Jerry Oltion - Fait Accompli

“I quit using it three months ago,” I told her.

“I see.” Pause. “Well, send us what you have, and we’ll send her down for a personal interview after she’s had a chance to look it over; but if you don’t mind the wait, we’ll schedule your shuttle last so we don’t hold up the other stations’ supplies.”

“Sure, sure, I can handle it,” I said. “As long as I know it’s temporary.”

“Fine.”

I linked the computer to the radio and transmitted the files. I expected Duvall to sign off as soon as she received them, but when the bleeps and twitters of computers talking had finished, she said, “Have you heard from station Alpha recently?”

Alpha. That was Ed Lawrence, at the north pole. “No,” I answered. “Not for a couple of weeks. Why?”

“We can’t reach him by radio.”

“Not surprising,” I said. “We don’t talk much between us down here, and he’s quiet even by our standards. He probably just switched it off.”

“We get an automatic response to our coded signal,” she said. “The radio works, but Lawrence won’t answer. Or can’t answer.”

I looked around the dome. Six meters across, two and a half high, and most of that filled with equipment and supplies. Could I ignore a radio call in a space this small? Not likely. “What’s the status of his station?” I asked.

“Operational,” Duvall answered. “We get continuous input from all the instruments except temperature. The last reading for that shows minus sixty, dated spring, uh, fifty-third.”

“We just have four months here,” I explained. “Spring fifty-third would have been—” I checked the X’ed-out calendar on my desk “—ten days ago. He’s dead then.”

My certainty surprised her. “How can you know that?”

“Because when something breaks in a station, you rejoice,” I said. “You’ve got something to do. You don’t necessarily hurry, but you do go out and fix it. If Lawrence hasn’t fixed his station in ten days, it’s because he’s not alive to do it.”

“Perhaps he’s only sick.”

“Ten days is a long time to be sick. Especially sick enough to keep you from fixing a thermometer.” I thought a moment, then asked, “What were the readings just before it went out?”

I waited for Captain Duvall to pull the information out of her computer. “Fluctuating around minus forty until two days before the malfunction, then dropping steadily to minus sixty for a day, then nothing. Why do you ask?”

“Look at barometric pressure and snow depth to be sure,” I said, “but I’ll bet it was storming. You don’t know what that means until you’ve seen it first hand, but it looks like Lawrence went out in it to fix the thermometer and got lost.”

Duvall said, “That does seem to be the logical explanation. Poor soul. He was due to come back this trip, too.”

I nodded, a useless gesture over the radio. “Yeah, too bad, but I pity his replacement more, especially if he’s got a vivid imagination.”

“Oh?”

“Ghosts, Captain,” I said. “They’re bugging me every night, and mine came from forty light-years away. I don’t even want to think what it’d be like living alone for six months in a dome where somebody died.”

“I’ll, uh, have the counselor discuss it with her,” said Duvall. “In the meantime, prepare for your own visit. By the counselor, I mean.”

I grinned. “Right.”

“Duvall out.”

I set the receiver back in its cradle. Lawrence was dead, huh? I felt a moment of sorrow at his loss, but I’d meant what I told Duvall. His replacement was in for a rough time.

I was packing my clothes a few hours later when the radio buzzed again. I expected it to be the shrink, but it turned out to be Duvall again. “I’ve got bad news,” she said without preamble.

“You found Lawrence.”

“We didn’t get that far. The shuttle was on its way down when the attitude control rockets failed. It crash-landed about three hundred kilometers from station Alpha, along meridian one-twenty. There is at least one survivor.”

“What do you mean, ‘at least’?”

“We can’t make radio contact, but someone set off the emergency beacon.”

“I thought those went off by themselves in a crash.”

“This was evidently too soft an impact for it,” Duvall said. “The transporter didn’t start broadcasting until ten minutes after the shuttle went down. Someone had to have triggered it manually.”

“Oh. So why are you calling me?”

“Because we don’t have another shuttle ready for flight. It’ll take us at least a week to assemble one, and by that time, if the survivors are injured, they could die.” Duvall sounded exasperated. I could tell she thought I was an incompetent boob and a pain in the ass to boot, and she wouldn’t have been talking to me unless she had to.

“You want me to go after them,” I said. “What, twelve hundred kilometers or so over the ice?”

“You’ve got a crawler, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “All the stations do, so we can reach our remote instruments, but I’ve never gone more than a hundred kilometers in mine and that’s on level ice. There’s a mountain range between here and there. I’d have to climb a moving glacier and hope there’s a pass or something at the top leading onto the polar ice sheet.”

“We can map a way for you from orbit.”

“Can you keep me from falling into a crevasse?”

“I thought you had radar for that.”

She had me there. The crawlers did have radar that would supposedly spot voids in the ice. I just didn’t want to trust my life to it. I guessed I was about to give it a try, though. Meridian one-twenty ran to the east of me by about fifteen degrees, but that still put the downed shuttle closer to me than anyone else. Damn. Here I was within a day or two of getting the hell off this dirty iceball of a planet, and now duty and honor were sending me off to get myself killed.

“What about storms?” I asked. “I’m not driving through a blizzard.”

She sighed again, and I could tell what she was thinking. A weather monitor who didn’t even keep track of the weather. Well, screw her; I kept the damned instruments running.

“The closest frontal system is four days west of you,” she said, and the silence grew while she waited for my answer. We both knew what it had to be.

“All right, all right, I’ll go,” I said. “But I want the widest, smoothest path between here and there, even if it takes me out of the way a little. The object is to get there in one piece, not play hero along the way.”

Duvall’s smile was almost audible. “We’ll get to work on it.”

“Good. Dump it into my computer when you get it; I’ll be outside getting the crawler ready.”

“Right. Duvall out.”

I left the radio on and made a circuit of the dome, tossing my medical console, some extra clothing, food, and anything else I could think of into boxes for the trip. The crawler would make about sixty kilometers an hour on the level, which would get me to the crash site in less than a day if it was all flat. I could count on maybe half of it being so, but the other half was going to be the trick. I packed for three weeks, and wondered if I’d go hungry before I got back.

After I’d stacked all my boxes of stuff by the door I pulled on my environment suit, a thick, heavily insulated overall—complete with sealed helmet—that felt like a construction worker’s spacesuit. It didn’t have air tanks, but the heater still made a clumsy bulge at my side. I tried not to knock it on the wall as I pried the outer door open.

It opened to the southeast, on the leeward side of the station. The wind whipped around in eddies, blowing loosened ice inside and howling around the edges of the door. I took a cautious step out. The sun blinded me for a moment; it was still late morning. Good. This time of year I would still have fourteen or fifteen hours of light for traveling, maybe more if I made it far enough north. After the artificial light in the dome the sun looked like an orange spotlight in the sky, but I knew I’d get used to the color soon enough.