He looked up at Hayes with wild, unblinking eyes. His face was white as kidskin. "There's . . . there's something up there, something moving in the other room."

They were all tensed and waiting, just as still as the ice around them.

A floorboard overhead creaked. There was a weird and low vibration followed by a crackling sound. A pounding like a fist at the door above. A sliding, whispering noise. They were all crouched down low with Cutchen now, holding onto one another. A shrill, echoing peal sounded out above.

"What the h.e.l.l is it?" Cutchen said.

"Shut up," Hayes whispered. "For the love of G.o.d, be quiet . . . "

They waited there, hearing sounds . . . thumpings and knockings, scratching noises and that unearthly crackling. Hayes held onto them, never having felt this absolutely vulnerable in his life. His thoughts had gone liquid in his head. His soul felt like some whirlpool sucking down into fathomless blackness. He felt something catch in his throat, a cry or a scream, and Sharkey made a muted whimpering sound.

No, they hadn't seen anything, but they had heard things.

The things that probably drove the Russians insane. And they were feeling something, too . . . something electric and rising and palpable.

Those vibrations started again, making the entire building tremble. The walls above sounded like hammers were beating into them. There were other sounds above . . . like whispering, distorted voices and hollow pipings, a buzzing noise. And then - Then Sharkey gasped and a huge, amorphous shadow pa.s.sed over the trap door as if some grotesque figure had pa.s.sed before the lantern, making a sound like forks sc.r.a.ped over blackboards and then fading away.

They stayed together like that maybe five or ten minutes, then Hayes went up the ladder, expecting to see something that would leech his mind dry. But there was nothing, nothing at all. The others came up and not a one of them remarked on those weird spade-like prints in the snow.

The wind was whipping and the snow coming at them in sheets as they found the SnoCat and Hayes started it up. He brought it around and bulldozed through a few drifts. Cutchen was staring into his rearview mirror, seeing things darting in and out of the blizzard that he would not comment on.

"Just drive," he said when Hayes asked him. "For the love of Christ, get us out of here . . . "

30.

So in the days following the successful probe of Lake Vordog, Professor Gundry found himself wishing that he had stayed at CalTech working on his glaciological models. Wishing he had never come down to Antarctica and opened Pandora's Box, got a good look at what was inside. For though it made absolutely no scientific sense, he now knew there were things a man was better off not seeing, not knowing. Things that could get down inside a man, unlocking old doors and rattling primal skeletons from moldering closets, making him feel things and remember things that could poison him to his marrow.

Gundry was no longer the man Hayes had gotten to know, however briefly.

He was not a bundle of nervous energy and inexhaustible drive and ambition. He was no longer a perpetual motion machine that seemed to move in all directions simultaneously, constantly thinking and emoting and reacting. No, now he was a worn, weathered man in his mid-sixties whose blood ran cold and who felt the weight and pull of each of those years dragging him down, compressing him, squashing him flat. His mind was like some incredibly rare and tragic orchid whose petals no longer sought tropical mists and the heat of the sun, but had folded up and withered, pulled into itself and sought the dark, dank depths of cellars and crawls.p.a.ces. Cobwebbed, moist, rotting places where the soul could go to mulch and fungus in secret. There were such places in Gundry, crevices and mildewed corners where he could lose himself.

Away from prying eyes and questioning tongues, a man could face the truth of who and what he was, the ultimate destiny of his race. For these were weighty, soul-scarring issues that would crush any man just as they were crushing Gundry.

Gundry was a Southerner.

He was from the Bible Belt and his old man had been something of a lay-preacher. When he wasn't raising sugar beets, melons, and sweet corn, the elder Gundry did his share of preaching at county fairs and carnival booths. He had no earthly patience with such higher realms of thought as organic evolution and cosmic generation. He believed what the Bible taught and was happy within those narrow confines.

Gundry had always thought his father ignorant and parochial, a fly trapped in amber, a man in a constant state of denial as science and technology slowly ate away the foundations of conservative belief and tradition. The way Gundry saw it, science and enlightenment were the only true cure for dim centuries of religious bigotry and hypocrisy.

But now, all these many years later, Gundry finally understood his father.

Though he could not honestly believe in some invisible, mythical G.o.d, he could understand religion now. He could understand that it was a security blanket men wrapped around themselves. Maybe it was dark and close under that blanket and you couldn't see more than a few inches in any direction, but it was safe. G.o.d created Heaven and Earth and there was a serenity to that, now wasn't there? It was simple and rea.s.suring. And if religion was indeed a sheltering blanket, then science was the cold hand which yanked it away, showing man his ultimate insignificance in the greater scheme of things, the truth about his origins and destiny. The very things man had tried for so many millennia to walk away from, to forget. A cage he had liberated himself from slowly and, even if a candle of truth still burned in the depths of his being, if he did not look at it, then it did not exist. But now man had been thrown back into that cage, had the door slammed shut in his face. And the truth, the real truth of who and what man was and where he'd come from, was staring him dead in the eye.

