Dark Winter (26 page)

"I'll be okay if I can get to talk to you."

"That's all I'm promising."

"I know."

"Rod is pretty jumpy. Be patient."

"I will."

But when she left to do some maintenance work on the computers in astronomy he decided he couldn't wait. To hell with patience. To hell with tomorrow. He was sick of being isolated in Clean Air like some kind of germ. He went to the phone and called Cameron's office. There was no answer, so he dialed the galley. Pulaski told him to try a radio. "Our station manager is making his rounds. Can't it wait?"

"No, it can't." Lewis hung up and picked up the radio. "Enzyme to Ice Pick. Over."

After a few tries, Cameron's raspy, tired voice finally came on. "This is Cameron."

"This is Lewis. Where are you?" Anybody with a radio could listen in but he was too determined to care.

"Checking the fuel arch."

"Rod, can we meet to talk?"

There was a wary silence. Then: "I'm kind of busy."

"I'm going nuts in Clean Air."

"It's for your own good, buddy."

"I've been talking with Abby. Let me come back to the dome. She can keep an eye on me. Lock me in my room at night if you have to."

He stalled. "I'll talk about it to Doctor Bob."

"Doctor Bob has no authority here. You do. I've been exiled without charges. That's unconstitutional, isn't it?"

More uncomfortable silence. "I don't know. It's easier having you out there." The implication was plain.

"Rod, I think it was suicide. Suicide and an accident. You can't blame me and you can't blame yourself."

"Things are kind of messy, Jed."

"You mean Tyson?"

Cameron's voice was cold. "Tyson's a dead man. Don't bring him up to me."

"Don't blame me for him. Let me come over to talk. Let's meet privately, you and me. To talk."

Another long silence. "I have to check out these tanks."

"I'll find you there. We'll talk in private."

"Enzyme…" Cameron sounded besieged, reluctant. "Listen. Stay in Clean Air. When I finish this inspection I'll swing by and see how you're doing, okay?"

"Will we talk?"

"Yes." It was a sigh. "We'll talk."

"Talk about changing things?"

"We'll talk."

It was enough. "Roger that." He put down the radio, impatient and hopeful. Maybe with Abby Dixon he could find a way to live in this place.

I Choose Survival Every once in a while you arrive at a point in life where you can't afford to make a mistake. Might be a job. Might be a romance. Might be a gamble or the way you choose to answer with a gun pointed to your head. Might be an icy road and oncoming headlights and that drink you had that was one too many. You can't know when or how it's going to come. But when it does, you have to get things right.

If you don't, you're dead, figuratively and literally.

My climbing companions didn't get it right.

For the first two hundred feet I was optimistic. It was difficult climbing but not impossible, even for relative amateurs. There were cracks and toeholds and chimneys enough to squirt our way upward, though the rocks we dislodged banged down and set off a fresh round of squeals and shouts from the kids below. Crash! Sorry about that. Hey, we were making it, inching back up, getting to a point where maybe everyone but Fat Boy could climb back out of purgatory, Chisel Chin and Carrot Top straining up to each piton, breathing hard, eyes wide, limbs trembling, yes- but making it. Our lives were at stake. The two kids were doing what they had to do.

I was feeling good about saving them. I was pulling us out of the trap.

To understand my choice you have to picture how piss-poor miserable it was on Wallace Wall. At first the light had strengthened as the sun rose, giving a crumb of encouragement, but then the storm blotted out any sight of Old Sol and the morning grew dim and murky. Snow was blowing horizontally, turning the rock slippery, and small puffs of snow broke off from the cornice at the top of the wall and rained down on us like sand into a pit, each of us tensing in case the drizzle heralded a larger avalanche. The gusts were up to forty, I learned later, and the windchill well below zero. Our mittens were off to allow us to grip but the rock was shredding our glove liners and our fingers were turning numb and bloody. The wall angle wasn't vertical but almost so, and it was a strain to stay glued. The farther we ascended, the more anxious I became. I could imagine the fear the two kids were feeling, the exposure, the helplessness. I kept remembering Kressler and Fleming pinwheeling off that cliff.

