The Winter Over

by Iden, Matthew

  “After what we’ve been through? Who the hell thought that was a good idea?”

  “Think of it as exposure therapy.”

  “As long as it doesn’t turn into a documentary.” Cass flushed the toilet and watched the blue whirlpool for a moment. “What about unofficially?”

  “Nurse Beth—she’s a wild one, she is—told me some of our more adventurous colleagues are planning an ice party down in the warehouse whilst the movie is showing.”

  “The warehouse is sixty below zero. Why would anyone have a party down there?”

  “Well, apparently, someone with a degree in chemistry has been nicking a bit of sugar from the approximately ten thousand pounds of it in the warehouse and using it to fuel a small distillery in the back of the generator room, which, as you know, is not that far away from the warehouse.”

  Cass leaned out of the stall to stare at Biddi. “You wouldn’t happen to have a degree in chemistry?”

  “No. But my ancestors were bootleggers.”

  “So, it’s just more drinking? Homemade hooch isn’t going to do much for frostbite,” Cass said. “It’s going to get ugly when body parts start freezing and falling off.”

  “Ah, well, as to those body parts . . .” Biddi said, her voice trailing off.

  Cass leaned out again, curious. A note of embarrassment had crept into Biddi’s voice, something Cass had never heard before. “Yes?”

  “Evidently, there will be more than just drinking going on. It has been suggested that certain . . . calisthenics are planned.”

  Cass looked at her blankly. “Calisthenics?”

  “Yes, Cassie.” Biddi, impatient at having to explain the obvious, did a quick bump and grind. “Calisthen ics.”

  Cass’s jaw dropped. “No way.”

  “I shit you not, love.” Biddi snapped her washrag and moved to the next mirror.

  “How do you find out about these things?”

  “Sanitation engineers are the great levelers,” Biddi said haughtily. “We might be bloody fucking janitors, but we talk to everyone and everyone talks to us.”

  “I’m a janitor, and no one told me about the orgy.”

  “That’s because you’re down in the VMF all the time, fondling engine parts when you could be fondling . . . other parts. I, on the other hand, prefer to walk among the people.”

  “So Mr. Boychuck and his hose will be there, I take it?”

  “Um, well. Yes.” Biddi cleared her throat. “You should join us, Cassie. For the boozing, if nothing else. People think you take things too seriously.”

  “Thanks but no thanks. I’ve got a date with a real plate of food, a glass of wine, and that’s it.”

  “That nice man Jun looks lonely.”

  “He’s married, Biddi.”

  “Not for long, I hear.”

  “What?”

  “He’s been in the doldrums for some time now. Anne told me he’s having trouble at home. Didn’t you know?”

  Tears, spilling from his eyes . “He told me a few things and I guessed the rest. Is there something new?”

  “An American wife, a domineering family, pressure from his school, gone to the South Pole for nine months,” Biddi said. “The math is pretty easy, love.”

  “It’s a sad situation.”

  “Perhaps you could give him a hand, then. You never know what a little bit of tenderness might do for the poor man,” Biddi teased. “An ice wife might be just what he needs to cheer him up.”

  “Can we go back to talking about food, please?”

  “You brought it up, darling.”

  The conversation turned to more neutral topics, like what Pete would be putting on the menu, whether the champagne would be drinkable or better used to scour toilets, and laying bets on whether Hanratty would smile. Time flew by as their chatting turned the bathroom duty into an afterthought, and they were done before they knew it.

  Throughout the rest of the day, Cass felt a sense of excitement infect the station as the crew began to anticipate the midwinter celebration. It was a nice change from the anxiety the communications outage had caused, although there was a reluctance to talk about the celebration openly, as if mentioning it out loud would cause Hanratty to cancel it out of spite. But it was impossible to ignore the look of anticipation on everyone’s faces as she passed them in the hall or sat down to eat in the galley. Even the previously tasteless lunch buffet took on a richer flavor as the crew whispered to each other how much better the next night’s meal would be than the gruel they were eating now. The day couldn’t pass quickly enough.

