scraped along the plywood with a squeal. Then it caught on a joint between two sheets of wood and he jammed it down past the plywood into the ice. Their slide was arrested.
They were stretched like beads on their rope, their waists painfully squeezed.
'Rod! You all right?'
'I'm hanging in some damn pit! Can you back us up?'
'Pulaski and I can brace ourselves against the plywood walls,' Geller grunted. 'You pull on the ax, Lewis.'
Slowly the three men who had escaped the fall began to retreat, hauling the station manager back up as they did so. Cameron got to the lip of the hole and worked his way over broken plywood to the top. They rested a moment, panting.
Lewis had the only light. 'What happened to yours?' he asked, shining it on Cameron.
'Dropped it.'
The station manager crawled to the edge of the pit and looked down. Lewis joined him. The fallen flashlight was still glowing feebly fifty feet below where the old study excavation hole ended, the pit's icy sides marked by meter sticks installed four decades before. The hole had been roofed over with boards and plywood, but someone's weight had broken through before them. Cameron had simply stepped too close and slid down the sagging wood into thin air.
'Ah, Jesus,' the station manager now breathed.
A man was down there, curled in a fetal position in the cone of fading light. They had found Mickey Moss.
It took them an hour to lift the astronomer out. Pulaski had done some rock climbing in the military so they lowered him to the bottom of the pit to attach a line around the stiff corpse. Then he shimmied back up and they hauled, cursing when Moss's rock-hard limbs caught momentarily on the uneven edges of the broken wood. The scientist was heavy. Finally they got him up and over the edge of the pit.
They sat back, gasping. Moss's parka-clad body seemed to fill the tunnel.
Cameron dug out a water bottle he kept unfrozen by strapping it to his torso and passed it around. The water was actually lukewarm. 'To Mickey. Drink all you can. Working in the cold is how you get dehydrated in Antarctica.'
Lewis drank and shuddered. 'I need to keep moving.'
'We all do. My hands and feet are numb. I think we can sled Mickey from here.'
They dragged the body unceremoniously, finding it skidded well. When they came through the door back into the stairwell they lifted Moss more gently, like pallbearers, and carried him to the aluminum-roofed observatory above. A ladder led to a wooden trapdoor, which they pried until it fell down, swinging on its old hinge. There was a roof of snow over the entrance, softly blue, and the men looked at the color eagerly. A few twists of Cameron's shovel and the snow cascaded down in a flush of gray light. They lifted and pushed Mickey's body up and surfaced, gasping as if emerging from underwater. The hole they'd come from looked pitch-black. Cameron reached down and pulled the trapdoor shut.
'That's enough of that.'
Lewis looked at the horizon. Clouds were moving in, obscuring the low sun. The day was hardly more than a gloomy twilight and yet brilliant after the darkness below.
'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
