He didn’t mention what he had asked Gunvald to do, because he had decided to take Pete’s advice to heart. He wasn’t going to trust anyone. Except himself. And Rita. And Brian Dougherty.
Stepping out of the cave into the wildly howling night, Harry discovered that the snow had at last given way entirely to an ice storm. The tiny spicules were harder than mere sleet, needle-sharp, glittering in the headlamps, coming along like great clouds of diamond dust, on a course nearly horizontal to the ground, hissing abrasively across every surface they encountered. They stung the exposed sections of Harry’s face and began immediately to plate his storm suit with transparent armor.
The supply shed at Edgeway Station was a pair of joined Nissen huts, in which the expedition stored tools, spare parts, any equipment that wasn’t in use, comestibles, and the other provisions. Just inside the door, Gunvald stripped out of his heavy coat and hung it on a wooden rack near one of the electric heaters. The coat was sheathed in ice, and water began to stream from it by the time he had taken off his outer boots.
Although the trip from the communications shack to the supply shed was a short one, he had been chilled as he’s shuffled through deep drifts of snow and prickling clouds of wind-driven ice spicules. Now he reveled in the blessed warmth.
As he walked to the back of the long hut in his felt boots, he didn’t make a sound. He had an unpleasant but unshakable image of himself: a thief in a strange house, prowling.
The rear half of the supply shed lay in velvety darkness. The only light was the small bulb at the door, where he had come inside. For a moment he had the eerie notion that someone was waiting for him in the shadows.
He was alone, of course. His uneasiness arose from guilt. He didn’t like having to do what he was there to do, and he felt as if he deserved to be caught in the act.
Reaching overhead in the blackness, he located the light chain and tugged it. A naked hundred-watt bulb blinked on, shedding cold white light. When he let go of the chain, the bulb swung back and forth on its cord, and the supply shed was filled with leaping shadows.
Along the back wall, nine metal lockers stood like narrow, upright caskets. A name was stenciled on the gray door of each, white letters above the set of three narrow ventilation slits: H.CARPENTER, R. CARPENTER, JOHNSON, JOBERT, and so forth.
Gunvald went to the tool rack and took down a heavy hammer and an iron crowbar. He was going to have to force open five of those lockers. He intended to breach them one after the other, as quickly as possible, before he had any second thoughts that might deter him.
Previous expeditions onto the icecap had learned that every man needed a private space, no matter how small, even a few cubic feet, that he could regard as his and his alone, where he could keep personal belongings and where inadvertent trespass wasn’t possible. In the cramped environment of an Arctic research station, especially in one established with minimum funding in an age of tight money and especially during particularly extended tours of duty, the average person’s natural preference for privacy could rapidly degenerate into a craving for it, a debilitating obsession.
There were no private quarters at Edgeway Station, no bedrooms where one could sleep alone. Most huts housed two, in addition to various pieces of equipment. And the vast, empty land beyond the camp offered no refuge for anyone in need of solitude. If one valued his life, he simply didn’t go out there alone, not ever.
Often, the only way to have solitude and actually ensure it for a few minutes was to visit one of the two heated toilet stalls that were attached to the supply shed. But it wasn’t practical to cache personal effects in the toilet.
After all, everyone had at least a handful of items that he preferred to keep private: love letters, photographs, mementos, a personal journal, whatever. Nothing shameful was likely to be hidden in the lockers, nothing that would shock Gunvald or embarrass its owner; scientists like themselves, perhaps excessively rational and all but compulsively dedicated to their work, were a bland lot, not the sort to have terrible dark secrets to conceal. The purpose of the lockers was merely to maintain a totally personal space as a way to preserve each person’s necessary sense of identity in a claustrophobic and communal environment where, in time, it was easy to feel absorbed into a group identity and thereby become psychologically disassociated and quietly depressed.