Hive

21

Zero hour.

Gundry and his people weren’t calling it that, but that’s how Hayes was seeing it. The cryobot had been launched some twelve hours before. It took nearly eight of those for it to melt through the remaining 100 feet of the ice dome over Lake Vordog and then it dropped to the misty, black waters of the lake far below. Gundry and his people had not slept for over twenty-four hours now and Hayes didn’t see that happening anytime soon.

They were all wired.

Hayes had gotten up at like four a.m. because he, too, was excited. Excited and, yes, apprehensive as to what might be found down in that ancient lake. He went about his work, checking in at the drill tower from time to time to see how things were proceeding. Apparently, Gundry and Parks, the project’s geophysicist, had been concerned about the possibility of there being some massive methane ice bubble trapped down below the cap. Most permafrost regions have quantities of methane beneath them, they explained to him.

“You see, Jimmy,” Gundry explained to him. “There was some anxiety about what we’re doing down here. Environmental groups were worried that we would pollute that pristine lake below and among the scientific community, there was some grave concern that we might tap into a dangerous quantity of methane gas… which, if released, could prove disastrous to world climate.”

When Hayes heard that, his mouth maybe dropped open. “You mean… Jesus, Doc, you saying you guys could’ve wiped us out just to explore that goddamn lake?”

“That was something of a concern, so to speak,” Gundry admitted. “But we took every precaution and all our tests and coring confirmed that, while there certainly were quantities of methane, there was also helium, nitrogen, trace amounts of exotic gases such as xenon… but nothing that could affect our atmosphere.”

So, Project Deep Drill went ahead.

And now the cryobot had melted its way through the ice cap and dropped into the lake itself. It had been there some three hours now, sending back a wealth of information on the lake’s temperature, chemistry, and biology. It had already detected vast quantities of organic molecules and even varieties of archaebacteria, eubacteria, and eukaryotes. So the lake was definitely alive just as they thought and not only alive, but organically rich.

This really got everyone excited and particularly Campbell, the team’s microbiologist. He got so excited, in fact, he forgot that Hayes was the guy who ran the generators and boilers and not a brother scientist. In the control booth, as all that wonderful info came up from the cryobot and began appearing on the computer screens, Campbell grabbed Hayes by the arm and started babbling on like a kid talking about presents under the Christmas tree. Except what he was talking about were molecular biology studies, forensic biology, and ancient DNA protein analysis. Hayes acted like he knew all about that stuff, smiling and nodding happily as Campbell filled his head with the specifics of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) using gene-specific and random primers, PCR amplification of evolutionary conservative genes and microbial metabolic activity, and, of course, the wonders of cyanobacteria and paleo-indicators.

An hour after the cryobot had entered the lake, it released the secondary cryobot on a cable which then descended to the bottom, some 900 feet below. Gundry and the others had chosen this location because the lake was over 2000 feet deep in some spots and it was near to that perplexing magnetic anomaly. When Hayes got back to the drill tower again, the secondary cryobot was on the bottom and had been for the past thirty minutes.

“You’ve come just in time,” Gundry told him. “We’re about to release the hydrobot. Keep your fingers crossed.”

Hayes did. He was keeping a lot of things crossed. He was glad they were finding what they had hoped for… more, even… but there was still that worming tension in his belly, that almost superstitious dread at probing around down here at something that had been sealed away from the world for almost forty-million years… like they were picking the scab off a sore and there was a danger of some infection running rampant as a result. Now and again Gundry would look over at him and something would pass between them, some sense that they were on the verge of big things, things that might crush them.

At least, that’s how Hayes was reading it.

When the hydrobot was released successfully, there was just Gundry, Campbell, Hayes, and Parks, the geophysicist, in the booth. People had been coming in all day long to see what was going on, but it was a long process and most left soon after they arrived.

But Hayes, in-between his rounds of the power station and boilers, hung on like a tick and now here it was, the moment they’d all been waiting for. When the hydrobot was released and started to send back data everyone cheered. This was going to work, all those millions of dollars were going to pay off. Today Lake Vordog and tomorrow, Mars and the moons of Jupiter. It really was an incredible moment and Hayes was almost wishing Lind could have been there. He would have appreciated the historical significance of it all… and his part in it, too.

Campbell and Parks sat before monitors, gathering data, and Gundry and Hayes stood behind them. There was a video screen above, but as yet there had been no video feed. The screen flickered a few times, but nothing. Hayes could sense the heavy hearts of the scientists over that.

“I’m reading water temperatures of sixty degrees, with currents up over a hundred. Wait now… okay, okay,” Parks was saying as the numbers came in from the hydrobot. “Yeah, picking up chemical signals… magnesium and iron smoke… manganese, zinc… copper sulfides, sulfur dioxides… carried on the warm currents. Okay, got a hot plume here… almost 200 degrees. We’ve definitely got ourselves a smoker down here, gentlemen. Hydrothermal vents… gotta be… yeah, more than one. Several sites, I’m guessing.”

Campbell was equally as happy for his bio-sensors were picking up all kinds of goodies from both the secondary cryobot on the bottom and the hydrobot. Analysis of water and sediment were showing bacteria, yeasts, archaea, algae, even grains of pollen.

“Diatoms… shit, I’m getting indicators of rich plankton fields here.”

“Outstanding,” Gundry said.

Parks was nodding his head. “Come to papa… oh yeah… chemical enrichment of water almost two million times that of normal seawater or fresh water.”

“Meaning what?” Hayes asked.

“Meaning,” Gundry said, “is that the buffet is surely open. You’ve got smoker vents down here, Jimmy, spewing chemical nutrients into the water that heat-loving bacteria feast upon. The buffet is open.”

Parks started fooling around with the uplink to the hydrobot and the video screen flickered, flickered again, rolled and went black. Then it came on and they were seeing… well, huge clots of sediment drifting up from the muddy bottom in the powerful halogen lamps of the hydrobot. They were now seeing what it was seeing.

“Incredible,” Hayes said without being aware of it.

It was like some alien world and, in effect, that’s exactly what it was. A sunken, ancient plain of murky waters and sediment drifting about like motes of dust. It was thick and grainy on the screen.

Hayes swallowed, struck somehow by the eerie stillness of that place. He was seeing flitting shadows at the edges of the light and it could have been the motion of that suspended sediment or something else entirely.

