He polished off another player, his eleventh in a row, and was about to start a new game when he saw his e-mail icon blinking. Hoping for a more interesting distraction than another round of 'gammon, he toggled to his e-mail page. Three messages. Their mainframe did a good job of filtering spam for the rest of the crew, but, for whatever reason, Mark allowed a lot through to his computer. Junk messages were better than none.
One was spam. One was a move in a long-running series of chess matches he was playing against a retired Israeli professor. He'd have the man in mate in another four moves, and the old physicist didn't yet see it coming. He dashed off his reply, and glanced at the address for the final message.
He didn't know anybody at Penn State, but the subject line looked intriguing. It read Lonely. Probably some lame college dating service, he thought, but he opened it anyway.
Hi there. Remember me? Until recently, I was the chairman of a major corporation. Now I'm the king of a penguin colony here at the Wilson/George Research Station. My friends had to leave me behind. They didn't know I'd gotten clear of the gas plant and escaped in the confusion after it blew. I guess I shouldn't have broken my radio in a fight. I have spent the past four days hiking through the snow to reach this place, surviving on nothing but the protein bars I'd loaded into my smuggler's leg, the one with the hollowed-out calf. I've got the generator going and have plenty of food, so my main problem is loneliness. Any suggestions?
Cabrillo had signed it, Abandoned in the Antarctic.