Dark Winter (14 page)

Lewis hesitated. He was curious. Cameron glanced at him, waiting for him to go, but Lewis thought Tyson might let something useful slip. "Maybe I can help."

Cameron blinked. It might help to have a witness. "Okay. No secrets." He turned to Tyson. "What're you doing, Buck?"

Tyson looked sourly at his boss. "Stuff."

"You get this Spryte fixed?"

"The machine's a piece of shit."

"We need it anyway."

"It's fucking dangerous if it breaks down."

"It's fucking all we've got. And I thought you were a good mechanic."

Tyson looked from Cameron to Lewis, wondering how belligerent he could afford to be, and spat, deliberately, the spittle hitting the floor. "I'm working on it."

Cameron looked at the big man's fist. "What's that, then?"

Tyson looked at the metal in his hand with apparent surprise and then held it up, the sharpness glinting in the light. "Piston rod," he said, deadpan.

Cameron looked at the hoisted knife and then back at Tyson. "I looked at the water budget this morning. Do you know the daily ration is off fifty gallons?"

"Why no, boss, I don't."

"It's because of your damn showers, isn't it?"

"Beats me."

"I do. I've been timing you."

"Then you've got more time than I do."

"You're using as much water as six other people!"

"So melt some more."

"You know the Rodriguez Well is slow!"

"Two months ago you were complaining I was too dirty."

"That's because you stank every time you came to meals! You'd clear an entire table, like some goddamn wino! Are you insane, or what?"

"Don't you wish you'd sent me home?" Tyson smiled.

"You know I couldn't find a replacement, you goddamn butthead!"

Tyson pointed at Lewis. "Sparco did. You could, too. There's still time to get a plane in here, maybe. For an emergency. I feel appendicitis coming on."

"I'm warning you, Buck…"

"Because I wish you'd send me home." The mechanic tossed the knife aside onto the metal workbench, where it rang like a bell. He raised his big hands. "You want to compare hands, Rod?"

"Don't you threaten me."

"You want to compare those soft, white, thin-fingered paws of yours, which hardly ever get out of your warm fucking office, with mine, which get so hard I gotta soak 'em in Vaseline and wear gloves to bed? You want to spend a day under this Spryte or the Cats, where the metal's either so hot from the stinking engine, spewing carbon monoxide, that I burn my hands, or so cold that I burn 'em again? You want to work on shit so brittle that it shatters like glass, and string extension cords so stiff they snap like a twig?" He glowered as he spoke, like a looming thunderhead. "Don't talk to me about your fucking precious water! It's the only damn thing keeping me sane!" His volume had grown to a roar.

Cameron instinctively stepped backward. The big man was at the barest edge of control. The station manager was sputtering. "I've about had it with you."

"No, you haven't, you ineffectual snot!" The mechanic seemed to expand with frustrated rage, like an inflating balloon. He filled the garage, dark and hairy, and Lewis felt nervous, too. Tyson was losing it. "You haven't had it with me for another eight, fucked-up, gloriously boring months! You can't get away from me, and I can't get away from you, and so you can take your lunatic work calendar and cram it like a suppository up your soft supervisory ass!" The mechanic waited defiantly for a response, quivering with rage, and yet there was none, Cameron momentarily speechless at this outright defiance. The station manager had gone rigid. Then Tyson turned arrogantly back to the workbench, picking up the knife.

"That's outright insubordination!" Cameron finally managed.

"You need me, I'll be in the shower."

Cameron looked at the mechanic's back with a mixture of disbelief and hatred. "This time you've gone too far," he choked, trembling with outrage.

"So fire me."

"I'm writing you up in my e-mail report."

Tyson laughed. Cameron looked bitterly at Lewis, who was embarrassed at this exchange. The manager knew he couldn't let this one go. Couldn't risk losing control. Couldn't bear the humiliation.

"This time, Buck Tyson, you're toast."

We Decide as a Group Kids come out of their childhood thinking they'll be taken care of. Kids show up in college with this sorry-ass misapprehension of helplessness glued between their ears like slow-setting concrete, as hapless as clams, as dim as donkeys. Fix me. Be fair.

