd been doing work at the Pole since the 1960s. The National Science Foundation respected this kind of longevity. They liked the guys who came back. Ignoring Moss was a political risk because word of any snub would get back to Washington. The man had become cranky and vindictive as he aged, and it was dangerous to cross him.

"Mickey, we all operate on mutual trust down here," Cameron tried. "You know that. We depend on each other for survival. Making accusations of thievery is like throwing gasoline on a fire."

"So is stealing. I've been here longer, and trusted longer, than anybody."

"Well, I didn't take your rock," Lewis said. He was disappointed that Cameron was allowing himself to be bullied by the headstrong scientist. It wasn't right.

"Then I want this place turned over until we find out who did."

Cameron groaned. "Mickey…"

"I'm not going to let this pass, Rod."