When he’d first seen Leroy’s prescription, in the early days of the winter-over, he’d approached Keene to make sure the psychologist was aware of just what kind of challenge they might have on their hands. Keene had assured him he had the situation under control and gone back to reading his copy of Applied Psychology , leaving Ron frustrated but powerless. TransAnt had cleared the man to work, he was taking his medication, and Shackleton’s shrink said everything was okay. It had bothered him at the time, but after that early push, work and life on base had swept the issue away. Until now.
A knock at Leroy’s berth went unanswered and no one he asked seemed to have seen the electrician, not his neighbors in the dorm or Pete scrubbing down the breakfast grill or a weary Dave Boychuck climbing the Beer Can steps. Growing progressively more concerned, Ron struck gold when he spotted Biddi coming out of the e-systems lab carrying a bucket and a mop.
“Biddi!”
Biddi smiled. “Dr. Ayres?”
“Have you seen Leroy Buskins around?”
“No need to use his last name, Doctor, he’s the only Leroy on base,” she teased. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t. Not for some time, in fact. Why? Is there something wrong?”
Ron ran a hand across his forehead. “I need to find him and I’ve looked everywhere.”
“Is it possible you’ve simply missed him? Shackleton isn’t that big, but there are a bunch of nooks and crannies to this place.”
He mentally ticked off the places he’d looked and crew he’d asked so far. Discounting the locations Leroy simply wouldn’t bother to go, like the skiway or COBRA, then he’d damned near covered the entire station. It was always possible that they’d both been moving and missing each other, of course—he was on the second floor when Leroy was walking the first; he’d checked the galley when Leroy was in the library—but he’d been thorough and asked nearly a dozen people if they’d seen the man . . . and almost to a person, they hadn’t seen him in recent memory. Out of a crew of forty, that was the equivalent of sending out an APB. Unless he’d missed the obvious.
“Biddi,” he began slowly, “you’ve got keys to the berths, don’t you?”
“I do. Though Leroy specifically asked me not to clean his room. I shudder to think what state it’s in.” She cocked an eyebrow. “He’s not in any trouble, is he?”
“No, not like that. He’s simply due for a checkup and it’s strange he hasn’t shown up for it. And no one’s seen him around. You don’t think . . .” His voice trailed off as he thought about what he was considering.
“Yes?”
Ron blushed. “Do you think you could perhaps give me a peek into his room? If he’s sleeping soundly, I’d hate to pound on his door. But if he is in there, it would put my mind at ease. What do you say?”
She made a motion like she was clutching an imaginary necklace of pearls. “Why, Dr. Ayres, are you asking me to break into a fellow crew member’s private sleeping quarters?”
He gave her a weak grin. “Something like that, yes. It’s for his own good.”
“Then we’d better hurry before anyone catches us.”
Biddi pushed the mop and bucket into a niche and they hustled to the E1 berth. When they got to Leroy’s room, Ron rapped lightly on the door as a final courtesy to roust the man if he were in there, then motioned for Biddi to unlock the door. Flipping through her keys, she located the master and had the door open in a few seconds. She stepped back and presented the door with a flourish.
He paused for a moment, staring at the knob. For the people who worked in Antarctica, privacy was cherished above almost everything else. Living cheek-by-jowl with the same people for nine months meant that absolutely nothing replaced a sense of ownership over the space that was your berth. Breaking into someone’s room was a violation on a level that was hard to match short of physically attacking someone.
Weighted against that was everything he believed in as a physician, both in what he considered his medical obligations, but also the social ones. He was responsible for the crew’s well-being, dammit, whether that was a broken leg or a serious mental issue. There’d only been one time he hadn’t listened to his inner voice and followed up on a patient. The blank, sad stares of the other VA doctors. The glancing, sliding gaze of the nurses. No one had wanted to tell him. Where is Gary? Where is my son? He should be getting treatment, he should be getting help, goddammit. He doesn’t need an IV drip full of poison, he needs his father. Yes, I took him off of that shit. You’d turn him into a vegetable instead of talking to a man. Where is Gary?
