by Tim Curran
Finally, Gates said: “You’re all asking me to answer questions without having had enough time to even make an educated guess. Are the creatures alien? Unknown. Did they build that city? Possibly. Are they any threat to us? Of course not. C’mon, people, put away your comic books here. That city was abandoned during the Pliocene and the mummies we’ve found have been dead, I’m guessing, since the Triassic.”
Feeling that he had thoroughly chastised them and turning away from them with the sort of distaste he might reserve for torch-bearing villagers and other superstitious idiots, he donned his coat and stomped out into the night.
LaHune, who had been studying it all with his usual detachment, stood up and said, “That’s enough now. Dr. Gates has told you all he can tell you. Really, people, he has been good enough to share with you some of his findings and you’re acting like a bunch of children.”
And for once, Hayes was in complete agreement with him. Children? No, more like villagers looking for a witch to burn. Slowly, they settled down, realizing to a man that LaHune had made mental note of their reactions and it would be going into their files. A bad mark on their records would mean any number of them wouldn’t be returning to Antarctica. That meant the loss of big money for contractors and the loss of NSF funding for the scientists.
“Well, wasn’t that amusing?” Sharkey said.
Hayes grunted.
Amusing? Well, it was certainly something. Ancient civilizations. Pre-human intelligences. Aliens. Then that bit about what they had found up there changing the idea of who and what the human race was . . . well, how did you walk away from that without your chin dragging on the floor?
“What do you make of that?” Hayes finally asked Sharkey.
“I think I can’t wait for spring,” was all she would say.
But Cutchen, well, he had an opinion. His specialty was supposedly the weather, but he always seemed to have an opinion on everything. “Tell you two something right now. I heard all about what happened to Lind and, like you, I’ve drawn a few of my own conclusions. Maybe that thing thawing out in the hut had nothing to do with Lind’s breakdown . . . but if it did, just keep in mind we’re trapped here until spring and whatever that thing is, we have to live with it all winter.”
“It’s just a fossil for godsake,” Sharkey said.
“Do you think so, Doc? Do you honestly believe that? Great. Then go out to the hut and stare in those red fucking eyes and tell me if something’s not staring back at you.”
But Sharkey wasn’t about to do that.
8
True to his word, Gates went back up to the tent camp, but left his mummies behind. He had three of them thawing in the shed — which was now locked and bolted, LaHune having the only key — and three more still frozen in their sheaths of ice out back in the cold shed.
People were still talking about it all, but they had calmed somewhat. Even grand revelations became mundane given time. You made some discovery that will alter our view of who and what we are? It might change civilization as we know it? No shit? Ain’t that something. You wanna hear something better? Word has it a couple of the techies over at the drilling tower are doing some drilling of a more intimate nature, you catch my drift, sunshine.
Didn’t matter what happened at South Pole stations . . . its shelf-life was relatively short.
Besides, truth be told, it was an exciting winter at Kharkhov and there was more on the stove than just Gates’ fossils and some dusty old ruins up in the mountains.
There was the lake.
Some three-quarters of a mile beneath the continental ice sheet that the Kharkhov Station sat on, there was a huge subterranean lake roughly the size of Lake Ontario. It had been discovered some five years previously using ice-penetrating radar and radio echo-sounding and promptly named Lake Vordog. This in honor of a Russian seismologist whose early studies in the region led to its discovery.
Vordog was hardly the first lake discovered beneath the ice, there were some seventy others, but Vordog — and a few others — had piqued the curiosity of the world scientific establishment. For here was an underground lake trapped beneath nearly a mile of ice, some 300 miles long and nearly fifty in width, that had been hidden away from the light of day for some forty-million years. No sunlight, no outside atmosphere, no contact with any organisms but those it contained originally. Such isolation, it was thought, may have allowed whatever lived in it to follow an entirely separate path of evolution than that of the outside world.
Imaging had shown that Vordog was over 2,000 feet deep in spots and thermographs proved that instead of being frozen or near-freezing like other sub-glacial lakes, Vordog had a near-constant water temperature of fifty degrees with hot spots up to sixty-five. The only thing that could possibly account for that was some form of subsurface geothermal heat source, possibly hydrothermal vents like those on the ocean floor. In which case, the lake could possibly be teeming with life . . . much of it completely unknown to science and, quite possibly, evolved forms of organisms long extinct elsewhere.
So instead of the usual paleoclimate coring carried out at the drilling tower, this winter there was something truly exciting happening: a group of technicians headed by a CalTech glaciologist named Gundry were drilling down to the lake in order to release robotic probes into those ancient and pristine waters. The entire thing was being funded by NASA, as part of their groundwork for the Europa Ice Clipper mission which would send similar probes to Jupiter’s ice-covered moons, Europa and Callisto, which were both thought to contain large sub-glacial oceans.
Whatever was down there had been undisturbed for forty-million years.
And now that was about to change.
9
Exactly one day after Gates’ big announcement and two days before Gundry’s drilling team broke through the ice, the Kharkhov Station was zipped-up tight and locked-down. Communication of any sort, whether radio or satellite or email for that matter, was brought to a screaming halt. They were suddenly alone and more isolated than they had been before. But it wasn’t because of a fierce storm or mechanical failure, it was because of LaHune. His directive was quite simple: until further notice, all communication with the outside world was suspended, save emergency beacons.
