They unwired and unbolted the smaller door that led to the dome ramp, breaching their fortress for this one grave duty. Then they filed upward to the plateau like a hooded procession of monks, Lewis bound and hobbled. Everyone was there because Norse insisted that everyone be there, that they make this decision together, that they unify as a group. 'When we explain that we did this to save the station, it has to be unanimous,' he told them. 'Beyond a reasonable doubt.'
Several looked sick. But they came along.
The night outside was green and gold and red, a shimmer of auroral light caught by the earth's magnetic field. Lewis was going to die under the colors of Christmas. The stars had added their illumination to the starlit glow of snow, and the plateau was a silver mirror of color, a spangle of galaxies. They glittered above and glittered below, like the spark of Mickey's neutrinos. The survivors marched on a platter of stars.
A long metal tube used for ice coring was solemnly screwed into the snow at the South Pole stake until it was as rigid and strong as a fence post. They would tie Lewis there. The temperature was almost a hundred degrees below zero again, the air still. 'It's kinder than what he did to our friends,' Pulaski told the others, to help stiffen their resolve. 'He'll go quickly and then it will be over.'
They wrestled Lewis out of his parka and slit open his windpants, the sting of the invading cold instantaneous. They disregarded his wince. Their souls were as frozen as the Pole now, their mood vengeful. They'd had enough. They were going to extinguish their own fear.
'You're killing an innocent man,' Lewis gasped as the cold hit him. 'When I'm gone it will all start again and then this will be on your conscience, too.'
'Can't we gag him?' Geller asked.
'He's trying to divide us,' Mendoza added.
'No, let him talk,' Norse said. 'Let him predict. So that when it does end, after he's gone, you can all take heart in the knowledge that you did the right thing.'
They looked at Lewis, waiting for him to say more, and in the end he didn't know what more to say.
When they lashed him to the coring tube it burned through his thermal undershirt like hot iron. He writhed against it, struggling to think, already in mental shock because the absurdity of his dilemma was overwhelming. He'd come to the bottom of the world for companionship, and his companions were about to kill him. He'd come for purpose, and instead had found death. The sky was the most glorious he'd ever seen and he was about to see nothing ever again.
It was insane.
He wanted to weep, but his tears had frozen, too.
'How long will it take?' Lena Jindrova asked, her voice trembling.
'He'll be lucky to last half an hour,' Pulaski replied.
'This doesn't feel right,' she whispered.
Norse put his arm around her. 'It's right if we do it together.'
The coring tube was high enough that it was impossible for Lewis to slip his bonds over the top of it. They stood in a semicircle around him and watched for a moment, sickly fascinated, but he was beginning to shiver and no one wanted to watch this death for very long, the slow freezing that all of them unconsciously feared.
'Do we really all have to be out here?' Gina Brindisi asked.
'It has to be unanimous,' Norse said. 'So there's no finger-pointing afterward. So we can come together afterward.'
'I'm not taking any satisfaction in this,' she said.
'I am,' Geller muttered. 'I hope it fucking hurts.'
'When the shivering stops, so will the pain,' Pulaski promised. 'His brain will shut down pretty fast.' He finished his knots and stepped back.
They watched Lewis clench against the cold and then go into a quick spasm of shivering, his stare hollow now and far away. Then he'd shake again, rattling against the stake like a husk in the wind.
'I'm leaving,' Gina threatened. A few others nodded.
Norse turned away as well, addressing the others. 'This is pretty difficult for some of us. A hard choice, hard to watch. Hard for me. We don't need any more nightmares. Can you stand watch, Cueball? You've been a soldier. I'd like to take the rest of us back to the dome. We've got some healing to do.'
The cook looked at the hopeless Lewis. 'Go heal.'
They turned, a depleted platoon, Lewis hanging from the coring tube as if he were about to be shot. Six dead, a seventh dying. Abby missing, Skinner blinded. And months of isolation to go. It had been a disaster to allow the fingie to come at the last minute. A disaster not to have screened him first, not to have incorporated him from the beginning, not to have learned something about his warped personality.
A disaster to trust.
Their next job was to find Abby, deal with her, and then somehow piece the station back together. Endure the dark winter. Wait again for the first blush of sunlight, and with it their distant rescue.
'Goodbye, Jed,' Gina said sorrowfully as they began to move away.
'Good riddance,' Calhoun amended.
They started to follow their own boot prints back to the dome.
And then a shout from the crest of the ramp, two figures stumbling toward them. Again they had the anonymous hoods up but the one in the lead was obviously Abby, struggling over the sastrugi drifts of snow because she was bent with some burden on her back. Her left hand was extended to her companion, who could only be Skinner. 'Stop!' she shouted again. Her high voice drifted, a crystal note, a bell on the stillness of the plateau. 'Let him go!'
'Don't listen to her!' Norse warned. He'd stiffened.
But they did stop until she stormed up, gasping for breath, her gaiter a white beard of ice. Straightening her back, she rolled something off that looked like a squat mortar and let it fall with a plop on the snow. Skinner stopped beside her, swaying unsteadily, goggles missing but his eyes swathed, his head cocked at an angle toward a sky he couldn't see, so that he could hear better from one ear at the edge of his hood. He looked stricken.
'Are you all insane?' Abby challenged, pointing past them to Lewis. 'Get his damn parka back on!'
'It's too late, Dixon,' Norse said coldly. 'You let your lover out to kill again and he went after our most important member, our doctor. The group has made a decision to put an end to this nightmare. You've got a lot to answer for yourself. Push things now and there'll be serious repercussions.'
'Is that a threat, Bob?'
'If you like.'
Abby turned from the psychologist. 'So now he's got you to do his killing for him?' she asked, her eyes sweeping the group. They huddled like uncertain deer, newly bewildered by her arrival, depleted of their certainty by her own anger. 'Get his clothes back on him, Carl!' she told Mendoza. 'You're executing the wrong man!'
'You're bewitched by Lewis, Abby,' Dana tried.
'I'm an admirer of a man struggling to do the right thing. By God, get some clothes on him! He's going to get frostbite if you don't move! Give some time to hear me out! I've got proof! Proof that you're all being set up! You've got all winter to execute him if I'm wrong!'
'But you let the killer out of the sauna!' Dana accused. 'Maybe we should tie you out there, too!'
'I let Jed out of the sauna. And who's killing who, Dana?'
There was an uneasy silence, people shuffling in the cold. The awful irrevocability of what they were doing began to sink in.
'Let's put his clothes back on,' Pulaski finally muttered to Mendoza. 'She's right, there's time. What if we're wrong? Let's sort this out.'
'No!' Norse snapped, suddenly furious. 'Carl, don't you dare!'
The astronomer blinked in surprise. The psychologist's loss of cool was unaccustomed, and his implicit threat opened a wedge of doubt. It wasn't like Norse to snap at anybody, especially a beaker. Hesitantly, Mendoza took a step toward the stake.
'Don't you touch those ropes!' It was a hiss.
They all looked at Norse uncertainly now, surprised by his emotion.
'It wasn't Lewis!' Skinner suddenly hollered. 'You're freezing the wrong man!'
