by Tim Curran
Hopper—who was no longer anyone’s favorite basketball coach, but a sullen and confused man who didn’t give a rat’s ass about teamwork and cooperation and station spirit—just stood there in the same clothes he’d been wearing for days, bundled against the cold, his hair mussed, his face unshaven, his eyes like two pissholes in a snowbank, and said, “What in the hell do you want me to do?”
Gut, big and masculine and red in the face, said, “Do? What in the hell kind of thing is that to say? Who’s running this fucking dog-and-pony show? You’re in charge, Hopper, you goddamn idiot! Something’s happening to your people and I expect you to get off your numb white ass and do something about it! Quit pulling on Special Ed’s crank and stand up and take fucking charge! That’s why they pay you, isn’t it?”
“We’re doing everything we can.”
Gut gasped. “Everything you can? Oh my sweet fucking twat! What’re you gonna do? Form more search parties?”
“If need be.”
“I think we tried that with Slim and his ass is still lost to the four winds! In case you haven’t heard, Mr. Fucking Station Manager, Nicky and Little Gwenny Sweetcakes and goddamn Horn ran into a monster at NOAA Polaris! What’re you gonna do about that? Wait around while it snacks on our asses? It’s probably the same thing that took Slim and Cassie! It’s out there and it’s hiding! We searched this goddamn dump asshole to elbow and didn’t even find Jimmy Hoffa’s nutcup or Amelia Earhart’s lost tampon string, let alone a monster! Now I wanna know what you’re going to do! I want to know how we’re supposed to protect our merry fat asses from whatever’s out there that’s stealing people! Have you contacted NSF? McMurdo? Have you done a goddamned thing or are you and Special goddamn Ed too busy shoving your heads up each other’s collective asses to keep them warm? Do something! Any fucking thing! Call the NSF, call the Navy, call the ANG! Call up Ronald fucking Reagan or Howdy Doody’s ghost on your ouija board, but do something!”
And Gut never knew it, but she was a catalyst.
Frye was urging the whole thing on, trying to stir the contents of the pot into one smelly mess, but it was Gut who did the job. She was out of control. Afraid. Frustrated. Pissed-off. Pretty soon not only was she shouting at Hopper, but they all were. Ida faded away with The Beav. Danny Shin demanded that they be flown out of there, that there was no way he was spending the whole winter waiting for his number to come up.
Hopper just shook his head. “Nobody’s going anywhere! This is the goddamn winter, people! The planes don’t fly!”
“Bullshit,” Gut said. “They air-lifted that woman from Pole Station that year when she had a tumor in her tit! If they can do it once, they can do it again!”
“That’s right!” Shin chimed in.
“I’m not listening to this!” Hopper finally told them. “You people get back to work! This is all going into your files! You’re out of control!”
And that, more than anything, scattered the lot of ‘em.
Particularly Shin because he was a scientist and couldn’t afford to have the NSF cut his grants. The others left, stomping away angrily, because Hopper was in charge. He’d always been the most uplifting, positive sort of guy, and now he was simply at the end of his rope. He wasn’t playing hopscotch with them. He was telling them like it was. So the war party broke up, fading down A-corridor to the Community Room, Gut arguing with Shin and Shin arguing with Cryderman and Locke laughing at the lot of them saying they had just been carefully manipulated by their wallets.
When they were gone, Special Ed was just standing there like a wallflower looking for a slow dance and a shoulder to cry on.
“Well, that didn’t go over so well,” Frye said to him.
“I’ve never seen anything like this!” Special Ed said. “Do you have any idea what will happen when the NSF gets wind of this? Do you?”
“Yeah, yeah, Ed. They’ll squat and shit all over our grants and contracts. About effing time I got out of The Program anyway.” He turned away, saw the HR rep sulking, and went over to him. “Listen to me, Ed. I don’t know what’s going on with Hopper, but he’s not exactly a guiding light for the rest of us. Things are happening that haven’t ever happened before and he better get a grip, take charge of these people before it’s too late. Because things are about to get ugly and if it comes to that, he’s the only guy here who can head it off at the pass.”
“He’s under a lot of stress.”
“We all are! So what? You better talk to him, tell him to grab them reigns and grab ‘em tight before this buggy goes right off the road and into the ditch. You hear me? We need some kind of leadership right now and that asshole is dropping the ball. You better talk to him.”
And with that, he left Special Ed standing there, wringing his hands.
4
MARCH 10
WINTER DESCENDED WITHOUT MERCY.
No more sunlight until late September at the very earliest.
Now came the darkness and the waiting and the isolation that was not just a word or an abstract idea, but something real and suffocating and forever. Winter in East Antarctica was like being dropped into the deepest, blackest, bleakest hole in the world. It was premature burial, polar entombment, and you could scream your head off, but no one would ever hear you in the perpetual night save those buried alongside you.
Winter was forever.
And at Polar Clime it was like this:
The temperature dropped and the wind howled. Sheets of snow and fine ice particles blew throughout the compound, sounding like buckshot as they glanced off the walls. They came with such velocity sometimes that if you went outside unprotected, they would lay you bare. And at others times, it was so silent out there that the distant sound of boots crunching through the snowpack was like thunder.
