The usually gregarious Kolich went silent for a moment or two. That whine rose and fell from the set. They waited a minute, two, three, nothing.

"Nikolai? Nikolai? Are you there?" Sharkey asked. "Vostok? Can you hear me, Vostok?"

"Yes . . . we hear you, Elaine. I've . . . I've been getting properly chastised by the radio officer here . . . he says that I am not following proper procedure. I should be saying 'over' and that nonsense. There. There, he is gone and now we can talk."

"The abandoned camp . . . do you know of it?"

"Yes, Elaine, yes. You speak of the Vradaz Outpost, a coring site. It was abandoned back in 1979 or '80, as I recall. There was a lot of noise about it at the time, lots of wild stories . . . "

"Do you remember what happened?"

Silence, static. "Yes, but it's hardly worth going into. Just crazy talk. There was . . . well how do I say this . . . something of a ghost scare up there. Talk of a haunting of all things. Crazy business. Vradaz was a summer post and they were coring, struck into a cave or chasm or something. Yes. Then . . . I remember things got funny after that."

He paused and Hayes looked at Sharkey, but she wouldn't look at him. She was thinking what he was thinking. He knew it.

"Do you remember the details, Nicky?" she asked.

"Details? Yes. Yes, yes, I was here at Vostok when they brought the last three men in. They were all mad, hopelessly mad. The man in charge here then . . . you know of the sort I speak, Elaine? The political officer was a big Ukranian whom no one liked. He placed those three men in segregation, had me shoot them full of sedatives so they would not disturb the others."

"You said three men? I thought there were ten?"

"There was said, I recall, to be a rash of insanity up there. Men killing each other and committing suicide. We had been getting some very odd communications from Vradaz and then, nothing. Three weeks and nothing. A security force went up there, came back with the three and said the others were all dead. I was one of the few, being a medico, that was allowed to see these men. They were only here for three days, I think, then they were flown out. It was a sad, tragic business. Isolation . . . it can do terrible things to men."

"Those communications . . . do you remember them?"

"Yes." Another long pause and Hayes could almost imagine him mopping sweat from his brow. "Crazy business . . . the men up there, they wanted to get out, said they could not stay up there. These were scientists, Elaine, and they were scared like schoolchildren, yes? Talking rubbish . . . noises and b.u.mps, knocks and tappings, shapes seen flitting about at night . . . madness, that's all it was."

Sharkey chewed her lower lip. "Dr. Gates will find this all interesting."

"It was rubbish, Elaine, make sure you tell him that I did not believe these things!"

"Oh, of course not, Nicky." Sharkey stared at the dials and LEDs on the radio, thumbed the mic again. "Did those three men . . . did they say anything?"

The silence dragged on longer this time, much longer. "Yes, even sedated, they would not stop talking. It was all nonsense, Elaine. Silly stories, all of it. They were raving. Sounds in the night, noises in the walls and on the roofs . . . knocks at the door, scratching at the windows. Things of that nature. There was a ruined house when I was a child and . . . but, no matter. These men were raving about nightmares and voices in their heads . . . weird figures wandering through the compound that were not men . . . ghosts, bogies, I think. They spoke of devils and monsters, figures that walked through walls. It was a terrible business."

Kolich signed off soon after this and seemed to be in a hurry to do so. Maybe he was being overheard or maybe the memory of all that wasn't sitting on him right. Regardless, he had something that needed doing and he went to do it.

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

Sharkey kept staring at the set. She shook her head. "Nikolai is a man who likes to talk, Jimmy. But he was very abrupt about all this. Any other time I would have been on here an hour hearing about his take on that business. It's not like him."

"I got the feeling that maybe he was talking about something he wasn't supposed to be saying."

"Me, too."

"But you saw the familiar pattern there, I take it?"

She nodded. "It's like what we have . . . but worse." She was looking in his eyes now and Hayes saw something like fear in them. "Is this what's going to happen here, Jimmy? Are we all going to go mad and kill each other?"

"I don't know, but I think we better do something here before this gets out of hand."

"Like what?"

He smiled thinly. "Oh, I was thinking about asking you to take a little Sunday drive with me. Up to a place called Vradaz."

PART THREE.

THE WINGED DEVILS.

"That ultimate, nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness."

- H.P. Lovecraft.

21.

Zero hour.

Gundry and his people weren't calling it that, but that's how Hayes was seeing it. The cryobot had been launched some twelve hours before. It took nearly eight of those for it to melt through the remaining 100 feet of the ice dome over Lake Vordog and then it dropped to the misty, black waters of the lake far below. Gundry and his people had not slept for over twenty-four hours now and Hayes didn't see that happening anytime soon.

