matter of exactly just what did happen on the mountain was not-so-quietly dropped, despite the confused bleating of bereaved parents. And that was that. I'd done my best and was prepared to get on with my life.
Except my application for tenure was denied.
They wouldn't let it drop.
They wouldn't let it drop!
Barney Fife, deputy dipshit, kept nosing around. The whispering started. The peer reviews of my research papers began to get very much more pointed, very pointed indeed. They started murmuring about me in the campus coffee shop- I could feel the stares! — and plotting against me in the department. They denied it, of course, but I knew what was happening. I knew it! The file cabinets that were locked, the meetings called without notifying me they were being held, the evasive looks, the papers turned upside down on desks so I couldn't read them, the hollow sympathies. God, did I know it! Friends became distant. A woman I thought I felt something for became chillingly remote. No charge was ever brought and no charge was needed- my life had become intolerable. I'd been sentenced without being charged. So one day I just walked away.
Let me be perfectly clear about exactly what happened on that mountain. An act of individual and immature foolishness by a single overweight student led to leadership miscalculation, group panic, and a brutal winnowing based on skill and common sense. The strongest, clearest thinker had survived. It was as pure an experiment in natural selection as one could hope for. So don't call me lucky! I was not blessed! I was realistic. Brutally, coldly, and rationally realistic. No one was going to save me, so I saved myself. Once my companions slipped, I didn't have any chance of saving the others. With their trust in each other they had all doomed themselves. The ropes that bound us together had proved to be gossamer threads long before I brought out my knife. I am merely the surviving witness to the fragility of society. Any society.
Do you see my point? We are alone in life. We can't know another person. We can't join with another person. We are islands, made of either rock… or sand. Anything else is delusion.
I found that out when everyone turned on me.
I acquired another position and began to labor to document this point. I plowed into psychological and sociological research and combed through history. Cooperation comes only through coercion. It's so obvious when you look at the literature! Everything else is a fraud. Progress is achieved by the natural selection of the superior individual, and it is individual vision that drives or destroys the group.
No one would listen, of course. My realization collided with their cozy dreams of group comfort. Social security! The American myth of democracy, teamwork, compromise. The whispers followed, the looks, the suspicions. I saw it everywhere: in the supermarket, at the bank, in my office. Everyone looking at me strangely, thinking the worst of my quite defensible actions, blaming me for having the courage to survive. I saw it!
So. How to prove my point? How to demonstrate that I really had no choice?
Imagine a small society in a harsh environment. Imagine one that could be kept in experimental isolation for eight long, dark months. Imagine applying sufficient stress that group solidarity is tested. Imagine forcing each individual to realize how completely alone he or she really is.
The National Science Foundation ignored me, of course. They dismissed my carefully constructed application. They really had no clue as to the significance of the social experiment they had unwittingly constructed at the Pole. It was all astronomy and climatology to them, instruments and data. No vision of the future, no understanding of our grim evolutionary future in the cold blackness of space.
So. Everyone ignored me. My papers went unpublished. My grant proposals were rejected. My every step dogged by ugly rumor. I was broke, desperate, humiliated.
And then, destiny.
Can you possibly imagine what an arrogant, boorish prick Robert Norse really was? I met him at a professional conference when he was boasting of his assignment to Antarctica. His assignment to the Pole, precisely the place where I wanted to go! He blathered on mindlessly, gloating, stuffed full of himself, not having even the merest pathetic clue of just how unfairly his own good fortune had erased my own. He was going to a place he didn't begin to understand. And along the way, he was trekking in New Zealand.
A few months later, I read about his disappearance.
Do you believe in miracles? I'm a rational man, a man of science, and yet sometimes opportunity presents itself in so deliciously glorious a way that one can't help but wonder at the secret workings of the universe. The dark wood. It occurred to me that if I could not compete with Robert Norse, I had to become Robert Norse. I had to act decisively, just as I had on that cliff. And everything after that just… happened.
I acted on the best plan I had at the time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
This is completely insane,' Lewis said.
'Which is why it just might work in a place like this,' Abby replied.
It was past midnight and most of the winter-overs were asleep with whatever dreams plagued them, wrung out from their frenzy to barricade the dome. Only Gage Perlin, their plumber, was making hourly rounds as the designated sentry of the witching-hour watch. In preparation Abby had raided Jerry Follett's crate of atmospheric sampling equipment that was tucked against one wall of the dome, taking a small weather balloon and a gas canister. She'd filched and concealed a 150-foot length of sturdy rope, a lighter tether line half that length, a pack with a flashlight, two ice axes, and a coil of wire. Now she crouched behind the ruptured Comms building to fill the balloon while Lewis used first tape, then wire, and finally rope to bind the two ice ax prongs at right angles to each other. More tape fused the handles. The result was a crude approximation of a grappling hook. Tied to the climbing rope, it would be hoisted aloft by the balloon.
'What if somebody sees us?' Lewis had worried.
'They're worn out. Besides, how much more locked up can we be than we already are?'
In a grave, he thought, but didn't say that. There was a fierceness about Abby now that he found exciting. Infectious. Her own decisive energy had ignited his own. They weren't even sure what they were fighting, but they were at least beginning to fight back.
The pair peered around the corner and heard and saw nothing. 'We have to do this quickly,' Lewis said. 'Maybe twenty minutes before Gage comes through again.'
They briskly walked across the snowy floor to the center of the dome, pulling the bobbing balloon behind them. The gas bag was tied to a tether line that in turn was fastened by a slip knot to the makeshift grappling hook. The climbing rope hung from the hook. It was a bizarre plan made necessary by their bizarre entrapment. Norse and Pulaski had sealed every entrance to the structure except the most obvious one: the opening at the top of the dome that Jed had seen on his first day, left permanently open like a smoke hole in a kiva to allow air circulation. Looked at from below it was like the eyepiece of a telescope, giving a glimpse of a few bright stars and the outside world.
Lewis let the medicine-ball-sized balloon go, holding on to its light tether. It shot up faster than he expected and the line writhed like a flagellum until Abby grabbed it and controlled its ascent through her fingers. Then hook lifted off and the two lines uncoiled upward together at a steady pace, swimming in the night.
When the helium orb bumped against the icicles overhead a few broke off and fell, forcing the pair to duck. Fortunately, the frozen spikes plunged noiselessly into the snow in the center of the dome instead of banging against the roof of the modules. They stuck out from the ground like knives.
'Careful!' Abby hissed.
'Help me pull it over.'
They gingerly tugged on the lines to lower the balloon slightly and bring it under the hole. Then they let rope out again and the orb popped free. Once the gas bag was above the crest of the dome, the wind took it like a fish after bait, the ropes yanked taut. When their grappling hook was carried to the lee side of the opening they hauled sharply down, letting the ice axes wedge against the outside of the roof. As the pair threw their weight against it the aluminum bent slightly, snugging the ax heads tightly against the rim. Lewis jerked on the tether to free the slip knot and the balloon lurched upward and soared away into the night, the tether snaking up and out of sight. Remaining were the hook and its climbing rope, hanging downward from the vent hole. He sighted up the line's
