Frozen Hell

by John W. Campbell Jr.

  Slowly, though, the dip needle reacted to their motion, and the steady point toward the greater power of Earth’s South Magnetic Pole gradually weakening as they approached the unknown magnetic body near at hand. Abruptly, as they entered a region cut and folded with hundreds of crevasses ranging from 6-inch cracks to 10-foot wide gaps falling to unplumbed depths, the needle swung idle. Swung, then in the jar of a hummock of ice, languidly took a new direction.

  “Stop,” Vane called excitedly, “She’s swung!”

  The hiss of the air turbine, and the soft whine of the inductor coil spinning madly in the magnetic field started again as Vane unlocked the galvanometer needle and opened the valve. Slowly Vane rotated the brushes, while Norris took a sight on several of the brighter stars to the south, faded now in the growing light to the North as the sun crept nearer the horizon. “No effective field to speak of. The Earth’s field and the meteor’s field about cancel here.” Vane closed off the turbine valves, and the hiss of escaping air stopped.

  The dip needle rocked with the swaying sledge, twisting in its multiple, delicate gimbals. Now it moved less and less sluggishly as they approached the new center of attraction. The crevassed area forced their way to slant and twist, required the utmost care lest a small crack be the surface warning of a cavern whose walls curved nearly to meeting at the surface, leaving flimsy shelves to snap off under their weight. Roped to each other, 190-pound Barclay lead the way, examining each crack as he passed.

  “That ridge damming back the ice must lie near here, Norris.” McReady pointed toward the field of crevasses ahead, and the further field of smooth ice sloping down to a field of familiar antarctic drift snow beyond.

  The sledge twisted on, through the last of the crevassed region. The returning sun sweeping above the horizon had begun to stir a slight wind, a wind that would barely turn anemometer cups, but added a danger of sudden frost-bite at that temperature. The crest of the ice-buried hill was passed, and a gradual slope to the field of drift snow, less broken than the region they had passed, lay before them.

  “She’s almost vertical now, Norris,” Vane called presently. “A little to the left—whoa! She’s backed up! Norris, that damn meteorite isn’t fifty feet across!”

  Barclay took a beryllium-bronze hammer from the sledge, a blowtorch, and some sounding equipment. The ice axe cut a chip from the ice, while the physicists worked over their apparatus. McReady struggled with the blowtorch while Barclay buried the sounder and the receiver under ice chips. The torch roared suddenly, and in its blast the ice chips fused about the sounder and receiver, to freeze solidly the moment the torch was withdrawn. Skilled by long practice, Barclay thawed out the dry cells and slipped them, still faintly warm, into his belt against his body.

  He pressed the sounder key, and a sharp, clean-cut whine shot out from the sounder. Instantly a needle jerked across the dial of the apparatus, to halt abruptly a fraction of a division from the stop pin. “Less than fifty feet of ice, and then an unregistered depth of rock.” Barclay reported finally. The blowtorch freed the bits of apparatus. He tried a new station. Still less than fifty feet. Then the depth fell abruptly as they passed some ice-drowned rocky cliff-edge. Back and forth they maneuvered, plotting a profile of the invisible surface beneath the ice.

  Vane and Norris were tracing spirals about them, widening and narrowing their range, until at last they found their center of action. Barclay and McReady joined them. A dozen careful plots back and forth across the lines Vane and Norris determined magnetically gave only consistent readings of less than fifty feet—too small for the sonic instrument to measure.

  “I hate to mention it—” Vane looked suggestively at the ice axes and snow shovels lashed to the sledge. “That ice axe there has been forcefully reminding me of its presence all the way out here. Let’s give it a beating.”

  The sun rose very gradually above the horizon to the north, rising by sliding along an invisible, angling groove somewhere beyond the edge of the frozen continent. The thermometer rose slowly with it, and wind began to creep across the plateau, gaining velocity as the temperature differences increased. The thermometer passed -50°, and the wind passed 15 miles an hour. The four men still chopped and hacked into the cold-brittled ice. A sloping, step-nicked tube grew down into the ice, the solid blue of the stuff began to scintillate with blinding, intense azures, pure rays of sapphire, the chips became huge wealths of discarded emeralds, sapphires and rubies. The sun’s slanting rays were piercing down, heatless, through nearly twenty feet of crystalline ice. Still the magnetic needle pointed straight downward.

