by Joshi, S. T
(“Emergency”? I thought.)
“As our flight is long and the noise of the aircraft prevents any conversation, I strongly urge you to familiarize yourselves with the information contained therein. Its content will at first seem fantastic, but we rely upon the famous open-mindedness of your several disciplines to give it the consideration due to it.
“One more thing,” he bellowed. The noise of the motors really was becoming deafening; the silvery chains holding down the luggage and supplies chimed. “You will find a pair of sunglasses in your kits. Put them on as soon as we arrive at McMurdo Station. The health of your eyes is at stake. Thank you.”
Mr. Personne was right about the noise level in the plane at any rate. Even with the earplugs the din was terrific; and it was only due to its monotonous, unvarying nature that we were able to bear it for long.
But soon such considerations faded before the revelations held in the INVESTIGATIONS. Its full content and scientific proofs would be tiresome or at least confusing to most laymen, so I will omit them here. But in essence what it said was this:
What the Miskatonic Expedition of 1930–31 purportedly found, as reported by William Dyer, was real. There were two titanic mountain chains stretched across East Antarctica, and nestled against the lesser group was a sprawling city of pre-human origin. The creatures that had built it were “not dinosaurs, but far worse,” the text quoted Lovecraft (whose fictional treatment, we were informed, was in all essentials correct)—the star-headed “Old Ones,” interstellar entities of pentamerous symmetry and astounding intelligence. For the past eighty years, since the confirmation supplied by the Starkweather-Moore Expedition, a curtain of secrecy had been drawn around that entire section of Antarctica, and a select group of scientists, linguists, and researchers had been studying it all. Since the discoverers had been American but the actual territory involved was Australian, the two governments had cooperated in the largest conspiracy of silence the world had ever seen. Security, for example, was handled by a largely Australian force with the colorful name of the Ice Shadow Army. The plot was aided by the region’s near-inaccessibility and later by events in the human sphere. What with depressions, a world war, and a cold war, who had time for a chain of hills in the coldest place on the planet?
There were some close calls in all that time, of course. In 1956 two Soviet destroyers vanished when they approached the seaward end of the larger mountain chain on the Wilhelm II Coast—not sunk, not destroyed, just vanished. Scientists at Australia’s Mawson Station reported an eerie light high up in the south about this time; at first thought to be a rising planet but later identified with the “beacon” from that unholy mountain range which Dyer had seen in the distance. At first the Soviets had blamed “capitalist aggression” for the loss, but there was no proof. No Western craft were anywhere in the area at the time. There is a sense of high-level meetings in large, dark rooms in Washington and Moscow; and the whole incident faded amidst official declarations of the bravery of the People’s Navy. And, it seemed, the Russians were brought into the fold.
The conspiracy’s second big concern came with the advent of satellites. Nothing, it seemed, could prevent any nation with satellite technology from peering down from on high on the hidden mountains. But here it developed that the mountains and their enclosed superplateau had a property that blocked electronic images. To all the circling mechanical eyes the region presented a satisfyingly white blank.
In the meantime, the investigators at the base of the Mountains of Madness had not been idle. Linguists attacked the dot-groupings that had served the Old Ones as writing, and after decades of toil had begun to decipher them. Comparing dot-texts with adjacent sculpture-bands in the Old Ones’ buildings, recognizing repeated patterns and drawing analogies from human languages by computer programs, the linguists had determined that the Old Ones’ writing was very like musical notation. Meaning and context were changed by tonal variations, much as in Chinese and Vietnamese. All this fit in precisely with Dyer’s descriptions of the Old Ones’ “musical piping over a wide range.”
Many of Dyer’s other observations were also verified or revised in the light of later science. For example, carbon-14 dating of the petrified shutters in the Old Ones’ very oldest buildings had confirmed Dyer’s proposed age of +-50 million years (a figure so staggering that the test had been repeated seven times to ensure accuracy; all results were identical). Dyer had also speculated that the Old Ones had used their wings to navigate interstellar “ether,” a concept since destroyed by Einstein; but later discoveries of solar winds and “dark energy” have given the scientists further food for thought. Even in minor details Dyer’s conclusions were being borne out. The “vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to paleontology” that the Old Ones had employed to build their taller structures were almost certainly examples of the mighty Quetzalcoatlus, whose wingspans could reach fifteen meters (a re-creation of one may be seen today in the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin).
