George Bartram - Under the Freeze

He closed the hatch and worked the control that emptied it. Compressed air forced the water out from top to bottom. As the cylinder began to empty, bright lights came on.

Seventy seconds later he was standing in an air-filled, white-walled cylinder with only a small puddle of seawater on its floor. Steel rungs rose to a hatch in the habitat floor above him.

Clumsily, he climbed.

Always, afterward, he would wonder what it had sounded like inside the habitat. Its special noises never reached him through the helmet, except like the distant and garbled conversations overheard on a telephone line. Unsure of what the environment inside the habitat contained, he left his seals closed, balancing the suit’s and the environmental pressure and finding them almost the same. He imagined that the steel bubble creaked as ships creak, that its support systems made noises as his own did. He supposed that the current that swept down from the decks of the Homburg carried sounds, perhaps even something that sounded like the cries of men. But he never heard them, and to him the habitat under the Antarctic ice would always be a place of silence.

It was shaped like an Edam cheese. The entry tube went right up through its center, like the hole in a doughnut, its upper level a second airlock for entry into the space itself. It, like most other systems he was to find, was redundant, to assure that the environment would be as safe and stable as was possible.

The door from the cylinder into the habitat was like a ship’s, so low that he had to stoop, hard as that was to do in the semirigid suit. The door closed with a wheel, like a safe’s. White light flooded the space as he stepped out; above his head a display gave him the temperature, pressure, and air quality inside.

The habitat was divided into four sections connected by a narrow corridor that circled the core. The corridor itself hardly permitted him to move because of its narrowness, and it was so low that his helmet grazed fittings that projected down from the ceiling. Everything was labeled, and he supposed that the place was used by new crews often, for whom the signs would be their salvation. The corridor curved tightly around to his right as he emerged from the core; the wedge-spaced rooms were on his left, each entered by a watertight door. First was a living space — two rooms, each seven feet by about six, the first a sleeping room for two people and the second a combined galley and lounge. Much had been learned from space research about packaging and arrangement. Two people could have survived there for weeks, he thought.

He took three clumsy steps along the corridor and opened the second door. Inside was a room larger than the combination of the first two and more severely wedge-shaped. The ceiling was a featureless surface of light that made the whole room bright and sterile-looking. A table ran the length of the wall on his right, its plastic surface gleaming like ice. Above it were three CRT monitors and banks of instruments, while down the center of the room was a bank of gray cabinets and a computer terminal of considerable power. The first nine feet of the left-hand wall were taken up with banks of small doors made of brushed steel, each about the size of a book. Beyond the doors were another steel table and another bank of instruments.

Tarp moved cautiously down the room. The surfaces were immaculate. There was none of the clutter of the working laboratory — no notes, no cigarette butts, no discarded wad of computer paper. Whoever came here performed a task and then left, leaving nothing behind.

On one table was a rack of closed-end tubes a little like those that some cigars come in; they were made of steel and lined with foam.

The computer hardware was American. Tarp took a screwdriver from his belt and pressed a key with it because his gloved hands were too clumsy, and the monitor glowed and announced itself ready.

Tarp tried several languages on it, but there was no response. He wondered if anybody would bother with an access code in such a protected place.

Tarp tried the name Maxudov on it, and Schneider, and the names of the men left back in Moscow; he tried the word plutonium. The computer was mute.

Tarp went out, careful not to touch the corners of the tables with the suit for fear of damaging it, and he turned left to the next of the rooms.

Like Bluebeard’s castle .

The third was the control room. It was narrow and irregular, as if it had been intruded upon by other spaces and by the machinery it was meant to govern. Its walls had sprouted gauges and wheels and buttons, and the ceiling was festooned with instruments that flashed bright messages. He found a bank of meters that recorded the state of the capsule’s power supply; he found others that showed six parallel readings of heat measurement, probably from six heat exchangers. Others measured the current that flowed so brutally beyond the metal skin. Somewhere out there in the blackness a unit was extracting oxygen and storing it for the habitat’s use.

One part of the space was set aside for meters that recorded the conditions inside the habitat itself. There, above a desk, he found a bank of shiny dials set into bands of metal, all alike, all clean and precise. Their great drawback was that they all looked alike, packed into too small a space; looking at them, Tarp found it difficult to keep his focus on any one. They danced in the vision. Their operator must have found them as daunting as Tarp did, for half of them had been labeled with a black marker whose sometimes smudged letters were distinctly at odds with the glitter of the panel.

Tarp leaned forward until his helmet almost touched the dials. The black pen had marked a number of the dials with occ ; three were labeled with the whole word, occupado .

Good . But what’s occupied ?

The marker had put numbers on most of the dials that had occ - L443 , L447 , X271 .

He found one dial that was labeled MAX .

Above it to the right was another labeled JB .

And at the bottom on the left-hand side was one with an understandable Spanish word: GAUCHO .

Tarp clumped back to the laboratory and looked at the bank of doors, verifying that there were forty-eight of them just as there were forty-eight of the dials. MAX was the fourth from the top in the third row. The doors were locked, but not against theft; it took only a tool like an alien wrench to open them. He took one from his belt, tried it, found it too large; took the next size and screwed open the lock and the door swung out.

Pale-green light glowed from within the cavity behind the door. In its glow a white plastic rack looked like dyed ivory. It held three glass tubes fitted with rubber diaphragms for use with a syringe. A fluid like heavy, slightly pink cream filled each of the phials.

He did not have time to open all the doors. He opened half a dozen at random, finding phials of fluid in each, varying in color, seemingly in viscosity. Labels with cryptic identifications were attached to each. The two that corresponded to the dials marked GAUCHO and JB were much like that marked MAX . The phials were the same in all; all fitted snugly into the cigarlike tubes on the worktable.

Tarp left the boxes open and went out into the corridor again. He was oppressively hot in the suit, and the effort of walking in it was beginning to tire him. He plodded on past the control room to the last of the doors. Marked REFRIGERATED STORAGE, it had a triple-safe system of lights and buttons that prevented its being opened accidentally. CLOSE DOOR AFTER ENTERING, the last light read, but he stepped in and left the door open.