Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  The airlock opened and Gance’s light appeared. His hand followed, grasped his umbilical. Seconds later he was sliding out, borne into the cold water.

  They worked their way forward, clipping the umbilicals to rings welded to Vairon’s hull as they moved. When he reached the bow Tarp signaled to Gance to stay there, and he began to make his way forward along the flexible arm. The steel members were as thick as his wrists, slippery, white as bone in the brilliance of the light. He could hardly bend at all. He tried moving on the side of the arm from which the current flowed, but it pushed the suit so tight against the metal he could hardly move, and he slid back and went to the outside, feeling it try to sweep his feet away. Behind him Gance paid out the umbilical, without which he would sail into the void like an astronaut untethered from his vehicle.

  He moved into the lee of the Homburg ten feet from the first pylon. The current buffeted him less there. Five feet from the pylon he was able to keep his feet with ease, and when he reached the structure itself he was able to let himself slowly down the metal rungs he found there, using only his hands. As he left the Vairon’s skeletal arm it followed him, shining its light in a circle that seemed to protect him.

  There were handholds set into the ocean floor. He had no need for them, the suit’s weighted feet keeping him upright, but he guessed that there must be times when the currents here made it impossible to walk. Still, he moved slowly, careful of his slight negative buoyancy.

  At the center of the triangle formed by the pylons, as Jean-Marie had said, was a steel ladder. It rose into a cylinder that projected down from the floor of the habitat itself. The hatch was open.

  He climbed, using only his hands.

  There were six rungs up to the hatch. He pulled himself inside and shone his light around. The cylinder, now filled with water, was about four feet across, with the hatch in the middle of its floor. Tarp tugged at his umbilical but got no response because the current tore at it too vigorously for Gance to feel the pulse. He detached it from his belt and fastened it outside the hatch.

  There were controls on the cylinder wall. Their markings were painted on the white metal in Spanish, but there was a brass plate below them that read Agence Maritime Française.

  He closed the hatch and worked the control that emptied it. Compressed air forced the water out from top to bottom. As the cylinder began to empty, bright lights came on.

  Seventy seconds later he was standing in an air-filled, white-walled cylinder with only a small puddle of seawater on its floor. Steel rungs rose to a hatch in the habitat floor above him.

  Clumsily, he climbed.

  Chapter 37

  Always, afterward, he would wonder what it had sounded like inside the habitat. Its special noises never reached him through the helmet, except like the distant and garbled conversations overheard on a telephone line. Unsure of what the environment inside the habitat contained, he left his seals closed, balancing the suit’s and the environmental pressure and finding them almost the same. He imagined that the steel bubble creaked as ships creak, that its support systems made noises as his own did. He supposed that the current that swept down from the decks of the Homburg carried sounds, perhaps even something that sounded like the cries of men. But he never heard them, and to him the habitat under the Antarctic ice would always be a place of silence.

  It was shaped like an Edam cheese. The entry tube went right up through its center, like the hole in a doughnut, its upper level a second airlock for entry into the space itself. It, like most other systems he was to find, was redundant, to assure that the environment would be as safe and stable as was possible.

  The door from the cylinder into the habitat was like a ship’s, so low that he had to stoop, hard as that was to do in the semirigid suit. The door closed with a wheel, like a safe’s. White light flooded the space as he stepped out; above his head a display gave him the temperature, pressure, and air quality inside.

  The habitat was divided into four sections connected by a narrow corridor that circled the core. The corridor itself hardly permitted him to move because of its narrowness, and it was so low that his helmet grazed fittings that projected down from the ceiling. Everything was labeled, and he supposed that the place was used by new crews often, for whom the signs would be their salvation. The corridor curved tightly around to his right as he emerged from the core; the wedge-spaced rooms were on his left, each entered by a watertight door. First was a living space — two rooms, each seven feet by about six, the first a sleeping room for two people and the second a combined galley and lounge. Much had been learned from space research about packaging and arrangement. Two people could have survived there for weeks, he thought.

