"Nor is it to be thought...that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substances walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the s.p.a.ces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen."

- H.P. Lovecraft.

32.

A few hours after Hayes went out on his mission, Cutchen appeared at the door to the infirmary. "Knock, knock," he said.

"It's open," Sharkey said. She was staring into the screen of her laptop, gla.s.ses balanced on the end of her nose. "If you want drugs, the answer is no."

But Cutchen didn't want that.

He had an almost rakish smile on his face. And his eyes had that typical I-know-something-you-don't-know gleam in them. "How's things? Anything going on I should know about?"

Sharkey still hadn't looked up from her laptop. "Go ahead, Cutchy. I know you want to. You look like a little boy trying to sneak a snake into the schoolhouse. Spill it."

"It concerns our Mr. Hayes."

"Really?"

"Yeah, about an hour ago I was coming back from the dome and I saw the craziest d.a.m.n thing. I saw the camp bulldozer suddenly roar into life, come plowing through the compound and smash through the wall of Hut Six. Now isn't that astounding?"

Sharkey was still reading off her screen. "Yup. Crazy things happen. Hard to see out there."

"You know what I saw then? Oh, this is even better. I saw Hayes hop out of the 'dozer and elbow his way through a group of people at Targa House, ignoring their questions as to what the h.e.l.l he thought he was doing. Those people kept asking and he kept ignoring them and they were all smiling, some were even clapping."

"Really?" Sharkey was looking up now, smiling herself. "Sounds like Hayes did a pretty careless thing . . . but it certainly perked up morale, didn't it?"

"I would say so. Jesus, everyone's been wandering around here like a bunch of G.o.dd.a.m.n zombies. All of them afraid of their own shadows . . . and now this. Yeah, they needed it. It was a real big boost, kicked them out of their sh.e.l.ls. Maybe even gave them the sort of hope they've been lacking." Cutchen laughed. "It certainly gave me a charge. Hayes is like our very own rebel leader now, our own Pancho Villa, our Robin Hood. But you already knew about this, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"And did you put him up to it?"

Sharkey shrugged. "I suggested it. Our Mr. Hayes is a very impulsive fellow, you know."

"Oh, I know. Everyone seems to look to him now, like he's in charge and not LaHune. I would tend to agree. Hayes is now our spiritual leader." Cutchen sat down across from her. "LaHune didn't care for any of it, of course."

Cutchen explained that LaHune came storming into the community room, demanding to know what Hayes thought he was doing and Hayes told him that he was preserving Gates' specimens before they rotted away completely. That he'd taken down that wall purely out of scientific concern for the mummies.

"LaHune, of course, started threatening Hayes with all sorts of repercussions."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Hayes then told him to go promptly f.u.c.k himself." Cutchen laughed about this. "As you might expect there was more applause."

"I imagine so."

Cutchen sat there for a time watching Sharkey who seemed to be pretty enrapt with what was on her laptop. "Tell you the truth, Elaine, I didn't just come here to tell you about that, though."

"No?"

"Nope. For some time now, both you and Hayes have been pulling me into this scenario of yours and I'll be the first to admit, I'm not seeing the big picture in this conspiracy. I know what I've been dreaming about and what I've been feeling and the things I've seen here . . . and at Vradaz. But you two have yet to feed me more than sc.r.a.ps. So let's have it. Tell me everything."

"Funny you should be asking these things, because I think I'm in a position, finally, where I can tell you. What I've been studying here on my laptop are Dr. Gates' files. I hacked into his system because I had a pretty good feeling that everything he hadn't told us that day in the community room was locked up on his computer and I was right." Using her mouse, she scrolled through a few pages. "You see, not only was all of it there, but more. Gates has been sending written reports from his laptop up at the excavation to his desktop here. The last one was dated two days ago . . . "

"You're a sneaky devil, Madam."

"Yes, I am."

"And? What did you find?"

