Dark Winter (8 page)

"She's good," Lewis observed.

"Coordinated," Geller said, loud enough for her to hear.

The woman pulled the dart out. "Coordinated enough to keep my thumb out from under a hammer, which is more than I can say for you, George."

"I know. I worship you, babe."

"And I'm indifferent to your existence." She winked at Lewis.

"What brings you to the Pole?" Lewis asked her.

Gabriella considered that one more seriously. "Time. Money. Fun. It's kind of a do-over, you know?"

"Do-over?"

"I was in a cubicle next to three thousand co-workers and not a single real friend. None of it was real. Nothing I was doing counted. Nobody seemed genuine. There was too much… noise. So I decided to see if I could get a new start down here."

"Quite a change."

"I hope so. Everyone comes down here with a lot of baggage. Armor. Everyone knows they're going home. So some people are here but they're not really here, you know what I mean? You can just wait the winter out if you want to. I don't want to wait, I want to live life. Here. Now. How about you?"

Lewis shrugged. "I guess I'm still a fingie on that one."

"Not for long, maybe." She was flirting.

He decided on caution. "There's some interesting personalities at the Pole."

"Oddballs, you mean."

"Characters. Individuals."

"It wouldn't be worth being here if there weren't. Would it?" She held out the darts. "Your turn again."

"And why the Pole?" Lewis asked her, toeing up to the line.

"Because it's a powerful place. Where all lines converge. Point zero. You're on sacred ground, Jed Lewis."

"Sacred snow, isn't it?"

"Just give yourself the luxury of feeling."

Their medic, Nancy Hodge, came in and was cajoled into taking a turn. Her stance was firmer, legs apart, head cocked back rigidly, dead serious. She missed the board completely and everyone laughed.

"That's the way she gives shots!" Geller called.

Nancy pulled the errant dart out good-humoredly. "Watch what you say, George. My charts tell me you're due for a prostate exam."

"I'd rather get cancer."

Nancy lined up again, mouth pursed in concentration, and this time managed to hit the edge of the board. Dana radioed the scoreless result.

"Now we know why we won the America's Cup," the Kiwis radioed back, the comment buzzing with static.

"I guess athletics aren't Nurse Nancy's forte," Lewis observed.

"Not after teatime anyway," Geller murmured again. "If you need something checked, try to see her in the morning. She's steadier then."

"Booze?"

"Ah, I don't know. She's just not big on the hand-eye coordination thing, which ain't too cool if you need brain surgery."

"Our sole physician."

"You get the best and worst at the Pole. Missionaries and escapees. How many good doctors can walk away from their practices for a year? It's like the old naval surgeons. They all tend to have interesting stories. From the lines on her face, she looks like she's got more than one. My bet is she busted up with someone and came down here."

"To lick her wounds?"

"Or to find somebody else. This can be Lonelyhearts Club sometimes, goofily so. Hell, even somebody as ugly as me gets lucky sometimes."

"I don't know if I believe that one," Lewis said, playing straight man.

"It's true. The pilots brought in a crash dummy once and even he scored."

"But Nancy's not competent?"

"I didn't say that. She's smarter than any of us. We have a lot of fun with each other, kidding around. Just seems kind of rattled sometimes, like she's anxious to get rid of a patient. Like she's afraid of making a mistake."

The darts were fun and unworldly, performed to the background buzz of a radio linking them to a base across eight hundred miles of ice and snow. The Kiwis were intrigued by the new American mascot and Dana insisted the slug was doing gyrations every time the Yanks scored a point. Players drifted in and out, Lewis holding his own for a while. With the Americans down three matches to one, however, he excused himself and walked up a flight of stairs to the upstairs bar, the only place on station where alcohol could be consumed. It was the one nutrient they had to pay for.

Norse was there and Lewis joined him, nodding at the psychologist's beer and getting one of his own from the fridge, putting a mark on a tab for later accounting.

"Feeling better, I see," Norse observed.

