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The Arctic Circle, 1977:
LOLLIA CONSTANTIA.
daughter of Thessala, Greek,
and Marcus, Roman:
adopted daughter of the great Lucius Aurelius Cotta;
husband of Rutilia, Roman;
father of Gaius, Roman;
offender of the gods of Rome;
and, therefore enemy of the Senate and People of Rome,
did not feel the core bit of the Moradian rig neatly take a piece of her gracilis muscle from the right thigh, 8.2. meters beneath the glacial ice north of the Queen Victoria Sea.
The body was as still as an unborn thought in a dark universe, stooped on the bare side of her life, stilled on its way to death by the cold. Even the hair did not grow, nor did the enzymes and acids eat away at the cells. More still than death she was, stone-perfect.
The retinas of the slightly slanted eyes were solid. Likewise her ligaments. The blood that had stopped suddenly in the veins and arteries could be chipped with a pickaxe. Each hard corpuscle was where it had been when the body rolled nude, bouncing along the ice, as stiff as wicker, into what was then called the German Sea, far south and centuries before.
At that time, being lighter than water, it floated north and joined with other ice, and, being lighter than ice, it moved within the ice northward, one inch, sometimes a foot a year, sometimes many feet. While some ice broke off and moved south or east to warmer places merely to become water again, then mist, rain, and sometimes ice once more, this form remained in its unbroken water and moved north.
Life stopped.
No part touched oxygen until the core bit, on its way towards a deeper section of the earth, went through a small piece of the thigh and brought it up through a barrel core to a dark, chill night at the rooftop of the world.
It was the long night of winter, and the men who worked here covered their faces and hands with layers of leather and felt and nylon and all the living skin needed not to freeze into pale death. Timers, worn under the layers of arctic shields, buzzed when the men had been out more than their allotted number of work hours.
3 white domes, technological wombs in a frigid world, supported the live serving the drilling rig. Exterior tunnels, like rigid veins, stretched from the domes to the rig and between each other.
There were no roads up here, and the nearest warm life was an air base two hours away, snowmobile travel time.
Up from the ice came core samples, perfectly round pieces of ice. Arctic mittens guided the core tube coming up from this outer layer of the world, this external skin at the earth's cold top, and at one-meter intervals sawed off a section. Then the mittens cradled each section and carried it through a tunnel that felt warm, even though it was below freezing because it merely protected against the sharp wind. The derrick man brought the sample into the laboratory dome and laid it in a rack above a long white sink.
He took off his arctic mask and felt the mouth part crack in his mittens. His breath had frozen to ice.
The rockhound, the geologist for exploration, sat on a high chair over the sink. He was a big man and wore checkered long johns under a bright red shirt and worn blue jeans. He signaled for the derrick man to push the sample down from the holding rack to the sink.
The derrick man wanted to talk. Dr. Kitteridge Carson did not want to talk back. But if the man took off his mask, it meant he was going to stay. He would find something to start a conversation, which might start with the weather or the new equipment or the food, but it would end up with had badly the superintendent in charge of the crew was doing things and whose side the rockhound was on.
Carson, a big man of much flesh and bone and muscle, had to take the extra care that big hands needed with precision instruments. He shaved off an end of the core sample.
"Ice?" said the derrick man.
"Ice," said Carson.
"Is there anything you won't check, man?"
"I check everything," said Carson.
His round face was red, and the tufts of remaining hair mingled strawberry blond with white, and it would have been a very handsome face if only he weren't six foot three inches tall and closer to three hundred pounds than two hundred. He was bigger than most men of the small crew, even the roughnecks and roustabouts who were known for their size. He sometimes suffered a locked knee from an old football injury. He had an Ed. D. from the University of Chicago, but the men always called him Kit.
He felt the rotary drill, which had restarted, send its vibrations up through the floor, a new synthetic compound that a vice-president of Moradian, back in Houston, Texas, promised would use air as insulation so effectively, everyone could "walk around in his bare feet up there, and never need anything more than slippers inside at most."
Kit hadn't even bothered to pack slippers and wore boots indoors. Those who had brought slippers, like the young superintendent, kept them in their duffles. The superintendent had told Kit Carson that packing slippers showed faith in Moradian, in Moradian engineering, in Moradian management, and Moradian integrity.
Kit Carson had worked for Moradian for 25 years. He was going to retire after this last exploration. He had faith that his employer would pay for his retirement. He had 25 years' worth of faith. He also knew cold-weather explorations. He didn't pack slippers. He had more faith in the ice than in the new Thermal-Floor-Pack.
