"Get on, you fucking moron!" Tyson yelled. "I'm half frozen looking for the likes of you!"
Lewis's leg seemed enormously heavy as he tried to lift it over the machine. He was on Jupiter, pinned by a cold that had become equivalent to gravity. Yet he managed to clutch the huge man in front of him, clinging to Tyson's waist, and the snowmobile howled and spun off, Tyson following the weaving course of his own track.
"Rod made me come look for you, you dumb fuck! I would have let you die!"
The dark wall of the dome loomed briefly out of the snow as Tyson followed it, the snowmobile growling as it jounced over confused drifts. Then there was a sudden bank of snow, the machine lurched up it, and they were airborne.
"Aw, shit!"
Lewis was so surprised he let go and felt himself separate from the machine. He fell, his world gauze, then hit hard ice and snow, rolling, and finally skidded to a stop, breathless and stunned. The snowmobile banged down somewhere, coughed, and went silent. In the stunned quiet that followed, Lewis realized he was somehow more protected from the wind.
He was on the ramp that led to the dome.
Tyson skidded down, colliding with him. "Fuck, I thought I'd lost you again!"
"What happened?"
"Snowbank from digging out the ramp. Jumped the sucker and did a barrel roll."
"The snowmobile?" Lewis managed to mouth.
"It's trash."
They half crawled, half skidded down the rest of the ramp, skittering like hockey pucks against the closed metal doors. Lewis yelped when he hit, sore and gleeful. The smaller plywood emergency door was to one side of the main entrance and he pushed on it. Frozen shut. Stuck like glue.
Tyson shoved him aside and butted it. "See what I told you?" he shouted. "Sufficiency, man! You couldn't get out of the jam on your own!" The door popped open, slamming inside as the wind caught it. "You didn't have me, you'd be locker meat!"
Lewis leaned through and mittened hands grabbed him and yanked. Tyson pushed through, too. The door slammed shut behind them, a puff of flakes trapped inside.
Even the cold of the dome was immense relief because the wind was shut out. Lewis could still hear it howling, the snow rasping the protective shelter, but at least he could breathe and the wind didn't cut at him. He reached to pull down his goggles and had to break them loose from his forehead where they'd frozen. "Ow!" He felt blind in the gloom. His legs were trembling, his feet dangerously numb.
"Lewis, my God, you all right?" It was Cameron, pounding on him. "You damned lunatic, we thought you'd lost it! Why didn't you take a radio? Take a light?"
"Uh…" No words came.
"I'm going to thaw you out just so I can kick the shit out of you." He shoved him in the direction of the galley. The station manager turned to Tyson. "Good job, Buck. Norse just got back, too. But Adams hasn't showed."
Tyson's face was a mask of ice. "Fuck."
"He was going to see Lewis. I can't raise him."
The mechanic slumped. "I'm wasted, man. The machine's kaput. I can't go back out there."
Cameron turned to Lewis. "Jed, did you see him at all?"
Lewis shook his head. He remembered the argument between Tyson and Adams in the weight room. How anxious would Tyson be to look for him?
"We got another machine?" Cameron asked.
Tyson shook his head. "Not fired up and ready."
"How long? If I go instead of you."
"No way. It's suicide, man. Don't go."
"But if I did."
"Too long. Too long, in that."
Sickly, they looked at each other.
"I'm going up the ramp to fire some flares," Cameron said. "Maybe he can home in on that."
"You can't see for shit." Tyson looked as exhausted as a blown horse.
"I've got to try something."
"You can't see, you can't hear, you can't find. I just stumbled on the fingie with dumb luck."
"I've got to do something. I can't lose two."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The storm blew for thirty-seven hours, the snow crystalline and pitiless, driven so hard by the wind that it sizzled against the outside of the dome like grease in a frying pan. In that long cold twilight of noise and confinement, with no telephone or radio call for help, the winter-overs of Amundsen-Scott base became glumly convinced that Harrison Adams was also dead. In the midst of the storm Cameron led a party, roped and lit, out along the flag route to the Dark Sector astronomy building to look for him again. One flag was down, a bad sign, and they had to use GPS to bridge the gap. They searched the building, endured two hours in the blizzard going and coming back, and found nothing. Any further searching had to wait until the wind died down.
"I told everyone to stay put," Cameron said bitterly as he exhaustedly shed his parka, his nylon frozen over by a sheen of ice. "Why the hell didn't they stay put?"
No predecessor had ever lost two people before.
The great hush that marked the end of the storm came at what the clock said was morning. So much snow had drifted that when they opened the exit door to the ramp again, there was a chest-high wall they had to dig through to get outside. Tyson was told to warm up a Cat to bulldoze more blocking snow away and this time he complied without rebellion. The tragedies seemed to be sobering him. The others marched out in a platoon of orange and fanned out to look for Adams's body. Cameron passed out whistles to signal.
The clouds were gone. It was almost the equinox, the time when the sun would disappear completely from the Pole. The orb scraped the horizon, a trick of light making part of it seem to catch and drag behind in a blob of trailing fire, the brightness washed out by the rim of light fog that surrounded them. The haze was so thick and the light so low that the entire station already seemed shrouded in cold, sepulchral twilight. The temperature was seventy-three degrees below zero. During the storm the windchill had dipped to a hundred and fifty below.
Lewis searched for Adams in a mood of glum depression. Maybe if he'd called about the storm at its first sign the astronomer might have made it. Maybe if he hadn't lost the flag route he'd have run into Adams. He was lucky he wasn't dead himself. Cameron had chewed him out for not staying at Clean Air as he'd been told. "Getting lost puts everyone else in jeopardy. It was a stupid, juvenile, fingie stunt."
Norse asked Lewis if he'd thought up anything new about Mickey's death. "Harrison said he was coming out to see you. I presume there was a reason."
"He didn't tell me that."
"People are pretty bummed out, Jed. We've got to get a handle on what's going on."
"Don't you think I'm trying? It's pretty tough to play detective when no one will talk to me. Help me out on this, will you?"
He grimaced. "People are shy about talking to me, too."
Lewis walked up the flag line now toward the astronomy building, trying to imagine where the missing astronomer might have gone. His own stumbling trek had made him realize how easy it was to get lost. Adams had obviously gone off course while trying to get to Clean Air, for some reason choosing to talk to Lewis personally instead of simply call. Why? Once disoriented, his body shutting down from the cold, Adams would have sought any shelter. Where?
The stark nature of the polar plateau created an illusion, Lewis had realized. The base seemed simple and yet there were more than a hundred separate buildings and structures scattered around: observatories, storage shacks, vaults, telescopes, antennas, and long rows of stockpiled crates called cargo berms. If lost, Adams could have stumbled into a lot of places to seek refuge. Cameron and a few others were already searching the electrical substation shack and telescope support buildings of the astronomy sector, digging into the drifted-over plywood bumps one by one.