And what of Dyer? He was clearly vindicated, and within the confines of Lake City (the research station established at the foot of the Mountains of Madness) venerated. But in the greater world he must, for the time being, remain discredited. As for fantasy writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft, his role in Dyer’s downfall takes on darker overtones. It was never stated explicitly in the INVESTIGATIONS that Lovecraft was part of the grand conspiracy of deception; but it was never denied either, and certain hints as to the source of some of his “revision” payments were ambiguous at best. Then, too, what were we to make of the fact that he died on March 15, 1937, just a week after the return of the Starkweather-Moore Expedition?
I took off my glasses—rubbed my eyes. It was all too much at once. I felt a nudge at my arm and opened my eyes and saw a blurry hand holding out a blurry pad and pencil. Replacing my glasses I could see written on the pad in Tom Spratt’s frantic handwriting:
do you buy this?
I considered a moment, then took the pad and pencil.
I’m not sure [I wrote]. The evidence is daunting, but I need more. And you?
He took the pad, scribbled furiously on it, and tossed it back. It read:
bloody tripe
To break up the strain of reading this remarkable document, I would turn and gaze out the window to the sea below. Once we had cleared New Zealand’s beautiful South Island we were above the “Roaring Forties,” that belt of raging sea below 40 degrees south which had been the terror of mariners for centuries. From our breathless height it was an endless expanse of gray streaked with white. Antarctica rings itself in concentric defenses of which the “Roaring Forties” was only the first. Later we saw white flecks upon the Southern Ocean that were the outliers of the great Antarctic pack ice. These increased in size and number, ice floes, icebergs, ice-shelf, and ice-barrier, until a terrible vastness of white ate away the entire southern horizon.
The one small break in this world of white came as we circled down to land at McMurdo Station on Ross Island. The worn buildings along the torn, brown streets of the settlement looked like a giant child’s forgotten blocks. Here we were to change planes, and here we first tried out our black sunglasses. Although the sun was low it burned with a pure, pale intensity, and I was glad of the protection.
After the crushing din of the C-130, the smaller Baslers to which we transferred seemed blessedly quiet. But they soon filled with the excited chatter of scientists, pent up after the six-hour flight from New Zealand, as we debated the content of the INVESTIGATIONS. Outside the white walls of our little aircraft the short Antarctic day declined slowly, the dull sun eroding by degrees into the flat horizon. It spread a golden splendor across the endless snows. Finally its last blinding arc slunk under the horizon and was gone. The purple of the zenith deepened into an inarguable black, and stars blazed forth with mad intensity. Still we flew on.
Later, people spoke quietly in pairs or not at all; a few slept. Tom and I debated the possible double meanings
of a quotation from Alone, Admiral Byrd’s account of a winter spent alone on the Ice: “The human race, then, is not alone in the universe. Though I am cut off from human beings, I am not alone.” I was flipping through my copy of the book, looking for a retort to Tom’s latest argument, when he softly said, “Good God.”
I turned to look at him. He was staring stock still out the airplane window. I unclicked my safety belt and leaned over him toward the window. Other belts were clicking open, and a mixed rumble of moving bodies and hushed voices signaled that others had seen what Tom had seen. Past the straight orange edge of the airplane’s wing; beyond countless leagues of flatness dimming to blue in the evening; in the nexus between earth and sky at the horizon’s rim, an ominous purple line of sharp-edged peaks arose. The haze of distance hid their bases but the afterglow picked out their summits in sharp contrast, like the bared teeth of a mouth ready to swallow the world. It became very quiet in the airplane.
