The drawer contained racks of test tubes. Again there were the cryptic labels, the fluids. Many of these were brightly colored, however, as if they had been stained. Part of the drawer held microscope slides. In the deepest corner were stacks of round glass dishes with a brown medium on the bottom and, spread across many, an uneven growth that looked like mold.
The second drawer was empty.
And the third.
He began to pull the drawers faster. They were eight feet long, like mortuary drawers, but he needed to open them only a quarter of their length to see what they held; finding one empty, he pushed it without much force and it would slide gently closed on its machined bearing. After six drawers he was impatient to be done, and he yanked open the seventh and had his gloved palm already flat against it to close it again before he had even taken in what it contained.
It was not empty, however.
It looked like a supermarket case in which a pinkish substance had been stored in heavy gauge plastic bags. Each was about the size of a pair of shoes. Stacked neatly in the drawer, two to a row, sixteen rows long, they looked neat and rather pedestrian. Ice crystals unevenly masked their contents. Tarp had to lean very close. It was like looking at the rusted skin of the Prinz von Homburg and trying to make sense of what was seen. Now he looked and tried to puzzle out these shapes — a curving gray pinkness, a bulge. A hand? But such a very small hand.
A baby’s hand.
He looked at another bag.
Not quite a baby. A fetus.
He stepped back.
He had seen quite a number of corpses. Few had nauseated him. For a moment, however, these did, and he turned away and steadied himself. Then he turned around and deliberately opened the drawer as far as it would go and looked in. Neat rows of bagged and frozen, miniature human beings. Neatly labeled.
He took a very deep breath of the stale-smelling air of the suit, then closed the drawer and began to open the rest. There were two more drawers of the same sort. Then one that held five dead dogs. Then one that contained seventeen hearts, not, he thought, human.
The last drawer held a full-size human adult.
The body, like the fetuses, was in a plastic bag. Ice obscured much of the nude torso, but the area over the face was clear as if it had been already scraped clean for him. He had no trouble puzzling out what this mass of waxy skin, this blotched pallor, this slightly mangled shape was. It was a man’s head, and he knew the man.
It was Beranyi.
He took the camera from the carrying cylinder and went from room to room methodically, trying to get enough coverage of each to show what the habitat was like. An integral flash blinked with each exposure. Grim now, he worked quickly, ignoring the headache and the muscles that objected to the weight and the poor balance of the cumbersome suit. He shot the bank of small doors and the phials; he shot the controls from four angles; he shot the freezer room, then one drawer of the fetuses, and Beranyi. He took three pictures of Beranyi. He wanted there to be no doubt. He wanted anyone who saw the pictures to see that Beranyi was dead and that he had died the brutal death of torture.
Tarp packed the camera into the carrying cylinder again and then put in eight of the phials from the storage boxes and the hard discs from the computer. He put in all the phials from the box marked MAX and two each from GAUCHO and JB, and one chosen at random from the others. Each went first into one of the metal tubes, then into the cylinder until there was no room for any more of them. He snapped the locks on the carrying case and moved to the core of the habitat, locking the watertight doors behind him.
Three minutes later he placed the carrying case into the claw of Vairon’s left arm, and then, despite his fatigue and the warnings from the displays inside his helmet, he signaled Gance closer. He could just make out the shape of Gance’s face behind the thick plate of his helmet. Like a baby in a plastic bag.
Tarp shuffled across the ocean floor below the habitat toward the legs of a steel structure set behind the flattened sphere. He flashed his hand light over it, then motioned Vairon and its light closer. The brighter light showed something like an oversized wine rack, and, in the openings, eight bulbous canisters with Russian markings.
Chapter 38
He watched the helicopter lower the Vairon to the tanker’s deck, and then he went below, no longer patient with the anguished twistings of Jean-Marie; the Frenchman had stood beside him, his body contorted by the tension of watching the submersible lowered in. Hands in the pockets of his heavy coat, he had jerked his head and his shoulders at every motion of the egg. Vairon had been slightly damaged getting it out of the polynya, and Jean-Marie had flown back almost in tears, staring as it dangled off center from the cable.
“Not on the ice, not on the ice, not on the ice…” he kept repeating. He had told Tarp that he would rather they had left it in the polynya where there was a chance of recovering it, even if it sank. Tarp had ordered it lifted out, however, despite some damage; now it had come to rest again on the tanker’s deck-one arm broken, a boom sheared off, but without damage to the hull. “Eh-eh-eh-eh…” he could hear as he left the rail.
The capsules that contained the plutonium had been flown back in the second chopper and had been stored in one of the tanker’s forward compartments. There they were nestled in improvised racks and the compartment had been flooded.
“Man, you’re nuts to stay up on that deck.” Gance was in the wardroom with coffee, a beer, and a steak. “It is cold up there!” He waved at a chair. “How’s my friend Pierre doing?”
“Being a pain in the neck.”
“Comm says there’s message traffic for you. You want to eat first? The beef is great stuff. The best. You hungry?”
“Later.”
He went to Communications and was handed a clipboard with a single sheet of paper on it. He sighed, then took it to a cubicle and read it.
FOUND PRESENT FOR YOU MEXICO CITY. RUBIN.
Meaning that Repin’s got Pope-Ginna. He wrote a reply:
PLEASE GIFT WRAP AND DELIVER IN PERSON.
LOVE, BLACK.
He took another sheet and wrote out a message to “Mr. Smith”:
BUY.
The single word would be enough. It meant that they had succeeded.
Tarp went along a passage toward his cabin and found himself stumbling over a raised doorsill. He wanted a hot shower and sleep, he knew; he had been promising them to himself since he had climbed back into Vairon’s airlock. But he was disoriented, not merely by fatigue and by the enormous strain of the work under the ice: he was deeply disturbed by what he had seen in the habitat. It was not the fact of the fetuses. He was not sentimental about either life or birth. It was the appalling efficiency of it all, its ruthless cleanliness, which was always an expression of what was supposed to be best and most rational about humans. If cleanliness was next to godliness, then science, with its devotion to pure states and sterile environments, should have been almost holy. What he had seen in the habitat, however, suggested that those things could as easily be the attributes of evil. Hell might be as clean as an operating room.