  Barclay returned to the surface with a tarpaulin of ice-chips to dump, and cursed over the blowtorch. The rising wind nipped at his fingers, the metal was torture to ungloved fingers, and the gasoline blistered his fingers by its swift evaporation, while refusing to ignite. The wind whipped the flames out, and it was minutes before it roared in welcome blue-white heat.

  “As long as we’ve got this damned hole, we may as well try to heat it,” Barclay growled as he stumbled down the tube to the others. “And this ice seems clear as glass. Maybe we can see what we’re driving at if we melt a smooth patch.”

  The blowtorch flame licked at the chipped wall at the bottom of the pit. The jagged fractures smoothed, and ran. Slowly, as Barclay circulated the torch, the smooth surface widened to a window in the unbelievably clear, hard ice. The vague shapes of rocks moved and wavered as the melting water flowed away from the flame; a blue sea lit by the diffused light of the sun became visible beyond the clearing window.

  Norris looked through the window. Only vaguely could the dark, rounded forms of huge rocks be guessed at, great dark masses too far away now for clear vision. The compass needle pointed almost directly downward. “Try a window in the floor, Bar. I think you’ve got a sound idea there.”

  The flame washed at the floor, after McReady had chopped it more nearly level with an ice axe, and cut a deeper groove to catch the melted water. The others, crowded out of the narrow tube as Barclay worked below, saw him turn the torch aside suddenly. It roared to itself, a stuttering, fluctuating mumbling almost on the verge of speech. Barclay stared down through the window he had cleared, a black, slick surface in the blue sea of ice.

  He straightened slowly and cut off the torch. His head bent far back to look up the steep tube toward the others, he spoke at length. “I’m nuts, so I’m going to chop up this window, and you birds can go on digging, if you like.”

  The ice axe McReady had left shivered the slick blackness into refracting, scattering chips, and Barclay walked stolidly up the crude steps cut in the slanting wall of the pit.

  “Bar—what the hell’s the matter?” Vane demanded.

  “Go ahead and dig. I know damn well I’m screwy, so I’ll let you find out for yourselves. If you find what I think I saw, I’ll help. But not until or unless. It’s about five feet down. Go easy when you get there.” Barclay walked off toward the sledge, and began relashing the load silently.

  For a moment the other three looked at each other uneasily. “There’s one good way to find out,” suggested McReady. He slid down the steep slope, using an ice axe to break his fall. Vane joined him, throwing the ice chips he tore loose into a tarpaulin to be taken to the surface. Norris followed Barclay over to the sledge, fruitlessly trying to get some answer to his question.

  Abruptly, the two men turned at the explosive shout of McReady in the depth of the pit. There was an immense silence, then a single curse. Then: “Bar—Bar, you damned wall-eyed idiot. Why in ten hells didn’t you say what you saw. Norris—Norris—for God’s sake come here! There’s a plate of polished, machined metal that extends for an indefinite distance.”

  “It’s the magnet, Norris!” Vane’s voice rang out hollowly from the pit.

  “That,” said Barclay softly, seating himself on the edge of the sledge, “is not what I saw. I guess I’m not nuts, maybe, but maybe I am at that. They haven’t gone down five feet. Tell ’em to keep
going.”

  Norris left on the run. Vane passed up the ice chips to him, and a second sack before the first was returned, while McReady’s ice axe and snow shovel rapidly enlarged and deepened the pit before Norris was able to get down for an examination. Then—the brittle schith sound of the splitting ice crystals changed to a duller, sodden crack. The activity below became a sudden silence.

  “God!” said McReady softly. “Good God!” The schuff of the ice axe started, very gently, very carefully.

  Unable to see past the two men, Norris heard Vane’s soft sigh, and over his head caught a glimpse of glittering silvery metal. A smooth, curving metal surface nearly five feet square was bared. The sun had set again, but the rose and lavender, apple greens and melting yellows lingered in the sky. The light that trickled down through twenty feet of ice glimmered on the bared metal, hinting at an immense bulk of machined, rounded metal plates, joined with unhuman skill.

