by Tim Curran
He allowed himself to sigh.
But what he didn’t know was that this was simply the calm before the storm.
9
NOAA FIELD STATION POLARIS
—EN ROUTE, MARCH 8
JUST AS HE FIGURED, Coyle was chosen for the SAR team. Horn and Gwen came along as did Dr. Flagg. The NSF waited several days before launching a SAR, but in the end they had to.
Though morning, it was pitch black, and not the blackness of the real, civilized world, but the polar blackness that was infinitely blacker than any night you could imagine until you saw it firsthand. Flakes of snow and crystals of ice spun in the headlights in a swirling thick vortex, blowing and drifting and making the cab of the Spryte shake. They glanced off the windshield as the wipers frantically pumped to clear them. Beyond the headlights it was a white waste, barren and hostile.
Gwen was sitting in the front seat, between Horn who was driving and Coyle who was simply bored. She seemed to be enjoying herself. “This is fun, isn’t it?” she said. “Two men squeezing me from either side. Mama likes that.”
“Only you could get turned on out here,” Coyle told her.
“It’s the desolation, Nicky. Raw, violent nature. Gets my blood pumping.” Though there was plenty of room for three in the seat, she spread out her legs in her red wind pants so that her knees touched those of her companions. “I got an idea. You boys can be the bread and I’ll be the meat. We’ll make a nice Gwen sandwich. How does that sound?”
Coyle shrugged. “Well, I am pretty hungry.”
Horn just ignored her as he always did. To him, most people were something you ignored because rarely did anything they say warrant your undivided attention. He cursed under his breath, finally said, “Real sweet morning for a drive, Nicky. I’m loving it.”
“What’d you expect?” Coyle said.
“Oh, quit your whining, Horn,” Gwen said. “You didn’t have to come. You volunteered for chrissake.”
He just grunted, guiding the Spryte over the ice and away from Polar Clime and the mountains and out onto the polar plateau itself. Ordinary compasses were pretty much useless on the Ice, but the Spryte had a GPS system that would guide them right to the door of NOAA Polaris.
Horn said, “I volunteered, Gwen, because I wanted to make sure Nicky made it there in one piece. I figured it was better than letting some bimbo drive him. You know, like you for instance.”
“Did he just insult me, Nicky?” Gwen said, enjoying it. Horn had pretty much ignored her since the season began. Finally, she had gotten a rise out of him.
“No, he didn’t insult you. That was a compliment.”
Gwen threw her hair over her shoulder. “I thought so. Now admit it, Horn, you weren’t worried about Nicky. You were worried about me. You’ve been hot for me from day one.”
In the backseat, Flagg ignored them, listening to his notes over a headset.
The cab jerked as they passed over a mound of hardpack. Horn kept peering through the windshield.
“I would go after you, Gwen,” he said finally, “but unfortunately I liken women in general to black widow spiders and I have no intention of having you suck me dry.”
“A good sucking never hurt anyone,” she said. “You should try it sometime.”
“I have, dear, I have. I was married once. And I still have the scars from her fangs on my neck. Not to mention other parts.”
Coyle was laughing under his breath. What a couple. Gwen the nympho and Horn the confirmed nihilist. He wasn’t hearing wedding bells in the near future.
Horn said, “Let me put it this way, Gwen. You can play the hot-to-trot little camp slut all you want, but I know women. I know how they are. They’re always after something and it rarely comes without baggage. Women play headgames. Women are on power trips. Sex to them is a way of controlling men, a way of owning them. You claim you want sex without strings, but I don’t buy that. You want strings to pull and men to manipulate. No thanks, I’ve already been through all that. Nobody owns me and nobody pulls my strings. Sex is just a power game that leads to relationships and relationships are just a way of selling your soul and getting shit in return.”
Either Gwen didn’t realize she was being insulted and her gender in general or maybe she just didn’t care. “I’m not talking about relationships, Horn. I’m talking about fucking.”
Coyle lost it, starting laughing his ass off.
Horn sighed. “Gwen, you’re a UT, right? A Utilities Technician?”
“Yeah. What of it?”