He brought two books instead. His size helped with that. Oilmen didn't particularly like people who read books, nor did they trust them. Somehow Kit's size, and his origins in a one-horse Texas town, compensated for his reading. He even read poetry. This they overlooked because, while he was "funny," he was also nice.
The derrick man finally found something to talk about, something good enough to unzip his Arctic jacket.
"Hey, Kit," he said, "what the hell is that?" He pointed to a pale discoloration in the tube of ice, like a pale banana skin, smaller than a jagged fifty-cent piece. Kit swung an overhead fluorescent bulb circled in a jeweler's magnifying lens over the discoloration. It always happened in these cold-weather domes that you began to even smell your flesh. It was like living in a rotten old sock.
"Are you staying or going?" he said to the derrick man, without looking up. "If you stay, take off that outer layer before you start sweating up. Your body's gotta breathe. Or get the hell outta here."
The piece had streaks of pink. Kit put his left forefinger and thumb around the bizarre discoloration. He could see the ridges in his fingers under the lighted magnifying glass. He pressed the finger ridges against the discoloration. It gave way, but there was no crunch of crystals cracking.
Carson suddenly looked at his hands. Then back at the discoloration.
"Did you cut yourself?" he asked.
"Hell no," said the derrick man.
"You can cut yourself and not even feel it," he said.
"No. I'd feel it. I'm warm. I'm A-OK."
"Then nothing," said Kit. "Thanks. Aux revoir."
The derrick man peeled off his outer coat down to a thin windbreaker covering a layer of sweaters. He scraped the melting ice from his Arctic mask.
"What nothing?"
"Nothing is nothing," said Carson.
"C'mon, Kit. Shoot. Yer not gonna be like the asshole running this gig. C'mon. What is that thing?"
"A piece of flesh."
"You're puttin' me on!" said the derrick man, shocked. He bent over the sample in the sink. The choppy surface was now glistening smoothly along the tube, water reflecting over the ice. It was melting. The derrick man bent low over the discoloration, sniffing.
"It smells weird," he said.
"That's you," said Kit.
"Might be," said the derrick man. "Well, what kind of flesh is it? Whale? Walrus?"
"Human."
"There's a person down there?"
"No way. That's 8.2 meters."
"A body?"
"Maybe."
"Where does human flesh come from but a body?"
"Maybe it's a piece of an arm."
"Do you think we're on top of a graveyard?"
"No," said Kit. "It's solid ice for a good way down. We've got ice for some time. I don't know of any people who bury in ice."
"Then what's a body doing down there?"
"I don't know. Look, don't make the crew more nervous than they have to be. It's all we can do to fight this damn cold."
"Sure, Kit, but what would a person be doing this far up? Do you think there are other oilmen?"
"That ice we're going through is very old, thousands of years. I don't know how old. But more than several centuries. We've been using fossil fuels for only a single century."
"What about the Europeans?"
"By we, I mean man. Mankind. This happens sometimes near the surface. It won't do anyone any good if you mention this. Please!"
"I swear to God, Kit, no one'll know shit from these lips. Like they're sewed closed. Swear to God."
"Thanks," said Kit.
45 minutes later the tool pusher, driller, and 2nd-shift driller were in the lab dome, taking off their outer layers of clothing, asking to see the hand.
"No hand here," said Kit. He was working on the possibility of electric logging the borehole if there should be a sufficient heat increase at lower depths. It was a possible backup measure to core sampling.
"What we picked up at eight meters," said the tool pusher. "You know what we're talking about, Kit.
Carson went to the sink. The ice had melted away into a small retainer drain, leaving an odd cookie-thick wedge of glistening material. It looked like a gun wadding from an 18th-century musket. It curled.
"That's it?" said the tool pusher.
"That's all," said Kit.
"Not much," said the tool pusher. "It's from a person?"
"Probably," said Kit. The rotary drill had to be working a short crew with all the men in the lab. Perhaps the superintendent was out there. He was young and didn't trust anyone anyway, Carson knew. He also knew that if the superintendent weren't so new and out to make a name for himself, the drilling crew wouldn't be in the dome seeking reasons to help him fail. It happened this way on explorations that were cut off from civilization, as much due to distances as to the company's not wanting people to know where they explored, if possible. The superintendent of the crew had to be good and seasoned to prevent the kind of flare-up that was coming.
