But Lind was shaking his head back and forth. "Dead . . . dead . . . nothing. But the hive, the hive can seed it . . . create organic molecules and proteins and the helix, we are the makers of the helix . . . we are the farmers, we seed and then we harvest. The primal white jelly . . . the architect of life. . . we are and have always been the farmers of the helix, the hive mind, the great white s.p.a.ce, the thought and the being and the structure and . . . the helix . . . the perpetuation of the helix, the surety and plan and the conquest and the harvest. . . the makers and unmakers . . . the cosmic lord of the helix . . . the continuation of the code the helix the code vessels of flesh exist to perpetuate the helix only exist to perpetuate and renew the helix the spiral of being... the primal white jelly... the color out of s.p.a.ce... "

Hayes tried to pull away now, because something was happening.

Lind's eyes were now black and soulless and malevolent, filled with a dire alien malignancy. They were black and oily, yet shining brightly like tensor lamps. They found Hayes and held him. And those eyes, those bleeding alien cancers, they did not just look through him, they looked straight into the center of his being, his soul, coldly appraising what they found there and contemplating how it could be crushed and contained and converted into something else. Something not human, something barren and blank, something that was part of the hive.

Hayes screamed . . . feeling them, those ancient minds coming at him like a million yellowjacket wasps in a wind tunnel, punching through him and melting away his soul and individuality, making him part of the greater hole, the swarm, the swarm-mind. He tried vainly to pull his hand out of Lind's grasp, but his muscles had gone to rubber and his bones were elastic. And Lind was like some incredible generator, arcing and crackling, electric flows of energy dancing over his skin in pale blue eddies and whirlpools.

And that energy was kinetic. It had motion and direction.

The gla.s.s face of a clock on the wall shattered like a hammer had struck it. Papers and pencils and folders were scattered from Sharkey's desk and blown through the air in a wild, ripping cyclone. Shelves were emptied of bottles and instruments and the floor was vibrating, the walls pounding like the beat of some incredible heart. The infirmary and sickbay were a tempest of anti-gravity, things spinning and jumping and whirling in mid-air, but never falling. Sharkey was thrown against the wall and then to the floor where she was pushed by a wave of invisible force right against the door leading out into the corridor. That awful vibration was thrumming and thrumming, the air filled with weird squeals and echoes and pinging sounds. Hayes lost gravity . . . he was lifted up into the air, Lind still clutching his hand, tethering him to the world. Cracks fanned out in the wall, ceiling tiles broke loose and went madly spinning through the vortex and then a And then Lind sat up.

The straps holding him down sheared open, wavering and snapping about like confetti in a tornado. His face was contorted and bulging, tears of blood running from his eyes and nose. He seized up, went rigid, and then collapsed back on the bed.

Everything stopped.

All those papers and pens and vials of pills and drugs and books and charts and paperclips . . . all of it suddenly crashed to the floor and Hayes with it. He sat there on his a.s.s, stunned and shocked and not sure where he was for a moment or what he was doing. Sharkey was pulling herself up the wall, trying to speak and only making weird grunting sounds. The force of that wind, or whatever in the Christ it had been, had actually blown the tight pony tail ring from her hair and her locks hung over her face in wild plaits. She brushed them away.

Then she was helping Hayes up. "Are you okay, Jimmy?"

He nodded dumbly. "Yeah . . . I don't even know what happened."

Sharkey went to Lind. She pulled open one of his eyelids, checked his pulse. She picked her stethoscope up from where it was dangling from the top of the door. She listened for Lind's heart, shook her head. "Dead," she said. "He's dead."

Hayes was not surprised.

He looked down at Lind and knew that if the man's heart had not given out or his brain exploded in his head, if whatever had not killed him, then both Sharkey and himself would probably be dead now. That energy had been lethal and wild and destructive.

"Elaine," he said. "Should we . . . "

"Let's just clean this mess up."

So they did.

They had barely begun when people were coming down the corridor, demanding to know what all the racket had been and why the G.o.dd.a.m.n infirmary smelled like bleach or chemicals. But then they saw Lind and they didn't ask any more questions. They politely tucked their tails between their legs and got out while the getting was good.

