Dark Winter (21 page)

"The best because you're a psychologist."

"Probably the best because I'm new, like you. A little apart from the others. And used to keeping confidences."

"Right." Lewis hesitated. Maybe Norse was really as isolated as Lewis was. Maybe they did have something in common, the fellow fingies. And because of that maybe he'd understand. "I came out because I'm done playing detective, Doc. Case closed."

Norse slipped one cardboard flap under another, sealing the box. "Say again?"

"The meteorite. Looking for it now will cause more trouble than it's worth. With Mickey gone, there's no point. And I'm toast if I keep grilling everybody."

The psychologist nodded slowly. "Ah." He considered this and then pointed to the astronomer's old desk chair. "Sit down, Jed." It was the tone of a parent about to lecture, not unkindly.

Reluctantly, Lewis sat.

"You think Mickey's death has ended things."

"For me it has."

"I'm afraid just the opposite is true."

"How so?"

Norse took a breath. "Rod and I have been in communication with NSF and Mickey's home institution. Nancy doesn't have the training to do an autopsy now, but there's going to be an investigation into Moss's demise. Some of that is standard, and some is unusual because of the peculiar circumstances of his death. There might be people down here in the spring asking questions."

"I understand."

"I'm not sure you do." The psychologist pulled over another box and began dropping in files. "The most likely scenario is that Doctor Moss suffered an unfortunate accident while trying to retrieve his meteorite. It's possible an autopsy would reveal a heart attack or another contributing factor. Another possibility, however, is suicide."

"Abby's picture."

"Yes. I'm not at liberty to fully discuss that, but suffice to say there's some evidence that Moss had an unusual interest in younger women."

"I don't believe that."

Norse glanced at the boxes around them, as if they held compelling evidence. "Nobody is asking you to."

"Mickey Moss is not the kind of guy who kills himself."

"I'm talking about possibilities." The psychologist looked at him speculatively. "Look, you know what's appealing about the hard sciences? Their rationality. A handful of Greeks more than two thousand years ago said stop, we're not going to explain the world with supernatural miracles anymore, we're going to look for natural causes. It was almost a superhuman thing to do, embracing the scientific method, and for many scientists this rationality is their religion. Yet it's my contention that we're not wired to be rational, that superstition survives in all of us because that's the way people naturally think. Doctor Moss was a supremely rational man. But he was also a man, with all the freight of impulse and emotion and fear that any man carries with him. He might have been spooked. He might have been depressed. Who knows? It's completely unfair at this point to suggest anything untoward, but Abby and I have been discussing the situation. Please don't press her on it, because that could cause some real trauma in what in the best of circumstances is an emotional pressure cooker down here. Still, we all have to admit the possibility of the irrational."

"One more reason to put it all to rest, I think."

"Yes. We're really talking about the functioning of this group. Except there's a third possibility besides accident and suicide, you see."

"What do you mean?"

"Murder."

"Come on…"

"It's possible that whoever took the meteorite and lured Mickey Moss into the old base pushed him down that pit."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Doesn't it? An esteemed scientist finds a meteorite? A thief takes it? As a search closes in, our culprit becomes desperate and decides to eliminate the one man he thinks might figure out who did it?"

"You're suggesting the meteorite could lead to that?"

"I'm suggesting that with five million dollars at stake, any rational person would consider it as a possibility. And if there's anything we can say about the scientists and engineers who run our little kingdom back in Washington, they are supremely rational. Positively anal about it."

"Well, I'm sure as hell not going to play homicide detective."

"Ah, but I think you have to."

"Forget it."

"Based on what authorities know so far, only one clear suspect has emerged." Norse looked at him with unusual intensity. "Which means, in your own defense, you can't stop looking."

"Now, wait a minute…"

"Because that suspect is obviously you."

