The Night People (17 page)

“What
is
it?” Mason shouted to Care. “What in hell’s happening?”

The answer came through the door. The two hunters were back already, carrying the fallen Schlitzer. He was bleeding from a wound in the stomach.

“On the table,” Dr. Fathion shouted, slipping his arms into a white plastic jacket that had a large red cross on front and back. “Get my instruments. Quickly, men!”

Crowder was issuing orders as the others grabbed for their rifles. Someone shoved Mason’s into his hands. Then he was facing Crowder as the lame man spoke quickly. “It’s a sneak attack by the Khakis,” he said, talking in an officer’s monotone. “Two hours before the official start. Somebody get those shutters closed.”

As soon as he had spoken, one window shattered under the ripple of gunfire. Roderick Care pulled Mason down along the wall. “We’re in for it this year,” he said. “It’s another Pearl Harbor!”

“You mean this happens—”

Care was hugging the wall, edging toward the window with his carbine. “Last year we were lucky—only two wounded. I suppose we were due.”

“But this is madness!”

“No more so than any war.” Care lifted his head to the window and fired a quick burst with his carbine. “Didn’t you ever wonder why so many people get shot on the first day of hunting season?”

I
’M NO DETECTIVE. IN
fact, most of the time I’m more of a snowman, plowing through head-high drifts and 70-mile winds that plague us nine months of the year in the barren area of northern Canada beyond the permafrost line. But when you’re living all alone with one other man, 200 miles from the nearest settlement, and one day that only other man is murdered—well, that’s enough to make a detective out of anybody.

His name was Charles Fuller, and my name is Henry Bowfort. Charlie was a full professor at Boston University when I met him, teaching an advanced course in geology while he worked on a highly technical volume concerning the effects of permafrost on subsurface mineral deposits. I was an assistant in his department and we struck up a friendship at once, perhaps helped along by the fact that I was newly married to a sparkling blonde named Grace who caught his eye from the very beginning.

Charlie’s own wife had divorced him some ten years earlier and vanished into the wilderness of Southern California, and he was at a stage in his life when any sort of charming feminine companionship aroused his basic maleness. The three of us dined together regularly, and a close friendship developed along fairly predictable lines.

Fuller was in his early forties at the time, a good ten years older than Grace and me, and for as long as we’d known him he’d talked often about the project closest to his heart. “Before I’m too old for it,” he’d say, “I want to spend a year above the permafrost line.”

His opportunity came before any of us thought it would, and one day he announced he would be spending his sabbatical at a research post in northern Canada, near the western shore of Hudson Bay. “I’ve been given a foundation grant for eight months’ study,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity. I’ll never have another like it.”

“You’re going up there alone?” Grace asked.

“Actually, I was hoping I could prevail on your husband to accompany me.”

I blinked and must have looked a bit startled. “Eight months in the wilds of nowhere with nothing but snow?”

And Charlie Fuller smiled.

“Nothing but snow. How about it, Grace? Could you give him up for eight months?”

“If he wants to go,” she answered loyally. She had never tried to stand in the way of anything I’d wanted to do.

We talked about it for a long time that night, but I already knew I was hooked. I was on my way to northern Canada with Charlie Fuller.

The cabin—when we reached it by plane and boat and snowmobile—was a surprisingly comfortable place well stocked with enough provisions for a year’s stay. We had two-way radio contact with the outside world, plus necessary medical supplies and a bookcase full of reading material, all thoughtfully provided by the foundation that was financing the permafrost study.

The cabin consisted of three large rooms—a laboratory for our study, a combination living-room-and-kitchen, and a bedroom with a bath partitioned off in one corner. We’d brought our own clothes, and Fuller had brought a rifle, too, to discourage scavenging animals.

We had all the comforts of home, and we settled in for a long winter’s stay.

The daily routine with Charlie Fuller was great fun at first. He was surely a dedicated man, and one of the most intelligent I’d ever known. We would rise early in the morning, breakfast together, and then go off in search of ore samples. We came to know the places where the endless winds chafed against bare rock, where the earth was shielded from the deep blanket of snow. And best of all in those early days, there was the constant radio communication with Grace. Her almost nightly messages, staticky and distorted as they were, brought a touch of Boston to the Northwest Territory.

