The Spawning (29 page)

He really couldn't do a thing.

His senses were shut right down along with his mind and the only clear and rational thought that came through the haze was a creeping invasive knowledge that there was no going back now. That once you had seen something like this and acknowledged what it was, nothing could ever be the same again.

And this was the aftereffect of looking upon the thing.

And, worse, having it look at
him.

D
RYDEN WAS INTRIGUED BY their reactions.

Not only were they instantaneous, but positively violent and physical.

Interesting. When they'd located the specimen in a narrow vertical fissure at the rear of the cavern, his own reaction had been a curious mixture of fear and awe. Stone had gasped for breath. And Kenneger, for reasons only Kenneger understood, began to laugh with a cold dry cackling.

Those had been first reactions.

It had been several days now since they chopped it out in a single block of ice and man-hauled it out of the crevice. Something that would have been near-impossible if the floor of the crevice had not been made of slippery, glossy ice. But now here it was. You got used to it after awhile. Not comfortable with it exactly, but accustomed to it the way you might become accustomed to a malignancy inside you that had no intention of leaving . . . this side of the grave.

Lieutenant-Commander Beeman had not spoken while Warren had his episode. He had not even gone to the man's aid. He just stood there, staring, slapping his ice-axe against his leg after the tarp was pulled off the specimen, almost transfixed. While Stone took Warren away to the Polar Haven to rest in the warmth, Dryden stayed out there with Beeman and Kenneger.

And if Dryden was intrigued by the reaction of the men from above, then Kenneger was almost amused. There had always been something quite cold and almost cruel about the hydrologist, but it was much worse now. Much worse since he looked upon the thing. When Warren folded up, he smiled. He actually
smiled.

Beeman just shook his head. “So this it, eh?” he said like the thing was not exerting an overwhelming influence upon him. Like it was nothing. “So this is the big, bad boogeyman everyone's afraid of down here?”

“More or less,” Dryden said.

Beeman spit on the ice and then spit again as if his mouth was filling rapidly with saliva the way it did right before someone threw up. “Well . . . well . . . it's one ugly prick. I'll give it that much.”

Kenneger kept smiling. “Oh, come now, Commander. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all that. I'm sure this creature wouldn't consider you attractive either. Nor would a spider. But they might find their own appearances riveting.”

“Riveting, eh?” Beeman said, blowing out a cloud of frost. “Well, only a fucking scientist would think something like that.”

Dryden raised an eyebrow.

He knew Beeman quite well by this point. He was dutiful, efficient, conscientious, almost servile to the higher mantra of the U.S. Navy itself . . . but he generally kept his opinions to himself like a good little cog in the machine and when he did voice them, they were usually directly in line with naval policy. He was always careful of what he said, what he did, his future in the Navy being dependent on his conduct and his ability to keep his mouth shut.

But now, apparently, that had changed.

There was something in Beeman's eyes that had not been there before, a dirty sort of light, an intensity and maybe an intolerance for what had been chopped from the ice and maybe even for science in general.

Though Dryden's winter project here in the Emperor was NSF-sanctioned, most of it was underwritten by the Navy. And that's why they'd stuck him with Beeman. So the Navy would have a visible presence in the proceedings. Dryden hadn't wanted the military anywhere near this. But the powers that be had insisted.

Thinking about it, he grinned inwardly.

A game. That's what it was. Once the ice cave had been located, they brought Dryden in to run the project. He selected whom he wanted. Got any materials or resources necessary. And all for a glaciology study that could probably have waited for spring. Winter field projects were very risky with the cold and weather and isolation, but the NSF had been most adamant that research begin. Dryden wasn't stupid. With the Navy involved and the stories filtering out of Antarctica since the Kharkov Tragedy, he could put two and two together.

What they had found in the fissure was what this was about.

What it had always been about.

