Dark Winter (19 page)

"Mickey didn't get the cheese," Geller said, panting. "No meteorite. No jillion bucks. Was the pit a trap?"

The station manager wearily got to his knees and examined the body. The astronomer's eyes and mouth were open, and they could imagine him bellowing for help. One leg was twisted unnaturally, as if broken. "Or an accident. It would be easy enough to just fall. I did." He looked at Lewis. "You were smart not to take point, fingie."

"I don't like dark places."

Cameron said nothing.

"It's weird," Pulaski said. "He could have been lured, pushed, dragged, whatever."

Geller lay back, blowing. "Not dragged. Too much work."

"Well, somebody shut the door behind him, right?"

"He could have done it himself. Or it swung shut. Who knows?"

"Can we just get back?" Lewis asked.

Cameron rocked Moss this way and that, looking for anything that could tell a story. "If anyone was aware of the dangers of the old base it was Mickey."

"We've got to get back or I'm going to freeze," Lewis insisted. His torso was beginning to tremble. He'd never felt such cold.

"I know." Cameron glanced at Lewis speculatively and stayed at a kneel, his hands searching. Moss's outer pocket held the usual gloves. Then the station manager yanked hard on the parka zipper, breaking a sheen on ice, and reached inside to a polar fleece pullover. There was something flat in a zippered pocket.

He pulled out a photograph and looked at it in mystification, not showing it to the others. Then he tucked it inside his own clothes and took out his field radio, calling Comms.

"This is Ice Pick," he radioed. "Harrison there?"

Clyde Skinner, their radioman, took a few minutes to fetch the astronomer.

"Adams."

"You guys traced that e-mail yet?" Cameron asked.

"Dixon did," Adams said, his voice crackling. "Is Lewis with you?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll tell you later."

Cameron looked at the fingie. "No. Tell me now."

There was a hesitation. "The message came from one of the computers in Clean Air. Jed Lewis's password."

The quartet absorbed this. Then: "Roger that. Out." The station manager put the radio away.

Everyone looked at Lewis.

"If I sent Mickey that message, would I do it from my own machine?" he asked. "My own password?"

No one replied.

"Come on!"

"Did you send Mickey that message?"

"No! No." The others looked grim and tired. "Look, this is crazy."

"It sure is," Geller said.

I'm being set up, Lewis thought, his heart hammering with new paranoia. "So who was that picture of?" he asked, pointing.

"Nobody."

"Hey, if someone's sending e-mail on my account, I get to see what else is turning up."

Cameron considered and then slowly took it out. The others frowned.

Mickey Moss had been carrying a picture of the one person who knew all their passwords, who could read all their mail. A picture of Abby Dixon, next to his heart.

Fatal Confidence Going down a new route is always harder than going up. It's risky to lean out far enough to properly see, and gravity conspires to short-circuit your decision making. People bunch up, hesitating and sliding, and inadvertently kick stuff down on each other. If the kids hadn't been a pack of scared-silly sheep, with implicit trust in our decision making, we'd never have gotten them started down the wall at all. Kressler kept telling everyone it wouldn't be bad after we got to Fat Boy. They were frightened enough to believe him. Once started, the students gasping in anxiety and their limbs trembling as they clutched the wall, it seemed even worse to have to go back up. Yet each step we took, each foot we descended, sank us deeper into the trap we were digging for ourselves.

Fat Boy didn't exactly help the mood. His pleas and moans and bitchy impatience were enough to put experienced climbers on edge, let alone a bunch of shaky kids. Then he cursed and whined at the rocks and snow that seventeen clumsy people inevitably knocked down toward him, hugging himself to the cliff wall and expressing all varieties of self-pity. I wouldn't have blamed his classmates a bit for pitching the blob off the ledge once we got down to him. But instead there were shouts of greeting and reconciliation and hugs and a hurried half-assed setting of his broken leg, Fat Boy roaring in pain. For a moment of excited triumph we were all united again, one for all and all for one, plucky and indomitable: in other words, so thoroughly deluded that I could have written the overblown feature story about our insane little victory all by myself.