"Are we drilling through bodies these days?" said the tool pusher, who three times in Kit's presence had felt forced to tell the superintendent how many sites he'd worked on and how many came in before the superintendent was born.
"We didn't drill through a body. We drilled alongside a body. That flesh isn't big enough to be through," said Kit.
"It's wounded. Look, pus," said the tool pusher.
"That's not pus."
"What's that pinkish, yellowish straw kinda stuff?"
"Blood."
"Couldn't be. Blood's red. I never heard o' no blood that weren't red."
"There are things in the blood that make it red," said Kit, and he forgot whom he was speaking to because then he went on. "Red blood cells have to combine with the oxygen in the air to be red. In your body, the blood is pale. But now you take something or someone who's been at below-zero temperatures for a while, the red cells get destroyed and the white cells increase. So what you get is pinkish, and sometimes it could be yellowish, like straw."
"What about red-blooded? Ah never heard of pink-blooded. Or yellow-blooded Americans?" said the tool pusher, his flat Texas twang ringing like nasty prairie dust in Kit's face, looking for a fight.
"Red and blood are also symbolic. Red has always been a symbolic color. In ancient Rome, it was called purple, and today we call it royal purple. Although we're not sure what they meant by purple. It could be grape purple or blood red. You see, words...."
"Blood's always red," said the pusher.
"When it's got red blood cells, yes. But when red blood cells have been driven out, it's straw-colored."
"Looks like pus," said the tool pusher.
"If you insist it's pus," said Kit, "then it's pus."
"How do you know it's blood?" said the tool pusher.
"I've read. I've also seen some work done in low temperatures. In Oslo there's a Chinese doctor doing experiments in thermal reduction. We've used him for emergencies."
"What's thermal reduction?" said the tool pusher.
"Oh, c'mon," said Kit.
"You could've said cold," said the tool pusher. "The skin's gray. Was he black, white, yellow?"
"I don't know. I'm not sure it's a he. I'm not even sure it's human. Whatever that is, it's been there a long, long time."
The tool pusher accused Kit of being a suck-up for the superintendent, and Kit only had to stand up from the stool he had perched his backside on and the men put on their outer gear.
They almost bumped into the crew superintendent entering the lab, ripping off his cold-weather mask. They pushed past him moodily. He angrily stared at Kit, veins throbbing in his forehand.
"All right, where is that damn thing?" he demanded. Kit pointed to the sink.
"And that is.....?" said the superintendent.
"Some little grayish thing in some yellowish stuff," said Carson with flat respect.
"That's nothing," yelled the superintendent, a ferret of a man, his temper always near the surface and now bursting out in the lab.
"That's what I said," said Carson.
"Then what's this bullshit I'm hearing about us drilling through someone? What the hell are you doing telling that to the crew?"
"You, sir, are not listening to me," Kit told the superintendent.
"You're not listening to me!" the superintendent roared back. "That's a piece of elk or reindeer down there. No way that's human!"
"Why not human?" said Kit. His voice was even and he was remembering every word he said. It might be needed if this young idiot tried blaming Kit for whatever happened, if, God forbid, anything did.
Suddenly there was a cathedral silence in the dome. Nothing whirred around them. The silence came like doomsday trumpets in a nightmare. The drill had stopped.
"Aw, crap!" moaned the crew superintendent.
"Your machinery can't afford downtime at these temperatures," said Kit.
"Oh, it's my machinery, now? Not ours? When we're through here, Carson, the first thing I'm gonna do is kick your ass!"
He snapped his mask back on and ran skidding out of the lab dome.
Kit shrugged. He would hold his tongue because if he could hold his tongue for a quarter-century, he could hold it for one more project that would lead to his retirement. Whether they drilled in, striking oil, or whether it was a dry hole, he would collect his pension from Moradian….if he couldn't be blamed for trouble.
But it was as inevitable as it was unwanted that he became involved as a mediator between the crew and the superintendent. They chose his lab to fight.
"You've got two minutes before that down machinery needs blowtorches to restart it, and that means you may not get to restart it," Kit shouted into the noise. They turned to him.
Now they could hear the wind, like a giant sucking maw, reminding him that the machinery had given up during its pitiful temporary life in the long, cold night. If nothing else, Kit wanted to hear the grinding drill move so as not to hear that terrible wind.
The superintendent was assigning blame for the stilled machinery when Kit interrupted that announce that it was now one minute and thirty seconds.
