Dark Winter (16 page)

Cameron wouldn't get on the same machine with the ostracized mechanic and so he was leading the others in a systematic search of the buildings. If Moss wasn't there he had to be out here. By crackling radio, they were confirming he was neither.

"Didn't he go off by himself all the time anyway?" Lewis asked.

"Just over to the Dark Side with his junk food," Pulaski said. "You could phone him. Never went off like this before."

Snow skittered up to their knees, blowing so fast that any tracks were erased within minutes of being made.

"So what'd they teach you about this in the Army?" Tyson asked Pulaski. It was an honest question, not a mocking one, and a tentative effort toward reopening some kind of communication with the group he'd scorned. Tyson had seen the piece of toast on his door and was quietly reconsidering his defiance. He was tired of the Pole but it was spooky how nobody was talking to him. Maybe he'd gone too far. Besides, the mechanic respected the cook's mysterious military past.

Pulaski let a silence hang for a moment, just to let Buck know where he stood, and then answered. "Have clear objectives. Inform your superiors. Maintain communication. Prepare for the unexpected." The cook squinted into the wind. "Doesn't look like Mickey did any of that to me."

"Anybody ever vanish like this before?" Lewis asked.

"The program's been pretty safe, considering. I mean there's been a lot of American deaths in Antarctica- more than fifty since World War II, if you count all the ship and plane injuries- but mostly industrial accidents. We've never lost a beaker at the Pole. And a guy as experienced as Mickey… it's weird, man."

They shuddered in the wind. The uncomfortable orange cab was beginning to look good again.

"So do we just keep driving around in circles?" Tyson demanded. "I'm about to go snow-blind."

"I'm betting he's not out here," the cook agreed. "Unless he was suicidal or something. And this is a tough way to go. It's like swimming out to sea- all of a sudden the station looks very far away and you turn back. Any sane man would do that."

"Was Mickey sane?" Lewis asked. Suddenly it seemed like a fair question, given the man's long association at Amundsen-Scott.

"This place was his life."

"And why would Big Rodent be suicidal?" Tyson added. He looked pointedly at Lewis. "The way I heard it, he was about to come into big money."

"Maybe that was the problem," Norse said quietly.

The others didn't reply. Everyone on station was contemplating the coincidence of Moss vanishing shortly after the meteorite disappeared. Everyone, Lewis was sure, was thinking about how his own arrival had brought bad luck.

"Maybe Mickey has fled or left or escaped the station on purpose, going somewhere else," Norse suggested.

Pulaski barked a laugh. "Where?" He gestured at the blank plateau. "There's no place to go to, Doc."

"Yeah," Tyson muttered. "Except Vostok."

"Where?" Norse turned to the mechanic.

"The closest Russian base," Tyson explained. "It's across the plateau, which means it's basically flat. No glaciers, no crevasses. Nobody in their right mind would want to go there but it's the one place you might actually drive to. People have joked about it."

The psychologist was interested. "You think Moss could have gone there?"

"No. It's seven hundred dick-shriveling miles. You'd need a vehicle, extra fuel, and I'm the guy in charge of the motor pool. Mickey didn't check anything out."

"Is it hard to drive a Spryte?"

Tyson looked at the psychologist dubiously. "It ain't hard on your brain. It's hard on your butt. But I'm telling you, we ain't missing a Spryte."

"But someone could do it."

Tyson contemplated the Spryte. "With that piece of shit? Maybe. You'd have to want to get there very, very bad to risk it. But it could be done, if you were lucky."

"But Moss didn't do it," Pulaski clarified.

The mechanic nodded. "No way. Dollars to donuts he's within five miles of where we're standing. And frozen stiffer than the poker that's up Rod Cameron's ass."

The station manager called another meeting in the galley that night. Lewis came last and sat in the back, depressed by the mood of bad feeling. Abby glanced his way and then turned her head, looking troubled. He'd said hello to her earlier, hoping she'd warmed, but she'd flitted by him in distraction, not wanting to talk. "It's not you, it's Mickey," she had muttered. Something about Moss's disappearance had hit her hard.

