Dark Winter (2 page)

Cameron frowned. He had a look of rugged self-confidence that came from coping with cold and administration, and a hint of strain for the same reason. The Pole wore on you. "Egos in kindergarten." He shook his head. "My job is to herd cats. And I'm having a bad day. We had a little alarm last night."

"Alarm?"

"The heat went off."

"Oh."

"We got it back on."

"Oh."

The station manager studied the newcomer. Lewis still looked smooth, sandy-haired and tanned, with the easy tautness of the recreational athlete.

It would pass.

"You got your file?"

Lewis dug in his duffel and fished out a worn manila envelope with employment forms, medical records, dental X rays, and a list of the personal belongings he'd shipped to the Pole in advance of his own arrival. His new boss glanced inside, as if to confirm Lewis's presence with paper, and then put the folder under his arm. "I've got to go back outside to see this last plane off," Cameron said. "I'll show you around later but right now it's best to just sit and drink."

Lewis looked around the galley in confusion.

"I mean drink water. The altitude. You feel lousy, right? It's okay. Fingies are supposed to."

"Fingie?"

"F-N-G-I. Fucking New Guy on the Ice. That's you."

Lewis failed at a grin. "Latecomer."

"Just new. Everybody's a fingie at first. We know we're lucky to get you last minute like this. Jim Sparco e-mailed about you like the Second Coming."

"I needed a job."

"Yeah, he explained that. I think it's cool that you quit Big Oil." Cameron gave a nod of approval.

"That's me, man of principle." Lewis had a headache from the altitude.

"Course, we need their shit to keep from freezing down here."

"Not from a wildlife refuge, you don't."

"And you just walked out."

"They weren't about to give me a helicopter ride."

"That took some guts."

"It had to be done."

Cameron tried to assess the new man. Lewis looked tired, disoriented, chest rising and falling, half excited and half afraid. They all started like that. The station manager turned back to the door, impatient to get away, and considered whether to say anything else. "I've got to go get the plane off," he finally said again. "You know what that means, don't you?"

"What?"

"That you can't quit down here."

A stream of people followed Cameron out, some looking at Lewis curiously and others ignoring him: the winter-overs going to offload the supplies and the last from summer flying home. The Pole had a brief four-month window when weather permitted incoming flights, and then in February the last plane left, fleeing north like a migrating bird. In winter it was too dark to see, too windy to keep the ice runway clear, and too cold to risk a landing: Struts could snap, hydraulics fail, doors fail to open or close. The sun set on March 21, the equinox, and wouldn't rise again until September 21. From February to October the base was as remote as the moon. There were twenty-six winter-overs who retreated under the dome to maintain its functions and take astronomical and weather readings: eight women and eighteen men this year. It was like being on a submarine or space station. You had to commit.

The galley had emptied and Lewis took a place at a Formica table. The room was low-ceilinged, bright, and warm. A bulletin board was thick with paper, a juice dispenser burbled, and in the corner a television monitor displayed outside temperatures. It was fifty-eight below zero near the runway, the breeze lowering the windchill to minus eighty-one. The reading was an abstraction except for the freezer door he'd come through. That was old, and cold leaked around its edges to rime its inner face with frost. The frost reached all the way across it in stripes, like fingers. The pattern reminded Lewis of a giant hand, trying to yank the door away.

"Drink as much as you can. Best cure for the altitude."

Lewis looked up. It was the cook, bald except for a topknot that hung from the back of his head. His skull looked knobby, as if knocked around more than once, and he had a gray mustache and forearms tattooed with a bear and eagle. Here was somebody easy to remember.

"It doesn't look high."

"That's because it's flat. You're sitting on ice almost two miles thick. Our elevation is ninety-three hundred, and the thinning of the atmosphere at the Poles makes the effective altitude closer to eleven thousand. Walking out of that transport is like being dumped on the crest of the Rockies. Your body will adjust in a few days."

"I feel hammered." The short walk from the plane had made him ill.