  Vane straightened, and backed away. Half visible between McReady’s legs was a head, a half-split head laid open by a careless ice axe. Norris turned up toward the sun-painted patch of sky and called out to Barclay.

  “Bar, if what you saw had blue hair like earthworms and three red eyes, it’s here.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The autogyro settled to the ice gingerly, in an absolutely vertical descent. The thirty-five-mile wind rushing across the bald ice was a steady, smooth river of super-cold air flowing from the high South Polar Plateau to the sea somewhere to the north. The brilliant orange of the plane was the only color on a landscape, made glaringly blatant under the fierce brilliance of four magnesium torches. The moment it touched, the four members of the Secondary Magnetic Station party started inward with the torches, while Blair jumped from the cabin of the plane with ice-anchors in hand. Behind the wiry little biologist, the stocky figure of Dr. Copper tumbled out with further anchors. The ’gyro rocked slightly back and forth as the pilot gunned the engine uncertainly. The propeller had to maintain a fair thrust to barely hold the plane in place against the unceasing thrust of the wind from the south. The twinkling rotor blades shifted jerkily, then slowed as Macy gradually cut their lift-angle to make the plane stay more solidly on the ground.

  The biologist and the medico had the anchors placed by the time McReady and Norris reached them, and the pilot cut back his throttle. Almost instantly the thin, cold blast of air chilled the motor, and it began to splutter. Macy gunned it again, jazzing the throttle to make it catch. His mouth moved behind the plastic windows, but the roar of the engine drowned his words.

  “Six sacks of coal—food supplies—two more bunks.” Blair shouted. “He’s going right back. Dr. Copper can stay only two days or so. Commander Garry had to stay behind—too much weight.”

  Norris nodded vigorously. Barclay and Vane came up, dousing their unneeded torches. The bitter blast of the plane’s slipstream forced the men to some distance, as Copper explained the plans.

  “Garry thinks he will let you men work here, modify the plans for the Geological Party to leave this tractor available. They’ve sent another gang of men to the coal vein so more fuel can be used. Done any more digging?”

  Vane shook his head. The booming of the engine made conversation half lip-reading. “Waiting for you. Moved the tractor up, though. Bring the saw?”

  “Yes. Upjohn kicked, but gave it up. He’s needed it making the ‘houses’ on the other tractors, so he wants it back when we can let him have it. Macy wants to get going. Says that he can land the Douglass here if you can promise a wind like this all the time.”

  McReady grinned sourly. “We’ve had it practically 24 hours of every day we’ve been here. The elevation’s only 1100 feet, and a little chopping will smooth any humps out of this ice. He could land the big Boeing here if he had to. I’ll promise him a 35-mile wind any day, and on special order we can get him a 50-miler.”

  “We’ll need more coal,” Barclay put in. “We’ll be running the tractor engine for the dynamo a lot.”

  “Couldn’t carry any more this trip. Too much junk. He’ll be back for me in the Lockheed, he said, and bring three tons if you need it. Let’s get that stuff out before his engine conks. Ye gods, its cold.”

  McReady said, “You haven’t been here, Doc. It’s -45° tonight. Let’s go.”

  * * * *

  Ten minutes later, the ’gyro’s vanes began spinning more rapidly. There was no need to clutch in the engine here; the river of wind cranked them to speed. The plane took off from the ice in a vertical climb, the windmill vanes flapping awkwardly, like some immense duck rising from blue water. The tiny lights circled overhead, then vanished at express speed as Macy turned downwind toward Big Magnet.

  “I’ll signal the take off.” Barclay started toward the buried station, two bags of coal trailing black dust behind him, black dust the rushing wind scoured off the ice instantly to whip away toward the Antarctic Ocean 400 miles north. Blair and McReady were lashing the little biologist’s instruments onto the sledge, piling bunk sections and sacked food supplies on top.

