Dark Winter (39 page)

"Jesus." He rubbed his head wearily. "What the hell am I supposed to do about it? I'm locked up."

"I've been thinking about things and I think I need to unlock you."

"Escape?"

"Reconnoiter. Get out to a computer that works and try to figure out what's going on. Before it's too late."

"What do you mean?"

"Pulaski has armed everybody. He gave a class and painted poor Dana with glops of spaghetti sauce to show where the lethal parts are. He said we're all warriors, we're all deputies. He said it's like the arms race. People are strutting around like gladiators and someone's going to get hurt. Hiro did get hurt: He was tired and got in a quarrel with Alexi and the Russian cut his hand and now it's all bandaged up and Alexi is in a funk about the whole thing because it's just the kind of craziness he's been accusing you of. Hiro's terrified of him. All the rooms have been searched again, this time throwing everything into the open. There's no privacy left, no dignity. If something more happens, I'm afraid they'll come looking for a scapegoat. Looking for you."

"They can't blame anything on me when I'm in here."

"Some people already have. Someone prepped Comms to explode before it happened. Something to do with the wires and batteries. It was a booby trap, and Clyde had his entire face burnt off. He might even die. So who did that?"

"Not me."

"The same somebody who killed Gabriella."

Lewis shut his eyes in weariness. "Does Norse know you're here?"

"No." She glanced sideways as if he might be watching. "He led the others into sealing you off, and I think it's deliberate. He doesn't want me talking to you. Or you talking to anyone."

"Why?"

"He called me in after you were locked up, after the explosion, and said he understood my support for you but that Gabriella's death had changed everything, changed his own thinking. Then he showed me the note."

"What note?"

"He said he found it in Rod Cameron's desk drawer. It says Rod can save his career by giving you the meteorite, and it's signed… by you." She was watching him.

"Come on. I didn't write that note."

"It had your name."

"It's a forgery, Abby. It has to be. This is all so crazy! Norse, or Rod, or someone, is screwing me. They're out to turn us against each other."

"He said he hadn't shown it to the others yet but if more bad things continued to happen they might have to ask you some hard questions."

"Hard questions?"

"Jed, I think he wants to interrogate you. Break you, somehow."

"To hell with that."

"I'm just telling you that you can't stay here waiting for things to play out."

Now he was suspicious. The paranoia was infectious. He looked at her narrowly, suddenly wary. "Bob put you up to this, didn't he? He wants me to try to escape. He'll use it against me."

"No! But he wants to turn your head around, just like what's happening now. He twists everything. He objects to Pulaski in public and then confers with him in private. He's playing him. Playing you, playing me. There's something wrong- "

"Wait a minute! I did sign it!" Lewis had remembered.

"What?"

"A piece of paper, the first day I came here. We were joking around about psychology and handwriting analysis and Bob had me sign something…" His eyes were distant, trying to recall what Norse had done with the paper. "I did sign it. What the hell, has this been a setup from the beginning?"

Abby looked intrigued. "You think he planned this?"

"I don't know what to think. That far ahead?"

"What if Mickey was right and it was Bob who took my picture?" she asked. "That's what I've been thinking about. What if he planted it on Moss?"

"But why?"

"To confuse us. Make us think Mickey might have committed suicide. Put pressure on me to see how'd I react."

"You think Norse is responsible for all this?"

"What do we really know about him? He's a fingie just like you. He came down at the last minute just like you."

"To figure us out."

"Or bewilder us."

"But he's been holding things together."

"Has he?"

"Jesus." He thought a minute, trying to go back over events. Norse had admitted he'd heard where Mickey might have hidden the meteorite. Norse had been out in the storm when Adams died. Norse had helped Tyson flee… "But why?"

"That's what you've got to find out. You're the one person who can sneak out of the dome right now and not be missed. The one person with time to wait for the satellites and get on the Internet. The one person who will ask who Robert Norse really is."

"I thought you said the radios and the computers are down."