The hydrobot descended again, closer to the lake bottom and Campbell started getting really excited. “Look there, do you see it?” he said, squinting through the ooze and sediment as if it were his eyes seeing this and not the hydrobot’s forward camera. “Right there… those marks in the mud, those snaking ruts… those are the marks of deep crawlers — maybe shrimp or brittle stars, sea spiders. Hard to tell this deep, could have happened yesterday or two hundred years ago. Really hard to say.”

The hydrobot roamed ever forward, the screen almost black at times as it pushed on through clouds of silt.

“Any chance it’ll get stuck in all that?” Hayes said.

“No, it has a seriously advanced AI package on board, same sort of stuff we use on space probes and the Martian rover, except better. It’s doing most of its own thinking right now. It has sonar to avoid large objects and infrared to hone in on living things, an on-board lab to analyze just about anything.”

“Why does it keep pausing?”

“It’s using its robotic arms to take samples. It sucks them up, analyzes them and feeds the results to Dr. Campbell here.”

Gundry told him the hydrobot worked much like an ROV with a prop at the rear to pull it or push it or turn it around and in any direction. It could rise or hover, do whatever its software package demanded of it.

“Magnometer’s picking up some strong fluxes,” Parks said. “Jumping a thousand, now two-thousand nanoteslas. Five-thousand. Jesus. Strong and steady.”

Gundry explained that a nanotesla was the standard measure of magnetism. That the norm here at the Pole was in the vicinity of 60,000 and now they were getting nearly seventy. The hydrobot was reading it and gradually honing in on its source. If it lost it, it would go back to tracking the hydrothermal vents.

The hydrobot climbed and the silt thinned considerably. It went from a blizzard of flakes the size of quarters to a flurry with flakes the size of beads. The light penetrated better now. Suddenly, there was a storm of bubbles coming at the camera and then the hydrobot was buried in them… pulsing membranous bubbles that were purple and blue, sometimes orange and red, indigo and neon green.

“Jellies,” Campbell said. “Will you look at that! Like comb jellies… ovoid with frilled plates to propel themselves. But I’ve never seen any like this… we seem to be in a massive colony.”

“Can they hurt the hydrobot?” Hayes asked.

“No… see, the hydrobot has slowed down now. It’s concerned about hurting them so its passing through their ranks very slowy.”

It was a world of jellyfish, thousands of them like champagne bubbles. But pulsing and rippling, veined with brilliant bursts of ever changing color like fibre optic lamps. You could see right through them. It was hard to say how big they were, but maybe the size of softballs with lots of little ones, some no bigger than marbles. They seemed unconcerned about the hydrobot. After about ten minutes the colony passed away and the hydrobot dove down into the sediment again, detecting something interesting.

Hayes saw what looked like a gigantic albino crab picking its way through the mud. Its body was jagged and thorny, about the size of a wash tub — Campbell said — with spidery limbs reaching out three or four feet beyond. It had something like black eyes on two-foot stalks and Hayes pointed it out.

“No, not eyes,” Campbell said. “Receptors of some sort. It would be totally blind like everything else down here. A new species, though, without a doubt.”

The hydrobot passed over it, deciding wisely not to tangle with it, and darted down into a chasm filled with sea grasses and then up again, scanning the bottom and finding the shells of dead mussels and crustaceans, hundreds of them tangled in a bony carpet. Then a gully spread out, dropping maybe five feet below the level of the lake bottom. It was filled not with grasses, but white bloated things that had to be ten or fifteen feet in length, coiling and writhing. To Hayes they looked like thousands of blunt and fleshy hoses with pink suckers at the end that expanded and deflated.

“Tube worms and like none I’ve ever seen before,” Campbell said.

The hydrobot was interested. It inverted itself above them and slowly passed over them, panning them and giving what information it could on them such as their temperature and what the chemical composition of the water around them was. Hayes had seen tube worms on the Discovery Channel, but not like these… not moving and undulating, reacting to maybe both the hydrobot and its light. These didn’t look like harmless filter-feeding animals, but things that were hungry and predacious.

“This is simply amazing,” Gundry said.

Hayes was speechless. What he was seeing… no man had seen before and the impact of it all had quieted that feeling in his belly that there was something terribly wrong about this ancient lake.

“Shit!” Parks cried out. “Did you see that?”

They had. Something gigantic and fluttering that looked roughly like a pond hydra, but grown to nightmare proportions. It had to be twenty or thirty feet in length, looking much like an upended tree with a massive root system… a forest of clown-white writhing tentacles. It darted away from the light quickly enough and they only got the briefest glimpse of it. But what they had seen made them pretty sure they wouldn’t be taking any dips in Lake Vordog in the near future.

“Incredible… a mollusk maybe. Certainly squid-like,” Campbell said with a dry voice as if the thing hadn’t scared the hell out of him.

But it had. Without really thinking, all the men in the booth had pulled away from the screen involuntarily. Something like that… white and ghostly and alien… roaming in the darkness, well, it did something to you. Made you think bad thoughts, the kind that could keep you awake at night.

The hydrobot did not go after it, which was a good thing. But Gundry explained that it was programmed to study slow-moving creatures when it could, but not to burn unnecessary energy in any hot pursuits. And that hydra… or whatever in the Christ it was… had been damned fast. Damned fast and damned spooky.

Another bottom-dweller came onto the screen and Hayes had never seen anything like it, either. It looked sort of like a horseshoe crab, but narrowed and lengthened so that it was maybe ten feet long. It was covered in a chitinous exoskeketon that was fish-belly white like most things down there. There were two pairs of spiny walking legs to either side like those of a lobster and a set of hooked chelicerae, pincers, poised out front like they were looking for something to crush. Its plated tail ended in something like a stinger. Overall, it looked like some kind of massive scorpion, but eyeless with no less than four waving antennae.

“My God,” Campbell said. “I don’t believe it. Do you know what that is? A Eurypterid… a sea scorpion. Obviously an evolved form, but a Eurypterid all the same.”

“A new species?” Hayes said.

Campbell laughed. “The Eurypterids are an extinct subclass of arthropods, Jimmy. They died out roughly 200 million years ago… or so we thought. Goddamn!”

The hydrobot passed beyond the reach of the sea scorpion. Everyone in the booth kept watching the screen, seeing more exotic aquatic plants, colonies of tube worms, bizarre giant clams, some inching worms, and what might have been a squid that ducked away quickly. Then the terrain began to grow more rugged, slashed by chasms that dropped hundreds of feet and capped with rolling submarine hills that were set with something like pale yellow kelp. The magnometer on the hydrobot was picking up higher levels of magnetism and honing in on them.

