And what had Lind said?

Can't you feel it getting inside your head, wanting to steal your mind...?

Hayes swallowed, something caught in his throat. "There's something . . . bad about those things, Doc. We're all feeling it. Maybe not Gates and those other eggheads, but the rest of us are feeling it just fine, thank you. I don't know what to make of it."

"Lind seemed to think it was trying to steal his mind or something?"

Hayes nodded. "That's what he said. It was getting inside his head, unlocking things. You want to take a stab at that?"

She shook her head. "I'm not a therapist, Jimmy. I've given you my learned G.P. speculation, that's all I can do."

"How about off the record?"

She set her fork down. "Off the record? Off the record you couldn't pay me a million dollars to spend the night alone out there with that horror."

7.

That evening after dinner, Gates finally left the side of his lover out in Hut #6, and joined the others in the community room at Targa House. At what seemed a prearranged moment - the entire winter crew in attendance, some 20 scientists and contractors - he stood up and tapped a spoon against his water gla.s.s. It drew everyone's attention right away, because to a man, they'd been waiting for it.

Waiting patiently.

Now, it was rare to find everyone in the community room. Usually some of the contractors would be out at the power station or working on the vehicles and snowmobiles, maybe down in the shafts checking lines. And the scientists were usually out at the drilling tower or in one of their improvised labs or at their laptops, tapping away.

But not tonight.

Everyone was there, gathered around just waiting for Gates to say something because he hadn't exactly been a social b.u.t.terfly since he came down from the tent camp. So everyone was in attendance like spooks hanging around the War Room wondering if the president was going to bomb some country.

Hayes was sitting with Doc Sharkey and Cutchen, the meteorologist, playing poker. Rutkowski and most of the other contractors were at the table opposite playing cribbage . . . now and again, one of them would look over at Elaine Sharkey, nod their heads as if to say, yup, she's a woman, all right, knew it first time I saw her.

"I think Dr. Gates would like to say a word or two," LaHune said. He was sitting alone at a table in the corner looking . . . efficient. Sitting there in his fancy L.L. Bean sweater and windpants, straight and tall like he had an iron bar shoved up his a.s.s and he wanted to keep it there.

"Ah, the plot thickens," Cutchen said.

Gates smiled to everyone. His eyes were bloodshot with brown half-moons under them. He'd been busy and hadn't been sleeping much. "h.e.l.lo, everyone," he said. "Tomorrow afternoon I'm going back up to the excavation, but before I do that, I'd like to touch base and tell you what all this is about and what it might mean."

Everyone was watching him now.

"I'm not going to waste a lot of your time talking about the mummies themselves as we've only just completed a preliminary dissection of one of the intact specimens and it'll take time to correlate and interpret all the data Dr. Holm, Dr. Bryer, and myself have compiled. But I don't think I'd be going out on too shaky of a limb by saying what we've found out there will certainly revolutionize the field of biology. The creature . . . creatures . . . are of a completely new variety, composed of characteristics of both plant and animal and a few that fit neither pantheon. Let me just say that, in regards to its basal anatomy, it seems to fit nowhere in the fossil record. I'm guessing what we've uncovered up here will keep comparative anatomists and physiologists alike busy for decades to come.

"Anyway . . . let me just mention its nervous system briefly. I have made a pretty extensive examination here and . . . well, I think I can safely say that this creature was almost certainly intelligent. Possibly far in advance of ourselves. I don't want to bore you with anatomy, but I want you to understand a few things. Now, the human brain is double-lobed, as you I'm sure know, left and right hemispheres controlling a variety of functions, depending on whether you are left or right handed. These hemispheres communicate via bundles of axons. Now, let me say that our creature . . . we have, as yet, no good name for it . . . has a five-lobed brain which hints at an incredible level of neurophysiologic sophistication. Whereas our brains have but two main types of cells, the creature's brain has no less than five. Microscopic examination of its neurons, brain cells, also indicate a staggering degree of neural specialization and complexity. Human neurons are basically made up of a central cell body, the soma, and branched fibers called dendrites and axons. Neurons share information with other neurons via electrical impulses gathered by the dendrites at connection points which are called synapses. This information is processed by the soma and its output travels down the axons to the synapses of other neurons. Boring? I suppose it is. Regardless, I tell you this only in comparison for the creature's neurons are totally alien, though, I would a.s.sume, operate in roughly the same manner. You see, the creatures' neurons are not made up of a single cell body, but a sort of triple soma connected to a highly sophisticated network of dendrites, axons, and a mysterious third plexus of branching fibers that has us simply baffled.