They were all wired.

Hayes had gotten up at like four a.m. because he, too, was excited. Excited and, yes, apprehensive as to what might be found down in that ancient lake. He went about his work, checking in at the drill tower from time to time to see how things were proceeding. Apparently, Gundry and Parks, the project's geophysicist, had been concerned about the possibility of there being some ma.s.sive methane ice bubble trapped down below the cap. Most permafrost regions have quant.i.ties of methane beneath them, they explained to him.

"You see, Jimmy," Gundry explained to him. "There was some anxiety about what we're doing down here. Environmental groups were worried that we would pollute that pristine lake below and among the scientific community, there was some grave concern that we might tap into a dangerous quant.i.ty of methane gas . . . which, if released, could prove disastrous to world climate."

When Hayes heard that, his mouth maybe dropped open. "You mean . . . Jesus, Doc, you saying you guys could've wiped us out just to explore that G.o.dd.a.m.n lake?"

"That was something of a concern, so to speak," Gundry admitted. "But we took every precaution and all our tests and coring confirmed that, while there certainly were quant.i.ties of methane, there was also helium, nitrogen, trace amounts of exotic gases such as xenon . . . but nothing that could affect our atmosphere."

So, Project Deep Drill went ahead.

And now the cryobot had melted its way through the ice cap and dropped into the lake itself. It had been there some three hours now, sending back a wealth of information on the lake's temperature, chemistry, and biology. It had already detected vast quant.i.ties of organic molecules and even varieties of archaebacteria, eubacteria, and eukaryotes. So the lake was definitely alive just as they thought and not only alive, but organically rich.

This really got everyone excited and particularly Campbell, the team's microbiologist. He got so excited, in fact, he forgot that Hayes was the guy who ran the generators and boilers and not a brother scientist. In the control booth, as all that wonderful info came up from the cryobot and began appearing on the computer screens, Campbell grabbed Hayes by the arm and started babbling on like a kid talking about presents under the Christmas tree. Except what he was talking about were molecular biology studies, forensic biology, and ancient DNA protein a.n.a.lysis. Hayes acted like he knew all about that stuff, smiling and nodding happily as Campbell filled his head with the specifics of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) using gene-specific and random primers, PCR amplification of evolutionary conservative genes and microbial metabolic activity, and, of course, the wonders of cyan.o.bacteria and paleo-indicators.

An hour after the cryobot had entered the lake, it released the secondary cryobot on a cable which then descended to the bottom, some 900 feet below. Gundry and the others had chosen this location because the lake was over 2000 feet deep in some spots and it was near to that perplexing magnetic anomaly. When Hayes got back to the drill tower again, the secondary cryobot was on the bottom and had been for the past thirty minutes.

"You've come just in time," Gundry told him. "We're about to release the hydrobot. Keep your fingers crossed."

Hayes did. He was keeping a lot of things crossed. He was glad they were finding what they had hoped for . . . more, even . . . but there was still that worming tension in his belly, that almost superst.i.tious dread at probing around down here at something that had been sealed away from the world for almost forty-million years . . . like they were picking the scab off a sore and there was a danger of some infection running rampant as a result. Now and again Gundry would look over at him and something would pa.s.s between them, some sense that they were on the verge of big things, things that might crush them.

At least, that's how Hayes was reading it.

When the hydrobot was released successfully, there was just Gundry, Campbell, Hayes, and Parks, the geophysicist, in the booth. People had been coming in all day long to see what was going on, but it was a long process and most left soon after they arrived.

But Hayes, in-between his rounds of the power station and boilers, hung on like a tick and now here it was, the moment they'd all been waiting for. When the hydrobot was released and started to send back data everyone cheered. This was going to work, all those millions of dollars were going to pay off. Today Lake Vordog and tomorrow, Mars and the moons of Jupiter. It really was an incredible moment and Hayes was almost wishing Lind could have been there. He would have appreciated the historical significance of it all . . . and his part in it, too.

Campbell and Parks sat before monitors, gathering data, and Gundry and Hayes stood behind them. There was a video screen above, but as yet there had been no video feed. The screen flickered a few times, but nothing. Hayes could sense the heavy hearts of the scientists over that.

