was evaporating. He stumbled, almost fell. He should turn back. He was risking frostbite by staying out so long. But there was the polar stake! Norse had paused at it, watching him. 'You can do it, Jed!'
Lewis staggered to the Pole and looked back. Everyone else had disappeared inside. The dome looked impossibly far away and he realized he'd misjudged. This was insane! He was naked at a hundred degrees below zero and his sauna warmth was leaking away like a reservoir from a ruptured dam. 'I think I'm dying,' he gasped. He was looking up at his own ephemeral existence: the aurora!
'Not yet.' Norse reached out and seized Lewis's arm, jerking him back in the direction of the dome. 'Double time!' They jogged together, their goal rocking in his vision, the psychologist's hand like a vise. 'You can do it!'
'It feels like my shoulders are freezing up. I can hear them cracking.'
'You've got to sprint, man! Sprint to save your life!' He seized Lewis's hand and the two began awkwardly running flat out, nude, intimate, two earthlings cast off into space, barely keeping their balance on the skittering of snow. 'Go, go!'
They saw Pulaski at the crest of the ramp, waving them in like an orange-clad angel. Stars began dancing in Lewis's eyes. 'I… can't… do…'
He fell, skidding on powder, his chest painfully burning on the firmer packed snow just underneath. Then he was being pulled up off the snow by one arm, the stars swinging crazily and his consciousness dazed, Norse dragging him forward like a wounded man. 'We're almost back!' The psychologist leaped over the crest of the ramp, howling at the cold, yanking Lewis over its lip with him, and then they fell and slid down it together in a tangle, scraping their skin again. Pulaski ran and hauled them up. Snow stuck to them like flour, their skin flushed red. 'We made it, Cueball!' Norse gasped in triumph. 'Made it to the Pole!'
'Now you have to make it inside!' The cook pushed the pair through the dome door and slammed it shut and they staggered on, utterly frozen, back under the dome toward the sauna.
Lewis had no memory of the last minute or so across the dusky dome. Just the wooden door, a blast of heat, and then falling into the welcoming arms of the others who'd crowded back into the sauna before him, snatching at towels and coughing and swearing and shouting with victory from the cold that had seared into their lungs.
Three hundred degrees!
Now he was one of them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The pig is on fire. Repeat. The pig is on fire.'
The warning over the galley public address system penetrated a haze of post-sauna alcohol and set off an explosion of consternation and amusement. Pulaski had arranged for an entire pig to be flown down for a midwinter luau, planning it to occur at the June 21 winter solstice, the darkest time at the Pole. But by general consensus the darkest time was now, with Rod's death and Tyson's flight, and so he'd decided the group needed the pig in order to recover equilibrium and fraternity. He'd constructed a crude barbecue out of scrap sheet metal and concrete blocks in the archway near the gym, fed it with propane, and lit it up soon after the disappearance of Tyson, putting the pig to roast before the Three Hundred Degree Club even met. As the animal turned, their cook deputized assistant pit chefs to check it occasionally after ritually donning a Hawaiian shirt. Now Hiro, with his heavy Japanese accent, was delivering an apocalyptic message in his scientific monotone, informing them that their luau was in danger of turning into a cremation.
Laughing and hooting, several of the men spilled out of the galley with fire extinguishers and flame blankets to rescue their meal. Pulaski, sprinting after them, just barely managed to deflect an enthusiastic but ill-thought-out blast of halon before it contaminated the meat. He smothered the flames in a blanket instead. 'This is our dinner, morons!' Then he examined the blackened hide with a jeweler's squint. 'No harm done.' The pig was elevated above the gas flames to keep it above the flash point and the rescuers trooped back to the galley with mission accomplished, Lewis among them, the pungent smell of cooked pork making the men salivate in anticipation.
'The pig has been extinguished!' Pulaski announced, the women dutifully applauding this act of male prowess.
It had taken Lewis a full half hour in the sauna to thaw himself from the brutal run, coughing uncontrollably for several minutes from the bronchial rape of raw polar air. Then fifteen minutes more to convince himself that none of his parts, public or private, were seriously frostbitten. He was the last to limp out from the cedar box, dehydrated and exhausted, and was ready to collapse into bed when others seized him, gave him water, pushed him into the shower, and then told him to join the survival party in the station galley. It was a camaraderie he was unaccustomed to. Now he savored it. He saluted the cook along with everyone else, hoisting a cup of dome-brewed beer.
The Three Hundred Degree Club had purged the group of tension. The participants were pink and relieved, the veterans welcoming and inclusive, and the suspicions and speculation had been, for the moment at least, erased. 'Tyson fled for our sins,' Geller belched. A shadow had passed and the polar night had been symbolically rolled back. The survivors desperately needed psychic relief and couldn't go anywhere but inside themselves to get it. A rock anthem was playing, haunting and accumulative as it built in volume, a fossilized pulse from planet Led Zeppelin, a world back across the edge. 'Cliiiimbing a staiiiirway to…'
'Hey, all the way to the Pole, man!' Geller, gleeful and drunk, slapped Lewis on the back. 'You're lucky your dick didn't fall off!'
'Heaaavennnn…'
Lewis grinned modestly. 'I'm not sure it didn't. I got so cold I'm still looking for the damn thing.'
Geller laughed. 'Check out Gabriella, dude. She'll help you find it.'
Their Gal Friday had put on a skirt, short and tight, a garment more extraordinary at the Pole than a bathing suit or sarong. She wore a tank top, its straps tangled with those of the lacy bra underneath like a DNA helix. The outfit revealed an upper arm tattooed with a ringlet of flowers. Her dark hair had been released to cascade down to her shoulders, its color matching her black, liquid eyes. She was beginning to sway by herself in time with the music, her hips hypnotic as she did so, her look demurely downward but her entire being intensely aware of the attention she was drawing to herself. She had a smoky intensity, as if she, too, could burst into flame.
'That's almost scary,' Lewis confessed.
'Not after a couple margaritas, man. Carl is mixing up a batch in honor of Cinco de Mayo. You'll be ready for her then.'
'It's not even May yet.'
'It's any day you want it to be, former fingie. It's luau night, Mexican Independence Day, the Lord's birthday, and Halloween rolled into one. We're alive, my friend, the North Dakota boogeyman is gone, and we're all so thoroughly toasted that tonight might as well be the first insane night of the rest of your life. Cheers, brother! Heeeee-haw!'
The pig was deemed ready by Hiro's watchdog replacement, Alexi Molotov. A group of men went outside again and brought it back slung on a pole, chanting as Pika kept time to their march by knocking together two pieces of wood. The pig's head was still attached, mahogany brown, shiny and squinting, a red rubber ball stuck in its snout in lieu of apples long since eaten. The preposterous animal filled half a galley table. There was hot fresh bread, canned fruit salad, yams with brown sugar and pecans, mashed potatoes, olives, baked beans, peas and onions, cheeses, Jell-O, chips. The other tables had cloths and lit candles and coupled bottles of red and white wine.
A memorial to the dead had been pinned up near the galley tray table. Pulaski had posted pictures of Mickey Moss, Harrison Adams, and Rod Cameron. 'They live on in our memories,' a small banner read.
Norse was looking at the pictures as if they might reveal something that had eluded him.
'It makes me want to cry,' said Lena Jindrova, who unconsciously carried with her the perfumed scent of the tomato plants she tended in their greenhouse. She'd come up beside Norse.
'But you're not crying, are you?' the psychologist replied a little coldly.
She took it as a criticism. 'Well, I have accepted them not being here. Does that sound mean?'
'It sounds human,' Norse conceded, his manner softer. 'Do you know what I was told in college?'
She shook her head.