And, with that in mind, Gundry knew now that enlightenment was the lamp that would burn mens' souls to cinders and the truth was the beast that would devour him and swallow him alive.

For if those things down in the lake had their way, men would never be men again, but just appendages of a cold and cosmic hive-intelligence as it had been intended from the very beginning.

The idea of that terrified Gundry.

It shook him to his roots and filled his soul with venom. All these years, all these thousands upon thousands of years, man had been running from his origins. And now the world was poised on an event that would throw him right back into those very arms. Culture, society, philosophy, religion, poetry, art, music . . . it would all be rendered meaningless beneath the burning, dominating eye of that dire alien intellect.

There was something very offensive and even obscene about that.

So very late in life, Gundry finally, ultimately embraced the insular teachings of organized religion and came to accept that, yes, there indeed was a serpent in Eden . . . and it had come from another star.

Gundry was sitting in the old core sampling room, his head in his hands, whimpering, mourning at the grave of humanity.

Jesus, oh Lord, if you exist, stop this, stop Them before it's too late. Before everything we are is lost to Their memory, swallowed by it.

n.o.body had been to the drilling tower in several days now.

Oh, they knew what had been found in the lake and mainly because Hayes had been blabbing about it, but they preferred to leave it alone. Even the scientists themselves had not asked to see the video feed. And wasn't that interesting? Yes, but not surprising with what was going on. Mankind was going full circle and they all felt it and it scared the s.h.i.t out of them.

Scared? Gundry thought. They think its bad over at the compound, they should try it over here for a few days.

Gundry refused to go into the control booth anymore.

Campbell and Parks had pretty much been in there since the day they launched the cryobot. Though the hydrobot was dead, the primary and secondary cryobots were still operating. Still operating and pa.s.sing reams of information to the surface.

But that wasn't all they were pa.s.sing.

They were picking up a series of vibrations down there that were steady and organized, a constant stream of pulses that repeated every five minutes to the second. Gundy knew it was not due to some natural phenomena. This was purposeful and directed and he knew it was coming from the archaic city down below. These vibrations were very much like Morse code. The computers could crunch those pulses into mathematical symbols, attach to them a numerical value . . . but it would take months if not years to accurately decipher what the Old Ones were sending.

Or maybe not.

Because maybe on the surface those pulses sounded like noise, but inside, deep inside your mind, you recognized them and understood them. Something long dormant in the human brain was receiving them and waking up. That's why Parks and Campbell would not leave the booth - they were in tune with it. Gaunt, haggard zombies with eyes like staring gla.s.s was all they were now, listening and listening as the Old Ones imposed their will upon them and stripped away their humanity inch by inch.

Gundry could not go in there now.

Those pulses made something in his head ache and something in his belly recoil. The three techs who had operated the drill were gone now. Gundry didn't know what had happened to them exactly. Just that one afternoon they stood over the drill hole, staring down into it with blank looks on their faces. And by evening, they were gone. Gundry figured they had wandered off into the Antarctic night just as they were told to.

There was a sudden vibration in the drill tower that Gundry could feel coming up through his feet. It was a constant, electronic humming that rose and fell. Made him want to chatter his teeth and scream his mind away. But it was more than that, for it got inside his head and made something hurt in there. And he knew if he would only stop fighting against it, the pain would recede and a black wave of acceptance would carry him off to eon-dead worlds.

Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

The pain was so intense in his head now, thrumming in cutting, tearing waves, that Gundry's vision blurred and tears were squeezed from his eyes. His molars ached and drool fell from his lips. But he was still a man and he would remain one. Digging frantically into his desk drawer, he pulled out his little .38 and put the barrel in his mouth. There was an explosion and an impact, a shattering and a sense of falling.

Gundry's corpse slid from the chair to the floor.

Denying the intellect of the hive, he died as a man with freedom on his tongue and defiance in his soul.

31.

"I'm all out of answers. I'm empty and finished and just going through the motions now," Hayes said the morning after they returned from the Vradaz Outpost. "I don't know what to think and what to feel. Like a rat in a f.u.c.king maze. Once again."

"Least you're not alone in the maze," Sharkey told him.

Why did that seem precious little consolation?