Standing there with Beeman and Kenneger, Dryden looked away from the men, studying the mammoth cavern around him. It was spectacular, really. You could have tucked a city block neatly into it and still had plenty of room. The walls were formed of that glossy electric blue-green ice which was set in gigantic columns, shimmering ridges, and sparkling towers. There were numerous crevices and tunnels, some leading deeper into the glacier itself and others opening up into bottomless crevasses. Everywhere he looked, branching dendritic ice crystals grew in amazing profusion and crystalline complexity, the ceiling arched like a dome, thousands of giant icicles suspended up there. The ice refracted the artificial lighting, creating an almost luminous field of rich blue illumination.

As a glaciologist, Dryden knew that ice caves were formed by the movements of the glaciers themselves, by seasonal periods of thaw and freezing. They were not static things generally, sometimes ones that had been accessible for years were sealed by the glaciers while new ones opened up. It happened all the time.

This is what he knew as a scientist.

But as a man he couldn't get past the idea that the cave was a tomb.

Kenneger and Beeman were still staring at the specimen, each in their own respective ways. Kenneger had that crooked little smile on his face which was about as friendly as a knife cut. And Beeman's lips were trembling, sometimes pulling away from his teeth. His eyes were huge, black, and glistening. They did not blink.

In that blue glow, his face had the pallor of a corpse. “Somebody . . . somebody ought to take that damn thing and drop it in the deepest crevasse he can find. You know? We're just better off not looking at it, not seeing it, not . . . knowing about it or having it know about us.”

Dryden was waiting for some inappropriate comment from Kenneger, but it never came.

The three of them just stood there, faces lit green, breath puffing out in white clouds while the thing before them looked at them from its block of clear blue ice and the glacier cracked and popped, bits of ice dropping from the walls and ceiling.

Dryden had been avoiding looking at the thing in the ice, but now his eyes swam back in its direction. And it was like he had no real choice in the matter.
Look at it,
he thought then.
It's not some harmless fossil or curious relic whose threat has been nullified by death and the passage of eons. There's something very vital about it as if it's just sleeping, waiting to wake up. That's unscientific as hell. But you know it. You feel it. There's life in that thing, vitality, a disturbing sense of awareness. And anybody who looks upon it feels the same way. That thing has a dire effect on the human mind and that's because it is an evil thing from an evil race.

He knew he should cover it back up with the tarp, but he couldn't seem to move. Almost as if he were paralyzed. So he just looked and felt his blood run cold in his veins. He was no biologist; he could not classify the thing. Stone was a biologist, but his thing was microbes so he didn't even attempt the job. But who really could? In its casket of ice, the creature stood maybe seven feet tall. Its body was gray and leathery-looking, rounded like a barrel and tapering at each end. It had legs on the bottom . . . or something
like
legs, walking appendages anyway . . . that looked more like coiling serpents. It had wings, too, that were accordioned to either side.

How did you classify something like that?

It was alien, unnatural.

It had a head, too. Up on top, a bloated knob of a head with five fleshy projections that looked like writhing worms with an eye at the end of each that was the lurid purple-red of bloodclots and obscenely translucent. Those eyes were the things that got you. That stared holes right through you and made something inside you run like hot wax. To Dryden, they looked very much like the bulbs of flowers opening from wrinkled sockets.

“And you want to thaw it out?” Beeman said, directing those eyes, those awful wrath-filled eyes on Dryden now. Gesturing at him with his blue-chromed ice-axe. “You and these fucking eggheads want to thaw this . . . this goddamn
atrocity
like a steak on a plate? Oh, now that's good. That's all I need to know about science and scientists. That really takes the cake.”

“We're not thawing it, Lieutenant-Commander. Not here.”

Beeman trembled, shivered, his face corded and tense. “Well, that's good, Doc, that's real good. Because, see, I won't allow it. You melt that thing out and I'll soak it with gasoline and burn it. I swear to God, I will. I won't have that fucking thing running around down here, doing God knows what.” He was being irrational, but nobody dared mention the fact. His eyes were filled with a stupid, mad hatred and nobody wanted to be on the receiving end of it. “Ugly fucking thing. I know what it's about. I know what it wants and I'm not going to let it have it. Understand?”