"Why do I tell you all this?" Gates smiled thinly, then frowned. "Because you need to understand the nature of what we're dealing with here, the level of intellect this creature must have possessed in life which must have been limitless. I doubt the human brain will be anywhere near this level of development for several million years. Maybe not even then. So now you know . . . this creature was possessed of something of a hyper-intellect and appears to have sensory adaptations that hint at senses beyond the normal five."

Hayes looked over at Sharkey and she whistled silently. Which was pretty much what he'd been doing in his head. Sure, some of what Gates said was a little heady, but the impact of it was shocking. What he was saying was that these creatures - apparently million of years gone - were intellectually above man as man was above your average toad. Jesus, it was enough to suck the wind out of you.

Gates took a drink of water. "Now I know that there's been a lot of talk about our mummies . . . I'm not sure if that word even applies such is the state of their preservation . . . and a lot of it has been pretty wild. What I keep hearing is that people are saying these creatures might be alien, as in extraterrestrial. I won't even hazard a guess as to that, but I will say that, given their level of development and culture, I suppose it's not impossible. We won't even be able to speculate much on things like that until we begin a comprehensive a.n.a.lysis of the creatures' DNA and proteins. As you know, I'm sure, all life on Earth shares the same DNA . . . we're only different from a spider or a fungus because of how our DNA synthesizes and replicates proteins. If, say, the DNA breakdown of the creature was to show marked irregularities from our own . . . or even a completely alien structure . . . then, my friends, we would have some very tough questions to ask ourselves."

Hayes wasn't liking any of this.

Gates wasn't definitively saying that those things were from Mars or Altair-6, but he sure as h.e.l.l wasn't ruling it out either. Christ, Rutkowski and the boys were going to have a field day with this.

Gates took another drink of water. "Okay, time for your history lesson now that you've had your biology lecture." There were a few stifled laughs at that. "Aliens. It's sort of a word that's pretty much been worn out, but it's one you hear about from time to time if you've spent any time down here in Antarctica. For years there's been crazy stories circulating about some great pre-human civilization under the ice. I'm sure most of you vets have heard your share of horror stories. But how did all that start? Well, I'll tell you - the Pabodie Expedition and the Starkweather-Moore Expedition. Ah, I saw a few eyes light up at the mention of those names. Some of you might be familiar with them . . . "

He went on to say that both of these expeditions had taken on the characteristics of urban myths over the years to such an extent that most people - even most scientists - were of the mind neither expedition had ever taken place, that it was all some great hoax dredged up by conspiracists and Antarctic field workers with too much d.a.m.n time on their hands. But, in truth, the expeditions had not only been very real, but serious in intent and staffed by some very bright people. It was all a matter of historical fact.

"The Pabodie expedition of 1930-31 was the first," Gates said. "It was led by William Dyer, a geology professor from Miskatonic University . . . where, heh, heh, I did my undergrad work. Anyway, the purpose of the expedition was to do coring work with a newly-designed drill and shed a little light on the geologic and paleontologic history of the Antarctic continent. Well, the results, at first, were mixed. Then the team's biologist, a fellow named Lake, discovered what appeared to be fossilized prints in Precambrian rock that Lake surmised was from the Archeozoic era . . . "

As it turned out, Gates said, it was the beginning of the end. More prints were discovered and Lake had no doubt by that point that what he was seeing was the fossil evidence of some unknown, but apparently advanced organism that walked upright eons before such a thing could have been possible. It was startling. The fossil record was implicit on the fact that nothing beyond simple algae or very rudimentary worms were extant at the time, roughly 700 million years ago.

Then, drilling northwest of the main camp, Lake and his a.s.sociates broke into a subterranean cave.

