The Winter Over(17)

He tilted his head and smiled again. “You ever sat in a cornfield?”

The other man pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “No, I haven’t.”

“If you had, you’d know there’s nothing to do. I sat and thought and I listened. When I figured I could sneak back into the house without getting a whipping, I went.”

“To what did you listen?”

He hesitated. “The wind.”

“Why the wind?”

“It was the only thing out there.”

“What did it sound like?”

He paused. “Like wind.”

“Was it the same every time?”

His eyes flicked around the room, following the shelves, counting the books. He was unaware his mouth moved as he did so. After a moment, he answered. “Not always. When it went through full cornstalks, it was different than later in the season.”

“After the corn had been harvested.”

“Yeah.”

“And what was different about it?”

“It hummed, a little.”

The man nodded. “Did you ever fight with your sister?”

“I told you, she whipped me.”

“How about when you got older? Bigger? Seven years isn’t much of a physical difference when you’re sixteen or seventeen.”

He shrugged. “I guess. Yeah.”

“Did you hit her when she wasn’t expecting it? The way she hit you?”

“Once or twice.”

“When you were bigger and started to hit back, did you hurt her when you hit her?”

“No.”

The man said nothing.

“I told you, I didn’t.”

“A lot of people would want to get back at someone who had punished them so much. Are you saying you never felt the urge to dish out some retribution?”

He gave another shrug, provided from an endless supply. “I made myself head out to the fields when I felt that come on real strong. When it got to be too much. When I got the jumps.”

“And you listened to the wind?”

“Sure, if it was blowing.”

“Do you still feel them?”

“Feel what?”

“The jumps.”

“Sometimes.”

“What do you do when you feel them?”

“I take a walk outside.”

“Does the wind sound different here?”

“Yes.”

“How is it different?”

He grinned. “Hell of a lot colder’s all I know.”

The man smiled back at him. “Winter is coming and it’ll be dark all day, every day. That makes taking a stroll pretty hard. What are you going to do then?”

“I guess I’ll have to walk it off in the halls. Work out in the gym, maybe.”

Another nod. The man reached a long arm back to his desk and flipped through a stack of papers at the edge of his reach. He found what he was looking for, then studied the paper for a few moments, flipping it back and forth to check something. “Are you on any medications?”

“A few.”

“And you brought those with you? Enough for nine months?”

“Sure. I don’t need them all the time.”

The man nodded, thoughtful, then smiled again and stood. “I think that’s all I need for now. But I’d like to talk to you next week, if you don’t mind.”

“Why? Do you think I’m crazy, Doc?”

“Of course not. No more than any of us. But I get the jumps myself, sometimes. I find it helps to talk things out. What do you say?”

He thought about it. “Sure. But I can handle it. I’ll be fine.”

The other man smiled like his teeth had been painted onto his face. “I’m sure you will, Leroy.”





CHAPTER EIGHT


Cass sat backwards in a plastic chair, resting her chin on her forearms, savoring the peaceful moment now that she’d put the tour with Sikes and his crew behind her. She squinted into the morning sun, her face almost pressed against the glass of the library window like a three-year-old ogling a fish tank. The view swallowed her entire field of vision. For a thousand miles in that direction, there was not a single human habitation.

She felt a rush of gratitude for the architect or site planner who had decided that the east-facing view from Shackleton would be of a vast, pristine expanse of ice. The western and southern sides—marred by outbuildings, the airstrip, and the deep-ridged tracks of hundreds of industrial vehicles—seemed to her to be the worst kind of accumulation of people and their things. It couldn’t be an accident that there was nothing man-made visible on this side of the station. Someone had planned this view.

Interestingly, while the vista might be unblemished, it wasn’t uninterrupted or uninteresting. The base had been built on a plateau and the escarpment it capped ran for hundreds of meters in a half-moon shape to the right. If she leaned away from the window and used a little imagination, she could curve her arm so that it matched the proportions of the ridge exactly. Angular shadows cast by frozen cliffs broke up the landscape while subtle blue variations in the sastrugi made the whole look more like a choppy sea than an unending field of very solid ice.

In time, probably, the technology would improve and the number of residents at Shackleton would increase until today’s bustling research station would be merely the central building of a larger complex. Traffic and everyday commerce would compromise the land, and it would take a monumental effort to find a place where the past and present hadn’t infiltrated the panorama.