  The next night, long lines formed outside the galley while the smells of cooked food—the kind no one had experienced in months—wafted down the halls. It was virtual torture and the crew shifted from foot to foot, antsy and barely able to contain themselves, trading jokes and telling stories to keep their mind off the dinner that was so close. Cass had heard of one’s mouth watering in anticipation before, but she’d never experienced it, at least not like she was now.

  Colin and Anne were standing in front of her, with Colin trying unsuccessfully to remember the punch line to a joke, though based on Anne’s expression, it wouldn’t have helped. At one point, with her back half turned to Colin, she rolled her eyes at Cass, who bit her lip and turned away.

  “Cass?”

  She turned. Pete, wearing his white cook’s apron, had appeared at her elbow looking harried and carrying an insulated cooler with a thick handle. He was a small man, perpetually hunched over as though carrying the combined weight of the one hundred meals he had to prepare every day. A few strands of dark, stringy hair had escaped his hairnet and were plastered against his forehead.

  “What’s up, Pete?”

  “I hate, really hate, to ask you this, but I need a favor.”

  Her heart sank down to the depths of her stomach. “As long as it doesn’t mean missing dinner.”

  “No, not quite,” he said, then hurried on when he saw the look on her face. He gestured with the cooler. “Almost everyone on base is here for the dinner, but there are a few people who can’t make it. It doesn’t seem right that they have to miss the big blowout.”

  She groaned. “You want me to deliver it to them?”

  He nodded. “I would do it, but it’s going to take everything I’ve got just to get the real meal on the table for everyone.”

  Cass tried to ignore the flip-flops her stomach was doing. “What are you offering?”

  “The eternal goodwill of your fellow crew members?”

  “I can’t eat goodwill,” Cass said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Anne grin. “Try again.”

  “I can promise you an extra dessert.”

  “Two. Plus a bottle of wine.”

  “Good Lord,” he said. “Not a chance. Two desserts and an extra glass of wine.”

  “Got any candy bars hidden back there?”

  He looked at her slantwise. “Maybe.”

  “Two desserts, an extra glass of wine, and a couple of candy bars.”

  “Done.” They shook and he handed her the cooler. She frowned, thinking of something. “Wait, why the cooler? Whose meal am I delivering?”

  “Jun’s.”

  She glowered at Pete. “You are not going to tell me he’s out at COBRA.”

  He grinned and started moving back toward the kitchen. “Afraid so.”

  “Jesus Christ. It’s going to take me an hour.”

  “No take-backsies, Cass.”

  “You son of a bitch! I want three desserts,” she called, but he’d already disappeared through the swinging door with a wave.

  Anne, Colin, and the others around her shot her a sympathetic look, but no one offered to take her place, she noticed. The way the food was smelling, ten desserts wouldn’t be a good enough trade.

  “If you follow the flag line, it’s not too bad,” Anne offered with a pained smile.

  Grumbling, Cass broke out of line and carried the cooler down the hall to her room, where she went th
rough the laborious process of suiting up in full gear, including three under-layers, a parka, bunny boots, and the two-tiered glove system—a neoprene layer under bear claws—needed for the cold. She kept the hood down and the balaclava off until she reached the airlock for Destination Zulu, the ground-level exit, but before long it was time to put both on and cinch them down tight.

  Gritting her teeth, Cass turned on her headlamp and opened the outer door. The initial paralyzing cold was held at bay by her layers of clothing, but the brute physical force of the wind pushed against her as though she were a sail, and she had to lean into the first step just to get through the door. She exited the base, stepping into the night, and slammed the door shut behind her.

  Fat flakes of snow pelted her face and Cass blinked in reaction even though her ski mask protected her face. Pausing for a moment to adjust, she tromped down the steps to the ground level, then turned her headlamp back toward the base of the stairs, illuminating a metal pole that had been planted to the right of the door. Welded to the pole was a group of lanyards. Lashed to each lanyard was a colored polystyrene rope, different than its neighbor, and tied to each line was a small nylon tag with a handwritten word on it. Fighting the wind, Cass fumbled with the rope until she found a red one marked “COBRA.” She glanced down its length. Every fifteen feet, held up by a small pole, a scrap of red nylon was tied to the line, though only the first two flags were visible in the dark. Cass shook the line and the rope bounced, sending the flags dancing frantically in the wind.

