The winter-overs jerked at this loud pronouncement. And that was enough to suddenly make the astronomer stride to the stake, cursing at everyone and everything, and begin untying Lewis. 'Start talking, Abby,' he said fiercely as he worked clumsily. 'Start talking, and if you don't make your case I'll strangle this bastard with my own hands.'
The ropes began to fall on the snow. No one moved to stop what he was doing.
'You're making it worse,' Norse warned, his voice trembling slightly. He was tensing, his eyes flickering from the object Abby had dumped in the snow to the others around him. 'When you remember the truth, the execution will be worse.'
'The killing stops now,' Abby countered.
Lewis was mumbling incoherently, uncertain what Mendoza was even doing, his mind already numb from the cold. He was disoriented. Gina began to sniffle.
'Yeah, start talking, Gearloose,' Geller said. 'What the hell is that?' He pointed toward the mortarlike object.
'It's Doctor Bob's telescope kit,' Abby replied. 'Fat suckers like this are called Dobsons- hobbyists use 'em, right Bob?'
'You stole that from my room.' His voice had a quiet menace.
'I broke into your room because I was looking for evidence to set things straight. Couldn't find a thing. Not even my picture. You're careful, Bob, I give you that. But then it occurred to me to lift up your telescope.'
'She's in love with Lewis,' Norse told the others. 'She's gone crazy herself. She's trying to twist things the same way he does, but she's not dangerous like him. We don't need to kill her. Just get her some help.'
Abby ignored this. 'Nancy Hodge did leave us a clue, Bob, but not Jed's X rays. Why do his teeth prove anything?'
He looked belligerent. 'How do you even know about Jed's X rays?'
'Oh, I was listening to your kangaroo court from above, from behind the bar.'
He started at his own failure to check above the galley and frowned, furious with himself for not apprehending her. 'We caught him in the act, Abby,' he blustered. 'Give it up.'
'You caught him in the act of discovering the body of a woman you'd already killed,' Abby corrected. She glanced past him to where Lewis was slumping forward as the bonds came free. Mendoza began to help the shivering man into his parka. 'Your silly recitation of evidence did give me an idea, though. I knew Nancy had no reason to pull Jed's X ray and put it in my folder- you did that- but I did think she might have successfully hidden the ones that really counted. Like you said, Hodge was smart. So while you assembled your lynch mob I went back to talk to Clyde here. You wouldn't let anyone talk to him because you'd been in BioMed just before Lewis and were afraid of what he might say. So I talked to him. And do you know what he was lying on?' She held up the sheet in her mitten, which they now saw was photographic film. 'Your dental X ray, Bob. The one I took from Rod's files, the one you brought down to Antarctica with you. The reason you couldn't find it is because Nancy had already hidden it under Clyde's pillow. She'd also hidden the earlier set sent down by NSF. Two dental X rays, supposedly of the same man.' She looked past him to the others. 'They don't match.'
'I had some work done,' he bluffed.
'You sure did. You gained four molars.'
There was a murmur of confusion, and then slow realization of what the X rays might mean. One set sent by NSF of the original Norse, a man perhaps still lost in New Zealand. And a second brought by his replacement, showing a different set of teeth. Lewis was being dressed, Mendoza pulling the clothes onto his trembling limbs as if Lewis were a young child.
'Who are you, Bob?' Abby asked. 'You're not the Robert Norse the National Science Foundation selected to come down here. He disappeared in New Zealand. Six days after he went missing, you followed him into the woods. Then you materialized in Christchurch and flew to Antarctica before too many awkward questions could be asked. Are you even a psychologist at all?'
'That's a lie!' he shouted to the others. 'She's covering up for Lewis!'
