James Bond shit. “Jesus Christ, Doc, I supposed to log in with some of the boys from McMurdo tonight. We’ve got a poker game going on the web… what the hell are they going to think?”
“What’s the rest of the world going to think?”
Hayes sat down, sighed.
Sure, there was more than just a poker game in the offing here. There were wives and children, sisters and brothers and parents. When they didn’t hear from their people at Kharkhov, they were going to start expecting the very worst.
And Hayes was with them, because he already expected the worse. He’d felt it from the moment he’d stepped off the LC-130 Hercules at Kharkhov Station six weeks ago and, day by day, it had been growing like a tumor in his belly… that near-certainty that things were going to get dark and ugly this winter. But he hadn’t mentioned that to anyone. They would have thought he was crazy.
Sharkey folded her arms. “I don’t use the Internet much and I don’t really have anyone I keep in contact with, so I guess I’ll survive better than most.”
Hayes felt something swell up in his throat. He tried to swallow it down. “What about… what about your husband?”
Sharkey looked at him, then looked away. And there it was again, that barely concealed tightening around her mouth and eyes that was akin to bitterness. “We generally don’t keep in close contact.” She uttered a small laugh. A very small one. “Besides, where he is, out in the jungle, the Internet basically consists of knocking coconuts together.”
Hayes did not comment on that.
He was divorced, no children. He had a sister, Liza, in Des Moines who was a Jehovah’s Witness. Last winter at the Amundsen-Scott Station they’d started emailing back and forth. But that had come crashing to a halt when he admitted to her that he did not believe in God and never had, asked her point-blank how she’d gotten mixed up in a cult like the Jo-Ho’s.
So, like Sharkey, he was pretty much alone.
LaHune had sited security reasons for the blackout. Security reasons. That was his explanation and he refused to elaborate on it. And you could count on LaHune to keep his word. No amount of ass-kissing or sweet-talking would thaw him. Better luck trying to get inside a nun’s habit than that cast-iron lockbox LaHune called a skull.
“Did he say anything?” Hayes asked her. “I mean, shit, people are already wigged out down here. They don’t need this, too. Did you try the medical approach? The psychological benefits and all that shit?”
Sharkey nodded again. “I tried everything short of a lapdance, Jimmy. It’s a no-go. He told me that when he receives clearance from the NSF bigwigs, he’ll give us our Internet and all the rest back. But not until. The National Science Foundation rules.”
“Clearance? Clearance for what?”
She shrugged. “He’s very cloak-and-dagger about the whole thing. But I get the feeling it’s because of Gates’ discovery and the things he was saying. The NSF doesn’t want that stuff getting out, not yet. Not until they’ve had time to think over how they’re going to handle all the questions they’re going to get barraged with. This is big stuff, Jimmy. You’ve got to know that.”
“I do know it, Doc. But, shit, I’m almost a thousand in the hole with those ringers at McMurdo. I mean, damn.”
Sharkey said she thought that part of it might be the flack the NSF was going to take, the intimations that everyone at Kharkhov was cracking up. Cabin fever.
“We are cracking up for chrissake,” Hayes said. “This whole goddamn winter has a real bad smell to it, Doc. I’ve had a bad feeling since the planes left and the snow started blowing like hell. A real bad feeling and don’t you dare laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing,” she said.
He shrugged. “Like I said the other day, those goddamn mummies are like some kind of catalyst here, a big ugly spoon to stir the pot. And now that pot is all stirred-up and the soup is smelling like shit. If that makes any sense.”
She smiled, seemed to understand.
“I guess what I’m saying, Doc, is that LaHune cutting us off like this is just plain stupid. What with those weird mummies and Lind’s breakdown, the crew down here are thinking funny things, you know? They sit around and do their bit, pretend like none of it’s bothering them, but it is. You can see it behind their eyes. They’re getting paranoid and scared. They’re sensing something and its eating their guts out, only they don’t dare admit to it and you can’t blame them.”
Hayes would never have said any of this to anyone else, but it was true. What you generally had at a station like Kharkhov during the winter was a lot of boredom. There was work to be done, sure, but the pace was nowhere near as frenetic as you saw during the summer. This year the boredom had been replaced by something else… a nervous tension, a sense of expectancy, the knowledge that the ball was going to drop. Hayes could feel it. Although the crew wandered around with stupid smiles on their faces and went through the motions, it was all an act. You peeled those smiles off and underneath you were going to see people on the edge, people cringing, people confused and worried and, yes, scared.
The atmosphere at a winter station locked down by the cold and snow and perpetual darkness was never exactly yippy-skippy, let’s-have-ourselves-a-parade, but even on bad years when you threw together a group that simply did not get along, it was not like this. There was not this sense of brooding apprehension, that almost spiritual sort of taint hanging in the air.
“What’re you thinking, Doc?” Hayes asked, seeing Sharkey’s blue eyes focused off into space.
She shrugged. “I’m just wondering if I’m going to have enough happy pills to get these people to spring.”
“Pills won’t cut it,” Hayes told her.
Sharkey smiled, looked into his eyes. “I was just thinking, Jimmy, how easy it would be for the NSF to dump a group of us down here and then throw something odd at us like this, see how we handled it. A sort of feasibility study. A group of people fairly diverse in that they come from the working class right up to the scientific elite. See how we react to certain things.”
“You saying they invented those mummies? Those ruins?”
“No, of course not. But it would be an interesting opportunity for the powers that be to take advantage of. Us stranded down here, facing philosophical and psychological challenges brought about by our isolation and the discovery of Gates’ mummies.”
“Doc, really, don’t be feeding my paranoia.”
She laughed. “Oh, I’m just speculating here.”
“Sure, but it sounds right to me. The bunch of us riding out this fucking winter, our lines of communication severed. Those goddamn mummies out there that are scaring the shit out of everyone… whether they’re willing to admit it or not.”
“Yes, exactly. And with our good Mr. LaHune as the control. Because, you know, if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be surprised if a mob decided to gather up Gates’ mummies and burn them like alien witches.”
Sharkey laughed nervously as if to dismiss it all, but Hayes wasn’t ready to dismiss it. He wasn’t much on conspiracies and the like, but those mummies were having a very negative effect on the crew. They were getting under peoples’ skins, making them imagine the worst possible things and runaway imaginations were a bad thing when you were trapped down at the bottom of the world. A mass-paranoia becoming a mass-insanity could become savage and devastating at the drop of a hat.
“If LaHune has any brains,” Hayes said, “then he’ll open this place back up, let these people chat with the outside world. It can’t be good for them to be internalizing this shit, chewing on it and swallowing it whole, letting it boil in their bellies.”