"For a spy, you're pretty blunt. You might want to work on that."
"The truth is, I'm not very good at the whole human interaction thing."
"Who is?"
"I guess that's what Doctor Bob wants to know."
"So, do you want me on a couch?" he asked. "Should I blame it all on my parents? My unhappy childhood?"
"Did you have an unhappy childhood?"
"Dismayingly, no. Middle class, middle brow, middle life."
"Me neither. Wealthy parents, but nice, too. It's so annoying."
They watched each other for a moment, smiling slightly.
"Damn," Lewis finally said. "I don't know what Doctor Bob is going to find to do all winter."
"Well," she said, "you're not entirely normal. We're all wondering what a geologist is doing on an ice cap."
"Ah. Jim Sparco was desperate for a replacement. He's studying oscillations in polar climates spaced over decades and my predecessor took sick, as you know. Reading the thermometer is not that hard a job."
"What did your family say?"
"My folks are dead, actually. Accident."
"I'm sorry."
"It happened after I left home, quite a while ago. Anyway, I was pretty much alone. Job gone. Friends fleeting. No warm and fuzzy relationships."
"No significant other?"
He took her curiosity as a good sign. "I never stayed in one place, so girls didn't stay, either. There wasn't a lot holding me."
"Still," she persisted, "it's hard to find people to come down here sometimes, especially at the last minute."
"Yes. I was desperate, too."
She looked at him with honest curiosity. "What happened?"
He paused to remember. What had happened? The tumult of emotions he'd experienced was only slowly being sifted by his mind into a coherent story. "I went into geology because I liked explanations," he finally said. "Rocks were a puzzle out of the past, a trip back in time. They were also stationary and organized and understandable, compared to people. I liked mountain climbing, so it meshed with my hobby. But to make a living in geology I had to concentrate on one kind of puzzle: where oil is hidden. That was fine for a while. Exciting, even. Texas, the Gulf, Arabia. But then I wound up on the North Slope of Alaska, puzzling in a place we weren't really supposed to be, just in case Congress changes its mind someday about opening up the wildlife refuges to drilling. We were pretending to be backpacking tourists, but we were setting off shock waves to probe for oil."
"And you began to question what you were doing."
"No…" he said slowly. "It was like there was never any question, and then suddenly there was no question about quitting. The tundra did that to me."
She waited for him to explain.
"It's a place something like this one. Not snow-covered, not in summer, but treeless and stark with this low, everlasting light that seems to reach inside you. And yet it took me a month before I really noticed that. My mind was underground. Finally there was a rainstorm late one afternoon, dark and furious, driving us into camp, and then rainbows, and finally a plume, like smoke, curling over one ridge under that prism of light. At first I thought it was a fire, but how could a fire burn in a place that damp? Then I realized it was caribou. A drift of life in a place so empty that suddenly everything hit me like adrenaline. All my senses suddenly came awake. Do you know the feeling?"
She nodded, cautiously. "Maybe. Like falling in love?"
The analogy hadn't occurred to him, and he cocked his head. "Maybe. Anyway, what I was seeing was the Porcupine River herd. I'd seen animals, of course, but never animals in numbers like you see numbers of people- never animals to make you question everything you thought you knew about whose world this truly is. They came over a ridge and down to the Kavik River. I stood there in that light watching them for hours. And that was it. Suddenly the idea of spending my life looking for a pollutant struck me as profoundly unsatisfactory. Sneaking onto a refuge seemed wrong. People told me my dinner was getting cold, but I ignored them, and then that I would get cold if I stood out there all night, but I ignored that, too. It wasn't even night, of course, the sun never fully set. I didn't feel the cold at all. Everything just got rosy and soft. Finally, when everyone else was asleep, I pulled together some gear and started walking after the herd. I left a note so they wouldn't worry about me."
"What did it say?" she asked. She was looking at him appraisingly, finding herself liking a man who could be affected so profoundly by caribou.
His smile was wry. "I quit."
"I'm sure that did reassure them."
"One of the things I realized is that I didn't truly know a single person in that camp. Had never thought deeply about what I was doing."
"Nothing to hold you, like you said."
"Nothing to care about. Nothing to be proud of. I walked two days before I hit the Haul Road that runs from Fairbanks up to Prudhoe Bay. It was the loneliest two days I've ever had, and two of the best. They turned me inside out. Then some scientists came by in a Bronco and gave me a ride. I stayed at an ecological research camp at a place called Toolik Lake and that's where I met Jim Sparco. He was doing climate measurements in the Arctic and he's one of those rare omnivores interested in all kinds of science. We hit it off, talking about weather, geology. Climate and oceans come from rocks, you know. Volcanoes run the planet. We stayed in touch while I bummed around Idaho. I was running out of money, deciding what to do next, when I got a package from Sparco's lab in Boulder. It had a T-shirt inside that read, 'Ski the South Pole. Two miles of base, half an inch of powder.' Plus his telephone number. I called and the rest, as they say, is history."
"He sent it to a geologist."
"Yes, because he knew me."
"And because of Mickey's rock."
He was surprised. "How'd you know about that?"
"I told you there're no secrets here. It's a small place. Mickey went weird at the drill site one day last fall, evasive, and people have wondered ever since if he found something unusual. He seemed pretty excited for a guy whose project is over budget and behind schedule. Then a geologist? It's not hard to put two and two together. What else could he find in the ice but a meteorite?"
"He told me no one knew."
"People guess. There's always a lot of buzz about everything because there's nothing else to do. The question is, why did you come all this way to see it?"
"It's more like I agreed to see it in return for getting to come all this way."
She leaned forward, looking expectant. "And?"
"And what?"
"Is it significant?"
He stalled, wondering what to say. "Don't I get seduced first?"
"Sorry. Just twenty questions."
"You're the worst spy I've ever seen." He knew she was pumping him and that he should muster some annoyance, but he actually enjoyed the attention. "The fact is, he asked me to keep quiet about it. I'm not supposed to talk."
She nodded, her interest confirmed. "He wouldn't bring you down here if it wasn't important."
Lewis smiled like a sphinx. "Women are so snoopy."
"Women listen."
"Sparco is a friend of Moss's. Our astrophysicist wanted an opinion from a rockhound. I was unemployed. That's all there is to it. I haven't even done any tests yet."
"But what you saw is worth testing."
"We'll see."
"If it's the right kind of meteorite it could be big."
"For Mickey's reputation."
"That's not what I mean. You know that's not what I mean."
"What?" She was too damn smart, and he liked smart women.
"If it's a meteorite, it could be worth a lot."
The wind came up as evening approached. When Lewis walked back to the dome from the Clean Air Facility he felt the first true bite of winter. The temperature still hovered at sixty below but a rising wind pushed the windchill to minus one hundred. Dry snow undulated in ragged sheets across the ice, the flakes rasping at the fluttering nylon of his windpants. They stung the bits of skin that were exposed, his upper cheeks and temples. The wind made a low moaning sound as it blew, a discomfiting change from the earlier quiet, and when he followed the fluttering route flags to the dome he found the big bay doors had been closed against the first drifts. He yanked open a smaller door to one side and the wind pushed him as he stepped in, so that he had to lean back against the door to shut it. As he caught his breath he regarded the gloom of the dome with new gratitude. Inside felt safer. He could still hear the hoarse scratching of Antarctica. The blowing snow made it sound as if the aluminum dome were being sanded.