Dark Winter (46 page)

I was ready to stop. You have to believe that. I was ready to stop. Tyson had fled, and it would be child's play to let all suspicion remain on him. I had a case study to prove my point and a valuable meteorite to give me freedom and security. I was on the very edge of happiness, I'm sure of it.

Yet Dixon couldn't see my possibilities. She'd been blinded by a lesser man, Lewis, and at my moment of triumph she ran to a man of clay.

So when I went to help the weeping Gabriella that night, I expected we could find some kind of solace with each other. Some kind of consolation. What I wasn't counting on was her anger, her fury at herself, her foolish longing for love, and her irrational focusing of her own poison on me.

She turned me down. The slut, after her rejection by Lewis, turned me down! Suddenly she wanted self-respect!

I found myself out of control without understanding why I even cared. Damn her! I was fighting with her, holding her down, my hands somehow around her throat- I'm not that kind of man at all!-but ordained by God, it seems, or doomed by the devil, to finally take the station down with me. I really didn't plan to end it this way. I simply wanted to choke out every hateful thing I ever imagined people saying.

And as she died, her eyes bulging, her frantic bucks becoming more feeble, her look became an accusatory question.

Had I become a coward on that mountain?

If I'm to have any peace, I have to erase them all.

But the hair on his head began to grow again…"

Norse's voice crackled over the galley intercom as condescending sermon, the paternal recitation of a school principal. The experiment had been conducted and its meaning was about to be revealed, so his own particular collection of winter-over lab rats had been ordered at gunpoint to stay in the galley while he announced his intentions from Cameron's old office in the other module, next to the radios he'd destroyed. Abby was being held hostage to ensure their compliance until he completed his lecture and his preparations to leave. The rest listened with gloomy apprehension.

"Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it…"

"He's gone balmy," Dana Andrews whispered.

"He always was," Pulaski said grimly, angry at himself. "The more we listened to him, the more over the edge he went. It fed him. We fed him."

"What the hell is he talking about?" Geller asked.

"I think it's stuff from the Bible," Lewis said, beginning to revive from his near-execution. He had just enough frostbite to make his nose and fingers sting like fire and his shudders were receding only with the help of some soup Pulaski had microwaved. The pain as his skin warmed helped keep him from collapsing. "He quoted some to me when I arrived. It's the story of Samson, destroying the temple of the Philistines."

"I ain't no Philistine. That's something bad, right?"

"It is if he pulls down our temple."

"My God, is he going to destroy the bloody station?" Dana asked.

"He might if we let him. He gets off on toying with us."

The intercom crackled again. "We've finally been stripped of pretense, haven't we?" Norse broadcast. The disembodied sound had an eerie power and Lewis realized that the psychologist had done what Lewis had asked him not to do: Norse had gotten into their heads. It wasn't just a voice, vibrating in air. His presence reverberated in their minds. "I'm revealed as Oz, puppeteer of souls. You're exposed as a thin biologic film on the petri dish of the Pole, as easy to erase as a smear of mold. You joined a society that can't protect you. That can't even recognize its own internal danger. How does that make you feel?"

There was no way for them to reply.

"I've been giving you an experience similar to that which I faced once," Norse went on, a teacher to his students. "In the face of group incompetence I had to rely on myself for salvation. I've been punished for it ever since. So the question is, was my misfortune simply a fateful tragedy of bad luck? Or is it modern civilization, the Age of the Committee, that is to blame? Are there so many of us now, in so many clubs and consortiums and families and clans and boardrooms and unions and seminars and societies, that we've forgotten how to think for ourselves? Act for ourselves? Be ourselves? What happens when the lemmings lead us to nuclear Armageddon or a stock market crash or global climate collapse or starvation from overpopulation or off the edge of a cliff? Will it be the feel-good commune that saves us? Or will it be individual preparation and reliance and free will? When I acted for myself was I exhibiting the worst of human nature? Or the best? I think evolution suggests the latter. I think we've been so cushioned by mere numbers that we've forgotten what evolution demands."

"He is a Nazi is what he is," Molotov said grimly.

