Suddenly he sprang to his feet, stiff-armed the unprepared Clyde Skinner to bowl him over, and grabbed Abby, his forearm around her throat. It was fluid, an action that had been mentally rehearsed, with the quick grace of an athlete. She went rigid and yelled.
"Get him!" Pulaski roared.
But before the survivors could rush, Norse lifted his other arm.
He had a pistol, its muzzle gaping like the twin barrels of a shotgun. It was crude and homemade, with no apparent magazine or revolving chamber, but was as black down its twin barrels as the bottom of the world. They presumed the gun held at least two bullets. "Back off or I kill some more," Norse growled.
They stopped, frightened by the weapon.
He grinned at their acquiescence, pinning Abby tighter.
"I told you not to open my telescope."
The Things We Share
Amundsen-Scott base was built by a nation that guarantees the pursuit of happiness. A good psychologist will tell you that all of us chase that elusive and torturous goal by seeking four things.
The first is freedom. Freedom? Mine had been robbed by Fat Boy, whose blundering mistake had bound my destiny to his and left me to drag his disgusting ghost of quivering blubber everywhere I went. With his death, choice collapsed in on me like the dirt of the grave.
Security? The kids and the mountain had robbed me of that, too. When I came down off that glacier I could never rest. Never rest! My career became migratory, my jobs makeshift, and my savings sifted away. I had no home, no institution, no identity, except as the man they whispered about. I'd whirl sometimes to catch them and they'd look at me like a curiosity, pretending that they hadn't been judging, but I knew better. I knew better! I'd been stripped of every certainty except my own moral innocence.
Recognition? All my life I've longed for respect. My ideas are significant. My insights are creative. My mastery at the Pole is a demonstration of ability already displayed a hundred times. Yet I was continually passed over. Snubbed. Outmaneuvered by lesser men and women, the victim of gossip and innuendo and condescension. It worsened after the climb. Every rejected paper was a rebuke. Every missed invitation was an accusation. I'd been shorn of all respect, judged guilty without trial. Damned for my own survival!
So at the very end I longed for the fourth thing the shrinks say we all need, response. For love, and if not love then at least friendship, and if not friendship then at least companionship, and if not companionship then at least acknowledgment, the comfort of knowing your words are listened to, your comments receive response. And at the South Pole I thought I'd found that. In the Three Hundred Degree Club I thought I'd found salvation.
The women shouldn't have betrayed me. They shouldn't have betrayed me!
I was ready to stop. You have to believe that. I was ready to stop. Tyson had fled, and it would be child's play to let all suspicion remain on him. I had a case study to prove my point and a valuable meteorite to give me freedom and security. I was on the very edge of happiness, I'm sure of it.
Yet Dixon couldn't see my possibilities. She'd been blinded by a lesser man, Lewis, and at my moment of triumph she ran to a man of clay.
So when I went to help the weeping Gabriella that night, I expected we could find some kind of solace with each other. Some kind of consolation. What I wasn't counting on was her anger, her fury at herself, her foolish longing for love, and her irrational focusing of her own poison on me.
She turned me down. The slut, after her rejection by Lewis, turned me down! Suddenly she wanted self-respect!
I found myself out of control without understanding why I even cared. Damn her! I was fighting with her, holding her down, my hands somehow around her throat- I'm not that kind of man at all! — but ordained by God, it seems, or doomed by the devil, to finally take the station down with me. I really didn't plan to end it this way. I simply wanted to choke out every hateful thing I ever imagined people saying.
And as she died, her eyes bulging, her frantic bucks becoming more feeble, her look became an accusatory question.
Had I become a coward on that mountain?
If I'm to have any peace, I have to erase them all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
But the hair on his head began to grow again…"
Norse's voice crackled over the galley intercom as condescending sermon, the paternal recitation of a school principal. The experiment had been conducted and its meaning was about to be revealed, so his own particular collection of winter-over lab rats had been ordered at gunpoint to stay in the galley while he announced his intentions from Cameron's old office in the other module, next to the radios he'd destroyed. Abby was being held hostage to ensure their compliance until he completed his lecture and his preparations to leave. The rest listened with gloomy apprehension.
"Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it…"
"He's gone balmy," Dana Andrews whispered.
"He always was," Pulaski said grimly, angry at himself. "The more we listened to him, the more over the edge he went. It fed him. We fed him."
"What the hell is he talking about?" Geller asked.
"I think it's stuff from the Bible," Lewis said, beginning to revive from his near-execution. He had just enough frostbite to make his nose and fingers sting like fire and his shudders were receding only with the help of some soup Pulaski had microwaved. The pain as his skin warmed helped keep him from collapsing. "He quoted some to me when I arrived. It's the story of Samson, destroying the temple of the Philistines."
"I ain't no Philistine. That's something bad, right?"
"It is if he pulls down our temple."
"My God, is he going to destroy the bloody station?" Dana asked.
"He might if we let him. He gets off on toying with us."
The intercom crackled again. "We've finally been stripped of pretense, haven't we?" Norse broadcast. The disembodied sound had an eerie power and Lewis realized that the psychologist had done what Lewis had asked him not to do: Norse had gotten into their heads. It wasn't just a voice, vibrating in air. His presence reverberated in their minds. "I'm revealed as Oz, puppeteer of souls. You're exposed as a thin biologic film on the petri dish of the Pole, as easy to erase as a smear of mold. You joined a society that can't protect you. That can't even recognize its own internal danger. How does that make you feel?"
There was no way for them to reply.
"I've been giving you an experience similar to that which I faced once," Norse went on, a teacher to his students. "In the face of group incompetence I had to rely on myself for salvation. I've been punished for it ever since. So the question is, was my misfortune simply a fateful tragedy of bad luck? Or is it modern civilization, the Age of the Committee, that is to blame? Are there so many of us now, in so many clubs and consortiums and families and clans and boardrooms and unions and seminars and societies, that we've forgotten how to think for ourselves? Act for ourselves? Be ourselves? What happens when the lemmings lead us to nuclear Armageddon or a stock market crash or global climate collapse or starvation from overpopulation or off the edge of a cliff? Will it be the feel-good commune that saves us? Or will it be individual preparation and reliance and free will? When I acted for myself was I exhibiting the worst of human nature? Or the best? I think evolution suggests the latter. I think we've been so cushioned by mere numbers that we've forgotten what evolution demands."