"What would satisfy you?" Kit asked the tool pusher.
"Respect," said the tool pusher, adding, "for the dead."
"We'll say prayers for the elk down there if that'll make you happy," said the superintendent.
"Think we should dig it up?" asked Kit.
"Don't know any other way to settle this bullshit," said the tool pusher. "If we find out what we've got down there, it might help shut him up!" The tool pusher jabbed an angry finger at the superintendent.
The superintendent stiffened as if getting ready to brawl. "Shut me up? Who the hell d'ya think you're talkin' to, fella?"
"Hey, we don't want any trouble," said Kit, standing and using his massive body as a peacekeeping instrument. "I just wanted to find out where everybody stood while the machinery froze and your bonuses went. Just wanted to know."
"All right, for your sake, we'll use a crew and probably wreck the rig to dig up some fossil. But I gotta insist that you sign a paper for it," said the superintendent.
His dark eyes twitched and his head bobbed. He had just taken a vote in his mind and was announcing the election results that Kit should sign a paper taking responsibility.
"No," said Kit. "I'm just trying to keep the facts in front of us all. He nodded to the crew, a glum, hostile group, packed together in their arctic wear like a cramped sports warehouse. Kit noticed one man perspiring now. It could be dangerous outside. Sweat became ice.
"I never heard of a crew digging up a fossil. We're looking for oil, not archaeology," said the superintendent. He was smaller than the crew, and he glowered as if trying to make up for it. "Go ahead. But I ain't gonna stand around just to watch something this stupid. I'm going back to the rig and I want help now. Whoever wants to dig in the ice, go ahead on your own time."
The driller and two roughnecks went with the superintendent through the passage while Kit plotted out where the piece of flesh was, and where, if there was a person, it might be. He took the exact point where the discoloration in the ice core had happened and drew a theoretical ball around it, seven feet in all directions.
"It's going to be a job," said Kit.
"We've got jackhammers. We've got a John Deere. We've got everything. They didn't want us running out of parts," said the pusher.
"I know," said Kit.
And what he didn't tell the tool pusher was that whatever they found would only have to be re-buried, if it were a person. But the tool pusher wouldn't have been interested. There was a fight going on, and whatever was down there was the issue being fought over. The fight was really between men.
Kit sketched in a rough diagram. The tool pusher asked Kit if he wanted to join the digging, and Kit refused. The superintendent, who had been waiting until the rebellious tool pusher left, came into the lab to speak. The talk was out of Management 304, Harvard Business School. It was problem-solving. It was goal-oriented.
Kit Carson passed gas and went back to the electronic log. They were going to need it now for sure.
"All right, Kit, what did I do wrong?"
"In this kind of exploration in this part of the world, it takes kind of a subtle hand to get the crew calmly working."
Kit felt banging jabs on the soles of his feet as little cracking coughs came from outside. The jackhammers were boring through the ice. They were going after the body.
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean you're ambitious."
"I don't want to end up like you, Kit. I don't want to end up a geologist after 25 years."
"All right."
"I don't mean to be insulting, but you had everything, Carson, from a doctorate to being from the same town as the Moradians and the Moslers to playing football for that cow college the company supports."
"That's what you want. I've got what I want."
"You could've been the president of this company."
"What do you want?" asked Kit Carson. His voice was soft, somewhat weak.
"For me?" asked the superintendent.
"No, from me," said Kit.
"Support."
"I'm a geologist. I make less than you. I'm thirty years older than you, and I take orders from you."
"Then, goddam it, support me!"
Kit was quiet. He'd been quiet for 25 years, and he only had to be quiet for the rest of this project. He was good at it. A person got good at anything he practiced, even silence.
Four days later, after much repacking of the upper borehole, the John Deere---as the men called the multipurpose cold-weather tractor vehicle---groaned, hauling up something. The whirring of the drill stopped.
Carson timed it. After 45 seconds, he felt the whir of the rotary drill come through the thermal pack floor again and up the soles of his feet. The men had done their digging and hauling in good time. And, more importantly, they had continued drilling while they had gotten down to where they wanted to go with the jackhammers and picks. The jackhammers had stopped a full day and a half before the drill stopped, which meant they had gone into the final work by hand power.
"Yechhhh!" said the tool pusher entering, about half a coffeepot of drinking after the drill had stopped two hours earlier in the day. "It's awful. We put it in one of the unheated domes, the windbreaker. I don't want that damn thing melting. It's weird. Did you see it?"