"Just drinking after realizing what I got myself into."

"Miss your rocks already?"

"At least the ones ground into sand on a sunny beach."

Norse looked at Lewis with amusement. "It's interesting that they picked a geologist to do your job."

"I was available."

"That's their reason. What's yours?"

It sounded like a shrink question. "I trace it all to my mother."

"Ah." The psychologist nodded in defeat. "Okay. Confession some other time." He sipped his own beer. "I heard you met the estimable Doctor Moss."

"He granted me an audience."

"Interesting that you two got together so quickly."

Lewis wanted to deflect this line of questioning, too. "He's friends with my mentor, Jim Sparco. And it's fun to talk to God. He says we're all down here for Science."

"Well, that's the party line," Norse said. "We're the cannon fodder of the National Science Foundation, you know. They see us all as a means to an end: knowledge."

"And you don't?"

"I see knowledge as a means to us: as a way to develop as people. It's a subtle difference, but an important one. Are we here to save civilization or is it here to save us? Some historians see all of human history as the triumph of the group over the individual. But one of my questions is whether it isn't the extraordinary individual who defines the group. If the group's purpose isn't to make possible the occasional exceptional human being. The Einstein. The Jefferson. The Alexander."

"You're looking for Einstein at the Pole?"

"I'm looking for character. Integrity. Individuality. I sense some of that in you, Jed. You have a certain center of gravity. And then determining if that kind of person functions in a tight, almost claustrophobic society like the Pole. Is smothered by it. Transcends it."

"I'm just trying to keep my butt warm."

"Exactly."

Lewis smiled. Norse seemed more interested in who Jed really was than in helping him fit what the Pole wanted him to be. "Lots of individual characters here," he said, "and I like that. But it can be lonely being too individual."

"Thinking of someone in particular?"

"Well, I heard Buck Tyson's real name is Island."

"That doesn't mean he's lonely."

"He said at dinner that you two think alike."

Norse laughed. "Did he? Well. My belief is that no two people do think alike, contrary to popular belief. The Western god is rationality, and a communal kind of sanity: all of us agreeing on reality, and pulling along the same track. This social scientist is squishier, I'm afraid, theorizing that each of us is a prisoner of our own beliefs, fears, perceptions. That we live in different worlds. So to me the fundamental question is whether the kind of knowledge we gather in places like this leads to real sanity or some view of the universe that, in its very rationality, is truly insane. Does it lead to happiness? Well-being? Does it solve anything at all?"

Lewis considered. "Isn't knowledge worthwhile just for its own sake? Rod Cameron told me the purpose of life is learning. Aren't we all down here because we sort of believe that, in an unconscious way?"

"Do you believe that?" the psychologist asked.

"I don't know. It's nice to have a goal."

"Whose goal? Yours? Or the group's?"

"Both."

"No. Cameron just gave the goal to you."

Lewis was irked now. "What do you think we came down here for?"

"I don't know," the psychologist admitted. He sipped again. "That's what I'm down here to find out."

"Make a guess."

"I don't guess. I'm a trained professional." It was self-deprecating.

The psychologist had his own evasions, Lewis saw. "Not good enough," he persisted. "What's your reason, Doc?"

"Okay. I came down here to see if we should be here at all." The psychologist nodded, as if to confirm it to himself. "Do you know that America spends two hundred million dollars a year in Antarctica? Two hundred mil on the altar of knowledge! That's a goodly chunk of change. But what if rationality is a fraud? What if sanity- the idea everyone should think the same way, share the same reality- is a fraud? What if science is a fraud? That what pretends to explain everything in fact explains nothing to animals like ourselves, that NSF stands for a myth, that the druids and pagans and witches were right and that the true knowledge, the real insight, is in the dark wood- is in ourselves? What if the outermost veneer of civilization we represent is no thicker than the aluminum on this dome? What if at some point in our explorations we reach not revelation but utter mystery, a whole new pit of the indescribable, the unknowable?" He was looking at Lewis, his eyes bright. "What do we do then?" That intensity again.