Jaw muscles worked at the memory. You could only be told so many times that something wasn’t your fault before you became convinced that it was.
He grasped the knob.
The lights were off inside. He slipped out a small pen flashlight he normally used to look at tonsils and panned it across the bed. No Leroy. He moved the beam over the rest of the room. Jeans, overalls, and dirty shirts hung from every peg and littered the floor. Candy wrappers had been crumpled and tossed into a corner as if the corner itself were the wastebasket, and the tiny quarters smelled faintly of bleach and foot odor and the general stale, stagnant odor of a human confined to a small space.
Ron hesitated, then turned to Biddi and said in a conspiratorial tone, “Would you be able to act like you’re cleaning the hall, Biddi? And, perhaps, rap on the door if you see Leroy coming?”
The woman waggled her eyebrows and snatched a dust rag from a back pocket. “Of course, Doctor.”
“Good girl.” He shut the door gently, turned the lights on, and proceeded to search the room quickly but thoroughly. As a physician, he had no training in how to toss a room, but as a former marine, he knew every nook and cranny people used to hide things in a bunk. Five minutes later, however, having lifted the mattress, run his hand along ledges and under frames, and peeked behind drawers, he had to admit defeat. If there was anything to be found, he wasn’t going to be the one to discover it. The man could use a lesson in personal hygiene, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Except that its occupant was nowhere to be found.
He took a look around the room, decided it wasn’t any messier or neater than how he’d found it, then cracked the door to the hallway. “All clear?”
“As a pane of glass.” Biddi was dusting the door frame and walls. He slipped out of the room and watched as his accomplice locked it.
She looked at him. “Should we sound the alarm?”
“No, not yet. Though, if you see him, would you call me?” Biddi nodded. He paused. “And let’s keep this to ourselves, please?”
She mimed locking her mouth and tossing the key. “Not a word, Doctor.”
He smiled. “Thank you, Biddi.”
She winked and went back to dusting the frame. Ron strode down the hall, a small knot of worry growing in his stomach.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Carla had been running a difficult set of tests on crystalline structures, a task that required her to be glued either to the small electron microscope in the biology lab or to the two computer screens that were capturing and recording the results in real time. Even as a grad student, her reputation for total concentration on a test had been legendary, to the extent that she’d often gone sixteen, twenty, and once twenty-four hours without leaving her chair.
But today, the first phase of the test wrapped up early and she sighed in relief as she backed away from the microscope, stretched with both hands on her lower back, and rolled her neck in circles. Grinning, she grabbed a cup of cold coffee and put her feet up on her desk with relish, something that would’ve surprised her colleagues, who assumed she thrived on the unblinking concentration her tests usually required.
In fact, Carla would’ve liked nothing better than to fire off a few lines on a command prompt and go to lunch, like the stargazers over at COBRA. But, in biology, if you missed a few significant tics, the results were inconclusive or mixed or open to interpretation. So, if you were going to bother running an experim
ent at all, why wouldn’t you put everything you had into the process? If you couldn’t take ten hours of frowning into the eyepiece of a microscope, maybe you should try a different field of science. Like geology, where the time scale ran into the millions of years and the tons of rock. Make a mistake? Wait awhile or bust open another geode.
She smiled a little, thinking of how peeved her favorite geologist would’ve been if he were there to read her thoughts. Cute, serious Colin. Brilliant in his field, but as obtuse as the samples he tapped apart with his rock pick, capable of flaking apart millimeter-thick layers of shale but clueless at doing the same for the simplest social cues. She wondered if he were as baffled in bed. Talk dirty to me, Colin. Pause. What do you want me to say, Carla? Scenarios along those lines coaxed her into a daydream for long minutes and, had anyone come into the office, they would’ve found her staring raptly into the depths of a skuzzy tank of Antarctic pearlwort like she was in love.