"The hub at Comms is destroyed. But if you could get to another source of power and shunt some electricity to Clean Air, you could still use the machines out here."

"If I can get to another source of power."

"There's an emergency generator at the Hypertats at Bedrock Village."

"Can I start it?"

"You could try. I think it might work. I think that's why Bob has allowed Pulaski to wall up the dome. He doesn't want us getting out there, calling out. All the doors are locked now. The perimeter is patrolled."

"So how the hell am I going to get out there?"

"That's why I came here. Look, everyone's exhausted. Almost everyone's asleep. They've been up for hours and hours, locking us in. I'm blitzed, too, but I was going crazy, thinking about Bob, thinking about you, so I couldn't sleep and got up and wandered outside and I just sort of collapsed in the snow under the dome, utterly defeated, just lying there, and then a snowflake hit me in the eye. You know how that feels? Between a kiss and a sting. So I stood up and then all these little snowflakes were sticking to me…"

He looked at her in wonder. It was like the image from his dream.

"Then I realized what we had all overlooked."

Error of Judgment For three days I was a hero. Then the weather cleared, recovery teams ventured out on the ice below Wallace Wall, and the bodies began to be recovered. Some goober of a deputy sheriff, who probably watched too much Columbo and talked like a Mayberry hick, started to yodel about the neatly clipped end of the line still attached to the corpses of Chisel Chin and Carrot Top. I professed shocked innocence- I'd left both fine young men on the ledge with the others. Just why the devil they were roped and how they'd fallen (were they trying to climb out on their own?) was a mystery to me. But then why was my own line broken? There were the beginnings of awkward questions of just who had been roped to whom. I expressed grieving outrage, of course, at any implication of negligence or wrongdoing. I had risked my life to save those kids! To save that whale Fat Boy! But the holier-than-thou crowd wanted to know why I had saved myself. Slow-talking Deputy Goober wouldn't shut up about it, even though he didn't have the balls to go down the cliff himself and look for evidence- like a knife secreted in a convenient crevice. Finally the university had to exert some pressure on the sheriff because of fear of a lawsuit. The matter of exactly just what did happen on the mountain was not-so-quietly dropped, despite the confused bleating of bereaved parents. And that was that. I'd done my best and was prepared to get on with my life.

Except my application for tenure was denied.

They wouldn't let it drop.

They wouldn't let it drop!

Barney Fife, deputy dipshit, kept nosing around. The whispering started. The peer reviews of my research papers began to get very much more pointed, very pointed indeed. They started murmuring about me in the campus coffee shop- I could feel the stares!-and plotting against me in the department. They denied it, of course, but I knew what was happening. I knew it! The file cabinets that were locked, the meetings called without notifying me they were being held, the evasive looks, the papers turned upside down on desks so I couldn't read them, the hollow sympathies. God, did I know it! Friends became distant. A woman I thought I felt something for became chillingly remote. No charge was ever brought and no charge was needed- my life had become intolerable. I'd been sentenced without being charged. So one day I just walked away.

Let me be perfectly clear about exactly what happened on that mountain. An act of individual and immature foolishness by a single overweight student led to leadership miscalculation, group panic, and a brutal winnowing based on skill and common sense. The strongest, clearest thinker had survived. It was as pure an experiment in natural selection as one could hope for. So don't call me lucky! I was not blessed! I was realistic. Brutally, coldly, and rationally realistic. No one was going to save me, so I saved myself. Once my companions slipped, I didn't have any chance of saving the others. With their trust in each other they had all doomed themselves. The ropes that bound us together had proved to be gossamer threads long before I brought out my knife. I am merely the surviving witness to the fragility of society. Any society.

Do you see my point? We are alone in life. We can't know another person. We can't join with another person. We are islands, made of either rock… or sand. Anything else is delusion.

I found that out when everyone turned on me.

I acquired another position and began to labor to document this point. I plowed into psychological and sociological research and combed through history. Cooperation comes only through coercion. It's so obvious when you look at the literature! Everything else is a fraud. Progress is achieved by the natural selection of the superior individual, and it is individual vision that drives or destroys the group.