"What you dug up?"
"Yeah. Yechhh," said the tool pusher, shaking his head and making sounds as if he were clearing a bad taste from his mouth.
"No," said Kit. "I didn't see it, and I don't want to see it. There are two things I want, tool pusher. I don't want to have anything to do with what you dug up. That's immediate. Long-range, like 5 weeks maximum. I want to retire with my pension money."
"It was a human body, Kit. It was a woman...." said the pusher. And then pausing, "Once."
Carson withheld his answer. "You don't want to know about it, right? asked the tool pusher. Kit knew he wanted some comment, some explanation, for the body that had been found and whatever condition it was found in. Just a body did not cause that kind of revulsion in a tool pusher, least of all an experienced one who'd been around oil fields.
"A woman?" said Kit Carson. "Tell me more."
"OK," said the tool pusher.
The body, as Kit found out, was small. A little lady, 5' 5". But what had unnerved the crew, according to the derrick man and two roustabouts, was that the little lady was nude.
"Whoa! Hugh Hefner would love this chick," said one.
"The core tube took out a piece just under her ass. From the thigh," said another.
The body was christened Angel and remained in the windbreaker dome for a week, as the drill bit went into the first layers of earth. A duplex pump had to be winched out of the windbreaker dome, and a variation of a bull-nosed reamer bit, for rotary, had to be installed. But two roughnecks dropped the pipe string, which shattered in a cold that made metal as brittle as glass. And that was another delay. The drilling was going badly.
"We snaked it out with a catline," the tool pusher told Carson later, referring to how the shattered pipe string was removed from the hole.
Kit nodded.
"We got ourselves a boll weevil, friend," said the pusher, referring to the newness of the superintendent. "I've never seen one this green, not at an isolated site."
"This kind of weather is not good for that kind of talk," said Kit at last. "This kind of weather tolerates virtually nothing."
"Well, whaddya say, rockhound?"
"I say it's damn sloppy, dropping a deadline anchor. You know everything becomes more brittle at these temperatures."
" 'Cept Angel in the shed. You know she didn't get no facial hair."
"Do I look like her beauty operator?" growled Kit.
"Well, hair grows on every human after death, even on women. Angel's didn't.
"They grow because the hair follicles are alive even after the body is dead. But this body was 8.2 meters down in ice."
"But hair can grow through ice."
"Low temperatures reduce and sometimes stop physical action. That's why you found her with her skin on."
"Is that so?"
"If we hit Angel somewhere in an Indonesian jungle, you wouldn't even have found the bones."
"But how did she get here without clothes on?"
"I don't know."
"We're two hours snowmobile time to an air base. How did she walk here nude? And don't tell me she strolled there in the summer, 'cause this shit is permanent up here."
"Nothing is permanent," said Kit.
"All right then, how did it get up here, rockhound?"
"Ice moves, tool pusher."
"Up here?"
"It's been there a long time."
"We shouldn't have dug it up."
"You didn't ask me then."
"Yeah. Well, we should've let Angel stay."
"Put her back then. Use jackhammers."
"We can't do that now. You wouldn't say that if you saw her. I've seen dead bodies, Kit. They're meat. This one's----somehow---alive."
"Nonsense!"
"We can't put Angel back. No one of would go for it!"
Kit's cot was in the laboratory. At one of the inner chambers of the laboratory dome at the side was the downhole tester he'd assembled himself. It measured the pressure of existing conditions. It was very important. As Kit lay down at the prescribed time for sleeping---you have to sleep by the clock when you don't have the sunrise and sunset---he noticed part of the downhole tester was under his cot, and he hadn't put it there.
When the superintendent came in later for his twice-daily geological briefing, Kit mentioned this.
"You're lucky. These assholes have gone through tools lately like Cracker Jacks. You've got yours. Angel has cursed this site. She has, Kit. I don't believe in ghosts or nothin', but Angel's spirit is ruining this. Angel is ruining my career."
Two nights later, Kit woke up in terror and he didn't know what terrified him. He looked around the lab, and everything seemed to be all right. The lab smelled somewhat rank, of course, and undoubtedly it would be even worse if he'd gotten some fresh air and entered it new. But that was normal. Something was incredibly wrong. He didn't know what it was, but it was wrong. His feet sweated in his sleeping socks and his stomach curdled and tightened, and then he realized the drill had stopped.
