Abby knew her stuff.
The light would alert anyone watching, but no one should be watching. The others had blinded themselves by barricading the dome.
Lewis set off for his workplace, boots crunching in fresh crust. It was eerie how dead the rest of the station looked. Everything was in silhouette under the stars, the antennas mute, the telescopes blinded. It was like walking a ghostly ruin. The snow was a frozen sea, an undulating series of drifts he strode up and down like a boat, his trail leading from one half-buried flag to the next. He wondered about the distant future. Would humans stay at the Pole forever or retreat someday? Would everything they had built eventually become as ghostly as the abandoned Navy base?
While fairly confident he wouldn't be missed until morning, Lewis flicked off the deck light once he clambered up the metal steps to reach Clean Air. He also didn't take the chance of turning on a light inside his old workplace. Instead he flicked on an auxiliary heater and used his flashlight to pick his way to one of the computers, dragging some furniture over to block its glow from the windows. He didn't want to be interrupted by pursuit. Only then did he turn the machine on. There was the familiar whir and bleep, and a faint crackle as photons danced in the tube.
Lewis checked his watch. The satellites that tied them to the Internet cleared the horizon at intervals of eight hours. The next one was rising now.
The temptation to simply sound a cry for help was powerful but was unlikely to bring any meaningful response. He couldn't stay out here to wait for a reply because he'd be missed in the sauna and a hunt would be on. And even if the National Science Foundation decided to dispatch the Texas Rangers at his strange SOS it would take at least days- and more likely weeks, in winter- to mount the logistics to fly to the Pole. All the military transports were back in the United States, their National Guard crews had dispersed, and their cold weather gear was stored. The Pole was designed to be self-sufficient until October. The winter-overs were facing a danger they'd have to deal with themselves, and before they could deal with it he had to understand what their peril was.
There was now one person of uncertain past, one person leading them to an even more uncertain future. Lewis launched a web search.
Robert Norse.
He started with the usual string of search engines: Alta Vista, Yahoo, AOL, Google, MSN. The results were frustrating because the name was too common. There were scores of references to Bobs and Norses, but none obviously fitting their psychologist. He turned up Robert's Rules of Order and a reference to Norse mythology, a link to a Warhammer game and a construction company in Minneapolis. "Come on…" There were even puzzling references to New Zealand, referring to outdoor hiking trips there. What the hell was that about? "Damn brainless Internet clutter."
He tried searching professional journals but quickly became lost in a bog of poor indexing and the ceaseless accumulation of academic publication. So much stuff that no one could read it, and so dense no one could understand it. Brilliant people in a cocoon of irrelevance. He didn't have the vaguest idea who Norse might have written for anyway. And what would an academic study prove?
Stymied, he decided to try news media databases instead. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal came up empty, but a Los Angeles Times brief from two years before mentioned Norse as a visiting lecturer at San Diego State University. The sentence came in a story about a psychological conference on human adaptation to extremes. It said Norse was planning polar research. "We're looking at the adaptability of people to stressful conditions," he'd told the reporter. Well, that made sense. Frustratingly, there was nothing more. The university web site had no listing for Norse: no picture, no biography, no vital statistics.
The city's newspaper?
The San Diego Union-Tribune electronic archive turned up "Norse" sixty-two times, in stories that ranged from a football lineman for the Chargers to a feature on Scandinavian cooking. It was near the end of the list that he found a two-paragraph news brief and whispered, "Bingo."
It was dated February 5 and datelined Christchurch.
LOCAL MAN FOUND IN NZ the headline read. The story began:
Robert Norse, a southern California research psychologist affiliated with San Diego State as a guest lecturer, survived two weeks in the southern New Zealand wilderness and walked out under his own power on Friday, New Zealand authorities said today.
Norse was reported missing on January 23, having disappeared from a guided walk in Mount Aspiring National Park. Searchers had given up hope when the American reappeared, hungry but in good shape, more than 30 kilometers from where he'd become lost. Refusing medical help, he left immediately for Christchurch where he is overdue to join an American scientific contingent assigned to Antarctica. Authorities said he gave little information about his ordeal.
There were no follow-up stories and no article in the archives about Norse's original disappearance. Lewis began trying other communities in a widening orbit around San Diego, hunting for their newspapers and trying their electronic databases. It wasn't until he'd broadened his search to the Orange County Register near Los Angeles that he hit pay dirt again.
ORANGE COUNTY MAN MISSING read the headline.
Robert Norse, an American scientist scheduled to conduct sociology studies at the South Pole, has disappeared during a hiking tour of New Zealand, a tour company reported yesterday.
A rare summer snow squall in the high country had obscured a popular trek route and Norse apparently lagged behind during bad weather. A search for him the following morning proved fruitless.
New Zealand authorities are continuing to look in the rugged area.
Norse, who is single, is a self-employed psychologist, writer and social theorist who occasionally teaches at area universities. Authorities said his most recent appointment was at San Diego State University.
So: Norse was what he said he was- a psychologist. And he'd mentioned something about New Zealand. Yet he'd never talked about being lost in New Zealand, even though everyone on station had depleted their life stories by now. It must have been a traumatic experience to be lost for two weeks. That was a hell of a long time in the woods. Yet Norse never referred to it? Odd.
What if his disappearance was intentional?
Lewis felt a rising excitement, that prickling that comes on the edge of discovery.
But why? What could he have wanted in the New Zealand wilderness? Some kind of personal test? Some validation for his theories of individual survival?
Lewis pondered, glancing at the clock at the bottom of the computer screen. It had taken him half an hour to hike to Clean Air from the Hypertats, fifteen minutes to get some heat and fire up the computer, several more to get a connection… Pika would be up soon. In half an hour he needed to race back to the dome if he didn't want to set off an alarm. The satellite was drifting out of range again anyway. Yet he was no closer to an answer than before.
There seemed no other obvious avenues to pursue on the Internet and so he considered the station's databases. The hard drives of the victims had been corrupted by a magnet, Abby had reported to him, the killer apparently smart enough to scramble any potential clue there. Even if there was an electronic link to Norse or anyone else, the culprit had squelched it. Lewis tried logging on to the station's uncorrupted astronomy database but found no reference to the psychologist, which was not surprising given the astronomers' attitude toward Norse and his trade.