The Thing (12 page)

"Looks like the remains of a medium-charge thermite cannister. Standard military ordinance. NATO uses the same stuff we do."

"Yeah." Macready heaved it toward the helicopter, the beginning of a growing collection. They spread out slightly and began to circle the crater.

There wasn't much solid debris. Much of what remained was too large to be carried. A fine gray ash lay on the ice and radiated outward from the center of the hole. Norris knelt and took a couple of small plastic tubes from a pocket. Using a small pick he started taking ice and powder samples from the crater's perimeter.

There wasn't much for the two pilots to do except wait for the scientist. Palmer continued to marvel at the size of the crater. Glacial ice this far south was solid as rock. No thermite charge had ripped that wound in the surface.

Macready got tired of walking, retraced his steps and bent over alongside Norris. The geophysicist was examining a small piece of metal. He had a small box out and open. It held tiny vials of reagents and catalysts. A chart full of fine print was glued to the inside of the cover. A few of the words were in English, the rest in rarified words of many syllables. The symbols were completely alien to him.

While he watched, Norris dribbled a little red fluid from one of the vials onto the specimen of debris. Nothing happened and the fluid ran off into the snow. The contents of a second vial were tried, with the same result. A powerful smell rose from the liquid and Macready's nose twitched.

Norris looked up at him. "At first I thought it was some alloy of magnesium. It's light enough. More than light enough." He carefully wiped the gray splinter against the ice, then the side of his boot.

"I never saw metal with such a low specific gravity. It has some of the characteristics of metallic lithium, but that's crazy. Stuff like that can't be worked like normal metal. At least, that's what I've been told." He carefully put the last vial he'd utilized back into its slot in the box.

"That was concentrated sulfuric acid. Might as well have been water for all the effect it had on this." He tapped the fragment with a gloved finger. "Yet some of it turns to powder if you so much as blow on it."

"So you don't know what it is?" Macready asked

Norris shook his head. "Haven't the foggiest. Some kind of alloy. Wish I'd taken more metallurgy. But I'd bet a two-year sabbatical that this stuff is unique." He turned to give the empty hole a look of disgust.

"And those poor dumb bastards had to go and blow the hell out of it."

"Give 'em a break, Norris," Macready said. "I'm sure they planted their charges carefully. They were probably just trying to break up enough ice to make digging easy."

"I guess." Norris didn't sound very understanding.

Macready picked up the splinter and gazed at it. "Some of it powders, but some, like this piece, resists strong acid. Then how the hell did they blow it up?"

"Something in the metal, or in something that vaporized during the explosion, must have reacted chemically with the thermite. Or maybe it was the heat that did it, I don't know." He took the specimen back from Macready, slipped it into a plastic sample tube and began writing on it.

Macready rose and studied the horizon.

"There've been a lot of temporary camps set up in this area. Could some outfit, the Soviets or the Australians or somebody, have dug in a short-term station here and then pulled up stakes without taking everything with them?"

"Like what, for instance?"

"You know the big tanks we use to store the fuel for the choppers and the tractor?" He gestured toward the crater. "Could some group have left one here? The thermite could've set off any remaining gas"

Macready was reaching. He knew it, and so did Norris

"Sorry, Mac," the geophysicist countered. "In the first place, the shape of the crater's all wrong. Next, this ice is glacial, not recent. You don't bury a temporary storage tank under twenty feet of solid ice. Also, propane and gasoline, any kind of fuel, is strictly rationed at any outpost. Nobody would take off and leave a lot of valuable fuel behind. Costs too much to get it down here."

"Maybe they intended to return."

"Maybe, but I wouldn't think so." Norris held up a gloveful of chipped ice. "This doesn't show any of the telltale signs of having been disturbed. It would if somebody'd had a base here. There'd be skid marks at least, even if all they put up were surface quonsets." He rose.

"Of course we can check on it when we make contact with McMurdo again. They'd have records of anything that's put down hereabouts."

"What if the Soviets or one of the Eastern European consortiums like the East German-Rumanian team were running a clandestine operation here?"

"C'mon, Mac," Norris chided him. "There's plenty of ice cover just as interesting as this a helluva lot closer to their permanent installations."

"Yeah." The pilot kicked at the surface, sending particles flying. "But maybe there isn't any oil there."

Norris considered a moment. "Now
that's
a possibility." He stared evenly at Macready.

After a moment the pilot grinned sheepishly back at him. "Okay, I give in, I don't believe any of that either." His expression turned serious once more. "So what do you make of it?"

"You know damn well what we both make of it."

"No chance it could have been some new kind of test craft?"

Norris shook his head. "No, and for a lot of the same reasons. This ice is too old and too undisturbed. Seismic activity has been shoving this region upward for a long time, not the other way round." He held up another ice sample.

"It's tough to be certain in the field, but I'd say this ice the thing was buried in is over a hundred thousand years old. Pleistocene at least."

There, was a shout from behind them and both men looked around. Palmer was waving to them.

"Now, what's he found?" wondered Norris. He and Macready walked over to stand alongside the younger man.

Palmer was standing some fifty yards from the rim of the crater. A large, rectangular chunk of ice had been cut from the surface near his feet. The excavation was some fifteen feet long, six wide and about eight deep, according to Norris's eyeball estimation. All three men stared silently at the hole.

There was nothing down there except more ice. Snow whirled around their boots like white laces . . .

This time of year night came quickly to the bottom of the world. Several of the men in the rec room were gathered around the large TV monitor. It was playing back the sequence showing the Norwegians finding the mysterious buried object that Norris and Macready, at least, were ready to believe was a vessel of unknown type and origin.

