He glanced around, looking for Abby. She was on the lower bench, looking down again as if lost in thought. She'd given him a shy glance in the corridor to acknowledge his return from Clean Air but showed nothing of the flirtatious familiarity he'd expected after their kiss. Cameron's death and Tyson's flight had gotten between them, leaving her troubled and remote. A shadowy, powerfully muscled man, probably Norse, sat behind her.
"This is what sets humans apart from the animals," someone said.
"A reckless thirst for experience?"
"Sweat."
Lewis felt light-headed. There wasn't enough air for this many occupants. His skin tingled as his pores opened, an almost forgotten experience after the dry cold of the Pole. His nose filled with the scent of their bodies, the perspiration and musk. The hot steam of the air heated his lungs. In a way the press of the bodies reassured him. After the fear that had divided it, the community was coming back together. The bizarre initiation implied a certain trust, an implicit friendship.
"I'm toassssssting…" someone wailed like the dissolving witch in The Wizard of Oz.
"I'm riiiisssssing…" Geller rumbled.
"Don't listen to him," Nancy Hodge assured. "You couldn't tell the difference with a surveyor's transit."
Everyone laughed.
"Do you like hot weather, Lewis?" It was Gabriella, whispering in his ear.
She made him nervous. "I'm a moderate."
"No, you're not. I know about you. Working for the oil companies. Always going to extremes."
"That's just where the oil is."
"There's oil in other places, too." Her breath raised the hair on his neck.
"Do you like hot weather?" He was staring at Abby but she wouldn't look up. She was more embarrassed by this intimacy, he guessed.
"I like sensation." Gabriella's lips were brushing his ear. Incongruously, he thought of the load master shouting into it, the day he arrived. The tale of the doomed fly.
"Gawd, I'm going to suffocate before I freeze," someone said.
"Almost there!" Pulaski called through the door.
Lewis leaned back, pressed against someone's body, leaned away. He was roasting, unbearably hot. His concern about dropping his towel was fading; he wanted release! He was looking forward to the cold! Sweat ran in tributaries down his temples, in rivers down his back. His belly was sticky with it. He wanted to make the Pole. He wanted to shed his newcomer status. Gabriella brushed his arm with her own. Both were slick, as if oiled.
Despite himself, his pulse quickened at her touch.
"Once I read that everyone's lonely," Gabriella whispered. "That what we want is to fuse with each other."
Lewis tried to joke. "Well, we're sticky enough." He was feeling dizzy.
"That hell is being scattered apart. Heaven is coming together."
"I thought heaven would have more oxygen." He felt drugged.
"That everybody wants reunion."
She was arousing him. He wished she'd be quiet.
"That all the parts try to become one."
He was saved when the door finally swung open, the light in the hallway killed to give a measure of privacy. There was a gush of cooler air. "And they're off!" Pulaski yelled.
Everyone stood, jostling like passengers anxious to get off an airplane. Towels dropped like shadows. It was so crowded and dark there was nothing to see. People began shoving out the door, breaking into an awkward run. Gabriella moved in front of him, her towel slipping away, and he got only an impression of curved form, lithe and smooth. Then he was carried with the crowd out the door, a jostling of elbows and knees like people squirming through a fire escape. They spread out in the corridor, darting through the exit and out under the dome's interior like a swarm of ghosts. Everyone was whooping and screaming with fear and excitement. Lewis felt like he was running on a beach, his core so hot he didn't yet feel any cold.
When they hit the chill of the dome their sweat flashed to steam. They ran in a river of fog, so dense they couldn't see each other's nakedness. As they sprinted out past the archways to the exit ramp, Lewis pulled his gaiter over his head and down around his mouth so his lungs wouldn't burn. The lining of his sinuses had already frozen.
When he burst outside he could feel a further temperature drop. It was like hitting a cold pond, his breath jerked away.
He could hardly see. He blindly followed the yells and laughter and howls of the others up the ramp and then across the sastrugi drifts toward the Pole marker. Some were already hurrying back the other way, he realized, stunned by the cold and turning for shelter well before reaching the taxiway. It was an act of self-preservation. He had no sense of who was who anymore, it was just a shuttle of bodies, a scene from a medieval triptych of hell.
His sweat was freezing on his skin. It had crystallized in his hair. His fingers were already numb. His testicles had shriveled. He was grateful it was as dark as it was.
"Come on, fellow fingie!"
It was Norse, loping ahead of him as if on an early-morning jog. He could make out the silhouette of the man's powerfully broad shoulders and slim hips. The psychologist was built like a Greek god, fit and vain. The steam had left them now and the other runners were gone, too. They were the only two loping across the runway for the distant stake. Lewis felt his muscles tightening. What if he cramped up out here?
With the steam gone it was dazzlingly clear. Glancing around, Lewis realized it wasn't as dark as he'd first thought. The structures of the research base were geometric sculptures in sharp starlit relief: the Dark Sector, Clean Air, the snowy hump of the summer Quonset huts that were winterized now. The sky was on fire, he realized: the aurora australis! It shimmered, a spangle of colors, as hallucinatory as a curtain to another world. The Pole had never looked so beautiful and for a revelatory moment he grasped the magnificence of being allowed to be here, of being given this glimpse of astronomical beauty. A rare privilege of time and space! And it was killing him!
Lewis was wheezing. His lungs ached with cold, despite the frost-shrouded gaiter over his mouth. His energy was evaporating. He stumbled, almost fell. He should turn back. He was risking frostbite by staying out so long. But there was the polar stake! Norse had paused at it, watching him. "You can do it, Jed!"
Lewis staggered to the Pole and looked back. Everyone else had disappeared inside. The dome looked impossibly far away and he realized he'd misjudged. This was insane! He was naked at a hundred degrees below zero and his sauna warmth was leaking away like a reservoir from a ruptured dam. "I think I'm dying," he gasped. He was looking up at his own ephemeral existence: the aurora!
"Not yet." Norse reached out and seized Lewis's arm, jerking him back in the direction of the dome. "Double time!" They jogged together, their goal rocking in his vision, the psychologist's hand like a vise. "You can do it!"
"It feels like my shoulders are freezing up. I can hear them cracking."
"You've got to sprint, man! Sprint to save your life!" He seized Lewis's hand and the two began awkwardly running flat out, nude, intimate, two earthlings cast off into space, barely keeping their balance on the skittering of snow. "Go, go!"
They saw Pulaski at the crest of the ramp, waving them in like an orange-clad angel. Stars began dancing in Lewis's eyes. "I… can't… do…"