After they had put things back in order and swept up the rest, Hayes and Sharkey sat down and she got out a bottle of wine she'd been saving. It was expensive stuff and they drank it from plastic Dixie cups.

"How am I going to log this one?" Sharkey said. "That Lind was possessed? That he exhibited telepathy and telekinesis? That something had taken over his mind and it was something extraterrestrial? Or should I just say that he died from some unexplainable dementia?"

Hayes sighed. "He wasn't possessed or insane. At least, not at first. He was in contact with them somehow, with those dreaming minds out in the hut or maybe the living ones down in the lake. Probably the former, I'm guessing." Hayes lit a cigarette and his hand shook. "What he was telling us, Doc, was a memory. A memory of an alien world where those Old Ones had come from . . . it was a memory of colonization. Of them leaving that planet and drifting here through s.p.a.ce, I think."

"Drifting through s.p.a.ce?" she said. "It must have taken ages, eons."

"Time means nothing to them."

Sharkey just shook her head. "Jimmy . . . that's pretty wild."

He knew it was, but he believed it. Completely. "You have a better explanation? I didn't think so. You felt the heat, smelled that ammonia . . . it was probably one of the outer planets they came from. Maybe not originally, but that was their starting point when they came here. Jesus, they must have drifted for thousands of years, dormant and dreaming, waiting to come here, to this blue world."

"But the outer planets . . . Ura.n.u.s, Neptune . . . they're cold, aren't they?" she said. "Even a billion years ago, they would have been ice cold . . . "

Hayes pulled off his cigarette. "No, not at all. I'm no scientist, Doc, but I've been hanging around with them for years . . . I knew this one astronomer at McMurdo. We used to hang out at the observatory and he'd tell me things about the planets, the stars. Neptune and Ura.n.u.s, for example, because of their size have immense atmospheric pressures, so the liquid on them can't freeze or turn to vapor, it's held in liquid form in ma.s.sive seas of water, methane, and ammonia."

"All right," Sharkey said. "But for them to drift here . . . you have any idea how long that would take?"

"Again, time only means something to creatures like you and me with finite life spans and I think the Old Ones are nearly immortal. They'd have to be. Sure, they may die by accident or design, but not from old age. No, Doc, they drifted here like pollen on the wind."

Hayes said he figured it was how they worked. Maybe drifting from one star system to the next, something that probably took millions of years. Then establishing themselves on worlds, hopping from planet to planet, seeding them with life.

Sharkey didn't want to believe any of it, but slowly the logic of it took hold of her despite herself. "Yes . . . I suppose that's how it must've been. It's just incredible, is all."

"Of course it is."

"You heard what Lind said? That business about the helix and organic molecules, proteins . . . the conquest and the harvest . . . the perpetuation of the helix?"

"I heard."

"And . . . "

"They created life here, they are the engineers of our DNA," Hayes said. "They created it. Maybe out of themselves or from scratch, who knows? Jesus, this is outrageous. This is really going to throw the creationists firmly on their a.s.s. So much for religion."

"So much for everything."

"I guess we've seen the face of G.o.d down here," Hayes said. "And it's an ugly one."

Sharkey started laughing. Was having trouble stopping. "Gates . . . that's what Gates was saying. That they might have seeded hundreds of worlds, directed evolution, that their ultimate agenda was harvesting those minds they had created . . . "

And this was the very thing Hayes was having trouble with. "But why? What do they want with them? What could it be?"

"To bring them into the hive, subjugate them . . . who knows?" Sharkey swallowed. "Down in the lake . . . those things down there . . . they've been waiting for us all this time. Waiting to harvest what we are. f.u.c.king Christ, Jimmy . . . the patience of those monsters."

What Hayes was trying to figure out is why they took total possession of Lind like they had. He'd been in the hut that day with Lind and those mummies had freaked him out, made him feel bad inside, but they hadn't taken over his mind. Was it that Lind was just a sensitive of some sort? A natural receiver, a medium for lack of a better word?

And what about Meiner and St. Ours?

Those things had leeched their minds dry and destroyed their brains. And Hayes himself had been psychically attacked twice by the Old Ones . . . once in the hut alone and last night out on the tractor . . . why hadn't they killed him, too? Why did he have the strength to fight? And Sharkey? She had had the dreams, too, as they all had. What in the h.e.l.l were those things saving them for? What was the ultimate plan here?