But after a time Grace’s messages thinned to one or two a week, and finally to one every other week. Fuller and I began to get on each other’s nerves, and often in the mornings I’d be awakened by the sound of rifle fire as he stood outside the cabin door taking random shots at the occasional snowy owl or arctic ground squirrel that wandered near. We still had the snowmobile, but it was 200 miles to the nearest settlement at Caribou, making a Saturday night’s trip into town out of the question.

Once, during the evening meal which had grown monotonous with repetition, Fuller said, “Bet you miss her, don’t you, Hank?”

“Grace? Sure I miss her. It’s been a long time.”

“Think she’s sitting home nights waiting for us—for you?”

I put down my fork. “What’s that supposed to mean, Charlie?”

“Nothing—nothing at all.”

But the rest of the evening passed under a cloud. By this time we had been up there nearly five months, and it was just too long.

Christmas came and went, and the winter wind howled outside from morning to night. We fought our way through the snow to gather specimens when we could, and spent the worst of the days in the small lab running tests. The cabin’s heat came from a single gas stove for which we had a number of fuel tanks, and the light was supplied by a small generating unit. It wasn’t exactly like home, but it would have been passable except for the human element.

It was fantastic, it was unreasonable, but up there—200 miles from the nearest human being—there began to develop between us a sort of rivalry for my wife. An unspoken rivalry, to be sure, a rivalry for a woman nearly 2000 miles away—but still a rivalry.

“What do you think she’s doing right now, Hank?”

Or—

“I wish Grace were here tonight. Warm the place up a bit. Right, Hank?”

Finally, one evening in January, when a particularly heavy snow had chained us to the inside of the cabin for two long days and nights, the rivalry came to a head. Charlie Fuller was seated at the rough wooden table we used for meals and paperwork and I was in my usual chair facing one of the windows.

“We’re losing a lot of heat out of this place,” I commented. “Look at those damn icicles.”

“I’ll go out later and knock them down,” he said.

I could tell he was in a bad mood and suspected he’d been drinking from the adequate supply of scotch we’d brought along. “We might as well make the best of each other,” I said. “We’re stuck here for another few months together.”

“Worried, Hank? Anxious to be back in bed with that luscious wife of yours?”

“Let’s cut out the cracks about Grace, huh? I’m getting sick of it, Charlie.”

“That’s too bad!” He left the table and went into the lab. After a moment I followed him in and found to my surprise that he was slumped against a cabinet, staring at the floor. “Leave me alone,” he said.

“Are you sick?”

“Sick of this place, sick of you!”

“Then let’s go back.”

“In this storm?”

“We’ve got the snowmobile.”

“No. No, this is one project I can’t walk out on.”

“Why not? Is it worth this torture day after day?”

“You don’t understand.” He turned to face me, just barely in control of his emotions. Oddly, though, the anger seemed to have passed from him, replaced by something very close to despair. “I didn’t start out life being a geologist. My field was biology, and I had great plans for being a research scientist at some major pharmaceutical house. They pay very well, you know.”

“What happened?”

He leaned against the wall to steady himself. “The damnedest thing, Hank. I couldn’t work with animals. I couldn’t experiment on them, kill them. I don’t think I could ever kill a living thing.”

“What about the animals and birds you shoot at?”

“That’s just the point, Hank. I never hit them! I try to, but I purposely miss! That’s why I went into geology—rocks, the earth. That was the only safe thing, the only field in which I wouldn’t make a fool of myself.”

“You couldn’t make a fool of yourself, Charlie. Even if we called it quits and went back today, the University would still welcome you. You’d still have your professorship.”

“I’ve got to succeed at something. Hank.” He ran a hand through his graying hair. “Don’t you understand? It’s too late for another failure—too late in life to start over again!”

He didn’t mention Grace the rest of that day, but I had the sinking sensation that he hadn’t just been talking about his work. His first marriage had been a failure, too. Was he trying to tell me he had to succeed with Grace?

