Dark Winter (4 page)

The others were excited about the fresh food, loud about their plans for the winter, and excited by the new responsibility of being cut off. Lewis picked at his own food but as he tired he realized he couldn't fully share the mood. He was exhausted from his journey, and in his weariness the crowd became cloying and the galley air hot and steamy. His appetite had deserted him and he couldn't concentrate. The plan after the meal, he was told, was to watch The Thing, a perennial Polar ritual.

"It is this American movie about an outer space being infecting the bodies of Polar scientists and killing them, one by one," Molotov summarized with relish. "It is very funny. They fight back with guns and flame throwers. Boom! Boom! Yet this"-he held up a butter knife- "is as wicked as it gets at real Pole." He laughed. "Everywhere else in life your body is taken over, by bosses, by advertisers, by government, by nagging wife. Here, no."

"Yet you watch it anyway."

"It is, what you call it…" He made a squeezing motion on his arm with his fingers.

"Inoculation," Nancy Hodge said.

"Yes! Yes! Inoculation against the fear. The scare of being left here, for the winter. You know? The veterans know all the lines by heart. You will see. It is lots of fun."

But Lewis was so weary he felt in danger of falling into his plate of food. The thought of enduring a movie appalled him. After embarrassing himself twice with dull responses that made him sound like a half-wit, he finally excused himself to bed.

The others nodded without surprise. It took time.

"If you wake up and you are the last one left," Molotov called after him, "don't be surprised. Then you know the outer space being, the creature- it is you."

Lewis's sleep was ragged, his body periodically jerking awake as he gasped for breath. Each time it did so he'd have to roll out of bed to urinate, ridding himself of bloat. By morning his soup can was full and his breathing was easier. He felt his body beginning to adjust, his red blood cells multiplying, but when he went to the galley all he wanted for breakfast was toast and coffee. The maintenance worker sitting next to him looked at his plate with disbelief.

"You'll starve on that bird feed." The man shoved more food into his mouth, talking as he chewed. "George Geller, G.A. I'm serious, you gotta eat more."

Geller was consuming a four-egg ham and cheese omelet, hash browns, two steaks, a bowl of cereal, and three tumblers of orange juice. The gluttony renewed Lewis's nausea.

"How can you hold all that?"

"This? Hell, I still lose weight in the cold. You better have more than that, man. The Pole devours calories. You eat against it."

Lewis put aside the last of his toast. "Not today."

Geller shrugged. "You'll see."

"I'm just not hungry."

"You will be."

Geller attacked his meal with a steady industry, like a steam shovel excavating a foundation. Lewis was half hypnotized by it. "You came here for the food, then."

The maintenance man broke his pace enough to smile. "Pulaski ain't that good. I came here to get away from it all. So did everybody."

"The urban stress of turn-of-the-millennium life?"

Geller speared a piece of steak. "The Minnesota stress of a fucked-up marriage, nowhere job, and pressing debt. Same problems as the guys who went with Columbus."

"I've got a Visa balance, too."

"My creditors are a little heavier than that, man." He chewed. "Truth be told, this is the Betty Ford Clinic for me. Cold turkey from the track and cards. I had an affair with Lady Luck and the bitch dumped me, so these loan sharks who looked like the missing link came calling and said highly disturbing things about accumulating interest. Down here they can't reach me. I'll make enough this winter to start over."

Lewis nodded. "You're here for the money."

"Fuckin' A." Geller nodded. "Everybody needs money."

"Is the money good down here? For you guys?"

He shrugged. "Same as a beaker. A long work week and no expenses. The wage scale's no better than back home but it's like forced savings: There's nothing to buy. I might even save enough to not go back. Keep my money for myself and chill out on some tropical island. Buy a boat. Who knows?"

Indeed. The Pole offered possibility.

Cameron came into the galley and stood over them, assessing. His air of authority had come back but there was also a hesitant uncertainty to it, Lewis thought, the betraying experimentation of someone new to command, never quite sure how the others would react, still caring what they thought. Cameron was in his late twenties, younger than many of those he supposedly supervised. "How's it hanging?" the station manager asked.