"You feel up to that drive I was talking about?" he asked her.

"Vradaz?"

He nodded. "I don't think we have much time left, Elaine. If we can learn something up there, maybe we might make it out of this yet."

"Okay," she said, but didn't sound too hopeful. "Jimmy? Lind said 'The Color Out of s.p.a.ce'. I've heard him say it before while he was heavily sedated. I thought it meant nothing . . . but I'm not so sure now. What is this Color Out of s.p.a.ce?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's the Old Ones themselves," he speculated. "And maybe it's something a lot worse."

28.

"Tell me again why I'm doing this," Cutchen said.

"For the good of humanity," Hayes told him. "What more reason do you need?"

Maybe Cutchen needed some rea.s.surance here, some encouragement, but Hayes didn't really have a lot to offer up in that department. Why were they going up to Vradaz Outpost, the abandoned Russian camp? Even he wasn't sure, not really. But something bad, something truly terrible had happened there and he felt it was important that they find out what. Maybe they'd find nothing but a snowed-in empty camp, but Hayes was thinking there had to be evidence of what came down. If even some of what Nikolai Kolich said was true, then the outpost had undergone pretty much the same sort of s.h.i.t that Kharkhov Station was currently undergoing.

Hayes could remember very well what Kolich had said.

Vradaz was a summer post and they were coring, struck into a cave or chasm or something. Yes. Then . . . I remember things got funny after that.

And didn't that just sound familiar?

"Storm's picking up pretty good out there," Sharkey said.

Hayes worked the stick of the SnoCat, pressing in the clutch, and bringing it up to high gear as they came over a rise and moved across a barren ice plain. He figured they'd make Vradaz in thirty or forty minutes if the storm didn't swallow them alive. They were plunging through Condition Two weather, sheets of wind-driven snow blasting the SnoCat and making it tremble. It was dark out, of course, and the only lights came from the 'Cat itself. All you could see in the high beams was the white, uneven tundra broken occasionally by k.n.o.bs of black rock and the swirling, blowing snow.

"You're not going to get us lost are you?" Cutchen said.

"No, I don't think so. I have a roll of kite twine on the back of the 'Cat and I tied the other end to Targa House." He glanced out his window at the huge rectangular mirror out there. "s.h.i.t . . . must have run out of string."

"Ha, ha, you so funny," Cutchen said.

"Relax. GPS knows the way and I took a bearing on Vradaz before we left. If we get lost, the beacon from Kharkhov will bring us back home."

"If worse comes to worse," Sharkey said, "we can gather up some wood and start a signal fire."

"Boy, you guys are good. I'll book you in Vegas when we get back . . . unless we don't get back." Cutchen thought about that a moment. "You think these Old Ones have much of a sense of humor, Hayes?"

"Yeah, I think they do. Look-it all the gags they've pulled on us. They're some really silly b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, you get to know 'em."

The SnoCat began to jump and lurch as it pa.s.sed over a field of sastrugi, frozen ridges of snow and ice that looked like waves heading ash.o.r.e at a beach. Except these never moved and they were tough as granite. But the SnoCat handled them just fine, jarring and bouncing, but handling it better on its twin sets of caterpillar tracks than an ordinary wheeled vehicle would have.

Hayes swung the 'Cat around a glacial valley, the storm getting worse, beginning to howl and screech, filling its lungs full of frost and white death and letting it back out in a wild, whipping tempest. The cab of the 'Cat was warm even without their ECW's on, but outside? They wouldn't have lasted long. Hayes had followed the ice road that Gates and his people had flagged for some thirty miles before the GPS told him it was time to trail blaze. It was dangerous work on an Antarctic night, but he had plotted a course on the contour map so he didn't drive them into a fissure or crevice. It was lumpy and b.u.mpy rolling over serrated ice ridges and steering around weathered black outcroppings of stone, but they were going to make it.

Hayes had already decided that.

He just wasn't giving much thought to whether or not they'd make it back again.

One heartbreak at a time.