I slept poorly that night, first because Charlie had decided to walk around the cabin at midnight knocking icicles from the roof, and then because the wind had changed direction and set up a banshee wail in the chimney. I got up once after Charlie was in bed, to look outside, but the windows were frosted over by the wind-driven snow. I could see nothing but the crystal formations of frost on every pane.

Toward morning I drifted into an uneasy sleep, broken now and then by the occasional bird sounds which told me the storm had ended. It would be pleasant, perhaps even sunny—though the bitter subzero cold might remain for days. I heard Charlie up and around, preparing breakfast, though I paid little attention, trying to get a bit more sleep. An icicle fell, clattering against the side of the cabin.

Then, sometime later, I sprang awake, knowing I had heard it. A shot! Could Charlie be outside again, firing at the animals? I stretched out in the bed, waiting for some other sound, but nothing reached my ears except the perking of the coffeepot on the gas stove. Finally I got out of bed and went into the other room.

Charlie Fuller was seated in my chair at the bare table, staring at the wall. A tiny stream of blood was running down his forehead and into one eye. He was dead.

It took me some moments to comprehend the mere fact of his death, and even after I’d located the bullet wound just above his hairline, I still could not bring myself to fully accept the reality of it. My first thought had been suicide, but now that I had time to let my eyes search the floor and table I could see this was impossible. The bullet had obviously killed him instantly, and there was no weapon anywhere in sight.

I covered every inch of the room, even looked at the ceiling. There was no gun anywhere—in fact, Fuller’s rifle was missing from its usual place in the corner near the door.

But if not suicide, what?

There was no other explanation. Somehow he had killed himself. I warmed up the radio and sent a message to the effect, telling them I’d bring in the body by snowmobile as soon as I could. Our venture into the country above the permafrost line was at an end.

Then, as I was starting to pack my things, I remembered the coffee. I’d turned off the stove sometime during my search, and even taken a sip of the coffee, all without giving it a thought. Do men about to commit suicide start making breakfast? Do they put a pot of coffee on the stove?

And then I had to face it. Charlie Fuller had not killed himself.

All right. It seemed utterly impossible—but there it was. I sat down opposite the body, then got up to cover it with a blanket, and then sat down again.

What were all the possibilities? Suicide, accident, murder—as simple as that. Not suicide. Not accident. He certainly hadn’t been cleaning his gun at the time.

That left only one possibility.

Murder.

By myself or by an outsider—the only two possibilities.

Certainly I hadn’t killed Charlie, even in my sleep. I’d come to as soon as I heard the shot, and I’d still been in bed.

I walked over and crouched behind his chair, trying to see what he must have been seeing in that final moment.

And then I saw it. Directly opposite, in the center of a frosted window, there was a tiny hole with wisps of snow already drifting in. I hadn’t noticed it before—the intricate crystal-like designs of the frost had effectively camouflaged the hole. A few cracks ran from it, but the snow had somehow kept the window from shattering completely.

It was with a sudden sense of exhilaration that I made the discovery. The bullet had come from outside—the mystery was solved!

But as soon as I put on my coat and ventured outdoors, I realized that a greater mystery had taken its place. Though the drifting snow had left a narrow walkway under the overhanging roof of the cabin, drifts higher than my head surrounded us on all sides. Even the snowmobile was all but covered. No one could have approached the cabin through that snow, and certainly not without leaving a visible trail.

I made my way past fallen icicles, some as thick around as my arm, to the punctured window. The snow had drifted a bit beneath it, but I saw at once the butt of Fuller’s rifle protruding from the whiteness. I pulled it out and stared at it, wondering what it could tell me. It had been recently fired, it was the murder weapon, but there was nothing more it could say.

I took it back into the cabin and sat down. Just the two of us, no one else, and somebody had murdered Charlie Fuller. That narrowed down the suspects considerably.

As the day passed into noon and the sun appeared finally low in the southern sky, I knew I would have to be moving out soon. I did not relish another night in the cabin with Fuller’s body, and the trip by snowmobile would easily take the remainder of the brief daylight hours and part of the night as well. For a time I debated making for Hudson Bay instead of Caribou, radioing ahead for a ski plane to pick us up. But could I go back, by any route or means, under the circumstances? Charlie Fuller was dead, and I had to discover how it had happened.