  He took three clumsy steps along the corridor and opened the second door. Inside was a room larger than the combination of the first two and more severely wedge-shaped. The ceiling was a featureless surface of light that made the whole room bright and sterile-looking. A table ran the length of the wall on his right, its plastic surface gleaming like ice. Above it were three CRT monitors and banks of instruments, while down the center of the room was a bank of gray cabinets and a computer terminal of considerable power. The first nine feet of the left-hand wall were taken up with banks of small doors made of brushed steel, each about the size of a book. Beyond the doors were another steel table and another bank of instruments.

  Tarp moved cautiously down the room. The surfaces were immaculate. There was none of the clutter of the working laboratory — no notes, no cigarette butts, no discarded wad of computer paper. Whoever came here performed a task and then left, leaving nothing behind.

  On one table was a rack of closed-end tubes a little like those that some cigars come in; they were made of steel and lined with foam.

  The computer hardware was American. Tarp took a screwdriver from his belt and pressed a key with it because his gloved hands were too clumsy, and the monitor glowed and announced itself ready.

  Tarp tried several languages on it, but there was no response. He wondered if anybody would bother with an access code in such a protected place.

  Tarp tried the name Maxudov on it, and Schneider, and the names of the men left back in Moscow; he tried the word plutonium. The computer was mute.

  Tarp went out, careful not to touch the corners of the tables with the suit for fear of damaging it, and he turned left to the next of the rooms.

  Like Bluebeard’s castle.

  The third was the control room. It was narrow and irregular, as if it had been intruded upon by other spaces and by the machinery it was meant to govern. Its walls had sprouted gauges and wheels and buttons, and the ceiling was festooned with instruments that flashed bright messages. He found a bank of meters that recorded the state of the capsule’s power supply; he found others that showed six parallel readings of heat measurement, probably from six heat exchangers. Others measured the current that flowed so brutally beyond the metal skin. Somewhere out there in the blackness a unit was extracting oxygen and storing it for the habitat’s use.

  One part of the space was set aside for meters that recorded the conditions inside the habitat itself. There, above a desk, he found a bank of shiny dials set into bands of metal, all alike, all clean and precise. Their great drawback was that they all looked alike, packed into too small a space; looking at them, Tarp found it difficult to keep his focus on any one. They danced in the vision. Their operator must have found them as daunting as Tarp did, for half of them had been labeled with a black marker whose sometimes smudged letters were distinctly at odds with the glitter of the panel.

  Tarp leaned forward until his helmet almost touched the dials. The black pen had marked a number of the dials with occ; three were labeled with the whole word, occupado.

  Good. But what’s occupied?

  The marker had put numbers on most of the dials that had occ-L443, L447, X271.

  He found one dial that was labeled MAX.

  Above it to the right was another labeled JB.

&nb
sp; And at the bottom on the left-hand side was one with an understandable Spanish word: GAUCHO.

  Tarp clumped back to the laboratory and looked at the bank of doors, verifying that there were forty-eight of them just as there were forty-eight of the dials. MAX was the fourth from the top in the third row. The doors were locked, but not against theft; it took only a tool like an alien wrench to open them. He took one from his belt, tried it, found it too large; took the next size and screwed open the lock and the door swung out.

  Pale-green light glowed from within the cavity behind the door. In its glow a white plastic rack looked like dyed ivory. It held three glass tubes fitted with rubber diaphragms for use with a syringe. A fluid like heavy, slightly pink cream filled each of the phials.

  He did not have time to open all the doors. He opened half a dozen at random, finding phials of fluid in each, varying in color, seemingly in viscosity. Labels with cryptic identifications were attached to each. The two that corresponded to the dials marked GAUCHO and JB were much like that marked MAX. The phials were the same in all; all fitted snugly into the cigarlike tubes on the worktable.

