Mulder blinked and shoved his gloved hand into his pocket, fumbling until he with-drew a flashlight. It clicked on; he swept it up and down in front of him, revealing a terrifying landscape.
He stood in the middle of an endless corri-dor carved into the ice. To the left and right, as far as he could see, were tall glassy shapes, regu-larly spaced on both sides of the passageway, like ice coffins stood upright against the cavern walls. He trained the light on the corridor, marking where it curved off into the distance; turned and did the same in the other direction. Then he spun around and pointed it directly in front of him. Mulder reached to brush frost from the surface ice. He gasped at what he saw.
There was a man frozen in the ice. Naked, his eyes open and staring into some long-forgotten distance. His hair was long and dark and matted, his flattened features oddly inhu-man: broad nose with flared nostrils, pro-nounced brow ridge, lips drawn back to show yellowing peglike teeth. Drawing closer he could see that the man's flesh had the same weird translucence as that of the fireman in the morgue.
Mulder grimaced, then drew back in revulsion as he saw something inside the man: an embryonic creature with huge, oblique black eyes, frozen like its host.
Mulder turned and quickly paced down the dim ice corridor. Where it ended, dim light seeped through several low, arched openings. Mulder dropped to his knees to peer through, and saw before him a brief passage that widened into a sort of balcony. He bellied down on his stomach and pulled himself through the arch, grunting as he scraped against ice and metal. When he reached the other end, he poked his head out onto the bal-cony and gazed up in wonder.
All around him was space, sweeping to a domed ceiling almost inconceivably high above him. He looked down and fought a wave of vertigo; wherever the bottom was, it was at least as far away as the top. Very carefully he pulled himself out, until he crouched on the lip of the balcony—actually a ventilation port opening onto the empty center of the dome. All around him, circling the dome, were count-less other ports; hundreds of them, thousands. Shakily he got to his feet, steadying himself against the wall behind him, and gazed down to the floor of the dome. There, a large central theater glowed with an eerie intensity different from the pale light that emanated elsewhere in the vast space: an icy, almost livid, glow. Leading down to this central theater were sev-eral enormous tubular spokes. One of them angled up past Mulder, perhaps an arm's length away.
It took several minutes for all this to sink in. The scale was too immense, much huger than anything Mulder had ever seen, could even imagine seeing. But strangest and most terrifying of all was what he saw within that central space: row upon row of roughly man-sized pods, dark-colored, hanging in formation from long railings that extended into the dark-ness. He squinted, trying to figure out what they were, and where the seemingly endless rows led; while hundreds of feet above Mulder, another figure gazed in disbelief at what was before him. Within the heated cab of his Sno-Cat, the Cigarette-Smoking Man leaned for-ward to clear a spot on the foggy windshield. Behind him the outlines of the ice station could barely be seen; before him a vague shape grew more distinct, until at last he could see it clearly—
The snow tractor Mulder had abandoned on the ice.
For a long moment, the Cigarette-Smoking Man gazed at the tractor. Then, without a word, he turned his own vehicle, and as quickly as he could, he drove back to the base.
Beneath the ice, Mulder continued to peer into the dimness, tracing the rows of frozen objects in an attempt to determine their origin. As he did so, he noticed that in the furthest recesses of the dome, the rows appeared to be moving. The objects suspended from the rail-ings slid along slowly and rhythmically, one by one clicking into place as though part of some gargantuan machine. He blinked, trying to get a better view, and then saw what he had not noticed before.
On the floor hundreds of feet below him, and within the shadow of those moving rows, lay a discarded cryolitter. Its plastic top had been removed and lay discarded alongside it. Amidst the dull gray bulwarks and stark, com-manding architecture of the dome, it looked surprisingly small and frail, the sole artifact made to human scale. And because of that, it unsettled Mulder more than almost anything else he had seen.
His face grim, he tore his gaze away and once more stared at the long tubelike structure that rose a few feet behind him. It had a small opening, just wide enough that a man might fit inside. Without stopping to think of the dan-ger, Mulder slipped inside.
It was tight, but he could fit. He began to climb down, struggling to see in the near-darkness, hands and feet slipping as he tried to gain pur-chase. The tube felt slippery, almost oily, to the touch, but there were small protuberances like rivets which he could steady himself on. He climbed down for what seemed like hours, fighting exhaustion, when without warning his hands slipped and he began to slide. He strug-gled futilely to stop, but continued until he reached the end of the tube and found himself striking a narrow ledge. He scrambled desper-ately at last managing to hold on.
His breath shuddering, he looked down-ward. As he did so the binoculars slipped from his pocket and fell. He watched them fall, light glinting as they twisted and turned. He waited for the sound of their impact, waited and waited and then held his breath, to make sure he wouldn't miss the sound of them hitting bottom.
He heard nothing. There was no bottom; or if there was, it was so far below him as to be the yawning chasm of a true abyss. He looked downward and saw an unimaginably black and bottomless pit. The sight terrified him. With every ounce of strength that remained, Mulder pulled himself along the ledge, his fingers dig-ging into the slick material, until finally he managed to lift himself up, and then over, onto the inner side.
He took a deep breath, then got to his feet. He was in a sort of corridor, darker and warmer than the one he had left, its walls glistening faintly. He pulled out his flashlight and trained its beam on the tunnel.
He walked carefully following the faint beam of light until he saw before him the cryolitter. He approached it hesitantly, and when he reached it he stood for a long moment. Inside were Scully's clothes and the little gold cross she always wore around her neck. He stooped and picked up the cross, pocketed it, and went on.
It was as though he were inside some hellish abattoir. Throughout the entire length of the corridor, a metal rack was suspended from the ceiling. Hanging from the rack were the pods-the objects he had seen on the upper level. But here it was warm enough that they were not completely frozen. He walked along slowly, his flashlight tracing the outlines of what each cryopod held: a human body, barely visible behind a very thin sheath of green ice.
But the faces that stared out from these pods were not the crude, proto-human visages of the thing he had seen above. These were men and women like himself. Each had a dis-turbingly organic-looking tube protruding from his or her mouth. Their eyes were wide, gazing out with blind, confused horror, as though they still looked upon whatever dreadful apparatus had frozen them alive.
Rapt with dread, Mulder walked alongside this malign carousel, staring at first one face, then another.
Trying not to admit to himself, even now, what he was looking for—who he was looking for—until he saw her.
"Oh, Christ," he whispered.
He drew up short in front of a wall of green ice. There, within one of the frozen cysts, her features unmistakable, was Scully. Her russet hair rimmed with snow, her eyes turned heav-enward. A tube protruded from her mouth, and she had a look of horror on her face.