“You left out something,” Cutchen said. “Gates’ little chat the night before he left. People were feeling funny about those fossils of his and Lind’s nervous breakdown, but the things he said to us in the community room were pretty wild. I don’t think there’s a one of us who didn’t come out of that with an inflamed imagination.”
“Sure. I’ll admit to that. But it’s more than imagination, Cutchy, let’s get fucking real here. We didn’t imagine the dreams or Lind’s nervous breakdown or Meiner and St. Ours having their brains boiled to jelly. There’s a common cause for these happenings and it’s right out in Hut Six, like it or not. Because those things are not dead the way we know dead, their minds are still active and maybe that has something to do with the living ones down in the lake, I don’t know, but Gates is right: we’re in terrible danger here. You heard what he said. Those things… they’ve been waiting for us down here, they want to use us. They have plans for us.”
“It’s pretty wild shit, Hayes,” was all Cutchen would say and yet, just behind his eyes, you could see an acceptance of it all.
“Sure, it’s the wildest thing in our history, without a doubt.” There was a big NO SMOKING sign on the wall and Hayes lit up anyway, completely carried away by what he was saying and maybe just happy to be letting it all out of his head. “Imagine them, Cutchy. Try and imagine a race like theirs that is so fucking patient they can wait for us millions of years. And so intelligent, they know that sooner or later, we’ll come down here because we have to.”
“How could they know that?”
“You saw what Gates said… other worlds, other stars… God only knows how many times they’ve watched beings like us evolve until they reached a state where they might be useful to them. No, Gates is right. They knew we’d come. It’s our nature to come down here and they were completely aware of the fact. They’re ancient and they know things we’ll never know. Who knows how many races like ours they’ve cultivated?”
“You make me feel like a potato,” Cutchen said.
“To them, you’re not much more,” Sharkey said.
Hayes didn’t say anything for a time. Maybe he was afraid of what he might say if he opened his mouth. “Rats in a maze, that’s what we are. Just rats running the maze,” he said finally, laughing at something he didn’t seem to find very funny at all. “It’s perfect, isn’t it? We’re trapped down here and they know it. It’s exactly what they wanted. It’s been some time, I think, since they’ve had an ample opportunity to pick away at human minds. But now here we are and here they are. This camp is a great living laboratory and they’ve got months to do whatever it is they want to do.”
“Which is?” Cutchen said
Hayes swallowed. “To harvest our minds.”
PART FOUR
THE HAUNTED AND THE POSSESSED
“The nethermost caverns… are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head.”
26
After he got out of the infirmary, it began to occur to Hayes just how apt his rats in a maze analogy was. It was so apt that he wanted to run screaming out of the compound… except, of course, there was nowhere really to run to. He kept imagining the lot of them there like microbes on a slide while some huge, horrible eye peered down on them gauging their reactions. It was very unsettling.
So, since he couldn’t run, he did the next best thing: he got rid of some snow.
It was something Biggs and Stotts generally did, but after what happened to St. Ours and what they had seen… or not… they weren’t in much shape to do much but hide in their rooms. Rutkowski was doing the same. None of them were as bad off as Lind, but they’d been broken on some essential level.
So Hayes decided he would pick up the slack.
The snow blower they used to keep the walkways clear was basically a big garden tractor with a blower attachment on it and a little cab that kept the wind off you. Hayes was tucked down in his heated ECW’s, so the cold that was hovering around sixty below wasn’t bothering him. The night was black and blowing, broken only by the security lights of the buildings themselves. Hayes moved the tractor along at a slow clip, clearing the walkways that led from Targa House to the drill tower and power station. The secondary paths that connected them with the numerous garages and outbuildings and huts, some of which held equipment and some of which had become makeshift labs. He banked the snow up against the walls of the buildings to help keep them insulated and most, by that point in the long winter, no longer had walls as such, just drifts of snow that sloped from the roofs to the hardpack on the ground. Doorways were cut and windows kept clear, beyond that everything looked like igloos.
He cleared a path to the meteorology dome — Cutchen would appreciate that — and tried to sort out what was in his head. The things Gates had said were exactly the sorts of things Hayes did not want to hear. Just affirmations that all the crazy shit he’d been thinking and feeling were not out and out bullshit, but fact. That was hard to take.
But, then again, everything down here this year was hard to take.
There was so much ugliness, it was hard to take it all in, keep it down. Sharkey said that Lind was getting no better. He no longer was any danger as such and didn’t need to be restrained, but he did need to be watched. She said she considered him to be clinically depressed now. He wouldn’t leave the little sick bay. He sat in there and watched TV, most of which was routed through American Forces Antarctic Network-McMurdo. Sometimes he read magazines. But most of the time he just sat on his cot with his head cocked to the side like a puppy listening for his master’s approach.
And maybe that’s exactly what he’s doing, Hayes thought.
And maybe it was what they were all doing without realizing it. Waiting and waiting. Because, when he thought about it, didn’t that seem almost right? That maybe what he’d been feeling since he stepped onto the frozen crust of Kharkhov Station was a sense of expectancy? Sure, underlying dread and fear and rampant nerves, but mostly expectancy. Like maybe somehow, some way, he’d known what was coming, that they were going to make contact with something.
Sounded like some pretty ripe bullshit when you actually thought about it, framed it into words, but it almost seemed to fit. And maybe, when you got down to it, there was no true way of knowing what was going on in that great soundless vacuum of the human psyche and its subcellar, the subconscious mind. There were things there, imperatives and memories and scenarios, you just didn’t want to know about. In fact, you -
Jesus, what in the hell was that?
Hayes stopped the tractor dead.
Terror punched into him like a poison dart. He was breathing hard, thinking things and not wanting to think them at all. He swallowed. Swallowed again. He thought… Christ, he was almost sure he had seen something over near Hut #6, something the tractor lights splashed over for just an instant. Looked like some shape, some figure pulling away, moving off into the darkness. And it wasn’t a human shape. He peered through the clear plastic shield of the cab. Didn’t see anything now and maybe he hadn’t in the first place.