Thinking about sex always made her hungry and, after a quick check of her watch, she jumped off her lab stool. It wasn’t every day that she could still make regular lunch hours in the galley instead of begging for scraps across the counter in the odd hours after her experiments wrapped up. She made sure everything was powered down or in a holding pattern as needed, then strode out the door and down the hall to the galley.
Halfway down the corridor, she frowned and wrapped her arms around her body. Living and working at the South Pole, it’s cold seemed a perverse statement. But the main part of Shackleton station was normally kept at a steady seventy degrees year-round. It was a rare day that she felt a chill, and even then it was from wandering too close to one of the outer doors when someone was coming in from the outside.
She shrugged to herself. Sometimes she caught a chill when all of her attention was focused on something in the lab, so much so that she wondered if her body, trying to help, shunted all of the blood and energy to her brain when she was working on a particularly thorny problem. She just needed to grab a bite and move her sedentary scientist’s butt.
When she reached the galley, however, she was still cold. She waved to Anne, who was already sitting with Tim and Colin. Anne wore fleece that was zipped all the way, with the collar covering the lower half of her face. Tim was rubbing his hands together, while steam rose from Colin’s cup of coffee like it had just been poured from the pot. At other tables, crew were hunched or hugging themselves.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked by way of greeting as she sat down.
“What do you mean?” Anne’s voice was muffled. “It’s like this all the time.”
“Deb did a drive-by earlier,” Tim said. “She and Hanratty and Taylor are going around, trying to reassure people.”
“About what?”
“The heating system went down about an hour ago. Some kind of problem with the furnaces.” He delivered the news contritely, as if apologizing on the administration’s behalf.
“Is it the power plant? Are the fuel tanks okay?” Carla had only a rudimentary idea of how Shackleton was powered, but she did know that the base’s furnaces were electrical and therefore relied on the energy produced by the diesel generators in Shackleton’s power plant buried deep under the ice.
But the generators ran off just one source of energy: the jet fuel that had been convoyed to the base over the SPoT road or flown in on the Hercs. If there had been a simple mechanical failure in the generators, that was bad enough—heat and electricity would be compromised and, okay, that wasn’t good—but it had always haunted her that they were sitting on top of several ten-thousand-gallon tanks of highly combustible petroleum product. If the fuel tanks or lines had a problem, an explosion would have the potential kinetic energy of a bomb. She didn’t want to freeze to death, but neither did she want to get blown into the sky.
“I think so,” Tim said. “Or we would’ve been evacuated. Which would be a little inconvenient right now, considering it’s a bit chilly outside.”
Carla shivered. “What happened to the backup systems? If it’s just an electrical problem and not something wrong with the power plant, they should at least be able to get the fallback furnaces going.”
“They’re having trouble with those, too.”
“Jesus.” Carla glanced around the table. “Isn’t that, you know, cause for concern?”
Colin shrugged. “I’m sure they have it under control.”
She shot the geologist an irritated glance at the empty statement. Her daydream about him, still fresh in her mind, frayed around the edges. “How long ago did Deb come by?”
The three looked at each other. “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago?” Tim ventured.
Carla, appetite blunted, glanced around the galley. No one was on the verge of panic, but neither did anyone seem motivated to get answers. She bit her lower lip and considered her tablemates. An astrophysicist, a materials science engineer, and a geologist. Brilliant people, all, but perhaps not as in tune with biological functions and what subzero temperatures might do to those functions as, say, herself.
“Anne, what’s the temperature in here, do you think?”
Her friend tilted her head. “In Fahrenheit? Sixty degrees, maybe high fifties?”
Carla grimaced. Sixty and dropping. Hypothermia had occurred at temperatures as high as fifty degrees, although that normally took place in extreme conditions where the victims didn’t have access to such things as fleece sweaters and hot coffee. But her breath steamed when she exhaled.