"I'm reading water temperatures of sixty degrees, with currents up over a hundred. Wait now . . . okay, okay," Parks was saying as the numbers came in from the hydrobot. "Yeah, picking up chemical signals . . . magnesium and iron smoke . . . manganese, zinc . . . copper sulfides, sulfur dioxides . . . carried on the warm currents. Okay, got a hot plume here . . . almost 200 degrees. We've definitely got ourselves a smoker down here, gentlemen. Hydrothermal vents . . . gotta be . . . yeah, more than one. Several sites, I'm guessing."

Campbell was equally as happy for his bio-sensors were picking up all kinds of goodies from both the secondary cryobot on the bottom and the hydrobot. a.n.a.lysis of water and sediment were showing bacteria, yeasts, archaea, algae, even grains of pollen.

"Diatoms . . . s.h.i.t, I'm getting indicators of rich plankton fields here."

"Outstanding," Gundry said.

Parks was nodding his head. "Come to papa . . . oh yeah . . . chemical enrichment of water almost two million times that of normal seawater or fresh water."

"Meaning what?" Hayes asked.

"Meaning," Gundry said, "is that the buffet is surely open. You've got smoker vents down here, Jimmy, spewing chemical nutrients into the water that heat-loving bacteria feast upon. The buffet is open."

Parks started fooling around with the uplink to the hydrobot and the video screen flickered, flickered again, rolled and went black. Then it came on and they were seeing . . . well, huge clots of sediment drifting up from the muddy bottom in the powerful halogen lamps of the hydrobot. They were now seeing what it was seeing.

"Incredible," Hayes said without being aware of it.

It was like some alien world and, in effect, that's exactly what it was. A sunken, ancient plain of murky waters and sediment drifting about like motes of dust. It was thick and grainy on the screen.

Hayes swallowed, struck somehow by the eerie stillness of that place. He was seeing flitting shadows at the edges of the light and it could have been the motion of that suspended sediment or something else entirely.

The hydrobot descended again, closer to the lake bottom and Campbell started getting really excited. "Look there, do you see it?" he said, squinting through the ooze and sediment as if it were his eyes seeing this and not the hydrobot's forward camera. "Right there . . . those marks in the mud, those snaking ruts . . . those are the marks of deep crawlers - maybe shrimp or brittle stars, sea spiders. Hard to tell this deep, could have happened yesterday or two hundred years ago. Really hard to say."

The hydrobot roamed ever forward, the screen almost black at times as it pushed on through clouds of silt.

"Any chance it'll get stuck in all that?" Hayes said.

"No, it has a seriously advanced AI package on board, same sort of stuff we use on s.p.a.ce probes and the Martian rover, except better. It's doing most of its own thinking right now. It has sonar to avoid large objects and infrared to hone in on living things, an on-board lab to a.n.a.lyze just about anything."

"Why does it keep pausing?"

"It's using its robotic arms to take samples. It sucks them up, a.n.a.lyzes them and feeds the results to Dr. Campbell here."

Gundry told him the hydrobot worked much like an ROV with a prop at the rear to pull it or push it or turn it around and in any direction. It could rise or hover, do whatever its software package demanded of it.

"Magnometer's picking up some strong fluxes," Parks said. "Jumping a thousand, now two-thousand nanoteslas. Five-thousand. Jesus. Strong and steady."

Gundry explained that a nanotesla was the standard measure of magnetism. That the norm here at the Pole was in the vicinity of 60,000 and now they were getting nearly seventy. The hydrobot was reading it and gradually honing in on its source. If it lost it, it would go back to tracking the hydrothermal vents.

The hydrobot climbed and the silt thinned considerably. It went from a blizzard of flakes the size of quarters to a flurry with flakes the size of beads. The light penetrated better now. Suddenly, there was a storm of bubbles coming at the camera and then the hydrobot was buried in them . . . pulsing membranous bubbles that were purple and blue, sometimes orange and red, indigo and neon green.

"Jellies," Campbell said. "Will you look at that! Like comb jellies . . . ovoid with frilled plates to propel themselves. But I've never seen any like this . . . we seem to be in a ma.s.sive colony."

"Can they hurt the hydrobot?" Hayes asked.

"No . . . see, the hydrobot has slowed down now. It's concerned about hurting them so its pa.s.sing through their ranks very slowy."

It was a world of jellyfish, thousands of them like champagne bubbles. But pulsing and rippling, veined with brilliant bursts of ever changing color like fibre optic lamps. You could see right through them. It was hard to say how big they were, but maybe the size of softb.a.l.l.s with lots of little ones, some no bigger than marbles. They seemed unconcerned about the hydrobot. After about ten minutes the colony pa.s.sed away and the hydrobot dove down into the sediment again, detecting something interesting.

