She led him down to the river, far enough from the camp that they would not disturb anyone with their conversation or their secondhand smoke. "Watch out for rattlesnakes," Nina warned Sam as she opened the packet and held it out to him.
"Are they around here? Do you have a light, by the way? I didn't pick up my jacket."
"Yes, here you go." She pulled a lighter from her pocket. "I think there are snakes here. If not, there's plenty of other deadly stuff — coyotes and the like, scorpions. Don't sit on a scorpion, will you?" As she lit his cigarette, Sam noticed that the device he had assumed was a light was actually Purdue's little folding tablet.
"I thought we were supposed to hand all our gadgets in?" Sam said, taking a grateful puff.
"Fuck that," Nina settled herself on a large, flat rock by the river and pulled off her shoes to dangle her feet in the water. "It would take more than some vague nonsense about 'connection' to persuade Dave to go give minutes without this. It's his favorite toy just now." She paused, waiting for Sam to speak, and then it struck her that the topic might be a little awkward. "So what did you make of all that stuff this evening?" She reached for the first alternative subject she could think of. "I wanted to look over and see how you were taking it, but I knew if I made eye contact with you I'd end up laughing and get us both in trouble."
"What, you mean you weren't sold on all the 100 percent genuine, definitely not made up some time in the 1960s Native American mythology? You do surprise me."
"It just pisses me off," she said. "I'm not keen on the idea of making money by selling a watered-down version of someone else's culture. To be honest, I nearly balked at the whole thing when Dave invited me to join him for a Vision Quest. I came because I wanted to see whether it's possible for these things to be done with any kind of integrity or respect for the history that they're laying claim to."
Sam laughed gently. "Of course, you did. Spoken like a true history scholar, Nina."
She went quiet. It took Sam a moment to notice, because he was accustomed to lapsing into companionable silence with Nina, or breaks that occurred naturally while they both smoked. She picked up a stone from the shale bank beside them and lobbed it into the water. "Not anymore," she whispered.
Little by little, in between long drags and long silences, Nina began to tell Sam what had happened after their last encounter at the university. After Matlock's book had come out to great fanfare, it left Nina in the unenviable position of being asked about it by staff and students. Had she known about Matlock's expedition? Was it true that she had been there too? Had she worried about Matlock when he insisted on going alone into uncharted areas of the ice station in search of Nazi artifacts? Knowing that she had been a much more proactive member of the expedition party than her boss — indeed, knowing that he had actually attempted to ensure that she would not be part of the expedition — Nina had found this galling. The fact that Matlock had appropriated her research and a handful of artifacts that rightly belonged to her and Sam made things even worse.
Sam nodded. He remembered how upset she was by being done in and he still felt bad about helping Matlock with his book and causing a rift between him and Nina's possible romance. But he knew that they had put that behind them during the last collaborative journey. Still it vexed her, of course, because it was the genesis of her resentment.
"Then when my annual review came up, the bastard had the audacity to tell me that I wasn't an enthusiastic enough member of the team — as if we were ever a fucking team! That department was a nest of vipers, not a team. And he said that the department wasn't happy that I'd taken a sabbatical before Wolfenstein! Never mind that if I hadn't, he wouldn't have his precious book.
Then he had all these shitty remarks about my shooting for tenure, of course disguising his smugness under a smooth delivery, which he thought sufficed as 'advice'… " she sneered and paused for a second, then continued her rant, "Anyway, he made all sorts of irritating comments about how I'd better start toeing the line a bit more if I wanted to have a career in academia, and said that maybe once my fellowship was up I should try a different university and maybe shift my focus to something along the lines of gender theory. It wasn't such bad advice, but coming from him… I'm not going to be told that I'm not allowed to write about anything other than the role of women in the Third Reich, especially not by him. I might not have been able to stop him cheating me, but I don't have to let him patronize me into the bargain." She looked up at the sky and under her breath she added, "Wish I could introduce that fucker to Calisto… "
Sam could not help but smile at the thought of Purdue's female ex-bodyguard leaping into Matlock's office, ripping his misogynistic face off in a comic book spill of justice.
Nina's anger spent, she took a deep breath and reached down to scoop some cool water in her cupped hands. She poured it straight over her head. It cascaded down her bobbed black hair and trickled onto her pale skin, catching the moonlight. "It's so hot," she said. "How are you coping? I'm melting out here."
Sam wondered about the new position he played in the Nina game. She was so nonchalant about it all, as if she had never noticed their closeness while working on the Spear of Destiny in Purdue's sinister laboratories. Alas, Sam decided to let it go and enjoy the fact that they were at least talking, that they were once more in each other's company.
"Where's your light? Take a look at this." Sam pulled up the side of his T-shirt to show Nina the heat rash that had been developing down his left side during the course of the day.
"Ouch. Well, I don't have that, at least. I might have no job; I might have torched any prospects I had of a career in academia by telling the head of my department to go fuck himself; I might have no clue what I'm doing with my life; but I haven't got a heat rash. Have you got anything to put on that? Of course, you haven't. Try talking to Cody about it; he'll probably be able to give you something. For a man who arrived here with nothing but a small backpack, that man's got supplies for everything.
"That Hunter guy managed to get himself bitten by something while we were all down by the river — I don't know what, probably a mosquito or something — and Cody disappeared for a couple of minutes and came back with a whole range of antihistamines. Pills, creams, capsules, drowsy, nondrowsy… he must have had a dozen different kinds. Who just carries all that around with them?"
"Sounds like a hypochondriac," said Sam. "Though I must admit, I wondered where all the cooking stuff came from. They got dinner ready in no time. Must be a chest freezer stashed away under a rock or something, chock full of frozen lentil dinners. He probably buys them in bulk from some crap catering company that pads them out with floor sweepings."
"Ha, probably." Nina stubbed out her cigarette, smoked right down to the filter, and carefully tucked the butt in her pocket. She tapped gingerly at Purdue's device until it flashed up a digital clock. "Christ. It's after midnight. That's, what, about 6:00 AM back home? I still haven't adjusted. I suppose we should head back and try to get some sleep." She trailed her hand over the smooth rock. "I wish I could sleep out here without getting eaten by something or getting baked alive when the sun comes up. The tent's a bit close for my liking."
"Well, you know, I'm always game for a midnight cigarette if you need company," Sam offered. "Especially because these people don't seem to take kindly to the idea of us pumping ourselves full of toxins on their time."