A Dream of Ice (23 page)

Both women remained silent as, one by one, Adrienne passed the items from the tray. She didn't speak again until there was only one artifact remaining.

“This is impossible,” Adrienne said.

“Isn't it, though?” Flora asked with an edge of delight. Her ears were pounding slightly and she felt warm but not enough to be concerned.

“Dr. Davies, I don't think you realize—they don't all fit in the node. The artifacts are helping each other. You're sure they're not magnetic?”

“Wood? Fabric?” Flora said.

“They could still be affected by any magnetic fields in the stones.”

“No.” Flora slid the last artifact onto the top of the stack. “They are not magnetic. The other objects are not being impacted by paramagnetism or diamagnetism. We did those tests.” Then she just stood there and looked at them.

“I just want to remind you that you've been in there for well over two minutes. How do you feel?” Adrienne asked.

“Wonderful, actually,” Flora replied. “It's . . . clean here. Pure. I don't know how else to describe it.”

Adrienne's eyes shifted from the objects to the Group's director. It was the first time she'd seen her smile like this. “Dr. Davies, why are you obsessed with these?”

“A scholar's interest in the inexplicable.”

“No,” Adrienne said. “A scholar would be publishing articles about these in journals, and asking every scientist and researcher she could contact for help with studying them.”

Flora ignored her.

“You're keeping secrets,” Adrienne said.

Again, she made no reply.

“Who or what are you protecting?” Adrienne asked. “What did you cover up a death for?”

Flora turned ever so slightly and glanced back. “What death?”

“My predecessor,” Adrienne said. “I asked around, I heard about Arni Haugan.”

Flora smiled mirthlessly. “You appear to be a better detective than you are a scientist.”

“Not fair and not true,” Adrienne said.

Flora turned her back on the younger woman.

“Any idea what really happened to Haugan?” Adrienne asked.

“The artifact,” Flora said grudgingly. “But we don't know how. We have no idea what he was doing with it at the time.”

“Doesn't that bother you?”

“Not enough,” Flora admitted. “This is a lab and it was a workplace accident. They happen.”

Adrienne frowned but she decided not to pursue the issue now. She didn't like Flora but she couldn't afford to conflate that with the truth of what Flora had just said.

Flora surprised her then. “Besides, Haugan is not gone. Not really. Not if some theories are correct.”

Adrienne took a step forward. “Doctor, I think the ultrasound may be affecting you—”

“Be quiet. Here's something you don't know,” the woman went on. “The civilization that created these artifacts proved that there is life after death. More than proved it, in fact. We think they systematized their access to it.”

Adrienne stared at her. “Myth.”

“Fact.”

“What are you going off of?”

“Partial translations. Very partial. Drawings. A gut feeling and dreams.”

“Dreams?” Adrienne's voice was soaked in doubt and frustration.

“
Shared
dreams,” Flora stressed. “As we gathered these artifacts together, my associate Mikel and I began to have the same dreams.”

“Elaborate, if you don't mind,” Adrienne said.

Flora did not respond. She felt fine, still, but she was puzzled and transfixed by the miracle of what she was seeing in the chamber. Cautiously, she reached into the node and removed the top artifact. When nothing changed, she slid it, carvings faceup, beneath the main stone.

Instantly they felt the room heat up. Within three seconds sweat was beading on their foreheads.

“Whatever you just did, undo it!” Adrienne pleaded.

Flora didn't hear her. She was suddenly having difficulty breath
ing. The heat was as powerful as a sauna set on high. Her head felt heavy and she put a hand on the back of her neck.

“Dr. Davies!” Adrienne shouted. “Grab the artifacts and get out!”

Flora heard a hum and saw that the main stone was vibrating. She reached a weakened hand forward and carefully removed the top artifact from the stack.

“Doctor!” Adrienne screamed. “Don't be gentle about it!”

Flora took two at once but she was trembling at the knees now. She placed the objects in the crook of her arm. Then she realized she was not the only thing shaking, so was the floor. Suddenly, all the stones began to wobble madly. The bottom one dropped from the stack and hit the floor. Flora reached down as fast as she could manage and saw that the black floor panel was bubbling. She pulled the artifact from the chaos.