"Now, people, this is where things get strange. Lake discovered the remains of creatures that were, yes, exactly like the ones my team has uncovered. He broadcast some fairly detailed information back to Dyer at the main camp, telling Dyer that he had found more fossilized prints and that he was of the opinion that the specimens he found were, in fact, the individuals that had made those prints. Fascinating stuff . . . "

Through the years, he explained, the controversy surrounding Lake's discoveries had become something of a battleground for scientists. No actual specimens were taken back for further study, so all they had was Lake's word on it and some corroborative testimony from Dyer, a few blurry snapshots that were not exactly undeniable proof of anything.

"It seems that at this point, things went bad for the Pabodie Expedition. After they had not heard from Lake for several days, Dyer and a few others flew up into the mountains to Lake's temporary camp. What they found was utter destruction . . . tents flattened, machinery destroyed, sleds gone, and, worse, all eleven men were missing. As were the specimens Lake had found. Curious. Anyway, this is the point where most people believe that Dyer and his people went mad, dementia Antarctica, they called it, that he imagined all the awful things that he later freely admitted to . . . "

Dyer apparently radioed back to the world a censored version of what he saw at the devastated camp, saying that a freak wind storm had wiped out the entire party. But he wrote a completely different version that was pretty much kept from the public at large and with good reason. For it wasn't a wind storm, he claimed, that destroyed that camp but something much worse. Something Gates wouldn't even comment on.

"So, Lake and his people were gone. Dyer and the others used the drills to seal the cave entrance shut and then flew higher up into the mountains and discovered the ruins of an incredibly ancient city clinging to the slopes, the remains of an advanced pre-human civilization. Dyer said it looked vaguely like Macchu Picchu in the Andes, but exaggerated to a fantastic extreme. He mentioned, also, the excavated Sumerian foundations of primal Kish. Basically, then, an immense prehistoric city, much of which was covered by the glaciers. Dyer claimed that the city dated from the Carboniferous Period, some 280 to 350 million years ago, and had been abandoned sometime during the Pliocene, roughly two or three million years ago when our ancestors were little better than manlike apes.

"Well, Dyer returned with what remained of his party and quite of few of them were completely mad and had to be inst.i.tutionalized. Dyer's findings . . . supported only by those dim photographs . . . were scoffed at. His journal, which went into some impressive detail about the city and culture of what he called the Old Ones or Elder Things, was shown only to certain scientists, then locked away in the vaults of the Miskatonic. I was allowed to read it about ten years ago, one of a handful that have been granted that opportunity. Well . . . " Gates sighed and shook his head " . . . it's wild stuff, people. Dyer had no doubt that these Old Ones built that city and were of an extraterrestrial origin. Much of Dyer's journal is probably sheer fantasy induced by temporary madness, but there can be no doubt now that Lake did indeed find these Old Ones, for, as you know, we've found them now, too.

"Well, where does any of this leave us? I'm not really sure. I rather doubt we'll be able to corroborate much of what Dyer said, but some of it, yes, a great deal in fact. But what about that city? Is it still up there? Yes and no." Gates looked around at those faces, seeing maybe fascination and curiosity and, yes, maybe fear, too. "What Dyer described, unfortunately, is gone. The area he visited was decimated in the 1930s and '40s by geologic cataclysm and intense glaciation. Those awe-inspiring 'Mountains of Madness' of his were destroyed for the most part . . . the seismic activity and shifting of the glaciers now makes it almost impossible to say where his ruins in fact were. The entire area is changed . . . gorges and valleys opened where none existed before and the shattering of those high peaks he spoke of opened up the area to intense snowfall. If any of it's there, it's now buried beneath a mountain of snow and ice."

"What about that other expedition?" someone asked.

