Barclay watched as McReady, last to leave, crawled out of the prepared hole.
“All clear!” he called. “Wait ’til I get over there.”
He ran toward them, running the long electric cable leading from tractor to bomb through his hand as he came, checking for possible breaks. The six men stood on the peak of the ridge, the slight slope down to the pit clear before them. The equipment had been moved back, save for ice axes, shovels and small items. There was no great danger of crevassing, but none at all beyond the rock ridge, where the ice pressure changed direction. Barclay speeded the dynamo until it hummed softly, then choked with a startled snarl as he closed the knife switch.
A light appeared in the ice beneath the pit mouth—25 pounds of aluminum powder and iron oxide/thermite mixture starting into an incredible inferno. Molten metallic iron flared at a temperature almost high enough to make the metal boil, running from the suddenly molten-steel casing into the ice. The ice exploded into steam, cracking, pushing, the intolerable glare of radiant energy shooting out paths of weakness through the solid stuff.
A puff of steam shot up from the pit mouth. “That ought to be about all,” Barclay decided as the fierce glare began to fade slowly. He waited a moment, slowing the dynamo. The others started forward slowly—started, and stopped. The glare was building up again, becoming more brilliant. Another puff of steam belched up from the pit into the Antarctic twilight. The fierce light below was growing stronger still.
A slow hissing roar built up, a roar that forced itself against the rushing stream of the wind toward them; white clouds of steam become ice-smoke whipped away from the pit mouth in the breach of the wind. The glare was spreading, a wide patch of ice that sent a dazzling spear of light high into the dark Antarctic sky, a roar that became a thunder. The pit was growing visibly before the mad rush of a vast jet of steam. Incredibly, the ice above the buried Thing from unknown ages began to heave, cracking in spreading radiants with a muffled tearing rip. Vastly the surface of the ice heaved and cracked, became a white, glowing mass, behind which there was an incredible, unearthly torch. The thunder of the vast plume of steam bellowing through the growing pit was whipped away by the wind as the men threw themselves flat on the ice. A sky-shaking roar thrust fifty-foot blocks of ice into the air, freeing an incandescent, growing lake of molten, blazing metal. For a moment the vast shape of the stranger ship was limned in its pyre: a slumping streamlined oblong 300 feet in length, sixty feet in diameter, lying precariously on a rocky slope, its vast nose crumpled against a towering bastion of grey, hard granite.
An incredible torch in the midst of a vast, blasted area of ice. A dazzling, blue-white stream of molten stuff tumbled from a softened rent in the side of the ship to roll down toward the mightier, towering ramparts of ice still undefeated. It struck them with a vast hissing roar, and they crumbled before it, tumbling into exploding steam as they fell into the growing lake of supernal fire. White-hot spheres of flaming metal exploded outward, to thunder downward through thousand-foot-thick ice.
The howling, rushing wind seemed to gain strength, thrusting the ice-smoke toward the distant Antarctic ocean. Great blocks of ice tumbled madly through the air. For a moment, resistant in blue white heat, withstanding even the lapping sea of molten fury, vast dazzling bulks stood out firm in the center section of the ship, huge machines of curving, dazzling splendor, shedding the rain of blazing metal from incandescent, adamantine backs. Then abruptly, they dissolved in a vaster, fiercer flame that sent darting rays through the towering, tottering glaciers looking on about the ship. The black, glistening rock of the ice-drowned mountainside glowed faintly red before that onslaught.
The wavering curtains of the aurora overhead jerked suddenly, spiraled in a mad vortex of shimmering light, and beat down a savage stalk to the incandescent fury. From the mountain, from the ice, vast angry tongues of lightning crashed against the molten pool. Lesser lightnings darted from the tractor, from the steel treads to the ice. Ice axes and shovels grew warm in the hands of the men, as thrilling shocks darted from wristwatches and metal buckles.
Along the mountainside, a vast motion of ice swept in. From the glacier to the south, pressed for ages by the weight of ice spilling over the mountain ridge a convulsion of billions of tons of ice thrust mile-long blocks of ice. The dwindling, flaming pool of metal vanished under a hissing, screaming bellow of tumbling ice.
The driving, rushing wind from the south whipped away a last trace of ice-smoke. It thrummed monotonously through the tractor rigging, cutting with a cold-keened edge. High in the sky, the curtains of the aurora wavered and moved in their immemorial fashion, against the rose-and-lavender wash of the setting sun.
Vane staggered to his feet. “It was a magnesium-aluminum alloy, hardened with beryllium and other metals.”
“There aren’t any more where that came from,” said McReady grimly, nodding toward the sledge. “What happened? We set off their fuel supply?”
Vane shook his head. “I think it was just the ship’s metal. An immense magnesium metal torch. Hundreds and hundreds of tons of it. That flare toward the end—when the engines went—I think it was the power that thing soaked out of Earth’s magnetic field ages ago, getting loose again with the final dissolution of the engines. The aurora felt it, the lightnings felt it—”
“The dynamo felt it,” Barclay called. “The coils are fused in a solid lump. The transformers and coils of the radio are also fused. Your magnetic apparatus looks as though you’d stepped in it. We can’t signal Big Magnet ’til we get back to the Station, if then. And they’ll be worrying about us, I imagine.”
“They saw that,” Vane nodded. “We’ll have to get back to the station at once, though they may guess that it would burn out coils here. There’s nothing more we can do around here, if we can leave. The crevasses—”
“The ice hasn’t moved much this side of the ridge.” McReady pointed toward the west. “But it will. We’d better go while we can.”
The tractor stirred, a cough of steam spurting from the exhaust. “We can talk that over later—if we move now.” suggested Barclay.
CHAPTER THREE
“Peaceful place!” Barclay shouted over the clatter of the tractor.
Big Magnet base lay in the sheltered hollow below, a dirtied stretch of drift-snow, lumped and humped over the buried shacks. Half a dozen stove-pipes smoked languidly, the dark soot moving off in startlingly slow spirals, in a manner seeming almost magical to these men returning from the wind-rushed bald plateau at Secondary Magnetic Station, the station that was no more.
McReady nodded vigorously. The clatter of metal parts and the hiss of steam made conversation too much of an effort. The howl of the huskies in Dogtown succeeded, somehow, in piercing the rattle of the tractor with a rolling, despairing note.
The Administration Building suddenly seemed to shake itself free of the snow, and half a dozen men stumbled outside, shading their eyes to look toward the approaching tractor and its trailed sledge. The spidery finger of the radio tower cast a long, broken shadow out across the roiled snow toward them.
“Imagine!” Barclay shouted. “No wind at all for as much as seventy hours running! I wonder if I’ll be able to sleep down here!”
“You can go back if you insist!” McReady shouted back. “I could still find something of interest out there, even if Vane and Norris’s pet project doesn’t exist any more!”
“Hold on! I’m turning!” Barclay stomped on the left clutch, and the rattle of the tractor changed its tone. The left caterpillar stopped, while the right continued moving. The clumsy machine lurched sideways, then turned toward the jumbled snow of the tractor garage. Five tarpaulin-covered masses, half drifted over, represented the rest of the Base force of mechanical ground transport.