Nine thousand feet beneath them, the plane, still under control by the alien entities, banked along a continuous orbital loop safely outside the range of ground zero and the destructive residual effects of the total annihilation of what must have been an immense extraterrestrial complex hidden beneath thousands of years of ice accumulation.
If each man on board the LC-130 had thought prior to that moment that their worst nightmare was yet to come, it would have been grossly understated. The mother ship, the size of which was beyond human imagination, suddenly appeared out of nowhere at the same altitude, hovering threateningly above the Mulock Glacier. Its enormity filled the sky, and collectively, these men would not be able to precisely relate its monstrous dimensions.
The orbital path circling the Mulock Glacier over the area of what would later be understood to have been the perimeter of the alien complex was ringed by the twelve accompanying saucer disks. They were spaced evenly apart like the cardinal points on a clock, the whiteness glowing with extreme intensity.
The LC-130 continued to bank along an arc outside of the ringed disks in a perfect circular pattern. The air movement at this altitude was as placid as the ice below it. But the calmness was not to last, as the great vortex that would be created by the momentous melting of the glacial ice would produce an atmospheric disturbance so violent that all of the men on board the aircraft felt for certain that this was the end to which the aliens had brought them.
An enormously wide beam of dark green light projected downward from the belly of the behemoth mother ship, and it bathed the surface of the glacier spanning an area that encompassed what they judged to be at least three miles wide. All later agreed it covered the area which included not only the crevasse, but the encampment and runway as well. The Antarctic glacial moraine was suddenly transformed from a white panoramic landscape into a bubbling cauldron, the sight of which no man had ever witnessed before.
The power of the green beam, a destructive force so awesome that the human mind could not even conceive of its power, almost instantly vaporized the ice sheet penetrating all the way down to what presumably was the rocky earth upon which the alien complex had been built. One man on board would later describe it…as if you poured a glass of water into a frying pan burning with hot grease on the stove.
A mushroom cloud of steam exploded upward into the still atmosphere creating an enormous whirlwind that immediately sucked everything off the ground along with it. It shot skyward like a volcanic eruption, everything that was below instantly vaporizing what had moments ago been all the complex molecules that for millions of years lay dormant as the basic construct of the earth in this place. In a brief few seconds of time, all that had been this portion of the Mulock Glacier—including the ancient alien complex below that had been preserved in secret for tens of thousands of years—simply no longer existed.
The mother ship, momentarily going unnoticed by the men on board the LC-130, had somehow blinked off to the side of the rising cloud out beyond the orbital path of the aircraft. As the plane moved through the air some distance away from the cloud, suddenly the air turbulence intensified, threatening to tear the fragile aircraft into pieces. The wind buffeted the wings, stressing the airframe to the point where everyone on board was certain that the end time had arrived and they would drop from the sky into the oblivion below.
The de-pressurization of the immediate atmosphere within a several mile radius of the orbiting plane created a series of air pockets that bounced the plane around like a piece of debris flapping in the breeze. The air turbulence became so intense at one point that the men’s eyeballs were jarred with such force that they were unable for a few moments to focus on the devastation still continuing below.
As the plane flew its pre-destined flight path through the hurricane-force cloud of turbulence still rising from the glacier, they watched horrified at the awesome power of the aliens. What was left beneath them after the initial detonation appeared now as a bubbling cauldron of molten magma, and as another man later put it…a volcano could not have frightened me more than the terror I felt looking down into the mouth of that hell.
When the atmosphere immediately surrounding the area of the glacial valley finally stabilized, most of the men on board the LC-130 were too busy praying to comprehend that somehow the aircraft had managed to stay structurally intact. Whether the aliens had a design in that would never be understood. Most aircraft engineering experts, upon later evaluating the eyewitness accounts of the incident, unanimously agreed that considering what had taken place in the air, the LC-130 should have disintegrated. But the fact remained that it had not.
No one would be able to recall precisely when it was that the mother ship and the twelve disks departed. Whether they had left in grandiose fashion, or simply blinked out as they had appeared so often, no one knew. Only one fact remained. They were not to be seen again on the Mulock Glacier. They would be seen only once more in the land of Antarctica.
The LC-130, after having made numerous orbits around the Mulock Glacier along the alien-chosen flight path, suddenly leveled to the precise heading the pilot had previously set for McMurdo. The yoke controls unlocked. The pilot had to fly the plane by himself all the way back to McMurdo. Marshall Abbott sat in the co-pilot’s chair beside him to ensure the pilot—and everyone else for that matter—that the extraordinary event was now ended. Some of the men stared off into space in shock, including the co-pilot who would later remember very little. Marshall Abbott, Mike Ruger, and the rest of their group would forever remember the parting image of the Mulock Glacier as the plane banked away tangent from the orbit.
Pure white steam now rose slowly skyward even as the massive pool of bubbling magma began the rapid cooling process. Huge walls of ice rising hundreds of feet high above the pool of molten rock began breaking off in gigantic chunks, falling into the bubbling caldera. The process would continue like that for the next several days until the molten pool was cooled down enough to form the initial crust, and the vaporization of the ice would slow to where the newly-formed crater would begin to fill with water from the melt. It would take only a day beyond that for the frigid air to reclaim the liquid water and turn the lake back into a frozen mass.