No one would listen, of course. My realization collided with their cozy dreams of group comfort. Social security! The American myth of democracy, teamwork, compromise. The whispers followed, the looks, the suspicions. I saw it everywhere: in the supermarket, at the bank, in my office. Everyone looking at me strangely, thinking the worst of my quite defensible actions, blaming me for having the courage to survive. I saw it!

So. How to prove my point? How to demonstrate that I really had no choice?

Imagine a small society in a harsh environment. Imagine one that could be kept in experimental isolation for eight long, dark months. Imagine applying sufficient stress that group solidarity is tested. Imagine forcing each individual to realize how completely alone he or she really is.

The National Science Foundation ignored me, of course. They dismissed my carefully constructed application. They really had no clue as to the significance of the social experiment they had unwittingly constructed at the Pole. It was all astronomy and climatology to them, instruments and data. No vision of the future, no understanding of our grim evolutionary future in the cold blackness of space.

So. Everyone ignored me. My papers went unpublished. My grant proposals were rejected. My every step dogged by ugly rumor. I was broke, desperate, humiliated.

And then, destiny.

Can you possibly imagine what an arrogant, boorish prick Robert Norse really was? I met him at a professional conference when he was boasting of his assignment to Antarctica. His assignment to the Pole, precisely the place where I wanted to go! He blathered on mindlessly, gloating, stuffed full of himself, not having even the merest pathetic clue of just how unfairly his own good fortune had erased my own. He was going to a place he didn't begin to understand. And along the way, he was trekking in New Zealand.

A few months later, I read about his disappearance.

Do you believe in miracles? I'm a rational man, a man of science, and yet sometimes opportunity presents itself in so deliciously glorious a way that one can't help but wonder at the secret workings of the universe. The dark wood. It occurred to me that if I could not compete with Robert Norse, I had to become Robert Norse. I had to act decisively, just as I had on that cliff. And everything after that just… happened.

I acted on the best plan I had at the time.

This is completely insane," Lewis said.

"Which is why it just might work in a place like this," Abby replied.

It was past midnight and most of the winter-overs were asleep with whatever dreams plagued them, wrung out from their frenzy to barricade the dome. Only Gage Perlin, their plumber, was making hourly rounds as the designated sentry of the witching-hour watch. In preparation Abby had raided Jerry Follett's crate of atmospheric sampling equipment that was tucked against one wall of the dome, taking a small weather balloon and a gas canister. She'd filched and concealed a 150-foot length of sturdy rope, a lighter tether line half that length, a pack with a flashlight, two ice axes, and a coil of wire. Now she crouched behind the ruptured Comms building to fill the balloon while Lewis used first tape, then wire, and finally rope to bind the two ice ax prongs at right angles to each other. More tape fused the handles. The result was a crude approximation of a grappling hook. Tied to the climbing rope, it would be hoisted aloft by the balloon.

"What if somebody sees us?" Lewis had worried.

"They're worn out. Besides, how much more locked up can we be than we already are?"

In a grave, he thought, but didn't say that. There was a fierceness about Abby now that he found exciting. Infectious. Her own decisive energy had ignited his own. They weren't even sure what they were fighting, but they were at least beginning to fight back.

The pair peered around the corner and heard and saw nothing. "We have to do this quickly," Lewis said. "Maybe twenty minutes before Gage comes through again."

They briskly walked across the snowy floor to the center of the dome, pulling the bobbing balloon behind them. The gas bag was tied to a tether line that in turn was fastened by a slip knot to the makeshift grappling hook. The climbing rope hung from the hook. It was a bizarre plan made necessary by their bizarre entrapment. Norse and Pulaski had sealed every entrance to the structure except the most obvious one: the opening at the top of the dome that Jed had seen on his first day, left permanently open like a smoke hole in a kiva to allow air circulation. Looked at from below it was like the eyepiece of a telescope, giving a glimpse of a few bright stars and the outside world.