"Where do I begin?" She sat back in her chair. "What we saw at that Russian camp, Cutchy . . . how would you cla.s.sify that business?"

He shrugged. "Ghosts, I guess. Memories locked up in those dead husks like Hayes said. Sensitive minds come into contact with them . . . or maybe any minds at all . . . and out pop these memories: noises and apparitions and that sort of business. I never believed in any of that bull before, but I don't have much of a choice now."

"You'd call them ghosts?"

"Yes." He leaned forward. "Unless you have a better term . . . maybe one that would help me sleep better at night."

Sharkey shook her head. "I don't. 'Ghosts' will have to do. Because, essentially, that's what they are. Gates wrote in some detail about psychic manifestations occurring in proximity to the Old Ones. People have been seeing spooks down here a long time, having bad dreams and weird experiences . . . and I guess you can figure out why. Reflections, are what Gates calls these phenomena, projections from those dead husks, from minds that never truly died in the way we understand death . . . just waited. Maybe not conscious really or sentient, but dreaming. And what we're picking up are the ethereal projections of those dead minds . . . intellects, a ma.s.s-consciousness that was so very powerful in life that even death couldn't crush it. Not completely. Gates isn't certain about a lot of that . . . just that those minds are active in a way, not really alive but functioning pretty much on auto like a radio station, broadcasting and broadcasting. Our minds come into contact with them and we pick up those signals, then the trouble starts."

Cutchen nodded. "I'll buy that. Makes sense. And maybe as they unthaw, those minds become stronger. Maybe that's what got to Meiner and St. Ours."

"They may have been more sensitive to it than others. Same way I think Hayes is. Gates had another theory on that. He thought that maybe those dead minds were being energized not only by us, but amplified by that huge and overpowering central consciousness down in the lake. That the living ones might be acting as sort of a generator."

"He's guessing, though."

"Of course he's guessing. There's no way to know." Sharkey scrolled through a few pages on the screen. "Did Hayes tell you about his experiences? Out in the hut and on the tractor?"

"Yeah. Those minds almost did to him what they did to Meiner and St. Ours," Cutchen said.

"Did he tell you about his telepathic link with Lind after the events in the hut?" She could see that he hadn't, so she filled him in on it. "Lind was seeing things millions of years old. A city here at the Pole before the glaciers swallowed the continent. And just before he died, well . . . "

"Possessed." Cutchen said the word so she didn't have to. "That's what everyone's saying. That Lind was possessed by those things."

"Yes, at least what we could call diabolical possession. He manifested all the signs you hear about in those cases . . . telepathy and telekinesis, that sort of thing. He described to us the original colonization of this world and we were able to smell and feel what he was smelling and feeling. The thick poisonous atmosphere of another world, the heat there, then the freezing cold of deep s.p.a.ce."

"Did Gates confirm that they are alien? I mean we've all been tossing the word around, but - "

"Yes, he was certain. You see, he unlocked the code of their writings, their glyphs and bas-reliefs. That ancient city he found, it was scrawled with writings which were essentially a written history of who the Old Ones were, where they came from, what they planned to do . . . and had done."

"He unlocked all that? In just a month or so?"

Sharkey nodded. "Yes, because he found something akin to the Rosetta Stone, except this one was a key to their language and symbols. He called it the Dyer Stone after Professor Dyer of the Pabodie Expedition. A soapstone about the size of a tabletop . . . with it, he was able to translate those writings."

"And . . . and what did he find out?"

"There are carvings in those ruins, Cutchy. Ancient maps of our solar system and other systems as well. Dozens and dozens of them. Firm evidence, Gates said, of interplanetary and interstellar travel and this probably before our planet was even cool. Dyer mentioned certain ancient books and legends that hinted at Pluto as the Old Ones' first outpost in this star system, but according to the maps Gates found, they came here from either Ura.n.u.s or Neptune . . . but before that, who can say?"