"Didn't freeze," Lewis said.

"You ate?"

"A little."

Cameron looked dubiously at the toast. Fingies. They all had to learn. "All right, then. Looks like you're ready to see the homestead. Let's saddle up."

"Yippie-ki-yay."

Suiting up to go outdoors was as laborious as donning armor. Heavy long underwear and two pairs of socks. Sweater. Fleece vest, pants, and insulated nylon bib overalls. Neck gaiter, goggles, stocking hat, white plastic "bunny" boots, glove liners, mittens, ski gloves in case dexterity was required, and finally down parka with hood. Lewis felt as padded as the Michelin Man and awkward as an astronaut. He was roasting.

"Up to a point, there's no such thing as cold," the station manager said. "Just inadequate clothing."

"Up to a point?"

"If you put too much on when you're working you can actually sweat," Cameron said. "That's dangerous when you cool down, or because of dehydration. At the other extreme, nothing will keep you warm when the wind comes up."

"What do you do then?"

"Tough it out. Up to a point."

"I can't walk in these things." Lewis pointed to his boots, inflated with air for insulation. They looked like white melons.

"You'd be walking on frostbitten stubs without them. Dorky, but they work."

Lewis clumped along the floor. "Like wearing weights."

"One year some pranksters started pouring sand into a guy's bunnies where the air goes. Little bit each day. By the end of the season they weighed about seventy pounds. Pretty funny."

Lewis shook a boot, listening. "Ha."

Stepping out of the berthing unit into the gray light of the dome was like stepping into a freezer. Lewis was jarred again at the nearness of such cold, just outside the door. The icicles hung overhead from the dome as before. And yet he was so hot from the dressing that the change felt good at first. Refreshing.

The snow ramp from the dome exit led upward to the plateau surface and a bright cold that was more telling. This was a chill that wasn't confined to an enclosure but was the single salient fact of his new world. He stood a moment, letting himself adjust. The sky was overcast, the light flat. Even with a mild breeze he could feel the temperature sucking at him, trying to drain him of heat. The cold got into his lungs and palpated his heart.

He pulled his gaiter over his nose and mouth, the moisture of his breath immediately starting a growth of frost. Goggles shielded his eyes and forehead. His hood kept a thin cocoon of slightly warmer air near his face. He took a moment to practice breathing, as if he were underwater.

Okay. He wasn't going to die.

Lewis looked around. The snow was flat and, beyond the cluster of human structures, utterly empty. Nothing moved. There was no natural feature to catch the eye.

"First of all, stay close to the base," Cameron lectured, leaving his neck gaiter down so he could be heard clearly. "Even when it's not snowing the wind can kick up surface powder into a blizzard six or seven feet high. The blowing snow is just high enough to put any human who isn't in the NBA into whiteout conditions. So, if you do go somewhere, sign out, take a radio, and take some bearings. Pay attention to where you are, where we are. Start memorizing the layout. People have died in Antarctica a dozen feet from shelter. Temperatures can drop fifty degrees in ten minutes."

Lewis nodded.

"Second, we're marking the most frequently used routes with flags." He pointed to long poles with pennants on the end. "In the dark that's coming you just follow one flag to another to get back to a building. One route goes to astronomy, which the beakers call the Dark Sector because lights aren't allowed out there: It screws up their telescopes. Everyone else calls it the Dark Side. Another goes to Clean Air, where you'll work. It's away from the generators and any air pollution. A third goes to Summer Camp, which is shut down now." He pointed at distant buildings. Summer Camp was a row of Korean-War-vintage canvas Quonset huts. "A branch goes to Bedrock, those little blue huts there. That's our emergency shelter if anything goes wrong in the dome."

"Goes wrong?"

"Fire. Generator failure. Battery explosions. Well poisonings. The usual." He smiled.

Cameron also pointed out antenna towers, telescopes, construction materials, supply crates, drifted-over vehicles, and random jetsam, everything raw and jutting from the snow like the debris of some midair collision. Lewis thought the place looked like a dump but wasn't surprised. All the treeless places he'd worked in had the same look: Where could you hide the mess? The chaos represented logistical evolution.