  She stared for a long, long moment into the looping continuation of white snow and black night. The vision made almost no sense, as though she were staring into the sea, trying and failing to find a measurable length of space. There was no way to bind it, no way to put a limit on the endless. Though seemingly only an arm’s length away, the end of the rope was tied to the infinite.

  Cass cursed and shook herself. Thinking like that would get her killed. Life wasn’t measured in the limitless. You paced it off, one step at a time.

  She adjusted her grip on the cooler with her right hand, tightened her left on the flag line, and plunged into the darkness.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Despite reading the diaries of expired explorers, and listening to all the warnings, and enduring TransAnt training sessions with titles like “How to Survive the First Hour,” Cass had never actually believed she might die in Antarctica. Too many people had come before her, too many safeguards were in place, life was too modern for her to die from something as mundane as the weather. Pulling Sheryl’s body—or what she’d thought was Sheryl’s body—onto the sled had shaken that confidence badly, but as time had passed, she’d gradually returned to the belief that life in Antarctica was, at its core, safe, that it was almost impossible that she could die from simply being at the South Pole.

  Until now.

  With her left hand clutching the flag line, she staggered forward against a wind that, had she tried to fall, would’ve held her perfectly upright. The flurries were so savage that they turned the spray of ice crystals into a physical attack that largely ignored her three layers of clothing, dotting her neck and face with searing pinpricks and hitting her hood with a sound like radio static at full volume.

  Visibility was zero. She knew that several red signal lights topped the COBRA lab building and, at just over a hundred meters away from the main station, she should be able to spot the lights from here, but the whiteout was total—she could see nothing but billions of snowflakes whipping past her face, barely illuminated by the frail red light of her headlamp.

  The single piece of good news was that, with the wind rushing at the speeds it was, there was little buildup on the ground, and so no drifts to push through. If she could simply put one foot in front of the other one hundred and ten times, and not let go of the flag line in the meanwhile, she would find herself at the door to COBRA. She could drop off the cooler, put both hands on the line, and walk back to claim her reward from Pete. Struggling against the gale, feeling the ice begin to make its way down her neck and between her shoulder blades, it crossed her mind that she’d come across as seriously cheap at nothing more than two desserts and an extra glass of wine. She must’ve been food-drunk.

  To occupy her mind, she began counting steps, kicking herself for not starting the moment she’d left the base. She might as well begin counting now . . . but how far had she come? Granted, it might seem like she’d been walking forever but, in truth, she’d been moving slowly, forging one step at a time. She’d only come thirty steps at best, so thirty it was. Thirty-one, thirty-two .

  Her mind wandered, lighting on subjects then taking off again, landing nowhere for very long, blown off course like the flurries around her. She thought back to the conversation she’d had with Vox, about the potential that she was the subject of a psychological test meant to push her to her emotional limits, and what she should do about it.

  From a number of perspectives, it seemed unlikely that she was the only one being tested. What kind of findings would they get by testing one person, under a single set of circumstances? It wouldn’t be worth it. Assuming that the theory of a station-wide test was real and not just a function of her suspicions, that meant that others were being tested in the way she was. But how many? And how often? And to what extent?

  Forty-five, forty-six .

  The answer was important, because three people staging a protest wouldn’t be effective, but ten times that number would. But how was she supposed to compare notes with the crew without tipping off Hanratty and whoever else was involved? What if half the base were subjects of the experiment . . . but the other half knew about it?

  She shivered, and not just with the cold. Imagination was the cork in the bottle of paranoia. Open it up and there was no end. What if this season’s winter-over had never been meant to have any scientific research benefit? What if the crew members had been recruited with some kind of experiment in mind? Was she delivering a meal to Jun the astrophysicist or to Jun the psychology post-doc brought in to test and record her emotional and mental reactions?