Except we were squeezed onto a ledge that was like an overloaded, open-walled elevator going nowhere, cliffs below and cliffs above, and the clouds were blotting out the surrounding peaks. It was getting colder.

Kressler and Fleming were hearty as hell, of course. Everyone was doing great, way to go, jolly good, pip pip, and any other kind of bullshit nonsense that popped into their heads. Me myself and I, however, happened to take a tiny peek over the edge of our view terrace and didn't see Kressler's easy way down at all. There was, in fact, a several-hundred-yard drop down a soft-rock cliff before another ledge led sideways to a point where we might sidehill on snow again- assuming we didn't trigger an avalanche. How we were going to get two hundred and twenty pounds of blubber boy and fourteen other amateur climbers down this way, however, was not at all clear to me and, it turned out, not at all clear to our would-be department chairman.

Kressler, we now learned, had never been here at all. He'd just read that it was climbable.

Jesus. Oh, what a pack of veritable Einsteins we were.

Let me tell you something about Cascade volcanoes. You go up the right way, at the right time and season, and most of the way it's a steady snow slog to the top, exhausting but not terribly technical. Really dumb people have done it, and have the snapshots to prove it. Get fancy about it, however, and you can face some of the most treacherous climbing in the world. The mountains are hot inside, active and full of steam, and the steam leaches out through the lava rock of their cones and turns their geology into a kind of Swiss cheese, crumbling and unreliable. The mountains are weak and have an alarming tendency to break, slump, or slide with no warning. The rock is about as firm as hardened snot, in other words, breaking off with pops and bangs with each rise of the spring sun, spitting out pitons and breaking loose hand-holds for anyone optimistic enough to try it. Skill can very quickly be trumped by bad luck. It was dawning on me that all our luck this day seemed exceedingly bad indeed.

I suggested we go back up and regain the normal route.

The kids wouldn't hear of it. Kressler had scared the shit out of them getting them down this far, and the idea of going back up the mountain when a storm was swirling in struck everybody but me as absolutely insane. I started arguing, me against the other two, and a debate in front of weeping Fat Boy and tired, shivering sophomores was probably not the brightest thing we could have done. Kressler was furious I'd even raised the question. He needed confidence and the group was losing it.

My two esteemed colleagues finally announced that they would show us the way while I babysat the classroom. Climb down to that beckoning snowfield and scramble back up, setting ropes, driving belay points, and generally building a super freeway for the rest of us doubters so we could get the hell out of here before we found ourselves in whiteout conditions.

There was long, doubting silence. They were all waiting for me to speak. Well, go for it, I finally told them. Oh Pioneers! Yep, you fellows go right ahead. I'll just bundle up with the coeds here and you all call when you're ready. Oh, and hurry it up, will you?

Didn't say that, of course. Just gave my in-the-face-of-adversity nod and said I'd try to fashion some kind of sling to lower Fat Boy. What choice did I have, as the lone voice of reason? I was being dragged down with them, doomed by the Original Sin of Fat Boy's unroping, and if we by some chance actually survived I'd sure as hell demand my share of glory for trailing along.

Idiots.

The doughty pair started down off the ledge. It was rock climbing, for which we were neither equipped nor prepared. We had stiff boots for crampons, not rock shoes, and the two instructors were weighted with too many ropes and carabiners and pitons because they wanted to fashion a near-ladder for the class. Even in the best of conditions it would have been difficult to descend that route. Now the sky was spitting snow. Fat Boy was groaning in discomfort, many of the others were snuffling, and when Fleming's head disappeared below the edge I have to confess that even I felt terribly alone.

If they'd made it, of course, everything would have been very different.

I crawled over to watch their progress. The wind was rising and nothing was audible, but I could see them slowly picking their way down. The more they descended the more they hesitated, and I could tell the descent was looking more and more impossible. Once Kressler stopped and looked back up at me for the longest time, as if realizing he was in over his head.

Come back up, you moron, I thought to him as hard as I could. I really did.

