Raising Atlantis

12

An hour later ,inside the warm P4 habitat module, Conrad was concerned as he looked at Serena on the fold-out surgical table. Her eyes blinked rapidly beneath the high-intensity lights, an oxygen mask over her mouth and several EKG electrodes attached to her chest. Her hair was brushed back from her face and the belt around her cargo pants loosened.

Conrad pointed out the fogged-up porthole at the American flag Yeats had planted atop the pyramid summit.

“Focus on the flag and breathe deeply,” he told her as he administered the oxygen from a heavy yellow canister.

Her parka and outerwear were gone, and he tried not to gaze at her full breasts rising and falling beneath her wool undershirt. She had been hyperventilating since they reached the bottom of the ice gorge, spooked, it seemed, by the frozen graveyard that entombed them. Conrad glanced at the EKG monitor. Only now was her heart rate returning to the upper register of the normal range.

“Better?” he asked her after a minute.

She looked at him like he was a lunatic for asking.

Conrad looked around the cramped habitat perched atop P4’s flat summit at the bottom of the gorge. It was a single module, fifty-five feet long and fourteen feet in diameter. Yeats was huddled with the three technicians by the monitors. One was Lopez, a female officer Conrad recognized from Ice Base Orion. The other two were fair-haired steroid freaks who answered to the names of Kreigel and Marcus. They were clearly Yeats’s muscle down here.

Conrad turned to Yeats. “Was there any particular reason why you forgot to mention the frozen bodies?”

“Yeah,” said Yeats. “I wanted to see your reaction.”

Conrad gestured at Serena and glared at Yeats. “Satisfied?”

“Quit whining.” Yeats stood up, a hypodermic in hand. He flicked the syringe with his finger, and a clear liquid squirted into the air. Serena squirmed.

Conrad watched in alarm as Yeats grabbed hold of Serena’s arm. “What are you doing to her?” he demanded.

“Giving her a shot of the stimulant eleutherococcus,” said Yeats, injecting it into Serena’s arm before Conrad could stop him. “It’s a plant extract of the ginseng family. Deep-sea divers, mountain rescuers, and cosmonauts take it to resist stress while working under inhospitable conditions. About the only damn usable thing the Russians ever contributed to our space program.”

The drug seemed to be working. Conrad looked at Serena, who was breathing more evenly now, although there was anger in her eyes. Clearly this wasn’t a woman who was used to being taken care of.

“She’ll be fine,” said Yeats. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got to check my drill team’s search for that mythical shaft of yours.”

“As mythical as P4,” Conrad called out as Yeats opened the hatch and stepped outside. Subzero polar air whooshed inside.

“You seem to be holding up just fine, Conrad,” Serena said, catching him off guard. She had removed her oxygen mask. “I take it this isn’t the first time you’ve seen frozen bodies at least twelve thousand years old?”

He looked down at her, barely able to contain his excitement. It wasn’t every day he found evidence for his theories, or proof that he wasn’t crazy. “Those bodies explain how the pyramid got here.”

“Got here?” She managed to sit up, the color returning to her high cheekbones. “What are you talking about? Did it move?”

Conrad dug into his pack and produced a frozen orange. “I chipped this out of the wall,” he said. “This proves Antarctica was once a temperate climate.”

Serena looked at the orange. “Until it suddenly froze over one day, I suppose?”

Conrad nodded. “Hapgood’s theory of earth-crust displacement.”

“Charles Hapgood?” Serena asked.

“That’s right. Dead for years. So you’ve heard of him?”

“The university professor, yes, but not this displacement theory.”

Conrad always relished an opportunity to tell Mother Earth something she didn’t know. Holding up the orange, he said, “Pretend this is Planet Earth.”

“OK.” She seemed willing to humor him.

He snapped open a pocket knife and carved an outline of the seven continents on the thawing peel. “Hapgood’s theory says the ice age was not a meteorological phenomenon. Rather, it was the result of a geological catastrophe about twelve thousand years ago.” Conrad rotated the orange upward so that the United States was in the Arctic Circle and Antarctica was closer to the equator. “This was the world back then.”

