Dark Winter by William Dietrich

nickname a little less descriptive," Lewis said. "Vaguely heroic, perhaps. Like Stormwatcher. Skywalker."
    "It will never catch on." She hung up her coat. "Too nice."
    "Doesn't anyone have a flattering nickname?"
    "Neutral is the best you can hope for."
    "How did the tradition get started?"
    She plopped into a chair, shivering slightly as the tension of being in the cold outside was shed, her cheeks pink, her dark eyes bright. She seemed confident in this environment and he liked that. Her strength. Her energy. "I don't know. The Navy, maybe. Or the parkas. When we're outdoors it's hard to tell who's who: Everyone looks like an orange traffic cone. So they came up with name tags, except people didn't like that- it felt like we were at a convention- so some put them upside down. Names seem part of the world we've left behind. So people got tagged for their occupations. And it evolved, in the perverse way things do around here. You have noticed how perverse this all is?"
    "Wade Pulaski told me it's paradise."
    She laughed. "Cueball would say that."
    "That's his nickname? He called this place Planet Cueball. I thought he was referring to the terrain, not his head."
    "Rod says he looks like Queequeg in Moby Dick. I'd go with Jesse Ventura, or an old Yul Brynner movie. He's actually ex-military, which he doesn't talk much about except to hint he was into some extreme stuff. Scuba, climbing, biting the heads off chickens. Whatever. Apparently he didn't fit into ordinary life very well so he came down here."
    "Odd alternative."
    "Better than winding up a mercenary in Angola. I guess you could say that about all of us."
    "The South Pole saved you from Angola?"
    Abby smiled. "The South Pole saved me from being ordinary."
    There was silence as he considered this. Of course.
    "It's interesting I could detect your approach by your CO2," Lewis finally said. He pointed to his sampler. "It's like I have superpowers down here."
    "By the end of the winter you'll wonder if the instruments are an extension of you or if you're an extension of your instruments."
    The observation seemed to echo what Norse had said about machines. Had he made the same ramblings to her? "To what do I owe this visit?"
    "The official reason is that I wanted to check to make sure the broken computer is performing okay."
    "Wow. Every technician I've ever spoken to- after forty-five minutes on hold with excruciating music- wanted to get off the line as rapidly as possible. None ever called back to see if things actually worked."
    She smiled again. "You're in paradise, like Cueball said."
    "And what's the unofficial reason you've come for a breath of Clean Air?"
    "I wanted to check how you're getting along. It isn't easy being the fingie, and everyone's curious about you. So…"
    "Curious?"
    She looked at him wryly. "It's unusual to come down on the last plane like you did. And you're a geologist, not a meteorologist, which is kind of odd. And you quit some oil company, apparently. And…"
    "You came for the gossip."
    "I came for the truth. It's a small town, Jed. People talk. Speculate. If they don't know about a person, things just get made up."
    "Ah. So they send a comely lass to worm my secrets out of me. A spy. A temptress. A- "
    She wrinkled her nose. "Please."
    "But it's more than your undeniable fascination with me." Lewis grinned disarmingly. He was enjoying this. "You're an emissary of espionage. You were elected. Someone sent you."
    She looked disappointed. "It's that obvious?"
    "I'm just used to being ignored by women."
    "I doubt that." She paused to let him mentally log the compliment. "Actually, Doctor Bob suggested I visit. He said he's trying to write up a sociological profile of the base: who we are, why we're here. Then he'll track our attitudes over the winter. At the end- "
    "We're all toast."
    "Yes."
    "The good doctor already asked me to explain myself, you know," Lewis said.
    "He told me that," she admitted.
    "And?"
    "He said men will tell things to