Kenneger grinned. “But that's why we're here, Commander.”

“You're here for the glacier! To study the Emperor! That's what I was told!”

“You were lied to,” Kenneger told him without a drop of sympathy in his voice. “We were all lied to right from the start. But, you see, the rest of us
knew
it was a ruse. We knew they wanted one of these things and would stop at nothing to get one–”

“Kenneger . . .” Dryden said.

“Because that was the purpose, Commander. To get one of these creatures. To thaw it. To let it live again. To unleash it here in these caves in the utter isolation of the Beardmore with only the eight of us here. Only eight lives. Not too much to ask to harvest the secrets of the stars themselves, eh?”

Beeman fumed.

“In science, we call that a
controlled experiment.
The isolation provides a sterile environment with no risk of contamination from outside factors.” Kenneger laughed. “Lab rats. We're just lab rats.”

Dryden didn't bother trying to disagree with Kenneger.

Because essentially, he was right.

That's what it was about.

That's what it had always been about.

Dryden was no fool. God knows he'd heard things through private channels. That the whole Kharkov business was not a fiction but a fact. That they had uncovered some of these things and the entire crew, save two, died as a result. The NSF knew what was going on down here just as it knew that these things were behind it.

One of Dryden's colleagues who had spent two summers at a remote field camp at the foot of the Mulock Glacier said the early expeditions to Antarctica—and the Transantarctic mountains in particular—had whispered about these things and that during Operation Highjump in the 1940's, they had secured several frozen corpses from mountain caves which were still locked away at secure cold storage facilities.

Why perpetuate the bullshit machine?

Kenneger was telling the truth.

Paxton and Reese had come out of one of the crevices now, were staring at Beeman.

“I've had nightmares ever since I looked at it,” Dryden confided.

“You're not the only one,” Paxton said. “We're all having ‘em.”

Dryden swallowed. “Let's just cover it back up. I plan on keeping it frozen. At least until spring.”

Beeman was staring at him. “Yeah, Doc? Well, maybe the thing has other plans. You ever consider that? You ever consider it might be–”

“Alive?”
Kenneger said. “Yes, of course, Commander. Because it
is
alive. Look at it. Look at it and tell me it's not. Maybe not alive as we understand such things, but certainly capable of living again. And it's aware. It's looking at us. It's looking right at us and thinking about us. Can't you feel it–”

At that moment, whatever was bubbling in Beeman ever since he set eyes on the thing just boiled right over. His eyes went bright and savage. His mouth hooked into a snarl and he made a guttural, growling sound that did not even sound remotely human.

He charged right at Kenneger, the ice-axe raised to strike.

Kenneger had time to cover his face and that was about it.

But the axe never descended.

Beeman was seeing the thing in the ice and nothing else, driven by a relentless and instinctual hatred. He knocked Kenneger on his ass and went right over him and right at the frozen thing. And then the axe was rising and falling as it bit into the block of ice, chips and chunks spraying as the blade cut into the block and he tried to get at what was inside.

Paxton and Reese charged in, taking hold of him and he almost casually threw them to the ice.

And when they were down, he stood above them with the axe raised to strike . . . then he tossed it away, covered his face with his hands and collapsed. His eyes rolled back white and that was it.

Dryden quickly covered the thing up with the tarp.

“Jesus,” Reese said. “Did you see that?”

“He won't be the last,” Kenneger said. “It'll get to all of us like that.”

And Dryden knew he was right.

C
OYLE WAS IN THE Galley, listening to the wind shake the dome and pouring liquid eggs into an industrial-sized bowl. Standing there with a whisk in his hand that wasn't much smaller than a baseball bat, Frye came in with Gut, both suited up in their ECWs from a brisk morning of plowing the roads and snowblowing the drifted walkways. Not true snow, just drift that blew around daily making a mess of things. True snowstorms weren't as common as most thought in Antarctica. Mostly the snow was old snow. But now and again, a good storm could get born at sea or up in the mountains and bury the stations in a matter of hours.