Dark Winter (12 page)

"Are you going to be searched?" Lewis asked.

Moss snorted. "Me! I'm the victim here!"

"How do we know that?"

"You're presumptuous, fingie!"

"Not as presumptuous as you!"

"I'm afraid Lewis has a point," Norse interjected quietly.

Moss looked at the psychologist with annoyance. "Pardon?"

"That you have the plainest motive of all. If the rock seems to have disappeared, you could smuggle and sell it without arousing suspicion. If you have a grudge against someone, like Lewis here, all you have to do is hide the rock and accuse him of stealing it. In fact, you could plant it on him, or anyone else. Maybe you're looking for sympathy. Maybe you've decided the meteorite is actually worthless but still want recognition for what you almost had. I can think of a thousand reasons to suspect you." He shrugged.

"You have a devious mind," Cameron complimented.

"He's full of shit," the astrophysicist corrected.

"Thank you," Norse said. "Occupational requirement."

"What you've suggested is ridiculous," Moss went on.

"I'm just saying that we're dealing with Pandora's box here. You throw accusations around and human emotions begin to burn like gunpowder. We need to think about this carefully. A disappearance occurring in a group small enough for everyone to be searched and questioned, if it comes to that. Does the thief wish to be caught? Did he hide the meteorite where it can't be found? Do we arouse suspicions? A dilemma as old as the first sailing ships, I'm sure."

"I'm glad you're having so much fun, Doc," Cameron said.

Lewis's mind was whirring. Moss? Abby? Who had the most plausible motive?

"Investigating this could prove a nightmare," Norse said. "However, it's just the kind of emotional dilemma I was hoping to explore."

"Then maybe you stole the rock," Cameron said with a sigh. He was visibly aging.

"Indeed. I should be among the first searched, if we decide to take that step. And Doctor Moss. Just as we searched Jed. Anyone with knowledge or motive. If we truly want to investigate this we're going to be making a list and checking it twice. So, the question is indeed, Who? Who knew about the meteorite?"

The others looked uncomfortable, thinking. "Well, I did," Cameron conceded. "I was skeptical about the Lewis hire, a geologist in a weather job. Mickey filled me in, sort of. I probably should have locked up the damn thing. Except there's no place to lock it."

Norse made a checkmark in the air with his finger. "Yes, of course. Lewis?"

"I didn't tell anyone. But Abby said it was common knowledge. Or at least rumor. The meteorite craze is no secret. I'd look for someone who needed money."

"People down here don't care about money," Norse quipped, quoting Cameron.

The station manager scowled. "I heard Geller's got some debt," he allowed. "Tyson's talked about money. Alexi doesn't have any in Russia- "

"Prestige?" Norse interrupted.

The station manager shrugged. "That's wide open. Any scientist. Anyone jealous. Anyone who doesn't like Mickey…"

Moss looked annoyed.

"Which means that Lewis here could actually be a fall guy for the real thief," Norse concluded. "They wait until he arrives and lift the meteorite. Voila, the fingie gets fingered. By accusing Lewis, you might be playing into their hand."

Moss looked at Norse with frank dislike. "I despise your profession, you know."

"And I think you're close to retirement after an arduous career that has yielded you little fame and less money. We have no idea what you intended to do with the rock."

Moss jerked as if stung. Lewis was surprised at the psychologist's apparent willingness to make a powerful enemy. Willingness to come to Jed's aid.

"So, Doc, do we turn over the mattresses?" Cameron asked the psychologist, his tone strained by the sparring. "Strip-search the inmates?"

"That's your decision, of course. I'm just the observer. But we can consider the pros and cons. The danger of any search is it accomplishes nothing while pissing people off. The advantage is it could recover the meteorite."

"How much does that opinion cost?" Moss asked sarcastically.

Norse ignored him.

"Maybe we should sleep on it," Cameron said.

"No!" Moss objected. "That just gives the thief time!"

"I don't advise that, either," Norse said. "Make a decision. We should all pledge ourselves to secrecy about this discussion, of course- but I guarantee the dilemma will be all over the base anyway inside of an hour."