“Well, you’re down here to fix things. Washers and humidifiers and furnaces?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m not a utility that you can fix. I’m broken and bitter and hateful. Better to stick with your tool belt.”
She smiled and cast him a salacious look. “Oh, mama’s very good with tools. You should come and see sometime.”
“Especially if they have batteries,” Coyle said.
“Batteries? Mama don’t use no batteries, boys, she plugs right into direct current.”
“Of course. Why not? Every time the lights dim, she’s going at it, Nicky.”
“Oh, just sometimes,” Gwen said. “Ask Nicky . . . mama’s given him a few presentations he won’t forget.”
Gwen played hard at being a nympho and she did it, Coyle figured, to have the exact opposite reaction that you would think: to scare away men. It could be a hard life for an attractive woman at the stations, so she resolved this by coming on too strong and scaring men away. Oh, it got her into trouble from time to time and especially when the men were drunk and discovered she was just a tease, but, surprisingly, it worked more often than not. Simple child psychology.
And Horn?
Horn was not so easy to explain.
Other than the fact that he was a damn good mechanic, little could be said. He did not trust people. He was nihilistic by nature, cynical, angry. Coyle knew him about as good as anyone, had spent more than a few winters and summers with him. The thing about Horn you wanted to remember was that he fit in no box.
One summer at McMurdo, Horn openly confessed that he had lost his faith. So, since it was gone, he decided he needed to create his own religion. If some half-assed science fiction writer like L. Ron Hubbard could make up something as inherently ridiculous as Scientology, Horn claimed, then why couldn’t he start his own religion, too? He figured that most religious people were religious because down deep they were atheists trying to overcompensate for their pessimistic world-views. So it only stood to reason that somebody with absolutely no faith should start a religion of his or her own.
Horn thought long and hard about it and came up with something called Utilitology.
In Utilitology, only inanimate office utilities such as typewriters, file cabinets, and fax machines could be worshipped. And this only within the cubicles of office parks. His motto was: WHEN ALL ELSE HAS FAILED—UTILITOLOGY. Of course, office parks and cubicles were difficult to come by in Antarctica, so he had to broaden the scope of his new religion. That’s when he decided that Richard Byrd, the noted Antarctic explorer, was to be the patron saint of Utilitology and that somewhere beneath the vast wastes of the South Pole there was a relict population of Penguini, the Chosen Ones, who were brought about by Ernie Shackleton’s men mating with Emperor Penguins.
That’s how nuts Horn was.
Last year at Clime, Coyle and Horn had decided to write a novel together called Asshole of the Civilized World: A Journal of Polar Sodomy. It concerned a famous female American Indian Antarctic explorer called Pokatwatalot who was abducted by a violent band of inbred criminal penguins, viciously raped and forced into prostitution in polar brothels. After a series of unpleasant interludes amongst the smarmy penguin underworld, she was rescued by a dashing—and well-hung—NSF administrator named Hard Tack.
All of which, just goes to show what bored and bitter minds will resort to and just how far around the bend Horn’s thinking was.
“That was a good supper you
made last night, Nicky. I can always tell when you cook compared to Ida or The Beav.”
“Nicky is famous for his beef stroganoff,” Gwen said.
Coyle laughed. “That’s right. And don’t you forget it.”
Gwen pushed up against him. “Mama likes beef, Nicky, especially yours.” She winked at him. “Only yours.”
He gave her knee a squeeze and she grabbed his hand and moved it up to her thigh.
“Enough already,” Horn said. “Jesus Christ, this is serious business. Those people might be dead.”
“That’s right,” Flagg said from the back. “Let’s act like adults here, shall we?”
“You worry too much, Doc,” Gwen said.
“I think we all have a damn good reason to worry.”
Gwen shook her head. “It’s not my way. Too much shit to worry about in life without worrying about things that haven’t even come to pass.”
Coyle smiled. Gwen’s practicality was priceless.