No, he would not have been able to handle any of this alone. It would have stripped his gears. But at least alone he could have sought the oblivion of suicide, but now that was out of the question. For he felt a sense of responsibility here. Maybe to his race and the world, but certainly to those that were still alive at Kharkhov Station.

Maybe he was inflating his own importance, but he didn't think so. For he had an odd and unwavering sense of necessity.

Looking back, he was the only who had felt the badness coming and seen it for what it was. More or less. Maybe the others had, too, in some sense, but just refused to admit it. He felt somehow that he was the guiding hand in this s.h.i.tf.u.c.k and if there was going to be any closure to it, he would be the one to shut the door.

Maybe because those things had tried to infect his mind several times now and had failed. Maybe it was this that gave him such a feeling of self-importance. Sharkey was on the same page with him and so was Cutchen . . . most of the time . . . but the others?

No, from LaHune on down they were mice.

Just going about their mindless business and nibbling their cheese, pretending they were not in incredible danger. St. Ours had been an a.s.shole. Hayes would be the first to admit to that. But good or bad, St. Ours had had enough gumption to sense danger and fight against it.

But what now? What came next?

Hayes just wasn't sure.

Sharkey had just finished telling him two disturbing pearls of knowledge. First that Gates and his people had not been heard from in nearly thirty-six hours now. And secondly, that she'd been on the radio with Nikolai Kolich at the Vostok Station and he had pulled a complete 360 on them, acting like he had never said a word about anything odd happening at Vradaz. Completely denying it all like somebody had a gun to his head. If they'd had an ally there, they'd lost him now.

"We have to decide what we're going to do, Jimmy. Do we try and sit this out? I don't think so. Something has to be done and it's up to us to do it. We can't expect LaHune to help us and probably n.o.body else either." She appraised Hayes with those crystal blue eyes of hers that always made something seize up inside him. "What I'm thinking is we first . . . neuter those mummies out in the hut. A little exposure to our lovely air down here ought to put them back to sleep. Also, how do you feel about me sending a message to the NSF that we're in serious trouble here?"

Hayes didn't know if that was such a good idea. "I'm willing to bet the NSF will ignore it. Because, chances are, LaHune is sending in his glowing daily reports, fiddling while Rome burns to f.u.c.king toast."

"You're probably right."

He figured he was. "We'll look like a couple crackpots. Besides, Cutchy says we're heading into a full-blown Polar cyclonic storm within twelve hours. We're going to be looking at white-out conditions when those winds start sweeping down from the mountains, picking up everything in their path. No way in h.e.l.l a rescue team can get in here . . . even if they wanted to."

Sharkey didn't dispute any of that.

Winter on the Antarctica continent was savage and relentless, marked by screaming subzero winds, perpetual darkness, and wild blizzards that buried camps almost overnight. Planes did not fly to the South Pole even on good days, let alone what they were facing a Condition 3 blizzard with zero visibility and 80 mile-an-hour winds that would lock Kharkhov down for days if not weeks. So whatever was going to happen here, they were going to face it alone.

"There's more here at work than the weather, Elaine, and I think we both know it." Hayes lit a cigarette, seemed to find revelation in the glowing tip. "We've all been sensing a lot of things, some of it coming in dreams and some of it coming just as feelings we can't honestly explain. I'm probably the worst of the lot, spouting out reams of bulls.h.i.t that I have no way of explaining or proving. Most of what I've been . . . what word should I use here? . . . intuiting has been about those dead ones out in the hut, the others down in the lake. But not all of it's been about that. I told you I had a bad feeling about LaHune and I still do. And now, with our good buddy Nikolai Kolich turning his pink tail on us . . . I'm getting an even worse feeling."

Sharkey just watched him, far beyond the stage where she would even consider trying to talk him out of his conspiracy theories . . . because piece by awful piece, the puzzle he'd been prophesizing was slowly coming together. "You think . . . " She swallowed, paused. "You still think that LaHune is sitting atop a conspiracy, don't you?"

He shrugged. "Yes, even more than I did before. I'm seeing him as the big old mother hen sitting on a brood of eggs that are going rotten and wormy, but he's so f.u.c.king brainwashed that he don't have the sense to climb off . . . until he's told to. You like that, darling? Well, I got more. You wanna hear more?"

"Yes, I suppose I do."

