"Do I want to know?"
"Loaded him into a torpedo tube and fired him out. He was kicking, screaming, pleading, crying, it didn't matter. He'd made no friends and everyone was around the bend with tension anyway. There was hell to pay when they got back, of course, and a few careers ended. But at the time, ejecting him into the Arctic Ocean seemed the right thing to do. That's what I'm worried about here. The right thing to do."
Tyson nodded dumbly.
"I'm gambling on this one, Buck. Gambling on you. So punch on out of here and hope you make friends with the Russkies. Your boots and parka are in the cab."
Tyson looked at the Spryte, resignedly determined. "I'll make it. What are you going to tell them?"
"That I helped you go. If I get blamed for it, I'll tell them you pulled a knife on me."
"Adding to my reputation."
"Until winter's over and the truth comes out. I have to live here, too."
Tyson stepped up on the treads of the Spryte and looked back at Norse. "If I didn't do it, who did, Doc?"
"I'm not sure you didn't do it. I'm just praying it doesn't matter. Because with you gone and convicted in abstentia, any other murderer escapes suspicion. Which means he has good reason not to strike again."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Pika Taylor always woke first to check the generators and walk the archways, surveying their safety. It was he who discovered the open garage door and the missing Spryte. So much snow had blown into the entryway that he couldn't close the bay and had to fetch help to shovel it clear. His shouts woke the survivors.
A group filed into the garage and gaped at the opening and the tread tracks going up its ramp as if it were as miraculous as Jesus' tomb. The temperature in the vehicle shed had plunged, coating the workbenches and machinery with a flocking of frost. The winter-overs worked rapidly to clear the drifting snow, melt a rim of ice, and shut the bay door against the night. Then they went outside.
The darkness was deepening. The cloudless sky was beginning to spot with stars and the horizon had only the faintest of blushes, the blue there as eerie as the glow of Cherenkov radiation in a nuclear fuel rod pool. The snow glowed silver. There was no wind but it was bitterly cold. The tractor and sled tracks steered for the horizon as straight as the wake of an autopilot boat, the Spryte's message as plain as a telegram. Tyson was pointed toward Vostok station. Their nemesis had fled.
His escape was received as deliverance. The monster was gone. No longer did they have to fear him, hold him, or prepare the runway to export him. Their water crisis was solved in an instant. His blustering hunt for the meteorite became a bad dream. He left behind only the nervous disorientation that follows a nightmare, an emotional tingle as barely contained panic gave way to mutual reassurance. They'd survived! They straddled the tracks in numb relief.
That Norse must have had a role in Tyson's disappearance was quickly assumed. Despite the excitement, the psychologist didn't emerge from his room to follow them out into the snow and he didn't join in the wildfire of announcement. It was as if he already knew what they'd find out there. Rising later, he admitted nothing, nor did anyone pronounce it. Still, he hadn't talked to their bosses at the National Science Foundation and had gone to bed late the night before as if the problem were solved. Norse's equanimity about the mechanic's escape told the rest all they needed to know. He was calm, where Rod Cameron had visibly battled depression. Robert Norse was their rock.
"I wonder if Tyson took the rock," Geller said happily at a late breakfast, working through a celebratory stack of pancakes. "Maybe he found it. Maybe he's the one who took it all along."
"Good riddance if he did," Calhoun opined, forking a sausage.
"Maybe he'll hock it. Maybe we'll meet him years from now on a beach in Hawaii, tanned and retired, still sipping mai tais from Mickey Moss's meteorite. Maybe he's smarter than any of us and got Doctor Bob to help send him to the Russians."
"So?"
"So, it would be ironic if dumb old Buck got exactly what he wanted."
"If I survive this freezer and get back to a beach in Hawaii to see him, do you think I'll give a flying fuck?"
"Alexi," Geller asked with his mouth full, "you think Vostok will take him?"
The Russian shrugged. "Why not? He brings his own car, maybe his own food- even his survival scraps will be better than theirs. They'll radio: Who he is? We'll say a what, a… defector, just so they don't fear him and send him back. He'll work or he'll starve at that base. It will be worse for him than jail here. And he'll find some companions even scarier than he is. Only the hard-core ice-men still survive at Vostok. The real Russians." He grinned. "They chew leather and pound nails with their foreheads."
"The Brits up at Faraday wear leather and paint their nails," Dana said. "And their women are even kinkier." She'd rediscovered her spirit as soon as she blearily woke to find Tyson gone.
"I hear the Kiwis nail their women and leather their foreskins," Geller remarked.
"Well, the Argentines at Esperanza- " Calhoun began.
"Make fun of the Chileans at Bernardo O'Higgins who tell jokes about the Poles at Arctowski who long for the Chinese food at Zhongshan," their psychologist interrupted, sliding into a seat with a cup of coffee. Norse had come into the galley quietly. "It's a wonder any work gets done in Antarctica at all."
"We were just wishing Tyson the worst, Doctor Bob," Geller explained. "We figured the Russians would give it to him."
"He's given it to himself. The plateau at Vostok is a half mile higher than the Pole. The world record low was set there- minus 128.6 degrees." Norse said it as if the precision gave him pleasure. "And traveling seven hundred miles is like driving from Berlin to Moscow. He'll be doing well to get there without losing his fingers and toes."
"He brought it on himself."
Norse sipped somberly. "That's the question, isn't it? What was Buck's choice? The central conundrum of psychology. How much of what we do is free will and how much is genes and conditioning? How responsible are we for our actions?"
"One hundred fucking percent," Pulaski said, bringing a bottle of syrup from the pantry to replace what Geller had depleted. "If you don't believe that, then society doesn't work because nobody's responsible for anything. Don't give me the behavioralist song and dance. Tyson was a mean sonofabitch who scared everyone here and deserves every inch of frostbite he gets. The feds are going to have a lot to answer for by not taking him back to begin with, when he started grousing. The Pole is no place for malcontents. Uncle Sam better hope Rod's relatives don't find a good lawyer."
"Lawyers. Now, there's a scary bunch," said Geller.
"I happen to agree with you, Wade," Norse told the cook. "You can't have freedom without accepting free will, and all the risk and responsibility that goes with it. Buck believed that, too. He just wasn't very adept at fitting his philosophy into a group."
"He was damn antisocial," said Calhoun.
"He refused to follow but he also refused to lead," Norse corrected. "He tried to isolate himself in a place where that was a physical impossibility. He had to either change the Pole, change himself, or leave. Rod's death made him realize that, and he left."
That struck Abby, who was listening, as a little too neat. "You're saying he should have tried to take over?"
"I'm saying that just as the natural world is an evolutionary struggle of species against species, society is an intellectual and emotional struggle of ego against ego. You conquer or you submit. You impose your own will or you labor under someone else's. You lead or you follow because life's a dance. Mere rebels, like Buck, simply hang or go into exile." The psychologist sipped his coffee again.