It was Chisel Chin who made the mistake. The first rule of climbing is to keep at least three of your four limbs in contact with the mountain at any one time. He was impatient and had both a foot and a hand reaching for fresh holds when a rock broke and both legs were suddenly churning in empty space. He hung for a moment on one exhausted arm, kicking in the air for substitute footholds he'd failed to locate first- I'd warned him!-and then with a grunt he dropped, all of this happening in the flash of a second. I had time to jam one forearm in a crack, almost breaking it, and braced against the shock. He fell to the limit of his rope, yelling, and it cinched on my waist so hard that I felt like I was being crushed against a wall by a car bumper, the impact expelling my breath and igniting my adrenaline.

With an experienced team we probably would have recovered. If Chisel Chin had a few seconds to dangle in space until he forced down his panic and found fresh purchase he could have taken the pressure off the line, we could have stabilized, and after a minute's shaky breathing we could have started up again. But when he dropped past Carrot Top the second boy jerked in surprise and panicked, coming off the wall for no reason at all, his wits gone in a blaze of shock. He dropped heavily, a condemned man through a trapdoor, wrenching at me, and then hung like a cow, both of them swinging and screaming and sawing on me with the weight of four hundred pounds.

"Grab something! Get the weight off me!" My own panic erupted and all I could see was that picture of Kressler and Fleming, tumbling lazily through empty gray air. The two kids were going to pull me off with them and we'd spend the last moments of our existence watching each other's sick dread as the glacier rushed up at us.

Or we could act.

"Grab, grab! I'm coming off the cliff!"

They kicked and twirled like the condemned.

When that life moment of split decision comes, you don't think but you react, and you react with instincts formed by all the thinking you've done before. I'm a strong man, but not strong enough to handle two heavily weighted climbers swinging across the face of a cliff, arms and legs flailing, rock peeling off, everyone roaring and cursing together. I can carry myself, but not the rest of the world with me.

So I reached for my knife.

If I'd fallen, every kid in that class would be dead. I knew that. I was their only hope in the world. The choice wasn't really about my survival, but theirs. Yet I had to think for myself, too. Think of myself.

I really did it for them.

I reached with my knife and slashed at the climbing line, even as I felt my other forearm being dragged out of its crack.

In memory there may have been just a moment's slackening of tension as one or both of the boys briefly grabbed back onto the rock. It was a confused experience and I'll never know for sure. Don't you think I've wondered, in the dark sweats of the night? But it was too late because I was already cutting, desperate to get free of them, and finally the rope parted and I slapped back against the cliff, making a woof, and then below me I heard long, terrified screaming.

I knew better than to look down.

From the ledge below there were more shouts, cries, wailing, terror as the students' two companions flashed past them. I ignored it all. That part was past me now, and there was nothing I could do. The surviving kids called to me like a wounded man calls for his mother and I ignored them, knowing that there was no second chance, that destiny had made its irrevocable turn. Instead I waited a couple minutes to catch my breath, my sweat freezing on my collar and hair. I still had presence of mind. I took the end of the cut rope and rubbed it against the rough igneous rock for the longest time, almost frantic, until I had frayed it into ragged string. I reached with my knife and put it into a deep crevice on Wallace Wall where it will never be found, I hope.

Then I resumed climbing.

What else could I do?

Dana Andrews shivered, and it wasn't just from cold. The shadowy fuel arch gave her the creeps, this dank tunnel that stank of petroleum and was so dimly lit. Accordingly, she started down the shadowy steel-roofed tunnel that held the station's petroleum supply with exasperated reluctance. Where the bloody hell was Rod Cameron?