Suddenly the landscape on the screen, the movements of the members of the Norwegian team, no longer seemed so matter-of-fact. The tape was no longer a dull record of ordinary, everyday events. It had acquired something more than mere historical interest. Something intangible and yet very real to the men in the room who stared at the flickering, badly focused pictures.

It contained a presence.

Macready was sitting quietly across from a new chess set, though his attention was split elsewhere, between private thoughts and the glass of Scotch resting on the edge of the table.

Clark had recovered from the previous day's shock. He was sitting by himself in a corner chair, flipping through a magazine salvaged from the Norwegian camp. The contents were not of a scientific nature, but the handler found the succession of glossy photos edifying nonetheless. They took his mind off other, less pleasurable things recently observed.

He turned another page, his free hand toying with a piece of the peculiar metal the exploration team had brought back from the site of the explosion.

Childs finally turned away from the group studying the videotape and walked over to confront Macready. The pilot looked up absently.

"Hi, Childs." He waved indifferently at the board. "Want to play?"

The mechanic shook his head. "Don't know how."

"I'll teach you. I get tired of playing the machine."

"Not now," Childs said impatiently. "Okay, Mac, now run this by me again. Thousands of years ago this rocket ship crashes, right?"

"It probably didn't have rockets, according to what Norris tells me."

"Yeah, well, I don't give a damn if it used oars. This ship crashes here on the ice and the . . ."

Macready's mind was elsewhere.

"Macready!"

The pilot blinked, sat up straighter in his chair. "Look, we're just guessing about this stuff. It could've been part of some Soviet installation or something. Some secret experiment they were running."

"That's not what you told Garry."

"He wanted my opinion. That's all it is at this point. Norris's too."

"Yeah. Go on."

Macready sighed as he started to reiterate the theory he and the geophysicist had concocted on the flight back from the site of the crater.

It was hard to participate fully in the daily life of the camp when you were required to spend most of your waking time in one room. Nauls didn't mind the isolation, though. It left him alone with his music.

At the moment the Gossamers were cooking in the background while he prepared to do so literally at the stove. He hunted through the large storage cabinet.

"Where's that big ol' steel pot of mine? Damn! Never can find anything the day you need it."

He slammed the door of the cabinet shut and turned in frustration to several of the overhead storage shelves, that's when he spotted something in the nearby trash bin. Curious, he walked over to check it out. When he recognized what it was his curiosity turned to disgust.

Somebody was always playing jokes on him. Good old Nauls, always the easy target. Everybody in camp knew how fastidious he was about his kitchen.

He reached into the trash bin and pulled out the dirty, torn pair of long johns. Somebody was going to own up to this outrage. Practical jokes were one thing, sanitation something else.

". . . and so it crashes," Macready was telling Childs, "and this guy, the pilot or whatever he was, gets thrown out, or walks out, and ends up freezing. Then a hundred thousand years down the line the Norwegians come moseying along, find him and dig him up, and then accidentally blow up his ship while they're trying to excavate it."

Childs made a face. "I just can't believe this bullshit." He looked across the room. "You believe this bulishit, Blair?"

Lost in thought, the biologist failed to reply. Cell structure and alloy structure were all jumbled together in his mind, confusing him worse than ever.

"I'll stick with your Soviet camp theory," Childs told Macready confidentially. "As for that big block of ice they cut out, it might've held corroborating evidence. Something with Cyrillic markings or stuff. That's why they were trying so hard to get at the bigger stuff. Maybe it blew because it was booby-trapped."

Macready eyed the mechanic challengingly. "Sure, and then they buried it under twenty feet of glacial ice. Anyway, we'll know soon enough. Garry's checking the station records to see if the Russkies have been operating in that region in the past. We'll double-check with McMurdo as soon as Sanders can get through to them.

"But don't hold your breath. Norris says it's impossible to bury anything in ice that old and that solid without leaving some indication that you've been digging. And we didn't find so much as a shovel scratch, except for what the Norwegians left behind."

The joint dangled loosely from Palmer's mouth. It was unlit, but its presence comforted him. He was already pleasantly high anyway, a nice condition to be in when you had to deal with the possibility that an ancient alien spaceship might've just blown itself to powder barely a few miles from your bedside.

The relaxed state of mind also facilitated Palmer's personal research. Norris and Blair weren't the only ones at the station who could perform serious research, no sir! Palmer still had several months of back issues of the
National Enquirer
and
The Star
to catch up on.

He looked up at the scoffing mechanic. "Happens all the time, man. They're falling out of the skies like flies. Government knows all about it. Chariots of the Gods, man. They practically
own
South America. I mean, they taught the Incas everything they knew. How do you think those skinny little Indians built Sacsayhuaman, man? You think they hauled those ten-ton boulders around on their backs?"

Childs gave him a disdainful look. "Somebody ought to hit you with a ten-ton boulder, man. Shake out the cobwebs." He indicated the stack of scandal sheets. "That shit you're reading ain't exactly
Scientific American
, you know."

Palmer waved a handful of garish headlines at the mechanic.

"It's all suppressed in the slick magazines. The government doesn't want anyone to know. Read von Däniken! Have you ever read von Däniken, huh? Get your facts straight. They've been watching us for years." He rolled his eyes skyward, his voice full of mock fear. "They're probably up there, watching us right now."

"If they're looking for specimens I sure as hell hope they take you," Childs shot back. "They'll never bother us again." A few guffaws sounded from some of the other men,