Dark Winter (9 page)

I'd expected Fat Boy to drop the class by now. He wasn't just obese, he was weak. He wasn't just weak, he was incompetent. He could never remember the knots, never keep track of his gear. And he wasn't just incompetent, he was stupid. Twice he'd dropped off a route to catch his wheezing little breath, and once I'd had to go back down myself to find him. He hadn't been apologetic, he'd been surly. I'd told him the sport wasn't for him. He'd shown up the next class anyway. I should have shaken him, slapped him, shamed him into recognizing his own limitations. But we weren't allowed to do that. And at that time I was still weak. I was still willing to believe that others, the kind of morons that wind up in administration, might know what was best for me.

The warning signs were there. Fat Boy was last to climb out of his bag. Last to dress, last to eat, last to gather his equipment. He'd farted, stumbled, spilled. After three months of classes he still needed help with his crampons! Still needed help with his line! Almost put another student's eye out with his ice ax! Whining, defensive, apologetic. In a realistic kind of world- a just one- his kind of genetic fluff would be combed away in an instant.

But the world carries its cripples now, doesn't it?

For a while I thought we could pull him along okay, like a goat on the end of a wagon. Fleming, the other prof, knew how much I hated the kid and so put him on his rope, last in line, and managed to cajole rather than curse. The man had the patience of a saint. And for a while I could forget Fat Boy was with us. We topped the glacier, made Sullivan's Saddle, and pushed on up the central cone, only half an hour behind schedule. The boy had blubbered a bit, nose dripping, pack awry, one mitten lost who the hell knew where, but he was keeping up with a frantic gasp and if we finally made the damn summit I think I'd have been almost ready to forgive him. My contempt wouldn't fade, but my anger might.

I was actually in a good mood that morning. I still had a life. The sky was pinking. The Cascades were turning from black to deep blue shadow, and we could see the glint of the cities along the Sound. The air was cold and so clean it washed you out, laundered your brain, and I could taste the top, we were so close. Clouds were building in the west, an approaching storm, but I thought we could beat it. I was ready to forgive Fat Boy anything if we could just finish and be done.

But then there was a shout and the party came to a jerking, unsteady halt, the students gasping gratefully for breath in the respite, confused calls running up and down the line.

I unroped and sidestepped down the snow, trying to find out what was the matter. Minutes ticking on. The sun approaching to the east. Overcast from the west. The summit waiting. We had a tight window. We had to summit and get down.

Of course, I knew what I'd find before I even got down to the last team. Fleming pointed in the light of the dimming moon and I followed the rope with my eye to where its end trailed on the snow like a dead snake, empty of anything.

He'd spoiled it, of course, for all the others.

He'd spoiled it for me.

Fat Boy had untied himself and was gone.

Lewis sniffed Abby Dixon's approach before he saw her. Not perfume. Her breath.

His new instruments at Clean Air alerted him. So sensitive was the carbon dioxide sampler at detecting changes in the surrounding atmosphere that the tracking pen jumped from the contribution of her lungs. Other meters logged the dying sunlight, chlorofluorocarbons that could attack the earth's ozone layer, ozone itself, and water vapor. It was like gaining new senses. He'd come back inside after a brisk thirty minutes of collecting snow samples and was still warming up in front of his machines when she stamped her boots in the vestibule by the door.

"Gearloose," he greeted her.

"Rockhead," she replied cheerfully, pulling off her parka.

"I'm thinking of a nickname a little less descriptive," Lewis said. "Vaguely heroic, perhaps. Like Stormwatcher. Skywalker."

"It will never catch on." She hung up her coat. "Too nice."

"Doesn't anyone have a flattering nickname?"

"Neutral is the best you can hope for."

"How did the tradition get started?"

She plopped into a chair, shivering slightly as the tension of being in the cold outside was shed, her cheeks pink, her dark eyes bright. She seemed confident in this environment and he liked that. Her strength. Her energy. "I don't know. The Navy, maybe. Or the parkas. When we're outdoors it's hard to tell who's who: Everyone looks like an orange traffic cone. So they came up with name tags, except people didn't like that- it felt like we were at a convention- so some put them upside down. Names seem part of the world we've left behind. So people got tagged for their occupations. And it evolved, in the perverse way things do around here. You have noticed how perverse this all is?"

