There was the distant chug of the generator but no other sound. No bird call, no rustling leaves, no distant shout of children, no drone of highway noise. Lewis pushed back his hood and pulled down his gaiter a moment to listen, ignoring the bite of cold, his exhalation a puff of steam.
There was a quiet whisper behind him.
He turned his head. No one there.
They kept walking, puffing over the drifts.
Again the whisper.
Lewis turned completely this time. Odd. The snow was empty. What the hell?
The station manager was watching him with amusement.
"I thought I heard something."
"It's your breath, fingie. The moisture freezes as you walk and crackles behind your ear as it sprinkles down. Weird, isn't it?"
"My breath?"
"The vapor cloud."
"Oh." He puffed and listened as his exhalation floated away like fairy dust, with an audible crinkle. "You notice the noise," he conceded. "There's nothing else to hear."
"Just the voices in your head."
An outside metal staircase led up to the Clean Air Facility, perched on its columns like a heavy bird. Inside were instruments he'd been briefed on at Boulder by NOAA. Windows looked out at the flat bleakness of the ice cap. The elevated structure was here because air at the South Pole was thousands of miles from human industry, and hence the most unpolluted on earth. Lewis's primary job was to sample that air for evidence of global warming. He actually had to keep track of thirty-five separate measurements, some of them automated and some requiring manual sampling of air, snow, sunlight, and atmospheric ozone: temperature, carbon dioxide concentrations, wind, snowfall, pollutants, barometric pressure. My job is important. If the planet was heating, it would perversely show up here first, just like the ozone hole had. If their ice plateau melted, it would drown the world's ports. Antarctica was a global trip wire, warning humans if industrialization had gone too far. Jed Lewis was this winter's Paul Revere.
"Kind of cozy," he commented. Indeed, the elevated building felt like a tree house. A boy's fort.
"You've got good duty," Cameron said. "Your job forces you to get outside each day so you don't become a dome slug, and you get some privacy and independence out here. It's the closest thing to a vacation condo this side of the KitKat Club."
"The what?"
"An old balloon-launching shack. We don't need it anymore because the balloons have gotten smaller and lighter. A carpenter turned it into a getaway pad with carpeting, heat, stereo, and VCR TV. Since then it's seen more consummations than Niagara Falls. Not that we station managers approve, of course."
"There's a lot of nooks and crannies to this place, aren't there?"
"Oh yes indeedy."
"And this building is a rendezvous as well?"
"People come out to Clean Air sometimes to break the monotony and party. Carl Mendoza is promising to cook up some dome-brew."
"He'd better not spill beer on my instruments."
"Nah, they spill it over here." The station manager walked out on the platform ringing the building and pointed downward to a yellow-stained cleft in the snow. "Our Grand Canyon is the pee crevasse. It's a long run to the john in the dome so guys just piss over the rail here. It's quite a sensation when the wind's blowing."
"Clean air, dirty snow?"
"We don't take our drinking water from here, needless to say. Storms cover up the evidence each winter."
"What do women do?"
Cameron laughed. "Who knows what women do?"
"You certainly don't," a female voice said.
They turned. A young woman about Lewis's age was standing in the doorway, nylon windpants over her legs but her feet in wool socks and her upper half clad only in long underwear, which showed some nice shape to her. She was holding a screwdriver and seemed oblivious to the cold.
"We look for a leafy bush," she confided to Lewis. The closest one was two thousand miles away.
"Hello, Abby," Cameron said.
"Hello, pig," she replied pleasantly.
"You were hiding under one of your computers."
"I was getting our planned obsolescence ready for our newcomer." She looked at Lewis. "Please pay no attention to Ice Pick. He's flunked every chance at being a New Age sensitive type of guy since assuming his exalted post and all the women on station are preparing a lawsuit against him. Or maybe just ritual castration."
"Hey, I'm sensitive. And I like women."
"Exactly the problem."
Cameron made the introduction. "This is Abby Dixon, our resident computer nerd. Abby, Jed Lewis, our new weatherman."
They stepped inside and Lewis shed his mittens to shake. She had long, slim fingers and a firm grip. Her hair was short and dark, her features tomboy pretty, her smile wide and welcoming. Not bad.
"I didn't see you at dinner," he said.
"Sometimes I eat on the job. Especially when we have fruit. An apple, a PC, and me. Heaven."
"You don't miss our companionship?"
"Machines are good company. Especially compared to some of the alternatives." She cast a mischievous glance at Cameron.
"Abby's an elusive one," the station manager said. "Pretends to have some geek boyfriend stashed elsewhere in Antarctica. Our isolation and my charm, however, are breaking down her reserve."
"I'm positively gregarious compared to Jerry," she told Lewis. "Jerry Follett. You'll work with him, too. His idea of small talk is atmospheric dynamics. He'll want some help launching his balloons but he's loud as a mollusk. Don't be put off by it."
"So you work out here, too?"
"Just when you need me. I heard you'd arrived and thought I'd better get the busted one up and running. It's been on my list after your predecessor broke it."
"I hope he didn't spill beer," Lewis said.
"Probably threw up on it. Had a tough time with the altitude." She turned to Cameron. "So, we going to name this guy Snowman, too? He's collecting it."
"No, everyone needs their own nickname. Polar tradition," he explained to Lewis. "I'm Ice Pick, because I can be a prick when I have to be."
"He's just fussy," Abby said. "Picky. He fails at being mean."
"I'm just nuts from coping with twenty-five other eccentrics in a place that demands conformity. Everyone wants to make their careers in six months and solve their life problems while they're at it. When they don't, it's the station manager's fault."
"Maybe we should call you picked-upon," Abby teased.
"Picked apart, anyway. Cotton-pickin' crazy. Now." He considered Lewis. "Abby's Gearloose, for her vast technical skills. And you are… maybe… Krill."
She laughed. "Oh dear!"
"Krill? What does that mean?"
"Zooplankton," Cameron replied smoothly. "A tiny, translucent shrimp that makes up much of the marine biomass off Antarctica. Vital to the ecosystem."
"I look like a shrimp?"
"It's worse than that," Abby said. "He means you're at the bottom of the food chain. The new guy."
"The fingie," Cameron said cheerfully. "Nobody newer for eight toasty months."
"I don't think so," Lewis said slowly. "How about something flattering?"
"Not allowed," the station manager said.
"What about the grumpy shower guy? Tyson? What's his nickname?"
"Buck to his face, because he's big and into knives. But we spell it with an F behind his back."
"And Island," Abby said. "As in, 'No man is'? Every winter there's one guy so weird that he runs the danger of being ostracized. Tyson seems to crave the honor."
"Not me. I came down to get along." Embarrassingly, his stomach chose that moment to growl. As Geller had predicted, he was hungry, fiercely hungry. "And eat."
Abby took pity. "Don't think you look like a shrimp."
"Thanks. I am almost six feet." His stomach rumbled again.