The Spawning (10 page)

“In the summers,” Kim said, “there's a dividing line between scientists and workers that's very apparent.”

“Oh, sure. But you'd get that in a factory or an Army base, anywhere people are crowded together. But in the winter it's different. A plumber and botanist play chess together. A heavy equipment operator and geochemist shoot darts. It has to be that way when the crews are smaller. You get very tight, cohesive.”

Her second week she spent mostly with Captain Starnes launching weather balloons in conjunction with the Balloon Inflation Facility at Pole Station and the Atmospheric Research Observatory. Both the BIF and ARO had a detailed schedule of balloon launches and payloads that Starnes had to adhere to strictly.

“You can use satellites to track ozone depletion but that's notoriously unreliable because you're looking through the entire layer,” he told her. “With balloons, you get right in there. I played with balloons when I was a kid and here I am still doing it.”

The balloons carried radiosondes that measured humidity, wind speed, pressure, temperature etc. and ozonesondes that tracked ozone levels in the stratosphere. The results were sent to the ARO immediately.

This was Starnes's thing.

Professor Borden was a geomorphologist involved in climatic studies. He was taking core samples from the ice sheet. Trapped gases in the glacial ice gave his people back at Princeton a detailed archive of ancient climate data.

Kim spent her second week getting a feel for what he was doing and the past three days she'd been hanging out with Andrea Mack, a planetary sciences grad student from UCLA who studying the mechanics of ice sheets.

“When I told my mom I was going to spend my summer in Antarctica, she thought I was crazy. She said I'd freeze to death. I told her that rarely happened anymore,” Andrea told Kim. “But she was bothered about me coming. How can you go down there, she said, with what happened with those other poor people? She was talking about Kharkov Station, I think. But that's mom: she likes her gossip and she'll believe just about anything.”

“Then you attach no credence to the supposed events at Kharkov?” Kim asked her.

“No, none whatsoever. I'm a scientist. I don't doubt the existence of alien life but the idea that it's down here in Antarctica and has been for millions of years, that there are extraterrestrial cities under the glaciers older than the Cretaceous . . . well, that's stretching reality a bit too much.”

Kim had video of each interview archived that she could edit later for
Polar Life.
The NSF, of course, would demand that any mention of Kharkov be excised out of respect for the families of the cursed crew. Maybe that was the reason. Maybe it was something else.

No matter, even without the ghost stories of Kharkov, Kim was convinced that she was going to get some unprecedented footage this winter. The crew was small, insular, inter-dependent, and the relationships would be strong, nearly intimate. She was going to witness things this winter that would be absolutely revelatory.

She just had that feeling.

And on this, she was right.

FEBRUARY 25

V
OICES.

They said if you listened to the wind long enough you would hear voices on it and maybe even your own name being called and sometimes Kim Pennycook could almost believe that one. And especially on nights like this when the wind screaming across the polar plateau sounded like the voices of the dead howling to be let in.

But that was Antarctica.

There were a hundred ways to go mad down there and especially once winter showed its teeth and the sun settled lower and lower each day and the darkness came, bleak and eternal. Something about the perpetual night made people want to climb the walls. Made them start imagining things and turning on one another.

She had seen it happen plenty of times and it could make for a long ugly winter. Petty rivalries became inflamed. Minor disagreements turned into major battles. Professional jealousies amongst the scientists became blood skirmishes. Despite all the psychological profiling, it still happened with unsettling frequency on the Ice. All it took was one nut to turn an entire station into a twelve-step program.

And that's why she was starting to worry about Andrea.

There was nothing there, nothing definable, yet she'd noticed a certain almost morbid shift in Andrea's character over the past few days and it was worrying her. Andrea, despite her scientific credentials and pragmatic world view, was young and impressionable.

“C'mon, Kim,” Borden said. “You in or out? The redoubtable Captain Starnes has just laid down a full house, Jacks over tens . . . do me a favor and skunk him with four-of-a-kind. He deserves it.”

Starnes laughed. “Ah, the man is clearly jealous of my card mechanics.”

