THE ABYSS
T
HE SKY OVER THE CHASM
turned an ominous deep black, and Serena felt the wind pick up with a sudden chill. If this was supposed to be a lull in the polar storm, she didn’t want to stick around for the real deal. Mist boiled up from the abyss below, where the nearest shelter, the so-called P4 Habitat, was a one-mile drop.
“You sure you’re up for this, Sister?”
It was Yeats, sliding down the icy wall above her in his white freezer suit, grinning like the devil under the blinding light of his headtorch. Back on the surface, he had detailed the risks to her about coming down with the insertion team. But what other choice did she have? To wait back at the base with the rest of the world until the team resurfaced would be to remain in the dark.
“Technically, it’s Doctor Serghetti, General,” she said, digging the crampon attached to her plastic boot into a toehold. “And I climbed Everest with my first Mother Superior.”
“She give you the garter?”
Yeats was pointing to Serena’s harness. It actually did look like a red garter belt with two loops around her thighs. In case of a fall it would spread the shock evenly throughout her lower body.
“No, just this.” Serena pulled out her ice ax and hammered an ice screw into the frozen wall before attaching a new line with a carabiner. She wanted to show Yeats she was more than up to the challenge. But in fact she was feeling strange. Her heart was pounding and she was breathing rapidly. “Do you smell something?”
“Yeah,” said Yeats. “Your story.”
She had never met the infamous Griffin Yeats until Ice Base Orion, only heard about him from Conrad. But she didn’t trust him. Like Emerson said: “Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.” The guy was a rogue at heart, just like this expedition. He simply did a better job of hiding it than Conrad, who was refreshingly honest and even charming about his shortcomings. She also concluded that Yeats hadn’t agreed to let her join the team out of the kindness of his heart or even because he valued her for her expertise as a linguist.
“Tell me again why you changed your mind and let me tag along?”
“If anything, I learned from NASA that women are always a pleasant addition to astronaut crews.”
She had expected something sexist like that coming from him. “Gee, I thought it was because women are actually better with precision tasks, more meticulous, and more flexible at multitasking than men.”
“Whenever they’re not too emotional or easily upset,” Yeats replied and dropped out of sight just as Conrad rappeled alongside her.
“Anything wrong?” Conrad asked.
Serena sighed and shook her head. “Your father never stops, does he?”
“It’s not in his nature,” Conrad answered without feeling. “Once he’s programmed, he keeps going and going until he finishes the job.”
“And leaves a trail of bodies behind him.”
“Then we better not let him get too far ahead of us,” Conrad said, rappeling down.
She went after him. He was an expert climber in tropical climates. But overconfidence could be fatal in icy conditions like this. And she was worried for him. For his soul. For her own too. Because in trying to save him once before she felt she had condemned them both.
Conrad was within reach now, and she dropped down a few feet and found a hold. The color of the ice was a beautiful blue and almost seemed to glow. “Pretty,” she said.
“Don’t stop, Serena. Keep going.” Conrad spoke rapidly.
Serena continued to ease up on her line. But Conrad’s physiology concerned her. Was he hyperventilating? Serena didn’t know and could feel her own breathing quicken to an unnaturally fast pace. Her heart too. The pounding was regular but fast.
She eased up a bit more when Conrad motioned with a gloved hand. “Down there,” he said. “See it?”
Serena peered into the mist below. A hole parted and she could see a grid of lights, like a landing pad. “I see.”
“No, do you see it?”
Suddenly Serena could see that the landing pad was in fact the flattened summit of a gleaming white pyramid rising sharply through the floor of the abyss. She had to shade her eyes from the glare of the lights off the pyramid’s surface.
“P4,” she heard herself saying under her breath.
“Don’t ask me how it got here,” Conrad said, now sporting his sunglasses. “I can’t explain it yet. But I will.”
The conviction in his voice inspired confidence. His excitement was pure, unadulterated, and moving. Not a trace of fear, she thought with envy, just genuine curiosity and enthusiasm. She had almost forgotten what that felt like.
She slipped on her sunglasses. The flat summit, brighter than the whitest snow, was blinding. So this was why the pope had sent her down, she realized. She had suspected something spectacular, but she was completely unprepared for the sight or dimension of this monument. It was gigantic.
She was staring at it in wonder when she heard her line creak.
“Just some slack,” Conrad assured her. “No worries.”
She heard a sharp crack and the ping of metal. The piton holding her line in the ice popped out, and she thought she was falling.
“Conrad!” she shouted as she buried her ice ax into the wall and hung on.
But Conrad said nothing. She looked to her side. He was gone. It was his piton that had popped out.
She looked down in time to see Conrad fall into the mist.
“Conrad!” she screamed.
Yeats rappeled down beside her.
“You couldn’t wait until afterward to bury him?” he asked, scanning the billowing mist below. Yeats flicked Conrad’s line with the back of a gloved finger. “He’s still floating.”