The wastelands to either side were dead white with canopies of ice that jutted like mountain peaks. You caught them out of the glare of the lights and out of the corner of your eye, they looked like monuments and gravestones sometimes. The landscape became very hilly as they approached the Dominion Range, full of sudden gullies and ice-pilings, horns of wind-blasted rock rising up like church spires. Rough, dangerous country. The Dominion Range was located along the edge of the East Antarctic ice sheet, where the ma.s.sive Beardmore and Mill Glaciers came together. Had it been daylight, Hayes knew, they would have been able to see the rugged cones of the Transantarctic Mountains rising before them.

The SnoCat plodded along, plowing through waist-high drift and over ridges of ice. The wind kept blowing and the snow kept pushing from the high elevations, threatening to bury them at times.

"Hey! You see that!" Cutchen said, almost choking on his words.

Sharkey tensed next to him and Hayes tried to swallow. "What? What did you see?"

"I . . . well, I saw a shape . . . I thought I saw a shape," Cutchen said. "Off to the right. It pa.s.sed right by us . . . then I lost it in the snow."

"Probably some rocks," Sharkey pointed out.

"No, it was moving . . . I think it was moving away from us." Cutchen let that hang a moment, then added, "I thought I saw eyes reflected."

"Eyes?" Hayes said. "How many?"

Sharkey crossed her arms almost defiantly. "Stop it. Both of you."

"Just a shape," Cutchen said. "That's all."

Hayes was going to tell him he was crazy, that there was nothing moving out there but them, but the spit had dried up in his mouth. It felt like something was spinning a web at the base of his spine, a chill stealthily creeping up his back.

"It was probably nothing," Cutchen said like he was trying to convince himself of the fact.

Ten minutes pa.s.sed while Hayes hoped they'd see nothing else. He checked the GPS. "Okay, we should be right on top of Vradaz . . . gotta be right in this area somewhere."

But it was dead winter in Antarctica, the perpetual night billowing and consuming like black satin. Hayes downshifted the 'Cat and cranked up the headlights, put the spots on. Shafts of light cut across the glacial plane, making it no more than twenty or thirty feet before they reflected back the blizzard. It looked and sounded like a sandstorm out there.

They kept going, Hayes bringing the 'Cat around in a loose circle, staying within the perimeters of the GPS field. Cutchen splayed the spots around. The snowfall died down a bit and they could see a huge ice barrier just beyond them that must have been seventy or eighty feet high.

"There," Cutchen said. "There's something over there."

He was right.

A cl.u.s.ter of irregular shapes thrust from the snow, right at the foot of the barrier. Hayes could see what might have been roofs, an aerial, the rusted sheet metal of a wall blown clean of drift. Much of it was lost beneath an ice fall. The glaciers were pushing that barrier down from the mountains, a few feet a year. Sooner or later, Vradaz Outpost would be crushed beneath it.

Hayes pulled the SnoCat in closer, pushing through the night. Waves of snow like breakers at sea were spread across what must have been the compound at one time, gathering here at the foot of the ice barrier.

"A few more weeks and the camp would have been buried," Cutchen said. "I think we should have waited."

Hayes pulled the 'Cat to a stop and killed the engine. Suddenly then, there was only that immense and eerie stillness, that ominous sense of desertion and lifelessness all abandoned camps seemed to have. The wind was blowing and that great ice barrier was cracking and popping.

They sat there in the cab, waiting, thinking.

Hayes didn't know about the others, but the sight of Vradaz entombed in snow and ice made something in his belly stir like gravy. There was a tenseness to his limbs, a tightening of his ligaments and a quickness to his pulse. He found himself involuntarily reaching out for Sharkey's hand just as she reached for his and for Cutchen's. And there they sat, in that windy darkness, listening to the snow glance off the windshield and pepper the sides of the SnoCat. n.o.body was moving. They were barely breathing.

Like standing outside a haunted house on a chill October night, Hayes found himself thinking. Listening to the leaves blow and the shutters creak and wondering if we have the b.a.l.l.s to see this through.

"Okay, I've had enough," Cutchen said. "Either we do this or turn around. I say we turn around. The brochure clearly said this place had a pool. I don't see any pool."

Hayes broke his grip with Sharkey's gloved hands. "I suppose we can't sit here like this being all girly."

He opened his door and the cold blasted in.