They had. Something gigantic and fluttering that looked roughly like a pond hydra, but grown to nightmare proportions. It had to be twenty or thirty feet in length, looking much like an upended tree with a massive root system… a forest of clown-white writhing tentacles. It darted away from the light quickly enough and they only got the briefest glimpse of it. But what they had seen made them pretty sure they wouldn’t be taking any dips in Lake Vordog in the near future.
“Incredible… a mollusk maybe. Certainly squid-like,” Campbell said with a dry voice as if the thing hadn’t scared the hell out of him.
But it had. Without really thinking, all the men in the booth had pulled away from the screen involuntarily. Something like that… white and ghostly and alien… roaming in the darkness, well, it did something to you. Made you think bad thoughts, the kind that could keep you awake at night.
The hydrobot did not go after it, which was a good thing. But Gundry explained that it was programmed to study slow-moving creatures when it could, but not to burn unnecessary energy in any hot pursuits. And that hydra… or whatever in the Christ it was… had been damned fast. Damned fast and damned spooky.
Another bottom-dweller came onto the screen and Hayes had never seen anything like it, either. It looked sort of like a horseshoe crab, but narrowed and lengthened so that it was maybe ten feet long. It was covered in a chitinous exoskeketon that was fish-belly white like most things down there. There were two pairs of spiny walking legs to either side like those of a lobster and a set of hooked chelicerae, pincers, poised out front like they were looking for something to crush. Its plated tail ended in something like a stinger. Overall, it looked like some kind of massive scorpion, but eyeless with no less than four waving antennae.
“My God,” Campbell said. “I don’t believe it. Do you know what that is? A Eurypterid… a sea scorpion. Obviously an evolved form, but a Eurypterid all the same.”
“A new species?” Hayes said.
Campbell laughed. “The Eurypterids are an extinct subclass of arthropods, Jimmy. They died out roughly 200 million years ago… or so we thought. Goddamn!”
The hydrobot passed beyond the reach of the sea scorpion. Everyone in the booth kept watching the screen, seeing more exotic aquatic plants, colonies of tube worms, bizarre giant clams, some inching worms, and what might have been a squid that ducked away quickly. Then the terrain began to grow more rugged, slashed by chasms that dropped hundreds of feet and capped with rolling submarine hills that were set with something like pale yellow kelp. The magnometer on the hydrobot was picking up higher levels of magnetism and honing in on them.
For a time it was pretty much business as usual save for a school of transparent fish… or what looked like fish… and then, Campbell saw something.
“Did you… what the hell was that?”
Hayes had seen something like it before.
A murky oblong shape that darted away from the light. Maybe it was nothing and maybe it was everything. Whatever they were seeing, catching glimpses of, there were more than one of them and they were quick, stealthy. That feeling was back on Hayes again and he couldn’t shake it this time. Because he was thinking things that he didn’t dare say… not out loud. For whatever was out there, he had the feeling it or they were following the hydrobot, but hiding away from the light. The hydrobot was picking up lots of blips, but that in itself meant nothing except that the sea was very alive… which it certainly was.
“I’d like to know what those are,” Parks said. “They remind me of…”
“What?” Gundry asked him.
He shook his head. “Nothing, nothing. Thinking out loud.”
But Hayes knew what he was thinking and he wondered if they all weren’t thinking the same damn thing, seeing those flitting shapes and remembering them from somewhere else and not liking them one bit.
And then -
And then Gundry gasped. “Did you see that? Looked like… well, almost like an arch.”
Parks fumbled over his words, relaxed and tried again. “Some weird volcanic structure. Can’t be an arch down here, not down here.”
But it was gone too quickly before any real guesses could be made. All they could say for sure was that it had looked like an arch jutting from the roiling sediment below. And a big one at that… the hydrobot had passed through it.
Parks, almost nervously, started rambling on about volcanism and how it could shape ordinary rock into the most peculiar shapes. And particularly underwater where the lava flow would cool quite quickly, twisting into the oddest forms that very often appeared man-made… or, in this case, manufactured by an intelligence. For there was no possible way anything down here had ever been touched by man.
The hydrobot continued on, tracking that magnetic anomaly and Parks kept calling out numbers and other than that, there was only the occasional beeping of the computers as they logged what was going on below. The men, other than the geophysicist, were quiet, expectant maybe. Hayes could only speak for himself. His mouth was dry as fireplace soot and he was grinding his teeth and bunching his fists.
The silence was so thick suddenly you could’ve hung your hat from it.
The hydrobot ventured forward, scanning over clusters of things like anemones and spiny urchins and finally great outcroppings of coral. Here was an ecosystem of clinging sponges, pale worms, and bivalves. Primitive bryozoans encrusted like bee honeycombs. Campbell pointed out that, though marine zoology was not his forte, these were either new species or ones long thought extinct.
But he was talking just to be heard, maybe to be comforted by his own voice, as the hydrobot’s magnometer was reading pulses right off the scale. To which Gundry joked offhand that it must be picking up the emissions of some massive electromagnetic generator with the mother of all magnetic cores. But nobody laughed and maybe because they didn’t like the idea of what that alluded to. Because at that particular moment nobody would have been surprised at anything. Had they seen a flying saucer jutting from the lake bed and weeds, they would not have been surprised. For whatever was putting out that kind of raw energy almost certainly had to be artificial.
And then they saw it… or the hydrobot did.
Another arch. And so perfect in form its design could not have been a simple natural abnormality for just beyond it other shapes… rectangular slabs standing upright and others lying flat like ancient tombstones and what might have been a shattered dome rising from the congested weeds. What they saw of it had to have been several hundred feet across, though in fact it was probably quite a bit larger. Jagged cracks were feathered over its surface.
Nobody said anything, not a damn thing because there was more of it all the time, whatever it was they were looking at. Now they were seeing what appeared to be monuments jutting at wild angles like gravestones in some incredibly ancient cemetery. Things like obelisks and monoliths leaning over, wanting to fall… they were coated in a pink slime and set with the holes of borer worms and appeared to be of a vast antiquity. But there was more, always more. Crumbling walls encrusted with colonies of sponges and the carbonate skeletons of long-dead marine organisms.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Gundry said, sounding like he was hyperventilating. “Would you look at that… would you just look…”
Parks kept shaking his head. “A city… something, but down here?”
“Why not?” Hayes said. “Why the hell not?”
Parks couldn’t seem to stop shaking his head. “Because… because this goddamn lake has been cut off from the world, tucked under a glacier for forty-million years, Hayes, that’s why.”