Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [147]
“I don’t know. My sister says I like to fix messed-up guys not that I mean you!” she added in a rush.
Frank only laughed. “That’s all right. Maybe your sister was right. I am certainly messed up, but you are fixing me.”
“And you me, believe me.”
But then, she went on, she had discovered by accident that he had chipped her, why she could not be sure; and a cold war, silent and strange, had gone on since then.
Frank shivered at the thought of this. They talked about other things, then. Their workouts, the weather: “I thought about you the other night when it got windy.”
“Me you too.”
Their windy night, oh my—
“I want to see you again,” she said.
“When can we?”
“I don’t know. I’ll look for a chance. There’s some stuff happening I may have to deal with. Maybe I’ll have something set up by next week.”
“Okay, next week then. Which one of us should call, by the way?”
“I’ll call you. I’ll start with this same number.”
“Okay good.”
He walked back to his van, passing first their elevator box on Wisconsin Avenue, then the little park where they had met the first two times. His Caroline places. This would be a new addition to his set of habits, he could tell, and all the rest would be transformed by it. He had gone feral, he had gone optimodal, he had become the Alpine man; and on Friday evenings he would get to talk to his Caroline on the phone, and those talks would lift and carry everything else, including the next time they met in person.
BUT FASTER THAN FRANK COULD FOLLOW, winter went from the sublime to the ridiculous, and then to the catastrophic. He was enjoying it right up to the moment it started killing people.
That night, for instance, it was cold but not terribly so; there wasn’t much wind, and its bite was invigorating. It made so much difference how you were experiencing it—not just what you wore, but how you felt about it. If you thought of it as an Emersonian transcendental expedition, ascending further in psychic altitude or latitude the colder it got, then it was just now getting really interesting—they were up to like the Canadian Arctic or the High Sierra, and that was beautiful. A destination devoutly to be wished.
But temperatures the following week plummeted from that already low point, an astonishing development no matter what they had been reading in the newspapers about other places. And that drop took them out to the equivalent of Antarctica or the Himalayas, both very dangerous places to be.
The first big drop was like a cold snap in a cold front, barreling in from Edmonton. It arrived at midnight, and by two A.M. he could not get warm even in his sleeping bag—a rare experience for him, and frightening as such. He fired up the space heater and cooked the air in the tent for a while, and that helped. But the heat sucked out of the tent the moment he killed the heater, and after a couple of burns he decided he had to go for a walk, maybe even a drive, to soak in some of the van’s warmth.
Climbing down Miss Piggy was a nasty surprise. He started to swing in the wind, and then his hands got too cold to hold on to the rungs properly, so that he had to hook his elbows over and hang on for dear life, waiting for the wind to calm; but it didn’t calm. He had to continue one rung at a time, setting his feet as securely as possible and then reaching down for another elbow hook. One rung at a time.
Finally he dropped onto the snow. He pushed the remote, but the ladder did not swing up into the night. Battery too cold.
Really very cold. You could only survive exposure in this kind of cold with the appropriate gear. Even ensconced in his spacesuit, Frank was struggling to stay warm. This was a temperature equivalent to being in the death zones of Everest or the Antarctic plateau.
And yet people were still out there in cotton. Out there in blue jeans and black leather jackets, for God’s sake. Newspaper insulation for the most hapless. And the animals, all but the polar ones—they would be dying if they weren’t in one of the shelters.