But he didn't hear my mental message, or chose to ignore it. A few hundred more yards and his mistakes could be transformed to rescue, the second-guessing transformed to a good war story. His chairmanship might be secure. Can you imagine any goal more pathetic? So they kept going, fixing a line, and for one brief minute I began to concede they just might show me up. Get down, get the kids down, even get Fat Boy down. And they would have, too, if they were descending a wall with any kind of structural integrity.

But Wallace Wall is as unreliable as a lover's promise. One minute they were bolted to it, making our route, and the next moment a foothold gave way and Fleming, who was highest, slipped, fell, and bounced, hanging on his rope from a piton, suspended in terror, his ice ax sparkling as it whirled away downward. There was an awful pause, Kressler roaring instructions, and then the pitons popped off the steam-riddled rock like buttons in a Fat Boy squat. Ping, ping, ping! The rope curled out in space in a lazy arc, bright red against the foggy depths beyond, and then Fleming fell past Kressler and plucked him off his perch as neatly as you'd pick a grape.

They went screaming.

The students shrieked, too, an anguished wail that signaled their own sudden realization of mortality and doom. The instructors tumbled in a gray dawn light, orbiting each other in an embrace of line, and then hit rocks, ice, glacier, snow, setting off a small avalanche to accompany themselves and sliding down in their very own slurry of debris, the rope snapping. They settled out individually finally to lie still some infinity of distance below us, their broken profiles looking like discarded dolls.

They were dead.

The keening from my little mob of survivors was as mournful as the bitter wind. Snow was spitting at us, visibility failing, and we were trapped on a shelf of rock with about as much square footage as a king-sized bed. The easy route down had been exposed for the fraud it was, and our leaders for fools.

So now they clutched, pleaded, wept.

And turned to me.

The funeral of Michael Mortimer "Mickey" Moss, astrophysicist and Old Antarctic Explorer, took place the following morning at the stake that marked the South Pole. Or at least the clocks said morning. Lewis, still tired and sore from recovering the body, felt a groggy, growing disorientation from time. The sun ran around the base like a coin on a track, refusing to go up or down or acknowledge the normal succession of days. Geller had made a joke about it: "A cowboy riding into the sunset would get mighty dizzy here."

Under the dome, in contrast, was perpetual shadow. Brain chemicals that were normally triggered by the rhythm of darkness and dawn were beginning to misfire.

"It gets worse," Nancy Hodge had told him when he first complained about the problem. "They've found the Pole can mess up your thyroid and a bunch of other stuff. T3 Syndrome. Reports of depression date back a hundred years to the first explorers. A study a decade ago found two-thirds of winter-overs had trouble sleeping and half were depressed. It saps your energy, slows your mind. The best thing you can do is be conscious of it and stay focused. Scheduled."

"If I feel this toasty now, I'm going to be a charcoal briquet by October."

"Find a hobby. Gina is teaching Italian. Hiro is trying to learn the harmonica. Bob is building a telescope. Even Tyson is doing something."

"Right. Manufacturing knives."

But Lewis hadn't found a hobby yet and was feeling increasingly alone and misplaced. It had taken him two hours in the sauna yesterday to expunge the haunting chill of the old base and he'd left the hot room wrung out and exhausted. His sleep had nonetheless been troubled. Lewis had never seen a dead body before: By the time he got back from Saudi Arabia after his parents' death the funeral was over and they were already in the ground. At first the corpse had simply been a frozen weight, a piece of cargo. Pulled up on the ice cap, however, Mickey Moss had been recognizable as a once-dominant human being. Without wishing to, Lewis had caught a glimpse of the skim-milk pallor of frozen flesh, the obscenely open mouth, the bulging eyes. Moss had died in pain and horror.

And who was trying to blame it on Lewis?

The astrophysicist's shock was covered now by the plastic garbage bags used as a makeshift shroud for the body. Sealed with duct tape around the dead man's torso, the plastic rattled in the bitter wind like a playing card in the spokes of a bicycle. Lewis found the others stood a little away from him, and he thought the twenty-four other mourners looked like a cluster of orange monks, hooded and hunched. Their ski goggles and neck gaiters masked all expression, and the tendrils of their fur ruffs waved like the groping cilia of sea anemone. Blowing snow slid across the plateau, caressing the corpse with filmy waves.