"You don't have a very high opinion of us."

"I don't have a very high opinion of human nature."

Cameron looked gloomy. He was thinking of the station report he'd have to file. "Would a thief really be stupid enough to put it in his room?"

"Yes. Because he might not be after a rock, or money, so much as to satisfy some other psychological need. Criminals betray themselves with regularity. A surprise search could work. Failure, however, might simply encourage our troublemaker. There's no right answer."

"We could just forget about the damn rock," Cameron said.

Norse smiled. "Yes. Forget about several million dollars."

"I don't want to turn the station upside down."

Moss glared. "If you don't, I will. There's science at stake, too, if that rock really hails from Mars. Or even if it doesn't."

Cameron closed his eyes. "People are going to go ape-shit, Mickey."

Moss looked implacable. "I already have."

"Perhaps there's another solution," Norse suggested.

"What's that?" the station manager asked gloomily.

"Jed Lewis here represents opportunity." The psychologist nodded toward the newcomer. "He's a geologist. Our resident expert on all things stony. He should be motivated to clear his name. So I propose two things. First, that with his permission, we search his workplace as well. I don't think we'll find anything, even if he's the thief, but it simply eliminates one of the variables. Then search each of the rest of us in turn, right now, with all four along. Let's not have suspicions linger that any of us have anything obvious to hide."

His eyes polled the others. No one spoke to object.

"Second, let's enlist Lewis as our detective."

"What do you mean?" Moss said slowly.

"Lewis simply tells the truth. He admits he was brought down partly to check out the meteorite. He quietly lets slip it's missing and asks for guidance on likely suspects. These are people who've been together for four months. They know each other by now. Perhaps a suspect emerges."

"I'm going to be a private eye?"

"A discreet investigator. You're going to be yourself, with a newcomer's curiosity. It's not Rod, laying down the law. It's not Mickey, looking like a steaming bull. It's you- asking a few new friends for help. If you handle it right, no one will be upset."

What friends? "Another of your spies," he clarified.

"Mickey's spy."

Lewis looked at the others, considering. Poking around was unlikely to make him very popular. Yet if he didn't, he'd be hung with Moss's presumption that he had something to do with the disappearance. A lousy choice. "What do I get if I find it?"

"Your good name back," Norse said.

"I never lost my good name."

"Your name and a recommendation for future employment," Moss said.

"No." Lewis shook his head. "There's no reason I shouldn't get that anyway. I'm doing my job. I didn't take your damn rock. I want something else."

"What, then?" Cameron asked.

"An apology for dragging me into this." He pointed at Moss. "From him."

The astrophysicist scowled. Moss was not the type to apologize to anybody. "Find it first," he said grudgingly.

"An apology for rousting me out of bed."

"Find it," Moss growled, "and I'll be fair."

"And what does that mean?"

"That you don't want me as an enemy."

Now what, Sherlock?

Lewis stood indecisively at the junction of tunnels near the entrance to the dome. Two corrugated steel archways, both completely buried under the snow, branched at either arm. To his left were the generators, gym, and garage. BioMed, the sick bay, was to his right, tucked into the same arch that held the station's fuel supply. The tunnels were like a huge half culvert, cold and dimly lit, and a scuffed layer of dirty snow coated their plywood floors like old sawdust. The medical facility was a windowless metal box the size of a truck trailer. Inside this makeshift hospital Doctor Nancy Hodge dispensed everything from useless advice on the inevitable polar crud- "We can't escape each other's viruses; deal with it"-to better-appreciated painkillers, stitches, and antiseptics. If seriously hurt, their lives were in her hands. If desperately ill or wounded, there was probably little she could do.

It was a place to start. By necessity, Hodge knew everybody.

Lewis wanted to find the meteorite. Not for itself so much as to find who'd caused him this trouble. Any thief must have known the fingie would be suspect. And of all the people on base, he was least equipped to probe because he was the fingie, the outsider. He really knew no one. Which the thief knew, too.

