He followed Spiff and Andrea and some others down the ramp into the archway of the old station. In the tunnel it was black as the pit, and by the time his sight returned he was past the geographical pole’s pole and being led into the center of the domed area. Next to the box that had held the old galley there was a round railing and a round trapdoor, like the cover of a giant sewer hole. “This is the old utilidor,” Spiff said up to Wade. “Follow me.”
Wade climbed down a metal ladder so cold he had to yank on his hands to get them to detach from the rungs. At the bottom of the ladder a flashlight beam revealed that ice-crystal flowers had covered everything to the point that it was impossible to tell what was under them. It was like spelunking in a white cave. Spiff brushed off a handful of crystals, and jammed it in his mouth after a swallow from his flask. “Scotch snow-cone,” he mumbled. “Real good. This is the utilidor.”
“Which is?” Wade said, watching their breath freeze and fall to the floor.
“It was the passageway they used to work on the guts of the old station. Cold down here.”
“Yes it is.”
“Sixty-six below, all the time.”
“Sixty-six below?”
“Fahrenheit. That’s right. You can imagine the guys working down here on some busted plumbing or broken wiring or the like. And this was before heated gloves.” Now they were moving along at a good speed, crouched under a ceiling of ice chrysanthemums, and when Wade slowed down Andrea pinched him in the butt. “Now here’s the start of the tunnel to the rest of the underground complex.”
“Complex?”
“That’s right. Did they tell you about old old station?”
“No.”
“Not possible! Those guys. The old station above us here is not the oldest station. The old old station is the one they built back in the IGY, in 1956. It’s about thirty meters under the surface now. The buildings are all getting squished, but there’s a fair amount of space down there still, and a lot of stuff.”
They ducked through a hole at the end of the utilidor, and stepped into a tunnel walled by crystal-coated plywood, which was bowed in at the sides, and down from the ceiling, and up from the floor, and in places even shattered. “It’s okay,” Spiff said. “It’s a slow-motion process. Now we don’t even mess with plywood, because we can remelt the holes so easily with the new laser melters.”
“So you cut this tunnel?”
“Parts of it were cut by a number of different people. Here, look here.” He gestured in a side door at what looked like a closet, with a mattress on the floor and some boxes next to it. “This is really old. There was a winterover when one guy started only showing up for dinners, and no one knew where he was the rest of the time. Then several seasons later the seismograph crew came through and found this place. He must have brought in a lamp, and maybe a space heater. But when they found it there was only a single page from a Playboy, and this stuff here.”
“Wow,” Wade said, peering into this memorial to mental illness.
“They keep it on the route to remind people to be more active in their resistance. See, NSF and ASL think they own this station, they think it’s here for beakers like me, but the people who work here, they know better. They know a lot that NSF doesn’t know about this place.”
They moved on in the frigid tunnel, past a side tunnel that ran, Spiff said, to a crashed Herc buried at the end of the landing strip; then down a branch tunnel that led into the quiet zone, where Spiff shouted out “Hey Ed, come on, we’re going to go sliding!”
No response, so they went down and pounded on the door. It opened, and a pony-tailed head stuck out. “Six of you, three in bunny boots, three in tennis shoes.”
“Right again. This is Wade. Ed can identify the number and footwear of his visitors by reading his seismographs.”
“As well as Chinese nuclear tests, oil exploration blasts anywhere in the southern hemisphere, rocket launches from Canaveral, arguments my ex gets into with her new victims, and dropped bowling balls in Iowa.”
“Sensitive instrumentation,” Wade ventured.
“You bet.”
Ed scribbled an explanation for the sudden explosion of squiggles on the paper rolls slowly emerging from his machines, and followed them down the tunnel.
Another half hour’s freezing walk, and then they climbed down a ladder set in a crack, into another station. Wade looked around, amazed.
This station was crystallized entirely. The walls were buckled, the ceiling in some places only waist high. In the flashlight gleams it looked like a museum exhibit of artifacts from the 1950s, shattered and crystallized. Thick wires looped down like strings of jewels, or the long-sunken rigging of a shipwreck. “Don’t worry, there’s no power here anymore.”
“So you say.”
“No electricity, then. Here, let’s go to the galley. See, look in here.”
Wade noticed that no one was behind them anymore. “Where are the others?”
“Oh, they’re setting up the slide. Here, take a look.”
Wade followed the astronomer into the next broken-walled white cave. Here tables were still covered with china plates and Styrofoam cups, and the walls had shelves of condiments and galley equipment—just like the old station he had already visited, in fact, except more iced-over. A pair of dirty bunny boots on a table. A big coffee pot. Heinz catsup. Over in the corner on the floor lay a spill of rib-eye steaks, badly freezer-burned, and topped by what looked like a human turd.
“This was the first permanent settlement,” Spiff said. “They lived here about twenty years. It was mostly Jamesways buried in the snow, and some bigger plywood boxes, and the connecting archways.”
“Incredible.”
“Yeah. But listen to this. There was a lot of stuff down here just a few years ago, that isn’t here anymore. Most significantly, a big generator. They even considered pulling it when they built the current station, and putting it back to work, because there was nothing wrong with it. But it wouldn’t meet the safety codes and so on. In the end they just left it here. But two seasons ago we came down here, and it was gone.”
“Gone from down here?”
“Exactly. So how did it get out of here, you ask?”
“I do.”
“So did we. We went to every corner of this station that hadn’t been crushed, to try and find out. And on the far side of the station, near where the generator was, we found a snow wall that had been repacked. We cut through it, and there was a tunnel like ours, going off in the other direction. There were wheel marks in the floor. And that tunnel went on for ten kilometers.”
“Not possible.”
“I agree, but there it was! And then it came up to the surface, where there was a little trapdoor covered by snow. And outside that, the polar cap. Nothing else. We were over the horizon from the station. We had gone under the snow the whole way. And no sign of where they went.”
“None?”
“No tracks of any kind!”
“How could that be?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe a helo had dropped people, but there are no helos on the polar cap. Ed thought a hovercraft might have come in, but I thought the sastrugi weren’t disturbed enough.”
“Are there any hovercraft on the polar cap?”
“Yes, there’s an old Hake at the oil camp on Roberts Massif.”
“So you think they took the generator?”