Dark Winter Read Free

and forearms tattooed with a bear and eagle. Here was somebody easy to remember.
    "It doesn't look high."
    "That's because it's flat. You're sitting on ice almost two miles thick. Our elevation is ninety-three hundred, and the thinning of the atmosphere at the Poles makes the effective altitude closer to eleven thousand. Walking out of that transport is like being dumped on the crest of the Rockies. Your body will adjust in a few days."
    "I feel hammered." The short walk from the plane had made him ill.
    "You'll be racing around the world before you know it."
    "Around the world?"
    "Around the stake that marks the Pole." He sat down. "Wade Pulaski. Chief cook and bottle washer. Best chef for nine hundred miles. I can't claim any farther because Cathy Costello back at McMurdo is pretty good, too." McMurdo was the main American base in Antarctica, located on the coast.
    "Jedediah Lewis, polar weatherman." He shook.
    "Jedediah? Your parents religious?"
    "More like hippies, I think. When it was a fad."
    "But it's biblical, right? You're a prophet?"
    "Oracle of climate change by temporary opportunity. Rockhound by training. And it's actually just another name for Solomon. 'Beloved of the Lord.' "
    "So you're wise."
    His head was pounding. "I take my name as God's little joke."
    "What do you mean by rockhound?"
    "Geologist. That's my real job."
    "So you come to the one place on earth where there aren't any rocks? Doctor Bob will have a field day with that one."
    "Who's Doctor Bob?"
    "Our new shrink. NASA sent him down to do a head job on us before they plant too many people on the space station. He's wintering over to write us up while we mess with each other's minds. He thinks we're all escapists."
    Lewis smiled. "Rod Cameron just told me we can't quit."
    "That's what I told Doctor Bob! It's like being paid to go to prison!"
    "And yet we volunteered."
    "I'm on my third season." Pulaski stretched out his arms in mock enthusiasm, as if to claim ownership. "I can't stay away. If the generators stop like they did last night we've got maybe a few hours, but we always get them running again."
    "Why'd they stop?"
    "Some moron turned the wrong valve. Rod went ballistic, which meant nobody was in a mood to confess this morning. But it was a stupid annoyance, not a threat. And you're going to learn that as long as you don't freeze to death things are really good down here, especially now that the last of summer camp is leaving and the bureaucrats are ten thousand miles away. I give you better food than you'd get back home and there's no bullshit at the Pole. There's no clock to punch, no bills, no taxes, no traffic, no newspapers, no nothing. After today everything calms down and this becomes the sanest place on earth. Cozier than most families. And after eight toasty months you come out with your head straight and your money saved. It's paradise, man."
    Lewis reserved agreement. "You got any aspirin?"
    "Sure." The cook got a bottle from the kitchen and brought it back. "You feel like shit right now, but you'll get better."
    "I know."
    "You even acclimate to the cold. A little."
    "I know."
    Pulaski went to the counter where food was passed. He bent under it to get a commissary-sized soup can, its label stripped and its inside cleaned to a bright copper. "Here, your arrival present."
    "What's this for?" Lewis realized he felt stupid from the altitude.
    "You'll drink all day and pee all night, this first night. It's your body adjusting to the cold and altitude. This can saves you about three hundred trips to the real can."
    "A chamber pot?"
    "Welcome to Planet Cueball, fingie."

CHAPTER TWO
    Lewis's room was windowless and just ten feet long. He could span its width with lifted arms, his fingertips brushing each wall. It was one of a row of cells on the second floor of the science building, another orange metal box that claimed its grandiose title by virtue of having a small computer lab downstairs. His room looked every day of its