Lewis watched the first big storm of the winter season approach on his instruments as if he were tracking an armada of bombers, the barometer falling and the temperature actually rising slightly as the monster swelled up from beneath the horizon. Faxed satellite photos made the tempest look as vast as a pinwheel galaxy. Yet nothing happened at first, the atmosphere at the Pole seeming to hold its breath. He paced from his weather monitors to the windows, and from the windows to the monitors, curious and watchful, anticipating the storm but seeing nothing but gray blandness. He looked out at the other buildings on station and everything seemed still.

His wait was like the solitude of a lighthouse keeper. Lewis made people nervous now, since the discovery of Mickey's body, and people avoided him like they avoided Buck Tyson. No one had accused him of anything. No one had asked any questions. But when he was out at Clean Air no one telephoned, either. No one e-mailed. When he was out with his instruments, Jed Lewis was the last man on earth.

A murder suspect! Absurd. No one but Norse had said a thing and yet in every eye he now read suspicion and in every gesture a distancing. That e-mail! Galley chatter subsided at his approach as if he turned down a dial, and when he sat away it regained its volume. Not so much a snub as formal politeness. "Hey, Lewis." And that was it. No questions about anything. His isolation was exactly the opposite of what he'd expected at the Pole. His daily walk to Clean Air was a kind of voluntary exile, his trudge home one of dread at the caution he would encounter.

Every five minutes, Lewis cursed Mickey Moss.

He was reluctant to notify Cameron of his readings. It was difficult to talk to the man. The station manager had become remote since Moss's death, as if Lewis represented potential contamination. Cameron never visited Clean Air. In fact, he rarely left his office, where he was struggling with a report to Washington. His depression was dangerous. It affected the entire station. When Lewis suggested in a rare phone call to the station manager that Cameron stick his nose out of the dome once in a while, the response had been curt.

"I'm a little occupied, Lewis. We're still trying to hash this out."

"Hash what out?"

"Mickey."

Were they convicting him behind his back? "I'm tired of Mickey. I didn't have anything to do with him."

"I understand what you're saying. I'm sorry. I'm busy."

But as the approaching tempest swelled with power, Lewis was its first witness, and while he resented that all communication had to be initiated by himself, his duty was to warn the others. The storm would howl over the corpse of Mickey Moss, entombing him, and trap any human who hadn't scurried for shelter. In fact, the storm would do its best to snuff out the entire station, trying to push people back home where they belonged. Except at the end they'd still be here, burrowing out, and with them would reemerge his own problems, his own mystery. What was the astronomer doing in that pit?

He telephoned Cameron.

"Rod here." The tone was tired.

"This is Lewis. We've got a Herbie." The name was slang for storm and Lewis had picked up on it immediately, adopting the language of Antarctica.

"What?" Cameron came to life. "Where? When?"

"Greenwich quadrant. It will hit soon."

"How soon is soon?"

Lewis looked at the storm boiling up on his screens. "Within the hour. Maybe sooner. I don't know. I've never seen one before."

"An hour! Didn't you see the storm?"

"I saw it."

"I'm supposed to get a heads up!"

"I'm giving you one."

"Earlier! Why the hell didn't you call earlier?"

"The sucker brewed up out of nowhere. You know how fast the weather changes."

"I need more of a heads up."

The scolding irritated Lewis. "Rod, I haven't noticed a whole lot of interest lately in what I have to say."

There was silence for a moment. "Anybody else out with you?"

"No."

"You okay?"

"I'm talking to you."

"Okay, listen. I want you to stay there. I want you to clock the storm."

"The instruments will do that automatically."

"I know. I just don't want you wandering around until this blows through."

"That might take a while."

"Just sit tight. I've got to get everyone battened down. This is dangerous, Lewis. We need an early heads up. We need to get some warning."

"That's why I'm calling. Listen, nobody ever calls me."

Cameron hung up.

"Nice talking to you, Rod."