  Fifty-eight, fifty-nine .

  She shook her head, a futile physical gesture. Giving in to her suspicions wouldn’t work; she needed allies. And, anyway, she’d spent too much time with them to believe she could be fooled by Jun or Ayres or Biddi. No one could keep up an Oscar-worthy performance for that long.

  She cursed out loud, the words muffled by her mask and scarf. She didn’t have to give into paranoia, but that didn’t mean she was going to be someone’s guinea pig. Armed with the knowledge—or belief, at least—that she was being manipulated, she would stay alert, record the things that were done to her or around her, and face them all down once she was safely back stateside.

  Seventy-three, seventy-four .

  Seventy-four divided by one hundred and ten was . . . sixty-seven percent. She was two-thirds of the way through risking her life to deliver a single meal to a man because she felt bad for him and had been bribed with sugar. Actually, she corrected herself, she was just one-third of the way through. She still had to return to Shackleton to claim her reward.

  She pulled back hard on those thoughts like she was sawing on the reins of a horse. Think too hard about how far you had to go on the ice, and you were laying the groundwork for surrender. Focus on the task at hand.

  Eighty-two, eighty-three .

  Her body swayed in the wind like a mast as she paused for a minute to orient herself. The lights of the lab were still hidden. Moving with exquisite care, she turned in place and looked back at the way she’d come. A hollow feeling raced through her chest. Shackleton, normally lit bright by red spotlights at each corner of the building, was gone.

  Fear clutched at her and she squeezed the rope in her hands. Easy. Take it easy . Shackleton wasn’t so much gone as she was blind to it—her headlamp illuminated a curtain of snow that effectively blinded her beyond three feet. Even if the station wall had been an arm’s length away, she proba
bly wouldn’t have seen it.

  Well, there’s an easy way to test that, isn’t there? Swallowing her anxiety, she put the cooler down and slowly reached up to turn her headlamp off. Absolute darkness engulfed her and she had the disorienting sensation that she’d stepped outside her body. Only the relentless wind gave her any sense of place. She looked back the way she’d come.

  Shackleton was nowhere to be seen.

  A slight groan escaped her mouth; she clamped down on it. Relax. Nothing’s changed. You’re no more than a football field away from the station . Visibility, even for a one-thousand-lumen lamp, was reduced to just a few feet. If she’d used her brain and thought about it before turning around, she would’ve laughed to think that the lights of the station would be blazing like a lighthouse.

  The vista abruptly vanished as she turned her headlamp back on and forced herself to face front, away from the endless black. Carefully and intentionally clearing her mind, she returned to the march toward the lab, focusing on each physical step forward—literally looking at her feet and letting the flag line guide her—instead of listening to the wanderings of her mind.

  Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine. One hundred!

  Cass raised her head. The deep, dark vista she’d been staring at for twenty minutes stared back at her.

  COBRA should be ten, maybe fifteen, steps away. But there were no lights, no building.

  She stumbled forward—to hell with counting —the cooler banging against her leg. With the beam of the headlamp jogging up and down, she followed the line as she ran, five steps, six steps, her breath coming in rasps, until she saw that the flags simply . . .

  . . . stopped. One last post kept the cord in place for the final eight feet, but the excess whipped back and forth in the wind like a dying snake. The flag line led precisely nowhere.

  Cass stared at the end of the rope, unable to reconcile what she was seeing with what she’d been expecting. She took a few hesitant steps forward, then stopped. Where did she think she was going to go?

  The other end of the line leads back home . The thought was the only thing that kept her from panicking. Once again, she turned in place, swapping hands on the line as she did a slow-motion pirouette. Kneeling, she put the cooler down on the ice and pocketed the one or two portable food items, then left the cooler behind. It was a shame Jun wasn’t going to get his entire midwinter meal, but she had bigger problems than one man’s disappointment right now. She wouldn’t be heading to COBRA tonight—or ever, if she had her way. She was going straight back to Shackleton.