  Tarp left the boxes open and went out into the corridor again. He was oppressively hot in the suit, and the effort of walking in it was beginning to tire him. He plodded on past the control room to the last of the doors. Marked REFRIGERATED STORAGE, it had a triple-safe system of lights and buttons that prevented its being opened accidentally. CLOSE DOOR AFTER ENTERING, the last light read, but he stepped in and left the door open.

  Like the other rooms, this one was bathed in white light. A fine matting of white frost lay in stripes along the wall opposite the door, marking the location of pipes that carried the freezing medium. Between the pipes were banks of rectangles with handles, like the fronts of file drawers. Everything was scrupulously clean. Unable to feel the cold, he felt as if he were watching a film of this frozen place: in the film, his massive, gloved hand reached up, grasped a drawer handle, and pulled it toward him.

  The drawer contained racks of test tubes. Again there were the cryptic labels, the fluids. Many of these were brightly colored, however, as if they had been stained. Part of the drawer held microscope slides. In the deepest corner were stacks of round glass dishes with a brown medium on the bottom and, spread across many, an uneven growth that looked like mold.

  The second drawer was empty.

  And the third.

  He began to pull the drawers faster. They were eight feet long, like mortuary drawers, but he needed to open them only a quarter of their length to see what they held; finding one empty, he pushed it without much force and it would slide gently closed on its machined bearing. After six drawers he was impatient to be done, and he yanked open the seventh and had his gloved palm already flat against it to close it again before he had even taken in what it contained.

  It was not empty, however.

  It looked like a supermarket case in which a pinkish substance had been stored in heavy gauge plastic bags. Each was about the size of a pair of shoes. Stacked neatly in the drawer, two to a row, sixteen rows long, they looked neat and rather pedestrian. Ice crystals unevenly masked their contents. Tarp had to lean very close. It was like looking at the rusted skin of the Prinz von Homburg and trying to make sense of what was seen. Now he looked and tried to puzzle out these shapes — a curving gray pinkness, a bulge. A hand? But such a very small hand.

  A baby’s hand.

  He looked at another bag.

  Not quite a baby. A fetus.

  He stepped back.

  He had seen quite a number of corpses. Few had nauseated him. For a moment, however, these did, and he turned away and steadied himself. Then he turned around and deliberately opened the drawer as far as it would go and looked in. Neat rows of bagged and frozen, miniature human beings. Neatly labeled.

  He took a very deep breath of the stale-smelling air of the suit, then closed the drawer and began to open the rest. There were two more drawers of the same sort. Then one that held five dead dogs. Then one that contained seventeen hearts, not, he thought, human.

  The last drawer held a full-size human adult.

  The body, like the fetuses, was in a plastic bag. Ice obscured much of the nude torso, but the area over the face was clear as if it had been already scraped clean for him. He had no trouble puzzling out what this mass of waxy skin, this blotched pallor, this slightly mangled shape was. It was a man’s head, and he knew the man.

  It was Beranyi.

  *

  He took the camera from the carrying cylinder and went from room to room methodically, trying to get enough coverage of each to show what the habitat was like. An integral flash blinked with each exposure. Grim now, he worked quickly, ignoring the headache and the muscles that objected to the weight and the poor balance of the cumbersome suit. He shot the bank of small doors and the phials; he shot the controls from four angles; he shot the freezer room, then one drawer of the fetuses, and Beranyi. He took three pictures of Beranyi. He wanted there to be no doubt. He wanted anyone who saw the pictures to see that Beranyi was dead and that he had died the brutal death of torture.

  Tarp packed the camera into the carrying cylinder again and then put in eight of the phials from the storage boxes and the hard discs from the computer. He put in all the phials from the box marked MAX and two each from GAUCHO and JB, and one chosen at random from the others. Each went first into one of the metal tubes, then into the cylinder until there was no room for any more of them. He snapped the locks on the carrying case and moved to the core of the habitat, locking the watertight doors behind him.

  Three minutes later he placed the carrying case into the claw of Vairon’s left arm, and then, despite his fatigue and the warnings from the displays inside his helmet, he signaled Gance closer. He could just make out the shape of Gance’s face behind the thick plate of his helmet. Like a baby in a plastic bag.