3
LAKE CITY LAY SCATTERED LIKE BRIGHT BEADS AT THE BASE OF THE Mountains’ foothills. For the past hour we had been watching those Mountains of Madness swell and grow into the northwestern sky until they seemed to claw at the very zenith. Then we saw the tiny array of lights of the station and the neat double row that guided us to our landing strip on the ice, and down we glided.
The silence that had invaded the cabin of the plane swelled a thousandfold when we disembarked. It wasn’t as though there were no sound at all, for audible even miles above we could hear the high, mindless screaming of the wind among the peaks. Rather it was a silence of the soul; a weight of Presence and a reverence that quashed all mere human utterance. Anything you could think of to say seemed inane. Grand and awesome and terrible towered those mountains, purple-black against the indigo sky, and all other features of the world felt far away and insignificant.
It was here, too, that I got my first real taste of true Antarctic cold. Our brief sojourn at McMurdo Base had exposed me to some bitter cold, but nothing I had not seen in New England. Here the cold gripped you and held you, pierced you and crushed you. Here, too, we were high above sea level. I breathed in short, painful gasps. I was relieved, therefore, to see our transportation nearly to the plane when we arrived. Two enormous Kharkovchanka tracked vehicles awaited us, growling and steaming in the polar twilight.
The main building of Lake City stood above the snowpack like a big black shoebox on short pillars. A line of yellow-filled windows dotted and dashed down the side of it. At one end a cylindrical tower stuck up an added two stories above the main structure—“the Silo”—and, I later learned, extended two stories into the ground below. Another building had been erected over the site of Lake’s first excavation (Pabodie Depth 2, in local jargon), and the lights of this glowed in the blue distance. Other buildings bulked close by—service sheds, garages, the army barracks.
Our hosts ushered us into Lake Central, the outpost’s main building. After stopping at our dorm rooms to leave our luggage, we had a quick meal in the station cafeteria. Then we were led to a long meeting room with a bank of windows looking out on the mountains. A screen stood against the wall opposite the entrance. Five men—four in the heavy pants, boots, sweater, and beard that were the unofficial uniform of Lake City, and one in army fatigues—stood by an open laptop and projector at that end of the table. The men looked as though they hadn’t slept in days.
When we were all seated the eldest of these men stepped forward to the laptop and began speaking.
“Good evening,” he said in a deep voice. “I am Doctor Dubchenko of the St. Petersburg Institute. I will be facilitator of this symposium.
“I wish I could say it was my pleasure to welcome you all here, but we are met in the face of crisis. We are working under the twin constraints of secrecy and urgency. Therefore I will dispense with niceties and proceed to the matter at hand.
“All of you, I’m sure, and our distinguished climatologists especially, will remember the ‘ozone-hole crisis’ of the 1980s. It was, in fact, only the most public phase of a story that began in the ’70s and continues today with the monitoring of human-based production of the chlorofluorocarbons thought to be responsible for the hole.”
A susurrus of shifting moved through the room. I could pick out my fellow climatologists by their reactions to this statement: “human-based”? “thought to be responsible”?
“For the benefit of all here,” Dubchenko continued, “I will give a brief summary of this story.
“Beginning in the 1970s scientists began noticing an alarming reduction in the ozone in the stratosphere over the Antarctic continent. The damage was such that between 1975 and 1994 the ozone level here dropped from 300 DUs to 150 DUs—a reduction by half.”
“‘DUs’?” Spratt whispered to me.
“Dobson Units,” I said. “Used to measure ozone concentrations.”
“Thank God,” Spratt said, sitting back. “I thought it was a form of DTs.”
I covered a smile with my hand.
“The causes for this drop,” said Dubchenko, “were found to be the man-made trace gases chlorofluorocarbons—CFCs—produced for aerosol cans and air-conditioning units, as well as aircraft exhaust and nitrous oxide from fertilizers, among others. Fortunately, the efforts of developed nations through such agreements as the ’89 Montreal Protocol have effectively eliminated many of these sources. We were encouraged by a noticeable recovery of the ozone layer and a reduction of the so-called ‘ozone-hole.’ CFC concentrations peaked in 2002 and have been dropping ever since.