For a time it was pretty much business as usual save for a school of transparent fish… or what looked like fish… and then, Campbell saw something.

“Did you… what the hell was that?”

Hayes had seen something like it before.

A murky oblong shape that darted away from the light. Maybe it was nothing and maybe it was everything. Whatever they were seeing, catching glimpses of, there were more than one of them and they were quick, stealthy. That feeling was back on Hayes again and he couldn’t shake it this time. Because he was thinking things that he didn’t dare say… not out loud. For whatever was out there, he had the feeling it or they were following the hydrobot, but hiding away from the light. The hydrobot was picking up lots of blips, but that in itself meant nothing except that the sea was very alive… which it certainly was.

“I’d like to know what those are,” Parks said. “They remind me of…”

“What?” Gundry asked him.

He shook his head. “Nothing, nothing. Thinking out loud.”

But Hayes knew what he was thinking and he wondered if they all weren’t thinking the same damn thing, seeing those flitting shapes and remembering them from somewhere else and not liking them one bit.

And then -

And then Gundry gasped. “Did you see that? Looked like… well, almost like an arch.”

Parks fumbled over his words, relaxed and tried again. “Some weird volcanic structure. Can’t be an arch down here, not down here.”

But it was gone too quickly before any real guesses could be made. All they could say for sure was that it had looked like an arch jutting from the roiling sediment below. And a big one at that… the hydrobot had passed through it.

Parks, almost nervously, started rambling on about volcanism and how it could shape ordinary rock into the most peculiar shapes. And particularly underwater where the lava flow would cool quite quickly, twisting into the oddest forms that very often appeared man-made… or, in this case, manufactured by an intelligence. For there was no possible way anything down here had ever been touched by man.

The hydrobot continued on, tracking that magnetic anomaly and Parks kept calling out numbers and other than that, there was only the occasional beeping of the computers as they logged what was going on below. The men, other than the geophysicist, were quiet, expectant maybe. Hayes could only speak for himself. His mouth was dry as fireplace soot and he was grinding his teeth and bunching his fists.

The silence was so thick suddenly you could’ve hung your hat from it.

The hydrobot ventured forward, scanning over clusters of things like anemones and spiny urchins and finally great outcroppings of coral. Here was an ecosystem of clinging sponges, pale worms, and bivalves. Primitive bryozoans encrusted like bee honeycombs. Campbell pointed out that, though marine zoology was not his forte, these were either new species or ones long thought extinct.

But he was talking just to be heard, maybe to be comforted by his own voice, as the hydrobot’s magnometer was reading pulses right off the scale. To which Gundry joked offhand that it must be picking up the emissions of some massive electromagnetic generator with the mother of all magnetic cores. But nobody laughed and maybe because they didn’t like the idea of what that alluded to. Because at that particular moment nobody would have been surprised at anything. Had they seen a flying saucer jutting from the lake bed and weeds, they would not have been surprised. For whatever was putting out that kind of raw energy almost certainly had to be artificial.

And then they saw it… or the hydrobot did.

Another arch. And so perfect in form its design could not have been a simple natural abnormality for just beyond it other shapes… rectangular slabs standing upright and others lying flat like ancient tombstones and what might have been a shattered dome rising from the congested weeds. What they saw of it had to have been several hundred feet across, though in fact it was probably quite a bit larger. Jagged cracks were feathered over its surface.

Nobody said anything, not a damn thing because there was more of it all the time, whatever it was they were looking at. Now they were seeing what appeared to be monuments jutting at wild angles like gravestones in some incredibly ancient cemetery. Things like obelisks and monoliths leaning over, wanting to fall… they were coated in a pink slime and set with the holes of borer worms and appeared to be of a vast antiquity. But there was more, always more. Crumbling walls encrusted with colonies of sponges and the carbonate skeletons of long-dead marine organisms.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Gundry said, sounding like he was hyperventilating. “Would you look at that… would you just look…”

Parks kept shaking his head. “A city… something, but down here?”

“Why not?” Hayes said. “Why the hell not?”

Parks couldn’t seem to stop shaking his head. “Because… because this goddamn lake has been cut off from the world, tucked under a glacier for forty-million years, Hayes, that’s why.”

“What about the ruins Gates found? Hundreds of million years old, pre-human in origin… I guess this pretty much supports what he told us.”

But you could see the look of disbelief on Parks’ face. Maybe he hadn’t really believed what Gates had said, maybe in his mind — regardless of the facts staring him dead in the face — he had refused to accept the concept of a civilization predating humanity by half a billion years. Human arrogance had a hard time with that one. It reduced the species’ significance considerably. Just another drop in the bucket, hardly the chosen ones.

“A city,” Campbell kept saying. “A city.”

But “city” wasn’t what Hayes was thinking, not at all. What he was seeing was sprawling and wild without any indication of an overall plan, more like a graveyard than a city, something that expanded as necessity required. All those monoliths and shafts, oblong slabs and worm-holed pillars, low stone buildings carpeted in ooze and weeds and marine creepers… yes, there was something inexplicably morbid about them like centuried graves and collapsing mausoleums and ivy-choked crypts. A necropolis, a marble-hewn city covered in rot and growth and sediment, falling into itself. The structures were crowded together and overlapping one another like what you might see in a medieval slum… crowded, claustrophobic, tangled with what might have been deep-cut lanes snaking amongst them. Hayes was looking upon it all, barely able to breathe, at the complexity and profusion. Everything jutting and leaning and rising and falling, like some litter pile of worm-holed bones heaped atop each other for uncounted millennia… pyramids and domes, shafts and cones and arches. Yes, like broken skulls and rib staves green with moss, pillared femurs and stove-pipe ulnas and ladders of eroding vertebrae. All dusted by a perpetual rain of silt that was blown and drifting like dandelion fuzz.

The hydrobot was rising as the city or graveyard itself began to rise up a sloping hill and then they saw it, the city. The real city. Not this rotting collection of debris and artifacts, but the city itself rising higher and higher up a submarine mountain… or maybe the city was the mountain. The silt began to thin and they saw the colossal, dead immensity of it as the hydrobot rose up, showing them something that had been hid from the light for forty million years.

Hayes just stood there, something fused inside of him.

A cyclopean, eon-dead city of towers and spires rising up to an incredible height and looking much like some fantastic crystalline growth ballooning up from its base… if it really had a base, for much of it seemed to be sunken in a forest of weeds and kelp. The structures were honeycombed with doorways that were like mossy cave mouths from which spilled a limitless blackness. It was a vast, shadow-enshrouded metropolis of perverse geometric architecture. The ruins of some primordial alien city deposited here on this muddy, weedy lake bottom… and still the hydrobot rose, its lights splashing over great galleries and domes and spirals of cubes that gravity should have pulled down, but didn’t.