She heard a crack and looked up to see the ice screw on her own line start to slip. She instinctively pulled out her ice ax and swung it at Yeats, who put up a defensive arm. “Hold this,” she said and suddenly felt herself plunging into space.
She fell through the cloud a few seconds later, hurtling toward the lights below when her line snapped tight and she stopped with a jolt. For a moment she feared she had shattered her pelvis. But her harness had done its job.
She caught her breath and could hear her windproof parka squeaking against the nylon rope as she swung back and forth.
“Conrad?” she called.
“Over here,” he replied. “I found something.”
She swung her head in the direction of his voice, and her headtorch found him swinging ten feet from the wall, unable to get a hold.
“Hang on,” she said as she swung over.
It took three tries before her arc was wide enough to reach him. As she swung toward him, she held out her hand, and he gripped it tight, holding her next to him. They swung together in space for a few seconds, clinging to each other.
“Finished bungee jumping, Conrad?” she asked, trying to mask her anxiety with sarcasm.
“Look!” he said.
She turned in the darkness and her headtorch bathed the wall with light. There was something in the ice. Then her eyes focused and Serena found herself face-to-face with a little girl, frozen in time.
“Dear Jesus,” she whispered.
“Remember when you told me the only way we’d get together again was when hell freezes over?” he told her. “Well, here we are.”
The mist lifted and the light from below flooded the entire wall. In an instant Serena could see hundreds of human beings, their faces frozen in fear. All of them seemed to shout out at once. Serena covered her ears, only to realize that she was the one screaming.
HABITAT MODULE
A
N HOUR LATER,
inside the warm P4 habitat module, Conrad was concerned as he looked at Serena on the fold-out surgical table. Her eyes blinked rapidly beneath the high-intensity lights, an oxygen mask over her mouth and several EKG electrodes attached to her chest. Her hair was brushed back from her face and the belt around her cargo pants loosened.
Conrad pointed out the fogged-up porthole at the American flag Yeats had planted atop the pyramid summit.
“Focus on the flag and breathe deeply,” he told her as he administered the oxygen from a heavy white canister.
Her parka and outerwear were gone, and he tried not to gaze at her full breasts rising and falling beneath her wool undershirt. She had been hyperventilating since they reached the bottom of the ice gorge, spooked, it seemed, by the frozen graveyard that entombed them. Conrad glanced at the EKG monitor. Only now was her heart rate returning to the upper register of the normal range.
“Better?” he asked her after a minute.
She looked at him like he was a lunatic for asking.
Conrad looked around the cramped habitat perched atop P4’s flat summit at the bottom of the gorge. It was a single module, fifty-five feet long and fourteen feet in diameter. Yeats was huddled with the three technicians by the monitors. One was Lopez, a female officer Conrad recognized from Ice Base Orion. The other two were fair-
haired steroid freaks who answered to the names of Kreigel and Marcus. They were clearly Yeats’s muscle down here.
Conrad turned to Yeats. “Was there any particular reason why you forgot to mention the frozen bodies?”
“Yeah,” said Yeats. “I wanted to see your reaction.”
Conrad gestured at Serena and glared at Yeats. “Satisfied?”
“Quit whining.” Yeats stood up, a hypodermic in hand. He flicked the syringe with his finger, and a clear liquid squirted into the air. Serena squirmed.
Conrad watched in alarm as Yeats grabbed hold of Serena’s arm. “What are you doing to her?” he demanded.
“Giving her a shot of the stimulant eleutherococcus,” said Yeats, injecting it into Serena’s arm before Conrad could stop him. “It’s a plant extract of the ginseng family. Deep-sea divers, mountain rescuers, and cosmonauts take it to resist stress while working under inhospitable conditions. About the only damn usable thing the Russians ever contributed to our space program.”
The drug seemed to be working. Conrad looked at Serena, who was breathing more evenly now, although there was anger in her eyes. Clearly this wasn’t a woman who was used to being taken care of.
“She’ll be fine,” said Yeats. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got to check my drill team’s search for that mythical shaft of yours.”
“As mythical as P4,” Conrad called out as Yeats opened the hatch and stepped outside. Subzero polar air whooshed inside.
“You seem to be holding up just fine, Conrad,” Serena said, catching him off guard. She had removed her oxygen mask. “I take it this isn’t the first time you’ve seen frozen bodies at least twelve thousand years old?”
He looked down at her, barely able to contain his excitement. It wasn’t every day he found evidence for his theories, or proof that he wasn’t crazy. “Those bodies explain how the pyramid got here.”
“Got here?” She managed to sit up, the color returning to her high cheekbones. “What are you talking about? Did it move?”
Conrad dug into his pack and produced a frozen orange. “I chipped this out of the wall,” he said. “This proves Antarctica was once a temperate climate.”