'You're the liar!' Skinner hollered, his ear turned to the debate because his eyes were bandaged. 'I heard you in with Nancy before she fell! You blinded me, you sonofabitch, but you didn't kill me, and that was your first big mistake. I smelled you, Doctor Bob! I wasn't sure just who was who but Abby brought your aftershave from your room and I remembered it! When you lose your eyes, your nose starts to remember! I smelled your aftershave! I smelled your fear when Nancy died!'
'That's absurd,' Norse snorted. 'A couple days of blindness and Clyde is some kind of bloodhound? To a scent Dixon brought him? Come on! What kind of aftershave does Lewis use?'
'Lewis stinks,' Calhoun drawled. 'He's been in jail.' Someone barked a laugh and with that Norse realized he was beginning to lose them. The spell was breaking.
'Nancy mixed up the X rays,' Norse tried. 'This is all a misunderstanding. Don't let this woman set the killer loose where he can attack you all!'
'I'm going to get him back inside,' Mendoza said quietly, the astronomer's manner embarrassed and subdued. 'I'm going to get him warm.' Putting his arm around the shuddering Lewis, he began walking him back to the dome. Nobody made a move to stop them. The group's righteousness had deflated. A growing dread was replacing it.
'I knew I needed something better to convince the rest of you,' Abby went on, ignoring Norse and addressing the others. 'Not circumstantial and confusing, like a pair of X rays. Evidence that was absolutely rock-solid, right? So I've been desperately thinking. It was the meteorite that started things. The meteorite that disappeared. Have you stopped wondering where it went?' She kicked the Dobson telescope with her boot and something clunked inside. 'When I picked this up it was heavier and noisier than what I expected. So I brought it out here on a bet. Alexi, you're the one who's always accusing Jed. Go ahead and look through it at the sky. Tell us what you see.'
'Leave it alone!' Norse yelled, stepping to block the others from it.
'Just give it a try, Alexi.'
The Russian hesitated, then stepped forward, brusquely pushing the psychologist aside. Kneeling in the snow, he set the Dobson telescope upright and bent to the eyepiece, cranking its focus first one way, then the other. Finally he looked up. 'It is dark. I cannot see from this thing. The telescope of Bob does not work.'
'That's because it's not finished yet!' Norse said with exasperation.
'I don't think it's a telescope at all,' Abby went on. 'I think it's a box, a hiding place, a way to smuggle down things that might otherwise be illegal. Something that can't be opened and thus something where no one would ever look. And I'm betting if we cut it open anyway we'll find a missing meteorite inside it.'
The group shuffled curiously forward, making a half circle around the telescope. Skinner unzipped his parka and withdrew a hacksaw he'd carried out.
'Don't you dare destroy my telescope! I've spent a hundred hours on the damn thing!'
'I'll make you a deal, Bob,' Abby said. 'If I cut into this and I'm wrong, you can tie me to your sacrificial stake out there. Because right now I'm a threat to your life. But if I cut into it and I'm right, then you're the one we strap to the coring tube.' She knelt beside the telescope. 'Deal?'
'Wait, wait!' He looked at the others with increasing panic and confusion. Mendoza was disappearing down the ramp with the stumbling Lewis. The ropes that had tied Lewis to the stake were in a tangle around its base. The group was extending its own enclosing line, flanking around him. 'All right, all right. But let me cut it open. For God's sake, maybe that way I can at least repair it when you see how wrong you are!'
Abby hesitated, holding the hacksaw. Norse reached out and snatched it from her.
'Okay?' he asked the others.
'Hurry up,' Geller growled. 'It's cold out here!'
Norse began sawing through the fat telescope tube. The Dobson was only two and a half feet long but as rotund as a small keg. Its simple mirror arrangement collected huge amounts of light and was a cost-effective astronomy tool for amateurs. It could also hold a lot inside. As the psychologist cut, the top of the tube sagged down. Finally it split, the front lens falling away, and something the size of a large potato rolled down onto the snow.
It was the meteorite.
'Bloody hell,' Dana whispered.
'She planted it in there,' Norse tried.
Nobody believed him.