It looked to Hayes like some gigantic calliope set with the naked, tubular pipes of a cathedral organ rising above to unknown heights… deserted and derelict and tomb-like, shot through with vaults and hollows. He saw panes of crystal and arches and spires and spheres crowded together and built, it seemed, right through one another as if the entire thing had been dropped and had shattered like this, collecting in some irregular pattern of razor-backed shards. And all of it encrusted with an amazing variety of sponges and barnacles and flowering anemones, pale slimy mosses and gardens of thick weeds that seemed to grow right out of the lurching walls, swaying gracefully in some unseen current.

“The… the magnetic anomaly,” Parks said. “It must be centered in there somewhere, somewhere.”

“Yeah,” Hayes heard himself say. “Like some engine, some generator that’s still running after all this time.”

The hydrobot was still rising, panning the city and trying to pull back as far as it could to give a broader view of what it was seeing, put it in some kind of perspective, but its lights simply wouldn’t penetrate far enough and all it could show them was more of that weird architecture, that morbid gigantism. Shadows darted and jumped and danced amongst the structures and the effect of it was disconcerting to say the least, making the city appear to be in motion, to be creeping and reaching out at them, those doorways shifting… vomiting storms of silt, weeds swaying and undulating.

Hayes was thinking the entire thing looked like some enormous and hideous alien skull, articulated and grinning, punctured with holes and narrow crevices.

But the total effect made him realize how far he was from home and how very alone they were. In a place so distant and remote, a place of echoes and ghosts and lost voices. A place where the sun never rose and the chill never lifted.

No, even for Parks, there was nothing but acceptance now. Bare, stark acceptance of things they now knew and all those things they did not. For no human brain could have conceived of such a city. The very insane geometry of the place made you want to vent your mind in a single rending and wet scream.

The hydrobot had been steadily rising for nearly an hour now and it told them that it had come up over five-hundred feet, but finally they were reaching the pinnacle of the city. From above it looked like a maze-like, congested forest of dead trees… all spires and shafts and what looked like the intersecting steeples of a thousand churches. All of which seemed to be connected by a spider-webbing of filaments like ropes. Hayes caught sight of something like gargoyles perched near the tops on flat, see-sawing widow’s walks. But they were not gargoyles as such, but slime-covered things like immense horned grasshoppers with too many limbs. Something about them made his guts suck into themselves.

But maybe he hadn’t seen them at all.

Maybe it was a trick of the light or darkness, for everything was obscured and encrusted with polyp colonies, gorgonians, whip corals, and the corrugated helixes of bryozoans.

The hydrobot hung over the top of the city, within spitting distance of a tangle of skeletal spires. It just hovered, apparently interested in something. Hayes and the others didn’t see what it was, not right away. But for Hayes, he could feel it. Feel that something was coming, something terrible and overwhelming, something that crushed him and sucked the juice from his soul. Oh, yes, it was coming, it was coming now. Hayes felt weak and dizzy like some low-grade flu was chewing at his guts. And in his head, there was a low, constant humming like high-power lines at midsummer or a transformer cycling at a low ebb.

“What the hell is that?”

Somebody said that and nobody seemed to know who it was. They were all staring at the screen, at what the hydrobot had been tracking long before it became visual. Except it wasn’t an it, but a they. Everyone in the booth saw them… those streamlined, cylindrical forms that looked impossible and ungainly laying on, say, a dissection table, but down here were fluid and free and fast-moving. They rose up above the city, like a swarm of vampire bats come to drain the world dry. Gliding up and forward, filling the ether above the city, their bodies pulsed as they rocketed forward, expelling water like squids and octopi, moving easily with those great outstretched fin-like wings.

Hayes felt like he was going to pass out or throw-up or maybe both. Alive, dear Christ, they were alive. The Old Ones. And what was even worse is that what he was seeing, that swarm rising like locusts, was exactly the image he had gotten from Lind’s mind.

Exactly.

The creatures came on, incredibly obscene as they bloated up and narrowed with their bastard propulsion. There was no doubt what was attracting them.

When they were maybe twenty feet away, the screen flickered, rolled, and went black. Everyone stood in shocked silence for a moment or two, not sure what to say or what to do.

Parks started hammering on his keyboard. “Dead,” he said. “Dead. Primary and secondary cryobots have lost contact with the hydrobot. It’s off-line, I guess.”

Well, thank God for small favors, Hayes thought, feeling numb and ungainly. He was glad. If he had had to see those things any closer, he would have lost his mind. If those globular red eyes had filled the screen they would have wiped his brain clean and he didn’t think that was an exaggeration.

“They’re still down there, still active,” he said, almost mumbling. “All these millions of years they’ve been waiting down there… waiting for us.”

Parks stood up, something like rage burning in his eyes. He went right after Hayes and Gundry had to stop him from going right over the top of him and maybe stomping him down in the process. “You can’t know that!” he said, drool hanging from his lower lip in a ribbon. “There’s no way you could possibly know that! You’re imagining things and making up things and acting like a scared little boy!”

Hayes laughed and walked straight past him, wanting badly to curl up in a dark corner somewhere. “You got that right, Doc, because I am scared. And I think you are, too. We all are and we have a real fucking good reason to be.”

22

Sure, Elaine Sharkey was iron. All hard edges and cutting corners sharp enough to slit your throat, you got too close, but when she was with Hayes? Maybe melted butter, something soft and warm and liquid and they both knew it and it was getting to the point that they didn’t bother pretending otherwise. Maybe to the other men her eyes were blazing and cold, blue diamonds in a deep-freeze and her scowling mouth was hard and bitter. But to Hayes it was anything but that. It was a mouth to desire and want and feel. Yes, there was a connection between them and it was electric and real and that was the secret they coveted. Which was no secret at all.

When he was done telling her his story, he said simply, “I saw them, Doc… Elaine, I saw them. They’re down there and they have been for millions of years, breeding and living and waiting in that warm darkness. Waiting for us… I know they’ve been waiting for us. It doesn’t make sense or maybe it does, but I know it’s true. Jesus, I know it’s true.”

“I wish I really thought you made all this up,” was all she could say.

