With the grotto lit… or their part of it… it was easy enough to make a run back to the archway. They did so, vaulting debris and slipping around stalagmites and climbing over rocks. When they got inside the archway, Hayes tripped and went flat on his face. And if he hadn’t, they would not have seen. His light went spinning, revealing the dark corners of the arch they had not originally noticed.
“What is that stuff?” Sharkey asked.
Hayes didn’t answer, not right away. What he was seeing were a series of thin plastic tubes wrapped around rocks and the frame of the arch itself. It was detcord hooked to electric blasting caps and their had to be seventy or eighty feet of it. Enough to cause a massive explosion.
That’s why the remote control detonator was up in the SnoCat. Somebody was planning on sealing this place off for an eternity. Gates. Must have been Gates.
“Don’t touch it,” Hayes warned Sharkey. “That’s detcord… C-8 plastic explosive shaped into a cord.”
“The detonator…”
“You got it.”
The lights were holding the swarm at bay, but they wouldn’t for long. Already Hayes could feel those minds out there collecting themselves, gathering their energies, charging their batteries as it were. And when they turned that force at the generator…
Hayes and Sharkey started up the steps.
They moved as fast as they could, running and climbing, falling down and getting back up again until they found the original passage. Behind them, echoing and reverberating, came that piping. It was building now. Angry and resolute and directed.
Hayes and Sharkey found the rope ladder, climbed up out of the chasm into the subzero polar night. The storm had passed and there were stars out above. Auroras were flickering and expanding in swaths of cold white light over the mountain peaks.
“Get that ’Cat warmed up!” Hayes called to Sharkey as he ran through Gates’ deserted encampment.
He ran one way and she ran the other.
He palmed the detonator from Gates’ SnoCat and climbed the slope to his own. Sharkey had it running. He climbed into the warming cab and brought the ’Cat around so its nose was pointing back down the drifted ice road. Then he hit the firing button on the detonator.
At first there was nothing and he thought it hadn’t worked or they were out of range, but then it came: a great rumbling from below that set-up a chain reaction of destruction down there. The ground shook and the hills trembled and Gates’ camp suddenly disappeared into a smoking crevice.
That’s all there was to it.
“Drive,” Sharkey said.
Hayes did.
43
On the way back, Sharkey read Gates’ field journal, breezing through things she knew. She said nothing for a long time and Hayes just drove. He couldn’t think of a single intelligent thing to say after what they’d been through. Nothing. He couldn’t even work up the strength to mourn Cutchen. Poor, goddamn Cutchen.
Finally, thirty minutes later, Sharkey said, “Gates had some interesting theories here concerning what this is all about. You up to hearing them?”
He reached over and held her hand. “I’m up to it.”
“According to Gates, there’s a method to the madness of the Old Ones. They’re harvesting minds in a very selective pattern. Some will be harvested to be used, but most… most of us will be culled, drained dry, and purged.” She clicked off her flashlight and closed Gates’ notebook. “They’ve waited a long time, Jimmy, for their seeds to bear fruit. Again, according to Gates, they’ll seek minds much like their own —cold, militaristic intellects that they can easily take hold of, brains that are ready to be awakened and, in some ways, are already awake, receptive. These will be the cells by which they’ll contaminate and conquer the entire race… reaching out and infecting us mind by mind by mind, spreading out like a plague and waking up those buried imperatives they planted in us so very long ago until we’re essentially a hive of bees or wasps, a colony with a single relentless inhuman intelligence, one that can be bent to their will, harvested, and used for their grand plan.”
Hayes lit a cigarette. “Which is?”
“Gates is a little vague on that.”
“So they don’t really want all our minds, just certain ones?”
“Yes. They will infect us all, then purge off those that are what they might consider mutants… defiant wills, individualistic minds. They cannot allow such disease germs in the greater whole. But even those that are purged, killed off… their psychic energies will be reaped.”
“Jesus,” Hayes said. “They develop us only to harvest. Like farmers. We’re nothing but a crop for them.”
Hayes was remembering what Gates had said when they chatted with him. He could see it in his mind now: I believe they have seeded hundreds of worlds in the galaxy with life and directed the evolution of that life they have an agenda and I believe it is the subjugation of the races they developed…
Sure, the great cosmic farmers spreading out star by star, selecting suitable worlds to be colonized and seeded. Waiting millions of years means nothing to them. For in the end, they always possess the races they engineer and the limitless power of their intellects.
“Gates believed that in every population there were what he refers to as Type-A personalities… dutiful, methodical, more machine than man. Minds much like their own. People who place duty and allegiance to a higher cause above all else. And particularly such trifling, human things as love, family, individuality—”
“LaHune,” Hayes said, his heart sinking like a brick.
“Yes, exactly. Minds like his may be accidental, but probably not. A small minority the Old Ones engineered in advance to be used like viruses with which to contaminate us all. The end result will be… well, I think you can guess.”
“A world filled with LaHunes.” Hayes looked like he needed to be sick. He pulled off his cigarette, feeling angry and nauseated. “None of us human… just cold and brainwashed. Worker ants, drones.”
Sharkey nodded. “Yes, but far, far worse, Jimmy. LaHune times ten, LaHune squared. LaHune sucked dry of even his most basal human characteristics… automatons with a single directed mind that those aliens can lord over.” She paused, slapping the notebook against her knee. “But to what end? I don’t know.”
But Hayes thought he did.
At least one or two of the reasons, though he suspected there were many of them. They had set a blueprint into motion on this planet as they had probably done on hundreds of others. They sent out colonists that would drift from star to star, planet to planet, seeding them for future harvest just as Gates thought. This would take billions of years but, ultimately, that wouldn’t matter to creatures like them that were potentially immortal anyway. And the end result was to establish thousands of outposts, a network of dominance. Using those minds they had engineered, they would have unlimited psychic energy to wield. The sort of energy that was far beyond such simple things as nuclear fusion, it was the very electricity and milk of creation itself.
Oh, it was very simple when you thought about it.
They had known it would work because they had been doing it for trillions of years. They knew how it would happen. All along, they’d known the human race would multiply and spread over the earth. That our engineered neurophysiology would make that quite simple, that we would reason our way out of darkness just as they had. They knew we would over-populate into the billions and that when our numbers reached critical mass we would find them again and they would be waiting, waiting to harness what we had… the limitless, pure kinetic psychic force of the human mind. They would harvest it. They would unite us into a single devastating mind. A new mind, a fresh hive, not ancient and jaded like theirs, but fresh and unborn and indestructible, eternal and infinite and immortal. They would direct the cosmic purity of our thoughts and those thoughts would be energy and matter and focus. They would punch a hole through the dark spaces between the stars and bring their race here, the legions, the swarms that would fill the seas and cover the lands and darken the skies and in doing so, would suck humanity dry.