Terminal Freeze

26

The set of rooms was small and stripped as bare as a monk’s cell. Only the skeletal frames of bunk beds and a few sad-looking metal cabinets remained. And yet as he looked around, Logan felt certain this had been the scientists’ quarters.

Locating it had proven a challenge: C Level was cluttered with so much spare junk, it was hard to discern habitat from mere surplus bedding. But there were precisely eight beds here, arranged in attitudes that suggested an actual living arrangement rather than mere storage. There were four bunks in the central room, two above two. A single bunk in a good-sized room to one side-no doubt the chief scientist’s quarters. Two more beds in a room on the other side. And one last bunk in a cramped space off the bathroom barely larger than a closet.

Logan switched on every available light. Then, hands behind his back, he strolled slowly through the suite of rooms, looking around, peering into the empty cabinets, silently cajoling the long-departed ghosts to whisper their secrets to him. He’d hoped to find something: tools, perhaps, or equipment, printouts, photos. But it was clear the quarters had been carefully searched long ago, every item of interest removed and-if standard operating procedure in such classified matters was followed-immediately incinerated. Two hangers hung forlornly in a closet; a button lay on the floor, trailing thread behind it like a kite string. A tube of toothpaste sat on the metal shelf above the bathroom sink, curled and desiccated. It seemed the space had little left to tell.

Logan returned to the central room. He had lived in a similar space himself once, years ago, on an archaeological dig near Masada. The Israeli army had loaned the team of scientists and historians a remote set of barracks to bunk in. Logan shook his head, recalling the aridity and the isolation. It had felt, he remembered, a million miles from anywhere. Just as this place did.

He settled slowly onto the wire springs of the nearest bunk. Empty rooms or not, scientists left trails. Their minds were always busy. They kept journals. They had ideas and observations to collect, and never more so than when away from civilization, far from phones or research assistants. There would be notes to jot down, things to come back to later in the comfort of private labs: ideas for experiments, theories for research papers. His wife had teased him about this very thing more than once, calling him a conceptual pack rat. “Other people hoard dish towels, greeting cards, spare toasters,” she’d said. “You hoard theories.” The scientists here would have been no different.

Except for one thing. They-and their theories-never got out.

He rose from the bed, looked around at the four bunks again. The chummiest guys, the socializers, would have slept in this room, played poker or bridge. He walked slowly through the other rooms, stopping at last in the cramped compartment. This dark and cave-like space would probably have been the least desirable berth. And yet it was the one he would have chosen: private, quiet, the ideal place to concentrate on one’s thoughts.

Or to write a journal.

As he stood there-in the acute and watchful silence-an unexpected but strangely delicious shudder passed through him. All of a sudden he felt intensely alive. Even if I don’t succeed here, he thought, even if this whole wild-goose chase proves a failure, right now is what makes it all worthwhile. There was something indefinably glorious about the hunt itself: here, in this room, three floors beneath the ice, trying to piece together the struggles of those men, fifty years ago; putting himself in their shoes; and maybe-just maybe-finding gold dust.

The room was utterly empty save for the bare bed frame. Kneeling quickly, he looked at it from below. Nothing. He pulled the lone, empty cabinet away from the wall, looked behind it, looked beneath it, pushed it back into place. In the rear of the room was a closet, barely big enough to stand in. He lifted the single metal rod that spanned it, peered into its hollow core, returned it. There was a narrow lip that ran along the closet walls, just below the ceiling; he reached up and drew a finger along it, finding nothing but dust. He stepped back into the room, looking around again: at the bare walls and ceiling, at the lone lightbulb.

If I’d been living here, he thought, if I’d been keeping unauthorized notes of my findings-and I would have-where would I have stashed them?

He pulled the bed frame away from the wall. The metal surface behind it was as bare as all the rest, save for an electrical outlet near the floor. With a quiet sigh, he pushed the bed back into position.

Then he paused. Pulling the bed away once again, he knelt beside the wall, retrieved a combination tool and a flashlight from his pocket, unscrewed the outlet plate, and shone the beam of his flashlight inside. What he saw surprised him. The outlet receptacles were disconnected and came away with the cover plate. Behind it was just a dark rectangular hole. Then, looking more closely, he noticed a strand of thick rubber wrapped around the ancient switch box. One end of the length of rubber disappeared down into the blackness behind the wall space. Gently threading it out, Logan found it was tied to a hole punched into the spine of a small notebook: yellowed, tattered, covered with mildew.

As carefully as if he was handling a Fabergé egg, Logan untied the little knot of rubber, wiped the dust from the notebook, and opened the cover. Faded, spidery handwriting covered the first page.

He smiled slightly to himself. “Karen, darling,” he murmured. “I wish you could see this.” But there was no response from beyond the grave-as Logan knew there wouldn’t be.