They had been traveling well over an hour by that point. It was about a ninety minute drive to NOAA Polaris. It was a dangerous jaunt. Something went wrong and so much for one mechanic, one UT, one doctor, and one cook . . . and part-time camp therapist. The four of them were bundled in their ECWs, but they’d unzipped their parkas because with the heater blasting it was a balmy 68 degrees in the cab. But all it took was a simple breakdown to turn a little drive into a fight for survival. It was thirty below outside and the wind was pushing it down to fifty. Exposed in that kind of weather, you wouldn’t make it more than a few hours at best, even with a heated polar jumpsuit on.
“We should be getting close,” Flagg said.
In the Spryte’s headlights, there was just an endless expanse of snow compacted by the ages, ancient blue ice showing through from time to time.
Horn picked up the radio mic, cleared his throat. “Polaris-One, Polaris-One, this is Spryte Two,” he said, using the call name/number of the Spryte. It was “Two” simply because there were two Sprytes at Clime, three Sno-Cats etc. “Polaris . . . do you copy? This is Spryte Two from Polar Clime en route to your destination. We have an ETA of ten minutes. Do you copy that?”
There was nothing but droning static over the speaker.
Horn sighed. “Polaris-One, this is Spryte Two. Do you copy? Repeat: Do you copy, Polaris?”
More static.
Nobody paid much attention.
Horn just shook his head. “Technology, the great white god itself has failed once again.”
“Oh, give it to me,” Gwen said, but she didn’t touch the mic.
“Here,” Horn said, offering it to her.
“I never said I wanted the microphone.” She winked at Coyle. “I just said, give it to me.”
Coyle laughed again. “Gwen, Gwen, Gwen. You really have to knock that shit off, girl. You carry on like that and you’re gonna get all the wrong attention. You’ll end up raped and stuffed in a snowdrift.”
“Promises, promises.” She snatched the mic from Horn. “Polaris-One? This is Spryte Two en route from Polar Clime. Do you read me? Do you read me?” She shook the mic. “We’re on our way. We got some hot stuff on the menu. Left-over beef stroganoff or a blowjob, whichever you want first.”
Coyle took the mic from her. “Gwen, Jesus Christ. Hopper’ll have a fit if he heard that.” He checked the radio. It seemed to be working. The GPS told him they were only minutes away. If it had been light out, they could have seen it. “Polaris-One? Polaris-One? Come on, boys, rise and shine. This is Spryte Two out of Polar Clime. Do you copy? Do you copy?”
More static. Dead air and nothing but dead air.
Nobody was surprised, of course. There had been dead air and nothing but dead air from NOAA Polaris in days. There had been a hope . . . albeit a small one . . . that maybe they were having some sort of transmission problems and that as the Spryte got within range, contact would be established.
No such luck.
Outside the cab, the bouncing lights of the Spryte showed them the flat white desolation of the polar plateau blown by surface drift and icy crystals, an occasional howling snow devil. Other than an occasional field of wind-sculpted sastrugi that looked like a rippling, frozen ocean, the landscape was an immense monotonous expanse of bleak nothingness.
“We should see it within five minutes,” Horn said.
Radio communications had a way of going toes up on the Ice . . . yet, Coyle was beginning to get a light fluttery feeling in his stomach. The sort of feeling you got in your guts as your bucket seat on the double Ferris wheel swung up and around the high arc and you had that awful sensation of weightlessness and relentless descent. Gwen had pressed up closer to him. In the dimness of the cab, her eyes looked very bright and wet.
She was no longer making jokes.
Humor, hope, and good cheer had no place out here.
The cabin altimeter said they were some 11,000 feet above sea level now which meant they were at the highest point of the Atlantis Dome and very close to Polaris Lab.
“There,” Gwen said. “There it is.”
Everyone studied what the headlights showed them: the gleaming ice; the flagged perimeters of remote pathways; the blowing snow and spinning ice crystals; the darkness as the beams slit it open, the slinking shadows that looked like they moved and pulled back of their own accord.
The wind was blowing harder now, gusting up to thirty knots and throwing snow at the Spryte with a vengeance. It rocked on its caterpillar treads as the conflicting gales tore at it, trying to peel it free of the ice. This was the result of the awesome katabatic winds which came rolling down from the highlands of the Transantarctics, gathering speed and density from downsloping gravitational forces and became a force to be reckoned with out on the plateau itself.
