Terminal Freeze

11

Later that night, Marshall found himself walking through the equipment-crowded corridors of B Level. In his lab and his quarters, he’d felt preoccupied and distracted-feelings not helped by the raucous conversations and clatter of passing gear. Knowing that, as usual, he’d find sleep difficult, he headed toward the surface to take the nightly walk that had become something of a habit with him.

He climbed the stairs and walked into the entrance foyer, his steps ringing on the metal-and-linoleum floor. The MP post was manned, as he knew it would be: since the documentary contingent had arrived, Sergeant Gonzalez had kept it staffed day and night, despite all the other demands on the soldiers’ time. But to Marshall ’s surprise the sentry station was manned by Gonzalez himself.

The sergeant nodded to him as he came up. Despite being well into his fifties, the man radiated a feeling of almost inexhaustible strength. “Doctor,” he said. “Going on your evening constitutional?”

“That’s right,” Marshall said. He felt a faint surprise: he didn’t know Gonzalez kept track of his movements. “Sleep’s a little hard to come by.”

“I’m not surprised-what with that frat party going on down there.” Gonzalez frowned. His bullet-shaped head seemed attached directly to his shoulders, and as he shook it in disapproval, heavy bulges appeared at the nape.

Marshall laughed. “They are a little noisy.”

Gonzalez scoffed. “Beg pardon, Doctor, but the noise is the least of it. There are just too damn many of them. We weren’t expecting half this many, and it’s putting my base under strain. The physical plant’s old, it’s been maintained only for light use. And this is hell and gone from light use. There are only four of us, we can’t nursemaid all of them. This afternoon Marcelin found one of them wandering out of bounds, in the military operations sector.” The frown deepened. “I’m half tempted to file a formal complaint.”

“Things should ease up soon. I think a dozen or so are leaving tomorrow.” He’d heard that once the bulk of the setup was complete, the roustabouts would be heading back south.

Gonzalez grunted. “Won’t be soon enough for me.”

Marshall glanced speculatively at him. My base, Gonzalez had called it. The man had reason to feel possessive. Now close to retirement, he’d supposedly spent almost thirty years at Fear Base, totally isolated, four hundred-odd miles north of the Arctic Circle. It seemed almost unbelievable-no doubt the other three soldiers couldn’t wait to finish their tours. Perhaps, Marshall speculated, he’d been here so long he couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Or perhaps-as Ekberg had hinted-he was just a man who valued his privacy.

Waving to Gonzalez, he headed toward the main entrance. The large external thermometer in the weather chamber displayed minus five degrees Fahrenheit. Opening his locker, he donned his parka, balaclava, snow boots, and gloves. Then he stepped through the staging area and pushed the outer doors open into the night.

The apron of concrete outside the base lay still beneath a vast dome of stars. He paused a moment, acclimating himself to the sharp chill of the air. Then he set off into the night, gloved hands in pockets, careful not to trip over the power cables that snaked underfoot. The wind had died away completely, and a gibbous moon lent a spectral blue light to the landscape. With the entire documentary staff currently inside Fear Base, the prefab huts and storage sheds were preternaturally silent. Everything seemed to be asleep. The only noise came from the powerhouse, which grumbled under the strain of supplying the power-hungry new inhabitants.

He paused at the perimeter fence, glancing carefully left and right. Since they had first arrived, there had been at least half a dozen polar bear sightings, but tonight no dark shapes could be seen prowling the endless permafrost or ugly coilings of ancient lava. Pulling his hood more tightly around his face, he walked past the empty guard post, letting his feet find their own path.

Soon he was climbing the steep valley toward the glacier, his breath streaming behind in great clouds. As he warmed to the work, his stride lengthened and his arms swung easily at his sides. A good dose of exercise, and just maybe he’d be able to sleep through all the noise the film crew generated.

In fifteen minutes, the slope lessened slightly. The hulking machinery had been repositioned and he had an unobstructed view of the glacier’s tongue, a deep blue wall of ice that seemed to glow in the moonlight with inner fire. And there, in its shadow, was the small black hole of the ice cave…

He stopped. There were figures standing at the mouth of the cave. Three of them, shadows within shadows.

