"They can't blame anything on me when I'm in here."
"Some people already have. Someone prepped Comms to explode before it happened. Something to do with the wires and batteries. It was a booby trap, and Clyde had his entire face burnt off. He might even die. So who did that?"
"Not me."
"The same somebody who killed Gabriella."
Lewis shut his eyes in weariness. "Does Norse know you're here?"
"No." She glanced sideways as if he might be watching. "He led the others into sealing you off, and I think it's deliberate. He doesn't want me talking to you. Or you talking to anyone."
"Why?"
"He called me in after you were locked up, after the explosion, and said he understood my support for you but that Gabriella's death had changed everything, changed his own thinking. Then he showed me the note."
"What note?"
"He said he found it in Rod Cameron's desk drawer. It says Rod can save his career by giving you the meteorite, and it's signed… by you." She was watching him.
"Come on. I didn't write that note."
"It had your name."
"It's a forgery, Abby. It has to be. This is all so crazy! Norse, or Rod, or someone, is screwing me. They're out to turn us against each other."
"He said he hadn't shown it to the others yet but if more bad things continued to happen they might have to ask you some hard questions."
"Hard questions?"
"Jed, I think he wants to interrogate you. Break you, somehow."
"To hell with that."
"I'm just telling you that you can't stay here waiting for things to play out."
Now he was suspicious. The paranoia was infectious. He looked at her narrowly, suddenly wary. "Bob put you up to this, didn't he? He wants me to try to escape. He'll use it against me."
"No! But he wants to turn your head around, just like what's happening now. He twists everything. He objects to Pulaski in public and then confers with him in private. He's playing him. Playing you, playing me. There's something wrong- "
"Wait a minute! I did sign it!" Lewis had remembered.
"What?"
"A piece of paper, the first day I came here. We were joking around about psychology and handwriting analysis and Bob had me sign something…" His eyes were distant, trying to recall what Norse had done with the paper. "I did sign it. What the hell, has this been a setup from the beginning?"
Abby looked intrigued. "You think he planned this?"
"I don't know what to think. That far ahead?"
"What if Mickey was right and it was Bob who took my picture?" she asked. "That's what I've been thinking about. What if he planted it on Moss?"
"But why?"
"To confuse us. Make us think Mickey might have committed suicide. Put pressure on me to see how'd I react."
"You think Norse is responsible for all this?"
"What do we really know about him? He's a fingie just like you. He came down at the last minute just like you."
"To figure us out."
"Or bewilder us."
"But he's been holding things together."
"Has he?"
"Jesus." He thought a minute, trying to go back over events. Norse had admitted he'd heard where Mickey might have hidden the meteorite. Norse had been out in the storm when Adams died. Norse had helped Tyson flee… "But why?"
"That's what you've got to find out. You're the one person who can sneak out of the dome right now and not be missed. The one person with time to wait for the satellites and get on the Internet. The one person who will ask who Robert Norse really is."
"I thought you said the radios and the computers are down."
"The hub at Comms is destroyed. But if you could get to another source of power and shunt some electricity to Clean Air, you could still use the machines out here."
"If I can get to another source of power."
"There's an emergency generator at the Hypertats at Bedrock Village."
"Can I start it?"
"You could try. I think it might work. I think that's why Bob has allowed Pulaski to wall up the dome. He doesn't want us getting out there, calling out. All the doors are locked now. The perimeter is patrolled."
"So how the hell am I going to get out there?"
"That's why I came here. Look, everyone's exhausted. Almost everyone's asleep. They've been up for hours and hours, locking us in. I'm blitzed, too, but I was going crazy, thinking about Bob, thinking about you, so I couldn't sleep and got up and wandered outside and I just sort of collapsed in the snow under the dome, utterly defeated, just lying there, and then a snowflake hit me in the eye. You know how that feels? Between a kiss and a sting. So I stood up and then all these little snowflakes were sticking to me…"
He looked at her in wonder. It was like the image from his dream.
"Then I realized what we had all overlooked."
Error of Judgment
For three days I was a hero. Then the weather cleared, recovery teams ventured out on the ice below Wallace Wall, and the bodies began to be recovered. Some goober of a deputy sheriff, who probably watched too much Columbo and talked like a Mayberry hick, started to yodel about the neatly clipped end of the line still attached to the corpses of Chisel Chin and Carrot Top. I professed shocked innocence- I'd left both fine young men on the ledge with the others. Just why the devil they were roped and how they'd fallen (were they trying to climb out on their own?) was a mystery to me. But then why was my own line broken? There were the beginnings of awkward questions of just who had been roped to whom. I expressed grieving outrage, of course, at any implication of negligence or wrongdoing. I had risked my life to save those kids! To save that whale Fat Boy! But the holier-than-thou crowd wanted to know why I had saved myself. Slow-talking Deputy Goober wouldn't shut up about it, even though he didn't have the balls to go down the cliff himself and look for evidence- like a knife secreted in a convenient crevice. Finally the university had to exert some pressure on the sheriff because of fear of a lawsuit. The matter of exactly just what did happen on the mountain was not-so-quietly dropped, despite the confused bleating of bereaved parents. And that was that. I'd done my best and was prepared to get on with my life.
Except my application for tenure was denied.
They wouldn't let it drop.
They wouldn't let it drop!
Barney Fife, deputy dipshit, kept nosing around. The whispering started. The peer reviews of my research papers began to get very much more pointed, very pointed indeed. They started murmuring about me in the campus coffee shop- I could feel the stares! — and plotting against me in the department. They denied it, of course, but I knew what was happening. I knew it! The file cabinets that were locked, the meetings called without notifying me they were being held, the evasive looks, the papers turned upside down on desks so I couldn't read them, the hollow sympathies. God, did I know it! Friends became distant. A woman I thought I felt something for became chillingly remote. No charge was ever brought and no charge was needed- my life had become intolerable. I'd been sentenced without being charged. So one day I just walked away.
Let me be perfectly clear about exactly what happened on that mountain. An act of individual and immature foolishness by a single overweight student led to leadership miscalculation, group panic, and a brutal winnowing based on skill and common sense. The strongest, clearest thinker had survived. It was as pure an experiment in natural selection as one could hope for. So don't call me lucky! I was not blessed! I was realistic. Brutally, coldly, and rationally realistic. No one was going to save me, so I saved myself. Once my companions slipped, I didn't have any chance of saving the others. With their trust in each other they had all doomed themselves. The ropes that bound us together had proved to be gossamer threads long before I brought out my knife. I am merely the surviving witness to the fragility of society. Any society.