At night it got so cold that your water bottle and boots would freeze to the floor and people often went to bed fully clothed. It was so dry that there were humidifiers in every room running non-stop and still the static charges that built up seemed strong enough to knock you on your ass. Winter was a time at the stations for drinking and playing games and forming ridiculous societies and in-fighting. It was a time to pursue solitary pursuits and to get to know the inner person or God himself. It was a time for diversion and if you didn’t have at least one, your own mind would open wide and suck you in or take bloody bites out of you until there was absolutely nothing left.
And this was why psychologists had always considered the Antarctic winter camp as a living laboratory for social and behavioral sciences.
Which it was, in effect.
When you crammed twenty rats from various colonies in a single box and expected them to form a seamless community you were asking a bit much. Previously established hierarchies and support systems were shattered. Behavioral routines fell to ash. Dominant individuals butted heads with other dominants and submissive types scurried around looking for a hole to hide in and a group to protect them. There was tension and jealously, alienation and despondency, delusions of persecution and rampant paranoia. Minor psychological aberrations became grossly inflated. Trifling obsessions became full-blown compulsions. Essentially, all the happy horseshit and sour milk of the human condition was put under the microscope and magnified.
But it wasn’t all badness.
There were friendship and camaraderie, love and faith and even happiness. You just couldn’t expect it was all. Because the stations were microcosms. The only difference between them and the real world was that everything down there was compressed and crowded and amplified.
By midwinter, people started doing a lot of staring and forgetting. They wondered just who in the hell they were locked up with. The workers called this getting “toasty” and medical professionals called it the “Winter-Over Syndrome.” It was caused by changes in hormone levels due to prolonged exposure to darkness and the cold. By the end of winter, the crew did little else but stare. It was called “long-eye,” a mild hypnotic state, the classic thousand-yard stare in
a twenty-foot room.
People lose concentration. They stare at walls, at ceilings, right through one another. Sentences and stories are half-finished, picked back up days later or not at all and five individuals in the same room might engage in five separate conversations. People tend to think out loud on a daily basis. The urge to go over the edge or tip-toe around its perimeter or to simply dive right into the void becomes stronger and stronger with the passage of days.
And this was in the course of an ordinary winter.
But this winter was special.
For there was a catalyst this year. Something immense and deadly and beyond human comprehension. And its influence made everyone doubt their own sanity and the sanity of the world at large. Made them question the very glue that held together the reality that they had always taken for granted.
Under the ice, it waited.
It was endlessly patient. It had been brooding and percolating for millions and millions of years and was about to reach complete fruition. And when the eggshell sheared open and this particular birth climbed free, there would be no going back. There would only be a single screaming descent into the blackness that would bring the human race face to face with who and what they were and what they would never be again.
5
EMPEROR ICE CAVE,
BEARDMORE GLACIER
MARCH 12
AS HE MOVED DEEPER into the Emperor, Lieutenant-Commander Beeman suddenly stopped.
He could not at that moment say precisely why. He was on the walkway that led down to the gigantic ice cavern far below. The walkway followed a natural passage that slowly angled down into the hard blue ice for hundreds of feet until it opened into the cavern. The passage itself had more twists and turns to it than a crawling kingsnake and twenty feet into it, you lost sight of the Hypertats, sheds, and generator station just inside the mouth of the Emperor itself. Then there was only that ancient blue ice pushing from all sides.
“Something wrong, Commander?” Warren said behind him.
Beeman almost jumped, turning quickly and stared at Warren in his ECWs, his bearded face peering from the slit of his red parka.
“What?”
“I said, is something wrong? You stopped.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Listen, you don’t wanna go look at the thing, I’m okay with that.”
Beeman clenched his teeth, a tension digging into him that he did not quite understand. “Don’t be silly.”
But he still wasn’t moving and he did not know why.
It was as if an invisible hand had just stopped him dead and he didn’t seem to have the willpower to go on. He felt . . . isolated and vulnerable. As if there was danger now, danger in the ice, and something inside him recognized such. Waves of fear rolled up from his belly and spread out through his chest in sharp gyrations. He swallowed, tried to make sense of it.
“I was just . . . amazed at the age of the ice,” he said.
Warren nodded. “It is something, isn’t it? Down here in this ice . . . hundreds of thousands and millions of years old. This whole damn continent is like that. So fucking old, you know?”
“Yeah.”
Aluminum poles had been drilled into the floor of the passage with ice screws and set with incandescents, all of them connected by an electrical cable that led back up into the generator. Long as the generator worked, there was light. But without it . . . God, blackness that was inconceivable.
Beeman looked around, seeing the ice and feeling it.
It’s just ice. I know it’s just ice. But... but I can feel the age of it and maybe something older, something that was here before the ice. Something that’s still here . . . something . . . active . . .
The passage was roughly circular, cut right through the glowing blue-green glacial ice that absorbed the artificial lighting and bathed everything in a soft aquamarine glow. An eerie blue phosphorescence that was almost like neon, but murky and shifting. The ceiling was thirty feet overhead and hung with a forest of gleaming icicles, the walls twenty feet apart and formed of runnels, ice falls, and intricate candlewax flows of that ghostly bluish ice that looked positively surreal.