Hayes grinned. "Well, sweetheart, it's your quarter so you might as well get your money's worth." He pulled off his cigarette. "LaHune. I told you once he doesn't belong here and that's the truth. But I think he was selected for this post by certain high-ranking a.s.sholes. Maybe he's NASA or JPL, s.h.i.t maybe he's NSA or Cee-Eye-Aye, baby, I don't know. But I think Uncle Sugar sent him down here. I think LaHune is some kind of spook. There, I said it. I felt it pretty much all along and now I'm admitting it. You've pulled a few tours down here, Elaine, and I'm willing to bet you've heard the same tired old stories I have. Crazy, fringe-s.h.i.t about the government sending certain security types down here on occasion, undercover, just to keep an eye on things."

Sharkey couldn't lie. "Yeah, I've heard it. And it was probably true during the Cold War . . . but now?"

"Yes, particularly now. I'm not even saying for one mad moment that the NSF is even aware that these types are crawling through their organization like worms in s.h.i.t, but I'll bet they are. My guess is that some people on the highest rung of the dirtiest ladder we got . . . or sitting on the biggest t.u.r.d, take your pick . . . arranged to have LaHune come down here. Why? Because I think they had an inkling of what we were going to find. Maybe that nonsense you hear about Area 57 and Roswell isn't as crazy as you think. Maybe there are things like that and maybe our government knows about 'em. Maybe. And just maybe they knew about what was down here. Maybe they took the Pabodie Expedition a lot more seriously than people imagined . . . and, h.e.l.l, maybe the same sort of people who quashed that back in the thirties are active now, sterilizing things for public consumption. Yeah, I know. That's a whole big peck of pickled peppers I'm balancing on the top of my pointy head, but it all makes sense to me."

Sharkey smiled. "I like the peppers a.n.a.logy, because all of this is giving me an upset stomach."

"Don't blame you. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I have cabin fever and maybe my d.i.c.k is made of yellow sponge cake, but I don't think so. LaHune is dirty and he has an agenda. I think the people who yank his strings knew about that ruined city and had suspicions about what was down in the lake . . . and that magnetic anomaly? Well, that was the icing on the cake, so to speak."

Sharkey leaned back in her chair, locking her fingers together behind her head. "Oh, Jimmy," she said, looking like a bad headache was coming over her. "I'm not saying you're wrong . . . but it's pretty spooky thinking, you know? If it is true, then why did LaHune lift the ban on communications, email?"

"I think he had to . . . or he was told to so things didn't get too randy down here." Hayes finished his cigarette. "Listen to me, Elaine. I'm not saying I'm completely right here, but I think I'm on the right path. And I think you know I am. I don't know what LaHune's people might want . . . maybe they want the technology, maybe they want to seize it before anyone else does. I don't know. I don't believe they realized the level of power that was still active down here, but maybe they did. Again, maybe they had some kind of half-a.s.s inkling of it. But I don't really think they meant to put us in any sort of real danger. I'm not that much of a conspiracist. No, whoever these people are, they only wanted us to do our jobs and gather intelligence for them . . . I don't think they meant to hurt us."

Sharkey just sat there for a time, not looking at Hayes, but the papers on her desk, a few framed snapshots of friends from other Antarctic camps. "You know what p.i.s.ses me off, Jimmy?"

"No, but I have a feeling you'll tell me."

"You do."

"Me?"

"Yes. And you p.i.s.s me off because I think you're right. Maybe not completely, but I think you're pretty close. What I saw at Vradaz pretty much confirms that. But where does any of it get us? Nowhere. Even if it's true, so what? It's out of our hands. LaHune will do what he's told to do and maybe some of us will walk out of this come spring. And I'm willing to bet if we do, we're never invited back."

"I agree," he said. "But I think it's beyond just that now. Regardless of what LaHune's puppet masters decide or don't decide, these things, these Old Ones, are the immediate threat. They're the ones in power now. If we want to get out of here alive, we better start thinking of how we're going to cut their b.a.l.l.s off . . . if they have any."

Sharkey got out of her chair and walked around behind Hayes. She stroked his hair and then kissed him on the cheek. "Why don't you go accidentally knock Hut Six down . . . that's a start. That might shut them down or at least set them back."

Hayes stood up and took her into his arms. And maybe he didn't really take her, because she seemed to fall right in place like a cog. He kissed her and she kissed him back and that kiss was in no hurry, it held on, pressed them together and only ended when it was on the verge of bigger things.

"I think I'll go do just that. Have a little accident with the 'dozer. A big f.u.c.king oops," he said, his insides filled with a warmth that quickly sought lower regions. "And then we'll see. We'll just see. You know, lady, I got me this crazy idea of us walking out of here together."

"Me, too," she said.

Hayes turned away and started down the corridor.

"Be careful, Jimmy," she said, not sure if he heard her or not.

PART FIVE.

THE SWARM.