"Do scientists have even the slightest idea of the human hardness that's going to be required now to explore the extremes of the universe or survive among the evolving brilliance of machines? Just how strong is your collective? Not very strong, is it? You panicked. You abandoned your work. You locked yourself in. You armed yourself. You quarreled. You turned on each other. You were ready to kill each other. The one who finally woke you up was Lewis, the fingie I set up as the outsider."

There was noise in the background, a scrape of furniture. "Shut up," Norse muttered. They assumed he was speaking to Abby.

"Civilization is a fraud," he resumed, his pontificating reminding Lewis of Mickey Moss. "It's a blip in time, a blemish on a million years of humanoid existence. Society is a fraud. They always fall, always break down. And when they do it comes down to individual survival. When something new is built in the ruins it's the strong individual, the visionary, the freethinker, who points the way. I followed the most fundamental of human instincts: survival. And they hounded me for it! So I came down to their little jewel, their farthest place, the place of night and hypothermia, to test social utopia. And you snapped like a cord in this cold."

"You wouldn't have survived thirty minutes by yourself, you deluded bastard," Pulaski muttered. There was no answer, of course.

"I hope you realize that you've made things far more terrible than I intended them to be," Norse went on. "I wasn't planning much more than an embarrassing psychological paper on station dysfunction, illustrated by depression and mistrust. But God had more in store for us, it seems: He planted an apple in Eden! Mickey was so greedy to get back his meteorite. And so pathetic at the end that he followed it, and me, right into the pit. He begged to be let out again. Let out? Was Lucifer let out? He fell from grace! He'd chosen his own fate! But the rest of you wouldn't stop. You wouldn't stop! First Adams, and then Cameron. It was you who turned on Buck Tyson, not me. You who mistrusted Lewis, not me. You who missed every clue and misplaced every doubt. I used Carl's candle to make a wax impression of Buck Tyson's knife locker lock. I didn't forge Lewis's name, I got him to write it for me. When I wondered how Lewis had escaped the dome, all I had to do was look down at the icicles stabbed into the snow, guess what he'd done, and find the rope to confirm it. I wanted to humiliate your little society, not destroy it. I'd made my point! But you wouldn't stop!" He took a breath.

They waited. He didn't mention Gabriella.

"So. At last it stops. How to end my little demonstration? Closing down an experiment can be as difficult as starting it. I think the best solution is that I leave, alone. I'm at my best alone. I'll give Miss Dixon here a final choice on her fate. She can save herself by coming with me or cast her lot with the morons. I'm indifferent either way."

"Let her go now so we can test your little experiment, tough guy," Pulaski said to the speaker. It was pointless. He was talking to a machine.

"As you saw, my telescope kit allowed me to smuggle down the necessary components of a gun," Norse went on blandly. "You might take me, sure, but I'd be sure to take more of you. Frankly, however, I think there's been enough violence. So this is what we're going to do. I need one hour. One hour to make my preparations! At the end of that time I'll commandeer the remaining Spryte. I'll take my chances on the polar plateau, just as Tyson did. And if you go telling stories to our Vostok friends, well, let's just say that I have a story of my own prepared. I can be quite convincing."

No one bothered to answer this time. They were depleted, defeated by their own mistakes. Spirit had been sucked out of them. It was difficult for them to even look at Lewis, the innocent man they'd almost executed.

"I was the serpent, people, and when I came you had no individual strength to resist my temptation. Look around at those so-called friends of yours. You have none. You have none! You'll all despise each other the rest of your short, miserable lives! Lewis, look at the people who just tried to kill you! And then credit me the path to inner strength. You came ten thousand miles for a family. Which meant you came ten thousand miles for a mirage."

More noise in the background. Then: "Shut up! Shut up!" A long pause.

He resumed. "One hour. One hour and I'm out of your lives. Remain in the galley until I'm on my way. I see that galley door open and the agreement's off. Don't forget, I have Abby."

The intercom switched off.