"Starkweather-Moore? That was a follow-up to Dyer's in 1931 to '32, but it proved inconclusive. Shortly after the Pabodie Expedition, the first of those geologic upheavals obliterated much of the region. So it was a bust. They had gone seeking evidence of a pre-human civilization and particularly of that great stone city built by an alien race and found neither. So, as you can imagine, all that Dyer claimed was scoffed at by the scientific community. Another expedition was funded privately in the 1960s but without any success. And since the days of the Pabodie Expedition, the tales down here of aliens and weird civilizations have been ripe and abundant. There has been no proof . . . until now . . . "

Here we go, Hayes was thinking. Now comes the spooky s.h.i.t as if all of this wasn't spooky enough already. Jesus. He looked over at Sharkey and she looked at him. It was hard to say what exactly pa.s.sed between them, but it was akin to the look a couple of wide-eyed kids might give each other around a campfire after they were told that, yes, the ghost story they had just heard was really true. It was certainly a day of revelations.

Gates was busy sketching out for them his own excavations in a series of naturally-hollowed limestone caves which were far east of Dyer's "Mountains of Madness." The original aim of Gates' team was paleontological and was extremely successful. They discovered Mesozoic theropods and tetrapods, near-complete sauropod dinosaurs. Proto-mammals such as triconodonts and cynodonts as well as Jura.s.sic mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, even more recent fossils of cetacians from the Cenozoic. And not just animals, but plants, cycads and cycadeoids. Vascular pteridophytes from the Devonian which included new species of Lycopods, club mosses, and sphenopsids. Gates went into great, dusty clinical detail concerning Cretaceous angiosperms and gymnosperms, Permian seed ferns.

It almost seemed that maybe he wanted to discuss anything but those "Old Ones" and the ruins he had discovered. But, finally, he came back around.

"So, as you can see, we did not go into this hoping to validate any of Dyer's wild stories, we had plenty of other concrete things to do amongst those ancient fossiliferous rocks. The specimens we found will take months to remove from the strata and years and years to cla.s.sify properly. But, as you know, we found other things there that immediately diverted our attention. These limestone caves I spoke of is where we found our richest fossil beds. But as we explored deeper into this labyrinth of caverns we discovered something like a burial pit into which our creatures had been interred vertically and then . . . yes, then our caverns grew into immense grottos hundreds and hundreds of feet in height. What we found there easily dwarfs Kentucky's Mammoth Cave . . . some of the caverns were so large you could tuck away entire cities in them . . . " And somebody had.

For inside those immense caverns they had found the ruins of a cyclopean city from some incredible ancient civilization much like the one Dyer had written about. Gates wasn't ready to put his reputation on the line and say that the Old Ones had built it, but it seemed a pretty fair guess from where he was standing. Within the ruins they had uncovered bas reliefs and hieroglyphics which pictured these creatures and the history of their culture.

"Now understand," Gates pointed out, "that these pictoforms are incredibly weathered and unreadable in parts, but what we're seeing would seem to indicate that the creatures were in fact the architects of that ruined city. The city, if I might call it that, goes on literally for miles underground. Much of it is glaciated and much of it is buried beneath cave-ins . . . but there's enough there for years and years, if not lifetimes, of research. Now, Dyer wrote about these same types of bas reliefs. His interpretations of these same glyphs and pictographs are, I think, utter fantasy. He wrote that they told the story of interstellar wars and the decimation of the Old Ones via some protoplasmic monstrosities they had created . . . but I've seen nothing like that. Now, granted, I'm no archaeologist and neither was Dyer. But, before diverging completely into paleontology, I did my undergraduate work in prehistoric archaeology, so I'm not completely ignorant of interpreting some of these things. In the spring, we'll fly in a real team of archaeologists, but until then, my team and I will do what we can, lay some sort of groundwork if possible. But let me just say that what Dyer claimed to have read in those ruins is positively pedestrian in comparison to what we're seeing, the story those glyphs are telling us. For, people, what I'm seeing there is something that might make us re-think who we are and what we are."

Everyone really started murmuring then, firing off question after question, but Gates would say no more. He told them frankly that he would field no more questions until he and his team had had at least a few more weeks, if not a month, for further study and exploration. But n.o.body was satisfied with that. You couldn't drop a bomb like that and just walk away. The crowd was getting ugly, particularly Rutkowski and his band of merry men. They were on their feet demanding to know what the h.e.l.l it all meant and if those aliens (he wasn't afraid to use the term) were going to wake up and start sucking peoples' brains out. Even the scientists themselves were demanding answers, even crazy speculation.