Serena looked at the orange. “Until it suddenly froze over one day, I suppose?”
Conrad nodded. “Hapgood’s theory of earth-crust displacement.”
“Charles Hapgood?” Serena asked.
“That’s right. Dead for years. So you’ve heard of him?”
“The university professor, yes, but not this displacement theory.”
Conrad always relished an opportunity to tell Mother Earth something she didn’t know. Holding up the orange, he said, “Pretend this is Planet Earth.”
“OK.” She seemed willing to humor him.
He snapped open a pocket knife and carved an outline of the seven continents on the thawing peel. “Hapgood’s theory says the ice age was not a meteorological phenomenon. Rather, it was the result of a geological catastrophe about twelve thousand years ago.” Conrad rotated the orange upward so that the United States was in the Arctic Circle and Antarctica was closer to the equator. “This was the world back then.”
Serena lifted an eyebrow. “And what happened?”
“The entire outer shell of Earth’s surface shifted, like the skin of this orange.” Conrad rotated the orange downward until it resembled Earth as they knew it. “Antarctica is engulfed by the polar zone while North America is released from the Arctic Circle and becomes temperate. Ice melts in North America while it forms in Antarctica.”
Serena frowned. “What caused this cataclysmic shift?”
“Nobody really knows,” said Conrad. “But Hapgood thought it was an imbalance of ice in the polar caps. As ice built up, they became so heavy they shifted, dragging the outer crust of the continents in one piece to new positions.”
Serena eyed him. “And you’d be willing to stake what’s left of your reputation on this earth-crust displacement theory?”
Conrad shrugged. “Albert Einstein liked the idea. He believed significant shifts in Earth’s crust have probably taken place repeatedly and within a short time. That could explain weird things, like mammoths frozen in the Arctic Circle with tropical vegetation in their stomachs. Or people and pyramids buried a mile beneath the ice in Antarctica.”
Serena put a soft hand on Conrad’s shoulder. “If that helps you make sense of the world, then good for you.”
Conrad stiffened. He thought she’d be as excited as he was by the evidence. That they were two of a kind. Instead she was attacking the conclusion he had drawn. More than that, she was attacking him personally. He resented this cavalier dismissal—by a woman of religious faith, no less—of a plausible scientific hypothesis from one of the greatest minds in human history. “Does the Vatican have a better theory?”
Serena nodded. “The Flood.”
“Same difference,” Conrad said. “Both fall under the God-Is-a-Genocidal-Maniac Theory.” But as soon as the words were out, he was sorry he had said them to her.
“Hey, mister, you watch your mouth,” said a female voice from behind.
Conrad turned to see Lopez looking cross at him. Another Catholic, he realized. Lopez looked at Serena and asked, “You want me to kick his ass for you?”
Serena smiled. “Thanks, but he gets it kicked enough already.”
“Well, the offer stands,” Lopez said before returning to her work. The Aryan twins, Kreigel and Marcus, looked disappointed. Conrad figured they must be Lutheran, agnostics, or simply of good German stock who in another time and place might have distinguished themselves as poster boys for Hitler’s SS.
Serena reached for her parka and slipped her arms through the sleeves. “What are you suggesting, Conrad?” She was trying to zip her parka, but the EKG wires were in the way. “That God is to blame for humanity’s every famine, war, or lustful leer?”
He realized she was looking straight at him now, her warm, brown eyes both accusing him and forgiving him at the same time. It irritated the hell out of him. So maybe he had been watching her breasts a little longer than he should have, he thought. He was only human. So was she, if she’d only admit it.
“I saw the way you looked at the little girl in the ice,” Conrad said softly. “It was like you were looking at yourself. Hardly the wicked sort the Genesis flood was intended to punish.”
“The rain falls on the just and the unjust,” she said absently. “Or in this case the ice.”
Conrad could tell her thoughts were someplace else. She couldn’t see her EKG numbers jumping again.
Conrad pointed to the monitors. “Look, maybe we should take you back up and bring down an able-bodied replacement.” He reached over to help her with the EKG wires. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She angrily knocked him away with her shoulder and ripped off the EKG leads. “Speak for yourself, Doctor Yeats.”
Conrad rubbed his head and stared at her in disbelief. “Could you send signals that are possibly more mixed?”
She zipped up her parka and jumped to her feet. “Who’s mixed up here, Doctor Yeats?”
Conrad stood still, aware of Lopez staring at him with interest. So were Kreigel and Marcus. The soldiers looked like they were just itching for the good nun to give the evil archaeologist a hard knee to the groin.
Then the hatch door opened and another blast of cold shot into the module with Yeats.
“You’re right, Yeats,” Conrad said coolly. “She’s fine.”
“Good. Now gear up. We’re going into P4,” Yeats said. “The drill team just found your shaft.”