Lewis shrugged in self-defense. "Well, golly. Open another beer, I suppose." He got one and did so. "You're saying you're getting your ass frozen off for no reason?"

Norse laughed, as if that were a huge joke. "I hope not!"

"But you think we're nutcases because we believe in sanity?"

"No, no. I'm rambling." The psychologist studied his beer. "Drinking. But in an age when the machines are bending us to become like them, to become part of them, I'm curious what it still means to be human. To stand for yourself. Here, at the most inhuman place on earth."

Lewis left the bar more wound up than when he entered it, still unable to sleep as his brain tried to make up its mind about his new home. He impulsively decided to walk outside. No dome slug he. The suiting up took fifteen laborious minutes and when he surmounted the ramp he saw the same pale sun at midnight that he'd seen that morning. Weird. The constant light was disorienting, the circuit of the orb dizzying. His own brain was swirling with impressions, new faces, glib philosophies. Individuals, every one. But a group, too. Which was what he'd come for.

Wasn't it?

Maybe Doctor Bob's problem was that he'd never been truly alone.

Lewis felt alone now, the station still, the breeze mild. Yet when he listened for the whisper of his freezing breath he realized he was not. There was a distant whining noise of a moving machine and he gradually recognized it as a snowmobile. Tyson? Someone, at least, was out driving at the witching hour. He began walking in a broad loop around the dome, still puffing from the altitude, looking for the source of the noise. Finally he saw a speck in the distance, an orange dot on a black one, someone driving out onto the featureless plateau. He had no idea who the driver was: old or young, man or woman. Odd at this time, but then scientists kept odd schedules.

Where was there to go?

The sound seemed to connect them like a thread and his eye remained fixed on the receding traveler, because there was nothing else to see.

Then the snowmobile slid out of view, as if entering a dip, and a few seconds later the noise grumbled away. Silence.

Lewis waited awhile for the pilgrim to reappear, but nothing happened.

The plateau was empty. He got cold and bored and turned back inside, exhausted enough now for bed.

What Came Before

I called him Fat Boy.

Not to his face, of course, because by law and custom and administrative directive the university was so politically and sexually and racially correct that those of us grubbing for a check were expected to be as unctuous as undertakers: prissy, constipated, and afraid. But in my mind he was Fat Boy, a lagging drogue of blubber, a leech, a handicap, a brake, an anchor, a limit, a curse.

I honor people who achieve the ultimate of what they can be.

I despise those who pretend to be what they can never be.

Fat Boy could never be a mountain climber.

Let me tell you about climbing. It is the most sublime of all human activities. First, because it is difficult. Second, because it is dangerous. Third, because it has a tangible goal and there can be no mistaking if that goal is reached or not: You summit, or you don't. Everything else is bullshit.

Fourth, because it is revealing. A mountain brings out the truth in a man. Or woman.

And fifth, because it is beautiful.

Our doomed little party started out at three minutes past midnight, the temperature fifteen degrees and the stars an orbiting city past the great dark silhouette of the Cascades volcano that was our goal. When the moon rose at three it turned the glacier into a bowl of milk and our route into a clean kind of heaven. It was early enough in the season that the crevasses were mostly filled with snow and so we made good time. Fifteen college students, two instructors, and myself tagging along on each climb because I actually knew what the hell to do on a mountain. It was a real class, Professor Kressler getting paid to pursue his hobby, Fleming in his shadow like an eager puppy, the kids getting credit for sweating in the snow. For me it was an excuse to go climbing. Schmooze. Brown-nose. Connect. You know the drill.

We were roped in three parties of six. The kids were quiet, in awe of the mountain, and I mostly just heard the clink of equipment and the rasp of nylon. It was good that way. The pant of their breathing was like a team of horses. The plan was to summit an hour after dawn and then glissade back down before the rising spring sun turned the snow to mush. It was the last climb of the semester.