It didn’t go over real big.
When LaHune announced it to the lunch crowd in the community room, it caused a near-riot. For the winter crews at the stations didn’t have much else going for them but their satellite Internet and an occasional radio chat with a loved one. These were their only ties with the outside world, the only things that could remind them that, yes, there were other people in the world and they weren’t really on the moon or Mars, just down yonder at the bottom of the world.
Later that day, Hayes caught up with Dr. Sharkey at the infirmary. “Did you try to talk sense to that overblown prick?” he asked her.
She nodded. “Oh, I tried, all right. I tried until I was blue in the face, not that it did me any good. This is an NSF facility, he said, as such it’s under government jurisdiction same as a military base. We all signed the Official Secrets Act and now he’s activating it. Nothing goes out, not until he says so. End of story.”
James Bond shit. “Jesus Christ, Doc, I supposed to log in with some of the boys from McMurdo tonight. We’ve got a poker game going on the web . . . what the hell are they going to think?”
“What’s the rest of the world going to think?”
Hayes sat down, sighed.
Sure, there was more than just a poker game in the offing here. There were wives and children, sisters and brothers and parents. When they didn’t hear from their people at Kharkhov, they were going to start expecting the very worst.
And Hayes was with them, because he already expected the worse. He’d felt it from the moment he’d stepped off the LC-130 Hercules at Kharkhov Station six weeks ago and, day by day, it had been growing like a tumor in his belly . . . that near-certainty that things were going to get dark and ugly this winter. But he h
adn’t mentioned that to anyone. They would have thought he was crazy.
Sharkey folded her arms. “I don’t use the Internet much and I don’t really have anyone I keep in contact with, so I guess I’ll survive better than most.”
Hayes felt something swell up in his throat. He tried to swallow it down. “What about . . . what about your husband?”
Sharkey looked at him, then looked away. And there it was again, that barely concealed tightening around her mouth and eyes that was akin to bitterness. “We generally don’t keep in close contact.” She uttered a small laugh. A very small one. “Besides, where he is, out in the jungle, the Internet basically consists of knocking coconuts together.”
Hayes did not comment on that.
He was divorced, no children. He had a sister, Liza, in Des Moines who was a Jehovah’s Witness. Last winter at the Amundsen-Scott Station they’d started emailing back and forth. But that had come crashing to a halt when he admitted to her that he did not believe in God and never had, asked her point-blank how she’d gotten mixed up in a cult like the Jo-Ho’s.
So, like Sharkey, he was pretty much alone.
LaHune had sited security reasons for the blackout. Security reasons. That was his explanation and he refused to elaborate on it. And you could count on LaHune to keep his word. No amount of ass-kissing or sweet-talking would thaw him. Better luck trying to get inside a nun’s habit than that cast-iron lockbox LaHune called a skull.
“Did he say anything?” Hayes asked her. “I mean, shit, people are already wigged out down here. They don’t need this, too. Did you try the medical approach? The psychological benefits and all that shit?”
Sharkey nodded again. “I tried everything short of a lapdance, Jimmy. It’s a no-go. He told me that when he receives clearance from the NSF bigwigs, he’ll give us our Internet and all the rest back. But not until. The National Science Foundation rules.”
“Clearance? Clearance for what?”
She shrugged. “He’s very cloak-and-dagger about the whole thing. But I get the feeling it’s because of Gates’ discovery and the things he was saying. The NSF doesn’t want that stuff getting out, not yet. Not until they’ve had time to think over how they’re going to handle all the questions they’re going to get barraged with. This is big stuff, Jimmy. You’ve got to know that.”
“I do know it, Doc. But, shit, I’m almost a thousand in the hole with those ringers at McMurdo. I mean, damn.”
Sharkey said she thought that part of it might be the flack the NSF was going to take, the intimations that everyone at Kharkhov was cracking up. Cabin fever.
“We are cracking up for chrissake,” Hayes said. “This whole goddamn winter has a real bad smell to it, Doc. I’ve had a bad feeling since the planes left and the snow started blowing like hell. A real bad feeling and don’t you dare laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing,” she said.
He shrugged. “Like I said the other day, those goddamn mummies are like some kind of catalyst here, a big ugly spoon to stir the pot. And now that pot is all stirred-up and the soup is smelling like shit. If that makes any sense.”
She smiled, seemed to understand.
“I guess what I’m saying, Doc, is that LaHune cutting us off like this is just plain stupid. What with those weird mummies and Lind’s breakdown, the crew down here are thinking funny things, you know? They sit around and do their bit, pretend like none of it’s bothering them, but it is. You can see it behind their eyes. They’re getting paranoid and scared. They’re sensing something and its eating their guts out, only they don’t dare admit to it and you can’t blame them.”