Fat Boy had been carried his whole life, I'm sure of it. Instead of being forced to get fit to survive, he'd always found a place on the team, always convinced the others to wait up, always whined his way into some kind of second-class acceptance. Fat Boy always got bailed out. And now he needed to be bailed out by me.

Who knows why the hell he unroped himself? To rest, to pee, to make the rest of us wait- what does it matter? He'd insisted on joining the group and was now slowing the group he'd joined, defining our chain by its weakest link. The end of his rope lay trailing on the snow like a foolish scribble. Somewhere he'd unleashed himself and was gone.

I looked at the summit, pink and swollen in the dawn light. I looked at the clouds to the west, which were beginning to mound into a grayish wall. If he cost us too many minutes, he'd cost all of us the climb. Unacceptable.

I wanted to take my team and Kressler's team up to the top. Let Fleming find him. He'd lost him. Why ruin it for everyone? Why ruin it for me? But Kressler sided with his friend and they insisted the entire class stay together. So down the tracks we went, the other kids grumbling and cursing, looking for the point where our chubby little moron had decided to wander off by himself, and myself so potentially eruptive that I knew better than to say anything. I half hoped Fat Boy had already found a crevasse and was gone for the next ten thousand years, frozen like the dense brick he was until a glacier spat him out. Then maybe we could still make the top.

I should be so lucky.

It turned out that the idiot Fleming had lost him a full quarter mile back, never having turned to check on the end of his string. The weak-lunged half-wit! Couldn't say that, either, of course, but Fleming was a lousy climber, truth be told. Piss-poor instructor. He was too nice, always a mistake. Made me uneasy. There's a difference between self-control and weakness. So back we went, a quarter-mile backtrack, and sure enough footprints led off the main trail we'd beaten and away in a meandering wander down one side of the saddle. What was Fat Boy thinking? We hadn't followed his trail for fifty yards when there was a break in the snow like a bite in a sandwich. The kid had obviously triggered a slide and been carried over the edge with it. I can't say I felt much pity. I frankly looked at the evidence with a certain feeling of satisfaction. Life was just. Finis. Can we go to the top now? But I bit my tongue.

Great surprise and consternation, of course. Wails, tears, and so much phony emotion I thought the sheer weight of the pathos would trigger another avalanche. As if anybody really liked the dumb kid! But of course we had to do the right thing, and the right thing was to clamber up and around, risking us all, and getting so close to the edge of Wallace Wall that we all might soon join Fat Boy in Paradise. I kept looking for a place to plant my ice ax once the class started the slide over. Except we didn't, and then, wonder of wonders, we heard a frightened scream.

Fat Boy wasn't done with us.

As the one instructor who really knew what he was doing, I had the other two belay me and edged downslope for a look over the cliff where Fat Boy had fallen, leaning so far that the rope was taut as piano wire. At first I couldn't see a damn thing in the dim predawn light but then I made out movement on a ledge about three hundred feet below. The kid had slid down a chute, bounced off into space, and then by a miracle had somehow fetched up about three thousand feet shy of the real bottom. He saw my silhouette and started screaming to beat hell. The smart thing to do would have been to leave him right then and go get help.

Except that the storm was coming.

Kressler and then Fleming had to take their turns edging down to see, minutes ticking by, our window closing. It was a mess, all right. A right royal snafu.

The triumvirate met. My advice was to get the rest of the kids off the mountain. Better to lose one than fifteen. Lower a bag down to Fat Boy and come back with a chopper and a medic unit when the weather allowed. Let's not be heroes now.

Kressler didn't like it, and I knew why. It was his class, really. We were assisting. A rescue would get in the newspapers and questions would be asked about why our dumb blubber buffalo had been allowed to wander off into an avalanche chute. Wouldn't look good for our fearless leader to have allowed such an elementary mistake. Kressler was up for department chair and the competition was vicious, as it always is in the ivied halls of academia, where so many fight so relentlessly for so little. His rivals would use this embarrassment against him. Silly, but there it is. Careers have turned on less. He'd really rather just bundle the kid down the mountain himself, if it was all the same to us. Come back a hero, smelling roses. It was the political thing to do.