Hayes saw what looked like a gigantic albino crab picking its way through the mud. Its body was jagged and th.o.r.n.y, about the size of a wash tub - Campbell said - with spidery limbs reaching out three or four feet beyond. It had something like black eyes on two-foot stalks and Hayes pointed it out.

"No, not eyes," Campbell said. "Receptors of some sort. It would be totally blind like everything else down here. A new species, though, without a doubt."

The hydrobot pa.s.sed over it, deciding wisely not to tangle with it, and darted down into a chasm filled with sea gra.s.ses and then up again, scanning the bottom and finding the sh.e.l.ls of dead mussels and crustaceans, hundreds of them tangled in a bony carpet. Then a gully spread out, dropping maybe five feet below the level of the lake bottom. It was filled not with gra.s.ses, but white bloated things that had to be ten or fifteen feet in length, coiling and writhing. To Hayes they looked like thousands of blunt and fleshy hoses with pink suckers at the end that expanded and deflated.

"Tube worms and like none I've ever seen before," Campbell said.

The hydrobot was interested. It inverted itself above them and slowly pa.s.sed over them, panning them and giving what information it could on them such as their temperature and what the chemical composition of the water around them was. Hayes had seen tube worms on the Discovery Channel, but not like these . . . not moving and undulating, reacting to maybe both the hydrobot and its light. These didn't look like harmless filter-feeding animals, but things that were hungry and predacious.

"This is simply amazing," Gundry said.

Hayes was speechless. What he was seeing . . . no man had seen before and the impact of it all had quieted that feeling in his belly that there was something terribly wrong about this ancient lake.

"s.h.i.t!" Parks cried out. "Did you see that?"

They had. Something gigantic and fluttering that looked roughly like a pond hydra, but grown to nightmare proportions. It had to be twenty or thirty feet in length, looking much like an upended tree with a ma.s.sive root system . . . a forest of clown-white writhing tentacles. It darted away from the light quickly enough and they only got the briefest glimpse of it. But what they had seen made them pretty sure they wouldn't be taking any dips in Lake Vordog in the near future.

"Incredible . . . a mollusk maybe. Certainly squid-like," Campbell said with a dry voice as if the thing hadn't scared the h.e.l.l out of him.

But it had. Without really thinking, all the men in the booth had pulled away from the screen involuntarily. Something like that . . . white and ghostly and alien . . . roaming in the darkness, well, it did something to you. Made you think bad thoughts, the kind that could keep you awake at night.

The hydrobot did not go after it, which was a good thing. But Gundry explained that it was programmed to study slow-moving creatures when it could, but not to burn unnecessary energy in any hot pursuits. And that hydra . . . or whatever in the Christ it was . . . had been d.a.m.ned fast. d.a.m.ned fast and d.a.m.ned spooky.

Another bottom-dweller came onto the screen and Hayes had never seen anything like it, either. It looked sort of like a horseshoe crab, but narrowed and lengthened so that it was maybe ten feet long. It was covered in a chitinous exoskeketon that was fish-belly white like most things down there. There were two pairs of spiny walking legs to either side like those of a lobster and a set of hooked chelicerae, pincers, poised out front like they were looking for something to crush. Its plated tail ended in something like a stinger. Overall, it looked like some kind of ma.s.sive scorpion, but eyeless with no less than four waving antennae.

"My G.o.d," Campbell said. "I don't believe it. Do you know what that is? A Eurypterid . . . a sea scorpion. Obviously an evolved form, but a Eurypterid all the same."

"A new species?" Hayes said.

Campbell laughed. "The Eurypterids are an extinct subcla.s.s of arthropods, Jimmy. They died out roughly 200 million years ago . . . or so we thought. G.o.dd.a.m.n!"

The hydrobot pa.s.sed beyond the reach of the sea scorpion. Everyone in the booth kept watching the screen, seeing more exotic aquatic plants, colonies of tube worms, bizarre giant clams, some inching worms, and what might have been a squid that ducked away quickly. Then the terrain began to grow more rugged, slashed by chasms that dropped hundreds of feet and capped with rolling submarine hills that were set with something like pale yellow kelp. The magnometer on the hydrobot was picking up higher levels of magnetism and honing in on them.

For a time it was pretty much business as usual save for a school of transparent fish . . . or what looked like fish . . . and then, Campbell saw something.

"Did you . . . what the h.e.l.l was that?"