"You can be more objective because you're new," Cameron had told him.

Bullshit. It was a sop to Mickey Moss and a thankless job for Krill, low man on the totem pole. But he'd do it to save his winter.

And if he found the rock, he'd be tempted to keep the dang thing.

But first he had to find it. Find someone who knew people's secrets.

The four men who'd met in Comms had searched each other's rooms in the quiet hours before breakfast and found nothing of interest except Moss's fondness for a box of scratched vinyl LPs he'd shipped with an old turntable, a barrel-shaped kit telescope that Norse was assembling to look at the winter stars, and a shelf of pathetic how-to-be-a-boss books next to Cameron's bedside. Norse had a chess set, Cameron a jigsaw puzzle, Mickey a book of crosswords. Lewis wasn't surprised at the lack of smoking guns. No one was going to put the rock under his pillow. But it had satisfied him to rifle through their belongings as they had his. Served them right.

Now he pulled open the door and stepped into BioMed. "Doctor Hodge?"

The medic looked up with a start. A small pharmacy of pills was scattered on the wool blanket of the sick bay bed. Nancy was bent forward from a chair and going through it, sorting drugs into piles. The doctor jerked at the intrusion and some of the pills went awry.

Nancy hastily rolled them back. "Don't you knock?"

"I didn't know we were supposed to."

"Sometimes I have patients."

"I thought you'd use the lock."

She was slightly mollified. Lewis was new, after all. "We never use it because someone might be in a hurry in an emergency. Looking for stuff when I'm not around. Is this an emergency?"

"Not exactly."

"Then knock next time." She began scooping up pills and putting them into bottles. "So. You got the crud?"

"No." He glanced around. There was an examining table and the single bed. "Just wanted to pick your brain."

The doctor straightened and leaned back in her metal chair, looking curious and mildly wary. She got tense and excitable when patients showed up, a lapse in bedside manner that had already made base personnel reluctant to seek her care. Had there been some kind of malpractice back home? Or was she still just adjusting to the Pole? Now she gestured toward the bed as if there were a need to explain. "Look at all this medicine that's accumulated over the years. Antibiotics, aspirin, laxatives, even seasick pills. Some are pretty potent. I'm trying to sort it out." She held up two pills. "One to make you bigger, and another to make you small."

"Your own pharmacy."

"I could market on street corners." She smiled slightly and he realized how rarely Nancy mustered amusement. She wasn't dour, but she was serious. Tired, maybe. Thin, her face beginning to line, her hair to gray, her eyes to lose their optimism. Late forties and tough as horn. "Not something we'd advertise to NSF."

"That's the odd thing, isn't it?" Lewis said. "That in theory we could do anything we want down here and nobody would ever know."

Nancy shrugged. "That's the theory. The truth is that everyone is such a blabbermouth that sooner or later the feds in D.C. know everything. Which probably is just as well." That half smile again. "Keeps the place from exploding."

"I'm wondering if you know everything."

"What does that mean?"

"About the people who come down here. You get their records, and you might have some insight as to what makes them tick."

She laughed. "If you mean their organs, yes. If you mean their heads, no. That's Doctor Bob's business."

"He's too new. You've been with everybody for four months."

"As their medic, not their mother."

"I just need somebody who might have insights."

That slight smile again, and a sigh. "Lewis, you're looking at a woman who realized not long ago that she doesn't know anything about anybody." She held up her left hand, displaying that white streak on her ring finger. "A medical marvel who just happened not to notice that the man she'd lived with for eighteen years had taken up with one of her own nurses, drained her savings, and eloped to Mexico- until he sent a 'Dear Jane' letter from a Guadalajara cyber-cafe. You want medical advice, maybe I can help. You want to understand people? There's nobody more clueless than me." She nodded toward the door.

He stood his ground. "Well, you're the only person I can think of to start."

"Start what?"

"Getting Mickey Moss off my back."

She regarded him speculatively for a moment. Finally she pushed away from the pill-laden bed. "What's the problem?"