Norse sat to one side of the room near the serving counter, again scanning the crowd. They needed a shrink now, didn't they? Yet the psychologist looked somber, no doubt remembering Tyson's blow-up at the last meeting. Lewis bet that slug eating hadn't been in his script. Now Lewis watched Norse catch Abby's eye once and give her a look of reassurance as if to say, I understand. Had their psychologist become her confessor? Lewis found the idea irked him.

His own mood was gloomy. He'd come to the Pole for a fresh start and instead his counseling on the meteorite had dragged him into the middle of a serious crisis. You can't quit down here, Cameron had told him.

Well, hell.

The station manager got up from his chair and stiffly faced the group. His movement left two chairs empty, Lewis noticed. Pulaski without thinking had set out twenty-six, and Moss's was conspicuously vacant. Everyone eyed the extra seat uneasily. It was an accusation, a plea, a warning.

Cameron looked haggard. He hadn't slept in thirty-six hours and the e-mailed heat he was getting from Washington, D.C., was enough to set his terminal on fire. First he'd had to tattle on Tyson's water-rationing violation instead of simply fixing the problem himself. Now the possible death of Michael M. Moss would be shocking the polar establishment. Moss was Mr. South Pole. Worse, the people on station were family and now he'd somehow lost one of them. Cameron had apparently failed in the most fundamental way: at keeping them all alive. He was in no mood to forgive himself. At the sight of his drawn face the group's anxious chatter died away.

"I'm not very religious," the station manager began, his voice hoarse. He stopped, looking confused. Pulaski got up and poured Cameron a glass of water, handing it to him with the gravity of communion. The station manager drank, and the simple act seemed to steady him. He tried again.

"I'm not very religious, but I'd like to start this meeting with a prayer- not mine but our own prayers, each of us individually, from our own hearts. I don't know where Mickey is but let's acknowledge the central truth- that whatever our relationship to him, he was- is- the soul of this station. So I'd like a minute of silence to pray for his soul, which I hope is alive and which I fear is somehow, inexplicably, dead. At least none of us have seen hide nor hair of him for more than twenty-four hours. We've looked and looked and are going to keep on looking, but right now I think we need the help of a higher power. So, for just a minute, please, send our sonofabitch Old Antarctic Explorer your best thoughts."

He bowed his head. Lewis did too, trying to think what Moss might have been thinking, or where he might have gone. It made no sense. Nancy Hodge was looking with sad sympathy at Cameron: She knew a tragedy like this would threaten to erase whatever professional advancement the station manager had hoped to gain by coming down here. Norse was calmly letting his eyes scan the group, as if someone would betray themselves. And Buck Tyson looked uncertain, as if the possibility of Moss's death were making him reconsider his intransigence. Self-sufficiency was one thing, exclusion another. Tonight, everyone had shifted their chairs away from his.

"Well."

Heads came up and Cameron continued. "I've let NSF know our situation and that we're doing everything we can. They send us their best and urge us to keep searching. I'm going to launch another perimeter search around the station tomorrow and go through the buildings again. I don't… I don't know what else to do." He hesitated, looking gloomy. "Maybe he had a heart attack."

"He was strong as an ox," Pulaski said.

There was quiet.

"Strong people die, too," Nancy finally amended.

"In any event," the station manager went on, "we're getting our winter off to a stressful start and it's at times like these that the group has to hang together. Together!" He looked at Tyson worriedly. "It's hard to lose anybody, but especially Mickey. Damned if I know what happened. Could have been illness. Could have been an accident. Could have gotten lost. You probably have your own ideas. I pray to God he'll just show up, but we all know how cold it is outside."

Several faces turned to check the television monitor. The temperature was sixty-one degrees below zero. A rising wind had pushed the chill factor to minus ninety-two.

"Why don't you tell us what this is really about, Rod?" a voice demanded. It was Harrison Adams, the astronomer. "As a scientist, I don't believe in coincidences."

"What does that mean?"

"The rumor is that Mickey found a meteorite in the ice. Someone apparently took it. He demands an investigation. Then he disappears. I mean, come on."

"What are you saying, Harrison?"