"You'll be racing around the world before you know it."

"Around the world?"

"Around the stake that marks the Pole." He sat down. "Wade Pulaski. Chief cook and bottle washer. Best chef for nine hundred miles. I can't claim any farther because Cathy Costello back at McMurdo is pretty good, too." McMurdo was the main American base in Antarctica, located on the coast.

"Jedediah Lewis, polar weatherman." He shook.

"Jedediah? Your parents religious?"

"More like hippies, I think. When it was a fad."

"But it's biblical, right? You're a prophet?"

"Oracle of climate change by temporary opportunity. Rockhound by training. And it's actually just another name for Solomon. 'Beloved of the Lord.' "

"So you're wise."

His head was pounding. "I take my name as God's little joke."

"What do you mean by rockhound?"

"Geologist. That's my real job."

"So you come to the one place on earth where there aren't any rocks? Doctor Bob will have a field day with that one."

"Who's Doctor Bob?"

"Our new shrink. NASA sent him down to do a head job on us before they plant too many people on the space station. He's wintering over to write us up while we mess with each other's minds. He thinks we're all escapists."

Lewis smiled. "Rod Cameron just told me we can't quit."

"That's what I told Doctor Bob! It's like being paid to go to prison!"

"And yet we volunteered."

"I'm on my third season." Pulaski stretched out his arms in mock enthusiasm, as if to claim ownership. "I can't stay away. If the generators stop like they did last night we've got maybe a few hours, but we always get them running again."

"Why'd they stop?"

"Some moron turned the wrong valve. Rod went ballistic, which meant nobody was in a mood to confess this morning. But it was a stupid annoyance, not a threat. And you're going to learn that as long as you don't freeze to death things are really good down here, especially now that the last of summer camp is leaving and the bureaucrats are ten thousand miles away. I give you better food than you'd get back home and there's no bullshit at the Pole. There's no clock to punch, no bills, no taxes, no traffic, no newspapers, no nothing. After today everything calms down and this becomes the sanest place on earth. Cozier than most families. And after eight toasty months you come out with your head straight and your money saved. It's paradise, man."

Lewis reserved agreement. "You got any aspirin?"

"Sure." The cook got a bottle from the kitchen and brought it back. "You feel like shit right now, but you'll get better."

"I know."

"You even acclimate to the cold. A little."

"I know."

Pulaski went to the counter where food was passed. He bent under it to get a commissary-sized soup can, its label stripped and its inside cleaned to a bright copper. "Here, your arrival present."

"What's this for?" Lewis realized he felt stupid from the altitude.

"You'll drink all day and pee all night, this first night. It's your body adjusting to the cold and altitude. This can saves you about three hundred trips to the real can."

"A chamber pot?"

"Welcome to Planet Cueball, fingie."

Lewis's room was windowless and just ten feet long. He could span its width with lifted arms, his fingertips brushing each wall. It was one of a row of cells on the second floor of the science building, another orange metal box that claimed its grandiose title by virtue of having a small computer lab downstairs. His room looked every day of its quarter-century age: scuffed, faded, and leaking. The insulation had become soaked and frozen on the outer wall and there was another mold of frost inside, a white reminder of how thin their protective shell was. A few inches inside the wall the temperature was kept near seventy degrees by a blowing heater. The air was very dry and smelled faintly of fuel from the base generator. The mechanical drone was like being on a ship.

"The dreaded Ice Room," said Cameron, who'd brought Lewis here after the plane left. The station manager looked tired but was trying hard to be welcoming. "Being on the end of the building sucks, but last come gets last pick."

Lewis put his hand against the wall, the clamminess cold as aquarium glass. "What if my butt freezes to this during the night?"

"We bring a blowtorch every time you're late for breakfast." There was a pause, for timing. "Just don't roll over the other way."

Lewis dutifully smiled. Sometimes you go to prison as a means of escape, he thought. Sometimes the very worst places offer the most possibility.

