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.
The station manager led the group in an awkward recitation of the Lord's Prayer, Cameron stumbling haltingly through the words. There were normally no services in winter and no minister. Only Pika and Eleanor Chen, a science technician, sometimes allowed themselves to be seen leafing through the Bible.
The group needed a priest. What they had was a psychologist.
Norse, too, stood a little apart from the others, as if to watch both them and the body. Like everyone else, his expression was unreadable under his swaddling of clothes, his goggles giving him that black, blank-eyed stare of cartoon space aliens. Lewis was sure he was trying to figure the tragedy out. Figure them out.
'There's not much I can say and it's too cold to say it,' Cameron began after the prayer, his gaiter pulled down and his beard beading with bits of ice. 'We'll put Mickey's body out by the cargo berms until it can be evacuated in the spring. As you know, he fell down an old research pit and it's impossible to say if it was accident, heart attack, the meteorite, or what.' He glanced at Norse, a mute acknowledgment of the possibility of suicide as well. Moss had found almost the only place on the flat Pole to fall any appreciable distance, and how accidental was that? 'We'll probably never know, and maybe that's how Mickey would prefer it. I think he'd like to be remembered for what he lived for, not how he died. And he lived for this base. He lived for us. We might not be down here, having this unique opportunity, without him.'
The group shuffled uncomfortably.
'Mickey was one of a kind, a sort of polar Miles Standish who helped pull this place together. He and I didn't always get along but I'll say this now, and I'll say it honestly- I'll miss him.'
'Amen,' Pika concluded.
Gabriella leaned forward with a plastic flower, liberated from a floral arrangement kept in a Coke bottle placed in one of the bathrooms that the women claimed as theirs. She put it on the body. The wind caught it and it flew off almost immediately, startling her. Norse stopped it with his boot and brought it back, sticking it upright into the snow. A red waxy rose.
'Pika?' Cameron prompted.
The power plant mechanic zipped down his parka, reached inside, and pulled out a small portable disk player. 'I downloaded this from the Internet,' he announced. He pushed a button and a mournful tune began, tinny and barely recognizable: the military ending known as 'Taps.' The military dirge played out, its long notes warped by poor recording and carried away by the wind.
Then there was quiet, except for the fluttering of the plastic shroud.
'Well, that's that, then,' Cameron said. 'We'll tow him over to the storage area. We made a cross for him out of black PVC plumbing pipe. The body will be rock solid perfect until we can ship it home. The berms of stored cargo will give him some protection from the wind.'
'That's not that,' spoke up Adams, his words muffled by his gaiter. 'I said I don't believe in coincidences.' His masked head rotated to look at Lewis and then Abby. 'I'm not sticking Mickey in the snow and forgetting about him. We need to check his hard drive, his records, his papers, everything we can to find out why the hell he died down there.'
Geller coughed. Lewis couldn't see past his goggles and the cloth that covered the maintenance man's mouth, but he imagined the smirk. Robbing the dead, he'd predicted.
No one said anything until Norse spoke up. 'There's still that issue of privacy.'
'I think group survival is a little more important than privacy,' Adams righteously replied.
'It was probably an accident,' Cameron said. 'Probably a coincidence. But yes, of course we're going to try to figure out what happened.'
'Who happened,' Adams corrected. 'You have to let me look through his things.'
'We'll talk about it.'
The group began to break up. Lewis heard a sound of snuffling and realized it was Abby, weeping behind her muffler. Any tears that leaked out would freeze.
Something was going on with her. Something about that picture. Why the hell had a geezer like Moss gone to his death with a picture of her on his chest?
Lewis watched as Norse stepped around the body and came to her, whispering something reassuring. Then the psychiatrist put his arm around her shoulder and led her toward the dome.
Lewis resented the intimacy.
No one else said a word to him. They'd heard where the e-mail had originated from. Guilty or not, he was bad luck. It wasn't even dark yet, the long winter still stretching ahead, and already he felt like toast.
At midnight, insomnia drove Lewis to the computer lab. Compiling weather numbers for Sparco was the one thing he'd found that was reassuring: If the sun would not finally go down, a necessary first step toward the eventual return of spring, at least his data sheets grew day by day with satisfying progression. Time was passing. He found that entering the readings was relaxing, a precise but mind-quieting task that could ready him for sleep. It was midnight and the station was still except for the ceaseless murmur of machinery and ventilation.
He was not particularly surprised to find Abby there, however, her face lit by the glow of a screen. She inhabited the nighttime lab like a specter, appearing at odd hours and taking comfort in nursing her sometimes balky machines. He admired her mastery of them, the self-possession her skill gave her when she burrowed into their innards. He liked her curiosity.
Right now she appeared to be taking a minute for herself, not easy to do in an environment where the expectation from higher-ups was tireless work. Beakers were desperate to get as much information as possible in their allotted research time and their pace set an air of urgency in research camps that was impossible to escape. Polar science was done at a dead run. But tonight her slim hand moved a mouse casually. She was playing solitaire on the computer.
He hesitated a moment in the doorway, watching her. The flicker of light played across the fine features of her face and made it float in the surrounding darkness as if disembodied, a ghostliness that seemed doubly foreboding after Moss's funeral. Suddenly everyone seemed vulnerable down here. Certainly Abby looked as lonely as Lewis felt. He needed a confidant and they'd proven harder to find than he'd hoped. Summoning up the courage to endure rejection, he walked in and sat next to her.
'Gearloose,' he said gently.
For a minute he thought she wasn't going to reply. Then, 'I've thought of a nickname for you.' She didn't look up from the cards on her screen. She was going to win, he could tell.
At least she was talking to him.
'Higher than krill, I hope.'
'Enzyme. The agent that makes things change.'
He winced. 'A metabolic chemical? I'm not sure that's an improvement.'
'It's true, though. Things are different since you came here.'
He waited for her to elaborate, but she didn't. She won her round and the deck of cards began handsprings of laudatory joy.
'How so?'
'More complicated.'
'I didn't send that message, Abby.'