Since coming upon the stiff, reaching hand of Harrison Adams, Dana had become more and more of a dome slug, clinging to the light and warmth of the galley and berthing floors like a child retreating to a bedroom. The winter was not beginning at all like she'd hoped. Thanks to Mickey's meteorite the station team seemed rent by suspicions and rivalries. Two deaths and the increasingly bizarre behavior of Mr. James "Buck" Tyson had smashed through the serenity she'd sought like a bus through a window. In reaction, Dana spent what time she could under the grow lights in the station greenhouse, helping Lena tend the hydroponic plants and trying to fight her own impending depression. God, it was claustrophobic here! Her work on polar atmospheric circulation was lagging to the point where she might not gain the tenure at the University of Auckland that she'd hoped to achieve by wintering at the Pole. She needed Tyson to help her sled and service her instruments pronto but it was impossible to get the mechanic to do anything unless he was ridden by Cameron, and the station manager had avoided Tyson since the two had almost come to blows two days before in the galley. It was an ugly situation. Cameron oscillated between bursts of annoying spunk, in which he'd radiate false optimism in a pathetic attempt to rally the troops, and a private gloom so profound he was becoming reclusive. Half the time he hid himself in his office and the other half he set off on pointless inspection tours of the tiny world of the dome. Then it would be up to the winter-overs to find him so they could get some work done.

Like now.

The crazy Americans were wrecking her work! Wrecking her future! It was hard being a woman in science, and she needed some good data, a solid discovery, to establish herself. Some stroke of dumb luck like Mickey's rock. Some commitment to the often mundane and tedious tasks that made up the painstaking minutiae of modern research. She needed logistical help and she needed to talk to the station manager alone. Have it out with him. Get him to snap out of it.

Their cook, who served as unofficial recording secretary of the comings and goings at the base, had told her that Cameron was checking the fuel that supplied the station. The generators suckled off four hundred thousand gallons of imported fuel kept in a chain of tanks in the arch behind Nancy Hodge's BioMed. The heat was as precious as oxygen. Periodically Cameron or Pika walked the tunnel to check the integrity of the valves and pipes as carefully as the hull of a boat. The fuel arch represented survival, but it also served as an excuse for Cameron to disappear. He'd taken to inspecting it more than necessary.

"Rod!" Dana cried out impatiently. She was standing on a steel grate catwalk that ran the length of the tunnel, looking for some sign of the station manager along the line of tanks. The system was new, installed two summers before to replace rubberized bladders that NSF had feared were too susceptible to leaks or sabotage, and the new metal had the reassuring solidity of a battleship. It was also cold. Her call echoed off the tanks and bounced to the archway's far end, the wall there lost in darkness. There was no reply.

Dana hated the gloom of the arches, where cones of light from infrequent bulbs were separated by pockets of deep shadow. For a moment she considered returning to the galley and surrendering to a cup of tea. But no, she needed to get her project firmly on track and that meant talking candidly to Cameron in a place where they could have a moment's privacy. Tyson was lurking and wandering around like a perverse moron, eating slugs and hogging shower water and boasting he would find the meteorite and make himself rich, and he'd scared poor Gina Brindisi half to death by jumping out from behind a shed out on the Dark Side as if to make a joke out of the common belief he was ready to erupt. Everyone hated him, and hated the water rationing he had perversely imposed on them. Everyone feared him. Norse seemed like the only person able to even talk to him, but their conversations had little apparent effect. Tyson was two hundred and fifty pounds of coiled resentment, impenetrable to reason and uncaring of consequences. There was no sign he'd taken heed of the toast Dana had tacked to his door. The mechanic in fact seemed to enjoy being an outcast. Cameron had to reestablish control or the base would become dysfunctional. It was time for Cameron to stand up to Tyson. Time to be a man.

Reluctantly she continued walking down the catwalk, her boots making a rhythmic thud that repeated behind as if someone were following her. Unable to resist, she turned. No one there.

"Rod?"

She'd neglected to bring a flashlight and so couldn't see well into the dark crevices between the tanks. Still, she should be able to detect the movement of Cameron poking about. Nothing. Was he even here? Dana began walking faster toward the end of the fuel arch, impatient to conclude her search and get out.

"Cameron, dammit, where are you?"

There! A dark shadow, moving ahead. Hadn't he heard her? The figure rose and then sank as she followed. Her boots rapped quickly.

"Rod!"