Hayes walked into the room, over near Lind's cot and right away Lind started to thrash in his sleep. He began to twitch, his eyelids fluttering. Hayes stepped back in the doorway, a weird thrumming sensation at his temples, and Lind settled back down. What the h.e.l.l was that about? Hayes walked back over there and the thrumming started again with drumming waves and Lind started jerking again like he could sense Hayes' presence and maybe he could and maybe it was even more than just that.

A voice in Hayes' head was saying: It isn't your mere presence he's reacting to, you silly b.a.s.t.a.r.d, it's what you're carrying. That thing in the hut, that p.i.s.sing Old One, it touched you, it got inside you, it stained something in you that'll never wash completely clean. That's what Lind's reacting to ... he can smell it on you same as he can smell it on himself. Violation.

You bear Their touch.

It was crazy, but it made sense. Like they had planted some seed in his head just as they had done with Lind, woke something up inside them that had been sleeping a long time. Something mystic, something ancient, something unspeakable.

But what? What was it?

For as Hayes neared Lind again, he started twitching and moaning, trembling as if he had come into contact with some sort of energy. Hayes backed away again, all the spit in his mouth dried up, a tension headache starting behind his eyes . . . except it wasn't that, it was something else completely. For he could - He was seeing inside of Lind's head.

It was crazya.s.s bulls.h.i.t, but, yes, he was seeing what Lind dreamed. It could be nothing else. He was connecting with him, their minds touching, sharing thoughts and brainwaves. The thrumming had gone away now and there was just those grainy, distorted pictures like a broadcast coming in on an old black and white Sylvannia tube set. Hayes felt dizzy, disoriented, those images rushing through his brain and making him want to pa.s.s cold out. But he saw, he saw . . .

He saw... a landscape... valleys and low snow-covered hills, hollows in which great beasts wandered listlessly, gnawing at squat vegetation. The beasts were s.h.a.ggy things like bison or maybe rhinoceros, but with huge archaic horns. It was tundra mostly, the snowline creeping in from all sides, the world turning to winter. There was an immense lake in the distance or maybe it was part of the sea. It was flanked by mounds about which was built some rolling, immense city that looked to be quarried from stone. The image was wavering, fading, but Hayes could still see those towers and weird skeletal spires, arched domes and scalloped discs . . . an impossible city heaped and cl.u.s.tered and crowded, tangled up in itself like the bones of some gigantic beast . . .

Then it was gone.

Hayes backed away into the infirmary, wide-eyed and shocked. He had not imagined any of it, he had not hallucinated any of it. He sat at Sharkey's desk, trying to catch his breath, wiping the sweat from his face. He was thinking things then, thinking terrible, impossible things that he believed nonetheless. That landscape . . . it was Antarctica as seen maybe in the late Miocene before the glaciers had covered it. When that immense, alien city found first by Pabodie and then later by Gates was not up in the mountains but set atop low mounds that would someday be mountains.

Gates had said the ice sheet was roughly forty-million years old.

Hayes went through all the normal channels trying to make sense of it, but there was no getting around what he had seen or how he had seen it. Lind was maybe like some sort of receiver picking up broadcasts from the dead and dreaming brains of the Old Ones, images of life in Antarctica forty-million years gone. And Hayes had been able to see what he was seeing.

Telepathy.

Parlor tricks. Psychic bulls.h.i.t.

But he had it now, at least some rudimentary form.

The Old Ones had touched his mind and given him this. No, no, he couldn't believe that. Maybe it had been in him all along and they just, well, woke it up, brought it to the fore from wherever it had been dreaming away the millennia. Hayes was thinking that maybe all men had it inside them, they'd just forgotten how to use it and now and then somebody would be born with the faculty fully activated and be labeled as a freak . . . or quietly go mad.

It was too much.

LaHune had to hear this s.h.i.t.

14.

LaHune was looking pretty much like he'd bitten into something sour as Hayes told him what had happened out in Hut #6. You could see that he did not want to be hearing s.h.i.t like this. Whether he believed in any of it or not was immaterial, the idea of those dead minds still being somehow active and animate was really beyond the scope of things as he saw them. What could you do with information like that? You surely couldn't crunch it on your laptop or scribble it on your clipboard or slip it in a folder and file it away. This was buggy stuff, now wasn't it? This kind of thing surely upset the old applecart, threw a wrench into the machine, and put the monkeys.h.i.t in the mayo.

