Finally, Gates said: “You’re all asking me to answer questions without having had enough time to even make an educated guess. Are the creatures alien? Unknown. Did they build that city? Possibly. Are they any threat to us? Of course not. C’mon, people, put away your comic books here. That city was abandoned during the Pliocene and the mummies we’ve found have been dead, I’m guessing, since the Triassic.”
Feeling that he had thoroughly chastised them and turning away from them with the sort of distaste he might reserve for torch-bearing villagers and other superstitious idiots, he donned his coat and stomped out into the night.
LaHune, who had been studying it all with his usual detachment, stood up and said, “That’s enough now. Dr. Gates has told you all he can tell you. Really, people, he has been good enough to share with you some of his findings and you’re acting like a bunch of children.”
And for once, Hayes was in complete agreement with him. Children? No, more like villagers looking for a witch to burn. Slowly, they settled down, realizing to a man that LaHune had made mental note of their reactions and it would be going into their files. A bad mark on their records would mean any number of them wouldn’t be returning to Antarctica. That meant the loss of big money for contractors and the loss of NSF funding for the scientists.
“Well, wasn’t that amusing?” Sharkey said.
Hayes grunted.
Amusing? Well, it was certainly something. Ancient civilizations. Pre-human intelligences. Aliens. Then that bit about what they had found up there changing the idea of who and what the human race was… well, how did you walk away from that without your chin dragging on the floor?
“What do you make of that?” Hayes finally asked Sharkey.
“I think I can’t wait for spring,” was all she would say.
But Cutchen, well, he had an opinion. His specialty was supposedly the weather, but he always seemed to have an opinion on everything. “Tell you two something right now. I heard all about what happened to Lind and, like you, I’ve drawn a few of my own conclusions. Maybe that thing thawing out in the hut had nothing to do with Lind’s breakdown… but if it did, just keep in mind we’re trapped here until spring and whatever that thing is, we have to live with it all winter.”
“It’s just a fossil for godsake,” Sharkey said.
“Do you think so, Doc? Do you honestly believe that? Great. Then go out to the hut and stare in those red fucking eyes and tell me if something’s not staring back at you.”
But Sharkey wasn’t about to do that.
8
True to his word, Gates went back up to the tent camp, but left his mummies behind. He had three of them thawing in the shed — which was now locked and bolted, LaHune having the only key — and three more still frozen in their sheaths of ice out back in the cold shed.
People were still talking about it all, but they had calmed somewhat. Even grand revelations became mundane given time. You made some discovery that will alter our view of who and what we are? It might change civilization as we know it? No shit? Ain’t that something. You wanna hear something better? Word has it a couple of the techies over at the drilling tower are doing some drilling of a more intimate nature, you catch my drift, sunshine.
Didn’t matter what happened at South Pole stations… its shelf-life was relatively short.
Besides, truth be told, it was an exciting winter at Kharkhov and there was more on the stove than just Gates’ fossils and some dusty old ruins up in the mountains.
There was the lake.
Some three-quarters of a mile beneath the continental ice sheet that the Kharkhov Station sat on, there was a huge subterranean lake roughly the size of Lake Ontario. It had been discovered some five years previously using ice-penetrating radar and radio echo-sounding and promptly named Lake Vordog. This in honor of a Russian seismologist whose early studies in the region led to its discovery.
Vordog was hardly the first lake discovered beneath the ice, there were some seventy others, but Vordog — and a few others — had piqued the curiosity of the world scientific establishment. For here was an underground lake trapped beneath nearly a mile of ice, some 300 miles long and nearly fifty in width, that had been hidden away from the light of day for some forty-million years. No sunlight, no outside atmosphere, no contact with any organisms but those it contained originally. Such isolation, it was thought, may have allowed whatever lived in it to follow an entirely separate path of evolution than that of the outside world.
Imaging had shown that Vordog was over 2,000 feet deep in spots and thermographs proved that instead of being frozen or near-freezing like other sub-glacial lakes, Vordog had a near-constant water temperature of fifty degrees with hot spots up to sixty-five. The only thing that could possibly account for that was some form of subsurface geothermal heat source, possibly hydrothermal vents like those on the ocean floor. In which case, the lake could possibly be teeming with life… much of it completely unknown to science and, quite possibly, evolved forms of organisms long extinct elsewhere.
So instead of the usual paleoclimate coring carried out at the drilling tower, this winter there was something truly exciting happening: a group of technicians headed by a CalTech glaciologist named Gundry were drilling down to the lake in order to release robotic probes into those ancient and pristine waters. The entire thing was being funded by NASA, as part of their groundwork for the Europa Ice Clipper mission which would send similar probes to Jupiter’s ice-covered moons, Europa and Callisto, which were both thought to contain large sub-glacial oceans.
Whatever was down there had been undisturbed for forty-million years.
And now that was about to change.
9
Exactly one day after Gates’ big announcement and two days before Gundry’s drilling team broke through the ice, the Kharkhov Station was zipped-up tight and locked-down. Communication of any sort, whether radio or satellite or email for that matter, was brought to a screaming halt. They were suddenly alone and more isolated than they had been before. But it wasn’t because of a fierce storm or mechanical failure, it was because of LaHune. His directive was quite simple: until further notice, all communication with the outside world was suspended, save emergency beacons.
It didn’t go over real big.
When LaHune announced it to the lunch crowd in the community room, it caused a near-riot. For the winter crews at the stations didn’t have much else going for them but their satellite Internet and an occasional radio chat with a loved one. These were their only ties with the outside world, the only things that could remind them that, yes, there were other people in the world and they weren’t really on the moon or Mars, just down yonder at the bottom of the world.
Later that day, Hayes caught up with Dr. Sharkey at the infirmary. “Did you try to talk sense to that overblown prick?” he asked her.
She nodded. “Oh, I tried, all right. I tried until I was blue in the face, not that it did me any good. This is an NSF facility, he said, as such it’s under government jurisdiction same as a military base. We all signed the Official Secrets Act and now he’s activating it. Nothing goes out, not until he says so. End of story.”