“Me, too. But we all saw that city, those things down there. Christ.” He paused, trying to catch his breath just like he’d been trying to catch it ever since he’d seen them. Trying to catch his breath and trying to plane his world flat before it went too far askew and pitched him on his ass. “It’s all on tape, though. Wait until LaHune gets his hands on this… we’ll have a blackout like never before. I bet he won’t even let anyone see it.”

Sharkey fed him whiskey and soft words, gave him a shoulder to lean on. It was enough. It had to be enough. They were in her room, sitting on the bed and maybe it was the best possible place to be and maybe it was the worse. For what came next was the result of chemistry. Later, they could not say who started it. Just that it happened. That they fell into each other and lost themselves in the warmth and necessity of the act. The foreplay had been the telling of Hayes’ story, no sweet nothings, but a great and voluminous blackness that had to be covered, had to be shut away somewhere and so it was. Like dread or mourning, the impact of what they knew to be true and what they guessed to be true threw them into each other’s arms and the connection was made whole, potential energy gone kinetic, and the power was real. Foreplay abandoned, there was the act, there was motion and breathing and moaning and hot skin, limbs entwined and heat shared and maybe hearts touched and filled. All that Hayes could remember later was that he had never felt so strong or so weak. When he was inside Elaine Sharkey and she was wrapped around him, her eyes glowing like azure flames, he had never felt so completely alive and so utterly pure.

There was an excitement, he knew, in bedding another man’s wife. The illicit thrill, the taboo. But it was far beyond that. The hunger had been growing for weeks and it was only a matter of time before the beast showed its teeth and filled its belly. And then, afterwards, the afterglow, a secret and a memory they shared and held deep inside themselves in a special place other hands could not touch or hope to sully. It was theirs and theirs alone and this was enough. This was all and everything and it was not spoken of. They could no more frame it with words than they could hold one another’s souls in the palms of their hands. And that was the beauty of it, the thrill and joy and the magic.

And later, wrapped in each other’s arms and touching and never wanting to let go, there were soft voices in the darkness.

“What… what are we going to do, Elaine?”

“I don’t know, Jimmy, I just don’t know.”

And he didn’t either, so he laid there, feeling her, and loving the tactile sensation of her flesh, smelling that perfume coming off her which didn’t come out of any bottle, but was just her inner beauty announcing itself as sweet honey, jasmine, and musk.

There were no answers, there was only the two of them in the darkness, feeling and being felt. Listening to the wind scraping across the compound and the blood rushing at their temples. What they had at that moment was the memory of their seduction and it was secret.

23

So LaHune had been feeding them a straight ration of shit for too long now, expecting them to chew and swallow, maybe ask for seconds, fill their bellies and smile and shove back empty plates, my compliments to the fucking cook. But day by day that was getting harder and you could see it behind their eyes and just under their smiles, like there was something pissed-off and randy waiting to show itself and when it did, my dearly beloved, cover your heads and hold onto your privates, this is going to be ugly and fierce and loud.

Sure, LaHune, Christian saint that he was, had given them back their Internet and SAT TV and maybe everyone should have been happier than a penis on a Playboy shoot… but it wasn’t that simple. The TV, the radio, the Internet… when you were locked down and nailed shut for five months in the coffin of Antarctica, got so you needed these things. Like clean air to breath. And when someone shoved a pillow over your face and cut off your wind, you didn’t exactly thank ’em when they pulled it off, let you breathe. What you did was kick them in the nuts so hard their little gonads rang off the inside of their skulls like ball bearings in a pinball game. Didn’t matter how many sweet nothings about the Official Secrets Act they hummed in your ear, you kicked ’em hard and sure so maybe next time they’d keep that in mind.

At least, that’s how the Glory Boys — Rutkowski, St. Ours, and a few others — were seeing this little scenario.

“We can sit here and hold each other’s dicks while we piss,” St. Ours told them. “Or we can zip our flies shut and do something. We can show that fucking monkey-skull LaHune which side his bread is buttered on.”

Maybe it was the loss of Meiner and too much whiskey and maybe it was just plain poor sense combined with isolation and confinement and that frustration they’d been gathering up like wool, but it made sense. St. Ours talked and the others listened with an almost religious rapture and plans were laid and not a one of them questioned any of it. Like a swift-rushing river they let it flow and carry them along, never once thinking of damming it.

At the far north end of Targa House, at the end of the corridor that split off the community room, you could find the radio room and supply lockers. You kept going, just around the bend, you’d find an Emergency Supplies Room that held extra radio parts, survival gear, freeze-dried food, ECWs, just about anything you’d need if the going got tough. You’d also find a weapon’s locker there.

And if you wanted to get into it, then it was only a matter of kicking through LaHune’s door across the hallway. Maybe going in there with three, four tough boys with liquor in their bellies and taking the keys.

LaHune never really saw them come in.

He was sleeping and about the time his eyes started to flicker open and register a vague shape standing over him, a fist had already collided with his temple. There was about enough time to cry out and then another fist caught him just above the eye and the lights went out. LaHune fell into blackness and his last sensory input was of pain and the stink of cheap whiskey, body odor, and machine oil… a very working man kind of smell.

“Tie that fucking puke up,” St. Ours said, toying with a flap of skin at his knuckle that he’d torn on LaHune’s head.

Rutkowski and the others — a couple maintenance jocks named Biggs and Stotts—just stood there like toys waiting to be wound, maybe considering for the first time that they were involving themselves in some real deep shit here. The sort of shit you could and would drown in when the whiskey left your brain.

“With what?” Rutkowski said.

“Cut up some of those bed sheets,” St. Ours said. “Tie and gag him, then we’ll get some guns and kerosene and have ourselves a wienie roast with Gates’ pets out in the hut.”

And maybe the others weren’t crazy about the idea of hurting LaHune or being an accomplice to an assault, but they liked the idea of torching the mummies. Yeah, they liked that just fine. Using pocket knives, Stotts and Biggs trussed LaHune up and that poor boy was out cold as a salmon steak in a freezer. When they were done, they were sweaty and maybe even a little confused.

“C’mon,” St. Ours told them.

In LaHune’s desk, they found keys for every lock at the station, but all they wanted were the keys to the Emergency Supplies Room and the gun locker in there. When they had them, they went across the corridor and let themselves in. The room was about the size of a two-car garage. Crates and boxes, medical supplies and laboratory equipment marked fragile, drums of fuel, just about everything else. Because down there at the South Pole during winter, if you didn’t have it and you needed it, you had to make it.

