Dark Winter (41 page)

The city's newspaper?

The San Diego Union-Tribune electronic archive turned up "Norse" sixty-two times, in stories that ranged from a football lineman for the Chargers to a feature on Scandinavian cooking. It was near the end of the list that he found a two-paragraph news brief and whispered, "Bingo."

It was dated February 5 and datelined Christchurch.

LOCAL MAN FOUND IN NZ the headline read. The story began:

Robert Norse, a southern California research psychologist affiliated with San Diego State as a guest lecturer, survived two weeks in the southern New Zealand wilderness and walked out under his own power on Friday, New Zealand authorities said today.

Norse was reported missing on January 23, having disappeared from a guided walk in Mount Aspiring National Park. Searchers had given up hope when the American reappeared, hungry but in good shape, more than 30 kilometers from where he'd become lost. Refusing medical help, he left immediately for Christchurch where he is overdue to join an American scientific contingent assigned to Antarctica. Authorities said he gave little information about his ordeal.

There were no follow-up stories and no article in the archives about Norse's original disappearance. Lewis began trying other communities in a widening orbit around San Diego, hunting for their newspapers and trying their electronic databases. It wasn't until he'd broadened his search to the Orange County Register near Los Angeles that he hit pay dirt again.

ORANGE COUNTY MAN MISSING read the headline.

Robert Norse, an American scientist scheduled to conduct sociology studies at the South Pole, has disappeared during a hiking tour of New Zealand, a tour company reported yesterday.

A rare summer snow squall in the high country had obscured a popular trek route and Norse apparently lagged behind during bad weather. A search for him the following morning proved fruitless.

New Zealand authorities are continuing to look in the rugged area.

Norse, who is single, is a self-employed psychologist, writer and social theorist who occasionally teaches at area universities. Authorities said his most recent appointment was at San Diego State University.

So: Norse was what he said he was- a psychologist. And he'd mentioned something about New Zealand. Yet he'd never talked about being lost in New Zealand, even though everyone on station had depleted their life stories by now. It must have been a traumatic experience to be lost for two weeks. That was a hell of a long time in the woods. Yet Norse never referred to it? Odd.

What if his disappearance was intentional?

Lewis felt a rising excitement, that prickling that comes on the edge of discovery.

But why? What could he have wanted in the New Zealand wilderness? Some kind of personal test? Some validation for his theories of individual survival?

Lewis pondered, glancing at the clock at the bottom of the computer screen. It had taken him half an hour to hike to Clean Air from the Hypertats, fifteen minutes to get some heat and fire up the computer, several more to get a connection… Pika would be up soon. In half an hour he needed to race back to the dome if he didn't want to set off an alarm. The satellite was drifting out of range again anyway. Yet he was no closer to an answer than before.

There seemed no other obvious avenues to pursue on the Internet and so he considered the station's databases. The hard drives of the victims had been corrupted by a magnet, Abby had reported to him, the killer apparently smart enough to scramble any potential clue there. Even if there was an electronic link to Norse or anyone else, the culprit had squelched it. Lewis tried logging on to the station's uncorrupted astronomy database but found no reference to the psychologist, which was not surprising given the astronomers' attitude toward Norse and his trade.

What else? What else?

There were always the station personnel records. This was mundane stuff, not the more intimate information known only to Rod Cameron, Norse, and Nancy Hodge and available only on paper, not on-line. Still, maybe the routine logging of the logistical comings and goings of base employees would reveal something. Its compiler was Gabriella, whose job had been the arrangement and recording of flights, rooms, counting heads at meals, tracking cargo and luggage.

He scanned quickly, looking for Norse's name. Had the psychologist brought something weird or unusual in his gear? Not really. There was a reference to hby tscp, which Lewis assumed was a reference to the telescope the psychologist had brought down to build. Appropriate project for a six-month night, as Norse had said.