Finally, Gates said: "You're all asking me to answer questions without having had enough time to even make an educated guess. Are the creatures alien? Unknown. Did they build that city? Possibly. Are they any threat to us? Of course not. C'mon, people, put away your comic books here. That city was abandoned during the Pliocene and the mummies we've found have been dead, I'm guessing, since the Tria.s.sic."

Feeling that he had thoroughly chastised them and turning away from them with the sort of distaste he might reserve for torch-bearing villagers and other superst.i.tious idiots, he donned his coat and stomped out into the night.

LaHune, who had been studying it all with his usual detachment, stood up and said, "That's enough now. Dr. Gates has told you all he can tell you. Really, people, he has been good enough to share with you some of his findings and you're acting like a bunch of children."

And for once, Hayes was in complete agreement with him. Children? No, more like villagers looking for a witch to burn. Slowly, they settled down, realizing to a man that LaHune had made mental note of their reactions and it would be going into their files. A bad mark on their records would mean any number of them wouldn't be returning to Antarctica. That meant the loss of big money for contractors and the loss of NSF funding for the scientists.

"Well, wasn't that amusing?" Sharkey said.

Hayes grunted.

Amusing? Well, it was certainly something. Ancient civilizations. Pre-human intelligences. Aliens. Then that bit about what they had found up there changing the idea of who and what the human race was . . . well, how did you walk away from that without your chin dragging on the floor?

"What do you make of that?" Hayes finally asked Sharkey.

"I think I can't wait for spring," was all she would say.

But Cutchen, well, he had an opinion. His specialty was supposedly the weather, but he always seemed to have an opinion on everything. "Tell you two something right now. I heard all about what happened to Lind and, like you, I've drawn a few of my own conclusions. Maybe that thing thawing out in the hut had nothing to do with Lind's breakdown . . . but if it did, just keep in mind we're trapped here until spring and whatever that thing is, we have to live with it all winter."

"It's just a fossil for G.o.dsake," Sharkey said.

"Do you think so, Doc? Do you honestly believe that? Great. Then go out to the hut and stare in those red f.u.c.king eyes and tell me if something's not staring back at you."

But Sharkey wasn't about to do that.

8.

True to his word, Gates went back up to the tent camp, but left his mummies behind. He had three of them thawing in the shed - which was now locked and bolted, LaHune having the only key - and three more still frozen in their sheaths of ice out back in the cold shed.

People were still talking about it all, but they had calmed somewhat. Even grand revelations became mundane given time. You made some discovery that will alter our view of who and what we are? It might change civilization as we know it? No s.h.i.t? Ain't that something. You wanna hear something better? Word has it a couple of the techies over at the drilling tower are doing some drilling of a more intimate nature, you catch my drift, sunshine.

Didn't matter what happened at South Pole stations . . . its shelf-life was relatively short.

Besides, truth be told, it was an exciting winter at Kharkhov and there was more on the stove than just Gates' fossils and some dusty old ruins up in the mountains.

There was the lake.

Some three-quarters of a mile beneath the continental ice sheet that the Kharkhov Station sat on, there was a huge subterranean lake roughly the size of Lake Ontario. It had been discovered some five years previously using ice-penetrating radar and radio echo-sounding and promptly named Lake Vordog. This in honor of a Russian seismologist whose early studies in the region led to its discovery.

Vordog was hardly the first lake discovered beneath the ice, there were some seventy others, but Vordog - and a few others - had piqued the curiosity of the world scientific establishment. For here was an underground lake trapped beneath nearly a mile of ice, some 300 miles long and nearly fifty in width, that had been hidden away from the light of day for some forty-million years. No sunlight, no outside atmosphere, no contact with any organisms but those it contained originally. Such isolation, it was thought, may have allowed whatever lived in it to follow an entirely separate path of evolution than that of the outside world.

Imaging had shown that Vordog was over 2,000 feet deep in spots and thermographs proved that instead of being frozen or near-freezing like other sub-glacial lakes, Vordog had a near-constant water temperature of fifty degrees with hot spots up to sixty-five. The only thing that could possibly account for that was some form of subsurface geothermal heat source, possibly hydrothermal vents like those on the ocean floor. In which case, the lake could possibly be teeming with life . . . much of it completely unknown to science and, quite possibly, evolved forms of organisms long extinct elsewhere.