"Ura.n.u.s? Neptune?" Cutchen shook his head. "Those are dead worlds, Elaine."

"Sure, now they are . . . but what about 500 million years ago? A billion? Maybe that's why they came here, because they knew their world . . . Ura.n.u.s or Neptune . . . was doomed. And maybe they just came seeking our warm oceans. Gates thinks that they are originally marine organisms, but given their durability, they can adapt themselves to just about any environment. Gates thinks that myths and legends concerning winged demons and flying monsters might be race memories of them, impressions from the dawn of our race that survived in the form of folktale and legend. Regardless, they've been here since the beginning. Our beginning and the beginning of all life on this world."

"I was hoping you weren't going to go there," Cutchen said.

"I have to. Because that's what this is all about: life. The creation of it, the continuation of it, the modification of it. When Lind was . . . well, possessed, he started ranting on about the helix. There was no doubt he was talking about DNA . . . the plan of all life on this planet. He was uplinked with those dead minds and telling us about the helix, that they were the farmers of the helix. That they created the helix and seeded it, world to world to world."

"That's kind of what Hayes was saying," Cutchen said, looking beaten and cramped from the weight of it all. "That they started life here, they started it and they would harvest it."

"Yes. It almost sounded like to the Old Ones, the helix was G.o.d. Which, I suppose, fits in with what certain evolutionary biologists have been saying. That life, all life, is merely a host, a vessel to ensure the propagation and continuation of the genetic material."

"That's pleasant."

Sharkey nodded. "Remember what Gates told us that day? Lake, the biologist in the Pabodie Expedition, had found fossilized prints in Precambrian rock that had to be at least a billion years old. The prints of the Old Ones. Probably from one of the earliest of their earth colonies. Some time later, Gates wrote, there would have been a ma.s.s migration that went on for millions of years. Their original outposts were doomed and unsuitable, so they came here. They came to earth en ma.s.se to colonize and found our planet to be dead, so they engineered a highly ambitious blueprint to bring forth not only life on this world, but intelligent life."

"But that's insane," Cutchen said. "I'm sorry, but it is. That the human race is the end result of something they started into motion a billion years ago. That's crazy."

"Is it? Think about it. These things have been seeding life on dozens and dozens of planets probably since before our sun was born. And they've been doing it with a very specific agenda: to bring forth intelligence. Intelligent minds that they could master, that they could modify and subvert. And since none existed here, they created them. G.o.d knows how many colonies they've created. Maybe hundreds if not thousands spread across s.p.a.ce, outposts on countless alien worlds. Out in our own solar system there are probably ruins of ancient cities much like the ones Gates found. And probably on the planets...o...b..ting a hundred stars, if not a thousand." She stopped, maybe to catch her own mental breath or to let Cutchen catch his. "It's fantastic, heady stuff, I know. That city Gates found . . . it was probably on a plain or in a valley originally that became a mountain millions upon millions of years later. Gates said that, according to ancient legend, there were other cities . . . in Asia, the Australian desert, a certain sunken continent in the Pacific. Maybe our tales of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu are, again, just ancestral memories of these places . . . "

Cutchen was looking for a hole in her logic . . . or Gates' . . . and Sharkey knew it. He was looking at it from all sides and trying to find the hole in it. Either he couldn't find one or it was so big he'd already been sucked down into it without knowing. "Okay," he said. "How is it these things got here? Not in ships as we understand them, I'm guessing."

"No, they did not possess a material, mechanistic technology, according to Gates. Not in the way we do. He said they would have possessed an organic technology if you can wrap your brain around that one. A living technology maybe supported by a certain level of instrumentation . . . but not gadgets like we have. Not exactly. They would have been light years beyond us to the point that their minds might have been strong enough to manipulate matter and energy and maybe even time as they saw fit.

