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 dogshit 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 dumbasses 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 bastards had been brought in. Maybe it was wild, fringe thinking, the sort of crazy horseshit 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 sturdy 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 hell 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 damn 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 fucking 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.”
“Fuck that, LaHune. I don’t care if we found the Ark of the goddamn Covenant or Jesus’ piss-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 asshole robotic general ordering men to their death even when he knew it was wrong. Morally and ethically wrong.