The rising steam would dissipate enough in a day for aerial reconnaissance photographs to clearly show the devastation that had taken place. And yet, in the aftermath of this most extraordinary of events, evidence of this newest sea of ice, in the days and months to come, would be silently erased by a power that not even the aliens could match. For Antarctica is ice, and ice is Antarctica. It would reclaim all that previously was. The Visitors may have been here through the millennia, but even they are ephemeral. In this time, in this place, on this most unique of planets, only The Ice remained eternal.
Chapter 21
FEBRUARY 11, 20--
RUSSIAN RESEARCH FACILITY
AT VOSTOK
1:19 A.M. GMT
The base doctor had insisted that Vassili Pietrovich spend a day or so in the infirmary or at least away from his duty station, but all that accomplished was creating a greater amount of friction than what already existed. After the harrowing experience a day ago, the base doctor was concerned about Pietrovich’s psychological state of mind. For after all, close encounters—the Russian scientists unabashedly embraced the term—were nothing new to the Russian agenda, which treated them more openly, unlike the American scheme of debunking when dealing with this type of business.
Pietrovich had been ordered to take at least one day off, but his commanding officer, the base manager, later recanted the order when such a furor developed. What was the difference? Pietrovich argued, whether he was isolated in the communications center or isolated in the drab infirmary or his cramped quarters? He might as well continue his function. Besides, the whole base had experienced the anomaly. He only happened to be the one at the front line closest to whatever those things had been. But whatever the motivation or rationale for the change in decision b
y the base manager, Vassili Pietrovich was back at work in the outer station.
It was at precisely at one nineteen a.m.—the exact time when the event had started twenty four hours ago—that things began to happen all over again. Pietrovich had been sitting at the console in front of the low band receiver when suddenly the lights in the entire facility began to flicker. Just like they had twenty-four hours ago. And when the whole center abruptly went eerily silent for the second time, Pietrovich thought his heart had momentarily stopped beating. Cold fear shot through his body like stinging needles. Vassili Pietrovich began to pray to his God for deliverance, for he was sure that this time the demons were going to end his life on this earth.
The sequence of events that began happening were the same except for one detail. Yesterday there had been twelve images on radar tracking. Today there was only one. He glanced over his shoulder at the enormous blip on the green display screen. Either the object was hovering so close to the facility that it was probably going to squash it into the ground, or the thing was so massive that the radar signature was humongous. Or maybe both.
As fear enshrouded the helpless man, he tried desperately to control his shaking hands, but his terror was so acute that it became as if blinders were pressing against his peripheral vision. He looked straight ahead, too horrified even to want to look around the room anymore. This isn’t happening! Please tell me this isn’t happening again! His heart thumped inside his chest cavity, and he swore it was the only sound that reverberated in the room for several minutes.
But it was deja vue all over again. Just like before, the radio receiver in front of him—the very same one through which the Morse code message had emanated yesterday—crackled to life all by itself while every other device in the room remained eerily silent. The dial began spinning through the frequencies, the digital readout on the blue LED’s changing rapidly. Pietrovich’s eyes were focused solely on the readout. He knew where the numbers were going to stop. On 3200 KHz.
For a moment, everything was silent again. Pietrovich knew that the frequency was open, his keen sense of listening to radio communications all these years telling him that a transmission line was open, but at this moment free of any radio frequency interference. He waited, terrified by what he anticipated was certainly going to happen next.
The message poured through the receiver. This time, Vassili Pietrovich did not bother to jot it down. The dots and dashes were just as clear and precise as they had been yesterday. The same two simple English words repeated over and over again.…
COME OUTSIDE…COME OUTSIDE…COME OUTSIDE…
The message jarred him. Spinning around, he looked at the radar scope again. The massive blip was still there, stationary. He knew what was to happen next. Moving his hands up to cover his eyes from the brightness he knew was only seconds away, he arose from the chair and walked toward the clothes rack where he had hung his outer garments. The brightness was intense only for a few seconds, and the familiar pulsating of the different colors once again seemed to filter through every crack in the structure.
The message continued to emanate from the receiver even as Pietrovich was getting dressed, constrained by some unknown force that seemed to compel him to accomplish this task. His hands still trembled wildly as he fumbled to pull the zipper up on his bib overalls. Pulling the parka hood over his head, he stepped into the outer portal of the facility. Then he opened the outer door and stepped into the Antarctic night.
There was a deathly silence all around, and even the wind had abated into nothingness. The furry hood wrapped around his head extended several inches to the front, cutting off his peripheral vision. He peered directly ahead. The bright blue beam was perhaps only twenty yards in front of the outer door, touching the ground directly over the pathway, extending skyward like a giant column holding the heavens at bay. So great was his terror that Vassili Pietrovich could not at first bring himself to look upward toward the obvious source of the blue beam.