In the gun locker they found flare guns, .22 caliber survival rifles. They were hoping for some bigger hardware, but they figured the rifles would be enough. They found the shells easily enough and loaded the guns. Then they stood in a tight little circle, holding up those guns and liking the feel of them… their weight and solidity, the way weapons always made a man feel somehow more like a man. A hunter. A warrior. They stood there looking at each other, seeing the lights in each other’s eyes, but not knowing what it was, only that it was strong and necessary and good.

It was all up to St. Ours now.

They would do what he said.

“All right,” he told them. “We’re going to get ourselves some kerosene in the Equipment Garage… maybe gas or even diesel fuel, then we’re going over to Hut Six and you know what we’re going to do then. Anyone gets in our way…”

They seemed eager a moment before, but now something in them was weakening and wavering and St. Ours didn’t care for it. “What? What the hell is it?” he put to them.

Rutkowski opened his mouth to say something, but the words didn’t want to come. He’d been feeling something the past few minutes, but he wasn’t really sure what it was. Only that it was in his head.

Biggs was rubbing his temples. “Damnedest thing… got me a headache, I’m thinking.”

“A headache? So take a fucking aspirin already. Jesus.” But St. Ours was looking at the other two and seeing it on them as well. Something was afoot. “Well? Are we going to do this or sit around pissing about our heads?”

Stotts, tall and angular and lantern-jawed like some stock New Englander, kept licking his lips. “It’s in the back of my head… I can feel it back there.”

“Oh, for chrissake.”

Rutkowski shook his head, too. There was something there and it wasn’t to be denied. The more he tried to ignore it, the more it raged, the more pain it brought with it. Maybe this wasn’t a migraine coming on him, but it lived next door.

“Fuck is with you people?” St. Ours wanted to know.

But they couldn’t really say because they were having trouble stringing words together and the pain was uniform and disorienting. Like something had woken up in their heads. Woken and stretched and started clawing up things. Rifles were lowered and then dropped and eyes went from being confused to being dark and shifting like simmering oil. Those eyes stared and rarely blinked and there was something very strange about it all.

St. Ours had been thinking maybe these boys had been affected by a leaky gas furnace or something because headaches were sure as hell not catchy. But what he was seeing in their eyes and beginning to feel along the nape of his neck was not gas, it was… it was a sense of visitation. Something was in that room with them, something unseen and nameless and malefic was filling the empty spaces between them, making everything and everyone just go bad to their cores.

Rutkowski kept trying to talk, but his mouth wouldn’t seem to open and his head was filled with a thick, black down and he couldn’t seem to think around it. His belly was filled with spiders and he could feel them in there, crawling up his spine and along his nerve ganglia making him want to fold-up or scream and -

“Fuck’s with you people?” St. Ours was saying, flat-out scared now. What was in their heads wasn’t in his, but he had enough other bad stuff going on to make up for it.

About then, they all became aware of the most peculiar vibration that seemed to be traveling through the floor beneath their feet and up into their bones, making their teeth ache. It was subtle at first, but growing, rising up now like some generator amping into life, that rhythmic thrumming passing through all of them and making them tremble and shake. And, Jesus, it was getting louder all the time like having your ear up against the metal casing of a hydraulic pump.

St. Ours tried to say something, but that thrumming drowned out his voice and the others were completely in thrall to it now, lost in a fog, their bodies moving now in cadence with that awful vibration. Noises began echoing around them… pinging sounds, whispering sounds, metallic sounds echoing down long pipes and brief squeals that almost sounded like human screams inverted or played in reverse.

And then there was a crackling like static electricity, a discharge of energy that made the hairs stand up on their arms and St. Ours wanted to cry out, but he couldn’t. He still had the .22 in his hands and he wanted to open up on something, drill something, anything to make it stop before his head flew apart. Maybe the others didn’t see what he saw then… and it was hard to say because they looked empty and dumb like window dummies… but it made him want to run.

Except, he didn’t think he could.

The far outside wall of the room was getting fuzzy. It was made of bare concrete blocks, except now it looked like it was made of smoke. Something almost diaphanous and insubstantial. It was fluttering and glowing now as if it were backlit by some enormous burst of energy and you could see the mortaring between the blocks standing out lividly.

Yes, St. Ours wanted to run away, but all he did was stumble forward, a weird sucking feeling in the pit of his stomach. But he still had the .22 and he was going to use it… use it when whatever was out there melting through the wall made its appearance.

Because it would.

And then it did.

It came through the wall as easily as smoke through a window grating, insubstantial and ghostly, yet gradually gaining solidity. And at that point, a ghost carrying its head tucked under its arm would have been welcome. Because this… well, this was something else.

St. Ours knew it was one of those things from Hut #6 and the sight of it filled him with a terror that was dream-like and blank.

It was obscene to see it in motion, to see it gliding forth on those thick and muscular snakelike tentacles at its base. It should have been sluggish, but it moved with a marked fluidity, grace, and ease. Its body was like some oblong barrel, the flesh gray and oily and ribbed, some sort of wriggling parasitic podia hanging from the lower quadrant. When it got within five feet of St. Ours, it opened up its wings, almost seeming to inflate them, fanning them out like the collar of a frilled lizard. It sounded like wet umbrellas being snapped open.

St. Ours could see a black vein networking in those wings. They looked membranous and rubbery. He tried to scream and could not. He was horrified and sickened, knowing it was not truly there physically, could not possibly be, yet smelling its stink which was like a poisoned carcass slowly decaying on a hot beach.

It stood before him, towering over him, wings fanned out like the sails of a hang-glider, stinking and evil and offensive. Those appendages at its middle were reaching out for him, quivering, looking much like branching dendrites and synapses of a brain cell. But the worst part was that starfish-shaped head with those glaring eyes like red glass. These, more than anything, are what made St. Ours start shooting, seeing those slugs pass harmlessly through the creature and punch into the concrete wall behind it.

The thing allowed him this one act of defiance and then those eyes stood out at the end of their stalks, looked at him and in him, showing him the pain of refusal, of raging against its kind. He heard a high, shrill, almost musical piping in his head like some distorted and trilling antique harmonium. And suddenly he was nothing and no one. His mind was bleached white and he was just a doll forged from warm plastic with a beating heart and staring eyes. He fell down before the thing, whimpering and giggling, and there was an intense wave of agony in his skull as his brain went to bubbling hot wax and his eyes exploded from their sockets and splashed down his face like wet vomit.

And then the thing began to fade, pulling away from the broken and sightless creature before it.

And back near the door, the spell broken, Rutkowski and the remaining Glory Boys began to scream.