“There she blows,” Horn said under his breath.
He turned on the spotlights atop the cab and night turned to day . . . or nearly.
The ice road had ended, opening up into a wide clearing and there was NOAA Field Lab Polaris: a self-contained prefab polar habitat that looked like a long orange box. It had been brought out here during the summer by a Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter in one piece and then bolted to the ice. Other than an attendant generator shed and a few modular plastic storage shacks, there was nothing else.
The habitat was dark.
“Looks pretty quiet out there,” Gwen said and there was something just under her words like a building panic.
Horn just sat there, his face unreadable as always. “Maybe they went for a walk.”
“What do you think, Nicky?”
He studied the snow-drifted habitat with a wary eye, feeling a sense of desolation that he did not like. “If they went for a walk,” he said, “I just hope it’s not the same kind of walk everyone at Mount Hobb took that night.”
10
POLAR CLIME STATION
SLIM WAS IN A box and there was no key.
He was trapped in the bowels of Antarctica and it really didn’t matter if he was going crazy, because there was absolutely no way out. If he went raving they’d just shoot him with sedatives and restrain him until spring Winfly. That was it. He was here and April was back home in Illinois with Rachel and they both needed him and there was nothing he could do about it.
He felt useless.
He felt like a failure as a man. As a husband and a father.
He jumped up off his bed and kicked the wall. “FUCKING BULLSHIT, MAN! THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!”
He paced back and forth, thinking and trying not to think, his mind filled with horrors that were, that might be, that were yet to come. The world was losing its collective mind and his family was caught up in it and all he could do was wait and wait and wait. Take sleeping pills and have crazy dreams, fight off the goddamn headaches that came and went with unsettling regularity, and think about the shit that Locke had told him. Dead cities and aliens. Megaliths that were machines or networks. The human race being some kind of fucking crop the aliens had seeded an
d were now preparing to harvest.
Falling to his knees on the cold floor, he thought, I don’t believe in that shit. I don’t care what kind of dreams I’m having or what kind April and Rachel are having . . . I don’t believe in that shit!
And, dear God, if only he really didn’t.
But he did.
The dreams, what was going on down here and back in the world . . . it was all part of something big. Something immense. Something so black and ugly and vile that it made him physically ill to contemplate its awful ramifications.
He climbed to his feet and kicked his little desk, scattered the papers that fell off and dropped on top of them, shredding them and balling them up. Drawings and half-ass attempts at poetry that had been written to explain what was in his mind, that evil influence he’d felt ever since he saw that thing under the tarp.
He hated all of it.
He kept tearing up the papers until he found his battered notebook. The one he wrote his song lyrics in. Because that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to write songs and do album cover design and body art. But those were pipedreams and he had a wife and a kid and, goddammit, he had to pay the bills. That’s why he had come down to Antarctica in the first place.
Kneeling there, Slim wept as he paged through his notebook and saw all the lyrics he’d scribbled there back when the world was good and not some twisted nightmare. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he saw the lyrics of a song he’d written with Locke not two weeks ago. He tore that page out and tossed it. It was like something from another life when he actually knew how to have a good time. It seemed like ages ago. Like something he’d read in a book or saw on TV: plastic, synthetic, unreal.
Life was not like that anymore.
It was a dark matter now written by a dark hand on yellowed vellum that was crumbling away with the dominion of the ages. And knowing this, Slim put his face in his hands and cried. Cried tears of blood for his soul was forever wounded and gored, slit open and laid bare by the cruel knife of antiquity.
And a voice in his head that was stark and flat told him: Even your gods and your religion and the very architecture of your civilization and society were but seeds planted by the Old Ones. Your race never truly had free will or choice, just a vague semblance of the same. You were puppets from the moment your ancestors crawled from the slime of cosmic generation. Every step plotted, every development foreseen. Biologically, mentally, and psychically . . . it was all directed and controlled to bring the race to where it stands now . . . on the very threshold of the ages, where its true nature and true purpose will be revealed.
