Chapter 12: The 300 Club

I turned the pager over in my hand on the way back from the comms shack.

November.

I waited for it to hurt.

It didn't, much.

It felt like hearing a building I used to live in was getting new windows.

Boone walked beside me and didn't say a word about it.

At my door he said, "You okay?"

"I put the ring in a drawer tonight," I said. "Before dinner. Before any of it."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Okay," he said.

That was all.

He went down the hall, tapping something on the wall with one knuckle as he went.

Dash dash dash. Dash dot dash.

***

Two days later the temperature outside dropped to a hundred below.

The power plant guy ran through every hallway banging a pot.

"Three hundred! Three hundred! Get your towels!"

The 300 Club was the oldest tradition at Pole.

You heated the sauna to two hundred degrees.

You sat in it until you couldn't stand it.

Then you ran outside in nothing but boots and a neck gaiter, around the ceremonial Pole and back, at a hundred below.

Three hundred degrees of difference.

"Absolutely not," I said in the galley.

"You're the doctor," the carpenter said. "We need you there anyway. In case somebody's heart explodes."

"Then I'll stand by the door with a blanket."

"Nobody who stands by the door is in the club," said the power plant guy, gravely.

Harriet looked up from her oatmeal.

"I did it at fifty-one," she said. "Don't make me look braver than you, Doc."

I did it.

***

The sauna was a wooden box at the end of the hallway, and twelve of us were packed into it in towels.

It was so hot my eyelashes hurt.

Boone sat across from me with his forearms on his knees and sweat running into his beard.

He'd taken off the watch cap.

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