"Now, we call this floor Upper Berthing, jargon left over from the Navy days. It's perfect for you since you're a beaker. You can crunch your data downstairs."

Beaker was polar slang for scientist. Lewis had already encountered this caste designation in New Zealand, where he was issued a punching-bag-sized duffel of cold weather gear at the American warehouse in Christchurch. "You get the shitty nylon because you're a beaker," the clerk had informed him, handing him insulated bib overalls. "The workers get Carhartt." This alternative looked like tough canvas.

"Scientists are workers," Lewis had protested.

"Scientists don't spend twelve hours fitting pipe. You get the nylon."

Now his place in the hierarchy had dictated assignment of a room. Like a runt piglet jostling for a teat, he was on the outer end. Also growing out of his orange box were appendages that included an electric substation, hydroponic greenhouse, and closet full of fire-fighting gear. Fire was the most feared enemy at the Pole.

"Homey," he offered.

"A leaking derelict," Cameron corrected. "The whole base had a life expectancy that expired five years ago and it's slowly falling apart. A recent inspection turned up two hundred safety deficiencies, which means we really have to stay alert just to stay alive. The National Science Foundation wants to replace everything- in summer they fly in congressmen like a D.C. shuttle- so we're under pressure here to show some results. Practical benefits from basic research. You'll find people are under a little strain. Still, the good news is that the Ice Room is warmer than outside, half private- your one neighbor will still hear more of you than they want to- and the government is past complaining about tape or tacks on the walls. Just don't put up a centerfold: We're politically correct now."

"You admit you weren't?" His question was wry.

"It was so macho that the Navy guys had nudes laminated into the tables. Only way to remember what females looked like. Gone with the wind, man, and better for it. Things are more civilized now that we have women."

"What happened to the tables?"

"They're still in the old base, abandoned in '75 when they built this dome. It's snowed over and slowly being crushed by the ice. Unsafe and strictly verboten, but a fascinating depository of cultural archaeology. Beer cans. Frozen hot dogs. America at her zenith."

"But you've seen it."

"Winter-overs have been known to explore. Big Brother left on the last plane, you know. Except for moi. Which reminds me." Cameron beckoned him down the hall and pointed toward the shared bathroom. "Our biggest shortage is melted water. That means the most onerous rule concerns the showers. No more than two a week, two minutes of running water each. You wet, turn it off, soap, turn it on, rinse off. We're sitting on seventy percent of the world's fresh water but it's so hard to melt we might as well be in the Sahara. It's rationed." He stopped, listening. They could hear the clumping sounds of someone inside.

"No shower for three or four days?" Lewis leaned back in exaggeration.

"It's so cold and dry you don't sweat much here." He was talking to Lewis but his attention was on the door. He sounded distracted. "Or if you do, people get used to it."

"Splendid."

The door opened and a lumbering bear of a man shambled out, naked except for a towel around his waist, his hair wet. He was bearded, hairy, and huge, a veritable Sasquatch. He stopped in surprise at their presence. "What's this, a line to pee?" The voice was deep, the eyes hard and squinty.

"Just rising to join us, Buck?" Cameron's look was of dislike.

The man scowled. "Just cleaning up after trying to make some room for all the crap that came in."

"We had trouble getting the plane off on time."

"It got off."

"We're both stuck here now. I need you on time."

"It got off. And I need you to stop nagging and let me do my job." The two men held their gaze for a moment, a mutual glare, and then the big man's slid away and he looked past the station manager. "Who's this?"

"The new guy, Jed Lewis. Getting the tour."

"Another beaker fingie? Great." He didn't offer a hand. "You getting the Ten Commandments from Ice Prick? Learning how to fill out work requests?"

There was an undercurrent of resentment that Lewis felt unsure how to respond to. What was the beef of this guy? "Just looking."

"Well, don't look the fuck at me." The man pushed past them, lurching down the hall, his fist clutching his towel to maintain some dignity.