They sat in the galley in sick indecision, listening to the hum of the ventilation system and half expecting it to go off as the power died. If they hunted down and confronted Norse, they risked Abby. If they didn't go after him, they might risk themselves: How did they know the psychologist wasn't sabotaging the station? Yet they were emotionally depleted. After the near-disaster with Lewis, none had the stomach to sacrifice Abby for the group right now by confronting the psychopath. A showdown might prompt Norse to somehow not just shoot her, but damage the fragile machinery that kept them alive. Maybe it was safer to wait. Maybe he would simply keep his word and drive away.

It was a depressed silence, each of them profoundly alone, a cataloguing of misgivings and second guesses and confused doubts. Norse had robbed them of their own self-confidence. He'd drained them of purpose.

"I don't get it," Pulaski finally said. "How can a man hate all of us like that? Hate his own kind?"

Lewis was in no mood for philosophy. "Easy. By hating himself."

"And if he hates himself, why? What the hell did he do?"

"Who knows? I think he lost it completely when he strangled Gabriella. Before that maybe it's something he didn't do once. Something he's been trying to justify to himself."

"Justify by killing people."

"By getting us to act like the fools he thinks we are. Maybe we'll find out someday, if we get through this."

"It would have to be something pretty bad, wouldn't it? Something to really make you feel terrible about life?"

Lewis looked at the cook for a long time and then let his gaze drift around the room. Geller. Calhoun. Dana Andrews. Alexi Molotov. Accusers. Executioners. "Yes," he finally said. "Like tying an innocent man to a stake at the Pole." He couldn't hide the bitterness.

Everyone looked away.

He should have bit it back but Norse's taunting had hit home. Lewis was angry, sore, depleted. He'd lived, yes, but some vital part of him seemed to have gone: He felt that he'd died a little just by being strapped to that stake. He wondered if he'd ever get that part of himself back. Basic optimism. Trust.

He'd come looking for community and they'd been willing to dispose of him. The harder he'd tried, the worse things seemed to get. So here he was, the woman he was falling in love with in the hands of a madman, without a friend and without a future. Welcome to the Three Hundred Degree Club, buddy.

Sitting in a metal box, waiting like dumb poultry for their fate. That's what Norse would have predicted, wouldn't he?

Predicted that, at the end, none of them would be talking to each other.

He'd played with them.

What if he was still playing with them?

It was the first thought to jolt Lewis out of his depressed apathy. What was Norse's game now? They had nothing but the word of a killer that he'd ever let Abby go. That he wouldn't damage the station. There were, what? He counted. Seventeen of them. Abby, the eighteenth, and then Norse. Six dead, assuming Tyson had succumbed. And…

Where the hell was Pika?

The little man was so quiet he was easy to miss.

Lewis stood up, suddenly terribly concerned but not certain what he was concerned about. The lethargy! They had to shake it off! Norse was counting on it to give himself time to get away. Get away with Abby. Get away with… what?

Seventeen against one.

What the hell were they sitting there for?

The others were eyeing him uncertainly.

"Cueball, did you get a look at his gun?"

Pulaski shrugged. "Barely."

"Is it real?"

The cook looked at Lewis speculatively, his own energy pricked slightly by the geologist's. "It looked real to me. Won't know unless we jump him."

"How many shots does he have?"

"Well, a real gun would have been picked up in the detectors when he came down here, so his looked pretty crude, a bunch of homemade parts." Pulaski thought. "I saw two barrels, which suggests there's no chamber for extra bullets. Probably just two shots, like a double-barreled shotgun, until he has time to reload. Who knows how many bullets? What are you thinking?"

"That we've been letting him control events since the winter began. And that we're still letting him, by sitting here."

The cook looked doubtful. "You want to risk Abby, Jed?"

"You think she's not already at risk? After all that's happened? Norse says he's going to leave, but how?"

"The Spryte," Geller spoke up. "Like Tyson tried. Norse was curious about it from the beginning. Load a sled with food and fuel and take off across the plateau. It's risky, but he knows he's dead if he stays here. If we'd killed you, maybe he would have gotten away with the whole thing, but not now. His only chance is to go to the Russians and try to bribe his way off the continent with the meteorite."