Hayes would never have said any of this to anyone else, but it was true. What you generally had at a station like Kharkhov during the winter was a lot of boredom. There was work to be done, sure, but the pace was nowhere near as frenetic as you saw during the summer. This year the boredom had been replaced by something else . . . a nervous tension, a sense of expectancy, the knowledge that the ball was going to drop. Hayes could feel it. Although the crew wandered around with stupid smiles on their faces and went through the motions, it was all an act. You peeled those smiles off and underneath you were going to see people on the edge, people cringing, people confused and worried and, yes, scared.
The atmosphere at a winter station locked down by the cold and snow and perpetual darkness was never exactly yippy-skippy, let’s-have-ourselves-a-parade, but even on bad years when you threw together a group that simply did not get along, it was not like this. There was not this sense of brooding apprehension, that almost spiritual sort of taint hanging in the air.
“What’re you thinking, Doc?” Hayes asked, seeing Sharkey’s blue eyes focused off into space.
She shrugged. “I’m just wondering if I’m going to have enough happy pills to get these people to spring.”
“Pills won’t cut it,” Hayes told her.
Sharkey smiled, looked into his eyes. “I was just thinking, Jimmy, how easy it would be for the NSF to dump a group of us down here and then throw something odd at us like this, see how we handled it. A sort of feasibility study. A group of people fairly diverse in that they come from the working class right up to the scientific elite. See how we react to certain things.”
“You saying they invented those mummies? Those ruins?”
“No, of course not. But it would be an interesting opportunity for the powers that be to take advantage of. Us stranded down here, facing philosophical and psychological challenges brought about by our isolation and the discovery of Gates’ mummies.”
“Doc, really, don’t be feeding my paranoia.”
She laughed. “Oh, I’m just speculating here.”
“Sure, but it sounds right to me. The bunch of us riding out this fucking winter, our lines of communication severed. Those goddamn mummies out there that are scaring the shit out of everyone . . . whether they’re willing to admit it or not.”
“Yes, exactly. And with our good Mr. LaHune as the control. Because, you know, if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be surprised if a mob decided to gather up Gates’ mummies and burn them like alien witches.”
Sharkey laughed nervously as if to dismiss it all, but Hayes wasn’t ready to dismiss it. He wasn’t much on conspiracies and the like, but those mummies were having a very negative effect on the crew. They were getting under peoples’ skins, making them imagine the worst possible things and runaway imaginations were a bad thing when you were trapped down at the bottom of the world. A mass-paranoia becoming a mass-insanity could become savage and devastating at the drop of a hat.
“If LaHune has any brains,” Hayes said, “then he’ll open this place back up, let these people chat with the outside world. It can’t be good for them to be internalizing this shit, chewing on it and swallowing it whole, letting it boil in their bellies.”
“It’s not,” Sharkey said. “Ever since those mummies came I’ve had people coming to see me wanting sedatives. They can’t sleep, Jimmy, and when they do they have nightmares.”
Oh, I’ll just bet they do. Some real doozies no doubt.
LaHune knew what all this was doing, but he was a company man and he’d toe the line regardless of what it did to these people. Even if the crew started cracking up and going at each other — and themselves — with razors, it wouldn’t move him. He’d sit there like some shit-eating weasel atop a heap of turds, simply enjoying the stink, the rot, and the flies.
Because that’s the kind of guy he was.
“I tell you what, Doc, LaHune better get his hands out of his fucking shorts already and derail this train because I got me a nasty feeling the track ahead is real dark and real bumpy.”
PART TWO
THE MIND-LEECHES
“A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs.”
— H.P. Lovecraft
10
But the train wasn’t derailed.
And that night, about two in the morning, there was a fierce pounding at Hay
es’ door and from the intensity of it, you could be sure it wasn’t a social call. Hayes came awake, shaking off some dream about mountains of black ice, and took a pull from his water bottle.
“Hayes!” a voice called. “Hayes! Would you fucking wake up already!”
It was Cutchen.
Hayes climbed out of bed, hearing the wind moaning through the darkness of the camp, cold and eternal. It sounded like something hungry that wanted in, something looking for warmth to steal.
“Coming,” Hayes said.
He fumbled the lock open — never used to lock his door, but lately he’d gotten in the habit — and pulled the door in. Cutchen was standing out there in the corridor, a small gray-haired man with a matching beard and dark, probing eyes that always seemed to know something you didn’t.
“It’s Lind,” Cutchen said. “Sharkey said to bring you. Lind has really gone over the edge now. C’mon, we better go.”
Shit, shit, and shit.
Hayes climbed into his Kansas State joggers and sweatshirt, brushed his bushy hair back with the flat of his hand and then he was following Cutchen down the gray corridors to the other side of the building where the infirmary was.
Outside the door, in the hallway, St. Ours, Meiner, Rutkowski and a few of the other Glory Boys were gathered, whispering like little old ladies at a funeral, espousing dirty secrets.
“See, Jimmy?” Rutkowski said to Hayes. “I told you he’d do something like this. Crazy bastard.”
“What happened?” Hayes said, his head blown with fuzz from sleep.
“He slit his fucking wrists,” St. Ours said. “Got a knife in there and plans on using it.”
“He won’t let Doc get to him,” Cutchen explained. “He’s lost a lot of blood and if she can’t get to work on him right away, he’s going to be toast. She thought you could talk to him.”