But Hayes was going to be heard and that was that. Maybe it was the intensity of his voice or the wild look in his eyes, but LaHune listened, all right. Listened while Hayes went on and on, all of it coming out of him in a tidal flow, running from him like waste.

Hayes hadn't come straight to LaHune from the infirmary. No, he went back to his room, had a few cigarettes and a few more cups of joe, thought it out, took himself down a notch. Leveled a bit. Organized his thoughts, pressed and folded them into orderly rows. And then, maybe a few hours later, went to see LaHune and promptly started raving like a madman.

"You think I'm nuts, don't you?" Hayes said when he'd finished, not needing telepathy to reach that shining conclusion. "You think this is just a bad dream or something?"

LaHune licked his lips. "To be honest with you, I don't know what to make of it. I've been out to the hut several times and have suffered no ill effects from close proximity to the . . . the remains."

Hayes almost started laughing.

He knew it had been a mistake coming here. But he'd thought it was worth a try. LaHune was the NSF administrator, right? As such, he had to be notified of any impending threat to the installation, right? Isn't that what it said in the bylaws? Yes, it certainly did. Sure as dogs.h.i.t drew bluebottle flies.

"I don't care whether you've suffered any effects or not, LaHune. Maybe you need the right sort of mind and maybe they're not interested in you. Maybe they just go for dumba.s.ses like Lind and me and maybe Peter Pan is hung like a horse, but I don't think so and it don't matter, now does it? Those things are dangerous is what I'm saying to you. Can you at least get on the same page with me on that? You know the way they've been getting to people around here."

"Paranoia, isolation . . . it'll do funny things to people."

"It's more than that and you know it. I've spent a lot of years down here, LaHune, and never, ever once have I felt something like this. These people are threatened, their scared . . . they just aren't sure of what."

"And you are?"

Jesus, what a guy LaHune was. Just about everyone at the station was having crazy nightmares and Doc Sharkey admitted she was handing out sleeping pills like candy at Halloween. Dreams weren't infectious, they didn't spread. Yet everyone was having some real doozies since those ugly b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had been brought in. Maybe it was wild, fringe thinking, the sort of crazy horses.h.i.t you found out on the Internet, but it was true and Hayes - and quite a few others by that point - felt it right down to his toes.

Not that you could ever convince LaHune of it.

He was an automaton, a brainwashed, officious little conservative company man. Hayes talked and LaHune clipped his nails, arranged the pens in his desk by color, sorted paperclips by size. He sat there in his L.L. Bean's, perfectly erect in his seat, never slouching, his teeth even and white, his face freshly shaven, his hair perfectly coiffed. Looking either like a mannequin or the latest Republican wonderboy . . . clean and shiny on the outside and empty as a drum on the inside, just waiting for his puppetmasters to pull his strings.

"I'm telling you they're a danger to the well-being of our group here, LaHune. I'm not shack-happy and I'm not drunk and I haven't smoked a joint in fifteen years. You know me, you know how I am. I come from st.u.r.dy stock, LaHune, my people and me in general don't see lights in the sky or read tabloids. What I'm telling you is the truth."

LaHune was buffing his nails with an emery board. "So what, Hayes? You want me to destroy the single most important find in the history of the race?"

Hayes sighed. "Yeah, and if you can't do that, then how about we drag the lot of those things about ten miles out and cut 'em a nice little berth in the ice, let Gates worry about 'em come spring."

"No," LaHune said. "That is utterly ridiculous and I refuse to entertain it."

Hayes was beaten and he knew it. Maybe the campaign had been over before it even began. "What's your thing, LaHune? I mean, c'mon, I know you don't like being here and you don't like us as a group. So why the h.e.l.l are you here? I don't see you as a team player . . . at least on any team I'd be rooting for. So what's your thing? Are you NSF or are you something else?"