24

Like the wreckage left by some horrendous traffic accident, just about everyone at the station came by to look upon the remains of Tommy St. Ours. They bustled in the corridor, poking their noses through the doorway and asking questions and whispering and then leaving as quick as they could get away. St. Ours was like some horror kept in a jar at a roadside carnival and people had to see what was left just to say that they had, that such a thing could be. Because most of them had never gotten a good look at Meiner sitting in that chair out in Hut #6 with his eyes sprayed over his face like slime, but they weren’t going to miss this.

Few actually saw St. Ours, though.

After five, then six and seven people circled in like turkey buzzards, Dr. Sharkey threw a white sheet over him like a corpse in an old movie. What more could really be done? Later, they would wrap him up in a tarp and ship him out to join Meiner in the cold house where was also kept the station’s meat and perishables, but for now at least they didn’t need to look upon him. So, yes, only a handful saw his grim cadaver, but to listen to them later, you wouldn’t have thought so. For they all had stories to tell that seemed to get more gruesome with the re-telling.

And then, after a time, there was only Sharkey and Hayes and La-Hune.

“What’re you going to log as the cause of death?” LaHune said, gently touching a great red knob over his left eye where St. Ours had hit him.

She looked over at him like maybe he was kidding, making some sick joke, but she saw he was dead serious. “Well, I’ll have to do a post, won’t I? But, chances are, I’ll be writing it up as another cerebral hemorrhage.”

“Yes,” LaHune said. “Yes.”

Hayes felt sorry for the guy… a little bit anyway, because nobody should’ve had to put up with being slugged and then tied up, but the guy just didn’t seem to be in touch with mother reality here. He knew what killed St. Ours, just as they all knew it, but he wouldn’t admit it.

Christ. An hour ago, Hayes had been sleeping alongside Sharkey and then Cutchen was at her door saying there had been another death and now he was here, looking at this and listening to LaHune.

Which was worse?

Of course, this death had a lot of drama tied to it. Rutkowski and the boys had gone screaming into the community room and the dorms beyond, banging their fists against doors, wanting help or salvation. Maybe both. That was how Cutchen and some of the others had untied LaHune and got a look at St. Ours. Now Rutkowski and his Glory Boys were sedated, because none of them were sure what had happened. They were raving about ghosts and monsters, saying that one of the Old Ones was traipsing about camp.

“I don’t think, at this point, that we need to be so concerned with how St. Ours died, but with what killed him,” Sharkey said. “Can we agree on that?”

“Well, yes, we need to know that. If you have any ideas, I’m listening.”

Sharkey just stared at him like he was an idiot.

Hayes said, “Doc’s right, chief. Don’t matter what happened, so much as who did it.”

“If you have any ideas…”

“Oh for chrissake, LaHune, what the fuck’s wrong with you?” he wanted to know. “You know same as me what happened. Those things out there… Gates’ fucking fossils… they aren’t exactly dead as you and I understand dead. Their minds are still active and if we don’t do something about shutting those minds down again, then who knows how many of us’ll be left come spring.”

LaHune swallowed. “I’m not about to accept any of that nonsense. There’s simply no real proof. I expect that from Rutkowski… he’s hysterical, but not you, Hayes.”

“Oh, really? You think because they’ve been frozen a million years or whatever that they can’t wake up again?”

“No, I don’t.”

“All right, then. We’ll say it’s not the frozen ones, okay? Maybe it was them down in that lake, LaHune, because I can tell you that those bastards are not anywhere near dead. So let’s not fuck around here, all right? I know you saw the videotape by now. You know what’s down there.”

LaHune looked uncomfortable. “Yes, I’ve seen the tape. But I tend to think what’s down in that lake and what’s up here are two different situations.”

Before Sharkey could hope to stop him, Hayes grabbed LaHune and slammed him up against the wall and with enough force to knock a few things off their shelves. “Listen to me, you pretentious fucking fool,” Hayes said. “Those things are physically dead, but psychically very much alive. They killed St. Ours because he was going to burn those bodies up and those things don’t want that yet. He was dangerous to them, so they squashed him. Those minds out there… I don’t think they’ve cycled up all the way yet, but when they do, when they fucking do, we’re all toast and you know it. If anybody’s left in this camp by spring, I can guarantee you of one thing, they might look like men, but what’s going to be in their heads will be anything but.”

25

“He said he would be online at six. That’s what his email said,” Sharkey was saying. “Let’s give it a little longer.”

They were sitting in the infirmary, Sharkey and Cutchen and Hayes, staring at her laptop like it was some oracle that would divine their future when it decided the time was right. Nobody was speaking and it was pretty much like that all over camp: just go about your duties and lose yourselves in your work and when you had to talk to others, keep it light and filled with fluff. Talk about how long the winter was and how this was your last one, what you were going to do when you got back to the world. Regardless, don’t talk about what was happening and what was still to come.

So they sat and waited, waited for Gates to come online. He was still up at the tent camp, at the excavation, and he had emailed Sharkey that he wanted to talk to her, but not on the radio. Hayes thought that was funny, odd… but then again, he was seeing everything a little off-kilter these days. For him, there were spooks and conspiracies behind every tree.

Good healthy paranoia, he liked to tell himself, sometimes it’s all that can save your bacon.

When he thought about it, tried to get a handle on things and balance them out in his mind, he could not be sure anymore just when the knowledge that things were fucked up at Kharkhov Station had come to him. True, he had had a bad feeling in his gut from the first moment he had arrived at the camp. And there had been no real reason for it, none whatsoever. But it had lingered on like a summer cold, annoying him and, at times, making him think that he was losing his mind. It wasn’t until word had come about Gates finding those mummies and those ruins, that whatever was in his belly really started chewing at him and when he’d seen those awful things in Hut #6 that day —the day Lind had gone mad — he somehow knew they were all in dreadful danger. And that was the funny part of it all, the things he knew. Sometimes when he started talking, he said things that he did not know to be true, but was certain of nonetheless. For example, he did not know that there was a direct link between the mummies and the living ones down in Lake Vordog, yet he was sure there was. Just as he was sure that the Old Ones wanted their minds and that men knew them from the dim past, that the hatred and terror they inspired was carried inside him and the others as some sort of race memory.

Christ, a therapist would have had a field day with him and he knew it, yet the certainty of these things remained.

Hayes was having the dreams like everyone else, but it was more than that for him. He had had that thing out in the hut invade his mind and nearly destroy him, but unlike Meiner and St. Ours, he had survived the invasion. Maybe this gave him an edge and maybe some of that telepathy was still cooking in his head. Regardless, he knew there were connections here between all these things and they were the sort you could hang yourself from.