"Wade Pulaski told me it's paradise."

She laughed. "Cueball would say that."

"That's his nickname? He called this place Planet Cueball. I thought he was referring to the terrain, not his head."

"Rod says he looks like Queequeg in Moby Dick. I'd go with Jesse Ventura, or an old Yul Brynner movie. He's actually ex-military, which he doesn't talk much about except to hint he was into some extreme stuff. Scuba, climbing, biting the heads off chickens. Whatever. Apparently he didn't fit into ordinary life very well so he came down here."

"Odd alternative."

"Better than winding up a mercenary in Angola. I guess you could say that about all of us."

"The South Pole saved you from Angola?"

Abby smiled. "The South Pole saved me from being ordinary."

There was silence as he considered this. Of course.

"It's interesting I could detect your approach by your CO2," Lewis finally said. He pointed to his sampler. "It's like I have superpowers down here."

"By the end of the winter you'll wonder if the instruments are an extension of you or if you're an extension of your instruments."

The observation seemed to echo what Norse had said about machines. Had he made the same ramblings to her? "To what do I owe this visit?"

"The official reason is that I wanted to check to make sure the broken computer is performing okay."

"Wow. Every technician I've ever spoken to- after forty-five minutes on hold with excruciating music- wanted to get off the line as rapidly as possible. None ever called back to see if things actually worked."

She smiled again. "You're in paradise, like Cueball said."

"And what's the unofficial reason you've come for a breath of Clean Air?"

"I wanted to check how you're getting along. It isn't easy being the fingie, and everyone's curious about you. So…"

"Curious?"

She looked at him wryly. "It's unusual to come down on the last plane like you did. And you're a geologist, not a meteorologist, which is kind of odd. And you quit some oil company, apparently. And…"

"You came for the gossip."

"I came for the truth. It's a small town, Jed. People talk. Speculate. If they don't know about a person, things just get made up."

"Ah. So they send a comely lass to worm my secrets out of me. A spy. A temptress. A- "

She wrinkled her nose. "Please."

"But it's more than your undeniable fascination with me." Lewis grinned disarmingly. He was enjoying this. "You're an emissary of espionage. You were elected. Someone sent you."

She looked disappointed. "It's that obvious?"

"I'm just used to being ignored by women."

"I doubt that." She paused to let him mentally log the compliment. "Actually, Doctor Bob suggested I visit. He said he's trying to write up a sociological profile of the base: who we are, why we're here. Then he'll track our attitudes over the winter. At the end- "

"We're all toast."

"Yes."

"The good doctor already asked me to explain myself, you know," Lewis said.

"He told me that," she admitted.

"And?"

"He said men will tell things to women they won't tell to men."

Lewis smiled as he looked at her, her neck high, ears as fine as shell, eyes large and guileless. He could guess why Norse had recruited this assistant- she could attract any man on base- and wasn't surprised she'd agreed to be recruited. It was indeed a small town. People would make fast friendships, and they'd rupture even faster. He'd noticed the undercurrent of flirting and competition almost immediately. What was it Cameron had said about women? We're more civilized now. Well, maybe.

"For a spy, you're pretty blunt. You might want to work on that."

"The truth is, I'm not very good at the whole human interaction thing."

"Who is?"

"I guess that's what Doctor Bob wants to know."

"So, do you want me on a couch?" he asked. "Should I blame it all on my parents? My unhappy childhood?"

"Did you have an unhappy childhood?"

"Dismayingly, no. Middle class, middle brow, middle life."

"Me neither. Wealthy parents, but nice, too. It's so annoying."

They watched each other for a moment, smiling slightly.

"Damn," Lewis finally said. "I don't know what Doctor Bob is going to find to do all winter."

"Well," she said, "you're not entirely normal. We're all wondering what a geologist is doing on an ice cap."

"Ah. Jim Sparco was desperate for a replacement. He's studying oscillations in polar climates spaced over decades and my predecessor took sick, as you know. Reading the thermometer is not that hard a job."

