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“You’re all asking me to answer questions without having had enough time to even make an educated guess. Are the creatures alien? Unknown. Did they build that city? Possibly. Are they any threat to us? Of course not. C’mon, people, put away your comic books here. That city was abandoned during the Pliocene and the mummies we’ve found have been dead, I’m guessing, since the Triassic.”
    Feeling that he had thoroughly chastised them and turning away from them with the sort of distaste he might reserve for torch-bearing villagers and other superstitious idiots, he donned his coat and stomped out into the night.
    LaHune, who had been studying it all with his usual detachment, stood up and said, “That’s enough now. Dr. Gates has told you all he
can
tell you. Really, people, he has been good enough to share with you some of his findings and you’re acting like a bunch of children.”
    And for once, Hayes was in complete agreement with him. Children? No, more like villagers looking for a witch to burn. Slowly, they settled down, realizing to a man that LaHune had made mental note of their reactions and it would be going into their files. A bad mark on their records would mean any number of them wouldn’t be returning to Antarctica. That meant the loss of big money for contractors and the loss of NSF funding for the scientists.
    â€œWell, wasn’t that amusing?” Sharkey said.
    Hayes grunted.
    Amusing? Well, it was certainly something. Ancient civilizations. Pre-human intelligences. Aliens. Then that bit about what they had found up there changing the idea of
who
and
what
the human race was . . . well, how did you walk away from that without your chin dragging on the floor?
    â€œWhat do you make of that?” Hayes finally asked Sharkey.
    â€œI think I can’t wait for spring,” was all she would say.
    But Cutchen, well, he had an opinion. His specialty was supposedly the weather, but he always seemed to have an opinion on everything. “Tell you two something right now. I heard all about what happened to Lind and, like you, I’ve drawn a few of my own conclusions. Maybe that thing thawing out in the hut had nothing to do with Lind’s breakdown . . . but if it did, just keep in mind we’re trapped here until spring and whatever that thing is, we have to live with it all winter.”
    â€œIt’s just a fossil for godsake,” Sharkey said.
    â€œDo you think so, Doc? Do you honestly believe that? Great. Then go out to the hut and stare in those red fucking eyes and tell me if something’s not staring back at you.”
    But Sharkey wasn’t about to do that.

8
    T rue to his word, Gates went back up to the tent camp, but left his mummies behind. He had three of them thawing in the shed — which was now locked and bolted, LaHune having the only key — and three more still frozen in their sheaths of ice out back in the cold shed.
    People were still talking about it all, but they had calmed somewhat. Even grand revelations became mundane given time. You made some discovery that will alter our view of who and what we are? It might change civilization as we know it? No shit? Ain’t that something. You wanna hear something better? Word has it a couple of the techies over at the drilling tower are doing some drilling of a more intimate nature, you catch my drift, sunshine.
    Didn’t matter what happened at South Pole stations . . . its shelf-life was relatively short.
    Besides, truth be told, it was an exciting winter at Kharkhov and there was more on the stove than just Gates’ fossils and some dusty old ruins up in the mountains.
    There was the lake.
    Some three-quarters of a mile beneath the continental ice sheet that the Kharkhov Station sat on, there was a huge subterranean lake roughly the size of Lake Ontario. It had been discovered some five years previously using ice-penetrating radar and radio echo-sounding and