“Getting something,” Sharkey said.

Her laptop beeped, letting her know she had incoming.

Paleodoc: gates here you there elaine?

Sharkey: I’m here. How goes it up there?

Paleodoc: we’re making progress finding out about things that maybe we’d be better off not knowing about but don’t mind me I’m tired

Hayes could just bet that he was. Up there in those ruins with all the dead Old Ones. Jesus, they must’ve been having some kind of dreams up there. It was a wonder they hadn’t cut their own throats by now and maybe some of them had.

Sharkey: Lots of things happening here. I found out from my Russian friend about that abandoned camp. What he knew about it. Apparently, it was a coring outpost and the crew up there got a little shack happy. Started seeing ghosts and killing themselves.

Paleodoc: any survivors?

Sharkey: None that were sane. They flew them out. The station was called Vradaz Outpost and it’s been deserted since the trouble, over twenty years now.

Paleodoc: did he say what the nature of the trouble was?

Sharkey: Just the usual haunted house stuff. Apparitions and sounds. Knockings and rappings. Things of that nature. Is any of that important?

Paleodoc: how did the lake project make out?

Sharkey: The cryobot was a success. Hayes was there when they released the hydrobot. They found a city down there. A gigantic city on the lake bed.

Paleodoc: still there then? I thought it might be

Sharkey: You knew about it?

Paleodoc: I’ve been studying the pictographs up in the city they tell some pretty wild tales if I’m reading them right think I am there was something I interpreted as a mass exodus down into the lake when the glaciers began to move in

Sharkey: Hayes saw them, Dr. Gates, from the hydrobot’s feed. There were hundreds if not thousands of those Old Ones still living down there. They were swarming. They lost contact with the hydrobot about that time.

Paleodoc: yes, I imagine they did

Sharkey: what does it all mean?

Paleodoc: I’m not sure just yet but soon the fact that they’re still alive down there is bad though if I’m reading these gylphs correctly the old ones have plans for us they want to exploit us

Sharkey: Are they terrestrial? Can you tell me that?

Paleodoc: no, I don’t see how they could be there are evidences in the glyphs etchings on the walls of our star system and others I’m reading it to be evidence of interplanetary and possibly interstellar travel I believe these things existed as a race long before our planet cooled I’m guessing if we could visit mars and the outer planets we’d find evidence of their colonization they’ve been with us since the beginning

Sharkey: Can you be more specific about that?

Paleodoc: the winged devils elaine they’ve been with us since the beginning all our tales of winged demons and devils have a single source do you follow

Sharkey: What do they want?

Paleodoc: I can’t be sure but I believe they’ve been waiting many millions of years for us to find them.

Sharkey: Why?

Paleodoc: listen to me elaine these things are dangerous in ways I can’t even tell you 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

Sharkey: We’ve had two deaths here.

Paleodoc: you’ll have more they will harvest certain minds and crush the others listen to me elaine I think you should get out of there get in the snocat and make for vostok station you are in danger

Sharkey: You had better come down first.

Paleodoc: can’t too much to do up here too many clues to follow up on if I or others return watch us close very close something not right with Holm I think they have his mind now they want mine and yours too elaine get out get out while you can

Sharkey did everything she could do to bring Gates back up, but he was gone. He had gone off-line according to her messenger. Finally, she gave up and shut her computer down and was forced to look at those two dour faces.

Cutchen spoke first. “Well,” he said. “Well… either our good Doctor Gates has lost his mind or we’re in terrible danger.”

“I don’t believe he’s lost his mind,” Sharkey said, but would not elaborate on it. “I don’t believe that at all.”

“Neither do I,” Hayes said. He looked over at Cutchen. “I don’t think you do either. What Gates said… what he’s been reading from those hieroglyphs or whatever he found in that old city… it’s nothing I haven’t suspected or felt. A lot of us have been dreaming crazy shit and feeling worse things, but none of it really made sense. We all maybe connected it up with those mummies out there, but was that because we were sure they were the culprit or because we were scared and we needed a scapegoat, a witch to burn? But now—”

“You left out something,” Cutchen said. “Gates’ little chat the night before he left. People were feeling funny about those fossils of his and Lind’s nervous breakdown, but the things he said to us in the community room were pretty wild. I don’t think there’s a one of us who didn’t come out of that with an inflamed imagination.”

“Sure. I’ll admit to that. But it’s more than imagination, Cutchy, let’s get fucking real here. We didn’t imagine the dreams or Lind’s nervous breakdown or Meiner and St. Ours having their brains boiled to jelly. There’s a common cause for these happenings and it’s right out in Hut Six, like it or not. Because those things are not dead the way we know dead, their minds are still active and maybe that has something to do with the living ones down in the lake, I don’t know, but Gates is right: we’re in terrible danger here. You heard what he said. Those things… they’ve been waiting for us down here, they want to use us. They have plans for us.”

“It’s pretty wild shit, Hayes,” was all Cutchen would say and yet, just behind his eyes, you could see an acceptance of it all.

“Sure, it’s the wildest thing in our history, without a doubt.” There was a big NO SMOKING sign on the wall and Hayes lit up anyway, completely carried away by what he was saying and maybe just happy to be letting it all out of his head. “Imagine them, Cutchy. Try and imagine a race like theirs that is so fucking patient they can wait for us millions of years. And so intelligent, they know that sooner or later, we’ll come down here because we have to.”

“How could they know that?”

“You saw what Gates said… other worlds, other stars… God only knows how many times they’ve watched beings like us evolve until they reached a state where they might be useful to them. No, Gates is right. They knew we’d come. It’s our nature to come down here and they were completely aware of the fact. They’re ancient and they know things we’ll never know. Who knows how many races like ours they’ve cultivated?”

“You make me feel like a potato,” Cutchen said.

“To them, you’re not much more,” Sharkey said.

Hayes didn’t say anything for a time. Maybe he was afraid of what he might say if he opened his mouth. “Rats in a maze, that’s what we are. Just rats running the maze,” he said finally, laughing at something he didn’t seem to find very funny at all. “It’s perfect, isn’t it? We’re trapped down here and they know it. It’s exactly what they wanted. It’s been some time, I think, since they’ve had an ample opportunity to pick away at human minds. But now here we are and here they are. This camp is a great living laboratory and they’ve got months to do whatever it is they want to do.”

“Which is?” Cutchen said

Hayes swallowed. “To harvest our minds.”