And he was awakened. The sound had been the constant background humming: the drone coming up through the floor had started as annoying and had become necessary as his body had adjusted to normal feelings. Now it was stopped. The silence had awakened him.
2:00 A.M. And it was stopped. Kit got an interdome line working and finally got in touch with someone. There had been an accident, a serious one.
Somehow the drill got working two minutes and forty-three seconds later, but the superintendent, his ferret face strained with deep, dark circles under his eyes, came to Kit and said they had to get Angel out of the site.
"Nobody's sending a plane here," said Kit. "You've got that John Deere up here with the plow in the windbreaker to push the ice and snow back over everything if we drill in. They don't want some pilots getting locations over the air. That's why we drove this stuff in, everything."
"Kit, you're just a friggin' geologist. Stay in your element. They're not paying you enough to worry about that."
"True," said Kit Carson.
"Can you get the body out of here?"
"You want your geologist to leave? You want your rockhound off-site?"
"Yeah."
"We've got roughnecks and roustabouts. That's what they're for. Let them get rid of it."
"They won't do it, Kit. Maybe you'd better not look at the body either."
"Do you want me to take this body away from the project and bury it somewhere?"
"Away. Go to the air base. Snowmobile it away at noon. There's the best light then. Take it to the air base."
"I can't show up at an air base with a body unexplained," said Kit.
"Keep it in its tarp. The crew says you know some doctor who can use parts and stuff, frozen."
"Well, talking to the crew again, I see. That's good. But I want a signed document ordering me to leave the base. I need it. This is my retirement. I've put in a lot of consecutive years without vacations to get this. I can't walk off my last site without a signed and witnessed document.
"You got it, Carson."
Shortly before noon, Kit bundled up against the cold. He put the document, signed and witnessed, against his chest under the long johns, nylon socks under wool socks, and a sweater over the long johns, and pants over the long johns, and nylon outer pants over the pants, and the arctic boots over the socks, and two layers of gloves, and a head mask, and wool head pullover, and a jacket with a head covering over all of that. Then he left the lab and made his way with the tool pusher, driller, and others following him.
Inside the windbreaker dome, they pointed to Angel. It was a tarpaulin-covered mound resting on a rubber tire, with cleats so sharp and new they looked as if they could cut paper. Above the reddish brown tarpaulin, white frost had formed on a strut. Many had breathed their recently, Kit observed. Their breath had made the frost. There had been a lot of looking.
A floodlight with a merciless glare made Kit feel he was entering some strange antediluvian temple of a hostile god---its incense, heavy motor oil; its alter, the tire; its object resting on top. The tool pusher flipped open the tarpaulin, and Kit saw what had upset everyone so much.
In a mound of blue-gray ice, a body on its side was running. He could see the long black hair and large clear sections of white skin. Its left arm in front, its right arm in back, its left leg forward, right leg in back, it appeared to be running. It was running. It was running, thought Kit. It was running and someone had stopped it. Like a movie frame, it had been stopped.
Its right rear thigh had that smooth and even borehole through the outer flesh. It was the only smooth cut on the dark blue mass before Kit's eyes. He circled to the front of the body.
Its eyes were closed. Its mouth was open. There was the tongue. Dead tongue in a dead mouth, yet seen so clearly. It appeared to be praying. The left arm in front seemed to be asking for something. It was nude all over. Bare as a baby. Yet muscular, sensuous, shapely. And little.
The little lady was so small Kit's arms could stretch from head to toe.
"What do you think, Kit?" asked the tool pusher.
"I think she's somebody I should stay away from," said Kit.
Which would have been a wise move on Kit's part, had he known that Angel had more than likely been born into a brutal and decadent ancient world, one governed by the law of the jungle rather than the law of men.
"You wonder where she was running to when she was frozen up like that," said the tool pusher. "Like she was headed somewhere and she was stopped. Is that what you're thinking?"
"The ice will make her too heavy for the back seat," said Kit. "We'll have to sled her behind my machine."
He wanted to start right away, while he had that brief hole of light. He was fairly sure he would reach the air base without incident if he took precautions. But this was not an American interstate road. If he made mistakes, if he got careless now or panicked driving off in some desperate direction, there could be two solid corpses up here.
"Goodbye, Angel," said the tool pusher as they strapped the tarpaulin cover to a sled hitched to the snowmobile. Kit patted his chest, feeling the paper against his breast. This was his last site in 25 years. He didn't say goodbye to the men.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