  Tarp shuffled across the ocean floor below the habitat toward the legs of a steel structure set behind the flattened sphere. He flashed his hand light over it, then motioned Vairon and its light closer. The brighter light showed something like an oversized wine rack, and, in the openings, eight bulbous canisters with Russian markings.

  Chapter 38

  He watched the helicopter lower the Vairon to the tanker’s deck, and then he went below, no longer patient with the anguished twistings of Jean-Marie; the Frenchman had stood beside him, his body contorted by the tension of watching the submersible lowered in. Hands in the pockets of his heavy coat, he had jerked his head and his shoulders at every motion of the egg. Vairon had been slightly damaged getting it out of the polynya, and Jean-Marie had flown back almost in tears, staring as it dangled off center from the cable.

  “Not on the ice, not on the ice, not on the ice …” he kept repeating. He had told Tarp that he would rather they had left it in the polynya where there was a chance of recovering it, even if it sank. Tarp had ordered it lifted out, however, despite some damage; now it had come to rest again on the tanker’s deck-one arm broken, a boom sheared off, but without damage to the hull. “Eh-eh-eh-eh …” he could hear as he left the rail.

  The capsules that contained the plutonium had been flown back in the second chopper and had been stored in one of the tanker’s forward compartments. There they were nestled in improvised racks and the compartment had been flooded.

  “Man, you’re nuts to stay up on that deck.” Gance was in the wardroom with coffee, a beer, and a steak. “It is cold up there!” He waved at a chair. “How’s my friend Pierre doing?”

  “Being a pain in the neck.”

  “Comm says there’s message traffic for you. You want to eat first? The beef is great stuff. The best. You hungry?”

  “Later.”

  He went to Communications and was handed a clipboard with a single sheet of paper on it. He sighed, then took it to a cubicle and read it.

  FOUND PRESENT FOR YOU MEXICO CITY. RUBIN.

  Meaning that Repin’s got Pope-Ginna
. He wrote a reply:

  PLEASE GIFT WRAP AND DELIVER IN PERSON.

  LOVE, BLACK.

  He took another sheet and wrote out a message to “Mr. Smith”:

  BUY.

  The single word would be enough. It meant that they had succeeded.

  Tarp went along a passage toward his cabin and found himself stumbling over a raised doorsill. He wanted a hot shower and sleep, he knew; he had been promising them to himself since he had climbed back into Vairon’s airlock. But he was disoriented, not merely by fatigue and by the enormous strain of the work under the ice: he was deeply disturbed by what he had seen in the habitat. It was not the fact of the fetuses. He was not sentimental about either life or birth. It was the appalling efficiency of it all, its ruthless cleanliness, which was always an expression of what was supposed to be best and most rational about humans. If cleanliness was next to godliness, then science, with its devotion to pure states and sterile environments, should have been almost holy. What he had seen in the habitat, however, suggested that those things could as easily be the attributes of evil. Hell might be as clean as an operating room.

  He had the plutonium and he thought he knew who Maxudov was, but he felt profoundly dirtied.

  *

  One of the big helicopters brought Repin and Pope-Ginna out from Cape Town two days later. Gance had gone with the chopper’s inward flight, taking with him two of the phials from the habitat and the name of a biologist who would analyze the contents.

  When the big chopper was visible against the dense gray sky on its return flight, Tarp went above-decks and waited near the improvised landing pad. It was warmer on the deck now, but there was a drizzle that the ship’s motion whipped into a stinging spray. Not cheerful weather.

  He had readied a space for Pope-Ginna’s arrival — a forward anchor locker that he had had emptied of all its gear. It was trapezoidal, uniformly gray, noisy with the vibration of the engines. Entered from above, it was eleven feet from deck to overhead, its only light the portable lamps that had been rigged from winch lines up above. When a man stood on the floor of that space, he knew he was a prisoner, an outcast in a steel shell.