Serena lifted an eyebrow. “And what happened?”

“The entire outer shell of Earth’s surface shifted, like the skin of this orange.” Conrad rotated the orange downward until it resembled Earth as they knew it. “Antarctica is engulfed by the polar zone while North America is released from the Arctic Circle and becomes temperate. Ice melts in North America while it forms in Antarctica.”

Serena frowned. “What caused this cataclysmic shift?”

“Nobody really knows,” said Conrad. “But Hapgood thought it was an imbalance of ice in the polar caps. As ice built up, they became so heavy they shifted, dragging the outer crust of the continents in one piece to new positions.”

Serena eyed him. “And you’d be willing to stake what’s left of your reputation on this earth-crust displacement theory?”

Conrad shrugged. “Albert Einstein liked the idea. He believed significant shifts in Earth’s crust have probably taken place repeatedly and within a short time. That could explain weird things, like mammoths frozen in the Arctic Circle with tropical vegetation in their stomachs. Or people and pyramids buried a mile beneath the ice in Antarctica.”

Serena put a soft hand on Conrad’s shoulder. “If that helps you make sense of the world, then good for you.”

Conrad stiffened. He thought she’d be as excited as he was by the evidence. That they were two of a kind. Instead she was attacking the conclusion he had drawn. More than that, she was attacking him personally. He resented this cavalier dismissal-by a woman of religious faith, no less-of a plausible scientific hypothesis from one of the greatest minds in human history. “Does the Vatican have a better theory?”

Serena nodded. “The Flood.”

“Same difference,” Conrad said. “Both fall under the God-Is-a-Genocidal-Maniac Theory.” But as soon as the words were out, he was sorry he had said them to her.

“Hey, mister, you watch your mouth,” said a female voice from behind.

Conrad turned to see Lopez looking cross at him. Another Catholic, he realized. Lopez looked at Serena and asked, “You want me to kick his ass for you?”

Serena smiled. “Thanks, but he gets it kicked enough already.”

“Well, the offer stands,” Lopez said before returning to her work. The Aryan twins, Kreigel and Marcus, looked disappointed. Conrad figured they must be Lutheran, agnostics, or simply of good German stock who in another time and place might have distinguished themselves as poster boys for Hitler’s SS.

Serena reached for her parka and slipped her arms through the sleeves. “What are you suggesting, Conrad?” She was trying to zip her parka, but the EKG wires were in the way. “That God is to blame for humanity’s every famine, war or lustful leer?”

He realized she was looking straight at him now, her warm, brown eyes both accusing him and forgiving him at the same time. It irritated the hell out of him. So maybe he had been watching her breasts a little longer than he should have, he thought. He was only human. So was she, if she’d only admit it.

“I saw the way you looked at the little girl in the ice,” Conrad said softly. “It was like you were looking at yourself. Hardly the wicked sort the Genesis flood was intended to punish.”

“The rain falls on the just and the unjust,” she said absently. “Or in this case the ice.”

Conrad could tell her thoughts were someplace else. She couldn’t see her EKG numbers jumping again.

Conrad pointed to the monitors. “Look, maybe we should take you back up and bring down an able-bodied replacement.” He reached over to help her with the EKG wires. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

She angrily knocked him away with her shoulder and ripped off the EKG leads. “Speak for yourself, Doctor Yeats.”

Conrad rubbed his head and stared at her in disbelief. “Could you send signals that are possibly more mixed?”

She zipped up her parka and jumped to her feet. “Who’s mixed up here, Doctor Yeats?”

Conrad stood still, aware of Lopez staring at him with interest. So were Kreigel and Marcus. The soldiers looked like they were just itching for the good nun to give the evil archaeologist a hard knee to the groin.

Then the hatch door opened and another blast of cold shot into the module with Yeats.

“You’re right, Yeats,” Conrad said coolly. “She’s fine.”

“Good. Now gear up. We’re going into P4,” Yeats said. “The drill team just found your shaft.”