  The Station seemed even more crowded, with everything jammed down to one wall. The magnetic instruments were gone, packed on the tractor and moved to the new location. But the battery-operated trail radio set had replaced them, the dry batteries forming a fringe under Barclay’s bunk, swinging high enough from the floor to be above the “frost line.” The transmitter had been suspended at shoulder height by cords from the ceiling, the key lashed to a horizontal brace of the wall.

  Barclay leaned against the bunk upright and began tapping out a call for Big Magnet. Macy and the ’gyro were already in sight over the main base before he got an answer fifteen minutes later. Macy had found a band of 80-mile wind at 4,000 feet.

  “Is it time for theories yet?” Dr. Copper asked, as the bunk sections were going into position. “By the way, I hope you birds aren’t sloppy eaters. I see my bunk is going to be the dining table.”

  “Bar’s not bad,” McReady grunted. “He laps up everything he drops. But I don’t think it’s theory time. Whatever that thing is, it might be taken for a submarine—the soundings we made, both magnetically and sonically, indicate it’s about fifty to sixty feet in diameter, and the magnetic instruments indicate a tapering length of about 250 feet. It definitely doesn’t have wings. There’s a tremendous concentration of magnetic mass, Vane says, near the center. Engines or something, maybe. It might be a submarine wrecked when this portion of Antarctica was submerged. I don’t believe that. Then it’s a type of flying gadget we never heard of, and it got wrecked somehow. The length of it, incidentally, runs northeast and south-west, almost at right angles to a line drawn from it to the Magnetic Pole.

  “Here’s where the meteorology comes in. It’s been glaciated under. Once upon a time, snow fell here, and drift fell, and the Thing was buried. Weight compacted the snow to this blue ice. Then the wind of this bald plateau scoured God knows how much of the snow and ice away. If that thing landed before the snow started compacting, it’s at least half a million years old. If it fell warm, it might have melted its way under the surface for a while and landed where it is at any time. It’s on the sheltered side of the drowned ridge, behind a tongue of high land that runs south for half a mile dividing the glacier, and diverting the ice movement and pressure. That’s the reason for those crevasses we ran into. You know Doc, that thing could have been there a hell of a while.”

  “How about the—thing you found?” Blair asked.

  “No dope.” Vane stoked his pipe and lit it. “We didn’t mess with it much, Unpleasant animal, I can tell you that. I think we said about all we knew about it. Frozen hard as the ice it’s in. Might have been there a million years—or fifty million. Perfectly preserved, of course, and dead as those mammoths they find in Siberia. It’s kept for some while already, so we figured it’d keep until you got here. You can play with it. We didn’t like it.”

  “You described the head rather vaguely,” the biologist objected. “Is it ant
hropomorphous?”

  “Man-like? The rest of it’s under the ice and rather blurred. What we could see suggested that we let you look at it. We saw enough. If it had a disposition such as the face indicated, I’m not interested, even if it’s been dead since Antarctica froze.”

  “Disposition—the face—?” Blair looked curiously at the members of the Station party.

  Barclay spat into the little stove and heaved in a few lumps of coal. “You can look at it tomorrow. You’d rather.”

  “Eh?”

  “He means you’ll sleep better,” Vane said. “There aren’t any scientific terms for facial expression, so far as I know.” He looked into the fire for a moment silently. “Anyway, the face isn’t human, so maybe we can’t interpret it. He might actually be registering resignation in the only way his kind of face could. But I don’t think so. Certainly if he was, he started out with a terrible handicap; that face wasn’t designed to register any peaceable emotion. From human experience—which one glance at the face would assure you has nothing to do with the problem whatever—it isn’t remotely human—I’d say the thing was trapped, and it was mad. Not crazy, though any human to have as much distilled essence of hatred in his eyes would have to be crazy. I think it was just angry.

  “Vaguely through the ice, I got a suggestion that the flying submarine-thing was jammed up against a rock wall, the nose crumpled in. The small section we exposed was strained and bent; I think the nose was ruined. From the build and the lines, I’d say that whatever it had been, it was fast—damn fast. Make the trip from the magnetic pole to where it was in maybe 30 seconds, say, or—perhaps—a trip from Mars or Venus in three or four days. Nothing Earth ever spawned had the inexpressibly cruel hatred those three red eyes displayed, I know that.