Adrienne yelled something incoherent and started to move into the chamber, but she found that her feet wouldn't lift properly. The concrete floor was liquefying and creeping toward the doorway, as if trying to escape the room. With effort she could lift her boots free from the slow sludge but it took a lot of muscle.

She looked up to scream at Flora again and saw the entire stack of artifacts collapse and fall to the floor. The main stone almost leaped from the pile and Flora was able to snatch it midflight as the other artifacts hit the bubbling, oozing black panel. She grabbed at the scattered stones and managed to retrieve them all, albeit dripping black liquid. Then she tried to turn and run but the floor gripped the edges of her shoes as it flowed.

Adrienne took a giant, heaving backward step from the doorway. She almost fell over but shoved the edge of the tray at the wall to gain equilibrium. She was horrified to feel the wall soften beneath its edge and jerked the tray away as soon as she felt balanced. Then she yanked her other leg out of the doorway too.

“Throw them to me!” she told Flora.

Flora, still lunging slowly forward, threw the first artifact, then the
next, and the next. It was so hot she wanted to vomit. She felt tears in her eyes as she saw fragments fly from the wooden artifact as Adrienne caught it. Only the petrified center was left now as the rest of it melted into the custard concrete floor.

Flora held the last artifact, the main stone, the Serpent, which was vibrating so hard she could feel the waves through her arms down to her feet. Her vision clouded, suffused with red, and she thought she smelled sulfur. Vaguely she could hear Adrienne screaming at her. She took another weak step forward and with all her willpower, she let go of the Serpent in Adrienne's direction.

The stone tumbled through the air and Adrienne dove forward and snatched it from the liquid concrete. Then the girl disappeared from the doorway. Flora heard the sound of running and suddenly realized she was hearing again. Her mind was clearing. The heat was lifting. She was gaining more control of her limbs. She lurched from the room and the floor seemed steady beneath her so she stopped, resting against a wall. She looked back at the chamber. The black panels had melted halfway down the walls. Long drips trailed from the panels on the ceiling. But the melting had stopped. The floor was still. The panels were no longer bubbling.

“Damn it!” she heard from down the hall. “We need another room!”

Adrienne was heading back down the hall in Flora's direction, yelling. “I'll get the rest of the panels. That deep freezer will give us fifteen minutes, max!”

B
ut he'll
die
!” Siem der Graaf shouted.

The taller man blocked Eric Trout's path to the spiral stairway. They were standing nearly nose to nose in the “jam tart,” the large red module that served as Halley VI's social hub. Eric's mustache hung in two tendrils past his chin, and days of sharp frustration had burned his typically jovial expression to a frazzle.

“Der Graaf,” Trout huffed, “this is essentially the only situation where the title ‘base commander' actually means something. Step aside.”

The younger man opened his mouth to speak but just shook his head.

Trout's chin sank into the collar of his heavy turtleneck. “Der Graaf, we're following orders strictly on this. We start the move off the ice shelf in thirty minutes.”

Trout raised a thick-fingered hand and gently pushed Siem to the side, then hurried down the stairs.

“But surely you don't need everyone for the move,” Siem argued, following on his heels. “You will have excess personnel, in fact. Or do you plan to have them sitting around inside the modules as you tow them?”

“Anyone without a specific job will be in the trucks and bulldozers, heading to the new location.”

“Fine. Then give me two men for just
that
amount of time, before you need them to start hanging pictures back on the walls.”

Trout fired back a severely disapproving look.

“Two men and Ski-Doos to save a life!” Siem said, pressing the commander.

Trout turned to face him in the empty dining area.

“You cannot have them,” Trout said finally. “We have to turn off everything for the move except the hydraulics. No electronics. Communications will be off. It's unconscionable to send out one man, let alone three, on a dangerous rescue mission with zero radio contact. I simply cannot, der Graaf. I will not.”

“Then you're killing him.”