Nothing else, however. No bombs, no meteorites, no knives, no nooses. Everything Gabriella Reid had written down about Norse was utterly tedious. Most of his winter-over gear had been shipped ahead of him, but that was normal: The Guard stockpiled personal gear in Christchurch and tucked it into the transports when there was room for an extra load. The winter-overs themselves arrived with a single duffel and found the rest of their things waiting for them. Much of it never went back home, as the storeroom at the KitKat Club testified. Norse apparently followed the routine.

He was just one more fingie, rotating in on tour.

Lewis sat back, frustrated, rubbing his eyes. He was missing something, something obvious, but he was damned if he could figure out what it was. His time was almost up and except for the New Zealand adventure he knew little more about Robert Norse than when he'd climbed out of the dome. Maybe he was investigating the wrong man. Maybe their paranoia was driving them to convert friends to enemies, enemies to friends. In any event it was time to drop back into imprisonment, since he still had no ammunition to secure his own release: no revelation, no smoking gun. Lewis flipped the computer off and stood up. Now what?

Nothing made much sense.

Norse was a scientist, just like him. Arriving late, just like him…

Then it hit him, the thing that had been staring him in the face and he'd been too blind to recognize. The discrepancy! He abruptly sat back down and fired up the machine again. That whir again, and the laborious chug. Beep, bop, boop. Come on… There was the familiar blue glow and he typed madly, getting back to Gabriella's station lists. Yes, there! 1-29. Auckland. That was the day Norse had checked his telescope and other gear with American authorities in the New Zealand capital, shipping it through to the staging base at Christchurch and then on to Antarctica.

Norse had signed the necessary forms. He had allowed inspection of his gear. Which meant, according to the records of Gabriella Reid, that Norse had been at the Auckland airport, dealing with logistics, at the same time the newspapers said he'd already disappeared into the country's wilderness.

Yet Norse hadn't emerged from his ordeal for another week. How could he have been lost at Mount Aspiring and back in Auckland at the same time? How could he have been in two places at once?

Had he gone astray on a vacation hike, popped out to check in his luggage, and then disappeared back into the woods again? Damn unlikely.

What else, then?

Lewis stared at the number. 1-29.

What if there were two Robert Norses, one going missing on January 23, another checking his gear six days later? Odd coincidence. Maybe the newspaper stories he dug up referred then to another man entirely…

Two Robert Norses going to the Pole?

No way.

How did Antarctic authorities know a person was who he said he was? Nobody had asked Lewis for I.D. once he'd cleared customs. He'd shown up in New Zealand, identified himself to warehousing authorities, been checked off a list and issued the necessary paperwork and polar gear. Was the second man really Robert Norse? Or someone claiming to be him? And which Norse had emerged from the New Zealand wilderness two weeks later, too rushed to answer any questions?

What if the man under the dome wasn't the real Robert Norse at all? What if the hiking disappearance had allowed an impostor to take his place, that somehow their Norse had followed the other Norse to New Zealand, cleared customs under his real name and passport, made sure of Norse's disappearance, assumed his role, boarded the plane to the Pole…

Lewis flipped off the computer and stood up, dizzy, excited, and still bewildered. Who, then, was Doctor Bob?

And how to prove that he and the real Norse weren't the same man?

Bob, I've got a problem."

Norse looked at Abby quizzically, his powerful fingers splayed to hold down something he was writing on his desk as if it might somehow blow away, the cursive letters hidden as he did so. In an instant he went from the distraction of his thought to focusing intently on her, a cautious smile on his lips, alert, ready. Once again she felt his peculiar magnetism. There was a strength to him that she found disquietingly alluring, and with his hair coming back he was more handsome than ever. There was also a strain to his gaze now, the kind of weariness she'd noticed in Rod Cameron. A pain to his slight smile. The Pole wore on you. It was wearing on all of them.

She'd seen it in the others, of course, a closing up like the petals of a flower at dusk. Nancy Hodge had retreated to BioMed, taking her meals there and tending to the burnt Clyde Skinner. For the first time since arriving on station she'd locked its door, insisting that anyone else needing help must knock first.