He stood motionless for several minutes, helpless with abandon. Then slowly, compelled, he raised his eyes toward the heaven. What he saw was beyond human description. Its enormity blotted out the entire sky. His knees buckled and he crumbled to the ground. And then, in the midst of the blue beam, there suddenly appeared four forms that were descending rapidly down through the shaft as if riding on a plunging elevator. The descent slowed, coming to a gentle stop when the forms reached ground level.
For another moment, Pietrovich waited on his knees for whatever fate was going to befall him next. Then quite unexpectedly, the blue beam blinked out. Above in the sky, there was a subtle trace of pulsating colors. And then there was nothing. The enormous object had vanished with an instantaneous blink.
For how long he remained on his knees staring up into the empty sky, Pietrovich would not later be able to recall. But for certain, a period of time elapsed before Pietrovich came to his senses. It was the frigid wind brushing against his face finding its way down along his skin beneath the garments. He shuddered at the coldness, and the shiver went along his spine forcing him to get off his knees and stand up.
For a few brief moments, he had forgotten about the four figures that had come down the blue shaft of light. His knees buckled momentarily again as the four forms stood unmoving only twenty yards away, their heads bowed low to where Pietrovich could not see their faces. Their attendance certainly appeared to be in human form. Unsure of whether they were even aware of his presence, Pietrovich gathered all his courage and slowly moved toward the silent forms.
As he made his approach, the forms began stirring, as if his own movement had suddenly triggered their awareness. By the look of their initial reaction to the predicament, all four of the figures must have been asleep as they began stretching their limbs. Pietrovich stopped a few yards from them. The four figures at first looked at each other. Then at Pietrovich. He could see their open faces rimmed by the furry parka hoods. Whether their look of astonishment was because of him or not was immaterial.
They were people, all right. Three men and a woman. For another minute, all five of them stood silent and unmoving. And then the cold wind seemed to shock each of them back into the reality of the harsh Antarctic environment. The woman wrapped herself in her arms to ward off the coldness, and Pietrovich suddenly became overwhelmed with compassion. He found himself for some reason responding in English, “Come inside with me. It’s warm there.”
He heard a whispered thank you from the woman before he extended his arms for her to hold onto, as she appeared to be weak when she stepped forward. The other three men quickly regained their strength and started moving around for several seconds.
A minute later, all four of them were moving around, stretching their limbs, clearing the cobwebs from their heads. Pietrovich could only watch with bewilderment as four desperate souls tried to re-orient themselves into reality. He heard the men asking each other, What happened? Where was I? Where were you? The last thing I remember…and confused faces only stared at each other, silent. And then abruptly the four strangers were again quiet. They all turned toward Pietrovich who stood helplessly in front of the group, his arms extended as if to welcome them from their sojourn, wherever that might have been.
One of the men stepped slowly forward, stopping a few feet in front of him. The man looked back at his other three comrades, who now were all focused on the trembling Pietrovich. Turning again to face Pietrovich, the man reached out a hand in greeting and said in a low, distinct voice, “My name is John Lightfoot…”
For the first time in his life, Vassili Pietrovich passed out.
Chapter 22
FEBRUARY 11, 20--
U. S. McMURDO STATION
3:30 P.M. GMT
There is a silence in Antarctica. It is not an undisturbed silence, for nature resounds in all her fury. It is rather a silencing of humans, not because of their absence, but because Antarctica permits them to say very little.
The frigid breeze blew gentle against his
face weaving through the thick beard until it found its way down inside his collar. He shivered, but it made him feel alive. He closed his eyes momentarily to take in the peacefulness of the quite isolation.
He opened his eyes. Mike Ruger tried to sort through the events of the past thirty six hours. To say their arrival back at McMurdo was anything but hectic would be an understatement. When the plane finally touched down, Ruger thought Hilliard Grimes was going to dive out through the cargo door to be the first one to kiss the ground. Aside from that, there were several minutes of mass confusion. It wasn’t until some time later when things calmed down that the impact hit home. They had lost four of their comrades. He had lost Allison.
But questions had to be asked and somebody wanted the answers right away. Despite total exhaustion—even the Base Manager Jimmy Morrison argued with the military doctors that these men should be allowed to take a hot shower, eat, and rest for a bit—there was too much going on for anybody to calm down.
Ruger took a back seat to Marshall Abbott who continued arguing with both base and military officials over the confidentiality of what had occurred out on the Mulock Glacier. Government classified material. None of the military’s business. A whole lot of shouting and hollering. At this point, Ruger didn’t care anymore how they told their story or who they told it to. It was over. But even worse than that, he felt the pain of a terrible loss. An anger and hatred far greater than he had ever known. His feelings for Allison Bryson had grown with such subtle intensity that it took all this time for him to realize just how much he had fallen in love with her.
And now she was gone. Ruger had been adamant against her going out on the glacier in the first place, but the maddening politics of this rotten society we live in have no regard for personal lives. About as little as those alien beings they’d encountered have for the whole human civilization. We’re all tools for somebody’s agenda in one way or another.
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