Part 8 (1/2)

The usually gregarious Kolich went silent for a moment or two. That whine rose and fell from the set. They waited a minute, two, three, nothing.

”Nikolai? Nikolai? Are you there?” Sharkey asked. ”Vostok? Can you hear me, Vostok?”

”Yes . . . we hear you, Elaine. I've . . . I've been getting properly chastised by the radio officer here . . . he says that I am not following proper procedure. I should be saying 'over' and that nonsense. There. There, he is gone and now we can talk.”

”The abandoned camp . . . do you know of it?”

”Yes, Elaine, yes. You speak of the Vradaz Outpost, a coring site. It was abandoned back in 1979 or '80, as I recall. There was a lot of noise about it at the time, lots of wild stories . . . ”

”Do you remember what happened?”

Silence, static. ”Yes, but it's hardly worth going into. Just crazy talk. There was . . . well how do I say this . . . something of a ghost scare up there. Talk of a haunting of all things. Crazy business. Vradaz was a summer post and they were coring, struck into a cave or chasm or something. Yes. Then . . . I remember things got funny after that.”

He paused and Hayes looked at Sharkey, but she wouldn't look at him. She was thinking what he was thinking. He knew it.

”Do you remember the details, Nicky?” she asked.

”Details? Yes. Yes, yes, I was here at Vostok when they brought the last three men in. They were all mad, hopelessly mad. The man in charge here then . . . you know of the sort I speak, Elaine? The political officer was a big Ukranian whom no one liked. He placed those three men in segregation, had me shoot them full of sedatives so they would not disturb the others.”

”You said three men? I thought there were ten?”

”There was said, I recall, to be a rash of insanity up there. Men killing each other and committing suicide. We had been getting some very odd communications from Vradaz and then, nothing. Three weeks and nothing. A security force went up there, came back with the three and said the others were all dead. I was one of the few, being a medico, that was allowed to see these men. They were only here for three days, I think, then they were flown out. It was a sad, tragic business. Isolation . . . it can do terrible things to men.”

”Those communications . . . do you remember them?”

”Yes.” Another long pause and Hayes could almost imagine him mopping sweat from his brow. ”Crazy business . . . the men up there, they wanted to get out, said they could not stay up there. These were scientists, Elaine, and they were scared like schoolchildren, yes? Talking rubbish . . . noises and b.u.mps, knocks and tappings, shapes seen flitting about at night . . . madness, that's all it was.”

Sharkey chewed her lower lip. ”Dr. Gates will find this all interesting.”

”It was rubbish, Elaine, make sure you tell him that I did not believe these things!”

”Oh, of course not, Nicky.” Sharkey stared at the dials and LEDs on the radio, thumbed the mic again. ”Did those three men . . . did they say anything?”

The silence dragged on longer this time, much longer. ”Yes, even sedated, they would not stop talking. It was all nonsense, Elaine. Silly stories, all of it. They were raving. Sounds in the night, noises in the walls and on the roofs . . . knocks at the door, scratching at the windows. Things of that nature. There was a ruined house when I was a child and . . . but, no matter. These men were raving about nightmares and voices in their heads . . . weird figures wandering through the compound that were not men . . . ghosts, bogies, I think. They spoke of devils and monsters, figures that walked through walls. It was a terrible business.”

Kolich signed off soon after this and seemed to be in a hurry to do so. Maybe he was being overheard or maybe the memory of all that wasn't sitting on him right. Regardless, he had something that needed doing and he went to do it.

”What do you make of that?” Hayes asked.

Sharkey kept staring at the set. She shook her head. ”Nikolai is a man who likes to talk, Jimmy. But he was very abrupt about all this. Any other time I would have been on here an hour hearing about his take on that business. It's not like him.”

”I got the feeling that maybe he was talking about something he wasn't supposed to be saying.”

”Me, too.”

”But you saw the familiar pattern there, I take it?”

She nodded. ”It's like what we have . . . but worse.” She was looking in his eyes now and Hayes saw something like fear in them. ”Is this what's going to happen here, Jimmy? Are we all going to go mad and kill each other?”

”I don't know, but I think we better do something here before this gets out of hand.”

”Like what?”

He smiled thinly. ”Oh, I was thinking about asking you to take a little Sunday drive with me. Up to a place called Vradaz.”

PART THREE.

THE WINGED DEVILS.

”That ultimate, nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.”

- H.P. Lovecraft.

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 ma.s.sive methane ice bubble trapped down below the cap. Most permafrost regions have quant.i.ties 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 quant.i.ty 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 quant.i.ties 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 quant.i.ties 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 cyan.o.bacteria 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 superst.i.tious 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 pa.s.s 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.