WeeGee, as the team called their home for the past six months, was out of some futurist sketchbook. It was located near a deep bay on the shores of the Bellingshausen Sea, midway along the peninsula that thrusts toward South America like a frozen finger. Had there been sunlight, a pair of binoculars on the hills behind the base was all one would need to see the southern ocean.

There were five nodes surrounding a central hub that served as the mess and recreation hall. The nodes were connected by elevated walkways that were designed to sway with the wind. On particularly bad days, people with the weakest stomachs usually crawled. The nodes were designed as laboratory space, storage, and dormitory-like rooms, with people sleeping four to a cell during the busy summer. All the buildings were painted safety red. With opaque panels in the domed ceilings and many walls, the facility looked like a group of checkerboard silos.

A short distance away, along a carefully roped path, sat a Quonset-type building that acted as a garage for their snowmobiles and the snowcats. With the weather so miserable during the winter, there had been little opportunity to use the arctic vehicles. The building used waste heat piped from the main base to keep it at a minimum of ten below so as not to damage the machines.

Most of their meteorological equipment could be remotely monitored, so there was very little for the crew to do during the sunless days. Bill Harris had his NASA study, a couple of them were using the time to finish their doctoral dissertations, and one was working on a novel.

Only Andy Gangle didn’t appear to have anything to occupy his time. When he’d first arrived, the twenty-eight-year-old postdoc from Penn State had actively overseen the launching of weather balloons and had taken his study of the weather seriously. But not long after he’d lost interest in local temperatures. He still performed his duties, but he spent a great deal of time out in the garage or, when the weather permitted, trekking solo to the shore to collect “specimens,” though no one knew of what.

And because of the strict privacy code needed to keep a group of people in isolation from getting on one another’s nerves, everyone let him be. The few times his case had been discussed, no one felt he was succumbing to what the shrinks referred to as isolation syndrome but what the team called bug-eyes. In its severest forms, a person could suffer delusions as part of a psychotic break. A few seasons back, a Danish researcher lost his toes and more when he ran naked from his base on the leeward side of the peninsula. Rumor had it he was still in a Copenhagen mental hospital.

No, it was decided that Andy didn’t have bug-eyes. He was just a sullen loner who the others were more than happy to avoid.

“Morning,” Andy Gangle muttered when he entered the rec hall. The smell of frying bacon from the cafeteria-style galley filled the room.