Several of the men had camped in the library like a squad from an occupying army, sprawling on the couches in sullen encampment while they watched a marathon stream of fuzzy video movies, a distracting blur of car chases and explosions and half-dressed women that they napped through in depressed exhaustion. Their talk was in monosyllables, their concentration wandering. Mostly, they tried to sleep.

Linda Brown was allowing the galley to slip toward disorder, a glacial backlog of unscrubbed pans grinding toward the sink, their food consumed without being logged.

Gina Brindisi was lost in old letters in her room.

Dana Andrews was typing in the computer room at a terminal that didn't work, its hard disk shorted out in the Comms room explosion, explaining the clack of the keys was helping her memorize the damning report she planned to write when everything was over.

And the greenhouse had been clear-cut. Abby had gone there after Lewis's exhausted return, confused by his discoveries and seeking inspiration for what to do next. Instead she found its benches covered with a brown carpet of withered leaves: Lena Jindrova had snipped the yellowing plants off at their base or hauled them out of their hydroponic tanks, leaving them dry and dead. The last greenery had been snuffed out.

Fearing for Lena's well-being, she'd found the young woman sitting in a corner of the galley with coffee, staring morosely at the station dartboard, which had been covered with some kinds of paper.

"We are either leaving this place or we are dying," Lena explained dully when Abby asked what had happened to the plants. "I didn't want them suffering from neglect."

"Plants don't suffer."

The young Czech used her finger to cut patterns into a coffee ring on the Formica of the galley table, alarmingly depressed. "Do you think not, with no sun and no warmth? Do you think these pretty plants are happy way down here, in the dark and the cold?"

"The dying is going to stop, Lena."

"I do not have that feeling. It is just beginning, is the feeling I have."

"We're going to learn what's going on," Abby insisted. "People are going to come together over this."

"No, people are abandoning hope. Did you see the board there?"

"Somebody covered it."

"No more games. No more matches with the Kiwis. Because no more radio, because the fixing is not going so well. So Dana and Carl got drunk last night and taped their research proposals to the board and threw the darts at them. They have given up because we are alone down here and we are forgotten."

"We aren't forgotten! I'm sure the rest of the world is wondering what happened to us. Trying to contact us. We'll get Comms up and running."

"No, we are forgotten. We are not people to them, I think. Just some name. Some file. Some record. We are trapped down here and so now I am done with my plants."

Name. File. Record. And with that Abby suddenly had an idea what to do. How to follow up Lewis's discovery. So now she was in the office Norse had taken over from the dead Cameron, trying to mask her own nervousness in approaching the enigmatic psychologist, trying to act casual in seeking something that could save them all.

Norse looked at her warily. "I hope you're not here about Lewis. I know you don't believe he's guilty but keeping him in the sauna is the only thing keeping him safe."

"No, it's not about Jed," she said. "I know you have no choice. I'm not sure myself that he is who he says he is." She watched Norse closely when she said this but he showed no reaction. If the man was a liar, he composed his emotions like a schedule. "My problem's more mundane," she went on. "I've got a toothache."

Norse frowned. Dental problems could become a real hazard in the isolation of the Pole. Everyone had thorough exams before coming down because bad teeth could produce either agony or, in summer, an expensive evacuation. "Have you talked to Nancy?"

"Yes, and she suspects it might be a problem with a loose crown. She needs to see my X rays. Apparently they're in the office here."

"I thought she had her own set."

"The one she has is fogged. Maybe it went through an airport detector."

"And there's another here?"

"Yes." Nancy knew that Cameron's old office had a storage closet that included a complete set of dental X rays for every winter-over at Amundsen-Scott base. They were required of all American personnel in Antarctica. One reason was to screen for problems that could be crippling in a remote camp. Another, more morbid rationale was to have on file a means- if aircraft crashed and bodies were burnt- of identifying the dead. For safe redundancy, two sets came down, one sent by medical authorities and the second hand-carried by the winter-over.