"That five million dollars makes this more than a simple missing person."

There was a murmur through the crowd as speculation suddenly became baldly stated fact.

"Five million what?" Pika asked in confusion.

"Take your ear protectors off once in a while, doofus!" Geller chided.

"Now, hold on," Cameron cautioned. "We don't know that."

"Do the arithmetic," Adams said. "That's what it comes out to if this meteorite is really a chunk of Mars or the moon, and our fingie isn't blowing smoke. Right? So that's my question. What do we know? Not that Mickey had a heart attack. Only that we're missing a stone that some people- irresponsibly, I might add- have wildly speculated might be worth a lot of money. Next thing we know, boom. Mickey's gone."

"Jed Lewis just gave a professional opinion."

Adams swung to look at the fingie. "It's an amateur, unscientific, seat-of-the-pants opinion and this problem started when Jed Lewis stepped off the plane."

"That's not fair, Doctor Adams." It was Norse. "Our meteorologist was asked to give a geologic judgment, based on his professional background, by Doctor Moss himself."

"That's right," Cameron said. "There's no evidence that anything's connected."

"And no evidence it isn't," Adams said.

"Jed said he was searched," Nancy Hodge spoke up. "What did you find?"

"Nothing," Cameron replied.

"Several of us were searched," Norse chimed in. "Including Mickey. Nothing was found."

Abby, Lewis noticed, had turned her face to the floor. Something was wrong. Had something been found?

"I want to emphasize here how little we know," the psychologist went on. "We don't know if the meteorite really had value. We don't know if it was lost or stolen. We don't know what happened to Mickey. Any conclusions at this point are premature."

Cameron looked at the psychologist with gratitude. Maybe Norse had his uses. An excited buzzing broke out among the group.

"So now what?" Gabriella finally shouted.

Cameron took a breath. "Now we decide what to do. Together. In trust."

"The only problem being that one of us may be a thief. Or worse." It was Pulaski.

"Exactly," said Norse, and heads turned back to him. "So a more realistic option is to work together in temporary distrust. To scrutinize each other carefully in order to get all bad blood out of the way."

"How do we do that?" Geller asked.

"Our real problem is lack of information," the psychologist said. "We're afraid because we don't know. Accordingly, I have a proposal to make. It's unusual, but this is an unusual situation. It has to be a group decision, not imposed from above. I was skeptical when Mickey himself first proposed it but it might be the quickest way to reinforce our belief in each other." He paused, his eyes polling the group, seeking permission to broach an idea. Physically and in personality, he was a more commanding presence than Cameron. His shower idea hadn't broken Tyson, but the mechanic's defiance was cracking. Norse seemed to have a better idea what to do.

"Go ahead, Doc," Geller prompted.

"I propose a broader search," Norse went on. "Not of the station, where we've been looking for Doctor Moss, but of our rooms, to look for the meteorite. I suspect we'll find nothing, but any discovery that would clarify this situation would help. Finding nothing, in contrast, might reassure each of us about each other."

"Our rooms are the only bloody privacy we have," objected Dana Andrews.

"I sympathize," Norse said. "I propose to limit the searchers to two people, myself and Doctor Hodge. I'll check the rooms of male personnel, she the female. As we've said, I've already been searched: I'm not asking anyone to undergo anything I haven't already experienced. We'll do it now, while the rest of you wait. If anything is locked, we ask for your keys. What we discover remains entirely confidential unless it has some bearing on the disappearance of Doctor Moss or the meteorite." He glanced at Cameron. "Agreed?"

"No!" Tyson yelled. "I don't want some self-appointed shrink searching me!"

"That's because you've got more phallic objects in that armory of yours than a nymphomaniac in a nunnery, bathing boy," Geller scoffed. The others laughed.

"Fuck you." Tyson glowered, his belligerence immediately returning in response to mockery. He was always ready for a fight.

"Nobody's afraid of a man who showers more than a teenage girl, Buck."

"Yeah? Try me sometime."

"My creditor friends tell me even the biggest goon can slip in the shower and not get up, if he stays in too long."

The group stirred uneasily at this threat.