"Third, pay attention to your body. It's sort of like being an astronaut where you pay attention to your air. Are you staying warm? Are you still alert? Are you losing energy? If you start to feel frozen, get back inside for a while. Capisce?"

"Yeah. Common sense."

"You'd be amazed how quickly that can disappear around here."

Lewis looked out at the foggy horizon. "How far can we see?"

"About six miles, three in each direction. A few more if you get up on a tower."

The sun was low, a white disk behind fog like a dim headlight. It circled the horizon every twenty-four hours, each day settling lower, like a marble rolling down a funnel. On March 21 it would be gone.

"You been to The Ice before, Rod?"

"Four times."

"So you like it."

"I love it."

"Even the Pole?"

"Especially the Pole. It's like no place else on earth. Come on, I'll show you."

They started walking toward the astronomy complex that squatted three-quarters of a mile away, crossing the ice taxiway. Just beyond was a stake jutting two feet out of the snow.

"Here it is. Go ahead, walk around the world."

"This is the South Pole?"

"Yep. Bottom of the planet. When it gets dark I come out here sometimes on a clear night and lay down to watch the stars and the aurora. Sometimes I do feel upside down, like I'm about to float off and drift into the sky. It's spectacularly beautiful then, and the vertigo makes me high."

"I thought the Pole would look like something more."

"In summer there's a ceremonial pole over there." Cameron pointed vaguely. "We took it down for the winter a couple weeks ago. It looks like a Santa Claus pole- you know, with barber stripes and a silver globe on top? We put the flags of the Antarctic treaty nations around it and the VIPs who fly in for a few hours pose for pictures. But this stake is the real pole. The ice cap moves, flowing toward the sea, so every January we have to drive a stake about ten meters from the last one to keep pace." He pointed out a line of older stakes marching away across the snow, marking where the Pole had been. "Eventually the dome will roll right over it, except maybe we can win funding for the new base and the dome will be dismantled."

"Everybody needs money," Lewis recited. He trod a circle around the stake. "Around the world. I read that Admiral Byrd said it was the middle of a limitless plain. You get here, and that's all. He said it was the effort to get here that counted."

"That, and getting away. But Byrd said that back in the 1920s, way before the base started in '58. Nowadays it's the staying that counts. We're here for a purpose. Your job is important. Mine is important. They're all important. Scientifically. Politically. We're at a place that no single nation owns, dedicated to knowledge. I think that's pretty cool."

"Cool." Lewis brushed the frost on the ruff of his hood.

"You know why people like it down here, Jed?" Cameron was looking directly at him, but with the goggles on the effect was odd, like being looked at by an insect.

"Why?"

"Because the purpose of life is to learn. That's why we exist, to learn. That's my belief, anyway. That's why the station exists. Moss and Adams and Mendoza have the world's best window on space. Jerry Follett and Dana Andrews are deciphering the atmosphere. Hiro and Alexi are trying to understand the aurora, which is one hell of a show. You do climate, Lena hydroponics… it doesn't get any purer than this."

The hood against Lewis's ears made everything like listening through a blanket. "So how do we tell direction down here?"

"We make our own grid. The Greenwich Meridian is grid north; the opposite way south. Mostly, though, we point. There's nowhere to go, so it's like being on a small island. Disneyland. Come on, let's go see where you'll work."

They trudged toward the Clean Air Facility, a brown metal box a half mile from the Pole. It was elevated on stilts and festooned with instruments and antennas. As they walked, Lewis felt as if he'd gained a hundred pounds. His feet felt hot and heavy and his lungs were unhappy with air that remained too thin, too dry, too cold. His neck gaiter had become a muffler of ice, scratchy and smothering. He swatted at it, breaking some bits loose, but more clung to the fabric. At the same time he realized he was sweating.

The snow squeaked as they walked, dry and powdery, a loose coverlet on harder blue-white ice. Wind blew this skin into small, shin-high drifts that Cameron called sastrugi. "Alexi says it's the Russian word for eyebrows." It was laborious to lumber over or through them.