Lewis watched the sun wink out in the advancing wall of snow and then the ice plateau itself seemed to evaporate as the storm rushed forward, devouring ground. It was as if the world were dissolving. The dome was snuffed, the route flags jerked over, flapping, and then the blizzard hit his own research building with a howl. Clean Air lurched and then shuddered, its glass quaking, the wind rising to a shriek. Flakes streamed past the railings in parabolic swirls. The plateau below was gone, replaced with a rushing river of fogged snow, and the sky was equally obliterated. Here was the real Antarctica, powerful and malevolent. Lewis clung to the frame of a window, drinking in the magnificent violence. The building trembled under his hand like a frightened animal.

He thought again of his predicament, suspicion rubbing on his concentration like a rock in a boot. The damning e-mail had been traced to the Macintosh that Abby had fixed, someone using his log-on or, more likely, taking advantage of the fact that he rarely bothered to log off of the machine. Unless she'd done it! Abby had their passwords. But no…

The problem was that Lewis had skipped the galley that night, electing to work out at the gym and take a packed meal to Clean Air afterward. Depressed by the feuding of Tyson, he'd purposefully been alone. Then he'd come back to his bed, leaving his computers on and unattended.

He had no alibi.

"Maybe it was Jerry Follett," he'd tried with Norse.

"Jerry?" The psychologist had smiled. "We both know Follett is a nerd's nerd. His idea of conversation is atmospheric chemistry. The station could burn down and he might not notice. No, Jed, Jerry Follett is an extremely hard sell."

"And I'm not?"

"I don't suspect you," Norse assured Lewis. "It's too neat. Too obvious to send the message from Clean Air. That's why I was against Harrison poking around in the first place. People jump to conclusions on fragmentary evidence. But you understand why you can't stop probing. We need to plumb the soul of every person on this base before this is over, Jed. We need to know who, how, and why you're being made to look like a killer. There's something really perverse going on and I'm worried it will only get worse."

"This is all a game to you, isn't it?" He was frustrated.

"No. I'm in greater earnest about this whole issue than any person on this base."

"Except me."

"Yes. Except you."

Well, that's just dandy, Doc, except I'm a damned fingie murder suspect in some kind of psychotic sinkhole where we don't even know if a murder occurred, he thought glumly. Maybe you could speed up the analysis and give me a little hand.

Lewis looked out at the storm now, the flakes rasping his shelter. He knew that relatively little snow was falling. The polar plateau was a desert with only a few inches of precipitation a year. What produced the ice cap was the fact that nothing ever melted. The blizzard was made of the ice cap's skin, picked up by the wind and hurled like Saharan sand. He was in a world where the molecules all rearranged themselves fifty times a year. When the storm ended there'd be an entirely new landscape- and it would look exactly the same as before.

The telephone buzzed again. It was Cameron. "Lewis, you with Adams?"

"Who?"

"Harrison. He set off from the Dark Side to talk to you about something. Something he found on Mickey's hard drive. You seen him?"

"I told you I was alone."

"I thought maybe he'd gotten there."

"No."

"Shit. That means he's out in the storm."

"Maybe he's holed up in astronomy."

"No, I tried there but Bob says he's gone." Norse was still boxing up Moss's things. "This is why we need a heads up."

Dammit. "I gave you one."

"I got people all over station. We need that heads up." He clicked off again.

Why the hell did Harrison Adams want to see him now? Had he found something incriminating? He moved from window to window, watching them breathe in and out against the wind. There was no sign of the astronomer.

It made him uneasy. He'd been too moody, not sounding the alarm the instant he could have, and that meant another mistake. What pissed him off about Cameron was that the station manager was right. He should have alerted everyone earlier.

Suddenly he felt restless, unfairly cut off. He had no food, no water, no toilet. He didn't want to sit out the storm here. It felt useless.

Cameron called again. "Adams there yet?"

"No sign of him. Not at the dome?"

"No."

They were quiet, Lewis listening to the rising wind.

"I'm worried about him, Rod."