“Card mechanics?” Borden said. “We used to call that cheating when I was a kid.”

More laughter.

“He's still mad because we're not getting the Callisto feed.”

“Do you blame me?” Borden said. “The biggest thing since sliced cheese and I miss it.”

They were all gathered at the table, supper dishes cleared, playing poker and gnawing on the cherry turnovers Dr. Bob had made. All of them . . . except Andrea.

She was standing before the window over by the radio listening to the wind, staring out into the blackness or maybe just staring at her own dour reflection in the glass.

The wind kicked up, shook the habitat, and the lights flickered.

Kim frowned. “Andrea? Why don't you come play some cards with us and have a few laughs?”

“Sure,” Dr. Bob said. “Get over here before Doc Borden eats all the turnovers.”

“Is that another snide remark about my weight?” Borden chuckled.

Andrea just kept staring into the darkness.

Kim and Dr. Bob looked at one another.

“Andrea?” Kim said.

“What?” she turned towards them now, her face pale and shadowy in the dimness. “The wind makes funny sounds if you listen to it.”

“Just the wind,” Dr. Bob said. “Out here on the plateau, there's nothing to stop it.”

Borden nodded. “Sure, give it a month and then it'll really start screaming. I remember one year at Pole Station it was so loud that–”

“Come on, Andrea,” Kim said. She walked over to her and put a hand on her arm. Andrea turned around, a vicious look in her eyes like she was ready to tear out Kim's throat.

“Hey!” Dr. Bob said.

“I'm all right,” Andrea said, her eyes dark and simmering. “I like to listen to the wind. It sounds like voices sometimes.”

Andrea put some Chapstik on her lips with a trembling hand. “Come and have some fun with us.”

“I'm fine right here.”

Borden and Starnes exchanged looks. What they were seeing in Andrea was not making them very confident of the next five months. All it took was one bad one, one member of the team that could not adapt, and there would be trouble. They all had work to do which would not get done if they had to keep an eye on Andrea.

She kept staring out into the night, head cocked, listening to something no one else seemed to hear.

POLAR CLIME STATION

I
T WAS SHEER CURIOSITY more than anything else that brought Coyle to the Community Room that night to watch NASA's feed from the Cassini 3 probe of Callisto. How could you not be curious about such a thing? That winter they had Professor Eicke from MIT's Haystack Observatory, an atmospheric physicist who spent most of his time in the Atmospherics Lab dabbling about with mid-latitude ionospheric research, magnetospheric studies and thermospheric measurements. Exciting stuff like that.

Eicke had told Coyle that the surface of Callisto was a pretty nasty place . . . cold, dark, and uninviting. It was the second largest moon of Jupiter and the third largest in the solar system itself. Other than immense meteoric impact craters, the surface was rather smooth, covered in what might be pack ice that hid a salty ocean below.

“It's a damned awful place by Earth standards,” Eicke said. “Over two-hundred degrees below zero and blasted by Jupiter's immense magnetic field that creates a storm of charged particles and weird electric currents at the surface. And don't forget that ammoniated ocean beneath the ice. Not exactly Palm Beach, Nicky.”

“You think there's life there?”

Eicke just shrugged. “Could be. But if there is, it's going to be microscopic or damned strange if it's not.”

The Community Room was bustling.

Chairs had been set out and Ida had made frozen pizzas and bowls of popcorn, The Beav on her ass the whole while. Coyle kept out of it, let the girls have their fun, trying not to think of the disaster area they were making of his kitchen. Most of those present were happily drunk or at least buzzed from the drinking and debauchery segment of the Callisto Party.

Coyle had put away a few, but he felt very clear-headed and alert as he waited for the transmission on the big plasma screen TV to begin. It had been his intention to get roaring drunk, but his heart hadn't been in it. The tension that had been slowly building in him would not be denied. So he remained tight as a wire, thinking and thinking about what Frye and he had been discussing the night before, all the weird things around them that seemed to be building into something.

Well, if anything's going on, Nicky, we'll start seeing the signs, I suppose.