No way, Jose.

But then Fleming, willing to brown-nose an up-and-coming department chair with the best of them- in order to grease his own skids toward tenure- sided with the ambitious idiot. The pair was convinced they could pull off this bit of derring-do.

Kressler was actually pretty good, technically, but Fleming was in over his head and didn't have the judgment of a flea. He trusted, always a mistake. And he trusted Kressler to be able to somehow snatch Fat Boy off that wall and save us all from an awkward morning-after of questions.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Except those clouds were coming. That was their trump card. I'd actually heard a little about the approaching storm- I'd volunteered to monitor the radio- but decided not to share it with the doomsayers the evening before because it might have cramped our try for the summit. In hindsight maybe that wasn't the smartest thing in the world to do but I thought we had time and I wanted the top, dammit. That was the whole point. We could have beaten the storm if not for the unroping of Fat Boy. Now the other two used the weather to justify our immediate rescue of the idiot. Left alone, the bozo might actually die. And then what was now mere bad luck becomes major fuckup. Turns Kressler from rising star to object of inquiry. So here's the plan. We climb down to Fat Boy- all of us- and then continue down an "easy" route that Kressler knew on Wallace Wall. We all get down off the mountain pronto. Disaster turns into rescue. Fat Boy becomes a trophy save.

Jesus.

The voice of reason, being me, gently pointed out that the pack of amateurs we were leading didn't have the skills to do this kind of Matterhorn macho shit. I told Kressler that he could go down there while Fleming and I took everyone else back down the glacier. But Kressler said he needed Fleming, and Fleming said Fat Boy was so heavy they really needed two more young studs to help, and no one wanted to break up the party, and so in the spirit of eternal togetherness the decision was made, over my quiet objections, to take fourteen kids down the hard way in hopes of saving one and avoiding any awkward questions.

I'm sure they'd tell you it made sense at the time.

The kids were frightened. "We need your help on this one," the other two instructors told me. I caved. With more camaraderie than sense I put on a happy face, announced we were all making a brief detour, and agreed to take Kressler's dubious route, picking up our overweight blubber baggage along the way. We'd look so smart when we reached the bottom!

Ah, togetherness.

A couple of the girls were weeping. A couple of the guys looked whiter than the snow. The sun was just cracking the eastern range.

We started down.

I think I need some help."

Lewis had found Abby in the greenhouse. It was little more than a closet with burbling hydroponic tanks, potted soil, and the smell of tomato vines, but it was brightly lit by grow lights and a refuge of steamy warmth. Lettuce, tomato, parsley, kale, and other greens struggled to maturity there, adding meager scraps of fresh chlorophyll to meals dominated by canned and frozen foods. While the greenhouse was more hobby than experiment, NASA scientists had visited twice to take notes on the facility as a model for future spaceships. Abby came regularly to help Lena Jindrova tend the plants and get an injection of artificial sunlight.

"I'm kind of busy, Jed," she told him. She was snipping dead leaves.

As he'd feared, his investigation was turning people cool. No one wanted a snoop. Lewis suspected Nancy Hodge had put the others on notice about his investigative efforts. Was their doctor the thief, trying to sabotage any inquiry? Or the enforcer of group propriety? Last night when he'd sat in the galley the conversation had muted. And this morning…

"Abby, I'm in a fix here and I don't know what to do."

She didn't look at him. "Why come to me?"

"Because you've been here longer than I have."

She took another snip. "So has everyone."

"Okay, because we're friends."

"A friend you said blabbed about the meteorite. That may have started this whole mess. That's what I heard."

Jesus. Ice Cream had turned hard again. "We were just discussing who knew about it. You pumped me."

She didn't reply.

"And I didn't come here to ask you about the meteorite."

"I'm disappointed I didn't make your list."

He stopped, exasperated. He'd crossed some unseen line at the station. Some unseen line with her.

At his silence she finally stopped trimming and turned to look at him, allowing some reluctant sympathy. "Maybe that wasn't fair," she allowed. "But I don't know about the meteorite, Jed."