It made red parkas look purple. It turned faces a pale green.
“Commander?”
“Gimme a minute, will ya?” Beeman said, breathing in and out. He needed time, God yes, he needed more time. Time to relax his muscles which were bunched tight and time to settle his nerves down which were jumping like live wires.
He looked around, breathing, breathing.
The temperature in the ice tunnel hovered at around a constant zero.
And that was the beauty of ice and snow, the physics of them. Regardless of how cold it was—and it hadn’t been above -40° in days, wind chills pushing it down to like sixty below out on the Beardmore—ice and snow stayed at a constant 32° Fahrenheit. So the cave provided a shelter from the elements. Because you could conceivably work outside when it was forty below for short periods and people had been doing just that in Antarctica for years. It was doable. The danger was not so much the cold, but the wind. It took hold of that cold and pushed it at you and it went right through you like steel blades.
So in the depths of the cave, zero was very acceptable.
Beeman knew it wasn’t the cold that was bothering him. And even that uncanny illumination, while disconcerting, was not at the root of this. It was something else. Something that had gripped him like an icy fist and would not let him go.
He was staring down the passage, feeling its age, and thinking about what Dryden and the others had chopped from the ice below. Maybe that more than anything was filling him with a crawling foreboding, an almost instinctive horror of going any further. But he had to. He knew had to. He couldn’t lose face with Warren. If he did that . . . well, then he was no better than that sonofabitch Biggs.
We’re going down to look at Dryden’s specimen, Biggs. You coming?
Fuck that. I ain’t going. I don’t wanna look at that thing.
It’s dead, you idiot. It can’t hurt you.
Sure, sure. The ones they dug out at Kharkov that year were dead, too. No thanks, Big Kahuna, but I ain’t letting one of those fucking mummies eat my mind.
You’re acting like a scared little boy.
I am scared and you should be, too.
No, Beeman would not let himself become a frightened little boy. He was Navy. He was an officer. He would go down there. He would look at that thing that had been sealed in the ice all these years and he would not flinch from it.
“Commander? We going or what?”
Something inside him recoiling from what was down there, Beeman led the way down the passage with lumbering, mechanical steps as something in his soul began to bleed.
6
PHASE I, CRARY LAB,
MCMURDO STATION,
ROSS ISLAND
IN HIS HEAD THERE were voices, but none were so loud as the one that kept saying: “Relax . . . now you must relax. Let them see how calm you are, how reasonable ... then they’ll let you go.”
John Polchek heard the voice saying this again and again and it took him a few moments before he realized that it was his voice. Lately, he had been talking to himself a lot, but how could it be helped when all his colleagues were either fools or hypocrites? His was the only mind that seemed rational these days. The only one that recognized the threat that was rising even now to engulf the world.
I’m your only hope, you fucking idiots.
Dr. Munse came into the room. A couple of paramedics from Medical were out in the hallway, bandaging up Matheson’s slashed ribs. You’ll be okay, don’t worry. That’s what they kept saying to him, not realizing that they were patching-up a . . . monster.
Polchek watched Munse’s face, his sad, pitying eyes. The bastard! But . . . no, he would not rage. Look at me, Munse. See how easy I am with it all. I’m hardly a raving lunatic. Peaceful. Intelligent. Introspective. Hardly a danger.
Munse sighed and
left the room.
You rotten motherfucker! You’re probably one of them, too!
Lying on the cot, Polchek kept pulling at the restraints, trying to sort out all the things in his cramped little mind. Drool ran down his chin and sweat beaded his brow but he was not even aware of it.
His office. They had tied him up in his own office. His books, his papers . . . it all seemed so meaningless now.
Just as meaningless as all the works of men would soon be if something wasn’t done about the threat, the threat beneath the ice.
Now he could watch and wait and warn.
But they don’t believe me, none of them do. They think I’m crazy.
“Ssshhhh,” he cautioned himself. “You are not crazy. You are the only sane one left.”
Once upon a time, long before he had attacked another scientist with a knife, Polchek had been a microbial ecologist from Ohio State University’s Department of Environmental Microbiology. He had come to Antarctica on an NSF grant as part of a multi-disciplinary team that was studying the geochemical and microbiological conditions of glacial and accretion ice core samples from the Dry Valleys of McMurdo Sound.
A dream job in the beginning.
And now a nightmare as he saw the truth of what the ice concealed at the bottom of the world. He had lost complete interest in paleo-organisms and bacterial phylotypes, electron microscopy and epifluorescence, DNA extraction and molecular analysis.
That was who and what he had been.
Before the dreams came to him.
Before he began putting things together.
Before he saw the truth.
Soon, very soon now, they would all know what he knew.
They didn’t pay attention when it happened at Kharkov Station, he thought as he wringed his hands, bunching them into fists. They swept it under the rug and went back to the same bullshit. The fighting and political games and corporate swindling. The hating and wars and intolerance. They didn’t take the hint that the Kharkov Tragedy was the only warning this world was going to get . . .