At his silence she finally stopped trimming and turned to look at him, allowing some reluctant sympathy. 'Maybe that wasn't fair,' she allowed. 'But I don't know about the meteorite, Jed.'
'I came to ask you about something else.'
'I don't have any suspects.'
'No. Something else.'
She let the shears drop by her side. 'What, then?'
'Someone slipped this under my door this morning.' He took a piece of thick paper from a pocket and handed it to her.
Abby unfolded a five-pointed star cut from yellow construction paper. On it were printed the words, 'Deputy Dawg.'
She frowned.
'I don't even know what it's supposed to mean,' Lewis said.
She crumpled up the star and threw it in a recycling basket. The sorting of trash was a basic ground rule at the Pole. 'It means to back off.'
'Back off what?'
She looked at him impatiently. 'Are you dense? You're the fingie, Jed. No one knows you yet. No one trusts you yet. But you're going around asking questions about Mickey's rock like a cop and implying that the rest of us are a bunch of crooks. Worse, you're doing Moss's dirty work for him. Nobody likes him, either, not really. It's the worst kind of way to try to fit in here, and somebody's trying to tell you politely to cut it out before you're toast for the rest of the winter. Why do you even care who took the meteorite? Nobody else does.'
'Because he thinks I might have taken it.'
She looked at him with impatience. 'And what do you care what he thinks? He's not the person you have to eat with, we are.'
'He's Sparco's friend and Sparco hired me and… I'm just trying to do the right thing.'
'Well, this is a great community of good-hearted people and you're doing exactly the wrong thing if you want to fit in. Mickey can be a bully and Cameron always feels pressured but those guys aren't the group. We are. And we're not a bunch of thieves.'
'I'm just trying to feel my way.'
'So do your job, keep your mouth shut, and watch. Learn. Listen. There's a society here and your winter will be miserable if you don't fit into it.'
'Tyson doesn't fit into it.'
'And is he happy?'
Lewis didn't have to answer.
'In fact, Tyson is an example of the risk you run. I ran into Rod and he's so hot he's got steam coming out of his ears. I think he and Buck had some kind of run-in.'
'They did. I saw it.'
She looked at him in surprise. She was instantly interested, unable to mask her curiosity. 'When?'
'I was in the garage when he told Rod to essentially go screw himself. That mechanic is unbelievable. He's nuts.'
'He's got so much anger it's scary. It's not the Pole. There's something wrong with him. Some basic resentment of other people, or frustration with his own life.'
'They should never have let him come down here.'
She nodded. 'I think Rod went to Doctor Bob for advice. Tonight he's called a meeting. And that's why it's not a good time to play Columbo, Jed. There's too much tension on station and the winter's starting poorly. Things are coming to a head.'
'About the meteorite?'
'About water.'
Amundsen-Scott station sat on a freshwater ocean, but it was frozen into ice that stayed a permanent sixty degrees below zero. Imported jet fuel ran a heater that melted a bulb of liquid water in the ice cap called a Rodriguez Well, but raising the temperature of the ice to the melting point was enormously costly. It took a gallon and a half of jet fuel just to fly in a gallon more for use at the Pole.
'Liquid water here costs more than gasoline at home,' Cameron told the assembly in the galley that night. 'Every drop we consume represents energy we can't use for heating or lights or to run our instruments. If we were on a nuclear submarine we could shower all day, but we're not. And we're using water faster than it's budgeted.'
'How much faster?' Carl Mendoza asked.
'About fifty gallons a day.'
Some of the others turned to look at Tyson, who was slouched in the shadows along a back wall. He looked determinedly bored.
'Are you listening, Buck?' Cameron called to him.
For a long minute the big man didn't answer. Then: 'What? Hard to hear you, Rod. Might need to wash my ears out tonight.'
There was an uneasy silence in the room. Tyson looked huge, surly, mean. Everyone was waiting to see what Cameron would do. What Cameron could do.
The station manager waited, letting the silence and uneasiness build. Finally he went on. 'The reason we're using so much water is, of course, a mystery.' There was a murmur of surprise, but Doctor Bob was watching Cameron expectantly, nodding slightly. 'The one thing we do know is that if we're going to make it through the winter with a sufficient fuel reserve, we have to curb our excessive consumption.'
'One person has to,' astronomer Harrison Adams muttered.
'So,' Cameron continued blandly, ignoring Adams, 'I'm being forced to announce a new rationing policy. Effective immediately, showers are being cut from two to one a week.'
'What?' Geller shouted. The crowd erupted. Several turned to glare at Tyson. He had straightened in initial surprise but now was grinning sardonically, enjoying their outrage, seeming to feed off it.
'That's not fair!' Dana Andrews protested.
'Rod, you can't do that to the maintenance crew,' station carpenter Steve Calhoun objected. 'We get dirty, man. We stink. Once a week is too long in between.'
'And I'm not going to lose my privileges to accommodate that blowhard baboon!' Mickey Moss thundered, pointing at Tyson. 'He's a bully!'
'Sticks and stones, man,' the mechanic mocked him.
'I'm going to break you!' Moss shouted at Tyson. 'Not just here but after, when we get home! Your performance is going to dog you the rest of your life!'
'Fuck you, Mickey Mouse.'
Moss was seething, fighting for self-control. 'The rest of your life, Tyson.'
Cameron held up his hand. 'This rationing is temporary until water consumption appears to be coming back into line with projections. I'm leaving it up to the rest of you to figure out how to make sure that comes about.'
There was quiet again, everyone looking speculatively at Tyson. He looked back at them defiantly, saying nothing.
'This is your fault,' Lena Jindrova finally hissed, standing up to look at the big man, who topped her by a good foot. 'You are the pig who is making the rest of us suffer.'
'Fuck you, too, Lena.'
'You are the pig like the old party bosses in Czechoslovakia, pulling everything to themselves, caring for no one.'
'This whole water-rationing crap is bullshit. We've got plenty of fuel. More than we can use.'
'You're wrong, Buck,' Cameron said quietly.
'You are like a worm that cares only for itself,' Lena went on heatedly. She pointed to the galley serving counter, where a glass mason jar held a leaf of lettuce and the curled form of Hieronymus. 'Our mascot has more heart than you. More soul.'