“He did this to himself, without orders,” Trout replied. His expression softened. “Has it not occurred to you he might want that?”

“What, to die?”

“No,” Trout said. “Not to endanger anyone
else
! You said he sent you back—”

“I don't think he fully understood the danger,” Siem replied. “No,” he went on. “I think he just made the greatest discovery of his life and he wasn't thinking clearly. He would want to live to see it brought to daylight.”

“Der Graaf, I've spent five winters and summers on the ice, watching people's minds bend in the twenty-four-hour darkness or light. If there's one thing I've learned, it's not to ascribe logic to someone behaving illogically. That's how to get more people killed!”

“He was as sane as any of us,” Siem snapped.

“Really? You mentioned that he ran out of ice screws so he slid the rest of the way down the crevasse.”

“It was not very far.”

“Far enough that he couldn't climb it?”

“Yes—”

“Thereby leaving himself without a way back up. He knew this, did he not?”

“He did, which is why I hammered in the screws he'll need.”

“Did he ask you to do that?”

Siem was silent.

“Der Graaf. Did Mikel Jasso
ask
you if you had extra ice screws?”

After a long moment Siem answered, “No.”

“Then he was mad. Or a reckless fool. I don't know which, and sadly, I cannot afford to care.”

“So, then, we let a mad, reckless fool die in a crevasse, because it is dangerous and inconvenient to rescue him
and
recover his scientific find—which, I may add, is one reason we are out here. To expand human knowledge.”

“Damn you. You're not even a scientist! You're maintenance!”

“That, sir, is not an argument.”

Trout waved away the rebuke. “Anyway, you know me better. We have to get the station onto grounded ice, ice that isn't inexplicably melting, ice that isn't subject to unpredictable seismic occurrences as our Norwegian friends have cautioned us. Now, you are wasting my—”

“We can do both,” Siem said. “We can. We must.”

“No.”

With a brusque sweeping movement, Trout made sure Siem left the module ahead of him. He also assigned the young man to assist Ivor and Dr. Bundy on all tasks, so that he couldn't steal a Ski-Doo and try to rescue Mikel by himself.

Outside, tempers were hair-trigger and the clipped conversations were tense. It was more than just the pressure of setting up to tow the jam tart and its seven blue sisters, one by one, across almost forty miles of ice. Every person on the team felt that the outside world was filled with odd shadows that did not seem to align with the position of the sun. Over and over the workers' eyes snapped toward things that weren't there. No one ever took safety and security for granted
here. But no one had ever feared their surroundings quite like this, either.

The weather was cooperating at least: almost no wind, and not cold enough to comment on it.

Eric Trout did the rounds, checking in by radio with each person to make sure they were a go. Then, from inside one module, he started flicking switches. First their radios died. Then the modules. Everyone felt instantly forlorn and abandoned; even Ivor, who had been singing a Scottish drinking song, stopped.

Trout clambered down and signaled to the engineer in charge of the first blue research center to be towed.

Siem, who had been working with Dr. Bundy securing the laboratory, stopped suddenly.

“Do you feel that?” he muttered to the scientist.

“What?”

“In your stomach,” Siem said. “Pressure. Waves of pressure.”

Bundy hesitated, then replied, “A little. It's just nerves.”

“Just nerves . . . doing what?” Siem asked earnestly.

Bundy looked at him strangely and didn't reply.

Several men worked with shovels around the ski tip of one strut of the blue unit until it began rising. Siem joined them, trying to give himself something to focus on besides his uneasiness. When the leg had completely retracted, they began to pack snow a meter deep beneath it. Repeating this process with the other three supports would create a new, sturdy foundation for the structure to rise on its hydraulics, allowing for its hitch frame to be attached. Then the team would attach it to a bulldozer and a truck for its long trip across the ice.

As they worked on the snow beneath each leg, Siem noticed that his discomfort increased when the jacking stopped and the team was working in silence. He also noticed that he wasn't the only one feeling it. Several of the people paused to adjust their waistbands or rest their hands on their ribs.