Logistics expert Linda estimated that they probably had enough fuel and food at the camp for a month. Survival after that would require an airdrop. They'd lost their cook, their doctor, their two best mechanics. They'd lost much of their clothing and supplies.
The survivors broke open a cache of emergency clothing and began to shed their oily garments and toss them outdoors for later cremation. Water was heated. People exhaustedly stripped, washed, and redressed without self- consciousness or modesty, helping each other numbly, small kindnesses enough to bring a tear of gratitude. Most were shaking from cold and shock.
Some granola bars were passed out, and hot tea.
Then they slept for twenty hours.
Slept as if dead.
Lewis came awake first, nestled next to a drowsy Abby. He couldn't remember their falling asleep next to each other. He couldn't remember much of anything. His life had become a blur. Around the pair the others were jammed onto the floor of just one of the huts, clustered in their need for human proximity. Cave dwellers must have been like this, he thought, huddling together against the cold of the night. Prehistoric! That's how far they'd fallen.
Abby shifted, too, nuzzling against him, her body warm, promising a future that still seemed tenuous and remote. 'Did you dream?' she whispered sleepily.
He shook his head, still groggy. 'Of home, I think.'
She was silent for a long time, clutching to him, their chests rising and falling in unison. 'Where's home, Jed?' she said softly.
He lay there, listening to the breathing and snoring of the others, and thought about her question. Where indeed? He had no family, no house, no address, no sense of place. He lay there in darkness, thinking first about her and then about himself. Where could they make a home?
She fell asleep again, resting against him.
He gently got up, swaying a bit from lingering exhaustion, and carefully stepped over the prone forms of the others. Some were half awake now, some exhaustedly asleep, but all were quiet, lost in their own thoughts or dreams, waiting to see what was decided next. A head or two rose up at his passing but no one spoke. At the end of the hut he dressed. The ritual that Cameron had taught him at a simpler time, which seemed eons ago: the layers of clothing, the boots, the hat, the mittens. He stepped into the Hypertat air lock, closed the inner door behind him, and, taking a breath, opened the outer one. He stepped outside into the midnight cold of the Pole.
The temperature hit him again like a slap, little different than when he'd first walked off that airplane. And yet it wasn't alien anymore. Just a new edge. He'd come to a place where people didn't belong and now, perversely, was used to it.
Lewis filtered cold air through his gaiter, filled his lungs, and looked around. The fire was out, the plateau lit by galactic milk. The station was a ruin of silvers and grays, as soundless as the moon.
What had he hoped for? A place uncomplicated. Pure.
Lewis slowly turned, taking in the geography of the battered station. They had no thermometer registering temperature anymore and so the cold was simply cold: embracing, leaching, and yet not as savage as that night when they'd all run from the sauna. He was surprised once more by the light: how the night could repeal itself and become less threatening. The galaxy was a banner of illumination, the snow fluorescent in its gleam. The base was wounded, unlit, stark, and yet even now the Pole was one of the most lovely places he'd ever seen, astonishing in its cleanliness. Spangled, ethereal, crystalline. As long as they lived there it was still a spaceship, drifting through space.
The aluminum dome still looked whole in the pale starlight and of course it mostly was. Perhaps the worst breaches could be patched, or the galley module stripped of food and parts. Like Crusoe, they had a wreckage of supplies to pillage. There were the cargo berms, the mothballed Quonsets of summer camp, the science buildings. It would be hard, but there was an enormous residue of equipment and dozens of structures with which to eke out a winter. Perhaps they could stick it out if enough food and fuel were parachuted in. Aid, as distant as it seemed, was over the horizon.
People had endured worse.
They could also freeze, he knew. Just one generator now, their last Spryte crippled, their two best mechanics dead, their quarters claustrophobic, their unity far from certain. Norse had mocked a group that had never really congealed.
Had they finally become a club?
The bigger question was where he belonged. Lewis had come to the Pole looking for some kind of fulfillment: escape, and an end to escape. Bizarrely, he may have finally found it in the station's near-destruction. In the heart of a nightmare he'd found a woman to love, tentative acceptance, life-changing experience, meaningful work. He actually cared about the damn place. He still cared about his weather readings.
He looked at the sky. Was the world warming? Hard to imagine, down here.
Still, he wanted to know. Wanted to help others know.
If they stayed, maybe he could record more readings. Send them to Sparco when the winter was done. And someday toast poor old Mickey Moss, the things that had made the astrophysicist human and the things that had made him special enough to push for this base.
Lewis looked across at the Spryte he'd recaptured with a certain melancholy. It would have been more fitting, perhaps, if the psychologist had finally made it to Vostok and eventually faced a realization that would have tormented him for the rest of his life: that the others had stayed, and lived, and come out of everything Robert Norse had thrown at them stronger than before.
That the Three Hundred Degree Club really worked.
'Maybe I busted up a five-million-dollar rock for nothing,' he whispered to himself, half smiling at the bitter thought.
But then maybe Norse had come to the same dread realization, just before he'd pointed the barrel of his pistol into his own mouth. That the flaw wasn't in society, but in himself.
It was a gamble to continue the winter, Lewis knew. Their position was precarious.
It was a bigger gamble not to.
He came back inside, slowly undressed, stepped over the drowsy forms of the others, and lay down next to Abby. She snugged him to herself with her arms, warming him, drowsily awake herself again.
Lewis kissed her hair.
'Maybe this is home,' he murmured.
She squeezed him. A tight hug of fear and hope.