And that's exactly what Coyle was worrying about.

He was sitting with Frye and Danny Shin, the geologist, all three of them sipping their drinks.

“This is pretty goddamn amazing,” Shin was saying, pulling off a bottle of Rolling Rock. “I mean, have you guys even taken the time to think about this? About what it all means?”

“What does it mean, Danny?” Frye said. “Being a scientist and all, maybe you better explain it to a dumb shit like me.”

Shin sighed. “It means the best part of you ran down your uncle's leg.”

“No shit? Well, least we got something in common, because the best part of
you
ran down your mother's chin.”

Shin laughed and stroked the mustache trailing off his face. “You know, that's your problem, Frye. You have no interest in anything important. Just that shit you spew from your mouth. Science means nothing to you.”

“You're right, Danny. I have no faith in it. Ever since your mother's birth control failed, I just don't trust it.”

Coyle tuned them out. Their arguments went on incessantly like a game of Monopoly. They were always picking at one another. Yet, whenever there was a gathering, they sat together. Go figure.

He studied the tinfoil flying saucers and stars that were hanging overhead, Doc's CPR dummies that were painted green and given big alien eyes and antennas like
My Favorite Martian.
The photos of bug-eyed alien monsters from 1950's B-movies like
It Conquered the World
and
Invasion of the Saucermen
that had been printed out and pasted just about everywhere. These were only outdone by Locke's contributions which were artist's conceptions of other planets and various blurry UFO photographs, not to mention blow-ups of the Beacon Valley megaliths that were plastered all over the internet. One of these was nearly the size of a mural with spooky gigantic lettering over its face which asked the eternal question: ARE WE ALONE?

Coyle pulled from his Captain and Coke, watching the people and trying to get a sense from them of what they felt about it all. How they felt about video from Callisto.

Horn sat by himself, looking mildly amused and mildly disappointed as he did at all gatherings. Ida and The Beav were swooping around with platters of food like mother birds looking for hungry beaks to fill. Hopper and Special Ed and Doc Flagg had taken up their spots in the back of the room. Everyone else was just loosely scattered around. The Coven—which consisted of Gwen Curie and all the other females in camp: Ida, The Beav, Gut, Cassie Malone, and a cute GA named Lynn Zutema that everyone called “Zoot”—were pretty much mixing as was Locke and his impromptu UFO conspiracy study group. Slim was cozying in with the Coven, doing shots of tequila with Cassie and Zoot. The FEMC crew—Facilities, Engineering, Maintenance, and Construction—which consisted of Koch, Cryderman, Hansen, and Stokes were at their usual table listening to Cryderman's cynical wit and wisdom. Gwen was shaking a mixer of martinis, her breasts jiggling beneath her jersey which read: I LUV ANAL PROBES. Harvey was alone, looking around to see who the Freemasons were. Every time Coyle caught his eyes, and Coyle was trying hard not to do that, Harvey would smile conspiratorially and quickly glance at one of the crew as if to say,
yeah, that one, Nicky. He's one of them. You can tell by their eyes.

He was very suspicious of the FEMC crew.

“You know what your problem is, Frye?” Shin was saying. “You're just plain ignorant.”

“Maybe I'm ignorant, but I ain't so ignorant that I can't admit when I'm wrong. Like some fucking eggheads I know.”

“Oh yes, start with that crap. Us against them. The scientists versus the workers.”

Frye swallowed the rest of his beer. “Right there, that's your problem, Danny. You think you beakers run the show down here. Well, you don't. If it weren't for guys like me keeping you warm and fed and keeping your lights working and your water running . . . where the hell would you be?”

“I never said we run the show. I just said that guys like you are in a support position. That's all. You keep things running so we can do our thing.”

“You're damn right. You should remember that.”

“Boy,” Shin said. “This guy will argue about anything.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Again, Coyle tuned them out. That was something you learned at the stations: you kept your sanity by ignoring just about everything that went on around you. And down there, ninety percent of everything was bullshit so that made things real easy.