More slowly, he approached. The three were talking: he could hear the muffled sounds of conversation. They turned at the crunch of his footsteps and to his surprise he recognized the other scientists: Sully, Faraday, Penny Barbour. The only team member missing was Ang, the graduate student. It was as if they had converged here-with a single mind-at the site of the discovery.

Sully nodded as Marshall joined them. “Nice night for a walk,” he said. One of the expedition’s hunting rifles was slung over his shoulder.

“Beats the madness back at the base,” Marshall replied.

If he’d expected the ever-politic Sully to protest at this, he was mistaken. The climatologist made a sour face. “They were filming some sequence in the tactical center, next door to my lab. Posing as us, if you can believe it. Must have done at least a dozen takes. Couldn’t hear myself think.”

“Speaking of films, how did your interview go?” Marshall asked.

The sour face deepened. “Conti stopped in mid-take. The soundman was complaining, saying-get this-that I was swallowing my words.”

Marshall nodded.

Sully turned to Barbour. “I don’t swallow my words, do I?”

“Bloody yobs crashed the file server this evening,” she said by way of reply. “As if they didn’t bring enough laptops of their own, they had to steal our processing cycles as well. Gave me some chat-up about ‘special rendering requirements.’ I didn’t half cause a fuss.”

“There was only a single empty seat when I went to dinner,” Marshall said.

“At least you got a seat,” Barbour said. “I waited, standing, for ten minutes before I packed it in. Took an apple and a bag of crisps back to my lab.”

Marshall glanced at Faraday. The biologist wasn’t joining in the conversation. Instead, he was staring into the cave, apparently lost in thought.

Although Marshall knew better, he heard himself ask anyway. “So, Wright, what’s your take on things?”

Faraday didn’t reply. Instead, he just kept looking into the dark maw that lay before them.

Marshall gave him a gentle poke. “Hey, Faraday. Rejoin the living.”

At this, Faraday glanced over. The moon had lent a spectral sheen to the lenses of his glasses, and he stared back at them like a goggle-eyed alien, looking perpetually surprised as usual. “Oh. Sorry. I was thinking.”

Sully sighed. “Okay, let’s have it. What’s the dire theory for the day?”

“Not a theory. Just an observation.” When nobody replied, Faraday continued. “Yesterday, when they were cutting the Smilodon out of the ice?”

“We were there,” Sully said. “What about it?”

“I took some readings with a sonar spectrometer. You know, since the earlier readings from the remote imager, top-down, were quite imprecise, and having access to a cross-section I wanted to-”

“We get the picture,” Sully said, waving a gloved hand.

“Well, I spent much of this afternoon analyzing the readings. And they don’t match.”

“Don’t match what?” Marshall asked.

“They don’t match a Smilodon.”

“Don’t be daft!” said Barbour. “You saw it, didn’t you? Like the rest of us, and all?”

“I saw very little, in an extremely cloudy medium. The sonar analyzer gave me far more data to examine.”

“So what are you saying?” Marshall asked.

“I’m saying that whatever’s inside that block of ice appears much too large to be a saber-toothed tiger.”

The little group fell silent, digesting this. After a few moments, Sully cleared his throat. “It must have been illusory. Some debris cloud you saw, maybe a lens of sand or gravel, trapped in a position to resemble the corpse.”

Faraday simply shook his head.

“Just how much larger, exactly?” Barbour asked.

“I can’t be precise. Perhaps twice as big.”

The scientists exchanged glances.

“Twice?” Marshall exclaimed. “So what did it look like, then? Mastodon?”

Faraday shook his head.

“Mammoth?”

Faraday shrugged. “The readings are pretty clear on the issue of size. They’re not as clear on, ah, shape.”

Another silence.

“Those were cat’s eyes,” Barbour said in a low voice. “I’d bet on it.”

“Sure seemed that way to me,” Marshall said. He glanced back at Faraday. “Positive those new readings are accurate?”

“I ran the analysis twice. Cross-checked everything.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Barbour. “If it’s not a Smilodon-not a mastodon-not a mammoth…then what the bloody hell is it?”

“There’s one way to find out,” Marshall said. “I’m tired of being pushed around our own research site.” And he began walking briskly down the slope in the direction of the base.