“However, more recent measurements have painted a different picture.”
He touched a couple of keys on the laptop, and an image blossomed upon the screen behind him. It was an image I knew well: the 2006 satellite photo of the Southern Hemisphere, showing the ozone hole at its largest. The globe was false-colored in areas of greens, blue, purple, and black, indicating progressively lesser concentrations of ozone. The purple and black areas covered most of Antarctica.
“This shows the ozone levels for Antarctic Spring of 2006,” Dubchenko said, waving at the screen. “Although impressive, it did not worry us at the time. The hole fluctuates naturally with the seasons, swelling in the spring months of September and October. Also, halocarbons such as CFCs last a long time in the stratosphere, so we expected a delayed event such as this.
“What we didn’t expect was this.”
Another couple of taps to the computer, and the image changed. Again the Earth appeared in false-color glory; but now the black and purple nearly covered the entire globe, extending well into the lower tips of South America and Africa.
“This was taken in February of this year,” Dubchenko said.
The chatter the picture had generated now exploded into exclamations and oaths. One big, bearded man across from me jumped to his feet and blurted, “Impossible!” My own heart sank within me.
Tom was looking left and right and finally caught my eye.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“It’s not so much that it’s bigger,” I said, shaking my head; “it’s the timing. Under ultraviolet radiation halocarbons release chlorine and bromine atoms, which catalyze with ozone to break it down. These atoms get bound up in stratospheric clouds during the Antarctic winter, but are released when the atmosphere warms up. Then, too, ozone breaks down naturally in light wavelengths under 1,200 nanometers, so the worst damage tends to come in September and October with the return of the sun.” I swallowed, staring back at the screen. “If it was that bad in February, it will be catastrophic come October.”
“How catastrophic?”
“Rule of thumb is a one per cent increase in ozone depletion equals a two per cent increase in UV reaching the earth,” I said, “which in turn translates into a four to ten per cent increase in the incidence of squamous cell skin cancer. You’re the biologist—you tell me.”
Tom blew out his cheeks and slumped back in his seat.
Dubchenko was trying to speak above
the clamor. “You will understand now the urgency of bringing you all here,” he called as the other voices died down. “Ultraviolet radiation levels have already been recorded in the 240 to 300 nanometer range across the continent. We are on the verge of a global disaster, and we need all your help to avert it.”
A heavy, pretty woman with dark hair raised her hand down front.
“Del Rio, UT, San Anton’,” she said in the gentle sway of central Texas. “The Montreal Protocol has loopholes for some developing countries, but I find it hard to believe that any country could produce such an effect in so short a time.”
“You are correct, Professor Del Rio,” Dubchenko responded. “No country, indeed, no group of countries could produce so drastic an effect in the time indicated. In fact, no human technology is capable of doing so. That is why we are meeting here,” and he swept his arm to indicate the bank of windows, beyond which the mountains loomed in indigo sleep. “At this point I must turn you over to our head of security, Colonel Mooney.”
Dubchenko stepped back, and the stocky man in fatigues—the head of the Ice Shadow Army—took his place. The fluorescents in the room glinted off his hair’s silver bristle, and his wide-set, sleepy blue eyes scanned across us all sitting there. I had the feeling that the sleepy look was deceptive and that Colonel Mooney could be a very dangerous man.
“You have read the INVESTIGATIONS,” he said in an Australian drawl, “so I don’t have to tell you the history of this locale. We are in the presence of very cunning and very lethal entities, and it is They who are behind this alteration to our environment.”
“Wait a minute,” Tom said, raising his hand. When Mooney gave him a cold look, he put in, “Spratt, Oxford. Biology.” (Secretly I wished I could blurt out credentials so impressive, but somehow “Metcalfe, University of Northern Rhode Island, Climatology” didn’t have that same sharp tang to it.) “Are we speaking of the ‘Old Ones,’ then?”
Mooney continued his icy stare, but Tom was unimpressed.