Tai pointed to one corner of the room, where a bunch of wires disappeared into the ceiling. "There are the leads that go to the antennas."
"Which probably blew away on the surface a long time ago," Vaughn said as he turned the radio off.
A transmitter on the other side of the room caught Vaughn's attention. Several large boxes containing long-lasting batteries surrounded it. A placard on the front read: CITADEL TRANSPONDER. FREQUENCY 45.83.
"What's that?" Tai asked.
"That's how the builders of the base planned to find it once it was covered over. The transponder-if the batteries were still working-is initiated by an incoming plane's radio. The pilot dials up the proper frequency-45.83-on the radio and presses his transmit button. That turns on the transponder. The pilot then homes in on the radio beacon.
"It's the same system set up at small airfields. It allows pilots to turn on the runway lights when they approach at night and there's no one in the tower. The antenna for this transponder is probably built into the roof of the access shaft."
Vaughn checked the transponder, but as he suspected, the batteries were long dead. However, one gauge indicated they were slowly recharging now that the power to the base was on.
"Let's move on," he said. They exited, and Vaughn paused. "Let's get oriented. Let's call the row of units closest to the entry shaft Row A. The next will be Row B, and so on. The long column to the left is One, the middle Two, and the one on the right Three. Thus we have just left Unit A2, which appeared to be a communications setup.
"This tunnel, designated the north tunnel on the power supply board, is blocked heading to Unit A1. We might be able to get to that unit by going up the west tunnel, but we will hold off on that until we work our way over there.
"Unit B3 is living quarters, where we have temporarily left our equipment and our pilot is catching some sleep." He opened the door directly across. "We are now entering Unit B2."
The first thing that caught his eye as he went through the door was Burke at the electric stove. Burke waved a ladle at them and then went back to stirring a large pot on top of the electric stove. "Dinner will be ready in about thirty minutes."
Vaughn led the way through the kitchen and dining area. "This appears to be the central area for meals, and probably was designed to double as the meeting area for the community that was to live here."
Tai followed him as they went to the next unit in line. This one was another set of living quarters except more lavish than the one they had set up in. There were two bedrooms and a small living room. Tai moved into the smaller bedroom and immediately noticed a large blue binder conspicuously placed on top of the bed. An envelope was taped to the binder.
She picked up the binder and stuck it in her backpack, then rejoined Vaughn in the other room. They went through the door and into C2, which turned out to be another set of living quarters. Then they crossed over to C3, which contained the strange metal tanks and light fixtures they had discovered earlier with Logan. Then on to D3, checking out the control panel for the nuclear reactor. Vaughn noticed just to the left of the panel that the grating was off and a dark tunnel beckoned. A small sign above it was labeled: POWER ACCESS TUNNEL.
"That must be where Logan has gone," Vaughn said. He led the way to the next unit, D2, which turned out to be an extremely well-stocked library. Not only were there numerous books on the shelves, but several file cabinets full of microfiche and three microfiche readers were set up on tables.
"Precomputer days," Tai noted.
Unit D1 was a dispensary with enough equipment to outfit a minor surgery. The shelves were stocked with numerous drugs.
C1 was an indoor greenhouse. Large banks of lights lined the ceiling, and trays filled with frozen soil were held in racks. There were lights on the bottom of the racks on down to the floor. Someone had spent quite a bit of time making every inch of space functional in the small room.
The west tunnel was blocked halfway up between B1 and B2 by the buckling of the ice ridge. Unit B1 itself was crushed halfway through. It appeared to be another bunk room.
Vaughn went back out into the main center tunnel. They'd been in all the units except A1, which was blocked. He now turned his attention to the set of large double doors on both ends of the main tunnel. He and Tai pulled open the set to the west. A large dark tunnel appeared. Groping inside the doors, Vaughn found a lever, which he pulled down. Sparks sputtered out of the ceiling, and then nothing. Using their flashlights, they probed the darkness, only to be met by the same wall of buckled ice that blocked off Unit A1. It had cut across the base diagonally and continued on through here.
"Let's try the other side," Vaughn said, led the way down the main cross tunnel and opened the doors there. He threw the lever, and large arc lights went on, revealing a massive tunnel burrowed out of the ice, extending almost two hundred meters straight ahead. There was a clear central passageway, but the rest of the twenty-meter-wide tunnel was crammed with mountains of supplies.
"Geez," Tai muttered as she took it in. "They were ready for a long stay."
Vaughn moved down the aisle, checking the labels on the boxes. Most of it was food. The last fifty meters of the storage tunnel housed a dozen snowmobiles, a bulldozer, a backhoe, several snow tractors of various sizes, and two large cabins on skis that looked like they could be hooked up to the back of the larger tractors.
The tunnel ended at a metal grating that ramped up and ended in the ceiling. "What do you make of that?" Tai asked.
"I think that's how they planned on getting these vehicles out of here," Vaughn replied. He pointed at sections of the metal grating stacked to the side. "They probably planned on running the bulldozer up the ramp and putting down the grating as they went until they reached the surface."
Tai looked at her watch. "Let's go to the mess hall and get some of that food."
They retraced their steps back to the east tunnel and turned right until they got to the shaft. When they entered the mess hall, Burke was ladling something into Logan's bowl.
"What did you find?" Vaughn asked Logan.
He looked up from his bowl. "I went down the access shaft to the reactor, but it was blocked by ice about fifty meters in. I assume the reactor is out that way another hundred meters or so."
Tai had the binder out and was paging through it. "The reactor is five hundred meters straight-line distance from the power room. Southwest," she said. "As you guessed, the rods aren't in. They were supposed to be brought in and put in place when the base was activated."
Everyone turned and looked at her. "You found the instruction book for this Tinkertoy set?" Vaughn said.
Logan got up and looked at the binder, flipping some pages. "Hydroponics!" he exclaimed, studying the diagram of the base and the label for Unit C3. "I knew I'd seen that somewhere before. They have a setup like that at UCLA."
"What's hydroponics?" Burke asked.
"It's the cultivation of plants in water rather than soil. They set aside Unit C3 to grow food just like the greenhouse in C1, except this one uses water instead of dirt." Logan shook his head. "But I don't understand why they needed to dedicate two units of their base to growing food when they have all the supplies in the ice storage tunnels." He pointed down at the diagram. "The one blocked ice tunnel to the west looks as if it's as large as the one to the east. That's a hell of a lot of food and supplies."
"It doesn't look like they thought they could count on a resupply," Vaughn remarked as looked at the pages. The binder listed the location of equipment and supplies along with instructions for the use of various equipment, but it didn't say anything about the purpose of the base or who was supposed to use it.