Then he worked up to his knees, trying to see. He felt dumbfounded. It seemed to be getting darker. He needed a flashlight, something to pick out color. But he'd left his light back at Clean Air.
Idiot. You've killed yourself.
Think!
Dully, he noticed the sastruga, the small drift he had tripped over. The sastrugi's tops had been torn off and hurled into the stormy air but their icier underlayment still existed, slowly being abraded by the wind. He'd walked over them every day and watched their wavelike pattern from Clean Air. Which way did they run? He tried to focus his mind…
Yes. Yes! He remembered. Perpendicular to his path. And lower, smaller, in the lee of the dome. He could read them like sailors read the water, perhaps.
He struggled back up, desperate now. He hadn't much time. He was seizing up like the Tin Woodsman. I'm rusting! He set off, abandoning the flags as lost in the storm, betting all on his ability to run into the dome. He stopped for neither air nor rest, plunging forward, determined to bang up against salvation. Trudging on, hammered by the wind, trying to read the drifts, increasingly disoriented…
Nothing. How much time had gone by? As he looked down through the curtains of snow, he was increasingly uncertain which way the sastrugi ran. It seemed they were dissolving and re-forming before his eyes, curling into circles. No dome, no flags, no hope.
He turned around. His footprints had already disappeared.
He'd failed, he realized. Gambled and lost. Somehow he'd missed a structure nearly the width of a football field…
He was a dead man.
The wind lessened slightly and above the shriek of the storm he heard a lower whine. Was he near the generators? He struggled to place it. A butterfly, bright red, spun by, its flicker like a flash of light. He was stunned. Butterfly? No, it was cloth! Old Glory, still on the dome up there, because they'd forgotten to take it in before the blow. The flag was being shredded to pieces, its bits spinning past him like sparks in the storm. He had to be close. Peering, he saw nothing, and then suddenly there was a light, catching him in its blaze, and a snowmobile snorted and charged up to him, a huge hooded figure on its back like Death itself.
'Get on, you fucking moron!' Tyson yelled. 'I'm half frozen looking for the likes of you!'
Lewis's leg seemed enormously heavy as he tried to lift it over the machine. He was on Jupiter, pinned by a cold that had become equivalent to gravity. Yet he managed to clutch the huge man in front of him, clinging to Tyson's waist, and the snowmobile howled and spun off, Tyson following the weaving course of his own track.
'Rod made me come look for you, you dumb fuck! I would have let you die!'
The dark wall of the dome loomed briefly out of the snow as Tyson followed it, the snowmobile growling as it jounced over confused drifts. Then there was a sudden bank of snow, the machine lurched up it, and they were airborne.
'Aw, shit!'
Lewis was so surprised he let go and felt himself separate from the machine. He fell, his world gauze, then hit hard ice and snow, rolling, and finally skidded to a stop, breathless and stunned. The snowmobile banged down somewhere, coughed, and went silent. In the stunned quiet that followed, Lewis realized he was somehow more protected from the wind.
He was on the ramp that led to the dome.
Tyson skidded down, colliding with him. 'Fuck, I thought I'd lost you again!'
'What happened?'
'Snowbank from digging out the ramp. Jumped the sucker and did a barrel roll.'
'The snowmobile?' Lewis managed to mouth.
'It's trash.'
They half crawled, half skidded down the rest of the ramp, skittering like hockey pucks against the closed metal doors. Lewis yelped when he hit, sore and gleeful. The smaller plywood emergency door was to one side of the main entrance and he pushed on it. Frozen shut. Stuck like glue.
Tyson shoved him aside and butted it. 'See what I told you?' he shouted. 'Sufficiency, man! You couldn't get out of the jam on your own!' The door popped open, slamming inside as the wind caught it. 'You didn't have me, you'd be locker meat!'
Lewis leaned through and mittened hands grabbed him and yanked. Tyson pushed through, too. The door slammed shut behind them, a puff of flakes trapped inside.
Even the cold of the dome was immense relief because the wind was shut out. Lewis could still hear it howling, the snow rasping the protective shelter, but at least he could breathe and the wind didn't cut at him. He reached to pull down his goggles and had to break them loose from his forehead where they'd frozen. 'Ow!' He felt blind in the gloom. His legs were trembling, his feet dangerously numb.
'Lewis, my God, you all right?' It was Cameron, pounding on him. 'You damned lunatic, we thought you'd lost it! Why didn't you take a radio? Take a light?'
'Uh…' No words came.
'I'm going to thaw you out just so I can kick the shit out of you.' He shoved him in the direction of the galley. The station manager turned to Tyson. 'Good job, Buck. Norse just got back, too. But Adams hasn't showed.'
Tyson's face was a mask of ice. 'Fuck.'
'He was going to see Lewis. I can't raise him.'
The mechanic slumped. 'I'm wasted, man. The machine's kaput. I can't go back out there.'
Cameron turned to Lewis. 'Jed, did you see him at all?'
Lewis shook his head. He remembered the argument between Tyson and Adams in the weight room. How anxious would Tyson be to look for him?
'We got another machine?' Cameron asked.
Tyson shook his head. 'Not fired up and ready.'
'How long? If I go instead of you.'
'No way. It's suicide, man. Don't go.'
'But if I did.'
'Too long. Too long, in that.'
Sickly, they looked at each other.
'I'm going up the ramp to fire some flares,' Cameron said. 'Maybe he can home in on that.'
'You can't see for shit.' Tyson looked as exhausted as a blown horse.
'I've got to try something.'
'You can't see, you can't hear, you can't find. I just stumbled on the fingie with dumb luck.'
'I've got to do something. I can't lose two.'
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The storm blew for thirty-seven hours, the snow crystalline and pitiless, driven so hard by the wind that it sizzled against the outside of the dome like grease in a frying pan. In that long cold twilight of noise and confinement, with no telephone or radio call for help, the winter-overs of Amundsen-Scott base became glumly convinced that Harrison Adams was also dead. In the midst of the storm Cameron led a party, roped and lit, out along the flag route to the Dark Sector astronomy building to look for him again. One flag was down, a bad sign, and they had to use GPS to bridge the gap. They searched the building, endured two hours in the blizzard going and coming back, and found nothing. Any further searching had to wait until the wind died down.
'I told everyone to stay put,' Cameron said bitterly as he exhaustedly shed his parka, his nylon frozen over by a sheen of ice. 'Why the hell didn't they stay put?'
No predecessor had ever lost two people before.
The great hush that marked the end of the storm came at what the clock said was morning. So much snow had drifted that when they opened the exit door to the ramp again, there was a chest-high wall they had to dig through to get outside. Tyson was told to warm up a Cat to bulldoze more blocking snow away and this time he