So instead of the usual paleoclimate coring carried out at the drilling tower, this winter there was something truly exciting happening: a group of technicians headed by a CalTech glaciologist named Gundry were drilling down to the lake in order to release robotic probes into those ancient and pristine waters. The entire thing was being funded by NASA, as part of their groundwork for the Europa Ice Clipper mission which would send similar probes to Jupiter's ice-covered moons, Europa and Callisto, which were both thought to contain large sub-glacial oceans.

Whatever was down there had been undisturbed for forty-million years.

And now that was about to change.

9.

Exactly one day after Gates' big announcement and two days before Gundry's drilling team broke through the ice, the Kharkhov Station was zipped-up tight and locked-down. Communication of any sort, whether radio or satellite or email for that matter, was brought to a screaming halt. They were suddenly alone and more isolated than they had been before. But it wasn't because of a fierce storm or mechanical failure, it was because of LaHune. His directive was quite simple: until further notice, all communication with the outside world was suspended, save emergency beacons.

It didn't go over real big.

When LaHune announced it to the lunch crowd in the community room, it caused a near-riot. For the winter crews at the stations didn't have much else going for them but their satellite Internet and an occasional radio chat with a loved one. These were their only ties with the outside world, the only things that could remind them that, yes, there were other people in the world and they weren't really on the moon or Mars, just down yonder at the bottom of the world.

Later that day, Hayes caught up with Dr. Sharkey at the infirmary. "Did you try to talk sense to that overblown p.r.i.c.k?" he asked her.

She nodded. "Oh, I tried, all right. I tried until I was blue in the face, not that it did me any good. This is an NSF facility, he said, as such it's under government jurisdiction same as a military base. We all signed the Official Secrets Act and now he's activating it. Nothing goes out, not until he says so. End of story."

James Bond s.h.i.t. "Jesus Christ, Doc, I supposed to log in with some of the boys from McMurdo tonight. We've got a poker game going on the web . . . what the h.e.l.l are they going to think?"

"What's the rest of the world going to think?"

Hayes sat down, sighed.

Sure, there was more than just a poker game in the offing here. There were wives and children, sisters and brothers and parents. When they didn't hear from their people at Kharkhov, they were going to start expecting the very worst.

And Hayes was with them, because he already expected the worse. He'd felt it from the moment he'd stepped off the LC-130 Hercules at Kharkhov Station six weeks ago and, day by day, it had been growing like a tumor in his belly . . . that near-certainty that things were going to get dark and ugly this winter. But he hadn't mentioned that to anyone. They would have thought he was crazy.

Sharkey folded her arms. "I don't use the Internet much and I don't really have anyone I keep in contact with, so I guess I'll survive better than most."

Hayes felt something swell up in his throat. He tried to swallow it down. "What about . . . what about your husband?"

Sharkey looked at him, then looked away. And there it was again, that barely concealed tightening around her mouth and eyes that was akin to bitterness. "We generally don't keep in close contact." She uttered a small laugh. A very small one. "Besides, where he is, out in the jungle, the Internet basically consists of knocking coconuts together."

Hayes did not comment on that.

He was divorced, no children. He had a sister, Liza, in Des Moines who was a Jehovah's Witness. Last winter at the Amundsen-Scott Station they'd started emailing back and forth. But that had come crashing to a halt when he admitted to her that he did not believe in G.o.d and never had, asked her point-blank how she'd gotten mixed up in a cult like the Jo-Ho's.

So, like Sharkey, he was pretty much alone.

LaHune had sited security reasons for the blackout. Security reasons. That was his explanation and he refused to elaborate on it. And you could count on LaHune to keep his word. No amount of a.s.s-kissing or sweet-talking would thaw him. Better luck trying to get inside a nun's habit than that cast-iron lockbox LaHune called a skull.

"Did he say anything?" Hayes asked her. "I mean, s.h.i.t, people are already wigged out down here. They don't need this, too. Did you try the medical approach? The psychological benefits and all that s.h.i.t?"