"What did your family say?"

"My folks are dead, actually. Accident."

"I'm sorry."

"It happened after I left home, quite a while ago. Anyway, I was pretty much alone. Job gone. Friends fleeting. No warm and fuzzy relationships."

"No significant other?"

He took her curiosity as a good sign. "I never stayed in one place, so girls didn't stay, either. There wasn't a lot holding me."

"Still," she persisted, "it's hard to find people to come down here sometimes, especially at the last minute."

"Yes. I was desperate, too."

She looked at him with honest curiosity. "What happened?"

He paused to remember. What had happened? The tumult of emotions he'd experienced was only slowly being sifted by his mind into a coherent story. "I went into geology because I liked explanations," he finally said. "Rocks were a puzzle out of the past, a trip back in time. They were also stationary and organized and understandable, compared to people. I liked mountain climbing, so it meshed with my hobby. But to make a living in geology I had to concentrate on one kind of puzzle: where oil is hidden. That was fine for a while. Exciting, even. Texas, the Gulf, Arabia. But then I wound up on the North Slope of Alaska, puzzling in a place we weren't really supposed to be, just in case Congress changes its mind someday about opening up the wildlife refuges to drilling. We were pretending to be backpacking tourists, but we were setting off shock waves to probe for oil."

"And you began to question what you were doing."

"No…" he said slowly. "It was like there was never any question, and then suddenly there was no question about quitting. The tundra did that to me."

She waited for him to explain.

"It's a place something like this one. Not snow-covered, not in summer, but treeless and stark with this low, everlasting light that seems to reach inside you. And yet it took me a month before I really noticed that. My mind was underground. Finally there was a rainstorm late one afternoon, dark and furious, driving us into camp, and then rainbows, and finally a plume, like smoke, curling over one ridge under that prism of light. At first I thought it was a fire, but how could a fire burn in a place that damp? Then I realized it was caribou. A drift of life in a place so empty that suddenly everything hit me like adrenaline. All my senses suddenly came awake. Do you know the feeling?"

She nodded, cautiously. "Maybe. Like falling in love?"

The analogy hadn't occurred to him, and he cocked his head. "Maybe. Anyway, what I was seeing was the Porcupine River herd. I'd seen animals, of course, but never animals in numbers like you see numbers of people- never animals to make you question everything you thought you knew about whose world this truly is. They came over a ridge and down to the Kavik River. I stood there in that light watching them for hours. And that was it. Suddenly the idea of spending my life looking for a pollutant struck me as profoundly unsatisfactory. Sneaking onto a refuge seemed wrong. People told me my dinner was getting cold, but I ignored them, and then that I would get cold if I stood out there all night, but I ignored that, too. It wasn't even night, of course, the sun never fully set. I didn't feel the cold at all. Everything just got rosy and soft. Finally, when everyone else was asleep, I pulled together some gear and started walking after the herd. I left a note so they wouldn't worry about me."

"What did it say?" she asked. She was looking at him appraisingly, finding herself liking a man who could be affected so profoundly by caribou.

His smile was wry. "I quit."

"I'm sure that did reassure them."

"One of the things I realized is that I didn't truly know a single person in that camp. Had never thought deeply about what I was doing."

"Nothing to hold you, like you said."

"Nothing to care about. Nothing to be proud of. I walked two days before I hit the Haul Road that runs from Fairbanks up to Prudhoe Bay. It was the loneliest two days I've ever had, and two of the best. They turned me inside out. Then some scientists came by in a Bronco and gave me a ride. I stayed at an ecological research camp at a place called Toolik Lake and that's where I met Jim Sparco. He was doing climate measurements in the Arctic and he's one of those rare omnivores interested in all kinds of science. We hit it off, talking about weather, geology. Climate and oceans come from rocks, you know. Volcanoes run the planet. We stayed in touch while I bummed around Idaho. I was running out of money, deciding what to do next, when I got a package from Sparco's lab in Boulder. It had a T-shirt inside that read, 'Ski the South Pole. Two miles of base, half an inch of powder.' Plus his telephone number. I called and the rest, as they say, is history."