His picture-window view of the tempest did not prepare him for its energy when he pushed out the door. The wind hit him with muscular heaviness like the side of a horse, a blow that knocked him sideways and almost off metal steps newly slick with a rime of ice. The door banged open and he slipped and hurt his knee scuttling back to close it, barely wrenching it shut against the push of the wind. As it swung he had a glimpse of a small tornado of paper that the wind had kicked up inside. Storm noise that seemed exotic inside his metal cocoon was a deafening cacophony when he stepped outdoors. The blast yanked his hood off his head because he'd neglected to tie it and he was blinded when it flocked his goggles. He wiped them with his nylon mitten and then shed the hand covering to clumsily tie his hood strings. He was stunned by the violence.
It was the cold that was most surprising. Lewis had partly acclimated to the everyday freezerlike syrup of chill that seemed to coat every object with brittle rigidity. This cold was different. It wanted to reach inside his clothes and suck him out, swallowing all available oxygen as it did so. He couldn't see, hear, breathe. How was he going to find Adams? Only if the astronomer met him coming the other way. Lewis realized instantly that if he didn't follow the flag line briskly and alertly to the dome entrance, focusing every bit of his being into where he had to go, he'd be dead.
People have died a dozen feet from shelter, Cameron had said. Use common sense.
Common sense was to stay put. Well, he was beyond that, wasn't he?
He needed to take control of events.
Lewis leaned forward into the wind. The nearest flag was bent like a bow, its pennant flapping frantically. The nylon of his own clothes stuttered like a jackhammer. Feeling as if he were climbing a steep slope, Lewis began staggering toward the flag. When he reached it he stopped, turned his back to the wind, pulled down his gaiter, and gasped for air. The strain of pushing against the storm had left him breathless.
He pulled his gaiter back up and turned around again, wiping his goggles against the sting. He could see the next flag! A couple dozen of the pennants and he was home free. With luck he'd find Adams staggering along the way. This way to hot buttered rum, buddy! You got a problem with that, Rod? Lewis bent and labored ahead toward the pennant.
Again, movement was like pushing through plastic. He was head-on into the wind. He made it to the flag and stopped, wheezing. When he turned around he saw the Clean Air building had already disappeared into the storm. Eerie. The dome couldn't be seen, either. It was just him and a bucking flagstaff in either direction. Everything else was white. He couldn't see the ground or the sky. His own body was erased at the waist.
Another stagger ahead. The noisy drum of the storm was like the hammer of a factory. Snow that found the crevice between his gaiter and his goggles burned his skin. His fingers were already stiffening. The pounding was stupefying. He'd skied bad days when snow spat like wet snot but that was nothing compared to this. A polar storm was beyond the pale. It was the literal end of the world. It was a head butt into tapioca, a struggle on the football line.
He began counting flags. Five, six, seven…
Then naming them, for amusement. Homer. Zeke. Jezebel. Hortus. Pygmalion…
God. How far was it? Wasn't he there yet? Had he somehow turned around?
Where the hell was Harrison Adams?
He stopped again to catch his breath, wiping tediously at his goggles. The snow crystals threatened to build into a mask of ice. His vision was blurring and he couldn't tell if it was the fogging of the goggles or the growing snow blindness of his own eyes. He realized his clothes were failing him. The wind seemed to be slicing right inside, robbing his torso of heat. It was like being knifed in the ribs.
"I've got to get inside soon."
The words were muffled by his gaiter, his cheeks and jaw slow to move, his tongue thick. Ib ga ge iside soo. Christ. How long had he been out here?
Cameron had been right. It was stupid to go into the storm.
Too late, mate. He had to be at least halfway, didn't he?
With no other choice, Lewis went on. Each thrust of his leg was like swinging a weight. His clothes buzzed in the wind, the fabric vibrating so fast that it might disintegrate. He felt dull, slow-thinking. The cold was freezing up his brain. Tightening his muscles. He kept his head down, trying to conserve heat.
An eternity passed, lost in self-pity. Why in hell had he ever come to the South Pole? Then Lewis remembered to look up. Nothing. He squinted. Where had the flag gone? He'd been aiming for it and now it had disappeared. He turned around awkwardly and when the wind struck his back it knocked him to his knees as if he'd been tackled from behind. He was tired. Dangerously tired.
No flag back there, either. He watched his own boot prints dissolving in the wind, covering up his passage. Somehow he'd stumbled the wrong way.
A vast dread began to overtake him.
Forcing himself to stand, he slowly turned in a circle, trying to recognize something. The universe was white. Think, think! Which way had he come? He'd been facing into the wind. But the wind kept shifting, and so did his path to the dome. How to get back to the trail?
He took a step, stumbled on a small drift, and lost his footing. As he began to topple, the wind caught him like a sail. He actually flew sideways a few feet, coming down on his belly and skidding on the snow. His hood came off again, a tie broken. Even as he lay there the slashing snow began to drift on his windward side. Curling into a ball, half weeping, he found the ends of his hood tie and got it back on, the strap now tight and choking against his throat. For one perilous second he considered not getting up.
Then he worked up to his knees, trying to see. He felt dumbfounded. It seemed to be getting darker. He needed a flashlight, something to pick out color. But he'd left his light back at Clean Air.
Idiot. You've killed yourself.
Think!
Dully, he noticed the sastruga, the small drift he had tripped over. The sastrugi's tops had been torn off and hurled into the stormy air but their icier underlayment still existed, slowly being abraded by the wind. He'd walked over them every day and watched their wavelike pattern from Clean Air. Which way did they run? He tried to focus his mind…
Yes. Yes! He remembered. Perpendicular to his path. And lower, smaller, in the lee of the dome. He could read them like sailors read the water, perhaps.
He struggled back up, desperate now. He hadn't much time. He was seizing up like the Tin Woodsman. I'm rusting! He set off, abandoning the flags as lost in the storm, betting all on his ability to run into the dome. He stopped for neither air nor rest, plunging forward, determined to bang up against salvation. Trudging on, hammered by the wind, trying to read the drifts, increasingly disoriented…
Nothing. How much time had gone by? As he looked down through the curtains of snow, he was increasingly uncertain which way the sastrugi ran. It seemed they were dissolving and re-forming before his eyes, curling into circles. No dome, no flags, no hope.
He turned around. His footprints had already disappeared.
He'd failed, he realized. Gambled and lost. Somehow he'd missed a structure nearly the width of a football field…
He was a dead man.
The wind lessened slightly and above the shriek of the storm he heard a lower whine. Was he near the generators? He struggled to place it. A butterfly, bright red, spun by, its flicker like a flash of light. He was stunned. Butterfly? No, it was cloth! Old Glory, still on the dome up there, because they'd forgotten to take it in before the blow. The flag was being shredded to pieces, its bits spinning past him like sparks in the storm. He had to be close. Peering, he saw nothing, and then suddenly there was a light, catching him in its blaze, and a snowmobile snorted and charged up to him, a huge hooded figure on its back like Death itself.