"But as to your question, they drifted here. They went into a dormant state, according to Gates, and drifted on what he called the solar winds. I suppose it's the same way they drifted into this solar system. Gates mentioned them possibly manipulating fourth-dimensional s.p.a.ce. You might remember that bit if you ever had any quantum physics . . . you jump into the fourth dimension at Point A and jump out at Point B. A to B could be ten feet away or ten million miles, it wouldn't matter. You could transverse incalculable distances easily as a man stepping off his porch. Maybe that's how they crossed interstellar voids. But if Lind's memory of them was correct - and I tend to think it was - then, yes, they went into a sort of dormancy and drifted here."

"s.h.i.t, Elaine, that would have taken eons," Cutchen pointed out.

"So what? It wouldn't have mattered to things like them. A thousand years or a hundred-thousand would be all the same to something that was essentially immortal and endless. Lind was in contact with that memory, Cutchy, a memory a billion years old and probably even two or three. And he experienced it . . . the dormancy, the drifting. Even the cold and lack of atmosphere were no deterrent to them. Nothing would be."

"I'm still having trouble with this," Cutchen admitted. "I mean, listen to what you're saying here. Something like this . . . to put forth a plan, a grand design for this planet that wouldn't see fruition for hundreds and hundreds of millions of years. It's just too incredible. That amount of time . . . "

"You're looking at this as any being with a finite lifespan would. But time means nothing to them, nothing at all," Sharkey said, realizing she was using the same arguments on him that Hayes had used on her.

Cutchen sighed. The bigness, the longevity of such an operation, the huge scale it must have been carried out on . . . all of this was flooring him. Not to mention that everything she said completely dwarfed man's history, his importance, his very culture. It made the human race no more significant in the greater scheme of things than protozoans on a laboratory slide. It was very . . . sobering. "All right. So these Old Ones drifted here, started life with some master plan behind it all . . . then what? Just hoped for the best?"

"Hardly. Our evolutionary development would have been carefully monitored through the ages," Sharkey told him, glancing back to her screen from time to time. "Remember, they colonized this world and they had no intention of leaving and still haven't. They would not have left anything to mere chance. Gates wrote that there are great gaps in our own fossil record, times when our evolution jumped eons ahead for no apparent reason. 500,000 years ago, for example, the brains of our ancestors suddenly doubled in size if not tripled. It happened more than once, Gates said. These were the times, Cutchy, when those ancestors of ours were carefully manipulated by the Old Ones. Through selective breeding, genetic engineering, molecular biology, methods we can't even guess at."

"And . . . and they've been waiting for us . . . their children . . . all this time?"

Sharkey nodded. "Yes, waiting and watching through unimaginable gulfs of time while the continents shifted and the glaciers arrived, while the Paleozoic Era became the Mesozoic and finally the Cenzoic. While our ancestors evolved along lines already laid out for them. And at times, I would think, entire populations would have been taken to their cities and altered, then placed back again with selective mutations installed. They've waited and watched and now, if Gates is right, we're ready for harvesting. Our intellects are sufficiently advanced to be of use to them. Down there in that warm lake, Cutchy, is the last relict population of a race as old as the stars."

"And now we've come," he said. "Just as they knew we would."

"Exactly. Men have always been drawn down here to the Pole, haven't they? And if what Gates is saying is correct, then it's been more than a sense of exploration. As a race we would be drawn to those places where our memory was strongest."

Cutchen was sweating now and couldn't help himself. The idea of it all was terrifying. Like the human race had never, ever been in command of its own destiny. It was shocking. "It's like we're . . . what? A seed planted in a f.u.c.king garden? Cultivated, cross-bred, enhanced . . . until they got the proper strain, the proper hybrid they desired." He just shook his head. "But what do they want, Elaine? What do they have in mind? To conquer us? What?"