She glanced out one of the many galley windows. Gusts whipped the snow savagely, making it appear as though the wind itself were white. Sweaters and hot drinks were nice, but with an outside ambient temperature of eighty below and the wind constantly peeling away radiant heat, real trouble could be just an hour away if they didn’t get those heating elements back online. How did that constitute the situation being “under control”? Someone needed to light a fire—figuratively and maybe literally—under the administration’s rear end.
Electing to do it herself, Carla had just started to stand when the intercom crackled. She eased back into her seat.
“Hello, everyone. Deb Connors here. As you are no doubt already aware, we’ve been having some issues with the station’s main and backup heating systems. We’re currently working on the problem with the engineering team. Please stay calm. If you find the low temperature distressing, all non-GA and DA staff should feel free to take temporary leave to go back to your berths or the galley. ”
Carla looked around the room, watching faces. Stating the problem had made it worse rather than better and what had previously been a shadow of apprehension was now transformed into definite concern for some, fear for others.
“Jack Hanratty or I will update you every half hour until we resolve the problem. In the meantime, please carry on with your regular duties. We hope to have the problem diagnosed soon and —”
Like a candle being snuffed, Deb’s voice stopped at the same time the lights went out, plunging them into darkness. Someone in the galley gasped, followed by a dozen low, moaned exclamations. Carla reached across the table and found Anne’s hand, cold and bony, likewise fumbling for hers. Dim footlights—battery-powered emergency illumination meant to come online only when the main circuit was broken—flickered to life, giving off a weak, muddy light that barely lit an area a foot off the floor.
“Easy, everyone. Take it easy,” a voice boomed nearby, making her jump. A cone of light appeared out of the dark, highlighting the face of Pete Ozment, the cook. He held a fat-headed, industrial-sized flashlight. “It’s just the lights. We’ll be okay. Everybody just stay seated. I’m sure they’ll get the generators going in a minute.”
Just like they got the heat turned back on? Carla thought, but she wanted Pete to be right. Still holding tight to Anne’s hand, she snaked her other out toward Colin’s.
“Colin,” she hissed. “Give me your hand.”
“Why?”
“Give me your hand, you stupid man.�
�
She could almost see his shrug in the dark and then she felt his rough, dry fingers wrap around hers. He had calluses on the palm of his hand.
Pete panned his flashlight around the room, then trained the beam on the galley door. “Everyone stay put. I’m going to see if I can round up any stragglers and lead them back here.”
“So we can all freak out in one spot instead of separately?” Anne asked sotto voce . They watched the comforting glow from his light bounce and fade as he turned down the corridor.
Each small group began murmuring amongst themselves in the dark; the collective conversations became, in some ways, a comforting chatter. No one made it to Antarctica, and certainly not to Shackleton, without being resourceful, smart, and well balanced. Most of the people Carla had met, from the kitchen workers to the head of the neutrino program, had diverse skills and broad experiences. This wasn’t a group to panic or to wait on a problem that could be fixed with ingenuity.
But as each minute built on the last, the room seemed to get colder and darker. Ozment didn’t return and there were occasional flickers of fluorescent green dials as people checked their watches. The chatter died as there was less and less to talk about that didn’t directly address being stranded in the dark.
“Twenty minutes since the juice went out,” someone called.
Thanks for nothing , Carla thought. But it was better to know than to guess. She leaned forward. “Anne? Guys? How long are we going to sit here and freeze?”
“As long as it takes to get the electricity on.” Colin, obdurate and blunt as a river rock.
“I don’t remember anyone making Pete Ozment station manager,” Anne said. “It’s nice he tried to keep everyone calm, but he’s not doing anyone any favors by being gone for so long.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Carla said. “If the station is in real trouble, I’d rather get ahead of it than be a team player and freeze to death. We’ve all got cold weather gear in our rooms. I’d feel better about sitting tight in the pitch black if I’m ready for what’s coming.”
The Winter Over Page 16