A slight blush of color touched LaHune's cheeks, retreated like a flower deciding it was just too d.a.m.n frosty to bloom. "I don't know what you mean."

"I think you do," Hayes said. "I think you know exactly what I mean. Why are you here? You don't belong in a place like this and we both know it. You're not the type. I heard you spent a summer at McMurdo, but other than that, nothing. You know, ever since I got here, I've had a bad feeling and when I'm around you it gets worse. What's this all about?"

LaHune closed his day calendar. "It's about what you think it's about or, should I say, what you should be thinking it's about. Kharkhov Station is a scientific installation running a variety of projects through the winter under the auspices of the National Science Foundation."

But Hayes didn't believe it.

He tried to reach into LaHune's mind, but there was nothing. Maybe the reawakened telepathy had been temporary and maybe there was just nothing inside LaHune to read. He only knew one thing and he knew it deep down in his guts: LaHune had a secret agenda here. He'd suspected it for awhile, but now he was sure of it.

And with that in mind, it was time to go fishing.

"C'mon, LaHune, spill it. Are you really NSF or are you something else? NASA or JPL? Something like that. We all know they got their hands in on that lake drilling project . . . are you part of that?"

"You're spinning conspiracies now, Hayes."

"You're right, I am. Because I can't shake the feeling that there's some subtext here, something under the surface I'm not reading. I was there when Gates told you over the radio about those mummies he found, the ruins . . . you didn't look at all surprised. Did you know they'd be there? And does it all tie in with what's down in that f.u.c.king lake? Because, maybe I'm crazy, but this all smells funny. You cutting us off from the world for what you say are security reasons . . . security of what? Jesus, LaHune, you're running this like a covert operation."

"I'm running it the way I'm being told to run it," LaHune said. "The NSF does not want any crank stories about aliens and pre-human cities leaking out before we know more."

"f.u.c.k that, LaHune. I don't care if we found the Ark of the G.o.dd.a.m.n Covenant or Jesus' p.i.s.s-stained underwear, there's no reason for a clamp-down like this."

LaHune just stared at him.

His eyes were spooky, Hayes found himself thinking, almost artificial-looking. There was something unnerving about them that made your skin want to crawl. Those eyes were sterile, antiseptic . . . dead and flat and empty. Whatever mind existed behind them must have been rigidly controlled, brainwashed and inhuman. The mind of an ant or a wasp, incapable of thinking beyond the mind-set of its superiors. Yeah, LaHune would shut off the generators if he was ordered to do so, watch the crew freeze to death and not feel a single twinge of guilt. That's the kind of guy he was. Like some a.s.shole robotic general ordering men to their death even when he knew it was wrong. Morally and ethically wrong.

Had LaHune always been like this? Or had he only recently sold his soul to the machine? Hayes had to wonder, just like he wondered how much they had paid him to betray the people at Kharkhov. And was it in silver like Judas Iscariot?

"I'm not going to sit here and entertain your paranoid fantasies, Hayes. But let me make myself clear on one point," he said and seemed to mean it. "You start spreading any of this nonsense around and it'll go bad for you, real bad."

Hayes stood up. "What're you gonna do? Send me to f.u.c.king Antarctica?"

LaHune just stared blankly.

15.

Maybe mid-afternoon, his guts still tangled in a knot from the whole mess, Hayes stopped by to see Doc Sharkey. He stood in the doorway of the infirmary while she administered a teta.n.u.s shot to a welder named Koricki who slit open his palm on a shard of rusty metal.

"There," Sharkey said. "No lockjaw for you, my friend."

Koricki pulled his sleeve down, examined the bandage on his palm. "s.h.i.t, I won't be able to use my hand for a week . . . d.a.m.n, there goes half my love life right down the toilet. Anything you can prescribe for that, Doc?"

She managed a grin. "On your way."

Koricki pa.s.sed Hayes, dropped him a wink. "Can't blame a guy for trying, eh, Jimmy?"

Hayes stood there for some time, smiling at what Koricki had said and unable to stop. The smile was pretty much skin deep and the muscles refused to pull out of it.

"Well? Are you going to come in or stand there and hold up the door frame?" Sharkey wanted to know.

