Hive

For inside those immense caverns they had found the ruins of a cyclopean city from some incredible ancient civilization much like the one Dyer had written about. Gates wasn’t ready to put his reputation on the line and say that the Old Ones had built it, but it seemed a pretty fair guess from where he was standing. Within the ruins they had uncovered bas reliefs and hieroglyphics which pictured these creatures and the history of their culture.

“Now understand,” Gates pointed out, “that these pictoforms are incredibly weathered and unreadable in parts, but what we’re seeing would seem to indicate that the creatures were in fact the architects of that ruined city. The city, if I might call it that, goes on literally for miles underground. Much of it is glaciated and much of it is buried beneath cave-ins . . . but there’s enough there for years and years, if not lifetimes, of research. Now, Dyer wrote about these same types of bas reliefs. His interpretations of these same glyphs and pictographs are, I think, utter fantasy. He wrote that they told the story of interstellar wars and the decimation of the Old Ones via some protoplasmic monstrosities they had created . . . but I’ve seen nothing like that. Now, granted, I’m no archaeologist and neither was Dyer. But, before diverging completely into paleontology, I did my undergraduate work in prehistoric archaeology, so I’m not completely ignorant of interpreting some of these things. In the spring, we’ll fly in a real team of archaeologists, but until then, my team and I will do what we can, lay some sort of groundwork if possible. But let me just say that what Dyer claimed to have read in those ruins is positively pedestrian in comparison to what we’re seeing, the story those glyphs are telling us. For, people, what I’m seeing there is something that might make us re-think who we are and what we are.”

Everyone really started murmuring then, firing off question after question, but Gates would say no more. He told them frankly that he would field no more questions until he and his team had had at least a few more weeks, if not a month, for further study and exploration. But nobody was satisfied with that. You couldn’t drop a bomb like that and just walk away. The crowd was getting ugly, particularly Rutkowski and his band of merry men. They were on their feet demanding to know what the hell it all meant and if those aliens (he wasn’t afraid to use the term) were going to wake up and start sucking peoples’ brains out. Even the scientists themselves were demanding answers, even crazy speculation.

Finally, Gates said: “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.

“Well, 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?

“What do you make of that?” Hayes finally asked Sharkey.

“I 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.”

“It’s just a fossil for godsake,” Sharkey said.