She shrugged. "I'm not sure and neither is Gates. But one thing's for sure, it's our minds that they want, our intellects they need. They are of a single mind, a single consciousness, a hive mentality. That is exactly what they intend for us to be. For us to be them but in human form." She scrolled through a few pages on her laptop. "According to Gates, they've bred certain characteristics into us. There are probably latent gifts we all carry in our minds, our carefully engineered minds, that they will now exploit. They'll reawaken faculties that we've long forgotten about, but have been buried in us all along . . . "

"Like what?"

"Abilities they planted in us long ago. Abilities that would make us like them. Mechanisms seeded in our brains, special adaptations that have been pa.s.sed on through our genes . . . wild talents that occasionally make themselves known like telepathy, telekinesis, prophecy . . . talents that, when the time was right, would make us like them - a single, ominous hive mind. That coupled with an overriding instinct, a blind compulsion to serve them. An all important seed they would have planted in our primitive brains and is still there today."

Cutchen said, "So everything we are, our entire history and even our destiny . . . these Old Ones were the architects of it? We're . . . synthetic?"

"Yes and no. Our culture, our civilization is our own, I think. Though much of it might be based upon archetypes imprinted upon our brains eons ago. Even our conception of a G.o.d, a superior being, a creator . . . it's no doubt based upon some aboriginal image of them placed into our subconscious minds. They would have seen themselves as our G.o.ds, our masters . . . then and now . . . and we, in essence, were designed to be their tools, an extension of their organic technology, to be used for what plans we could never even guess at. But it might be in us, that knowledge, lying dormant in our brains until they decide to wake it up. And when that happens . . . when that happens, there will be no more human race, Cutchy."

Cutchen's face was beaded with sweat, his eyes were wide and tormented. "We have to stop this, Elaine. We have to stop this madness."

"If we can. If we can," she said, her voice filled with a bitter hopelessness, a dire inevitability. "Lord knows what they planted in us, what buried imperatives and controls that they might be, right now, getting ready to unlock on a global scale to bring us to our ultimate destiny."

"Which is?"

But Sharkey could just shake her head. "I don't know and I don't think I want to find out."

"We're f.u.c.ked, Elaine. If Gates is right, we're f.u.c.ked." Cutchen kept trying to moisten his weathered lips, but he was all out of spit. "I really hope Gates is a lunatic. I'm really hoping for that."

"I don't think he is," Sharkey told him. "And the scary part is, n.o.body's heard from him in over forty-eight hours now."

33.

The way Hayes was seeing it, he'd paid for this dance and LaHune was going to have a cheek-to-cheek waltz with him whether he liked the idea of it or not. And LaHune most certainly did not like the idea. But he knew Hayes. Knew trying to get rid of the guy was like trying to shake a stain out of your shorts.

Hayes was tenacious.

Hayes was relentless.

Hayes would hang like a tattoo on your backside until he got exactly what he wanted. No more. No less. But LaHune, of course, had had his merry fill of Jimmy Hayes and his paranoid bulls.h.i.t. Had it right up to his left eyeball and this is what he told Hayes, not bothering to spare his feelings one iota. In his opinion, Hayes was the rotten apple in the storied barrel. The bee in the bonnet. And the cat p.i.s.s in the punch.

"I've had my fill of you, Hayes," LaHune told him. "I'm so sick of you I could spit. Just the sight of you roils my stomach."

Hayes was sitting in the administrator's office, his feet up on his desk even though he'd been warned a half dozen times to get his dirty, stinking boots off of there. "Are you trying to tell me something, Mr. LaHune? Because I'm getting this funny feeling in my gut that you just don't like me. But maybe it's just gas."

LaHune sat there, really trying to be patient. Really trying to hang onto his dignity which had been chewed up, swallowed, and s.h.i.t on by this man from day one. Yes, he was trying to hang onto his dignity and not come right over the desk at Hayes, that smarmy, bearded dirtball.

"No, you're reading me fine, Hayes. Just fine. And get your G.o.dd.a.m.n feet off my desk."

Hayes crossed one boot atop the other. "You saying it's over between us, then? No more quickies behind the oil tanks in the generator shack?"