Hayes went in there and sat across from her at her little desk. He did not say anything.

"You look like h.e.l.l, Jimmy."

"Thanks."

But it wasn't some offhand smarta.s.sed comment like one of the boys would drop at him and neither was it a medical opinion . . . it was something else, maybe something like real concern. Regardless, Hayes knew she was right . . . his face was a fright mask. Eyes bloodshot, skin sallow and loose, a tic in the corner of his lips. His hands were shaking and his heart kept speeding up and slowing like it couldn't find its rhythm. And, oh yeah, he hadn't slept more than an hour in the last twenty-four.

"You were up all night?"

Hayes nodded. "You could say that, all right."

"Why didn't you come see me?" she asked, leaving the suggestion of that maybe lay a little too long. "I . . . I could have given you something . . . I mean, heh, something to help you sleep."

But the thinly-concealed innuendo and numerous Freudian slips were completely lost on Hayes and that was pretty much obvious.

"How's Lind?" he asked.

"He's sleeping. He was up a few hours ago, had breakfast, went back out again. He seemed pretty lucid, though. I'm hopeful."

"Me, too."

She studied him with those flashing blue eyes. "I'm ready to listen anytime you're ready to talk."

And she was and he knew it. But was he ready? That was the question. In all those paperback novels that got pa.s.sed around the station during the winter the characters always seemed to feel some awful story they had to relate got easier with the re-telling, but Hayes wasn't so sure about that. He'd already told LaHune a good piece of it and as he thought about what he had to say, it only sounded loonier to him. But he did it. He marched straight through it like Sherman through Georgia and even clued her into the telepathy bit, seeing Lind's dreams.

"Okay," he said when he was done, his hands bunched into fists. "Should I just go take the cot next to Lind or what?"

She looked at him for a long time and there was nothing critical in that look, concern, yes, but nothing negative. "Two weeks ago I would have put you under medication."

"But now?"

"Now I'm not sure what to do," she admitted. "Something's happening here and we both know it."

"But do you believe me?"

She sighed, looked unhappy. "Yes . . . yes, I suppose I do."

And maybe it would have been easier if she hadn't. Things like this were so much easier when you could simply dismiss them. You got abducted by an alien and they stuck something up your a.s.s? Yeah, okay. Your house is haunted? Uh-huh, I bet it is. Casual, thoughtless dismissal saved you from a world of hurt. But that was how the human mind worked . . . it was skeptical because it had to be skeptical, it saved itself a lot of fear and torment that way, a lot of sleepless nights. Because when you believed, you honestly believed . . . well, that meant you had to do something about it, right?

"You believe," Hayes said, "but you'd rather not? Is that it?"

"That's it exactly." She drummed her fingers on the desktop, looked like she needed to be doing something with them. "Because in my position, I just can't sit on something like this. The health of the entire crew here is my responsibility. I have to do something, except there really is nothing I can do."

"How right you are. I already tried our lord and master, but that was pointless."

"I could go to him, too, but I would need something concrete . . . even then . . . well, you know how LaHune is." She opened her desk and took out a little microca.s.sette recorder. "I wonder if you would go through it all again so we have a record? It might be important to have some doc.u.mentation and your admission, on tape, that LaHune totally blew you off."

Hayes did not want to do that, but he did. He cleared his throat, brought it all back in his head and said what had to be said. It took about fifteen minutes to get all the facts straight.

"I'm glad you left out the conspiracy bit," Sharkey said. Then she held up a hand to him. "Please don't take that the wrong way, but it just wouldn't sound right on the tape. Maybe LaHune does have some secret agenda. If he does and he's involved in something way over our heads, we'll never get him to admit as such. All we can do is sit back and wait."

It made sense. Hayes believed it, though. He didn't know how he knew it to be fact, but he did and n.o.body could tell him otherwise.

"Are you still . . . still experiencing the telepathy?"

Hayes shook his head. "No, I think it was a brief surge. But I wouldn't be a bit surprised if other people around here start getting it, too."

"Lind's in there," Sharkey said, pointing to the door that led into the little sick bay. "Do you think if you - "

"I'm not up to it."