'F-N-G-I. Fucking New Guy on the Ice. That's you.'
Lewis failed at a grin. 'Latecomer.'
'Just new. Everybody's a fingie at first. We know we're lucky to get you last minute like this. Jim Sparco e- mailed about you like the Second Coming.'
'I needed a job.'
'Yeah, he explained that. I think it's cool that you quit Big Oil.' Cameron gave a nod of approval.
'That's me, man of principle.' Lewis had a headache from the altitude.
'Course, we need their shit to keep from freezing down here.'
'Not from a wildlife refuge, you don't.'
'And you just walked out.'
'They weren't about to give me a helicopter ride.'
'That took some guts.'
'It had to be done.'
Cameron tried to assess the new man. Lewis looked tired, disoriented, chest rising and falling, half excited and half afraid. They all started like that. The station manager turned back to the door, impatient to get away, and considered whether to say anything else. 'I've got to go get the plane off,' he finally said again. 'You know what that means, don't you?'
'What?'
'That you can't quit down here.'
A stream of people followed Cameron out, some looking at Lewis curiously and others ignoring him: the winter-overs going to offload the supplies and the last from summer flying home. The Pole had a brief four-month window when weather permitted incoming flights, and then in February the last plane left, fleeing north like a migrating bird. In winter it was too dark to see, too windy to keep the ice runway clear, and too cold to risk a landing: Struts could snap, hydraulics fail, doors fail to open or close. The sun set on March 21, the equinox, and wouldn't rise again until September 21. From February to October the base was as remote as the moon. There were twenty-six winter-overs who retreated under the dome to maintain its functions and take astronomical and weather readings: eight women and eighteen men this year. It was like being on a submarine or space station. You had to commit.
The galley had emptied and Lewis took a place at a Formica table. The room was low-ceilinged, bright, and warm. A bulletin board was thick with paper, a juice dispenser burbled, and in the corner a television monitor displayed outside temperatures. It was fifty-eight below zero near the runway, the breeze lowering the windchill to minus eighty-one. The reading was an abstraction except for the freezer door he'd come through. That was old, and cold leaked around its edges to rime its inner face with frost. The frost reached all the way across it in stripes, like fingers. The pattern reminded Lewis of a giant hand, trying to yank the door away.
'Drink as much as you can. Best cure for the altitude.'
Lewis looked up. It was the cook, bald except for a topknot that hung from the back of his head. His skull looked knobby, as if knocked around more than once, and he had a gray mustache and forearms tattooed with a bear and eagle. Here was somebody easy to remember.
'It doesn't look high.'
'That's because it's flat. You're sitting on ice almost two miles thick. Our elevation is ninety-three hundred, and the thinning of the atmosphere at the Poles makes the effective altitude closer to eleven thousand. Walking out of that transport is like being dumped on the crest of the Rockies. Your body will adjust in a few days.'
'I feel hammered.' The short walk from the plane had made him ill.
'You'll be racing around the world before you know it.'
'Around the world?'
'Around the stake that marks the Pole.' He sat down. 'Wade Pulaski. Chief cook and bottle washer. Best chef for nine hundred miles. I can't claim any farther because Cathy Costello back at McMurdo is pretty good, too.' McMurdo was the main American base in Antarctica, located on the coast.
'Jedediah Lewis, polar weatherman.' He shook.
'Jedediah? Your parents religious?'
'More like hippies, I think. When it was a fad.'
'But it's biblical, right? You're a prophet?'
'Oracle of climate change by temporary opportunity. Rockhound by training. And it's actually just another name for Solomon. 'Beloved of the Lord.' '
'So you're wise.'
His head was pounding. 'I take my name as God's little joke.'
'What do you mean by rockhound?'
'Geologist. That's my real job.'
'So you come to the one place on earth where there aren't any rocks? Doctor Bob will have a field day with that one.'
'Who's Doctor Bob?'
'Our new shrink. NASA sent him down to do a head job on us before they plant too many people on the space station. He's wintering over to write us up while we mess with each other's minds. He thinks we're all escapists.'
Lewis smiled. 'Rod Cameron just told me we can't quit.'
'That's what I told Doctor Bob! It's like being paid to go to prison!'
'And yet we volunteered.'
'I'm on my third season.' Pulaski stretched out his arms in mock enthusiasm, as if to claim ownership. 'I can't stay away. If the generators stop like they did last night we've got maybe a few hours, but we always get them running again.'
'Why'd they stop?'
'Some moron turned the wrong valve. Rod went ballistic, which meant nobody was in a mood to confess this morning. But it was a stupid annoyance, not a threat. And you're going to learn that as long as you don't freeze to death things are really good down here, especially now that the last of summer camp is leaving and the bureaucrats are ten thousand miles away. I give you better food than you'd get back home and there's no bullshit at the Pole. There's no clock to punch, no bills, no taxes, no traffic, no newspapers, no nothing. After today everything calms down and this becomes the sanest place on earth. Cozier than most families. And after eight toasty months you come out with your head straight and your money saved. It's paradise, man.'
Lewis reserved agreement. 'You got any aspirin?'
'Sure.' The cook got a bottle from the kitchen and brought it back. 'You feel like shit right now, but you'll get better.'
'I know.'
'You even acclimate to the cold. A little.'
'I know.'
Pulaski went to the counter where food was passed. He bent under it to get a commissary-sized soup can, its label stripped and its inside cleaned to a bright copper. 'Here, your arrival present.'
'What's this for?' Lewis realized he felt stupid from the altitude.
'You'll drink all day and pee all night, this first night. It's your body adjusting to the cold and altitude. This can saves you about three hundred trips to the real can.'
'A chamber pot?'
'Welcome to Planet Cueball, fingie.'
CHAPTER TWO
Lewis's room was windowless and just ten feet long. He could span its width with lifted arms, his fingertips brushing each wall. It was one of a row of cells on the second floor of the science building, another orange metal
